In the Shadow of the Culture

Extrapolation ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 62 (2) ◽  
pp. 181-197
Author(s):  
Sara Martín
Keyword(s):  
Science Fiction ◽  
Critical Attention ◽  
Key Issues

Iain M. Banks’s The Algebraist (2004), a Hugo Award nominee for Best Novel in 2005, has attracted far less critical attention than his Culture novels despite being a remarkable work. Born of the author’s wish to develop his science fiction beyond the Culture’s universe, The Algebraist is a complex novel displaying in its dense pages Banks’s wondrous imagination. Here I consider the ways in which the main civilizations he depicts in it, the Mercatoria and the Dwellers, connect with key issues raised in the Culture novels: the ethics of intervention in other civilizations, the use of AIs, and the nature of utopia. The Culture, as I argue, casts a long shadow but Banks’s decision to explore another narrative universe allows him to examine these fundamental issues from a different angle. The Algebraist complements, nonetheless, his main tenets in the Culture series.

The total archive: Data, subjectivity, universality

2018 ◽  
Vol 31 (5) ◽  
pp. 3-22 ◽  
Author(s):  
Boris Jardine ◽  
Matthew Drage
Keyword(s):  
Science Fiction ◽  
Free Market ◽  
Historical Context ◽  
World Health ◽  
The Social ◽  
Key Issues ◽  
Historical Trajectory ◽  
Health Organization ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
Archive Data

The complete system of knowledge is a standard trope of science fiction, a techno-utopian dream and an aesthetic ideal. It is Solomon’s House, the Encyclopaedia and the Museum. It is also an ideology – of Enlightenment, High Modernism and absolute governance. Far from ending the dream of a total archive, 20th-century positivist rationality brought it ever closer. From Paul Otlet’s ‘Mundaneum’ to Mass-Observation, from the Unity of Science movement to Wikipedia, the dream of universal knowledge dies hard. As a political tool, the total archive encompasses population statistics, gross domestic product, indices of the Standard of Living and the international ideology of the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization, the World Health Organization, the free market and, most recently, Big Data. Questions of the total archive engage key issues in the philosophy of classification, the poetics of the universal, the ideology of surveillance and the technologies of information retrieval. What are the social structures and political dynamics required to sustain total archives, and what are the temporalities implied by such projects? This introduction and the articles that follow describe and place in historical context a series of concrete instances of totality. Our analysis is arranged according to four central themes: the relationship between the Archive (singular) and archives (plural); the image of the archive and the aesthetics of totality; pathologies of accumulation; and the specific historical trajectory of the total archive in the 19th and 20th centuries.

Arthur C. Clarke

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Gary Westfahl
Keyword(s):  
Solar System ◽  
Science Fiction ◽  
First Century ◽  
Space Travel ◽  
Long Distance ◽  
Critical Attention ◽  
The Future ◽  
Fiction Writers ◽  
Distance Communication ◽  
First Time

Despite extensive critical attention, Arthur C. Clarke’s distinctive science fiction has never been fully or properly understood. This study examines some of his lighthearted shorter works for the first time and explores how Clarke’s views regularly diverge from those of other science fiction writers. Clarke thought new inventions would likely bring more problems than benefits and suspected that human space travel would never extend beyond the solar system. He accepted that humanity would probably become extinct in the future or be transformed by evolution into unimaginable new forms. He anticipated that aliens would be genuinely alien in both their physiology and psychology. He perceived a deep bond between humanity and the oceans, perhaps stronger than any developing bond between humanity and space. Despite his lifelong atheism, he frequently pondered why humans developed religions, how they might abandon them, and why religions might endure in defiance of expectations. Finally, Clarke’s characters, often criticized as bland, actually are merely reticent, and the isolated lifestyles they adopt--remaining distant or alienated from their families and relying upon connections to broader communities and long-distance communication to ameliorate their solitude--not only reflect Clarke’s own personality, as a closeted homosexual and victim of a disability, but they also constitute his most important prediction, since increasing numbers of twenty-first-century citizens are now living in this manner.

Science Fiction Futures and (Re)visions of the Anthropocene

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Julia D. Gibson ◽  
Kyle Powys Whyte
Keyword(s):  
Technological Change ◽  
Science Fiction ◽  
Philosophy Of Technology ◽  
Future Generations ◽  
Climate Justice ◽  
Mass Extinctions ◽  
Technological Risk ◽  
History Of ◽  
Key Issues ◽  
Climate Crisis

This chapter discusses how humans envision futures, especially environmental futures, including the climate crisis, the Anthropocene, and mass extinctions. Although the philosophy of technology has traditionally examined the forecasting of technological risk and arguments about whether to embrace or reject the growth of technological mediation of human lives, the field has yet to fully investigate environmental futurisms and imagination. To begin a conversation for the philosophy of technology, philosophies of science fiction narrative discuss the different roles that imagination plays in projecting our concerns with the present onto futures that have not occurred and future generations who are not yet living. One of the key issues that the chapter explores is how science fiction imagination is based on assumptions and values about the history of technological change, including industrialization, capitalism, and colonialism. These issues reveal ways in which technology, future narrative, and climate justice are related.

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.

Introduction to Part I

2019 ◽  
pp. 30-35
Author(s):  
Derek J. Thiess
Keyword(s):  
Science Fiction ◽  
Contemporary Science ◽  
Critical Attention ◽  
Science Fiction Studies

This brief essay clarifies the central theses outlined in the introduction and places them in the wider context of science fiction studies. Emphasis here is on the greater critical attention to embodiment in contemporary science fiction studies and the need for an approach that is both intersectional and biopsychosocial. This discussion includes an analysis of the 2017 film Life.

scholarly journals Surfaces of Science Fiction: Enacting Gender and “Humanness” in Ex Machina

2018 ◽  
Vol 22 (2) ◽  
pp. 281-301
Author(s):  
Catherine Constable
Keyword(s):  
Science Fiction ◽  
Dual Role ◽  
Gender Performativity ◽  
Mise En Scene ◽  
Key Issues ◽  
Mainstream Science ◽  
Reflective Surfaces ◽  
Reading Texts

This article explores two different conceptions of the postmodern surface and their take up in relation to mainstream science fiction cinema. Each offers a rather different genealogy for considering the surfaces of the science fiction film. The first traces Frederic Jameson's conception of postmodern superficiality and its dual role as a mode of reading texts and an aesthetic paradigm. The second traces Judith Butler's conception of gender performativity, its application to technology, and the expansion of performativity as a key mechanism for the enactment of “humanness”. The reading of Ex Machina (Alex Garland, 2014) will explore the aesthetics of film's mise-en-scène with its plurality of textured and reflective surfaces. It will trace the performative constructions of gender and humanness that intersect across the film, before finally focussing on the ending as a way of addressing key issues at stake in the conceptualisation of surface readings.

Archaeologies of the Future: Jameson's Utopia or Orwell's Dystopia?

2009 ◽  
Vol 17 (4) ◽  
pp. 101-119 ◽  
Author(s):  
Andrew Milner
Keyword(s):  
Science Fiction ◽  
Foreseeable Future ◽  
Theoretical Contribution ◽  
American Science ◽  
The Future ◽  
Key Issues ◽  
Science Fiction Studies

AbstractThis paper begins with the proposition that Fredric Jameson's Archaeologies of the Future (2005) is the most important theoretical contribution to utopian and science-fiction studies since Darko Suvin's Metamorphoses of Science Fiction (1979). It argues that Jameson's derivation of 'anti-anti-Utopianism' from Sartrean anti-anti-communism will provide 'the party of Utopia' with as good a slogan as it is likely to find in the foreseeable future. It takes issue with Jameson over two key issues: his overwhelming concentration on American science-fiction, which seems strangely parochial in such a distinguished comparativist; and his understanding of Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four as an 'anti-Utopia' rather than a dystopia. The paper argues that, for Nineteen Eighty-Four, as for any other science-fiction novel, the key question is that identified by Jameson: not 'did it get the future right?', but rather 'did it sufficiently shock its own present as to force a meditation on the impossible?'. It concludes that Jameson fails to understand how this process works for dystopia as well as utopia, for barbarism as well as socialism.

Probing vacancies and structural distortions at individual defects in ceramics using EELS

1996 ◽  
Vol 54 ◽  
pp. 678-679
Author(s):  
D. J. Wallis ◽  
N. D. Browning
Keyword(s):  
Structural Information ◽  
Core Loss ◽  
Nearest Neighbors ◽  
Ceramic Materials ◽  
Scanning Transmission Electron Microscope ◽  
Real Space ◽  
Atomic Scale ◽  
Structure Property ◽  
Scanning Transmission ◽  
Key Issues

In electron energy loss spectroscopy (EELS), the near-edge region of a core-loss edge contains information on high-order atomic correlations. These correlations give details of the 3-D atomic structure which can be elucidated using multiple-scattering (MS) theory. MS calculations use real space clusters making them ideal for use in low-symmetry systems such as defects and interfaces. When coupled with the atomic spatial resolution capabilities of the scanning transmission electron microscope (STEM), there therefore exists the ability to obtain 3-D structural information from individual atomic scale structures. For ceramic materials where the structure-property relationships are dominated by defects and interfaces, this methodology can provide unique information on key issues such as like-ion repulsion and the presence of vacancies, impurities and structural distortion.An example of the use of MS-theory is shown in fig 1, where an experimental oxygen K-edge from SrTiO3 is compared to full MS-calculations for successive shells (a shell consists of neighboring atoms, so that 1 shell includes only nearest neighbors, 2 shells includes first and second-nearest neighbors, and so on).

Elimination of Crime: Science Fiction or Reality

1974 ◽  
Vol 19 (1) ◽  
pp. 47-48
Author(s):  
ALICE M. PADAWER-SINGER
Keyword(s):  
Science Fiction ◽  
Crime Science
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