Asians and Asian Americans in Early Science Fiction

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
John Cheng
Keyword(s):  
Science Fiction ◽  
20Th Century ◽  
Asian Americans ◽  
Detective Fiction ◽  
Life Forms ◽  
Early 20Th Century ◽  
Yellow Peril ◽  
Terrestrial Life ◽  
The Invisible

This essay considers the expressive and figurative dynamics of Asians in science fiction in the early 20th century. Racial sentiment and policy in the era saw and defined Asians as “ineligible aliens” to exclude from immigration and citizenship. Asian figures expressed these dynamics in science fiction, adapting Orientalist tropes and Yellow Peril themes to the imperatives of the emergent genre. The invisible menace of villainous masterminds like Fu Manchu from crime and detective fiction were refigured as visible science fiction foes whose defeat redeemed the power and potential of science from its degenerate and dehumanizing application. Asian racial tropes aligned particularly with science fiction’s concern about extra-terrestrial life forms. While the term “alien” was not used in the period for such creatures, its later prominence expressed valences and associations, particularly with “invasion,” that Asians originally represented in the genre.

ANTHROPOLOGICAL DOCTRINES OF THE RUSSIAN THEOSOPHISTS OF THE EARLY 20TH CENTURY

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Artem I. Shevchuk ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Human Nature ◽  
20Th Century ◽  
Spiritual Practices ◽  
Early 20Th Century ◽  
Christian Tradition ◽  
Scientific Concepts ◽  
New Era ◽  
Universal Nature ◽  
The Invisible

The article suggests a typology of Russian theosophical anthropological theories of the early 20th century and offers an analysis of the root causes of disputes between theosophists on anthropological matters. Christian theosophists, who were critical about the Orientalist elements of theosophical doctrines, preferred to draw upon the Christian tradition, while synthesizing it with certain theosophical concepts. Russian theosophists, leaning towards the traditional theosophical doctrine, espoused the idea of universal nature of religious anthropology and often preferred the Oriental approach to anthropology. Nevertheless, they had regard to the Christianity and sought to homologate Oriental anthropology with the Christian one. Millennial expectations were common with the theosophists; they believed that a new era was approaching that would result in a change of the human nature. Many of them reckoned that the human nature could be transformed through spiritual practices. Like many other advocates of Esotericism of those times, theosophists engaged scientific concepts to justify their anthropological views and referred to experimental evidences that would allow revealing the Invisible. For all of their differences, theosophical approaches to anthropology had some shared features and reflected the trends that were common in that age

Ideology and Futurology in Early 20th-Century Britain: Wells, Haldane, Bernal, and Their Critics

2021 ◽  
pp. 38-56
Author(s):  
Peter J. Bowler
Keyword(s):  
Science Fiction ◽  
20Th Century ◽  
Human Life ◽  
Early 20Th Century ◽  
Space Travel ◽  
Human Race ◽  
Spiritual Dimension ◽  
Collective Mentality

This chapter studies the response of rationalist writers to the claims of theologians arguing that their ideology lacked any sense of a wider purpose to human life. It is argued that to replace the spiritual dimension of religion, authors such as H. G. Wells, J. B. S. Haldane, and J. D. Bernal appealed to the possibility that the human race could in future develop a collective mentality and spread this awareness throughout the cosmos by space travel. Their ideas thus anticipated themes developed by later science-fiction authors such as Arthur C. Clarke in his 2001: A Space Odyssey.

scholarly journals Real and Semi-Real – an Architectural Backstory for Flusser’s Dual Scientific Fictions

2021 ◽  
Vol 8 (1) ◽  
pp. 81
Author(s):  
William Hanff
Keyword(s):  
New Media ◽  
Science Fiction ◽  
20Th Century ◽  
Early 20Th Century ◽  
Visual Metaphors ◽  
The Fantastic

Vilém Flusser’s approaches to epistemology and science fiction are explored in connection with the fictionalism of Hans Vaihinger and other late 19th and early 20th century philosophies, as well as using an architectural metaphor of scaffolding and blueprints. From his 1980 essay “Science Fiction” Flusser’s two approaches to science fictions are labeled as 1) a ‘falsification strategy’ and 2) an ‘epistemology of improbability.’ These are further explored as metaphors for architecture and building based on ideas from his “Wittgenstein’s Architecture” in The Shape of Things: a Philosophy of Design and compared and contrasted with visual metaphors of the fantastic in the paper architecture called The Obscure Cities series by François Schuiten and Benoît Peeters. Further reinforcing the connection between Flusser’s and Vaihinger’s philosophies, semi-fictions and real fictions are envisioned as a type of new media architecture.

Haunted by History: Louise Erdrich's Tracks

Prospects ◽  
1996 ◽  
Vol 21 ◽  
pp. 169-192
Author(s):  
Kathleen Brogan
Keyword(s):  
North Dakota ◽  
Young Woman ◽  
20Th Century ◽  
Louise Erdrich ◽  
Early 20Th Century ◽  
The Past ◽  
The World ◽  
The Creation ◽  
The Way ◽  
The Invisible

Part German-American and part Chippewa, Louise Erdrich has described the “mixed blood's” quest as a search for parentage, an attempt to understand self by interrogating genealogy. In the opening paragraphs of Tracks, a novel set on a North Dakota Chippewa reservation in the early 20th century, Erdrich reveals that the investigation of background necessarily entails an entrance into the world of ghosts. When the narrator Nanapush addresses the young woman listening to his unfolding account of her familial and tribal past as a “child of the invisible, the ones who disappeared,” he simultaneously connects an awareness of the ghostly presence of the dead with the discovery of identity and the creation of history. The narrator's conjuring of “invisible ancestors and “ghosts” (2) who inhabit tribal woods introduces haunting as Erdrich's central metaphor for the way the past shapes and is shaped by the present.

Grassic Gibbon, Lewis (1901–1935)

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Brian McAllister
Keyword(s):  
Science Fiction ◽  
20Th Century ◽  
Historical Fiction ◽  
Early 20Th Century ◽  
Critical Attention ◽  
Socialist Politics ◽  
Lewis Grassic Gibbon

Lewis Grassic Gibbon, a pseudonym for James Leslie Mitchell, was a key writer of the early 20th-century Scottish Renaissance, most famous for his trilogy A Scots Quair—Sunset Song (1932), Cloud Howe (1933), and Grey Granite (1934). While the majority of critical attention has focused on this trilogy, Mitchell published a wide body of work, ranging from historical fiction to archaeological adventure to science fiction. His work often reflects a leftist, anarcho-socialist politics and a diffusionist worldview, in which modern civilization progressively distances humanity from a primitive, utopian state of being. Mitchell published seventeen books, fifteen between 1931 and 1934, before dying at the age of thirty-four.

scholarly journals Real and Semi-Real – an Architectural Backstory for Flusser’s Dual Scientific Fictions

2021 ◽  
Vol 8 (1) ◽  
pp. 81
Author(s):  
William Hanff
Keyword(s):  
New Media ◽  
Science Fiction ◽  
20Th Century ◽  
Early 20Th Century ◽  
Visual Metaphors ◽  
The Fantastic

Vilém Flusser’s approaches to epistemology and science fiction are explored in connection with the fictionalism of Hans Vaihinger and other late 19th and early 20th century philosophies, as well as using an architectural metaphor of scaffolding and blueprints. From his 1980 essay “Science Fiction” Flusser’s two approaches to science fictions are labeled as 1) a ‘falsification strategy’ and 2) an ‘epistemology of improbability.’ These are further explored as metaphors for architecture and building based on ideas from his “Wittgenstein’s Architecture” in The Shape of Things: a Philosophy of Design and compared and contrasted with visual metaphors of the fantastic in the paper architecture called The Obscure Cities series by François Schuiten and Benoît Peeters. Further reinforcing the connection between Flusser’s and Vaihinger’s philosophies, semi-fictions and real fictions are envisioned as a type of new media architecture.

scholarly journals Facing the Monsters: Otherness in H. P. Lovecraft’s Cthulhu Mythos and Guillermo del Toro’s Pacific Rim and Hellboy

Religions ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 11 (2) ◽  
pp. 58
Author(s):  
David McConeghy
Keyword(s):  
Science Fiction ◽  
20Th Century ◽  
Sigmund Freud ◽  
Modern Science ◽  
Pacific Rim ◽  
Early 20Th Century ◽  
The Uncanny ◽  
Rudolf Otto

What happens when we imagine the unimaginable? This article compares recent films inspired by H. P. Lovecraft’s Cthulhu Mythos with that author’s original early 20th century pulp horror stories. In Guillermo del Toro’s films Pacific Rim and Hellboy, monsters that would have been obscured to protect Lovecraft’s readers are now fully revealed for Hollywood audiences. Using the period-appropriate theories of Rudolf Otto on the numinous and Sigmund Freud on the uncanny, that share Lovecraft’s troubled history with racist othering, I show how modern adaptations of Lovecraft’s work invert central features of the mythos in order to turn tragedies into triumphs. The genres of Science Fiction and Horror have deep commitments to the theme of otherness, but in Lovecraft’s works otherness is insurmountable. Today, Hollywood borrows the tropes of Lovecraftian horror but relies on bridging the gap between humanity and its monstrous others to reveal a higher humanity forged through difference and diversity. This suggests that otherness in modern science fiction is a means of reconciliation, a way for the monsters to be defeated rather than the source of terror as they were in Lovecraft’s stories.

The ethno-graphy of prices: On the fingers of the invisible hand (1922-1947)

Organization ◽  
2018 ◽  
Vol 26 (4) ◽  
pp. 492-516 ◽  
Author(s):  
Franck Cochoy ◽  
Johan Hagberg ◽  
Hans Kjellberg
Keyword(s):  
20Th Century ◽  
Transitional Period ◽  
Invisible Hand ◽  
Early 20Th Century ◽  
Chain Stores ◽  
Self Service ◽  
The Invisible

This article is part of a project examining the long-term process of price display digitalization, ranging from manually written prices to contemporary electronic shelf labels. Based on the etymology of the term ‘digital’ (from digitus, finger or toe), we intend to show that the display of prices in retail settings surprisingly rests on a long-term digitalization process that started in the early 20th century. The study is based on a systematic reading of the trade magazine The Progressive Grocer during its first decades (1922-1947). This magazine assisted independent American grocers in their move from counter-service to self-service, and in facing the challenges of new competitors like chain stores and supermarkets. In this process, the disclosure of prices and their proper writing—their ethno-graphy—was central. We focus on a crucial and transitional period: the move from coded to open prices. This period entailed a double development of price ‘fingerization’ (using the fingers to write the prices) and price ‘de-fingerization’ (getting rid of handwriting thanks to novel price tag and printing devices). Ethnographying these mundane evolutions illuminates the role of the fingers of the invisible hand that animates the market, so to say.

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