scholarly journals Irradiated Cereal and Abject Meat: Food as Satire and Warning in the Fallout Series

2021 ◽  
pp. 155541202110308
Author(s):  
Sarah Stang
Keyword(s):  
Science Fiction ◽  
Video Game ◽  
Focal Point ◽  
Technological Development ◽  
Visual Design ◽  
Cultural Norms ◽  
Beverage Consumption ◽  
Food And Beverage ◽  
Irradiated Meat ◽  
Post War

This article is a close reading of food and beverages in Bethesda’s acclaimed post-apocalyptic science fiction video game series, Fallout. Through a discussion of the visual design, narrative positioning, and in-game function of food and beverage consumption, this article demonstrates how Fallout uses food to critique the unchecked technological development, rampant consumerism, and environmental devastation of post-war American atomic culture. Specifically, pre-packaged, pre-apocalypse food is presented as a focal point for satire, while the irradiated meat harvested from the mutated creatures that populate this post-apocalyptic world is presented as abject and ambiguous. In this sense, food in the Fallout series, as in much science fiction media, can reinforce or challenge ideologies, beliefs, and cultural norms by evoking real-world anxieties.

Dystopian Science Fiction and the Return of the Gothic

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sherryl Vint
Keyword(s):  
Science Fiction ◽  
Vantage Point ◽  
Victorian Culture ◽  
Gothic Fiction ◽  
Post War ◽  
British Culture

This chapter explores the connections between dystopian science fiction and gothic fiction. It links science fiction to a tradition of European utopian and surrealist writing, situating the genre equally within discourses of science and the gothic. This perspective, the chapter argues, was perhaps more possible from the vantage point of 1973 than it would have been for earlier critics: the scientific romance tradition was rooted in a Victorian culture that believed in empire, technology, and progress, even if it was not always convinced by their contemporary instantiations. The dramatic shifts in British culture during the Blitz and in the immediate post-war period looked back on such optimism with a rather jaundiced eye: British global hegemony was distinctly at an end. It is little wonder, then, that the speculative fictions of this period turned toward darker tones of dystopia and the gothic.

Unhealthy Food and Beverage Consumption: An Investigative Model

2015 ◽  
Vol 18 (5) ◽  
pp. 470-488 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jeremy J. Sierra ◽  
Anna M. Turri ◽  
Harry A. Taute
Keyword(s):  
Unhealthy Food ◽  
Beverage Consumption ◽  
Food And Beverage

scholarly journals Demons of the mind: The ‘psy’ sciences and film in the long 1960s

2021 ◽  
pp. 095269512110285
Author(s):  
Tim Snelson ◽  
William R. Macauley
Keyword(s):  
Child Development ◽  
Science Fiction ◽  
The Other ◽  
Research Centre ◽  
Film Culture ◽  
Radical Feminist ◽  
Critical Engagement ◽  
The Sixties ◽  
Post War ◽  
The Mind

This introduction provides context for a collection of articles that came out of a research symposium held at the Science Museum's Dana Research Centre in 2018 for the ‘ Demons of Mind: the Interactions of the ‘Psy’ Sciences and Cinema in the Sixties' project. Across a range of events and research outputs, Demons of the Mind sought to map the multifarious interventions and influences of the ‘psy’ sciences (psychology, psychiatry, and psychoanalysis) on film culture in the long 1960s. The articles that follow discuss, in order: critical engagement with theories of child development in 1960s British science fiction; the ‘horrors’ of contemporary psychiatry and neuroscience portrayed in the Hollywood blockbuster The Exorcist (1973); British social realist filmmakers' alliances with proponents of ‘anti-psychiatry’; experimental filmmaker Jane Arden's coalescence of radical psychiatry and radical feminist techniques in her ‘psychodrama’ The Other Side of the Underneath (1973); and the deployment of film technologies by ‘psy’ professionals during the post-war period to capture and interpret mother-infant interaction.

scholarly journals Counterfactuality as a Polyphonic Assemblage. Entangled Human and Nonhuman Stories of Early Modern Sciences in Neal Stephenson’s The Baroque Cycle

2018 ◽  
Vol 14 (1) ◽  
pp. 110-121
Author(s):  
Mateusz Chaberski
Keyword(s):  
Science Fiction ◽  
Technological Development ◽  
Vital Role ◽  
Multispecies Ethnography ◽  
The Past ◽  
Political Effects ◽  
Neal Stephenson ◽  
History Of ◽  
Ways Of Being ◽  
Point Of Departure

Summary In recent science-fiction literature, we can witness a proliferation of new counterfactual narratives which take the 17th century as their point of departure. Unlike steampunk narratives, however, their aim is not to criticise the socio-political effects caused by contemporary technological development. Such authors as Neal Stephenson or Ian Tregillis, among others, are interested in revisiting the model of development in Western societies, routing around the logic of progress. Moreover, they demonstrate that modernity is but an effect of manifold contingent and indeterminate encounters of humans and nonhumans and their distinct temporalities. Even the slightest modification of their ways of being could have changed Western societies and cultures. Thus, they necessitate a rather non-anthropocentric model of counterfactuality which is not tantamount to the traditional alternative histories which depart from official narratives of the past. By drawing on contemporary multispecies ethnography, I put forward a new understanding of counter-factuality which aims to reveal multiple entangled human and nonhuman stories already embedded in the seemingly unified history of the West. In this context, the concept of “polyphonic assemblage” (Lowenhaupt-Tsing) is employed to conceptualize the contingent and open-ended encounters of human and nonhuman historical actors which cut across different discourses and practices. I analyse Stephenson’s The Baroque Cycle to show the entangled stories of humans and nonhumans in 17th century sciences, hardly present in traditional historiographies. In particular, Stephenson’s depiction of quicksilver and coffeehouse as nonhuman historical actors is scrutinized to show their vital role in the production of knowledge at the dawn of modernity.

scholarly journals Doris Lessing’s Science Fiction

2020 ◽  
Vol 8 (7) ◽  
pp. 167-176
Author(s):  
Ms. Shikha Sharma
Keyword(s):  
Welfare State ◽  
Science Fiction ◽  
Short Story ◽  
Nobel Laureate ◽  
Doris Lessing ◽  
Feminist Movement ◽  
The World ◽  
Private Problems ◽  
Post War ◽  
Story Writer

Doris Lessing, the Nobel Laureate (1919-2007), a British novelist, poet, a writer of epic scope, playwright, librettist, biographer and short story writer. She was the “most fearless woman novelist in the world, unabashed ex-communist and uncompromising feminist”. Doris has earned the great reputation as a distinguished and outstanding writer. She raised local and private problems of England in post-war period with emphasis on man-woman relationship, feminist movement, welfare state, socio-economic and political ethos, population explosion, terrorism and social conflicts in her novels.

Eugenic Nostalgia: Self-Narration and Internalized Ableism in Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go

2020 ◽  
Vol 14 (4) ◽  
pp. 437-452 ◽  
Author(s):  
Will Kanyusik
Keyword(s):  
Science Fiction ◽  
Genetically Engineered ◽  
The Body ◽  
Subject Position ◽  
Cultural Norms ◽  
Cultural Narratives ◽  
Person Perspective ◽  
Liberal Democratic ◽  
Disability Identity

Rosemarie Garland-Thomson has recently argued that Ishiguro’s novel Never Let Me Go deconstructs ableism’s binary structure by postulating the existence of clone characters who occupy an abject position in a eugenic dystopia precisely because their genetically engineered, idealized able bodies exist to be used to “cure” the disabilities of others. The article builds on Garland-Thomson’s work, discussing the role of science fiction in Ishiguro’s book as a means to explore how ableist narratives contribute to cultural norms that enable an overt disciplining of disabled bodies that still occurs, despite it no longer being socially acceptable, and posits protagonist Kathy H.’s story as a narrative of disability identity that exposes the contradictory nature of a belief in the able body and its opposition to disability. Putatively able-bodied, Kathy narrates her experience of the world from a subject position that undermines a stable construction of the body within an ableist framework, ultimately showing these distinctions to be untenable. By discussing the role of first-person perspective in Ishiguro’s novel as a means to interrogate internalized cultural narratives that perpetuate ableist practices, the article examines how cultural notions of ability and disability function as terms that define through exclusion the citizen-subject in liberal democratic societies.

Wounded Warriors of the Future Disability Hierarchy in Avatar and Source Code

2020 ◽  
Vol 14 (4) ◽  
pp. 403-419 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sami Schalk
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Science Fiction ◽  
American Culture ◽  
Source Code ◽  
Cultural Norms ◽  
Disabled People ◽  
Disabled Veterans ◽  
The Future ◽  
Wounded Warriors ◽  
Contemporary United States

The article analyzes the representation of disabled veterans in James Cameron’s Avatar and Duncan Jones’s Source Code. The argument is that these two films use the figure of the heroic, technologically enhanced, white disabled veteran man to alleviate cultural anxieties, fears, and guilt about veterans and disabled people in the contemporary United States. In doing so, however, Avatar and Source Code perpetuate a disability hierarchy that reinforces a variety of oppressive cultural norms. The article, therefore, demonstrates how the films reflect the differential valuation and treatment of different kinds of disabled people in American culture at large via the genre of science fiction and its technological imaginative possibilities.

scholarly journals Hot food and beverage consumption and the risk of esophageal squamous cell carcinoma

Medicine ◽  
2017 ◽  
Vol 96 (50) ◽  
pp. e9325 ◽  
Author(s):  
Wei-Ping Tai ◽  
Guo-Ji Nie ◽  
Meng-Jie Chen ◽  
Tajigul Yiminni Yaz ◽  
Arzi Guli ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Squamous Cell Carcinoma ◽  
Esophageal Squamous Cell Carcinoma ◽  
Cell Carcinoma ◽  
Squamous Cell ◽  
Beverage Consumption ◽  
Food And Beverage

scholarly journals Life under another Sun: From Science Fiction to Science

2019 ◽  
Vol 28 (1) ◽  
pp. 18-39
Author(s):  
Michaël Gillon
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
Science Fiction ◽  
Paradigm Shift ◽  
Life Science ◽  
Technological Development ◽  
Major Theme ◽  
Extraterrestrial Life ◽  
Copernican Revolution ◽  
The Universe

Initiated in the sixteenth century, the Copernican revolution toppled our Earth from its theological pedestal, revealing it not to be the centre of everything but a planet among several others in orbit around one of the zillions of stars of our Universe. Already proposed by some philosophers at the dawn of this major paradigm shift, the existence of exoplanets, i.e. planets in orbit around stars other than our Sun, remained suspected but unconfirmed for centuries. It is only in the last decade of the twentieth century that the first of these extrasolar worlds were found. Their seminal discoveries initiated the development of more and more ambitious projects that led eventually to the detection of thousands of exoplanets, including a few dozen potentially habitable ones, i.e. terrestrial exoplanets that could harbour large amounts of liquid water – and maybe life – on their surfaces. Upcoming astronomical facilities will soon be able to probe the atmospheric compositions of some of these extrasolar worlds, maybe performing in the process the historical detection of chemical signs of life light-years away. But while the existence of extraterrestrial life remains pure speculation for now, it has been a major theme of science fiction for more than a century. By creating countless stories of encounters between humans and alien forms of life, science-fiction authors have pursued, in a sense, the Copernican revolution, confronting us with the idea that not only could life be widespread in the Universe, but also that our species may be far from the Cosmic pinnacle in matters of intelligence and technological development.

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