scholarly journals S.E.ARCH: Science Fiction and Extraterrestrial Architecture

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
◽  
KaiMei Shum
Keyword(s):  
Science Fiction ◽  
Outer Space ◽  
Popular Science ◽  
Artistic Practice ◽  
Space Industry ◽  
Time Space ◽  
The Future ◽  
Commercial Enterprise ◽  
Space Architecture ◽  
Interplanetary Missions

<p>Until this point in time, space architecture has relied heavily on engineering - resulting in little room for artistic practice. The resulting habitats are ill-equipped to sustain the quality of life required for long-term or interplanetary missions. However, rapid technological growth is beginning to enable the realisation of outer space for commercial enterprise, scientific gain, and personal exploration. Together, a budding space industry and the profession of space architecture are set to lead each other, hand-in-hand, into a new age of space exploration - and to destinations never before reached.  For almost as long as human culture has remembered we have been fascinated by the stars. A potent result of this fascination is science fiction and stories concerning space travel. A strong and tangible assemblage has formed between science fiction, social narrative, and outer space. Science fiction can make concepts of the future understandable. It can make communities focused on the future.  This thesis proposes that the discipline of architecture, with the help of popular science fiction, can re-imagine space architecture. It seeks to create empathy with the future inhabitants of outer space by envisaging the space industry of the future, and through the creation of a passenger ship it develops a hope for a future that unfolds differently to what we are planning for now.   This research seeks to investigate these connections in order to create safer and more fulfilling homes for spacefarers of the future. It does so by arguing against the typology we maintain. Through iterative designs which coincide with research on the use of science fiction and habitability in space, it concludes with a new ship typology.</p>

scholarly journals S.E.ARCH: Science Fiction and Extraterrestrial Architecture

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
◽  
KaiMei Shum
Keyword(s):  
Science Fiction ◽  
Outer Space ◽  
Popular Science ◽  
Artistic Practice ◽  
Space Industry ◽  
Time Space ◽  
The Future ◽  
Commercial Enterprise ◽  
Space Architecture ◽  
Interplanetary Missions

<p>Until this point in time, space architecture has relied heavily on engineering - resulting in little room for artistic practice. The resulting habitats are ill-equipped to sustain the quality of life required for long-term or interplanetary missions. However, rapid technological growth is beginning to enable the realisation of outer space for commercial enterprise, scientific gain, and personal exploration. Together, a budding space industry and the profession of space architecture are set to lead each other, hand-in-hand, into a new age of space exploration - and to destinations never before reached.  For almost as long as human culture has remembered we have been fascinated by the stars. A potent result of this fascination is science fiction and stories concerning space travel. A strong and tangible assemblage has formed between science fiction, social narrative, and outer space. Science fiction can make concepts of the future understandable. It can make communities focused on the future.  This thesis proposes that the discipline of architecture, with the help of popular science fiction, can re-imagine space architecture. It seeks to create empathy with the future inhabitants of outer space by envisaging the space industry of the future, and through the creation of a passenger ship it develops a hope for a future that unfolds differently to what we are planning for now.   This research seeks to investigate these connections in order to create safer and more fulfilling homes for spacefarers of the future. It does so by arguing against the typology we maintain. Through iterative designs which coincide with research on the use of science fiction and habitability in space, it concludes with a new ship typology.</p>

Lessing and Time Travel

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
David Punter
Keyword(s):  
Science Fiction ◽  
Outer Space ◽  
Time Travel ◽  
The Future

This chapter focuses on Lessing’s The Memoirs of a Survivor (1974), with the science-fiction novels Shikasta (1979) and The Marriages between Zones Three, Four and Five (1980), in order to assess her involvement with the future, which underlies all her work. Lessing is constantly involved with thinking the future – with, we might say, how the future presents itself, how it irrupts into the present, destabilising our assumptions, always making the present different from how we might expect it to be. We see something of this in Lessing’s remarks on science fiction, or ‘space fiction’ as she also terms it, exploiting a productive ambiguity in the word ‘space’ – as she considers not only the ‘outer’ space of both realism and conventional science-fiction, but what might happen to our understanding of space, spatiality, as we extend ourselves into the imagined, predicted, unpredictable, preordained future. What shall we remember? Or, what shall we ‘re-member’, in the sense of putting back together the shards and fragments of history? The chapter concludes by questioning whether this notion of accommodating the future, which we might refer to as a variant of time travel, has to do with telepathy, a concept to which Lessing was greatly attracted.

Dreams of the Earth and Sky

Leonardo ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 54 (1) ◽  
pp. 133-146
Author(s):  
Olesya Turkina
Keyword(s):  
Science Fiction ◽  
Outer Space ◽  
Popular Science ◽  
The Earth ◽  
Soviet Space ◽  
The Impact ◽  
Scientific Ideas ◽  
Technological Modeling ◽  
Interplanetary Flight

This article examines how artists, writers and filmmakers inspired by scientific ideas imagined space flight and how engineers and scientists were inspired by these fantasies. The first section discusses Konstantin Tsiolkovsky's impact on images of interplanetary flight and the promotion of outer space in the early twentieth century. The second considers the emergence of popular science films about space as conceived by director Pavel Klushantsev as well as the role of artist Yuri Shvets in the Soviet space epic and the impact of technological modeling on science fiction in art. Finally, the author surveys the “space work” of artists-cum-inventors Bulat Galeyev and Vyacheslav Koleychuk.

scholarly journals Marginalized Bodies of Imagined Futurescapes: Ableism and Heteronormativity in Science Fiction

2018 ◽  
Vol 10 (2) ◽  
pp. 226-245 ◽  
Author(s):  
Josefine Wälivaara
Keyword(s):  
Science Fiction ◽  
Physical Disability ◽  
Social Inclusion ◽  
Popular Fiction ◽  
Popular Science ◽  
Film And Television ◽  
Different Types ◽  
The Future ◽  
Symbolic Value ◽  
Queer Temporality

This article aims to contribute to an understanding of marginalized bodies in science fiction narratives by analyzing how physical disability and homosexuality/bisexuality have been depicted in popular science fiction film and television. Specifically, it analyzes what types of futures are evoked through the exclusion or inclusion of disability and homo/bisexuality. To investigate these futurescapes, in for example Star Trek and The Handmaid’s Tale, the paper uses film analysis guided by the theoretical approach of crip/queer temporality mainly in dialogue with disability/crip scholar Alison Kafer. Although narratives about the future in popular fiction occasionally imagines futures in which disability and homo/bisexuality exist the vast majority do not. This article argues that exclusion of characters with disabilities and homo/bisexual characters in imagined futures of science fiction perpetuate heteronormative and ableist normativity. It is important that fictional narratives of imagined futures do not limit portrayals to heterosexual and able-bodied people but, instead, take into account the ableist and heteronormative imaginaries that these narratives, and in extension contemporary society, are embedded in. Moreover, it is argued that in relation to notions of progression and social inclusion in imagined futurescapes portrayals of homo/bisexuality and disability has been used as narrative devices to emphasis “good” or “bad” futures. Furthermore, homo/bisexuality has increasingly been incorporated as a sign of social inclusion and progression while disability, partly due to the perseverance of a medical understanding of disability, instead is used as a sign of a failed future. However, the symbolic value ascribed to these bodies in stories are based on contemporary views and can thus change accordingly. To change the way the future is envisioned requires challenging how different types of bodies, desires, and notions of normativity are thought about. Sometimes imaginary futures can aid in rethinking and revaluating these taken-for-granted notions of normativity.

scholarly journals PRAGMATIC REALIZATION OF PROBABILITY CATEGORY IN THE RANGE OF “REALITY / IRREALITY” IN SCIENCE-FICTION NOVELS

2020 ◽  
pp. 143-154
Author(s):  
Nina Khrystych
Keyword(s):  
Science Fiction ◽  
English Language ◽  
Popular Science ◽  
Qualitative Assessment ◽  
Research Material ◽  
Sentence Construction ◽  
The Future

The article presents the results of the study of probability category in the popular science fiction novels “The Expanse” by James S. Corey and “Blindsight” by Peter Watts. According to the author, the pragmatic realization of probability category in the area “reality / unreality” is to analyze the pragmatic content of a particular communicative situation of interaction of communication participants. The analysis of the pragmatic content of the language units is focused on establishing those elements that carry information about the future. Pragmatic realization of probability category in the area “reality / unreality” occurs not only in a semantic-functional way of sentence construction, but also through modality. The research material showed that the semantic division of modality is determined by two criteria: quantitative and qualitative assessment of the speaker’s knowledge. Selected cases of modal probability are transmitted by units of different language levels: lexical, lexical-grammatical, lexical-syntactic and syntactic. The position of probability markers is significant to determine the degree of probability of information in the English-language utterance. The author believes that this problem requires a multifaceted study. There are still a number of issues that require more detailed study, namely, semantics of expressing degrees of probability, the plurality of means of expressing modal relations, and so on.

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?

Futures Honed

Futures ◽  
2021 ◽  
pp. 118-134
Author(s):  
Barbara Adam
Keyword(s):  
Social Sciences ◽  
Original Work ◽  
Collective Responsibility ◽  
The Past ◽  
Writing Theory ◽  
Time Space ◽  
The Social ◽  
The Future ◽  
Verse Form ◽  
The Way

This chapter comprises an interview between Barbara Adam and the editors, and is followed by Adam’s ‘Honing Futures’, which is presented in four short verses of distilled theory. In the interview Adam reflects on thirty-five years of futures-thinking rooted in her deeply original work on time and temporality, and her innovative response to qualitative and linear definitions of time within the social sciences. The interview continues with a discussion of the way Adam’s thinking on futures intersects in her work with ideas of ethics and collective responsibility politics and concludes with a brief rationale for writing theory in verse form. In ‘Honing Futures’, a piece of futures theory verse form, Adam charts the movements and moments in considerations of the Not Yet and futurity’s active creation: from pluralized imaginings of the future, to an increasingly tangible and narrower anticipated future, to future-making as designing and reality-creating performance. Collectively, the verses identify the varied complex interdependencies of time, space, and matter with the past and future in all iterations of honing and making futures.

scholarly journals Me, My Bot and His Other (Robot) Woman? Keeping Your Robot Satisfied in the Age of Artificial Emotion

Robotics ◽  
2018 ◽  
Vol 7 (3) ◽  
pp. 44 ◽  
Author(s):  
Rebekah Rousi
Keyword(s):  
Artificial Intelligence ◽  
Information Technology ◽  
Science Fiction ◽  
Sexual Partners ◽  
Sex Robots ◽  
Artificial Emotions ◽  
The Future ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
And Robotics

With a backdrop of action and science fiction movie horrors of the dystopian relationship between humans and robots, surprisingly to date-with the exception of ethical discussions-the relationship aspect of humans and sex robots has seemed relatively unproblematic. The attraction to sex robots perhaps is the promise of unproblematic affectionate and sexual interactions, without the need to consider the other’s (the robot’s) emotions and indeed preference of sexual partners. Yet, with rapid advancements in information technology and robotics, particularly in relation to artificial intelligence and indeed, artificial emotions, there almost seems the likelihood, that sometime in the future, robots too, may love others in return. Who those others are-whether human or robot-is to be speculated. As with the laws of emotion, and particularly that of the cognitive-emotional theory on Appraisal, a reality in which robots experience their own emotions, may not be as rosy as would be expected.

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