Futuristic Fiction Research Articles

A Study on the Impossibility of Representing the Archival Memory and Reconstruction of a Futuristic Fiction: Works by Ayoung Kim and Lindsay Seers

A Study on the Impossibility of Representing the Archival Memory and Reconstruction of a Futuristic Fiction: Works by Ayoung Kim and Lindsay Seers

Futuristic Fiction, Utopia, and Satire in the Age of the Enlightenment

Review of Giulia Iannuzzi, Futuristic Fiction, Utopia, and Satire in the Age of the Enlightenment: Samuel Madden’s Memoirs of the Twentieth Century (1733), Turnhout: Brepols, 2024, reviewed by Jason Pearl

Experiential futuristic science fiction: Genre and techniques

Experiential futurism is an important subgenre of futuristic science fiction in China, with the greatest number of works and the richest content. Several important works in this genre have gained widespread influence. Experiential futuristic works focus on conveying the experience of the future through words, and often use considerable appeal to call on people to pay attention to and to think about the future. Such works can be divided into two types: those attempting to convey the experience of a stand-alone technology and those attempting to convey a panoramic experience. The methods for creating experiential futuristic fiction include wonder creation, perception reinforcement, immersion creation, emotion activation and cognitive enhancement. Experiential futuristic works play a pioneering role in today's era of virtual reality and the metaverse.

‘To Learn from Nature, not to Exploit Her : Discerning Postcolonial Green Speculations in Vandana Singh s Indira s Web and Widdam

As a new generation of writers and artists from the Global South deal with the effects of human-caused environmental damage and climate change, they rely heavily on science fiction and fantasy as a genre to show the most important parts of the Anthropocene. Due to the geographical peculiarity and history of the colonial past, the Global South experiences inequitable effects of the Anthropocene as compared to the Global North. Therefore, speculative climate fiction from the Global South demands a critical interpretation contextualized in the geopolitics of the Global North and the Global South. The paper discusses the manner in which science fiction anchors ecological consciousness in the narratives from the Global South and further strives to depict the specific traits of Global South SF that make it different from Global North SF. This study intends to investigate two short stories, Indira’s Web and Widdam, by an Anglophone science fiction writer, Vandana Singh. The paper demonstrates how Singh’s stories, firstly, subvert the hegemony of western sciences by legitimizing indigenous knowledge systems as scientific, rational, and eco-friendly, and, secondly, criticize the need for technological and neo-colonial advancements at the cost of our environment. With the analysis of these stories, it would be argued that postcolonial futuristic fiction not only acts as a tool to question anthropocentrism but also functions as an appropriate literary form for enunciating environmental crises and climate change affecting the Global South.

O genetski izazvanim bolestima u romanu „Kralj Bola i skakavac” (Król Bólu i pasikonik) Jaceka Dukaja

The author discusses the historical changes in attitudes towards infectious diseases in the mythological, Christian-religious and scientific worldview before and after the discovery of the causes of these diseases in the context of the types of futuristic fiction. One narrative line of the novel by contemporary Polish writer Jacek Dukaj King of Pain and the Grasshopper (Król Bólu i pasikonik, 2010) is centred on to the production of retroviruses and carcinogenic agents by genetic engineering companies that cause epidemics and destroy wildlife in the southern hemisphere. The text points out the specifics of the author’s descriptions of the cause of the plague and discusses Dukaj’s speculative projections of futuristic fiction.

20:30 BRUXSELS TALKS

On the 23rd of January 2020, a radio talk show of the future, 20:30 Bruxsels Talks, took place in Brussels. With guests and artists from the year 2030, it discussed how the transition to a climate-proof city had happened since 2019. In this article, we present and frame the development of the show and provide insight into the participative creation process. The radio show exemplifies (a) how future fiction can be used as a tool to evoke change and (b) how the participatory development of futurist fiction can be used as a method to trigger imagination and conversation on what citizens want for our cities. We argue that there is an opportunity for researchers to explore fiction as a method, as a format and as a space. Foresight practitioners who want to create engaging stories may find inspiration in the body of knowledge of arts-based research and the arts. Note: This article should be read in conjunction with 20:30 Bruxsels Talks: A Script for a Future Fiction Radio Show, in this issue, written by the same author team and published in this volume.

Scribleriana

Scribleriana Howard Weinbrot Roy Wolper (1931–2020) Click for larger view View full resolution The last of the founding editors of The Scriblerian, Roy S. Wolper, died on July 10, after a long battle with cancer. He had continued his lifelong crusade against careless writing and slipshod thinking well into his eighties and he remained available to the current Scriblerian editors for advice and encouragement to the very end. We celebrated Roy’s career in the Spring 2017 issue of the journal, so will not repeat ourselves here. Paul K. Alkon (1935–2020) Paul Alkon died from cerebral bleeding on January 13, 2020. He received his A.B. from Harvard in 1957 and his Ph.D. from the University of Chicago in 1962. He went on to a distinguished career at the University of California, Berkeley, the University of Maryland, the University of Minnesota, and finally as Leo S. Bing Professor at the University of Southern California, 1980–2007. There was special honor in that endowed chair: Paul Alkon was Donald J. Greene’s successor. Paul was indeed a worthy heir of the Bing professorship. He was a founding member of ASECS, and a convener of its national meeting at the University of Maryland in 1971. He was a brilliant, [End Page 110] clear, learned teacher and writer with broad ranging interests, at which he regularly exceled. He published numerous articles, five books, and one co-edited volume; of especial interest to Scriblerian readers are his Samuel Johnson and Moral Discipline (1967), Defoe and Fictional Time (1979), and Origins of Futuristic Fiction (1987). He held a Guggenheim in 1983–84. One of his special talents was anticipating work that predicted the direction of subsequent research. Samuel Johnson and Moral Discipline, for example, included a major chapter on Johnson’s sermons. Defoe and Fictional Time anticipated studies of time as perceived and used in eighteenth-century literature and culture. Paul Alkon was my friend from 1958 until his death in January 2020. During those many years I saw Paul build ship models, a harpsichord, fill book shelves with eighteenth-century books, books about science fiction, Winston Churchill, Lawrence of Arabia, Inuit art, and almost any other matter on which an ever-hungry mind could feed. I will remember him as a friend, colleague, paradigm of scholarly and pedagogical excellence, husband, and father. One of his daughters wrote an apt sentence for honoring him: “In lieu of flowers, reach out to a friend and discuss a book you love.” Howard Weinbrot University of Wisconsin Philip Harth (1926–2020) Philip Harth died peacefully on April 28, 2020 at the Attic Angel Community in Middleton, Wisconsin. Phil received his MA from the University of Chicago in 1949, and his PhD, with Honors, in 1958. R. S. Crane was one of his mentors. From 1954 to 1956 Harth was a Fulbright Scholar at University College, London, and spent much of his time at the old North Library of the British Museum. That concentrated effort nurtured his doctoral dissertation, earned his position at Northwestern University (1956–1965), and evolved into his first book, the still invaluable Swift and Anglican Rationalism: The Religious Background of “A Tale of a Tub” (Chicago, 1961). The importance of his book was made plain in 1966 when the University of Wisconsin English Department tempted him to Madison to replace the retiring and distinguished Ricardo Quintana. Harth’s appointment assured Wisconsin’s enduring importance as a center for the study and teaching of eighteenth-century British literature and culture. Harth’s subsequent books were Contexts of Dryden’s Thought (Chicago, 1968), and Pen for a Party: Dryden’s Tory Propaganda and its Contexts (Princeton, 1993), and an edition of Mandeville’s Fable of the Bees (Penguin, 1989). Harth made plain that religion and politics are necessary to understand ancestral achievement. This uniformly admirable body of research, together with numerous articles and reviews, was supported by major grants: the Guggenheim Foundation, ACLS, the Clark Library, the Wisconsin Institute for Research in the Humanities, the Reed College Humanities Institute, the University of Virginia as visiting professor, and the Graduate School of the University of Wisconsin. In 1977 Philip...

Old Age and Euthanasia in Anthony Trollope’s The Fixed Period

In this article, I examine Anthony Trollope’s futuristic fiction The Fixed Period (1882) to discuss how the author criticizes Victorian Britain’s general pursuit of national efficiency by depicting a seemingly utopian nation where euthanasia of old and less productive individuals is used as an expedient means of implementing utopian values. In reading how Period portrays aging as a sign not only of personal deterioration but also of social inefficiency, I situate the text in the late nineteenth-century context, in which euthanasia was viewed as a countermeasure against large-scale degeneration. It is necessary to note that Trollope’s interpretation of the future without decline—without the elderly—is satiric, for he indeed speaks about the present society, obsessed with the ideology of progress. That is, although Trollope locates the mandatory euthanasia system in the future, his portrayal of it as a pivotal means of national regeneration serves to problematize the late Victorian reality, in which people felt a need to increase the size of the young and efficient generation and decrease that of the old and inefficient generation in order to prevent collective degeneration. In exploring how Trollope’s depiction of the future illuminates the seamy side of utopian productivism, I therefore suggest that he debunks the myth of youth, efficiency, and progress, which governed Victorian Britain.

Images and Narratives of Law and Order in the Manga KOBAN

While law and justice issues are well represented in the vast and diverse world of Japanese Manga, the medium’s predilection for fantasy tends to produce futuristic or overblown fiction far removed from everyday life. Fantastic treatments may also reflect relatively low awareness of legal matters in a society of low crime and litigation. One law and order institution that most people are familiar with, however, is the network of community police boxes that covers Japan, and this has spawned a gag-ridden yet somewhat more realistic genre of justice-related comics. This article focuses on Ishikawa Chika’s KOBAN, whose humour revolves around the contrasting personalities and petty squabbles of two cops in their dealings with mundane police work. The characters, plots and conversations are visually supported by juxtaposing the weaponry and equipment of law enforcement with childlike facial features and cute mascots, thereby constructing the police box as a halfway house between local neighbourliness and state bureaucracy.

La vida en resto. Cuerpos y basura en Alicia Duvojne Ortiz, Fernando Brito y Manuel Pinedo

A partir de tres propuestas distintas: la crónica periodística ¿Quién mató a Diego Duarte? Crónicas de la basura de Alicia Dujovne Ortiz (2011), la serie fotográfica de Tus pasos se perdieron en el paisaje de Fernando Brito (2009) y la novela Plop (2007) de Rafael Pinedo, se aborda cómo, en medios diversos (periodismo, imagen y ficción) se redefine la distinción entre vida y muerte contra su demarcación inmunitaria. Las tres producciones comparten esta figuración del cuerpo en tanto desecho y residuo: la crónica de Dujovne lo inserta en el circuito económico de la producción y el consumo; las fotos de Brito parten igualmente de la condición de abandono de esos cuerpos y su aplanamiento en la basura, aunque el contexto visual en el que se integran es un paisaje falsamente natural; por último la novela Plop radicaliza la noción de resto en una ficción futurista donde ese circuito económico y ese medio natural ha quedado devastado.

Into time

Vietnamese scholar Ngô Tự Lập recently attempted to establish Hồ Chí Minh as the birthfather of futurist fiction in Vietnam by reading a 1949 story called “The Ten-year Sleep” by Trần Lực, later said to be Hồ Chí Minh. To give credibility to his claim, Ngô cites Brent Hayes Edwards’ praise for the futuristic power of an earlier story signed Nguyễn Ái Quốc, whom Edwards unproblematically narrates as the future Hồ Chí Minh. I read the “Ten-year Sleep” and a biography said to be written by Hồ Chí Minh himself to argue that the story stages the founding of the nation through the omnipresence of the figure of Hồ Chí Minh within that story, enabling a nationalist prophetic temporality that erases the heterogeneity of time in the same way that the name Hồ Chí Minh erases the heterogeneity of the various authors of the texts attributed to him. The article considers the politics of such a move in order to recover the rich potentials at the intersection of black and Vietnamese studies.

Paul Johnston’s Body Politic: A Speculative Fable

Abstract Dystopias are speculative fictions with a close connection with the present condition and focus on the transformative potential of human agency. Paul Johnston’s futuristic crime fiction

Guerrilla Warfare, Slavery, and the Hopes of the Confederacy

Guerrilla Warfare, Slavery, and the Hopes of the Confederacy Mark E. Neely Jr. (bio) In 1861, on the very eve of the Civil War, Edmund Ruffin published a speculative novel titled Anticipations of the Future: To Serve as Lessons for the Present Time, in the Form of Extracts of Letters from an English Resident of the United States, to the London Times, from 1864 to 1870.1 It has never quite enjoyed the attention from historians that it deserves. Ruffin did fairly well in anticipating the future. He foresaw urban riots in the North during a civil war with the South, though he thought they would arise from class consciousness rather than objections to conscription. He predicted that the states of the Old Northwest would eventually cleave to the southern confederacy, and indeed anxieties about that possibility were often expressed during the actual Civil War of 1861–65. On his most important point, namely, that guerrilla warfare would lead to southern independence, he was proved wrong, but he looked hopefully to see its embrace by Confederate society throughout the war.2 What is most significant about the book is simply that Ruffin was thinking about the future in 1861, about what might happen if the South really seceded, trying to figure out how the slave states might gain independence despite the North’s great military advantages. It is difficult to find any substantial consideration of those questions in books or pamphlets published in the South on the eve of secession; arguments over the constitutionality of the act of secession itself dominated the polemical literature of the day. Emory M. Thomas, after writing many works on the Confederacy, still wonders at the lack of foresight displayed in the immediate origins of the Civil War and raises the question, “Both sides, it seems, decided to go to war because they could not—or would not—calculate the cost of their decisions.”3 Thus Ruffin stands out. Say what one will about his amateurish exercise in futurist fiction, he was thinking about the apparently unthinkable: what would happen if the South really did secede from the Union and faced a war with the North, which was obviously greatly superior in population, transportation, and manufacturing. The dangerous resort to [End Page 376] secession needed some plausible strategy for success, and Ruffin had at last figured out what it was: guerrilla warfare. To read the confident prose Ruffin dreamed up to show how guerrilla warfare would work for southern independence is doubly surprising, coming as it did from the pen of an ardent proslavery apologist. Current wisdom on the subject suggests something altogether different, that the Confederacy did not dare consider a self-conscious adoption of guerrilla warfare as a strategy for military victory from fear for the security of slavery amid the disorder of irregular war. The most forthright statement of that view comes from Gary W. Gallagher, but other historians agree, and all who have considered the idea have at the very least taken it seriously. “The threat of such chaos in a slave-based society,” Gallagher argued, “stood as the most important obstacle to a Confederate policy of guerrilla war.” “Both late antebellum fears of insurrection,” he added, “and behavior when confronting Union invaders during the war strongly suggest that white southerners would not have countenanced a national guerrilla strategy in 1861.” Guerrilla warfare defied “the models of earlier wars to which white Southerners looked for guidance.” Guerrilla warfare was only “marginally related to their martial tradition.” “Announcement of such a strategy in 1861,” he said, would not “have prompted an enthusiastic response.”4 The proposition has attracted the attention of some of the most important writers on the war: in addition to Gallagher, George M. Fredrickson, Reid Mitchell, and the writing team of Herman Hattaway, Richard Beringer, Archer Jones, and William N. Still. Considering why the Confederacy lost the Civil War, Reid Mitchell, in 1992, said, “In 1861 the Confederacy did not choose to fight a guerrilla war—because, in large part, it did not seem possible to fight a guerrilla war and keep slavery intact.” Coauthors Hattaway, Jones, Beringer, and Still, in a five-hundred-page consideration of Why the...

Anachronism in Early French Futuristic Fiction

This essay focuses on examples of anachronism—both intentional and unintentional—in several early French “retrofuturistic” novels: Louis-Sebastien Mercier’s The Year 2440 (1771), Emile Souvestre’s The World as It Shall Be (1846), Jules Verne’s Paris in the 20th Century (written in 1863, published in 1994), and Albert Robida’s The Twentieth Century (1882). I examine the many anachronisms in these “tales of the future” through the lens of two different reading publics: the texts’ original readers and the readers of today, who view them in retrospect from our vantage point of the twentyfirst century. As members of the latter group, we often project onto these “oldfashioned” visions of the future our contemporary aesthetic sensibilities and ideological memes. In reading them, our retrospective gaze is not only a seeking gaze; it is also a projecting gaze and itself intrinsically anachronistic.

WHEN A POINTY NOSE IS IN VOGUE: OR (UN) SAVING FACE IN KOREA

While borrowing from the theory of lookism, defined as “prejudice toward people because of their appearance” (Tietje and Cresap 2005, p, 31), this paper ventures into an emerging pattern of consumer behavior—designing one’s own body with the help of a surgical blade. The “designer body” idea has gradually moved from futuristic fiction to the exclusive domain of celebrity personalities and has lately arrived in the more mainstream marketplace (Kim, 2015). Available statistics indicate a growing number of plastic surgeries and clinic locations, the booming popularity of the aesthetics surgery specialty in medical schools, and burgeoning medical tourism with the goal of aesthetically reinventing one’s body (Akam 2014). Consumer vocabulary has embraced “rhinoplasty” and “liposuction” and lovingly transformed the dry medical jargon into the softer slang terms “rhino” and ‘lipo.”While breast augmentation is the most popular surgical procedure, in this work we purposely focus on the face. Unless veiled, the face is the body part that is always on display. In addition, we intentionally perform this study in the specific cultural domain that places strong metaphorical value on the face and has historically developed the dignity-centered concept of “saving face” as a major guiding principle of life. The choice of South Korea within this vast cultural realm seems the most logical given the fact that twenty percent of women in the country have something surgically done on their faces, which is arguably the highest known proportion in the world (Willett 2013). Finally, South Korea’s emphasis on Confucian values is part of our approach.Our research objective is to understand the interplay of major cultural forces that define the embrace of a novel mass marketed product (plastic surgery) designed to correct one’s genetic make-up. Considering marketing to be one such cultural force (Fedorenko 2014), we specifically aim to conceptualize its role in an ongoing interaction with Confucian values. What makes a culture rooted in conservative beliefs and respect for the elderly so openly question and surgically correct the “quality” of the body received from one’s parents? Does it happen because of or in opposition to Confucianism? Does fashion simply extend its province by converting desirable pointy noses and v-shaped chins into “in” items similar to pointy shoes? These research questions have shaped our qualitative methodological approach (Strauss and Corbin 1998) that relies on the juxtaposition of norms and values dictated by Confucian beliefs and those manifested through marketing channels.To uncover the normative messages and consumer directions coming from marketers, we turn to the so-called language of the street and perform close analysis of fifty advertising billboards and street signs promoting plastic procedures and located in Seoul, the capital of South Korea. We read both visual and textual data against the traditional Confucian literature. This methodological direction for our study was developed with the purpose to fill in the gap in the existing research, as detailed in the literature review, followed by the analysis of data, discussion of our findings, and the final section outlining a potential course for future research.

La robinsonnade d’anticipation: Sur une forme composite et ses péripéties

In nineteenth-century French literature, adventure novels and futuristic fictions share various narrative and thematic features which generate an extensive set of “science fiction adventure” novels that have not attracted much critical attention to date. However, such hybrid narratives lead us to reconsider a certain kind of futuristic fiction as it is defined as much by a geographical shift as by time travel. The particular and prolific case of the robinsonnade , regarded as a pivotal subgenre of adventure, facilitates highlighting such generic interferences. This paper examines four novels related either to utopian travel literature or to Jules Verne’s literary and editorial paradigm of the “voyages extraordinaires” in order to shed light on the dynamics framing the earliest forms of science fiction built on the topic of remote, flying, or spatial island. (In French)

A Made-Up Place by Anna Jackson et al. (review)

Reviewed by: A Made-Up Place by Anna Jackson et al. B.J. Epstein A Made-Up Place. Anna Jackson, Geoffrey Miles, Harry Ricketts, Tatjana Schaefer, and Kathryn Walls. Wellington, NZ: Victoria UP, 2011. 224 pp. Despite a strange cover that seemingly shows two girls in their underwear, this fascinating book by New Zealand-based scholars who teach children’s literature discusses what is likely to be new ground for many of us: young adult literature from New Zealand. It analyses a number of topics (ranging from race to sport, the Gothic to money) and refers to many authors, including Margaret Mahy, Maurice Gee, and Witi Ihimaera. The main topic is national identity, which is connected to other issues, so Jackson, Miles, Rickets, Schaefer, and Walls analyze young adult literature from New Zealand with the apparent aim of understanding what such works say about New Zealand and about the New Zealander identity (or identities). [End Page 95] This work helps New Zealand to escape from being known as “just” another Commonwealth country; the authors focus on the country’s literature and identity in its own right, rather than as an offshoot of Britain. And yet, there is a distinct sense of confusion about where New Zealand identity lies. Is it with the English, in a sense of Englishness, whatever that might be? Is it more generally European white (which is referred to as Pākehā)? Is it with the indigenous Māori? Is it some combination thereof? Is there such a thing as New Zealandness? Or something else altogether? The authors—and New Zealanders in general, it seems—are not sure. If it is true that “[w]here New Zealand YA authors represent the kind of institutionalized management of national identity or invention of tradition proposed by [Ernest] Gellner or [Eric] Hobsbawn, then, this is almost invariably in a critical spirit” (12), then this comment suggests an ambiguous feeling towards national identity. An implicit question in this book seems to be: is there a coherent New Zealand identity? Or are there multiple New Zealand identities? The authors respond: “Pākehā New Zealanders are defined at one and the same by their difference from the English, and by their English heritage” (45). But then, in “other New Zealand books for YA readers, we find similar representations of Englishness as a respectability against which New Zealanders define themselves by their difference; as a heritage which defines the Pākehā New Zealander in contrast to the Māori; as connected both to memory and to forgetting” (45). Memory and forgetting seem to be key themes in YA literature from New Zealand, and they recur frequently here, though the chapters themselves seem somewhat randomly ordered. In the chapter on historical fiction, Ricketts points out how historical novels for young adult readers are popular because“[t]he past, particularly the YA fictional past, is a potentially safe space to escape to, to fantasize about, even (through imaginative games) to pretend we live in” (68). And yet, “[one] of the oddities of New Zealand YA historical fiction is that until now it has almost exclusively been the preserve of Pākehā writers” (69). These Pākehā writers have been inspired by British historical fiction whose nationalist/imperialist attitudes have often found their way into NZ historical novels (73). As a result, NZ historical fiction tends to focus on settler experiences at the expense of Maori history. Ricketts offers an alternative explanation for this. Since the Māori view time and history differently from Europeans, the past is not necessarily past but rather a place you can return to easily, so historical fiction is perhaps a contradiction. Another popular genre in New Zealand young adult fiction seems to be utopian and dystopian novels. Miles suggests, “[in] a sense, the real country of New Zealand emerges out of this tradition of utopian fantasy and speculation” (88). Miles makes the case that futurist fiction is in some ways about identity and can be descriptive even if it is not realistic. He writes: “New Zealand’s YA dystopian fiction, then, is not simply following an international fashion for such fictions; it also springs from specifically New Zealand anxieties…about race...

Blogging the Other: Construction of National Identities in the Blogosphere

This essay examines the construction of Russian and Chinese national identities through the representation of the other in the blogosphere. Strategies that bloggers use to represent the other are analysed quantitatively and qualitatively. The quantitative examination is strengthened by a comparative perspective: the representations of Russian people by Chinese bloggers are contrasted with those of Chinese people by Russian-language bloggers. The qualitative examination of blogging posts is underpinned by a genre approach which leads the authors to the conclusion that the blogger's choice of genre, such as personal journal, futuristic fiction or ‘letter into the blogosphere’, is an important strategy in online identity construction and the representation of the other.

Technologies of History: Visual Media and the Eccentricity of the Past (review)

Reviewed by: Technologies of History: Visual Media and the Eccentricity of the Past Terence Wright (bio) Technologies of History: Visual Media and the Eccentricity of the Past.By Steve F. Anderson. Hanover, N.H.: Dartmouth College Press, 2011. Pp. vii+210. $35. We all have a sense of history: an idea of where we come from, where our family comes from, or what makes our social group or country what it is. Some of the information that forms our histories was taught to us at school: such school histories traditionally fit Jean-François Lyotard's notion of the "grand narrative." But our personal historical narratives, together with the information that gives us a sense of place in relation to preceding decades, is gained from a variety of sources. Anecdotes, family stories, local myths and legends, and state propaganda all have a role to play in creating our sense of historical identification. The media also play an important role, though, as Steve F. Anderson argues, they do so less through explicit attempts to teach about the past (as in historical documentaries) than through other, perhaps unexpected, sources. In Technologies of History, Anderson shows how home movies, science fiction, experimental film, and video games all play significant roles in forming our historical consciousness. His central concern throughout is visual history and its dependence on technology for its propagation. We may be aware that televised media and Hollywood are renowned for taking liberties with historical fact, but this is not the main issue for Anderson. As he puts it, "we should not look to media for the truth about the past but instead examine them for clues about the way history is constructed and engaged through cultural products, memories, myths, politics" (p. 2). Thus his book attempts to explore the complex entanglements of historical information with contemporary media technologies. In order to clarify Anderson's approach, we might apply it to a spaghetti Western such as Sergio Leone's A Fistful of Dollars (1964). As a work of fiction, its main intention is to tell a gripping story. Its narrative is not primarily concerned with describing a period of history. After all, the film is a [End Page 717] remake of Akira Kurosawa's Yojimbo (1961) in a Japanese setting (in turn inspired by Dashiell Hammett's detective novel Red Harvest set in the United States of the 1920s). Indeed, Leone shows how easily the archetypal storyline transfers from rural Japan to the lawless West. Yet A Fistful of Dollars does contain a number of much more subtle messages about how the particular historical period, nineteenth-century America, is to be regarded (as does Yojimbo convey information and suppositions about the nineteenth-century Japanese culture). But Anderson's argument, that a much wider variety of media forms play an important role in molding our conceptions of history and historical narrativity, is just the starting point. It is his contention that historians have disregarded the role of (what we might call) lateral inferences as making significant contributions to historiography and our historical understanding. One of the more extraordinary examples cited by Anderson, where futuristic fiction encounters History head-on, is an episode of Star Trek in which Kirk and Spock meet the inhabitants of a planet who base their culture on the 1930s/40s Nazi regime. Star Trek often fantasizes history for its "what if" scenarios. In the Nazi episode Anderson finds that "meaningful historiographical discourse takes place in many more places and cultural forms than we habitually acknowledge" (p. 18). The argument can be extended to the historiography of computer games in the controversial online game JFK Reloaded. Here "historical simulation" enables users to put themselves in the position of would-be assassin in order to evaluate how their strategies and responses weigh against the findings of the Warren Commission's official investigation into the Kennedy assassination. In the context of numerous conspiracy theories about the shooting, Anderson points out that the implicit historical goals are not to establish "truth" about events, but to create more or less successful interplays between the facts and "the cultural discourses of history" (p. 152). Technologies of History will be of interest to readers from a...

The Biological Basis for the Recognition of the Family

The Biological Basis for the Recognition of the Family