Abstract/Summary

This article is an exploration of made-up grounds, both those we walk upon and those we inhabit in the worlds of science fiction (sf). It is guided by Joan Slonczewski’s A Door Into Ocean which imagines an ocean world; a place where the ground is not pre-existent but must be continually constructed. It follows the characters of this novel to develop an attentiveness to the spatial and social significance of ground, in encounters that are traced onwards into other worlds of sf, architectural, and literary theory, and spatial practice. This article demonstrates how readings of sf can cast fresh strangeness onto issues of design and spatial justice, and support the construction of worlds made otherwise. By setting the grounds of the fictive world against, alongside, and in-between the ground of the given, it hopes to trouble the surface of the made-up ground on which we think we stand.