scholarly journals The Battle Within and the Battle Without: The Posthuman Worldview of Ken MacLeod’s The Corporation Wars Trilogy

2021 ◽  
Vol 37 (1) ◽  
pp. 85-104
Author(s):  
INDRAJIT PATRA
Keyword(s):  
Science Fiction ◽  
The Real ◽  
Life And Death ◽  
Present Essay ◽  
Binary Oppositions ◽  
Far Future ◽  
Fiction Writer

Abstract The present essay seeks to analyze Scottish science fiction writer Ken MacLeod’s The Corporation Wars trilogy (2016-2017) as an amalgam of politico-philosophical ideas set against the background of posthumanism. MacLeod’s far-future posthuman world-building relies on the conventional tropes of science fiction (man-machine hybrids, brain uploading, digital resurrection, and the agency of sentient machines) to engage with pressing ideologies (the master-slave dialectics, the historical perpetuation of age-old conflict between progressive and reactionary forces, the ethics of machinic consciousness). MacLeod’s novels project a postbinarist worldview where outmoded binary oppositions between life and death, the real and the virtual, the human and the machinic are constantly abolished, but which still preserves persistent ideological divisions.

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.

scholarly journals Fantasy in Literature: A Symbiotic Relation to the Real

Pravaha ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 26 (1) ◽  
pp. 119-123
Author(s):  
Lekha Nath Dhakal
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Science Fiction ◽  
Real World ◽  
Fairy Tales ◽  
External Reality ◽  
The Real ◽  
Fantasy Fiction ◽  
Fantastic Fiction ◽  
Artistic Representation ◽  
Symbiotic Relation

This article attempts to explore the use of fantasy in literature and how it has attained the position of a literary category in the twentieth century. This work also concerns how as the form literature, it functions between wonderful and imitative to combine the elements of both. The article reveals that wonderful represents supernatural atmospheres and events. The story-telling is unrealistic which represents impossibility as it creates a wonderland. In the imitative or the realistic mode, the narrative imitates external reality. In it, the characters and situations are ordinary and real. Fantasy in literature does not escape the reality. It occurs in an interdependent relation to the real. In other words, the fantastic cannot exist independently of the real world that limits it. The use of fantastic mode in literature interrupts the conventional artistic representation and reproduction of perceivable reality. It embodies the reality and transgresses the standards of literary forming. It normally includes a variety of fictional works which use the supernatural and actually natural as well. The developers of fantasy fiction are fairy tales, science fiction about future wars and future world. A major instinct of fantastic fiction is the violence threatened by capitalist violation of personality that is spreading universally.

scholarly journals Visions of Human Futures in Space and SETI

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jason T. Wright ◽  
Michael P. Oman-Reagan
Keyword(s):  
Solar System ◽  
Science Fiction ◽  
Dark Matter Particle ◽  
Short Term ◽  
National Science ◽  
The Galaxy ◽  
Near Future ◽  
Far Future ◽  
Made In

We discuss how visions for the futures of humanity in space and SETI are intertwined, and are shaped by prior work in the fields and by science fiction. This appears in the language used in the fields, and in the sometimes implicit assumptions made in discussions of them. We give examples from articulations of the so-called Fermi Paradox, discussions of the settlement of the Solar System (in the near future) and the Galaxy (in the far future), and METI. We argue that science fiction, especially the campy variety, is a significant contributor to the ‘giggle factor’ that hinders serious discussion and funding for SETI and Solar System settlement projects. We argue that humanity's long-term future in space will be shaped by our short-term visions for who goes there and how. Because of the way they entered the fields, we recommend avoiding the term ‘colony’ and its cognates when discussing the settlement of space, as well as other terms with similar pedigrees. We offer examples of science fiction and other writing that broaden and challenge our visions of human futures in space and SETI. In an appendix, we use an analogy with the well-funded and relatively uncontroversial searches for the dark matter particle to argue that SETI's lack of funding in the national science portfolio is primarily a problem of perception, not inherent merit.Also on arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/1708.05318Please cite this version:Wright, Jason T., and Michael P. Oman-Reagan. “Visions of Human Futures in Space and SETI.” International Journal of Astrobiology, 2017, 1–12. doi:10.1017/S1473550417000222.

scholarly journals Afanasy Afanasyevich Fet as a poet-thinker

2020 ◽  
pp. 9-23
Author(s):  
Alexey V. Fedorov
Keyword(s):  
Late Period ◽  
The Real ◽  
Life And Death ◽  
Religious Issues ◽  
The World ◽  
To Come ◽  
Good And Evil ◽  
Critical Reviews

The article proposes to consider the creative individuality of A.A. Fet as a poet-thinker. It places a special emphasis on his ideological views, expressed in his enthusiasm for the teachings of A. Schopenhauer’s and in disputes with L.N. Tolstoy; extensive epistolary material is involved (this correspondence with Ya.P. Polonsky, L.N. and S.A. Tolstoy, N.N. Strakhov, K.R. and others); a brief overview of the critical reviews of contemporaries on the poet’s poetry collections is given. Here, Fet’s philosophical lyrics are analyzed in particular detail (first of all – the late, period of “Evening Lights”, in which there is an understanding of the universal categories of being – life and death, good and evil, the world and man, time and eternity), some parallels are drawn with F.I. Tyutchev. The article traces the development of spiritual and religious issues in the work of Fet’s (gospel stories and motives, the image of the Lord, the genre of prayer, etc.). The article raises the question of expanding the concept of “poet-thinker” taking into account the category “mind of the heart” designated by Fet himself. From these positions, his poem “I am waiting, embraced by anxiety...” from the “Evening Lights” collection is analyzed. Considering Fet’s work as “the poetry of thought” does not cancel, but enriches his airy image in our minds, allows us to present Fet’s personality in more volume, to clarify and expand the idea of the real complexity and versatility of his artistic nature, to come closer to understanding “lyrical insolence” as “the property of great poets” (words of L.N. Tolstoy about A.A. Fet).

Fromhomo economicustohomo roboticus: an exploration of the transformative impact of the technological imaginary

2015 ◽  
Vol 11 (3) ◽  
pp. 245-264 ◽  
Author(s):  
Julia J. A. Shaw
Keyword(s):  
Information And Communication Technologies ◽  
Real World ◽  
Communication Technologies ◽  
Regulatory State ◽  
The Real ◽  
Race And Class ◽  
Binary Oppositions ◽  
Rational Thought ◽  
Information And Communication ◽  
Transformative Impact

AbstractThe largely unfettered realm of hardware and software code offers limitless possibilities in expanding the use and influence of information and communication technologies. As transcendent technologies they are unrestrained by the divergent equivalence of human categories of difference such as gender, race and class, or conceptual binary oppositions such as good/evil, happy/sad, freedom/oppression. Whilst a material grounding in earlier forms of embodied social experience remains an essential precondition of interaction with virtual systems, it is suggested that the virtual world is in the process of transforming the real world or, at least, subordinating it as slave to the machine world. This shift has fostered an imbalance of power between human and the posthuman, and consequently the epoch of the machine is often alleged to be both modern miracle and monster. Just as at a human level, rational thought processes restrain ideas which are unruly and require control, ICT advancements have proliferated to the point where these technologies also need to be classified, constrained where necessary, and diluted into the real world in real time. In this current climate of endless technological transformation, along with the growth of mass surveillance technologies together with the expansion of regulatory state powers, it is clear that any further innovations cannot be left to market forces without first considering the groundwork for the development of an appropriate monitoring mechanism. Before an appropriate set of regulatory mechanisms can be explicated, it is first necessary to consider the nature of the evolving transgressive human–machine relationship and the possible implications for humanity in the modern hypermediated world.

Epilogue

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Brian Cremins
Keyword(s):  
Science Fiction ◽  
Origin Story ◽  
Fiction Writer

The epilogue returns to Captain Marvel’s first appearance and studies the debt it owes to James Hilton’s novel Lost Horizon. This section also examines the hero’s impact on science fiction writer Harlan Ellison, whose story “Paladin of the Lost Hour” offers a variation on both Lost Horizon and Billy Batson’s origin story.

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.

Terraforming: Engineering Imaginary Environments

Terraforming ◽  
2016 ◽  
pp. 1-17
Author(s):  
Chris Pak
Keyword(s):  
Science Fiction ◽  
Nature Of Science ◽  
Analytical Framework ◽  
Scientific Discourse ◽  
Space And Time ◽  
Gaia Hypothesis ◽  
Fictional Narratives ◽  
Human Value ◽  
Environmental Engagement ◽  
Fiction Writer

Beginning with the coining of “terraforming” by science fiction writer Jack Williamson, this chapter explores the boundaries of the term in scientific discourse and in fiction, focusing attention on its significance for stories of interplanetary colonisation. It compares terraforming with its Earthbound counterpart, geoengineering, thus highlighting how science fiction explores modes of relating to Earth’s environment. It introduces James Lovelock’s Gaia hypothesis and explains its significance for terraforming, and explores the nature of science fiction’s environmental engagement and its intersections with ecocritical concerns. It also introduces the concept of nature’s otherness and of landscaping, and connects the latter to Bakhtin’s chronotope, thus delineating an analytical framework for exploring how space and time is invested with human value and meaning in science fictional narratives.

Beyond Borders with Miéville, Borges, Wolfe, Ligotti, and Numenera

Dread Trident ◽  
2019 ◽  
pp. 195-222
Author(s):  
Curtis D. Carbonell
Keyword(s):  
Science Fiction ◽  
Literary Studies ◽  
Dungeons And Dragons ◽  
Far Future

This chapter examines a final case study, the TRPG Numenera. It finds in writers such as China Miéville and Gene Wolfe precursors of how literary studies can inform and understanding of the imaginary worlds found in a game like Numenera. Miéville, for example, finds roots for his Bas Lag trilogy in elements from TRPGs like Dungeons and Dragons, articulating a granular style of textured detail like that found in the best of Lovecraft. With Wolfe, this chapter reads his blending of science fiction and fantasy elements, especially how he embraces a magical impulse. Numenera incorporates these elements into a post-anthropocene setting that imagines a post-human far future. Its cosmicism, though, lacks the pessimism of Lovecraft or a writer like Thomas Ligotto, who this chapter sees as moving beyond Lovecraft, yet retaining much of his insistence in resisting drawing the ultimate horror. This chapter ends by arguing that realized worlds such as those inspired by Lovecraft, e.g. Numenera, can also be seen in the first season of the HBO series True Detective, a series that valorized a pulp fantasism, yet refused to acknowledge it in the end.

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