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.

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.

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.

Freud in the Future: Work in German Science Fiction

Extrapolation ◽  
2006 ◽  
Vol 47 (1) ◽  
pp. 77-94
Author(s):  
Vibeke Rützou Petersen
Keyword(s):  
Science Fiction ◽  
German Science ◽  
The Future ◽  
Future Work

scholarly journals Darwin’s Monsters: Evolution, Science, and the Gothic in Christian Alvart’s ”Pandorum”

2019 ◽  
Vol 43 (2) ◽  
pp. 157
Author(s):  
Katarzyna Pisarska
Keyword(s):  
Science Fiction ◽  
Science And Technology ◽  
Evolutionary Processes ◽  
Advanced Science ◽  
The Future ◽  
A Site

<p>This article analyses Gothic tropes in the science fiction film <em>Pandorum</em> (2009, dir. Christian Alvart), through the lens of such concepts as evolution and science, which are presented in the film as inherently monstrous. Key to the analysis is the notion of the return of the repressed (or abjected) past which invades the future, disrupting biological, social, and moral borders of the human. This Gothic return, facilitated by advanced science and technology, turns the future into a site of humanity’s confrontation with their animal instincts, highlighting the fragility of our civilisation and proving our subjection to evolutionary processes.</p>

Animating the Science Fiction Imagination

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
J.P. Telotte
Keyword(s):  
World War Ii ◽  
Science Fiction ◽  
Science And Technology ◽  
Literary Genre ◽  
Space Travel ◽  
World War ◽  
Feature Films ◽  
Short Films ◽  
The Future ◽  
Technological Developments

Before flying saucers, robot monsters, and alien menaces invaded the movies of the 1950s, there was already a significant body of animated science fiction, produced by such studios as Disney, the Fleischers, and Terrytoons. That work has largely been overlooked or forgotten, despite the fact that the same pre-World War II era that produced this group of short films also saw the more prominent development and flourishing of SF as a literary genre. This book surveys that neglected body of work to show how it helped contribute to the burgeoning SF imagination that was manifested in pulp literature, serials, feature films, and even World’s Fairs of the era. It argues that prewar cartoons helped to create a familiarity with the scientific and technological developments that were spurring that SF imagination and build an audience for this new genre. Demonstrating the same modernist spirit as SF literature and feature films, these cartoons adopted many of the genre’s most important motifs (rockets and space travel, robots, alien worlds and their inhabitants, and fantastic inventions and inventors), offered comic visions of the era’s growing fascination with science and technology, and framed that matter in a nonthreatening fashion. Popular animation thereby not only added another dimension to the SF imagination, but also helped prepare postwar audiences to embrace SF’s vision of the future and of inevitable change.

Neo-Victorian Visions of the Future: Science, Crime, and Modernity

2018 ◽  
Vol 8 (2) ◽  
pp. 187-205 ◽  
Author(s):  
Elisavet Ioannidou
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Science Fiction ◽  
Technological Progress ◽  
Science And Technology ◽  
Recent Past ◽  
Victorian Era ◽  
Future Science ◽  
The Future ◽  
Perception Of Time ◽  
The Relationship

Neo-Victorian texts frequently associate science and technology with criminal acts, which their perpetrators perceive as acts of progress, because of their potential to initiate the world's passage to the future. Stemming from Victorian apprehensions of science, most notably the possibility of the scientist's malevolence, the abuse of science by neo-Victorian villains presents a criminal past that will give birth to a dystopian future. As the future of neo-Victorian narratives constitutes the present or recent past of the time of narration, the presuppositions of modernity are problematised both within the texts' Victorian narratives and in retrospect; and especially when neo-Victorian employments of science and technology echo concrete twentieth-century instances of scientific misapplication. Neo-Victorian texts expose their complex temporality and defy their integration within genres such as steampunk or science fiction. Considering the difficulty of generic classification, this essay suggests that neo-Victorian instances of scientific crime manifest nineteenth-century scientific and technological progress in a way that illuminates the Victorian era, while remaining relevant for contemporary audiences. The relationship that is thus effected between past and present underlines neo-Victorianism's perception of time as a continuum, in order to problematise contemporary understandings of progress and modernity.

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 ON THE WAY TO A NEW ROUND OF INTERESTS IN THE FIELD OF SCIENCE EDUCATION

2006 ◽  
Vol 3 (2) ◽  
pp. 4-4
Author(s):  
Elena Vasilevskaya
Keyword(s):  
Science Education ◽  
Science Fiction ◽  
Chemical Ecology ◽  
Medicinal Chemistry ◽  
New Technologies ◽  
Science And Technology ◽  
Mathematical Chemistry ◽  
New Directions ◽  
The Future ◽  
The Way

Movement along this path will fundamentally change many of the ideas about the possibilities of science and technology that have developed over the centuries and decades. The surge of research in the field of nanometer sizes, the emergence of new directions at the intersection of different sciences (medicinal chemistry, chemical bionics, chemical ecology, mathematical chemistry, chemistry of life) - these are the realities of today. The prospects for the use of new technologies in the future often resemble the plots of science fiction novels, but those whom we teach today will bring them to life.

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.

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