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In his introduction, Isiah Lavender III reminisces on his love for Japanese anime on American television and his first screening of Blade Runner before explaining how the concept of comparative racialization comes to bear on the seventeen essays gathered together in this collection. He discusses politics, racism, and science fiction as he considers how the collection brings together theories old and new to further explore and to expand the renewed visibility of the Orient in science fiction. Likewise, he indicates why the multidisciplinary approach for this collection offers a wide-ranging critical assessment of Asian representations in science fiction. Finally, Lavender suggests that the comparative, relational, and global intersections of Dis-Orienting Planets help readers positively, or at least in a different way, rethink contact among the races in each of the chapters.

Stephen Hong Sohn, in “‘Perpetual War”: Korean American Speculative Fiction, Militarized Technogeometries, and Yoon Ha Lee’s ‘Wine,’” investigates the look and feel of Korean American SF in its present shape. Sohn identifies how militarized tehcnogeometries, defined as the presence of and reference to soldiers, armies, battles, skirmishes, casualties, bombings, and other elements of war, become fundamental to the ways that a science fictional Korea overlays the historical and social contexts in which South and North Korea actually exist—ever under the peril of territorial dissolution. Sohn then shifts focus by analyzing Yoon Ha Lee’s “Wine” (2014) through the lens of militarized technogeometries to demonstrate how Korea materializes through its relationships to perpetual war.

Malisa Kurtz, in “‘Race as Technology’ and the Asian Body in The Bohr Maker and Salt Fish Girl,” analyzes the relationships among race, biotechnologies, and genomics in Linda Nagata’s The Bohr Maker (1995) and Larissa Lai’s Salt Fish Girl (2002). Asian characters in The Bohr Maker and Salt Fish Girl are differentiated by their genetics rather than visible physical traits, and both novels question how genomic research might lead to the re-emergence of racist assumptions about biological “destiny.” By specifically using techno-Orientalist tropes, both novels reveal the ways in which the bodies of people of color are doubly racialized in science fiction, reduced to instruments of both science and narrative exoticism.

Haerin (Helen) Shin, in “Engineering the Techno-Orient: The Hyperrealization of Post-Racial Politics in Cloud Atlas,” considers visions of technologized Asia and Asian bodies in the film Cloud Atlas (2012), and to a lesser extent the Philips TV commercial Robotskin (2007). Shin focuses on specific scenes that attempt to visualize the motif of crossing but instead deteriorate into problematic instances of conflation. Shin explores the appropriative use of stereotypes in transmedia augmentations related to techno-Orientalism, post-racialist politics, and Baudrillardan simulacra.

In “Beyond Techno-Orientalism: Virtual Worlds and Identity Tourism in Japanese Cyberpunk,” Baryon Tensor Posadas demonstrates how the impact of techno-Orientalism on Japanese SF opens up an important space to articulate the larger stakes of how the mechanisms of colonial cognitive estrangement continue to set the terms for the imagination of futurity. It goes beyond the mere cataloging of cultural misrepresentations. He uses Gorō Masaki’s Venus City (1992) to bring attention to the structural pervasiveness of the gendered and racialized infrastructure that sets the terms of the genre’s attempts to imagine other worlds and futurities.