Contemporary Science Fiction Research Articles

The Ethics of Human Cloning in Narrative Fiction

The Ethics of Human Cloning in Narrative Fiction

Introduction: Popular Genres and Disability Representation

narrative is not trivial, Nickianne Moody writes, forms part of discursive practices that support inequality, influence medical and social decisions and determine interaction between non-able-bodied and non-disabled experience and identity (Methodological Agendas, 39). The narratives circulating in popular culture play a significant role in shaping wider understandings of disability and impairment. Within broader category of popular narrative this special issue of JLCDS focuses on popular genre forms, with authors considering genres from melodrama to gothic to contemporary crime fiction. The analysis of disability representation in these popular genre texts produces insights that can illuminate all kinds of texts, whether canonical or contemporary, privileged or disparaged. In one way or another, all articles in this special issue challenge, problematize, or expand upon existing scholarly work on disability and representation, advancing our understanding not only of specific texts or genre forms that they analyse, but also of disability representation itself. Building upon Disability and Popular Fiction: Reading Representations, a one-day conference held at Liverpool John Moores University in 2009, and a panel on disability in romance fiction at Present Difference: The Cultural Production of Disability conference at Manchester Metropolitan University in 2010, this special issue showcases a range of work on disability in popular genre texts. Such a project is undoubtedly needed: in work on contemporary popular genres such science fiction, romance, and crime fiction, there is little engagement with disability. In well-developed body of scholarly work on crime, detective, and mystery fiction, for example, there are books on race and ethnicity in but none on disability. Even works whose titles would suggest necessity of a engagement with disability-such Gill Plain's Twentieth-Century Crime Fiction: Gender, Sexuality and Body or Christiana Gregoriou's Deviance in Contemporary Crime Fiction-show little evidence of a disability-informed perspective. In similarly expansive field of science fiction scholarship, a groundbreaking 2008 collection, Queer Universes: Sexualities in Science Fiction, places queer-theoretical approaches to genre centre stage, and there has been a plethora of recent works on race, ethnicity, and postcoloniality in science fiction. However, despite Michael Berube's speculation that genre is as obsessed with disability it is with space travel and alien contact (568), there has been little engagement with disability in work.1 The same can be said for rapidly expanding field of romance studies, though a recent article on disability in vampire romance by Kathleen Miller (one of contributors to this special issue), well numerous discussions of this topic on fan sites are encouraging signs. The general lack of engagement with disability in fields that it could so obviously enrich is a familiar story. Indeed, sort of summary given in previous paragraph is so well rehearsed in cultural disability studies to be conventional. For popular genre forms, however, there is a further lack of engagement within cultural disability studies. What David Bolt terms critical avoidance works on many levels (Social Encounters). That is not to say that scholars in cultural disability studies have not engaged with popular genre texts; such an assertion is patently untrue. As early 1987, no less a figure than Irving Zola analysed representation of disability in the crime-mystery genre, suggesting that both popularity and structure and content of crime-mystery writing justify such scrutiny (486). Also worth highlighting are more recent works by Johnson Cheu and Jeffrey Weinstock (both on science fiction), Jane Stemp (young adult science fiction and fantasy), and Andrew Jakubowicz and Helen Meekosha (detective fiction), well discussions of genre by Sharon Snyder and David Mitchell (in Cultural Locations of Disability), and Stuart Murray (in Representing Autism). …

“Let there be Light”... in Times of Digital Darkness: Visualizing Cyberspace through the Lens of a Contemporary Science Fiction Film

“Let there be Light”... in Times of Digital Darkness: Visualizing Cyberspace through the Lens of a Contemporary Science Fiction Film

Vox politica: acousmatic voices in Argentinean science fiction cinema

This paper discusses the role of acousmatic characters in three contemporary science fiction (SF) films from Argentina: La Antena; La Sonámbula; and Adiós Querida Luna. Drawing on the work of Michel Chion, who has introduced the concept of acousmêtre to define a voice-character that can be heard but not seen on-screen (and for this reason is invested with power and authority), I will analyse the ways in which such a figure functions within the narrative of the selected case studies. This paper will seek to demonstrate that in Argentinean SF films the acousmêtre, rather than being simply invested with authority, is also a subversive signifier that threatens dominant powers. Because these films present dystopian scenarios that involve totalitarian or corrupt governments, I will claim that the acousmatic voices can also be interpreted as an allusion to the desaparecidos (disappeared), the thousands of victims of State violence in Argentina under the military dictatorship of 1976–83 (an instance of political trauma that clearly informs the stories of the three films discussed). The disappeared and the acousmatic figures share a similar ontological status, centred on the tension between presence and absence, and both constitute a political symbol against oppression and violence.

Sounds between worlds: the audiovisual hyperchiasm in The Thirteenth Floor and The Matrix

Representations of virtual reality within contemporary science fiction films have focused considerable resources, in terms of special effects, on rendering the boundary between real and virtual worlds and bodies. However, the philosophical and phenomenological significance of this partition has received little scholarly reflection. Drawing upon Maurice Merleau-Ponty's concept of the ‘chiasm’, which mediates the reversibility of subject/object relations through the intertwining of the senses, this paper hopes to explore the combination of sound and vision in the expression of what I will call the ‘hyperchiasm’ between the real and the virtual. The hyperchiasm extends the unique communicative powers of cinema as a medium to enable modes of reversibility impossible within the everyday world, and it is sound I will argue that plays a key role in expressing these capacities. The hyperchiasm also focalizes a dialectical struggle of subordination between sound and image within cinema, in relation to which I will analyze The Thirteenth Floor and The Matrix as representative of key variations.

The Shape of Things to Come? Politics of Reproduction in the Contemporary Science Fiction Series “Battlestar Galactica”

In this article, I discuss how the politics of survival in the science fiction TV series “Battlestar Galactica” (BSG) correspond to contemporary biopolitics in late modern Western society. BSG takes place in a post-apocalyptic world where war between artificial, non-human bodies and organic, human bodies emphasizes the importance of sustained population growth and, ultimately, survival for the human race. The BSG survival narrative accentuates the challenges that advanced reproductive technologies pose to the female body and how this is interrelated to state regulation of reproduction and population control. As a political fiction, BSG facilitates a discussion of the dynamics of choice and duty in relation to post-human reproduction: the right to choose not to reproduce as well as the right to reproduce. In light of my analysis, I suggest that the BSG survival narrative concludes with a displacement of discourses of choice onto discourses of obligation due to biotechnological advancement. I posit that BSG's endorsement of post-human reproduction, coupled with a pro-natalist approach to population control, represents post-human reproduction as an evolutionary advancement the female body cannot refuse. As such, the BSG survival narrative reinscribes gender as a category of difference and the link between the female body and reproduction as key norms for late modern societies. “I'm not a commodity, I'm a Viper pilot” Starbuck, BSG 205: The Farm

Embodiment and the human from Dante through tomorrow

Katherine Hayles's How We Became Posthuman matches its rhetoric to its argument by highlighting anxiety in its cybernetic subjects as we face the prospect of disembodied humanity. Medievalists should be sympathetic since embodiment is key to the conception of full medieval personhood. Hayles reacted against a new desire to loosen the link of person to body and much speculative thinking continues to push in this direction. As contemporary science fiction shows, we can conceive a variety of technological advances that might allow intelligence to exist electronically and humans to become increasingly independent of their bodies. While some form of materiality and localized perspective seem necessary, in the future a person will be identified less by materiality or information than by understanding. The ability to recognize a being as a durable, comprehensible interlocutor will be the litmus test of the posthuman being.

The Blade Runner Experience: The Legacy of a Science Fiction Classic (review)

Reviewed by: The Blade Runner Experience: The Legacy of a Science Fiction Classic Janani Subramanian The Blade Runner Experience: The Legacy of a Science Fiction Classic Will Brooker, ed. New York: Wallflower Press, 2005, 250 pp. In the process of canonization, a film such as Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner earns titles such as “classic” and adjectives such as “essential.” The Blade Runner Experience, edited by Will Brooker, reopens the 1982 text and exposes it to recent scholarship in media studies, revealing and exploding notions of canonization at the same time. In the words of Brooker, Blade Runner (BR) has “splintered and warped” (2) since its 1982 release, and this collection of essays explores the various platforms—literary, fan, digital, and theoretical—where the film continues to resonate. The collection opens with essays by Brooker and Judith Kerman that discuss the spatial and temporal dimensions of the film, specifically how the film maps onto a contemporary Los Angeles in the wake of the new millennium. Brooker’s essay “The Blade Runner Experience: Pilgrimage and Liminal Space” delves into the liminality of fan culture, addressing the phenomenon of fan pilgrimages to sites where BR was filmed. In the attempt to reconcile the actual spaces with those portrayed in the film, fans find themselves in an “in-between” state that allows for multiple meanings to be transcribed on the actual sites and back onto the film. Judith Kerman also investigates BR’s apocalyptic foundations in “Post-Millenium Blade Runner,” considering the film in light of the millenium and the apocalyptic fervor that accompanied the transition to the year 2000. The first section of the collection focuses on the cinematic influence of Phillip K. Dick on BR and science fiction in general, an aporia that both scholars and fans feel is often overlooked. Although several of Dick’s works have been adapted to the screen, scholars such as Aaron Barlow and Dominic Alessio look at the way Dick’s works have pushed the science fiction genre as a whole. Barlow’s essay, “Reel Toads and Imaginary Cities: Phillip K. Dick, Blade Runner and the Contemporary Science Fiction Movie,” discusses the way both Dick and Ridley Scott introduced themes from noir and the hard-boiled detective novel into the male protagonists of contemporary science fiction. The resulting ambiguity in characters such as Deckard and the like, according to Barlow, has led to new depictions of morality in general within the genre; the influence of the pulp tradition has lent an introspective tone to science fiction, where fault lines are blurred, and conflicts are internally, rather than externally, prompted. Dominic Alessio’s essay, “Redemption, ‘Race,’ Religion, Reality and the Far-Right: Science Fiction Film Adaptations of Phillip K. Dick,” expands on Barlow’s discussion of moral ambiguity by adding facets of religious and moral redemption; looking closely at how the characters in BR and other Dick adaptations challenge categories of “human” and “non-human” and add dimensions of race and class to his works, Alessio points out how Dick’s often religiously motivated themes of love and morality translate to the contemporary big screen. Although the previous section highlighted the influence of the films’ two “authors,” the second part of the collection, “Playing Blade Runner,” explores the extension of Dick and Scott’s science fiction themes into digital realms. Contemporary science fiction films, with their elaborate mise-en-scène and technologically motivated narratives, lend themselves to video game translation, and both Barry Atkins and Susana P. Tosca address the implications of turning BR into a video game. Atkins, in “Replicating the Blade Runner,” argues that computer game Blade Runner PC, by turning the film’s two-dimensional space into three-dimensional possibilities, allows users/viewers to explore the spaces of the film in [End Page 63] detail, and his argument for this type of “remediation” adds another kind of space to the fan pilgrimages of Will Brooker’s study. Although the game does encourage new interpretations of the film’s themes, Atkins is careful to mention an ideological inconsistency: whereas the games present a utopic vision of technology, BR is more invested in interrogating technology’s dystopic tendencies. The ideological constraint that Atkins mentions...

Saviours and Sexuality in Contemporary Science-fiction Film: Reflections on Virginity, Chastity and Gender

In contemporary science-fiction film the myth of a saviour thrives. Though the stories clearly borrow themes from the Christian tradition the myth is also changed and challenged. This article explores what happens to Christian ideas of the sexuality of the saviour when science-fiction film-makers take on the myth. The focus in the article is on two aspects: the virgin birth and the chastity of the saviour. The analysis shows how these aspects are both transformed and reinforced in the stories. Gender and changing gender roles in the films are revealed to be of key importance. Strong female characters bring both love and sexuality to the centre, but not without some problems appearing. The attitudes towards sexuality and religion that the films suggest are complex, underlining the ambiguities connected with this issue today.

Postmodern messiahs: the changing saviours of contemporary popular culture

The messiah myth is alive and well in the modern world. Contemporary science fiction film has taken the myth to heart and given us an endless stream of larger than life heroes. The heroes of the present are, however, not exactly the same as the heroes of the past. A changing world demands new things of its saviours. Using a textual and narrative analysis based on insights gained from feminist film theory and cultural studies, this article looks closely at the messiah theme in science fiction films and TV series from the last three decades. The study explores the changes that have occurred in relation to images of the body, the attitudes and personalities of modern heroes, gender, questions of power and ideas of the transcendent. The article then discusses what these changes both between newer and older heroes and between contemporary heroes and the traditional messiah story might say about religion and spirituality in the modern world. Finally the article explores the question of why the messiah myth still finds an audience today.

MEMORIES OF THE SPACE AGE

In this article the mundanity of contemporary cyberspace will be contrasted with the technological sublime of the space programme, now almost 40 years ago. Using some short stories from J. G. Ballard, I explore the idea that contemporary forms of ‘space’, usually prefigured as ‘cyber’ or ‘virtual’, are insular and privatized in comparison to Apollo. To a certain extent, this contraction of ambition can also be witnessed in contemporary cyberpunk science fiction, and in the combination of capitalist and conspiratorial narratives about space. Though there are many ways in which the space race might be deemed politically suspect, it represents a triumph of a modernist concatenation of progress, technology and organization. In contrast to the introverted couches of the virtual, the sublime space between the stars might suggest a much more expansive relationship between technology and the human.

Understanding contemporary American science fiction: the age of maturity, 1970-2000

Understanding Contemporary American Science Fiction: The Age of Maturity, 1970-2000 explores the major trends and developments during three decades that witnessed science fiction's most dramatic progression from subliterary escapist entertainment to a more sophisticated literature of ideas. Darren Harris-Fain suggests that to understand American science fiction fully, it is essential to realize that the current field with all its variety results from the proceeding decades of writings. In addition, he contends that although much science fiction of merit was written in America prior to 1970, the latter decades of the twentieth century witnessed a dramatic improvement in quality, even as the field fragmented into a variety of subgenres and as writers sought to transcend earlier critical dismissals. Harris-Fain discusses significant and representative works, most of which mainstream literary scholars and critics ignore, as he charts the historical and literary development of contemporary American science fiction. He identifies influences and events central to the genre's growth, including the internal divisions along both literary and political lines experienced during the Vietnam era; the influence of the feminist movement and other contemporary concerns; the increasing contributions of female, African American, and gay and lesbian writers; and the emergence of such significant trends as hard science fiction, cyberpunk, alternate history, and shared-world stories. Harris-Fain also considers literary science fiction's relationship to the mass media, the effects the popularity of fantasy has on the field, and academia's continued misprizing of the genre.

Andere Zukünfte: Politik der Utopien

Famous utopias as well as the 20th century dystopias and contemporary science fiction designs are reviewed. The social background of these conceptions as well as the ideas of society and the use and meaning of technology incorporated in these utopias are discussed in favour to support a discussion about the construction of future societies.

The Outsider in Fiction and Fantasy

For Laurence Yep, the outsider is a dominant theme in writing and life. Whether writing historical and contemporary fiction, science fiction, or fantasy, he hopes that readers will see the magic and wonder in the world that can be found by shifting perspective and seeing “things instead as outsiders.”

E.T. Go Home: Indigeneity, Multiculturalism and ‘Homeland’ in Contemporary Science Fiction Cinema

Readings of films involving alien invasions do not take into account the fact that in many science fiction films, notably 'E. T', aliens are benign and friendly, are trapped in human societies, and desire above all to return to their homelands. A key to understanding such good aliens is the idea of the 'Indian', a figure widely used in the US to encode ideas about home, belonging and identity, often through the deployment of New Age discourses.

Limning Science Fiction's Edges

dging into the Future: Science Fiction and Contemporary Cultural Transformation, edited by Veronica Hollinger and Joan Gordon, will be useful to readers new to science fiction criticism, as it provides an excellent overview of the central concerns that currently preoccupy the field. It also boasts a few pieces that represent the best intellectual work SF scholars are producing today. The conceptual goals of the collection are relatively general; the editors state in their introduction that they wish to examine science fiction's complex intersections with this transitory present moment; to catch up to the imaginative futures being constructed in contemporary science fiction; and to disrupt the potential ossification of the sf canon as it has been developed through the academic teaching and critical writing of the 1990s (2). Clearly, in suggesting that they are interested in how science fiction depicts the present and the future, the editors are casting a very wide net. Hollinger and Gordon's third aim, to loosen the perimeter of the SF canon, is somewhat more specific, and, indeed, one of the most exciting dimensions of this collection is its introduction of a host of authors new to academic discussion. If the mainstream SF criticism

Inverting History in Octavia Butler's Postmodern Slave Narrative

Beyond of the historical slave narrative, Octavia Butler's 1988 may also be deemed a contemporary science fiction novel, though the author herself claims that is fantasy.... There is no science Kindred (Kenan 495). (1) Butler's vision the novel is certainly not utopic. Whatever its narrative context, Butler's novel looks to the antebellum slave narrative form as a background for exploring issues of literacy opposition to the reality of possession, oppression, and violence. Content and form intersect the novel as the veiling of temporal boundaries blurs the notion of slavery transcended. By zigzagging the time frame of the novel from past to present, points to ways which past and present become interchangeable. She also writes of plausible historical actions and relationships, filling in possible gaps that may be evident classic slave narratives. assumes a non-Western conceptualization of history--one which history is cyclical, not linear--in order to demonstrate ways which certain forms of race and gender oppression continue late into the twentieth century and beyond. She incorporates postmodern fiction literary techniques to critique the notion that historical and psychological slavery can be overcome. Unlike other contemporary revisions of the traditional slave narrative--most famously, Charles Johnson's Middle Passage, Sherley Anne Williams's Dessa Rose, and Toni Morrison's Beloved--Butler's neo-slave narrative, at least part, takes place the relative present. As such, it more clearly blurs history and the present (though the neo-slavery novel by convention imposes the past onto the present). The novel liberally borrows from very modern and postmodern ideas concerning time and continuity. Like John Barth's The Sot-Weed Factor or E. L. Doctorow's Ragtime, attempts a contemporary re-write of an historical or plausibly historical event. Thus, she reclaims control over text and ideas, significant postmodern concepts. This drive to contain and to define one's personal or communal history can be seen many contemporary novels. Ultimately, Butler's novel remains part contemporary postmodern text, part historical slave narrative. One might label a sort of inverse slave narrative. Born into freedom herself 1950, its protagonist Dana becomes enslaved on her twenty-sixth birthday 1976, the bicentennial year of US independence, and, as many actual slave rebels reported, she must prepare for a dangerous, consequential escape. Dana's escape, with its trials, pitfalls, and obstacles--including capture by her white owner-ancestor Rufus and his slave overseer Weylin--parallels numerous slave narrators' accounts of flight from bondage. It is not simply Butler's account of Dana's enslavement and escape that resemble antebellum slavery narratives', but also her novel's concentration on rhetorical strategies of subterfuge, its record of resistance and oppression, and its concentration on the separation of families. Underscoring the novel's slave narrative conventions, Sandra Y. Govan claims that Butler treats the recurring themes of casual brutality, forcible separation of families, the quest for knowledge, the desire to escape, the tremendous work loads expected of slaves as efficiently as any of the narrators or documentary histories discussing the slavery experience (Homage 91). (2) By assuming the form of the slave narrative and by shifting its focus from past to present to past, Butler's novel stresses the ways which present-day African Americans might suffer from the markings of the past. Adapting genres is, of course, a very postmodern concept. Both John Barth and Thomas Pynchon have taken the form of the 18th-century novel to write contemporary updates of their own. Butler's agenda, however, is much less playful than theirs--and much more political. Of course, to be reminiscent of a slave narrative, must present a world of intense and implacable oppression, possession, and violence. …

When Fibre Meets Fibre

When Fibre Meets Fibre

Representations of the post/human: monsters, aliens and others in popular culture

From the Publisher: Microchips. Genetic modification of plants. Cloning. Exciting new discoveries in reproductive, genetic, and information technologies all serve to call into question the immutability of the boundaries between humans, animals, and machines. The category of the posthuman reflects the implications of such new technologies on contemporary culture, especially in their capacity to reconfigure the human body and to challenge our most fundamental understandings of human nature. Elaine L. Graham explores these issues as they are expressed within popular culture and the creative arts. From the myth of Prometheus and the Gothic horror of Frankenstein's monster to contemporary postmodern science fiction, a gallery of fantastic creatures haunts Western myth, religion, and literature. They serve to connect contemporary debates with enduring concerns about the potential -- and the limits -- of human creativity.

An Introduction to Ten Outstanding Young-Adult Authors in the United States

Virginia Euwer Wolff 6 T / OUNG-adult literature is literature read by young \X people in approximately grades 7 through 12. j-i I Unlike other publishing movements, young-adult \g^ literature in the United States became a phenomenon in almost a single year, 1967, when writers and publishers of materials for teenagers reached beyond the simple plots and white, middle-class protagonists of the postWorld War II era and presented the more culturally diverse and socially complex environment of the 1960s. Three groundbreaking novels published expressly for the young-adult audience in 1967 were S. E. Hinton's The Outsiders, Ann Head's Mr. and Mrs. Bo Jo Jones, and Robert Lipsyte's The Contender. Among generalized characteristics of these and subsequent contemporary realistic young-adult novels are their varied subjects and often fast-paced narratives about independent and accomplishing protagonists who are presented from the point of view of a young person addressing emotions shared by young adult readers. These characteristics, emphasizing the needs and interests of young adults, appealed to the readership of the day. Since 1967, young-adult authors across many genres have created an enduring and respected body of literature that young adults have chosen to read. Any reader, young or old, may enjoy the best of young-adult literature by selecting from the wide range of works by ten outstanding U.S. authors: Robert Cormier, Paul Fleischman, Russell Freedman, Lois Lowry, Robin McKinley, Walter Dean Myers, Katherine Paterson, Gary Paulsen, Richard Peck, and Virginia Euwer Wolff. These ten have produced works that appeal emotionally to young people at their developmental levels and offer them opportunities to read with understanding and literary appreciation. As a group, their combined works represent the broad scope of youngadult literature, including the genres of poetry, contemporary realistic fiction, fantasy, science fiction, historical fiction, biography, and information books. More important, however, authorities in the field have recognized these authors. For example, Alleen Pace Nilsen and Kenneth Donelson have included the nine who are fiction writers in their honor list, a standard feature in their classic textbook, Literature