Signal from the Future: How Science Fiction Analyzes and Influences Today's Society

Aaron Harrison is a literary critic and lecturer in the Department of English at the University of California, Berkeley, where he teaches courses on science fiction, utopian literature, and critical theory. His research focuses on the intersection of speculative fiction and social thought, with particular emphasis on how genre narrative techniques enable forms of cultural critique unavailable to realist literary modes. He is the author of *Imagining Otherwise: Speculative Fiction and the Politics of Possibility* (University of Michigan Press, 2020), which examined the utopian tradition in twentieth-century science fiction and its relationship to anarchist and socialist political theory. His essays and reviews have appeared in *Science Fiction Studies*, *Extrapolation*, *The Los Angeles Review of Books*, and *The New York Review of Books*.

Before completing his Ph.D. in English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University in 2015, Harrison worked as a developmental editor for a major New York publishing house, an experience that continues to inform his approach to both criticism and teaching. He has held visiting positions at the University of Oxford and the University of British Columbia, and has served on the advisory board of the Science Fiction and Technoculture Studies program at UCSB. His current research, supported by a fellowship from the American Council of Learned Societies, examines the relationship between contemporary climate fiction and the emerging field of multispecies ethnography, asking how speculative