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104 BLURRED BORDERS AND SOCIAL INTEGRATIONSthe past and what apparently is setting us up for thefuture. Scientia, the Latin root of ‘science’ which means‘knowledge’, seems to give us a sudden understandingof what is truly meant by the word. However, anyattempt at definition is resolved only through aninherent conflict, and this continuous puzzlement willonly make us arrive at a more complex interweaving ofideas—one that is existent but is not usually noticed oris deliberately avoided. We almost always view scienceas just a particular mode of inquiry that producesknowledge and prides itself in empirical evidence andpositivism. This leads to a claim of championing a valuefreeand objective stance in the pursuit of knowledge.However one insists on the dimension of science asan arena of power relations, an aspect of science thatis incontrovertible but highly inconspicuous, it is stillseen as the bearer of truth and as the truth so that being‘scientific’ is tantamount to being ‘trustworthy.’ Inview of this conceptual association, it is of consequencethat the preeminence of science as the defining modeof knowledge formation of our time leads up to theeradication of other approaches to understanding theworld, approaches that at face value might seem to becontradictory to the tenets of Western paradigms of theproject of science even if these approaches still hold trueor are continuously significant to the communities thatchoose to keep them.It is along this line of analysis that we read the followingtexts of Japanese and Indonesian science fiction (intranslation). 1 The analysis examines the discourse ofscience in the aforementioned texts and attempts tomake explicit the political field within which science as adiscipline thrives and science as an institution persists, afacet that is commonly ignored whenever we accept it asa monolithic signifier of truth and progress. This projectalso aims to discuss the images of the future embeddedin the texts and the intersecting issues continually facedby the periphery as the world rolls along this track toprogress.Brief background of Japanese and Indonesian sciencefictionAccording to Robert Matthew (1989), science fictionin Japan had its origins in the Meiji era (1868-1912),a period of modernization following Western modelsof development. With the rapid development andchange being experienced by society and the people,the literature during this period consequently reflectedthis transformation. With the influence coming fromthe West, not only were paradigms of developmentimbibed by Japanese society, but also its literary form.This fascination with the West led to the appreciationby Japanese readers of adventure stories by Jules Verne,for example, whose works were immediately translatedinto Nihongo soon after their initial publication.Takayuki Tatsumi (in Seed 2005, 328) further dividesscience fiction in Japan into categories according to thegeneration foremost writers of the genre belong to. Heoffers us the following periodization: 21.2.3.4.5.“The First Generation Writers,” the formativefigures of the 1960s, who were deeply influencedby the Anglo-American science fiction (SF) of the1950s;“The Second Generation Writers” of the 1970s,who positively assimilated the New Wave of thelate 1960s and the early 1970s;“The Third Generation Writers,” from the 1980s,who are mostly contemporaries of the Anglo-American post-New Wave/pre-Cyberpunkwriters;“The Fourth Generation Writers” (late 1980s-1990s) who take for granted the postmodernmodes of Cyberpunk, cyborg feminism and “Yaoipoetics” [the Japanese equivalent of the taste forK/S (Kirk/Spock) fiction and Slash Fiction]; andA fifth generation of writers whose range cannotbe wholly portrayed just yet but are sometimesnicknamed “JSF” writers who made their debut atthe turn of the century.Indonesian science fiction, on the other hand, stands ona different plane compared to its Japanese counterpart.Although it is much too early to provide any definitivestatement regarding science fiction in Indonesia just bylooking at the texts gathered, it is worth taking note thatbased on available materials in various locations suchas bookstores, libraries, comic shops and video stores,there is a smaller number of Indonesian science fictionin various media relative to the amount of materialsgathered in Japan. Perhaps it is not being overly hasty toclaim that, by sheer volume, Indonesian science fictionlacks in popularity. 3It is also interesting to consider that some of the materialssuch as Supernova (2001) and Cokelat Postmortem(2005), which are generally described as science fictionin popular listings like websites or blog site discussions,may be considered as similar to the kind of incipientscience fiction writing seen in Japan. This statementis due to the fact that some materials may have beenclassified as science fiction because they contain ‘sciencefictionish’ elements, perhaps in the form of scientificterminologies, scientific principles or scientific facts,but do not necessarily create the critical topology ofAsian Transformations in ActionThe Work of the 2006/2007 API Fellows