Contemporary Science Fiction Research Articles

Posthuman Reconstruction of the World as a Simulation in Charles Stross’ Accelerando

In this paper my aim is to analyze the theme of simulation in Charles Stross’ hard science fiction novel titled ‘Accelerando’ (2005). The discussion shall start by pointing out the enormous significance of the ideas of simulation both in the world of pure science as well as in the fields of philosophy, arts and literature. We shall show by adopting an informational approach and by using the theoretical framework of Baudrillard’s ‘Simulacra and Simulation’ that science fiction novels like Charles Stross’ ‘Accelerando’ treat simulation not just as an abstract mathematical entity existing independently of human beings; rather they treat simulation as an indispensable step for mankind in their journey of ascension to the Posthuman plane of existence. This paper will also try to prove that Stross’ ‘Accelerando’ not only relies upon the description of the effects of use of many incomprehensibly powerful simulation technologies in various forms to produce the effect of estrangement upon the readers but it also implies that the very fabric of reality which deem to be real is composed of binary oppositions between different strands of contradistinctive signs and symbols which in a posthuman world will crumble together to give way to a Posthuman world replete with endless possibilities. This novel like many other contemporary hard science fiction novels implies that the reality is essentially indistinguishable from the simulation once the influence of human perception or consciousness is deducted from the equation and then the entire Universe can be interpreted as one gigantic computational entity consisting of myriads of quantum informational field operators through the manipulation of which we can derive a semblance of power indistinguishable from the actual one.Keywords: Science Fiction, Posthumanism, Simulacra and Simulation, Quantum Nature of Creation, Portrayal of Future

Cinema de ficção científica lo-fi: uma categoria sob escrutínio

This article aims to review the concept of lo-fi sci-fi , a term applied to part of the world’s contemporary science fiction film production, more authorial and independent SF films which dispense big budgets and fancy visual effects in favor of more thought-provoking kinds of speculative fiction. Thus, this work will investigate the relevance and effectiveness of the term lo-fi applied to SF cinema. Keywords: science fiction film, independent cinema, lo-fi-sci-fi.

Traveling through Time and Searching for Utopia: Utopian Imaginaries in Internet Time-Travel Fiction

The time-travel genre of Chinese Internet literature combines old mythological motifs with contemporary science fiction approaches to create a narrative line in which the protagonist travels through time, undergoes a series of trials, discovers new worlds, and realizes an idealized life. Borrowing Foucault’s theory of utopian bodies and heterotopias and taking Tianxia Guiyuan’s female-oriented Internet novel Empress Fuyao as its exemplary case, this study analyzes how time-travel fiction uses time travel in order to image a “utopia” and what kind of “new world” is projected by this utopia. In the process, this paper will simultaneously examine the relationship between utopia and twenty-first century China’s new media literature.

Sidelining Women in Contemporary Science-Fiction Film

The present article examines the role and space given to women in contemporary science fiction films since the 1980s. While the character of Ripley in the Alien franchise has been widely quoted and analyzed, I wish to argue that Ripley is an exception obscuring the general sidelining of women in a genre concerned first and foremost with masculine concerns. The emergence of women as active sidekicks in the 1980s (in RoboCop or Universal Soldier) led to the fleeting rise of action heroines in the 1990s (e.g. Terminator 2 and Ghosts of Mars), but the turn to postfeminism has contributed to the marginalization of women’s issues and roles in the films of the last decades. So why include women at all? This paper contends that the female characters literally play a supporting role vis-à-vis the male hero, defining and confirming the acceptable bounds of masculinity.

Socialism and Fantasy: China Miéville's Fables of Race and Class

Among a number of contemporary science and speculative fiction writers who identify as left-wing, China Miéville stands out, not only for the quality of his literary production, but also for the critical character of his political commitment, dedicated equally to socialism and to fantasy. In addition to his fictive works, he has written articles and given lectures on the nature and value of speculative and fantasy fiction; edited a collection of essays on Marxism and fantasy in an issue of the journal <em>Historical Materialism</em>; and, not least, published a list of "Fifty Sci-Fi and Fantasy Works Every Socialist Should Read." I wish to discuss here the form and thematics of the early novels known (after the alternate world in which they are set) as the Bas-Lag trilogy—which remains, if you take it as a single work, his most ambitious and memorable achievement. But since Miéville is a serious critic and advocate of fantasy fiction, I will approach the books with a brief discussion of his aesthetic positions and program, gathered from essays and talks as well as from his literary works.<p class="mrlink"><p class="mrpurchaselink"><a href="http://monthlyreview.org/index/volume-67-number-9" title="Vol. 67, No. 9: February 2016" target="_self">Click here to purchase a PDF version of this article at the <em>Monthly Review</em> website.</a></p>

Survivance in Indigenous Science Fictions

In contemporary mainstream science fiction victims are frequently the ultimate heroes, and white men are often (astonishingly) the ultimate victims. To occupy the position of the victim is often to be absolved of guilt and invested with the moral authority of retributive agency, and science fiction repeatedly offers agents of privilege an invitation to occupy the position of victims. In sharp contrast to this embrace of imperial masochism within mainstream science fiction, one of the most striking aspects of indigenous speculative fictions is a consistent refusal to sanctify victimry. Despite centuries of genocidal violence and extraordinary hardship within enduring settler–colonial regimes, indigenous sf narratives deconstruct victimization and eschew imperial masochism in favor of what Gerald Vizenor refers to as survivance paradigms. This essay examines key indigenous science fictions that reject victimization in favor of survivance narratives. Vizenor’s own “Custer on the Slipstream” (1978), for examp...

Science Fiction TV by J. P. Telotte (review)

Reviewed by: Science Fiction TV by J. P. Telotte Jen Schneider (bio) Science Fiction TV. By J. P. Telotte. London and New York: Routledge, 2014. Pp. vii + 223. $29.95. Film and media scholar J. P. Telotte begins Science Fiction TV by noting that, over the years, his undergraduate students at Georgia Tech have seemed to exhibit more familiarity with and enthusiasm for science fiction (SF) television than for SF cinema. Motivated to write the book by these “rather rabid” SF television fans, Telotte aims to provide an overview of such TV, both for readers who might already be “rabid” fans and for those not familiar with the genre. Both types of readers will find the book edifying. In this first in the Routledge Television Guidebooks series, each chapter analyzes topics pertinent to the study of science fiction television: history, narrative forms, cultural ideologies, audiences, and “boundary crossings”—SF television’s willingness to hybridize genre conventions. There are several advantages to the guidebook format. First, it doesn’t belabor the genre question—what “counts” as SF television—overmuch. It acknowledges that the boundaries between science fiction, fantasy, and horror are porous, even more so for television than for film because of the potential long-form quality of television programming, which allows for the rupture and reinvention of genre conventions. The final chapter makes this assumption explicit, arguing that genre permeability is in fact a hallmark of many SF series. Second, the book is fairly brief, making it both affordable and easily integrated into a more broadly focused science fiction or media studies course. Rather than aiming to exhaustively catalog all science fiction television, Telotte primarily references touchstone or cult-favorite SF series, such as Star Trek and The X-Files. To exemplify his major themes, each chapter also features a section called Key Series, focusing on Captain Video, The Twilight Zone, Battlestar Galactica, Farscape, and Fringe. Other series are introduced, but the analysis is not weighed down by excessive plot explication. Similarly, ideological analyses are neither ignored, nor overwhelming for the reader. Chapters, which can be excerpted to stand alone, provide structure and content that would function effectively as springboards for class discussion on ideological implications, industrial norms, genre conventions, and the role of audiences. One of the most pleasing chapters—and the one likely to arouse the most interest among students and fans—is chapter 4, “SFTV Audiences.” Telotte argues that SF audiences self-identify as “different from other popular audiences—as better educated, as having more interest in scientific and technological issues, as being more concerned about the future” (p. 120). Perhaps because the book was prompted by his interactions with fans in his classes, Telotte treats that audience with respect and curiosity, and [End Page 779] one could argue that the book focuses primarily on contemporary SF series with that audience in mind. If there is a criticism to be made of the book, it might be that Telotte misses an opportunity to examine intertextuality more fully across media. Though he references postmodernism frequently as a way of explaining how series might reference one another or serve as cultural pastiche, and briefly examines gaming in the conclusion, he doesn’t do much with how SF cinema and television might interact, for example. While Telotte’s students may not be as excited about SF film, it’s hard to imagine that their reactions to SF television would not be influenced by such massively popular SF cinema as the Star Wars films, for example. Examining this kind of intertextuality would make the book more useful in a course that is not simply about television. Still, the brevity and accessibility of the book are advantages, particularly when considering that Telotte’s analyses are wide-ranging and impressive. He has a masterful grasp of the literature related to science fiction film and television, yet writes in a manner that advanced undergraduate and graduate students will find enjoyable. Furthermore, fans who are no longer students might read the book if they are interested in some of the political and cultural context of their favorite shows, as well as to get ideas for other, similar shows they might appreciate. It is indeed a...

Death and the “Paradice within” in Paradise Lost and Margaret Atwood’s Oryx and Crake

Death and the “Paradice within” in Paradise Lost and Margaret Atwood’s Oryx and Crake Lara Dodds In their introduction to Milton in Popular Culture, Laura Lunger Knoppers and Gregory Semenza suggest that it is the sublimity of Paradise Lost that accounts for Milton’s influence on fantasy and science fiction. Writers of science fiction (SF) have been inspired by the epic’s “otherwordly settings, grand conflicts of good and evil, heroes who determine the fate of their worlds, space travel, warfare, [and] futuristic visions.”1 Science fiction has become the generic repository for the marvels and wonders that were once the domain of the epic.2 In addition to the sublime, however, there is a second line of descent from Milton’s Paradise Lost to contemporary SF. Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, the first science fictional rewriting of Paradise Lost, focuses not on the otherworldly spectacle of Paradise Lost but on the ethical dilemmas of creation.3 As early as the seventeenth century, proto-science fictional works became vehicles for rethinking the myth of the Fall, and SF continues to offer a generic home for the rewriting of the Fall myth.4 In this essay I show how Margaret Atwood’s 2003 dystopian novel, Oryx and Crake, fits into this tradition. Milton’s version of the [End Page 115] myth of the Fall has been definitive for English-language literature, yet the epic’s substantial legacy in science fiction suggests that Paradise Lost has also provided material for the rewriting of this myth in new forms and to alternate ends. Oryx and Crake is the eleventh novel by the prolific and award-winning Canadian author Margaret Atwood, and her third that might be labeled science fiction. Oryx and Crake, like Atwood’s 1985 dystopian novel The Handmaid’s Tale, uses the estranging techniques characteristic of SF to diagnose and critique the dangers of the contemporary political climate.5 In each case, Atwood creates a near-future fictional world in which the consequences of current cultural and technological trends—religious fundamentalism and nuclear radiation in The Handmaid’s Tale, human-made climate change in Oryx and Crake—can be explored through extrapolation. Atwood is not primarily a genre author, and she has frequently distanced her work from science fiction, preferring the term “speculative fiction.” Atwood distinguishes between the two based upon the degree of invention that each permits. Speculative fiction, she maintains, includes no impossibilities, “no intergalactic space travel, no teleportation, no Martians.” Atwood believes that her novels differ from science fiction because they invent “nothing we haven’t already invented or started to invent.” Atwood therefore defines Oryx and Crake as an extended game of what if: “what if we continue on the road we’re already on? How slippery is the slope?”6 As I demonstrate in this essay, Oryx and Crake explores the possibility of environmental catastrophe—including the collapse of human civilization and its potential for rebirth—through an extensive engagement with the Fall myth, which is also a story of origins and of catastrophe. Previous to Oryx and Crake, Atwood’s most prominent allusion to Milton’s poetry appears in The Handmaid’s Tale, where Milton’s reflection on the parable of the talents in “When I consider how my light is spent” becomes part of the protagonist’s indoctrination into coerced reproductive labor.7 Milton’s poem (and by extension Milton) is aligned with the oppressive patriarchal authority that the novel details so terrifyingly: “They also serve who only [End Page 116] stand and wait, said Aunt Lydia. She made us memorize it. She also said, Not all of you will make it through. Some of you will fall on dry ground or thorns. Some of you are shallow-rooted.”8 Offred remembers the line from Milton’s sonnet, which is more threat than promise, during her ordeal as a Handmaid, and the allusion initiates the novel’s nuanced exploration of the possibilities of passive and active resistance. In Oryx and Crake Milton’s poetry appears in a more positive context, but here, also, a key line from the Miltonic canon signals Atwood’s reworking of some of Milton’s most characteristic concerns. Scholars have...

Gabriel Trujillo Muñoz: Escritor, editor y estudioso de la ciencia ficción mexicana

En la ciencia ficción mexicana contemporánea Gabriel Trujillo Muñoz es uno de los protagonistas más destacados. Desde hace más de treinta años este autor mexicalense ha promovido y difundido este género literario en México por medio de cuentos, novelas, antologías y estudios críticos. En este artículo se hará un recorrido de las obras cienciaficcioneras más relevantes de Trujillo, empezando con sus cuentos y terminando con sus monografías.

Simulacra in Science Fiction

Abstract The paper examines the concept of simulacra, focusing on their employment in contemporary science fiction. It provides examples from literature as well as from popular cinematography, in order to present the topic in a more familiar context. These examples include Wachowski’s The Matrix, Gibson’s Neuromancer and Fassbinder’s Welt am Draht reflected in the light of ideas of theorists such as Baudrillard and Deleuze. The purpose of this paper is to provide the basic notion of the concept in connection with the science fiction genre, while also offerring a wide range of subject-related material

Világépítés mesterfokon. Sánta Szilárd: Mesterséges horizontok: Bevezetés a kortárs sci-fi olvasásába

Világépítés mesterfokon. Sánta Szilárd: Mesterséges horizontok: Bevezetés a kortárs sci-fi olvasásába

Nasty Nazis and Extreme Americans: Cloning, Eugenics, and the Exchange of National Signifiers in Contemporary Science Fiction

This article addresses German science fiction novels from the last ten to fifteen years, specifically those that thematize cloning and/or eugenics. The main novels under discussion include Die verbesserte Frau by Barbara Kirchner, Duplik Jonas 7 by Birgit Rabisch, and Blueprint/Blaupause by Charlotte Kerner, (which was released as a film adaptation starring Franka Potente in 2004). This discussion shows how these and similar novels do or do not contend with the legacy of Nazi eugenics and reproductive experimentation, and second, how the existent historical awareness in the novels relates to the content of debates on current issues of biotechnology, including those by Jürgen Habermas, Slavoj Zizek, and Peter Sloterdijk. The article concludes by bringing these debates to bear on cultural cross-referencing in comparative examples of American texts (Gattaca [1997], The Island [2005], to name two), which tend to imbue frightening aspects of reproductive technologies with signifiers of Nazism, while the German texts tend to implicate America as the future source of nightmarish reproductive possibilities.

A política dos ciborgs no México e na América Latina

This article focuses on the cyborg body in contemporary Mexican science fiction, contrasting it with its depiction in other countries of Latin America. Beginning in the 1990s, Mexican science fiction authors write stories about implants and neo-cyborgs, anticipating Alex Rivera’s portrait of “cybraceros” in his 2008 film Sleep Dealer by nearly a decade. The defiant cyborgs of Mexico are distinct from those of the Southern Cone, where they relate most often to torture and unresolved political issues from the period of re-democratization, and from those of Brazil, where they are related to issues of race and urbanization. While in Mexico and Brazil the cyborg is often used as a critique of neoliberal policies and the privatization of public industries, the insistence on the embodiment of cyborgs in Mexico is often tied to labor and border issues, problematizing the idea of cyborg-mestizaje or hybridity. Heriberto Yepez questions concepts of hybridity that diminish the inherent sense of difference and struggle through a discourse of conciliation. The Mexican cyborg figure that insists on the importance of its body time and again demonstrates its resistance to facile notions of political and cybernetic hybridity

The future's four quarters: Proposing a quadrant methodology for strategic prototyping in infrastructural contexts

Abstract In this paper I propose and demonstrate an experimental methodology for producing suites of complementary prototype stories with which to facilitate innovation and forecasting exercises in the global infrastructural sector. I construct a quadrant diagram in order to outline four possible near-future scenarios for 2025 based on the divergence of two high-level global trends. For each resulting quadrant, I select one or more “seed topics” related to the underlying suite-theme of global water stress and access scarcity, seeking in particular those topics which resonate with the scenario, and adding additional context where suited. I then present the four resulting prototype vignettes separately, introducing the seed topics and theoretical context, sketching out the “world” of the scenario in which it is set, presenting the prototypes themselves in synopsis form, and finally discussing the technological and social implications which emerge from each narrative, and their relationships with the scenarios from which they stem. Finally, I discuss the suitability of this methodology in the context of projects which focus on considering possibilities for infrastructural developments rather than evaluating discreet new technologies, and position it in the context of contemporary science fiction literature.

Tomorrow

This article explores the ramified meaning of the idea of ‘Tomorrow’ in the mid 1950s. It looks at a number of fictional and non fictional attempts to predict futures on the basis of extrapolating from the technological and cultural phenomena of the then present. With particular reference to the 1956 Whitechapel Art Gallery exhibition, the author seeks to establish the parameters of conjecture as well as the timely cultural politics of the Independent Group. He suggests how writers and thinkers, such as Charles and Ray Eames and Norbert Wiener, combined with the filtering of information theory in contemporary science fiction to generate significant harbingers of digital culture in the formulations of the ‘Tomorrow’ of 1956.

The future of prediction: speculating on William Gibson's meta-science-fiction

Ever since famed science fiction (SF) author Ursula Le Guin insisted that SF is ‘not about the future’ but rather ‘about the present’, critics of SF narratives have largely rejected the genre's popularly held associations with the function of ‘prediction’. Recent celebration of ex-cyberpunk William Gibson's Pattern Recognition as ‘artistically ambitious’ SF, notwithstanding its ‘present-day’ setting, thus appears to mark the inevitable conclusion to Le Guin's claims for the allegorical function of future-based fictions. Taken together, these events or trajectories may provide an opportunity to explore the question of the place of ‘prediction’ not only in contemporary SF and SF studies, but also in what Bruce Sterling has called our ‘truly science-fictional world’. For in a string of largely unremarked upon novels Gibson published throughout the 1990s, the function of prediction seems displaced from the level of narration and onto particular objects and characters appearing within the novels' diegetic world. The narratives thus take on a strange kind of metafictional quality, speculating on the very activity of prediction that is sometimes imagined to define the work of SF. Examining Gibson's ‘Bridge’ stories with a metafictional eye to how they imagine the future of prediction, therefore, may enable us to pursue a speculative engagement with cultural discourses on futurity – thereby reconsidering not only routine denunciations of SF's predictive sheen but also the ‘worldly’ uses of SF's visions of the future.

Colonial discourse as a Somebody Else’s Problem ( SEP) field: Reading Life, the Universe and Everything as a postcolonial text

This article acknowledges the established links between popular/science fiction and colonialism and identifies a gap in the body of knowledge; the link between science fiction and Australian colonialism. It begins by indicating how this gap affects the way we view both the colonized and the colonizer before going on to show how this blind spot can be revealed using literary analysis. The article begins with a textual analysis of Douglas Adams' Life the Universe and Everything to demonstrate how it can be read as a post colonial text, then the work of prominent cultural and critical theorists is drawn upon to demonstrate why it should be read as a postcolonial text. This is achieved by first showing that the text is clearly a reflection and explanation of the effects of, and workings behind, colonial discourse. We then go on to address the question of why it is important that this text, which is often labeled as comedic science fiction, is in fact making a poignant political comment on the effects and inner workings of colonial discourse, that it succeeds in bringing postcolonial theory into the present, appropriating the contemporary connotations of science fiction and the accessibility of popular comedy, in order to enable a wide and varied audience to become aware of their own blind spot when it comes to the subject of colonialism.

Cormac McCarthy’s The Road and “a world to come”

Cormac McCarthy’s The Road and “a world to come” Bill Hardwig (bio) Cormac McCarthy’s fiction is frequently associated with the tradition of literary naturalism. Barcley Owens, for example, considers McCarthy’s novels in the context of theories of naturalism, and Steven Frye articulates McCarthy’s “romantic naturalism,” while James Giles argues that contemporary naturalism comprises a “multilayered determinism” visible in Outer Dark (2). Dana Phillips characterizes McCarthy’s narration as “radically unanthropocentric” (446), and Eric Carl Link discusses McCarthy’s critique of the “cosmic optimism” of American exceptionalism (“McCarthy” 157). Especially in his early work, but really in nearly all of his fiction, McCarthy is committed to a project of peeling away social and cultural conventions in order to explore the non-contingent humanity/animality that undergirds our existence. This reduction of life to its barest realities is one that characterizes many classic naturalist texts. Such a commitment to a naturalist perspective, however, makes McCarthy’s work fit less obviously within science fiction or speculative fiction more broadly. Part of McCarthy’s naturalist impulse involves looking back to a distant, primal, and biological past, one that is antecedent to contemporary social mores or speculative thoughts about the future. At times, McCarthy’s backward gaze and his love of archaic language feel stubbornly resistant to the goals of science fiction. In Future Present, Michael Pinsky characterizes contemporary science fiction as being inextricably tied to the undetermined future, a genre that “favors indeterminacy: probabilities, chaos, wave functions. It resists its own traditional assertions of certainty. . . . Science fiction writes the future. And according to sf, our future apparently consists of both external encounters—technological marvels (and horrors), aliens, and outer space—and internal encounters—the mysteries of the human mind and body” (13). For the reasons I mentioned [End Page 38] above, this description does not mesh well with much of McCarthy’s fiction, especially his Tennessee novels and the early Western fiction. It does, however, resonate with McCarthy’s most popular and recent novel, The Road (2006), which is heavily invested in the uncertainty of the future and contains both Pinsky’s sense of dramatic external encounters (post-apocalyptic destruction) and internal ones (the thoughts of the protagonist as he struggles to survive and to justify this struggle). How, then, to account for McCarthy’s science fiction turn in The Road? What does this shift from the distant past to the indeterminate future do for the ways we conceptualize McCarthy’s work? In this essay, I argue that McCarthy looks to science fiction’s gaze into the future as a means of exploring the issues of trauma, loss, and mourning in a manner different from his earlier work. By imagining the unrealized and destroyed future, The Road reverses McCarthy’s tendency to remove from his narrative the entanglement of modern objects. In this speculative novel, he swivels his orientation towards, rather than away from, cultural artifacts, towards “things.” Bill Brown has developed an approach to literary texts that he calls “thing theory,” an approach that explores the “complex roles that objects have played in American lives” (“Thing” 12). McCarthy’s intense treatment of human-made things in The Road, the proliferation of his use of the term “thing” in the novel, and the tender treatment of these things by the book’s narrator, so different from McCarthy’s desire to shed his narrative of frivolous objects of civilizations, can best be accounted for by thinking about the aesthetic choices he makes when imagining the future. In other words, most of McCarthy’s fiction looks to the past, or the soon-to-be-paved-over present, and sees the trappings of culture and materialism as part of an entire system of forces that lead to artificial and false engagements with living and the world.1 In The Road, these trappings become filled with a radiant power, as McCarthy imagines the disappearance of the world and considers the world that will never be. When faced with the erasure of our current culture, things become resonant with an at times nostalgic meaning for what is gone and at other times a poignant meaning of the expectation of a future that such things evoke...

Future soldiers in contemporary science fiction: the victory of complete harmony of body and mind on the example of Gordon R. Dickson’s Mercenaries – Dorsai

Military Science Fiction as a sub-genre of SF literature has gained a major acclaim throughout the years, especially after the II World War. It mainly deals with predictions such as: how modern warfare will look like in the future, what body upgrading systems, weapons and armour will it involve etc. Gordon R. Dickson – a silent giant of this sub-genre, unappreciated during his lifetime – proposed in his works a different vision of future warfare – innovative but traditional at the same time, intelligent and cunning. This article aims at presenting Dickson’s vision of future warfare and how innovative and different his ideas were in comparison to other military SF writers.

Using science fiction to teach science facts

The contributors to this discussion teach in three different Faculties at the University of East Anglia (UEA) – Science, Arts & Humanities and Medicine & Health Sciences. They have each used science fiction to explore learning outcomes in their distinct teaching practices. The discussion below highlights how contemporary science fiction can operate as a touchstone for debate that informs biochemistry teaching. Laura, Helen and Richard have all studied basic sciences, gaining PhDs in various aspects of biochemistry and molecular biology, and each have taught undergraduates and postgraduates at UEA. Helen and Richard are based in the Faculty of Science. Laura is based in the Faculty of Medicine & Health Sciences, and uses her interest in science communication to explore university teaching practices that involve science fiction. Christine gained a PhD from her research of technology and performance in science fiction film and is based in the Faculty of Arts & Humanities.