scholarly journals France, Germany and Europe

2002 ◽  
Vol 10 (3) ◽  
pp. 301-304
Author(s):  
H. L. Wesseling
Keyword(s):  
Science Fiction ◽  
Foreign Affairs ◽  
The Future ◽  
Future War ◽  
Fiction Writer

In 1999, a book appeared in Paris with the rather alarming title De la prochaine guerre avec l'Allemagne (‘On the future war with Germany’). It had not been written by some sensationalist science-fiction writer, but by none other than Philippe Delmas, a former aid to Roland Dumas, who was twice minister of Foreign Affairs under the Mitterrand administration.

Distortion

Dismantlings ◽  
2019 ◽  
pp. 93-111
Author(s):  
Matt Tierney
Keyword(s):  
Science Fiction ◽  
Ad Hoc ◽  
Human Life ◽  
Theory And Practice ◽  
Transformative Change ◽  
The Future ◽  
Fiction Writer ◽  
As If

This chapter talks about distortion as a form of dismantling. It describes distortion as the historical and theoretical technique by which readers learn to approach political documents as if they were science fiction. When considered as a vehicle of distortion, literature is measured for its potential to alter exploitative conditions, like those of war, patriarchy, and racism. The science fiction writer Samuel R. Delany insists that transformative change takes shape neither in utopian nor in dystopian visions of the future, but rather in efforts toward significant distortion of the present. This attitude, which is also a theory and practice of literature, is one way to describe the inheritance of cyberculture in the works of writers and activists who employed speculative language to repurpose the thought of Alice Mary Hilton and the Ad Hoc Committee. These writers and activists focused not on the machines that would unveil the myth of scarcity, but instead isolate the forms of human life and relation that would follow the act of unveiling.

All Today’s Parties

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Gary Westfahl
Keyword(s):  
Pattern Recognition ◽  
Science Fiction ◽  
William Gibson ◽  
Human Relationships ◽  
The World ◽  
The Future ◽  
Long Time ◽  
Fiction Writer

This chapter examines three William Gibson novels: Pattern Recognition, Spook Country, and Zero History. Gibson had planned Pattern Recognition for a long time: in 1986, he declared that he would “eventually try something else,” and “in twenty years” he would probably be “writing about human relationships.” By shifting from the future to the present, Gibson clearly felt that he was relaunching his career, and hence he logically reverted to the pattern of his first novel. Known as a science fiction writer for decades, Gibson felt an obvious need to justify Pattern Recognition's present-day setting. This chapter considers a number of ways to argue that Pattern Recognition should be classified as science fiction. Spook Country asserts that we live today in a world filled with science-fictional events, but we are unable or unwilling to properly observe them. Zero History suggests that Gibson has entirely distanced himself from the world of computers, the focus of the cyberpunk literature he was once said to represent.

California: The Planet of the Future

2013 ◽  
Vol 3 (4) ◽  
pp. 3-11 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kim Stanley Robinson
Keyword(s):  
Science Fiction ◽  
Sierra Nevada ◽  
Orange County ◽  
The State ◽  
The Future ◽  
Sacramento Delta ◽  
Future Topics ◽  
Fiction Writer

Boom interviews prolific science fiction writer Kim Stanley Robinson about writing, California, and the future. Topics of discussion include utopian and dystopian visions of the state, the Sierra Nevada and Sacramento Delta, the Orange County of Robinson’s youth, how California’s landscape and environment have informed science fiction, terraforming, utopia, dystopia, and finding a balance between technology and environmentalism.

scholarly journals Scientific tales by Kurd Lasswitz: between literature, science and philosophy

2021 ◽  
Vol 19 (1) ◽  
pp. 152-167
Author(s):  
Alexander Belarev ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Science Fiction ◽  
Science And Technology ◽  
Fin De Siecle ◽  
Science And Literature ◽  
Ideal Society ◽  
Ethics And Technology ◽  
German Science ◽  
The Future ◽  
Existential Issues ◽  
Fiction Writer

The article deals with the works of German science fiction writer Kurd Lasswitz (1848–1910). The article provides a brief description of the main themes and directions of the writer’s work. Lasswitz was the creator of the scientific tale genre (das wissenschaftliche Märchen), in which he had set the task of building new relationships between science and literature, nature and man, the animate particle and the cosmic whole. In accordance with the spirit of the fin de siècle era the scientific tale represented a new, post-positivist ideal of knowledge. The key theme of Lasswitz’s fiction was the search for extraterrestrial civilizations.Mars became for Lasswitz a place where the intelligent extraterrestrial beings have realized an ideal society in which ethics and technology are NOT in conflict. Lasswitz was not a neo-Kantian philosopher only, he was also an active popularizer of Kant’s philosophy. He was striving to create a Kantian utopia in literature. For Lasswitz Mars became the realization of this utopia. Also Lasswitz sought to give literary embodiment to the ideas of another philosopher, Gustav Theodor Fechner. Following his philosophy, Lasswitz develops environmental and existential issues of the coexistence of intelligent plants with humans. In Lasswitz’ story for children “The Escaped Flower” (1910), one can trace how in Lasswitz’ science fiction (scientific tale) the themes of the habitability of space (Mars), science and technology of the future interact with the ideas of Kant and Fechner.

scholarly journals Expanding the Romantic Circle

2020 ◽  
Vol 23 (5) ◽  
pp. 915-929
Author(s):  
Tena Thau
Keyword(s):  
Science Fiction ◽  
Short Story ◽  
Physical Attractiveness ◽  
Point Of View ◽  
Moral Principle ◽  
Moral Concern ◽  
Moral Point ◽  
The Future ◽  
Moral Point Of View ◽  
Fiction Writer

AbstractOur romantic lives are influenced, to a large extent, by our perceptions of physical attractiveness – and the societal beauty standards that shape them. But what if we could free our desires from this fixation on looks? Science fiction writer Ted Chiang has explored this possibility in a fascinating short story – and scientific developments might, in the future, move it beyond the realm of fiction. In this paper, I lay out the prudential case for using “attraction-expanding technology,” and then consider it from a moral point of view. Using the technology would, in one respect, be morally good: it would benefit those whom prevailing beauty standards marginalize. But attraction-expanding technology also raises a moral concern – one that can be cast in non-harm-based and harm-based terms. I argue that the non-harm-based objection should be rejected, because it is incompatible with a moral principle central to queer rights. And the harm-based objection, I argue, is outweighed by the benefits of attraction-expanding technology, and undermined by the prerogative you have over your personal romantic choices. I conclude by considering whether, from the perspective of society, the development of attraction-expanding technology would be desirable.

Prologue

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jason Phillips
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Civil War ◽  
Antebellum America ◽  
Women Slaves ◽  
Military Planning ◽  
The Future ◽  
Future War

This introduction explains that looming, a nineteenth-century term for a superior mirage, shows us how visions of the future war affected antebellum America. First, some spark, an event or object, captured people’s attention. Second, a unique atmosphere elevated and enlarged that spark, making it loom greater than reality. Before the Civil War was fought or remembered, it was imagined by thousands of Americans who peered at the horizon through an apocalyptic atmosphere. Third, observers focused on it and reported what appeared to be beyond the horizon. Popular forecasts rose from leaders but also women, slaves, immigrants, and common soldiers. These imaginings shaped politics, military planning, and the economy. The prologue identifies the two prevailing temporalities of antebellum America, anticipations and expectations, and calls for more historical attention to the diverse temporalities of past people.

Living machines in our cultural imagination

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Michael Szollosy
Keyword(s):  
Artificial Intelligence ◽  
Science Fiction ◽  
Public Perceptions ◽  
Human Condition ◽  
Cultural Imagination ◽  
The Public ◽  
The Enlightenment ◽  
The Future ◽  
Public Imagination ◽  
The Human Condition

Public perceptions of robots and artificial intelligence (AI)—both positive and negative—are hopelessly misinformed, based far too much on science fiction rather than science fact. However, these fictions can be instructive, and reveal to us important anxieties that exist in the public imagination, both towards robots and AI and about the human condition more generally. These anxieties are based on little-understood processes (such as anthropomorphization and projection), but cannot be dismissed merely as inaccuracies in need of correction. Our demonization of robots and AI illustrate two-hundred-year-old fears about the consequences of the Enlightenment and industrialization. Idealistic hopes projected onto robots and AI, in contrast, reveal other anxieties, about our mortality—and the transhumanist desire to transcend the limitations of our physical bodies—and about the future of our species. This chapter reviews these issues and considers some of their broader implications for our future lives with living machines.

The Android and the Animal

PMLA ◽  
2009 ◽  
Vol 124 (2) ◽  
pp. 503-510 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ursula K. Heise
Keyword(s):  
Science Fiction ◽  
Police Officer ◽  
Human Subject ◽  
Genetically Modified ◽  
Organic Life ◽  
The Future

Pixar's animated feature wall-E (2008) revolves around a sentient robot, a small trash compactor who faith fully continues his programmed duties seven hundred years into the future, after humans have long abandoned their polluted home planet. Landscaped into skyscrapers of compacted waste, Earth no longer seems to harbor any organic life other than a cockroach, Wall-E's only and constant friend. Similarly, in Mamoru Oshii's Ghost in the Shell 2: Innocence (2004; ), sequel to the groundbreaking first Ghost in the Shell anime, the love of the cyborg police officer Batou for his vanished colleague Motoko Kusanagi is surpassed only by the care and affection he displays for his pet basset hound. These films are two recent examples of works of science fiction in which the emergence of new kinds of humanoid consciousness in robots, cyborgs, or biotechnologically produced humans is accompanied by a renewed attention to animals. Why? In what ways does the presence of wild, domestic, genetically modified, or mechanical animals reshape the concerns about the human subject that are most centrally articulated, in many of these works, through technologically produced and reproduced human minds and bodies?

Art, Forward Slash, Science

PMLA ◽  
2004 ◽  
Vol 119 (3) ◽  
pp. 526-529
Author(s):  
Gwyneth Jones
Keyword(s):  
Science Fiction ◽  
Iconic Memory ◽  
National Gallery ◽  
Horse Manure ◽  
Difficult Position ◽  
Internal Stimulus ◽  
First Time ◽  
Fiction Writer

Synesthesia … one day in 1997 (soon after the national gallery acquired the picture), i walked up the familiar marble stairs, crossed the rotunda, and was confronted, for the first time, by George Stubbs's Whistlejacket, the stunning, naked portrait—no groom or rider, no landscape—of a chestnut Arabian stallion. I smelled the stable, horse manure, and leather, and I had the thrill of knowing what was happening inside my skull. How the attention response had sent a cloud of fire leaping through my brain, tugging on associated traces, map on map of firing and partially firing neurons springing back into existence (never the same twice, yet continuous with my earliest childhood and the millions of years before that). Surprise and the power of the artist were making me read internal stimulus as external: recall had become once again perception (McCrone 194-217). This is an iconic memory for me. It holds, packed down and ready to unfold, both the direction my work has taken through my career and the context of that work: my own life and times; the history that made me; the Next Big Thing in science; and my privileged, difficult position as a science fiction writer, an arts graduate, and a woman.

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