Implications for the Future: Science Fiction Versus Reality

1995 ◽  
pp. 43-49
Author(s):  
Margaret J. A. Edwards
Keyword(s):  
Science Fiction ◽  
Future Science ◽  
The Future

Framing the Future: Science fiction frames and the press coverage of cloning

Continuum ◽  
2000 ◽  
Vol 14 (2) ◽  
pp. 187-199 ◽  
Author(s):  
John Huxford
Keyword(s):  
Science Fiction ◽  
Press Coverage ◽  
The Press ◽  
Future Science ◽  
The Future

Neo-Victorian Visions of the Future: Science, Crime, and Modernity

2018 ◽  
Vol 8 (2) ◽  
pp. 187-205 ◽  
Author(s):  
Elisavet Ioannidou
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Science Fiction ◽  
Technological Progress ◽  
Science And Technology ◽  
Recent Past ◽  
Victorian Era ◽  
Future Science ◽  
The Future ◽  
Perception Of Time ◽  
The Relationship

Neo-Victorian texts frequently associate science and technology with criminal acts, which their perpetrators perceive as acts of progress, because of their potential to initiate the world's passage to the future. Stemming from Victorian apprehensions of science, most notably the possibility of the scientist's malevolence, the abuse of science by neo-Victorian villains presents a criminal past that will give birth to a dystopian future. As the future of neo-Victorian narratives constitutes the present or recent past of the time of narration, the presuppositions of modernity are problematised both within the texts' Victorian narratives and in retrospect; and especially when neo-Victorian employments of science and technology echo concrete twentieth-century instances of scientific misapplication. Neo-Victorian texts expose their complex temporality and defy their integration within genres such as steampunk or science fiction. Considering the difficulty of generic classification, this essay suggests that neo-Victorian instances of scientific crime manifest nineteenth-century scientific and technological progress in a way that illuminates the Victorian era, while remaining relevant for contemporary audiences. The relationship that is thus effected between past and present underlines neo-Victorianism's perception of time as a continuum, in order to problematise contemporary understandings of progress and modernity.

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