Imaginable Futures: Tea from an Empty Cup and the Notion of Nation‪.‬

In "Dis-Imagined Communities: Science Fiction and the Future of Nations," Istvan Csicsery-Ronay, Jr. makes an astute observation regarding what appears to be a blind-spot in the thematic focus of science fiction; namely, the concept of nation "is so rarely explored in sf's thought experiments that one might conclude that it has been rejected as something that cannot exist in any future. More surely than even more fantastic social formations, like utopia or the recrudescence of premodern societies, the role of nationality appears unimaginable in sf's futures" (218). Indeed, this seems particularly the case with ScyberFiction (i.e., cyberspace-based Science Fiction) (1) as the prevalence of multinational conglomerates and the amorphous terrain of online realms and urban sprawls effectively efface the nation-state as a viable body. This is a point Csicsery-Ronay, Jr. makes clear, remarking that "the concept of nation, with its implication of some historical homogeneity through time, has been made obsolete by the dramatic heterogeneity of human, primarily urban, society. There is no national community to legitimize a state, nor is there a state that might consolidate a national constituency" (225). In ScyberFiction, the corporate enterprise that has seemingly replaced nation as the new constituency is inherently expansive and consumptive in its vying for economic and, by implication, social dominance. This corporate focus upon ever-expanding market-shares is quite the opposite from the communal sense of comradeship Benedict Anderson identifies as a defining feature of the nation: Indeed, Csicsery-Ronay, Jr. goes on to remark that cyberpunk (and, by implication, ScyberFiction) is antithetical to the very notion of a community-forming nation given that such sf "aims to depict the deterioration of the conditions of the present, and nation-states are exemplary forms of human community ... in the present" (226). While cyberpunk may be opposed to exploring the nation-state, those authors who have emerged from under the gravitational pull of the cyberpunk designation may not be as restricted in their ScyberFiction; in particular, Pat Cardigan's Tea from an Empty Cup seeks to address sf's unimaginable future, reinvesting the imagined community of the nation through the fusion of (corpo) reality and the fluid realm of cyberplace.