As sailors par excellence, the Phaeacians row their ship expeditiously in Book 13 of the Odyssey to escort Odysseus back to Ithaca. Into the open sea, the ship advances in such a swift manner that even a hawk, the best of flying beasts, could not but fall behind (13.87). This contrast to high light the Phaeacians’ nautical navigation skills proves their virtuosity, but Homer’s use of a simile here perhaps should be explored further—the fast-moving ship resembles a chariot drawn by four stallions on land (13.81-83). Homer’s comparison displays the Phaeacians’ excellence in sailing; it is also true, though, that thereby he subtly transforms Odysseus into a charioteer. Such a situation is complicated by the possibility that Homer’s simile of the Phaeacian ship as a four-horse chariot alludes, as Catalin Anghelina notices, to Poseidon’s charioteering in the Iliad (13.23-31). Therein lies the mention of a hawk, too, which indicates that the sea god drives his chariot as dexterously as the majestic bird flies (13.63). Yet, if one recalls that Odysseus moves faster than a hawk, one could infer accordingly that the hero is a charioteer superior to Poseidon. So, it seems that Homer implicates the hero again in usurping a divine power he has already unfortunately profaned. This paper thus aims to address Odysseus’s heroism in terms of athletics and then reconsider the role of the hero’s journey on the Phaeacian ship in relation to his embittered relationship with Poseidon—in point of charioteering, a culturally significant dimension that has drawn rare notice in literary criticism. Moreover, this paper also finds it necessary to contextualize the said issues in the oracular message given by Teiresias to the hero, as it implies narrative elements which make the apologoi cohere with the general picture of the Odyssey.

In Somnium, published posthumously in 1634, Johannes Kepler (1571-1630) integrates his advocacy for Copernican heliocentrism with imaginative narrative, thus laying the groundwork for modern science fiction. Originating from a 1593 student astronomical disputation and expanded through a dream vision added in 1609, Kepler’s Somnium unfolds through intricately layered frame narratives. Two embedded narratives abruptly end as the dreamer in the outermost narrative awakens, leaving them without proper conclusions. The core narrative contains a fantastical lunar tour given by a supernatural daemon, detailing the extraterrestrial life forms and otherworldly landscapes on the moon. This essay analyzes the unfinished frame narratives in Somnium, arguing that the daemon in the core narrative epitomizes an unprejudiced astronomer just like Kepler, who remains detached when presenting carefully calculated and scientifically grounded accounts of the lunar world. The daemon’s interrupted speech aptly symbolizes the unfinished state of Kepler’s astronomical explorations of the moon, which further attests to the insatiable human curiosity for unraveling the mysteries of the unknown as well as the everlasting pursuit of scientific inquiries.

Flashes of green glinting through speculative fiction’s cities draw the reader’s eye to the rhetorical power such apparitions of color can spark. The color’s speculative appearances signaling hybridity, ambiguity, danger, the alien, and possibility stand out against the dominant globalized Western neoliberal discourse in which green has become a metonym for the environment. To demonstrate how SF intervenes in and critiques this discourse and current political approaches to climate change, I analyze the rhetorical applications of green in Nnedi Okorafor’s 2014 novel Lagoon, in conversation with a range of Anglophone, Taiwanese, Italian, and Finnish speculative texts. An Africanfuturist novel set in Lagos, Nigeria, with clear environmentalist critiques, Lagoon applies green in a way that echoes other texts and suggests a critique of the green movement, pushing back against anthropocentrism and romanticization of nature, to envision possibilities for environmental renewal in an urban setting in the global South. Okorafor’s use of green evokes the monochromatic simplicity of human comprehension of our world, and hybrid possibilities for transcending those limits, threats and human power dynamics represented by military fatigues, and alien interventions offering utopian futures. These evocations structure the essay’s three main sections presenting an argument for how Okorafor’s figuration of green in Lagoon’s complex urban landscape represents a larger speculative turning away from the dominant contemporary green. Instead, the emerging speculative green decenters Western human perception and power, revealing human vulnerability and entanglements, critiquing colonization and capitalism, and engaging a spatial and temporal play that burns away the dominant metonymic discursive shadow of green.

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