Science Fiction Narratives Research Articles

THE MATRIX RECONSIDERED

This article employs the conceptual opposition of the red and blue pill that is presented in The Matrix trilogy as a mechanism for investigating the philosophical antagonisms and structural conflicts commonly associated with the ‘information society’. The text is divided into two main parts: The first reconsiders the logical structure of this pharmacological dialectic, arguing that the choice between these two alternatives originates in the history of western thought and demonstrating how this binary arrangement organizes not just science fiction narratives but our understanding of social reality. The second part reconsiders the choice of the red pill. It critiques the assumed value of ‘true reality’ that is expressed in the cinematic narrative and suggests alternative ways to think outside the box of this rather limited binary structure. The objective of such an undertaking is not simply to question the philosophical assumptions of what has been defined as the ‘right choice’ but to learn, through such questioning, to intervene in and undermine its very system. The article, therefore, suggests an alternative method by which to challenge and critique the established network of conceptual oppositions that goes beyond mere revolution and the other familiar strategies of social change.

"Beam Me up, Ömer": Transnational Media Flow and the Cultural Politics of the Turkish Star Trek Remake

“Beam Me up, Ömer”:Transnational Media Flow and the Cultural Politics of the Turkish Star Trek Remake Iain Robert Smith (bio) While subjected peoples cannot readily control what emanates from the dominant culture, they do determine to varying extents what they absorb into their own, and what they use it for. —Mary Louise Pratt, Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation In the recent Turkish sci-fi comedy G.O.R.A. (2005), writer/star Cem Yilmaz thoroughly lampoons many of the Americentric traditions of Hollywood science fiction. After the film opens on a space station in which all the characters are speaking English, one character points out the anomaly, pleading, "Can we not have it in Turkish?" Indeed, Turkish turns out to be the galactic lingua franca in this narrative, with everyone—including the alien races—conversing in the Turkish language and using Turkish lira to trade. It is not America that has colonized the people's consciousness—to paraphrase those infamous words of Wim Wenders—but Turkey. This pointed inversion of the U.S. bias in Hollywood science fiction narratives, however, is balanced with an obvious affection for said films, with the film also offering loving homages to such iconic U.S. films as Star Wars (1977) and The Matrix (1999). This tension between oppositional critique and mimetic reverence illustrates one of the many layers of ambivalence that lie at the heart of transnational processes of cultural exchange. While the film undoubtedly offers a critique of the Americentrism in science fiction narratives, it also draws upon and imitates elements from those same cultural products. Indeed, this is a relationship that can be traced throughout much of Turkish cinematic history, most evidently in those cycles of popular cinema from the 1960s and 1970s that are known within Turkey as Yesilçam. Steeped within what Nezih Erdogan terms "mimicry beyond innocent inspiration" (166), these films self-consciously appropriated elements from U.S. popular culture, often taking characters, plots, and music and recontextualizing them within films produced in the local industry. These ranged from unlicensed remakes in which stories were translated for local audiences, such as in ¸Seytan (Satan, 1974), which follows the basic premise of The Exorcist (1973), albeit with the Catholic iconography replaced with that of Islam, to films such as Dünyayi kurtaran adam (The Man Who Saves the World, 1982), in which footage from Star Wars (1977) was appropriated and used as special effects sequences in a wholly unrelated narrative. These processes of cultural hybridization reflect what Marwan M. Kraidy describes in his recent Hybridity, or the Cultural Logic of Globalization in that they represent globalization not as a unitary one-way process of cultural homogenization but as an interstitial process through which cultures borrow from and interact with each other. Nevertheless, while these examples point to the hybridizing nature of cultural exchange, this does not mean that we should neglect the fact that these processes of hybridization are highly contingent on structural factors. As Kraidy argues, while most analyses of globalization that focus solely on cultural imperialism tend to overemphasize the structural factors of economic power and dominance, and most analyses that focus on processes of hybridization tend to offer a politically benign vision of diversity, an alternative framework that he terms "critical transculturalism" would pay attention to the hybridizing nature of cultural exchange and yet still retain the broader concerns of cultural imperialism around unequal power distribution (9). In this article I utilize this framework of critical transculturalism to explore Turkish appropriations of American popular culture, looking specifically at how Turist Ömer Uzay Yolunda (Tourist Ömer in Star Trek, 1974), the film more commonly referred to within Western fan culture as the "Turkish Star Trek," reconfigures [End Page 3] and recontextualizes the world of Star Trek.1 Rather than see this unlicensed remake as a derivative plagiarism of the earlier TV series, I position Turist Ömer Uzay Yolunda within wider debates on the transnational flows of media and the overlapping, intersecting nature of cultural production. Opposing the essentialist positions that envision cultures as "pure" and under threat of being tainted by the "other," I intend this model of transcultural exchange to draw attention to the intricate...

From Superhuman to Posthuman: The Gothic Technological Imaginary in Mary Shelley's Frankenstein and Octavia Butler's Xenogenesis

From Superhuman to Posthuman:The Gothic Technological Imaginary in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein and Octavia Butler’s Xeno Genesis Theodora Goss (bio) and John Paul Riquelme (bio) Dystopian or Utopian? Superhuman or Posthuman? Although no two works can exhibit definitively the diverse character and directions of science fiction during the past 190 years, Mary Shelley's Frankenstein and Octavia Butler's Xenogenesis (comprised of Dawn, Adulthood Rights, and Imago)1 provide revealing related moments at the genre's origin and at a recent stage of its development.2 In both its early and late manifestations and throughout its history, science fiction emerges from the overlapping perspectives of a Gothic imaginary and a technological imaginary.3 Mary Shelley modifies and redirects the conventions of eighteenth-century Gothic narratives in English by making her protagonist a scientist whose wrongheaded ambition is to create life and, in so doing, to become [End Page 434] godlike. Early in his narration Victor Frankenstein states clearly his desire to stand at the top of a pyramid of power and value: "A new species would bless me as its creator and source; many happy and excellent natures would owe their being to me. No father could claim the gratitude of his child so completely as I should deserve theirs" (Shelley 1818, 36). Writing in the wake of the French Revolution, Shelley combines in Frankenstein elements of eighteenth-century Gothic with the technological ambition to dominate and manipulate nature. The science that Frankenstein practices is a dark, Gothic science, motivated by the technological imaginary's imperative to overcome death, to "renew life where death had apparently devoted the body to corruption" (36). Rather than serving humanity, the denial of death contributes to the scientist's effort to control life and death. Frankenstein attempts to metamorphose from a human into a superhuman by creating a superhuman being who worships him. In its hierarchical tendencies, the technological ambition central to Frankenstein is related to the social hierarchies that characterize earlier Gothic writing. Like the Montonis and other aristocratic villains from eighteenth-century narratives who dominate and exploit the people around them, Frankenstein, an intellectual aristocrat, expects to exercise power over his creation and over other people, as would a ruthless monarch. Not just another kind of hierarchical thinking, the technological imaginary's imperative, imperial aspect can stand for hierarchical thinking per se as both its cause and its purest form, its imago. Gothic reaches an important moment of cultural realization in its offspring, science fiction, when the scientist replaces the ruler and the priest as wielder of power and source of wrongdoing.4 In her trilogy, Butler combines Gothic elements and technological ambitions differently from Frankenstein in a narrative that emphasizes a process of emergence as a potential antidote to destructive hierarchical attitudes and behavior.5 Butler's combination arises from and responds to a changed literary and historical situation. She writes not only in the wake of an eighteenth-century Gothic tradition but also after science fiction narratives influenced by Frankenstein; she writes not in an era concerned with the spread of revolution but in an era of postcolonial nation building and the threat of nuclear holocaust. Like Shelley, Butler responds to hierarchical cultural tendencies of the kind regularly evoked in the classic Gothic novels of Ann Radcliffe and Matthew Lewis. She does so specifically by presenting an incarcerated heroine threatened by a powerful, manipulative figure, not a monster in human form as in the case of Radcliffe's Montoni, but an alien. At the same time as Butler recasts the gender hierarchies of many Gothic narratives, she translates and transforms the prejudicial nationalistic hierarchical thinking evident in classic Gothic writing. The [End Page 435] differences between Protestant and English, on the one hand, and Catholic and foreign, on the other, are replaced by contrasts between species, understood as races, and with differences that contribute to the emergence of new kinds of communities, rather than ones that express the dominance of an existing community over another. Even though the technological threat to human survival in Xenogenesis is far greater than the threat in Frankenstein, Butler's narrative affirms the possibility of a qualified or "critical Utopia" (Moylan 44).6...

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

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

The Future of Utopia

The Future of Utopia Gregory Flaxman University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill There is hope, but not for us. —Franz Kafka Part I However we traditionally define the figure of the intellectual, and god only knows how many ways this has been done, it seems that the intellectual today is defined primarily by virtue of discouragement. The reasons for this discouragement are, no doubt, the subject of a number of the essays collected in this journal, but I want to begin here by remarking on the condition itself—on what it means not just for anyone, but for the intellectual, to have lost hope. The quietly devastating fact, so widespread that it often goes unspoken, is that we can no longer muster the peculiar optimism with which the intellectual traditionally laid claim to another, different, or better world. As Frederic Jameson writes in his recent book on science fiction, the most crippling aspect of intellectual existence today is "that the historic alternatives to capitalism have been proven unviable and impossible, and that no other socio-economic system is conceivable, let alone practically available" (xii). Indeed, our cultural affinity for science fiction narratives in which humanity capitulates to vast extraterrestrial occupations seems, finally, to have been displaced by the sad revelation that we don't need any aliens to render our resistance futile—that we can no longer imagine a future that differs from our present. Hence, the title of this essay should already suggest the troubles of the intellectual, no less the troubling paradox we now confront, for the intellectual today grapples with the loss of that very aptitude on which hope rests. Traditionally, the power of utopia constitutes one of the most enduring means of intellectual critique, since the capacity to imagine another place (topos), however different or because it is different (utopos), conditioned the means to intervene in the present, in the here [End Page 197] and now. Far from being one narrative among others, then, utopia historically corresponds to something like our faculty of political imagination, but what happens when we can no longer invoke that faculty, when the trope of political hope is no longer available? Ironically, this is precisely the kind of bleak moment when we would be inclined to invoke utopia in order to conjure a hope for the future from the ashes of our despair—except for the fact that what makes this moment so depressing in the first place is that we no longer have recourse to utopianism. Whereas utopia traditionally concerned the fabulation of another world, we seem to have reached a point where or when we can no longer imagine the radical transformation of our own circumstances without a paroxysm of self-loathing, as though we should all know better by now than to indulge in impossible dreams. Of course, we've all heard the admonishments against utopia—"get over your far-flung hopes, stop fantasizing about a better world, and above all give up on all that Marxist blather . . ."—but rather than internalize them, we could just as well take them as the inducement for a reckoning with utopia itself. If "we have lost the utopian function of criticism,"1 as Hayden White has recently argued, how can we grasp this loss, and how can we address it? Is it possible to resuscitate the figure of the utopian intellectual? These are daunting questions, but I want to suggest that the constituents of a response have been rehearsed by a previous generation for whom the problems of the utopian intellectual already loomed large. We might even go so far as to suggest that our discouragement represents the recognition of a state of affairs that has been preparing itself for some time but that we are only now able or willing to acknowledge. Hence, this essay revolves around a "conversation" about the fate of the intellectual which brought together Michel Foucault and Gilles Deleuze, both specifically and more generally, in the wake of the events of May 1968. Unlike many of their contemporaries, for...

Brainwashing: the fictions of mind control: a study of novels and films since World War II

An examination of the literary and cinematic representations of during the Cold War era. The term brainwashing coined during the Korean War, was popularised by a CIA operative who was a tireless campaigner against communism. it took hold quickly and became a means to articulate fears of totalitarian tendencies in American life. David Seed traces the assimilation of the notion of into science fiction, political commentary, and conspiracy narratives of the Cold War era. He demonstrates how these works grew out of a context of political and socail events and how they express the anxieties of the time. This study reviews 1950s science fiction, Korean War fiction, and the film The Manchurian Candidate. Seed provides new interpretations of writers such as Orwell and Burroughs within the history of psychological manipulation for political purposes, using declassified and other documents to contextualise the material. he explores the shifting view points of how is represented, changing from an external threat to American values to an internal threat against individual American liberties by the U.S. government. Anyone with an interest in science fiction, popular culture, or the Cold War will welcome this study.

The Ireland They Dream of: "Eireville, Coolockland" and the Appropriation of Science Fiction and Fantasy Narratives in Short Irish Filmmaking

The Ireland They Dream of: "Eireville, Coolockland" and the Appropriation of Science Fiction and Fantasy Narratives in Short Irish Filmmaking

Germs in space. Joshua Lederberg, exobiology, and the public imagination, 1958-1964.

Under the leadership of Joshua Lederberg, some American biologists and chemists proposed exobiology as the most legitimate program for space research. These scientists used the fear of contamination--of earth and other planets--as a central argument for funding "nonpolitical," "scientifically valid" experiments in extraterrestrial life detection. Exobiology's resemblance to popular science fiction narratives presented a significant challenge to its advocates' scientific authority. Its most practical applications, moreover, bore an unseemly resemblance to the United States Army's research on biological weapons. At the same time that exobiologists wanted to use the media to attract support for their program, they had to monitor their statements carefully in order to maintain their view of exobiology as a peaceful, scientifically valid research program. In examining how exobiology's creators positioned their work in comparison to other space sciences as well as science fiction, this case study highlights how cultural and political imperatives entered science through practice and narrative during the Cold War.

The Mechanics of Engenderneering

THE MECHANICS OF ENGENDERNEERING: CYBORGS AND ALIENS AS MANUFACTURED EVIL IN SCIENCE-FICTION FILM This essay examines a process called engenderneering, which can be understood as personification with a twist: the investiture of non-human entities with a gendered identity. Science fiction films, despite their futuristic settings, often associate gender markers with assignments of moral value. Manufactured life forms such as robots and cyborgs highlight the extent that gender markers serve as necessary or sufficient determinants of an entity's value. Aliens, although not bound to human gender constraints, still tend to retain explicit, conventional signs of gender. To avoid projecting the negative associations of femininity into the future, perhaps science fiction narratives could transcend gender as a two-valued concept. The american novelist Ursula LeGuin raised a question whether gender was necessary to define an entity as human. To answer this question, LeGuin created in The Left Hand of Darkness the hermaphroditic...

Alien intimacies: hearing science fiction narratives in Hildegard Westerkamp's Cricket Voice (or ‘I don't like the country, the crickets make me nervous’)

This paper discusses listener responses to a contemporary soundscape composition based on the sound of a cricket. Soundscape composers make works based on everyday sounds and sound environments, usually recorded by themselves (Truax 1984, 1996). While the composer of this piece aims to bring listeners closer to the sounds around them by creating audio pieces based on these sounds (Westerkamp 1988), some listeners feel fear and anxiety rather than the heightened closeness and understanding that she wishes listeners to experience. I compare the sound structure of Cricket Voice with close listening to excerpts of the film soundtrack of Ridley Scott's Alien as well as a short excerpt from the soundtrack of the X Files, discussing how science fiction film and television soundtracks index sonic intimacy with different intent from that of Westerkamp, and raising questions about how such approaches to intimacy might simultaneously reflect and intensify urban anxieties about the sounds of ‘alien’ species that are associated with wilderness environments.

If Sambo Were a UFO

Remember when you used to watch science fiction? How it was acceptable that there were no black characters because it was an imaginary world? Well, that didn't sit well with David Huffman, an artist who inserts the black subject into science-fiction narratives. His fantastic sci-fi images go so far as to suggest that the black psyche can be liberated by ultra-advanced robotics and military technology. Huffman's choice to portray black characters turning toward technology to escape inner and outer defects is full of implications. While his work deals with notions of race enforced by images in the entertainment media, it is particularly concerned with the psychological and physiological ramifications of our shared history and anxiety about blackness.

Recreating Prometheus

Recreating Prometheus

“That Space Cadet Glow”: Science Fiction Narratives in Roger Waters’s Radio K.A.O.S. and Amused to Death

“That Space Cadet Glow”: Science Fiction Narratives in Roger Waters’s <i>Radio K.A.O.S.</i> and <i>Amused to Death</i>

American science fiction and the Cold War: literature and film

American Science Fiction - in both literature and film - has played a key role in the portrayal of the fears inherent in the Cold War. The end of this era heralds the need for a reassessment of the literary output of the forty-year period since 1945. Working through a series of important texts, David Seed investigates the political inflexions put on American narratives in the post-war decades by Cold War cultural circumstances. Nuclear holocaust, Russian invasion, and the perceived rise of totalitarianism in American society are key elements in the author'sexploration of science fiction narratives which include Fahrenheit 451, Invasion of the Body Snatchers and Dr Strangelove. Written in a lively and engaging style, the author's approach draws on the significant body of Nuclear Criticism and the historicism of Hayden White and others in order to bring out the ideological tensions and urgencies in this fiction. Relating the theory to a range of popular novels, stories and films makes this book accessible to students, academics and general readers alike.

Félix and Gilles's Tempestuous, Monstrous Machines

The concept of the machine circulates in the work of Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari in highly abstracted terms, yet they frequently maintained that it was not to be understood as a metaphor. This paper draws on the example of the film Forbidden Planet to explore the potential for cinematic representation to convey the terms under which Deleuze and Guattari ask us to imagine the machinic complex.

Terminal Identity: The Virtual Subject in Postmodern Science Fiction.

Scott Bukatman's Terminal Identity —referring to both the site of the termination of the conventional and the birth of a new subjectivity constructed at the computer terminal or television screen--puts to rest any lingering doubts of the significance of science fiction in contemporary cultural studies. Demonstrating a comprehensive knowledge, both of the history of science fiction narrative from its earliest origins, and of cultural theory and philosophy, Bukatman redefines the nature of human identity in the Information Age. Drawing on a wide range of contemporary theories of the postmodern—including Fredric Jameson, Donna Haraway, and Jean Baudrillard—Bukatman begins with the proposition that Western culture is suffering a crisis brought on by advanced electronic technologies. Then in a series of chapters richly supported by analyses of literary texts, visual arts, film, video, television, comics, computer games, and graphics, Bukatman takes the reader on an odyssey that traces the postmodern subject from its current crisis, through its close encounters with technology, and finally to new self-recognition. This new virtual subject, as Bukatman defines it, situates the human and the technological as coexistent, codependent, and mutally defining. Synthesizing the most provocative theories of postmodern culture with a truly encyclopedic treatment of the relevant media, this volume sets a new standard in the study of science fiction—a category that itself may be redefined in light of this work. Bukatman not only offers the most detailed map to date of the intellectual terrain of postmodern technology studies—he arrives at new frontiers, providing a propitious launching point for further inquiries into the relationship of electronic technology and culture.

The Merlyn reading aid

The Merlyn reading aid is aimed at 11–14 year old reluctant readers. It features four complete story boards with pop-up mechanisms, complemented with colourful artwork for a science fiction narrative. It also contains unique electrical components and a game-playing, interactive scenario that is designed to innovate and stimulate disinterested children.