In Odysseus's meeting with the Phaecians, Athena has magically ‘beautified him about the head and shoulders, making him look taller and stouter than he really was,’ so that he may impress them with his athletic prowess. He does so, both gaining their respect and yet standing apart from them because of his great aptitude—he is still a ‘stranger’ in a strange land and will be sent along his way. These athletic trials in the Homeric epics speak to complicated issues of citizenship and identity. Almost two and a half millennia later—and surely there are many examples in between—Washington Irving offers the tale of Rip Van Winkle, a story of a turbulent change in American identity. At the center of the story is Rip's encounter with ‘something strange and incomprehensible about the unknown that inspired awe and checked familiarity.’ This is a group of ghostly Dutch explorers led by Hendrick Hudson, drinking and playing at a ‘game of ninepins.’ Ninepin bowling, though still widely played throughout Europe today, was the predecessor of North American tenpin bowling, which is now recognized as both a collegiate and professional sport. As Rip awakens after a night of this drunken sporting, he finds himself, like Odysseus, a stranger in a strange land, a now-independent America. At two important, and vastly different, moments in the history of Western literature, there is an ironic confluence. Explorations of political and national identity are to be expected, but what is more unexpected is the mode of that exploration: explicitly through fantastic figurations of sport and athleticism. As this book will argue via a reading of sport in the context of science fiction, however, the mingling of politics, extrapolative genre, and sport is an important consideration to the study of each.

Why, then, have we not heard more about sport and science fiction? Immediately important is that in both of the above examples, the interventions of both the fantastic and of sport allow the protagonist to navigate between and among cultural identities. They allow for a kind of social mobility that the average person, the non-athlete, might never realize. It may be this very mobility that has led critics to assert that ‘success in sports creates a sense of privilege that involves specific material rewards, status, and an exemption from ordinary routines’ (Lesko 158).