Classic Science Fiction Research Articles

Speculative Evolution in Herbert George Well’s the Time Machine

Herbert George Wells The Time Machine indeed remains a significant work in science fiction literature, offering a reflection on social issues and class distinctions of his time projected into a distant future. The story’s exploration of humanity’s potential evolution and the portrayal of a divided society have left a lasting impact, influencing various adaptations across different media. Wells ability to use speculative fiction to comment on contemporary issues highlights his foresight and literary prowess. It seems like you’re referring to Wells classic science fiction novel, The Time Machine. In the story, the Time Traveller indeed creates a machine capable of traversing through time and ventures to the distant future, where he encounters the Eloi and the Morlocks, two distinct species evolved from humanity. The novel explores themes of evolution, class struggle, and the nature of time itself.

Time considered as a helix of infinite possibilities

This article explores the temporal implications of genomics through the lens of a classic science fiction story by Samuel R Delany, ‘Time Considered as a Helix of Semi-Precious Stones’. Delany’s...

The Omega Man or The Isolation of U.S. Antitrust Law

There is a classic science fiction novel and film that present a metaphor for the isolation of United States antitrust law in the current global context. Richard Mathiesson’s 1954 classic science fiction novel I am Legend, and the later 1971 film released under the name of The Omega Man starring Charleton Heston, both deal with the fate of Robert Neville, a survivor of a world-wide pandemic who believes he is the last man on Earth. While I am Legend and The Omega Man are obviously works of fantasy, it nonetheless has resonance for contemporary antitrust debate and discourse. United States antitrust law and policy divergences significantly from the rest of the global antitrust community in important areas of scope, philosophy, doctrine, procedure, remedies, and institutions. Much of this divergence in world view is the product of history and path dependence that is largely unique to the United States experience. At the same time, some of the divergence is the result of ideological choices over the past forty years that improbably have remained in place in the United States, while other politics, economics, values, and policy choices have come into prominence throughout the rest of the world. Unlike The Omega Man, there is no plague and there are no monsters. But there are major fault lines in competition law and policy where the United States is the outlier and in danger of becoming The Omega Man. While there are also many issues of agreement where the United States has been a thought leader, there are a significant number of the most salient and controversial issues in modern competition law where the United States is choosing to go it alone or nearly so. There are some important caveats to this tale of antitrust exceptionalism. Some of the United States antitrust exceptionalism means more enforcement than elsewhere in the world. In most of the areas discussed in this article, it means less enforcement that is seen elsewhere, particularly than in the European Union and the numerous jurisdictions whose competition law is modeled on EU principles. Nor does going it alone, or being in the minority, mean that the United States position necessarily is in error, but it does caution against demonizing foreign approaches or relentlessly searching to transplant U.S. approaches into very different societies. This article surveys several significant areas of antitrust law and policy where United States law, procedure, institutions, and remedies differ significantly from the rest of the world. The basic thesis of the article that the growing isolation of U.S. antitrust law is more than just a transatlantic divide. Rather, much of the global community understands U.S. antitrust law and policy, but has rejected its current narrow form in favor of a broader vision of what competition law means, what legal rules are appropriate, and how they should be enforced. Even in areas such as mergers and cartels, outward convergence often masks critically different practices just beneath the surface. As a result, the debate over the future of the Chicago School is largely moot. Examining what the rest of the world competition community actually does, rather what it says, shows the debate is largely over. Whether measured by numbers of jurisdiction, percentage of world gross domestic production, population, or most other measures, the Chicago school paradigm is the outlier, the Omega Man. Part I examines single firm conduct as perhaps the most significant and largest area of substantive divergence between the United States and the rest of the world. Part II shifts to the scope of competition law where U.S. antitrust law simply does not capture a wide variety of conduct and tools that form the core of competition law in much of the world. Part III looks at the widespread use of market studies and market investigations where the United States lacks the legal infrastructure to undertake what is routine in key jurisdictions around the globe. Part IV explores how competition law outside the United States may include public interest standards that fall outside the narrow focus of U.S. antitrust law and enforcement. Part V examines similar key divergences in public enforcement, remedies, and private enforcement. Part VI questions why the United States antitrust agencies largely have shied away from the implications of big data and algorithmic competition which are attracting more significant attention abroad. Part VII changes the focus from descriptive to normative and offers preliminary explanations as to the reasons for the growing isolation of United States antitrust law and how both the United States and the rest of the world can respond to this growing divide. I conclude by returning to the question of whether the United States is indeed the Omega Man of global competition law.

The Black Cloud—a classic science fiction novel from the pen of an astronomer

Throughout the long history of astronomy, scientists have repeatedly written fictional stories, which often lend themselves to use in the classroom thanks to the authors’ in-depth knowledge and an appealing storyline. This article uses the novel ‘The Black Cloud’, written by the well-known astronomer Fred Hoyle, to show which physical-astronomical tasks can be derived from it. For this purpose, the use of text excerpts as well as the whole novel is conceivable. Beyond the examples of distance determination and the thermodynamics of the atmosphere presented here, the book also offers interesting insights into the work of astronomers in the 1950s, which Hoyle was able to report on first-hand.

Out of Time: Time-Travel Tropes Write (through) Climate Change

Out of Time: Time-Travel Tropes Write (through) Climate Change

Editing the Soul: Science and Fiction in the Genome Age by Everett Hamner

BOOK REVIEWS 269 Editing the Soul: Science and Fiction in the Genome Age Everett Hamner The Pennsylvania State University Press, 2017. xii + 264 pp. $27.95 paperback. $94.95 hardcover. In openly rebuffing a strict binary between the secular and the religious/ metaphysical, postsecularism rejects both militant atheistic science (such as the scientism of Richard Dawkins) and religious fundamentalism (for example, Young Earth Creationism). In this, his first monograph, Everett Hamner successfully draws upon his interdisciplinary teaching and research as he utilizes a postsecular lens to investigate the myriad and complex intersections between literature, science, religion, and popular culture in the realm of genetics. In particular, he employs a combination of historical and theoretical approaches (in addition to meticulous close readings of a variety of visual media and written texts) to highlight how genetic fiction engages in “reshaping twenty-first-century conceptions of the self, the body, and various identity categories” (5). Indeed, the term “soul” that is prominently displayed in the book’s title rarely appears within its pages, an endnote explaining that Hamner was “consciously using self and soul almost interchangeably” as a way to blur “the lines between the secular self… and the religious soul” (226). Throughout the work Hamner defines, explicates, and traces a “successive ” rather than “cumulative” evolution through three subgenres of genetic fiction: fantasy, realism, and metafiction (10). Using a variety of representative works from all three genres, he explores two overarching questions: how humanity might “best use its rapidly growing knowledge of the genome” without “sacrificing our ethics,” and “what constitutes free will as knowledge of biological inheritance accelerates” (185). Hamner prepares the reader to ponder these weighty issues throughout a thoughtful introduction that could easily serve as a stand-alone essay in a course on science and science fiction. In a refreshingly honest summary of the state of science communication , Hamner leaves aside issues of media representations and focuses attention on the role scientists themselves play in propagating sensationalized “metaphysical rhetoric” in order to interest the public and potential funders in their research (3). As he insightfully notes, the danger is that “a prominent scientist’s hyperbole is more likely to be mistaken for a literal claim about reality” (3). In preparation for his detailed examination of the three subgenres of genetic fiction, Hamner provides elementary examples, such as the genetic fantasy of the X-Men franchise. The author’s deep appreciation for the works of Richard Powers is on display from these early Religion & Literature 270 pages, with the short story “Genie” (2012) offered as an exemplar of genetic metafiction. It is in this example that we also glimpse a minor drawback in Hamner’s somewhat myopic selection of works, as this short story has much in common with a work that Hamner ignores, the Ridley Scott film Prometheus released the same year. The classic science fiction film Gattaca (1997) begins Hamner’s foundational first chapter as an illustration of the very human fear of predetermination , an ancient dread that is potentially resurrected by science rather than religion in the wake of the Human Genome Project. Hamner patiently explains that connections between genes and medical conditions, gene expression, and environmental factors are not as simple as science fiction would suggest (with single-gene disorders being the vast minority). He warns that common misconceptions lead to the two unfortunate extreme positions, a fatalistically deterministic “astrological genomics” (37) and the likewise unhelpful “genetic dismissivism” in which genetic influence is ignored . He argues that while the latter may be related to biblical literalism or anti-vaccine fears, it could also be caused by simple ignorance of the basic science (40). Hamner then devotes the following chapters to investigating genetic fantasy, genetic realism, and genetic metafiction in turn. While chapter two predictably focuses on genetic fantasy featuring the “Carbon-Copy Clone Catastrophe masterplot” (92), Hamner seizes this opportunity to give the tired trope a fresh perspective by concentrating on how feminist authors (including Ursula Le Guin and Octavia Butler) have successfully exploited the genre to explore issues of culturally defined privilege (e.g. race, gender, sexual preference, and class). Deterministic fears play a key role in early twenty-first-century genetic realist literature, for example...

Alien and the New Enclosures

This article examines how Ridley Scott’s classic science-fiction film Alien (1979) both registers and anticipates the ‘new enclosures’, the series of dispossessions and privatisations that have wracked the globe in the last 40 years. I begin by giving an overview of these enclosures, especially the ones that pertain to Alien’s broad production context, such as the expansion of intellectual property rights, the privatisation of water, rampant logging in the national forests of the United States, and the destruction of public housing. I argue that David Harvey’s and the autonomists’ seemingly discrepant accounts of this process differ more in emphasis than in substance, and thus can be synthesised into a relatively coherent explanation for the persistence of enclosure. The rest of the article demonstrates the film’s articulation with the new enclosures, which occurs at several points: not only in the characters’ debates over their labour contracts, but in the corporeal appearance of non-human structures, and even the symbolic function of the alien itself. Alien’s diegetic universe, I conclude, is one in which the foundations of capitalism, and the terms of the capital-relation itself, are precarious or under question—one in which those terms have become legitimate objects of debate, rather than the self-evident bases of capitalist accumulation.

The Time Machine: Leisure Science (Fiction) and Futurology

ABSTRACTThere is a long, underlying presence of futurology—attempts to predict the future based on current or past events—throughout much of the leisure literature. On the occasion of the 40th anniversary of Leisure Sciences, I build on the work of futures scholars (e.g., Adam, 2008; Harrison, 2015) to explore how past ideas about the future have shaped the present. I revisit H. G. Wells's (1895) classic science fiction novel The Time Machine in view of recent trends and recurring debates (e.g., cybernation, (un)employment, the “leisure society,” and Universal Basic Income) that are (or were) forecast to shape the future. Throughout, I argue that the ways that leisure scholars envision the future have significant impact on the actions of the field and its practitioners today.

Media

Media

Generous Exclusion: Register and Readership in Junot Diaz's The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao

As Lev Grossman’s review of Junot Diaz’s The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao (2007) informs us, Diaz’s novel is “an immigrant-family saga for people who don’t read immigrant-family sagas.” However, Grossman also remarks, it “wouldn’t really be fair” to term the novel a family saga in that it is so much more than this, “a mixture of straight-up English, Dominican Spanish and hieratic nerdspeak crowded with references to Tolkien, DC Comics, role-playing games and classic science fiction.” To fix it in one particular category or genre, Grossman seems to suggest, is to miss a central point of The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao. Now the central point of Diaz’s novel is in fact rather difficult to locate. It tells the tale of the members of a Dominican family who are trying to make their way in the United States. In doing so, the text shifts its narrative focus back and forth between New York and Santo Domingo, New Jersey and the Dominican countryside. Consequently, it appears obvious that Diaz is keen to voice the concerns of the migrant, preferably in a register that rings true to the cultural and linguistic background of a given migrant’s specific situation. I will be arguing, however, that this most obvious theme of all, the migrant experience, is articulated much more effectively by means of the novel’s multiple registers. The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao works not just as a tale of immigration, not only as an account of American imperialism, and not merely as a condemnation of the brutal history of the Dominican regime. The novel effectively addresses these concerns, but it achieves much more. Paradoxically, it is in this very more—in the continued transcendence of the apparently central theme of migrancy—that Diaz’s novel presents its most successful approach to the migrant experience through linguistic and thematic digressions that seem to have nothing at all to do with

Transcending Embodiment: Communication in the Posthuman Condition

In Speaking into the Air: A History of the Idea of Communication, John Durham Peters argues that soul merger between humans is impossible because communication could never transcend the existential barrier between self and other. I contest Peters’ argument by constructing my own history starting from where Peters’ history leaves off. I show how disembodied communication is imagined in William Gibson's classic science fiction novel, Neuromancer, how cyberfeminist artists import embodiment into virtual realities, and how Ray Kurzweil's “the Singularity,” the notion that in our not-too-distant future humans will evolve into machines, makes posthuman communication a coming reality.

The Battle for the Bs: 1950s Hollywood and the Rebirth of Low-Budget Cinema

During their adolescence in the 1950s, the contemporary filmmakers Steven Spielberg and George Lucas drew their inspiration from popular science fiction B-films of the era. Classic science fiction and horror films such as Earth vs. the Flying Saucers (1956) and I Was a Teenage Werewolf (1957) are the subject of Blair Davis's fascinating study of post–World War II cinema. Defining the B-film as low-budget popular entertainment alternatives to mainstream studio productions, Davis provides a financial and production history rather than cultural narrative. Thus, Davis, an assistant professor in the College of Communications at DePaul University, asserts, The Battle for the Bs is an attempt to steer discussions of the B-movie away from taste-based cultural assessments of its seemingly questionable aesthetics and move toward a fiscally oriented understanding of how and why these aesthetics were formed. (p. 15) Davis argues that in the 1930s, B-films were the second films in the studio double-feature programming of the depression period. The industry changed with the 1948 Supreme Court decision that banned studios from requiring exhibitors to accept block booking of films (United States v. Paramount Pictures, Inc.). The major film studios responded to this decision and the challenge of television by curtailing production and focusing on big-budget A-films with new technological innovations such as Cinemascope unavailable on the small screen. However, with the expansion of venues such as drive-in theaters, exhibitors, especially in smaller markets, faced a shortage of films, and B-features were produced to fill the void.

The Spectroscopist’s Lament

See related article, p 2962. I can’t change the laws of physics!” Inflected with the appropriate Scottish brogue, this quote brings to mind a character from a well-known classic science fiction television series. However, Scotty’s lament might be that of the clinical MR spectroscopist as well, for there are few areas in medical diagnostic imaging in which the immutable laws of physics pose such direct constraints. In selecting an in vivo spectroscopy protocol, spectral quality (as measured by signal to-noise ratio), spatial resolution, spatial coverage, examination time, and the minimum time to obtain a spectroscopic imaging series are inextricably entwined. Optimization of one parameter necessitates a compromise elsewhere. For instance, improvement of the spatial resolution of a MR spectroscopic imaging (MRSI) series can be achieved, but at the expense of a longer acquisition time and/or reduced signal to-noise resolution of the spectra. The laws of physics will not have it otherwise. Although the first in vivo 1H spectrum from the brain of a patient poststroke was reported almost 25 years ago,1 followed a few years later by 1H spectroscopic imaging in one2 and 23 dimensions, the difficulty of obtaining good quality MRSI from patients after stroke, especially in the acute phase, has been one of the factors limiting the more widespread application of MRSI to stroke. Elderly, sick, often confused patients …

The Never Weres by F. Smyth

Smyth, Fiona. The Never Weres. Toronto: Annick Press, 2011. Print. What would life be like for humanity’s final generation, those who would always be the youngest people on Earth, born just before a “barren virus” has rendered humans infertile? This question underpins the pre-teen sci-fi mystery The Never Weres, the first graphic novel from Toronto-based Fiona Smyth, veteran painter, cartoonist, and illustrator. Smyth’s exploration of the daily lives of teenagers Xian, Mia, and Jesse is a fresh extrapolation of the dystopian “world without children,” popularly identified with P.D. James’ Children of Men. Smyth interweaves her heroes’ world — from which parents are variously absent — with classic science fiction tropes such as robotics, genetics, and virtual online communities. Most pressingly, the ethical and practical implications of human cloning are central to the mystery as it unfolds. Smyth handles the issue evenly and rightly represents it as controversial. By focusing on a missing girl’s possible involvement with long-ago experiments, Smyth effectively provokes reflection about cloning’s impacts on human relationships. However, she has simplified the relevant ideas to the extent that readers may not be challenged much by them. The layouts of The Never Weres are at times confusing and may hinder readers’ progress. The book’s visual style conveys Smyth’s vision of a bleak, crowded, deteriorating Toronto somewhat better than it captures her spirited protagonists. Overall, despite some weaknesses, The Never Weres wraps a worthwhile science-positive message within an engaging mystery adventure. Recommended with reservations: 2 out of 4 stars Reviewer: Sarah PolkinghorneSarah is a Public Services Librarian at the University of Alberta. She enjoys all sorts of books.

On Floods and Photo Ops: How Herbert Hoover and George W. Bush Exploited Catastrophes (review)

Reviewed by: On Floods and Photo Ops: How Herbert Hoover and George W. Bush Exploited Catastrophes Diane S. Hope On Floods and Photo Ops: How Herbert Hoover and George W. Bush Exploited Catastrophes. By Paul Martin Lester. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2010; pp. xviii + 240. $50.00 cloth. Paul Lester's comparison of two photographs of "mutual banality" (xxiii) separated by "almost seventy-eight years and only 200 miles" (201) provides a productive analysis for the student and general reader interested in the links between politics and photography. The first photo shows Secretary of Commerce Herbert Hoover and Secretary of War Dwight Davis posing with children at a "refugee" camp in Natchez, Mississippi, during the Great Flood of 1927 (158); the second depicts President George W. Bush with children and teachers at the reopening of an elementary school in DeLisle, Mississippi, after Hurricane Katrina in 2005 (193). Neither image is dramatic; neither records an event of genuine significance nor provides new information about either of the two catastrophic floods. Nevertheless, Lester's analysis contributes much to our understanding of the photo op as political rhetoric. The text begins with "Prologue: Discoveries," which will be especially helpful for young scholars. It offers a step-by-step primer on how and why the author came to research and write this book, describes Lester's purpose to "compare political photography and catastrophes through two points in time" (xi), and takes readers through his search for images, one to be focused on George W. Bush and Katrina, and another of a different politician photographed during a similar catastrophe at an earlier period in history. The result is Lester's comparison of the history and circumstances that surrounded the Hoover and Bush photo ops. Through navigational metaphors of rivers, streams, tributaries, and currents, the prologue concludes with the forewarning that Lester's research has carried him to unforeseen subjects and [End Page 745] unanticipated associations—an apt description of the book's major strengths and occasional weaknesses. Chapter 1, "Analysis: Ways of Seeing and Studying Images," offers a brief review of the basics of visual analysis, citing visual culture scholars, photographers, rhetorical critics, and visual communication texts. The review is useful and illustrated with examples from photography and painting. Chapter 2, "Publicity: The Photo Op as Political Tool," surveys the history of political image making with a focus on images made during catastrophes. For example, included are images of Senator Prescott Bush surveying flood damage in Waterbury, Connecticut, after the floods of 1955 caused by the twin hurricanes of Connie and Diane that claimed 184 lives, along with another image of President Eisenhower apparently looking at the damage from his aircraft window. As Lester points out, "the photo op [of Eisenhower] is misleading. The skies were so cloudy the inundated ground below could not be seen from the air" (27). The chapter also includes images of President Johnson in Air Force One observing the damage caused by Hurricane Betsy in 1965; a picture of Hoover's campaign truck, with "Why we should vote for Herbert Hoover—Told in Talking Motion Pictures" painted in large print on the side (52); and images of George W. Bush in front of Ground Zero (61). Lester concludes this section with an informative analysis of the players and circumstances of Bush's infamous PR disaster, his "Mission Accomplished" speech on the deck of the USS Abraham Lincoln (67). Chapters 3 through 6 are unusual in structure and style, presenting readers with tidbits of information that appear to be far-flung digressions from the subject. Yet the accumulated references provide a multilayered context for assessing the complex meanings of each of the two photographs. For example, Chapter 3, "Floods: When Water Defeats Land," opens with a brief summary of Frank Herbert's "1965 classic science fiction novel, Dune" (70) before segueing into the emergence of "ecology as a popular idea in the mass media" (71) and a discussion of the 1968 photograph of Earth taken by Astronaut William Anders (71). Lester justifies his wide approach: The 1969 Life cover of earth also highlights the three forms of water: as a vapor—the massive swirling cloud systems; as a solid—the...

Future West: Utopia and Apocalypse in Frontier Science Fiction (review)

Reviewed by: Future West: Utopia and Apocalypse in Frontier Science Fiction David Mogen Future West: Utopia and Apocalypse in Frontier Science Fiction. By William H. Katerberg. Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2008. 281 pages, $45.00. Kansas has become the current launching point for studies of speculative future frontiers, whether on this planet or in the larger universe. Following trails blazed anew by Carl Abbott in Frontiers Past and Future: Science Fiction and the American West (2006), William H. Katerberg's Future West: Utopia and Apocalypse in Frontier Science Fiction extends analysis of the West's future into the closely linked, often overlapping, realms of utopias, dystopias, critical utopias, and postapocalyptic frontiers. Though his review of previous scholarship is less thorough than Abbott's, and his organization is often difficult to track, Katerberg provides lively, provocative interpretations of a wide-ranging selection of texts. He begins with an analysis of classic western figures such as Frederick Jackson Turner and Buffalo Bill Cody, exploring formulations of frontier mythology at the end of the nineteenth century. Subsequent chapters explore widely divergent adaptations of frontier traditions to project apocalyptic disaster and utopian dreams. In Chapter 3, we begin with Francis Fukuyama's implicitly utopian reflections about "The End of History" as a template within which to explore Douglas Copeland's ironic [End Page 198] novels set in the contemporary West, which Katerberg describes as "rewriting regional narratives to suit a West that is not just postfrontier but also postindustrial and postmodern," a West "not at the beginning of history but at the end of an era" (42). Thus, traditional western stories projecting the promise of a New World have now become vehicles for sardonic descants about the New World becoming Old, yet often reinvigorated in radically new dreams of utopia rising from the wastelands. Such visions of apocalypse and rebirth vary dramatically with the cultural and political worldviews of different authors, of course, resulting in conflicting visions of the American Dream projected into the future. "Return to Nature," for instance, explores racist utopias in which traditional tropes about regeneration through wilderness violence usher in white supremacist societies purified through cleansing genocides of race war. By contrast, in the subsequent chapter, "Legacies of Hope," we witness Leslie Marmon Silko's visions of European American culture disintegrating as the return of spiritual forces, prophesied in Native American cultures, ushers in a new era. Subsequent chapters examine texts ranging from classic science fiction to near-future "critical utopias" to new, high-tech frontiers opened up by computers and nanotechnology. Among these are Ernest Callenbach's visions of a new ecologically based country of Ecotopia in the Northwest, and Kim Stanley Robinson's novels set in a futuristic, bittersweet Orange Country ("OC") in which orange groves are nostalgic images from a buried past. A Canticle for Leibowitz (1959), the classic science fiction novel set in the postapocalyptic new Dark Age of the Utah desert, also falls into this category. And finally, there are fascinating and foreboding high-tech cyberpunk scenarios exploring new frontiers in the virtual realties of cyberspace, and cyborg futures in which the self itself becomes a New World shaped by utopian dreams, nanotechnology, and biological engineering, often with appalling results. Discussing such a broad range of material requires a flexible interdisciplinary point of view, and Katerberg succeeds in providing illuminating perspectives from which to view wildly different terrains. In his conclusion, he observes, "I have mixed the language of politics, utopia, and redemption," and indeed his sensitivity to the multi-dimensional reverberations of these texts deepens his commentary (214). Utopias have always dramatized competing political ideals, but Katerberg is right to emphasize that most fundamentally, they present a "politics of emancipation and redemption," mirroring our deepest despair and our abiding yearning for secular and even spiritual salvation (217). [End Page 199] David Mogen Colorado State University, Fort Collins Copyright © 2010 The Western Literature Association

Mesmerists, monsters, and machines: science fiction and the cultures of science in the nineteenth century

Using key canonical science fiction narratives, Mesmerists, Monsters, and Machines examines the intersection of the literary and scientific cultures of the nineteenth century. In this original and refreshing approach to the study of early science fiction, author Martin Willis maintains that science fiction was just as important in defining the culture of the nineteenth century as other critics maintain it was in shaping the twentieth century. Mesmerists, Monsters, and Machines interrogates the cultural implications of scientific development as articulated, challenged, and reformulated by science fiction. Each chapter demonstrates that both science and fiction were vital parts of a culture of imaginative and empirical practices that were continually reacting to, arguing with, and influencing one another throughout the nineteenth century. In an engrossing narrative that cites classic science fiction texts, Willis establishes a timeline for the reader so that the cultural significance of science fiction is understood and its complexity and relevance to the nineteenth century is demonstrated. Those interested in nineteenth-century history and literature, cultural studies, the history of science, and science fiction will welcome this addition to the scholarship.

Coded Discourse: Romancing the (Electronic) Shadow in The Matrix

Haslam argues that criticism on the Wachowski Brothers' film, The Matrix (1999), has generally followed along the lines of early criticism surrounding the cyberpunk fiction of the late 1980s, which is usually seen as being founded by, and epitomized in, William Gibson's 1984 novel Neuromancer. Within this critical framework, The Matrix is supposedly the filmic refinement of the posthuman, indeterminate identity some see as being offered by cyberpunk fiction. Haslam, however, relying in part on a second strain of criticism surrounding cyberpunk, questions whether The Matrix and its sequels truly offer a radical critique of enlightenment subjectivity, or instead reproduce dominant ontological biases, specifically as they surround gender and race. The Matrix, Haslam suggests, can be read as a text that allows both of these readings, using a disturbed and disturbing set of plots and images surrounding gender and race that can be seen to point to the difficulties surrounding the performative nature of dominance as such.