Sci-fi Novels Research Articles

Envisioning Posthuman India: An Analysis of S.B Divya’s Machinehood

The contemporary technological epoch is witnessing the growth of posthuman discourse in science fiction novels as they focus on studying the future existence of humans and nonhumans. However, these posthuman insights and studies are mostly confined to Western sci-fi novels. The present study argues that contemporary Indian English science fiction optimistically deals with posthumanist concepts and shows how a harmonious existence is possible. The idea is delineated through S.B Divya’s debut novel Machinehood (2021), and it becomes a productive site to analyse posthuman India's future. The Borromean knot of human- achinenature in the novel delineates how this harmonious existence is possible. The study employs close reading and interpretation by using the concepts of “critical posthumanism” by Rosi Braidotti and “philosophical posthumanism” by Francesca Ferrando. The paper attempts to show how Divya deals with themes like advanced capitalism, neo-religion and sustainable environment, moving away from the conventional notions of anthropocentrism and how she unravels the potentials of posthumanism through symbiotic living.

Exploring the Influence of Science-Fiction: How Are Sci-Fi Novels an Agent in the Construction of Reality?

This paper examines the impact of science fiction literature on reality. The different roles of science fiction in technological innovation and social change are explored through a review of existing studies, an online survey targeted towards young scientists, and expert interviews in scientific and psychological research. Science fiction has played a significant role in shaping our current reality by serving as a guidebook for virtual world construction and inspiring technological innovations. Additionally, science fiction has had a strong influence on society, inspiring impactful communities and contributing to the improvement of social issues such as race relations. The mutual relationship between science fiction and reality is also noted, with the evolution of science fiction reflecting societal changes and technological advancements. The findings suggest that science fiction can be a valuable tool for inspiring innovation and promoting positive social change. Further research is needed to investigate the statistics of building projects utilizing science fiction ideas and to gather more diverse perspectives on the influence of science fiction on reality.

The Attempt to Be Here Now: “Storying” Time through a Virtual Audiovisual Archive

This article explores how conceptions of time are visualised and “storied” in the collaborative photography and video project Hemelliggaam or the Attempt to Be Here Now by Cape Town-based artists Tommaso Fiscaletti and Nic Grobler. Hemelliggaam is a digital audiovisual archive of photography and video installations “exploring the existential aspects of the human–environment– astronomy relationship” (https://hemelliggaam.squarespace.com/about). Through analysing a selection of photographs and videos, my investigation attempts to unravel the human–environment–astronomy relationship as it plays out in various narratives in the virtual archive. Combining representations of astronomic sites, such as the Square Kilometre Array (SKA) project in Carnarvon, with fragments of Afrikaans author Jan Rabie’s mid-century sci-fi novels, the archive seeks to visualise the multifaceted complexity of human engagements with time. I argue that Hemelliggaam, as an audiovisual archive that contextualises time through geology, astronomy, mythology, and science fiction, should be recognised as a project visualising the overlapping of different timescales. The article contextualises Hemelliggaam in contemporary discourses of the Anthropocene, specifically Dipesh Chakrabarty’s idea that a critical framing of the topic needs to recognise the differences between human- historical time and geological-planetary time. By examining the “storying” of overlapped timescales, I suggest that an interdisciplinary approach acknowledging the contributions of both the sciences and the humanities to meaning-making is increasingly relevant to our age of planetary crisis.

Victorian Visions of Suburban Utopia: Abandoning Babylon by Nathaniel Robert Walker

Reviewed by: Victorian Visions of Suburban Utopia: Abandoning Babylon by Nathaniel Robert Walker Willa Granger Nathaniel Robert Walker. Victorian Visions of Suburban Utopia: Abandoning Babylon. New York: Oxford University Press, 2020. ISBN: 9780198861447 Hardcover: 557 pages The coronavirus pandemic—which initially found footing in the US in the dense urbanism of New York City—has galvanized commentary on the imperiled future of cities. With affluent urbanites migrating from borough to hinterland, some have wondered about the spatial remapping of the national economy and how the endurance of virtual work will hollow out the American downtown.1 In this sense author Nathaniel Robert Walker stumbled upon a fitting moment for the 2020 release of Victorian Visions of Suburban Utopia: Abandoning Babylon. Indeed, Walker’s study is as much a genealogy of urban unease among English-speaking authors and critics of the nineteenth century as it is an exploration of suburbanism in utopian science fiction. In Walker’s own summation, Victorian Visions is a “pre-history of the modern suburb,” and he painstakingly catalogues how a preference for dispersed, green, and anti-urban settlements came to define a growing body of utopian literature throughout the nineteenth century.2 In this prodigious book, architectural historians and urbanists alike will find a familiar cast of characters such as Ebenezer Howard, Frank Lloyd Wright, and Jacob Riis. Yet Walker’s contribution lies in his efforts to recontextualize these figures alongside utopian science fiction of that period, including names both big and small: from Edward Bellamy to the obscure Alvarado Mortimer Fuller, whose novel A. D. 2000 conjures a Midwest submerged beneath an inland sea.3 Admittedly, much of the fun in Victorian Visions is simply getting to sample a range of sci-fi fantasies. Shared among the texts Walker discusses is a preference for verdant garden suburbs, yet their authors find diverse formal expression, from picturesque cottages to scattered towers.4 This trend typifies dystopian literature of the time as well.5 Always, Walker situates these writings and their authors within cities themselves, locating a suburban yearning within the dense squalor of places such as London, Manchester, and New York. Victorian Visions operates at the intersection of Victorian literary history and architectural history. Walker treats his evidence, which ranges from romance novels to political essays, as a form of architectural documentation, deploying the spatial and material tools of built environment scholars to understand the physical implications of science-fiction texts. In so doing, Walker excavates how this literature was received by both the reading public and by building professionals. The strongest part of Walker’s argument is where he demonstrates a causal relationship between ideas in sci-fi novels and the political, social, and architectural thinkers who put these ideas into play. One such figure was architect John Pickering Putnam, who designed and largely funded the Charlesgate Apartment Hotel, an eclectic co-operative structure perched above Boston’s Emerald Necklace and intended as a physical interpretation of Edward Bellamy’s socialist vision.6 Walker’s study describes not only these piecemeal moments of rus in urbe but also the failed utopian projects that these texts inspired such as Robert Owen’s frustrated community of New Harmony and less-known examples like the planned cottage community of Topolobampo in Sinaloa, Mexico.7 Victorian Visions positions utopian suburbanism as a transatlantic phenomenon of English-speaking worlds. As Walker’s subtitle suggests, Babylon—often analogized through the urban chaos of London itself—formed the foil against which [End Page 72] Victorian utopian authors crafted the vision of a rationalized suburban dream. It is for this reason that Walker begins in chapter one by lineaging the tropes of Victorian science fiction, charting their foundations from antiquity to the Renaissance. Victorian authors trafficked in the earlier utopias of Eden and New Jerusalem, in the sins of Babel and the anti-urbanism of Augustine of Hippo, and inevitably in the writings of Sir Thomas More, the inventor of utopia as a concept. Apart from this first chapter, Victorian Visions proceeds chronologically through the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. In chapters two through four, Walker moves from the 1830s to the 1870s, focusing on the early socialist schemes of British figures such...

Squashing and spaghettification in Newtonian gravitation

Action films and sci-fi novels should be common resources in classrooms since they serve as examples and references involving physical situations. This is due to the abstract nature of many physical concepts, and the lack of references in students’ daily lives makes them more difficult to be visualized or imagined. In this work we bring a discussion of how we can resort to films and literary works in order to elucidate the concepts regarding tidal forces. To this effect, we have used the action film Total Recall (2012) to present the squashing effect and the classic of juvenile literature From Earth to the Moon (1865) to discuss the effect of spaghettification in the context of Newtonian mechanics.

Podcast: Nature’s 2019 PhD survey, and older women in sci-fi novels

Podcast: Nature’s 2019 PhD survey, and older women in sci-fi novels

Space ageing: why sci-fi novels shun the badass older woman

The lack of galactic grandmothers in visions of the future reflects ageism and sexism in the here and now. By Sylvia Spruck Wrigley The lack of galactic grandmothers in visions of the future reflects ageism and sexism in the here and now. By Sylvia Spruck Wrigley

Sci-fi and Afrofuturism in the Afrophone Novel: Writing the Future and the Possible in Swahili and in Shona

The article explores literary experimentation in novels in African languages with a focus on Swahili and Shona science fiction and Afrofuturism. While science fiction is a genre whose relevance to Africa has often been questioned, Afrophone writers have produced sci-fi novels in several African languages and the genre seems to be experiencing new interest in the 21st century. A number of novels contain visions of Africa’s utopian or dystopian futures and often suggest ways to construct this future or, indeed, reconstruct the present in view of the future. The look at Africa from its imagined future also stimulates a rethinking of narratives about Africa’s past. The paper outlines the history of sci-fi and futuristic prose in Swahili and in Shona and analyzes the textual strategies that these novels employ to “write the future and the possible.”

Dawnland Voices 2.0: Sovereignty and Sustainability Online

Indigenous communities are marrying ecological humanities and digital humanities in ways that productively expand the definition of both terms. On the ecological side, indigenous activism argues for the sustainability and interdependence of the natural and the human. In this, it challenges many of the same things that ecocriticism challenges—the supremacy or distinctiveness of the human, anthropocentric notions of time—though such activism predates ecocriticism quite a bit. Many traditional indigenous narratives assert close affinity, even identity, between a people and their river, for instance, or a people and their animals, or people and trees; they were figuring nonhuman agency long before Bruno Latour. On the DH side, indigenous people are engaging electronic media outside major DH structures and funding. These insurgent engagements challenge the very definition of DH as a field (with its predilection for large-scale archives, metadata, and open access) while also raising questions about the sustainability of the digital itself. Despite the implicit teleologies still assumed by many people—from oral to written to digital—indigenous ecological digital humanities (EcoDH) never present themselves as the end point or answer. Rather, they are part of a vast and diverse communicative ecosystem that includes petroglyphs, living oral traditions, newsletters, wampum, sci-fi novels, baskets, and language apps.

Imagining High-Tech Bodies

Seeking for broad and inclusive ways of framing ethical debates on emerging technologies, in this article the authors explore imaginaries of body enhancement as encompassed in the science fiction (sci-fi) literature. They provide in-depth descriptions of three sci-fi novels: Neuromancer, The Player of Games, and Kéthani. They explore how ethical concerns are framed within the imaginary world of these novels, emphasizing that this framing is usually ambivalent, embedded within lived narratives, as well as future and collectively oriented. Because they evoke shared imaginaries, sci-fi novels appear as useful to trigger debate on new technologies.

Does not quantum compute

D-WAVE systems, a Canadian start-up, recently booted up a custom-built, multimillion-dollar, liquid-helium-cooled beast of a computer that it says runs on quantum mechanics. That's right. D-Wave, a 55-person company operating out of an office park in Burnaby, B.C., claims to have built that almost mythical machine, that holy grail of computing, the stuff of sci-fi novels and technothrillers - the quantum computer. Such a system would exploit the bizarre physics that apply on ridiculously small scales to compute ridiculously fast, solving problems that could stymie today's supercomputers for the lifetime of the universe.

Plasticland: where a new world comes true [Instrumentation Notes

Books, scientific journals, Sci-Fi novels, and even educational TV shows speak to us of a new world where devices help people in everyday life by expanding our action and sensing capabilities.

SINcerely Yours

Ferguson continuedfrom previous page Daughter mine, listen to the waves, and dance, daughter mine, dance! In contrast is the starkly literal Biagini's: Le stelle danzano la loro luce Il cielo notturno rabbrividisce. Ascoltando le onde, danza, figlia mia! — which hews strictly to Gioseffi's essence. Of particular note is the word rabbrividisce, which indeed means "shivers." Yet rabbrividisce would better be used to enhance the conveyance of a very difficult moment, it rumbles and slides so. So when then does meaning trump beauty? The answer: Whenever the author says. The dovetailing of Gioseffi's work is splendid . She keeps well to her views and conveys them consistently through the book's three sections. She never lets us forget that the real world is looming and that mystic Nature is the original wellspring of life. "Vases of Wombs" and "The Sea Hag and the Cave of Sleep," which takes us on a journey á la James Joyce (but without his spelling), intertwine well to initiate us into her vision. Yet she has already tempered this view in the first stanza of the first poem, "Music Is a Child of the Grass": "We live in the shadows of immense hands / like death that will take our sex away." When we arrive at "Some Slippery Afternoon," we find Gioseffi's communiqués change somewhat. They become directed more to the world at large, to more of her relatives, and more to the reader. The material is harsher, and generally less sensual. It is also where we are most fully shown that what is anathema to Gioseffi is mankind, which makes this section a hard read. Yet, like a skipping stone, she reminds us from time to time of her views of the true context of life. That the ways of Nature, for her, are the balm and surcease for the abundant cruelties of the world we are bom into, and which shape our own natures into something less than we would like for them to be. / sense a lost andprimitive priestess wandering in a walled city ofthe wrong century. In the end, we are allowed to meet the Gioseffi of today. Her self-image is now drawn in "Old Aphrodite Rises from Her Porcelain Tub," where we are shown how she has been completely wrought into the world and now deals with the fact that she is afraid of falling alone in her bathroom where no one would hear her— and yet still must live with man's devastations: and land mines are set to blow off legs of children running after butterflies in meadows. This third section is aptly called "Blood Autumn and the Peach." Aptly, because blood autumn speaks to ends, while a peach is a fruit that holds thé seed to be planted for the next life. And with a fine touch, she closes with "Orta Nova, Provincia di Puglia" ("New Orchard, Province of Puglia"), where her father was born. Where better to leave the seed for the next life? Perhaps since the world is such a mixed bag, we may be able to understand why Blood Autumn is such a mixed bag. From time to time the world comes straight at us. Other times, it makes no sense, and, on occasion, it reaches out to us with delicious subtlety. "This is what I am," the world says, and "This is my nature." Without excuse, artifice, or pretense, Gioseffi unveils her self to us and says the same. John Ferguson is a graduate ofthe American School in Rome and wrote this piece in Reggio, Italy. SINcerely Yours LindaAnn Loschiavo Mae West: It Ain't No Sin Simon Louvish Thomas Dunne Books http://www.thomasdunnebooks.com 512 pages; cloth, $26.95 America's vaudevillians and silent screen stars have found a voice across the Atlantic. Filmmaker Simon Louvish, an Israeli-Scot who lives in England, has penned sci-fi novels as well as four biographies ofclassic funnymen: W. C. Fields (Man on the Flying Trapeze: The Life and Times ofW. C. Fields [1997]), the Marx Brothers (Monkey Business: The Lives and Legends of the Marx Brothers [ 1 999]), Laurel and Hardy (Stan and Ollie: The Roots of Comedy: The Double Life...