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This book examines terraforming in science fiction and shows how, amidst contemporary anxieties about climate change, it has come to offer an important vantage from which to consider the ways humankind shapes and is shaped by their world.
A cultural study of an array of popular North American science fiction film and television texts, Excavating the Future explores the popular archaeological imagination and the political uses to which it is being employed by the U.S. state and its adversaries.
This important collection of essays acknowledges the long and distinctive history of the alternate history genre whilst also revelling in its vitality, adaptability, and contemporary relevance, with many of the chapters discussing late twentieth- and early twenty-first-century texts which have previously received little or no sustained critical analysis.
This volume presents the first collection of essays dedicated to the science fiction of microbiologist Joan Slonczewski. Posthuman Biopolitics consolidates the scholarly literature on Slonczewski’s fiction and demonstrates fruitful lines of engagement for the critical, cultural, and theoretical treatment of her characters, plots, and storyworlds. Her novels treat feminism in relation to scientific practice, resistance to domination, pacifism versus militarism, the extension of human rights to nonhuman and posthuman actors, biopolitics and posthuman ethics, and symbiosis and communication across planetary scales. Posthuman Biopolitics explores the breadth and depth of Joan Slonczewski’s vision, uncovering the reflective ethical practice that informs her science fiction.
This is a timely, comprehensive and thoroughly researched study of climate fiction from around the world, including novels, short stories, films and other formats. Informed by a sociological perspective, it will be an invaluable resource for students and scholars looking to enter and expand the field of climate fiction studies.
This book offers an in-depth exploration of science fiction literature's varied use of psychological discourses, beginning at the birth of modern psychology in the late nineteenth century and condluding wtith the ascendance of neuroscience in the late twnetieth century.
Speculative science fiction, with its underlying socio-political dialogue, represents an important intersection of popular culture and public discourse. As a pop culture text, the animated series Star Wars: The Clone Wars offers critical commentary on contemporary issues, marking a moment of interplay whereby author and audience come together in what Russian philosopher Mikhail Bakhtin called collaborative meaning making. This book critically examines the series as a voice in the political dialogues concerning human cloning, torture, just war theory, peace and drone warfare.
Mathematics has maintained a surprising presence in popular media for over a century. In recent years, the movies Good Will Hunting, A Beautiful Mind, and Stand and Deliver, the stage plays Breaking the Code and Proof, the novella Flatland and the hugely successful television crime series NUMB3RS all weave mathematics prominently into their storylines. Less obvious but pivotal references to the subject appear in the blockbuster TV show Lost, the cult movie The Princess Bride, and even Tolstoy's War and Peace. In this collection of new essays, contributors consider the role of math in everything from films, baseball, crossword puzzles, fantasy role-playing games, and television shows to science fiction tales, award-winning plays and classic works of literature. Revealing the broad range of intersections between mathematics and mainstream culture, this collection demonstrates that even "mass entertainment" can have a hidden depth.
The prevalence of science fiction readership among those who create and program computers is so well-known that it has become a cliche, but the phenomenon has remained largely unexplored by scholars. What role has science fiction played in the actual development of computers and computing? And likewise, how has computing (including the related fields of robotics and artificial intelligence) affected the course of science fiction? The 18 essays in this critical work explore the interrelationship of these domains over the span of more than half a century.