Made up Ground: Architecture, Science Fiction, and the Surface of Imagined Worlds

Abstract

Science fiction allows us to establish intimate connections with the surfaces of other worlds, and to focus on the image of architecture within these fictions denies much of their complexity. In response, this article focuses on the embodied experience of touch, drawing on the imagined experiences of other worlds to explore the everyday meetings between the body and the built, the points at which we touch the ground. It follows characters from Joan Slonczewski’s A Door Into Ocean as they move through a world where the ground is not preexistent but must be constructed. These encounters are traced onwards into architectural and literary theory, before being considered in relation to the world in which we find ourselves. By setting the grounds of the fictive world against, alongside, and in-between the ground of the given, this article hopes to trouble the surface of the made-up ground on which we think we stand.