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.

scholarly journals I Am that I Am: Subjectivity and World View in the Science Fictions of Philip K. Dick

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
◽  
Bradley Rose
Keyword(s):  
Science Fiction ◽  
World View ◽  
Scientific Discourse ◽  
Rudolf Steiner ◽  
American Science ◽  
New Beginning ◽  
The World ◽  
Subject And Object ◽  
Epistemological Basis ◽  
Fiction Writer

<p>In this account of American science fiction writer Philip K. Dick's work, the aim has been to describe the involvement of assumptions inherited from philosophical and scientific discourse in both the understanding and experience of subjectivity. It is argued that Dick's representations of identity both picture the tensions engendered by the prevalent reality standard with which he had to deal and, in their development, come to articulate a path beyond the impasse this standard presents. The fundamental insufficiency of the world view Dick's fiction both encounters and embodies is epitomised by the twin questions with which he characterised his work: 'what is human?' and 'what is real?' In coming to terms with the significance of these questions the work of the Austrian philosopher and scientist Rudolf Steiner has been engaged as a critical foil to Dick's fictionalising. Special attention is given to the epistemological basis of Steiner's anthroposophy and its account of the world and our peculiar situation in it that, far from asserting any external and unvarying standard of truth, describes a process essentially evolutionary and unfixed. It is claimed that in Steiner, as in Dick, the human contribution to both identity and reality constitutes the validity of each, a matrix of subject and object from which one's self is delivered, in each instance a new beginning.</p>

scholarly journals I Am that I Am: Subjectivity and World View in the Science Fictions of Philip K. Dick

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
◽  
Bradley Rose
Keyword(s):  
Science Fiction ◽  
World View ◽  
Scientific Discourse ◽  
Rudolf Steiner ◽  
American Science ◽  
New Beginning ◽  
The World ◽  
Subject And Object ◽  
Epistemological Basis ◽  
Fiction Writer

<p>In this account of American science fiction writer Philip K. Dick's work, the aim has been to describe the involvement of assumptions inherited from philosophical and scientific discourse in both the understanding and experience of subjectivity. It is argued that Dick's representations of identity both picture the tensions engendered by the prevalent reality standard with which he had to deal and, in their development, come to articulate a path beyond the impasse this standard presents. The fundamental insufficiency of the world view Dick's fiction both encounters and embodies is epitomised by the twin questions with which he characterised his work: 'what is human?' and 'what is real?' In coming to terms with the significance of these questions the work of the Austrian philosopher and scientist Rudolf Steiner has been engaged as a critical foil to Dick's fictionalising. Special attention is given to the epistemological basis of Steiner's anthroposophy and its account of the world and our peculiar situation in it that, far from asserting any external and unvarying standard of truth, describes a process essentially evolutionary and unfixed. It is claimed that in Steiner, as in Dick, the human contribution to both identity and reality constitutes the validity of each, a matrix of subject and object from which one's self is delivered, in each instance a new beginning.</p>

Around the World in Eighty Days

2008 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jules Verne
Keyword(s):  
Science Fiction ◽  
Critical Edition ◽  
Space And Time ◽  
New Man ◽  
The World

Having assured the members of London’s exclusive Reform Club that he will circumnavigate the world in 80 days, Fogg – stiff, repressed, English – starts by joining forces with an irrepressible Frenchman, Passepartout, and then with a ravishing Indian beauty, Aouda. Together they slice through jungles, over snowbound passes, even across an entire isthmus – only to get back five minutes late. Fogg faces despair and suicide, but Aouda makes a new man of him, able to face even the Reform Club again. Around the World in Eighty Days (1872) contains a strong dose of post-Romantic reality plus extensive borrowing from the author’s own Journey to England and Scotland – but not a shred of science fiction. Its modernism lies instead in the experimental literary technique, with parallel plots, a narrator constantly made to look foolish, four characters in search of their own unconscious, and a unique twisting of space and time. Verne's classic, a bestseller for over a century, has never appeared in a critical edition before. William Butcher's stylish new translation moves as fast and as brilliantly as Fogg’s own journey.

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 Teaching Evolution in Muslim Countries: Is Constructivism a Solution or a Threat?

2020 ◽  
Vol 34 (2) ◽  
pp. 561-578
Author(s):  
Özgür Taşkın
Keyword(s):  
Science Education ◽  
Education Research ◽  
Graduate Students ◽  
Nature Of Science ◽  
Scientific Discourse ◽  
Scientific Argumentation ◽  
Democratic Values ◽  
Theoretical Frameworks ◽  
Teaching Evolution ◽  
Muslim Countries

Since the turn of this century, constructivism has dramatically influenced science education and, particularly in Muslim countries, the teaching of evolution. This influence came about gradually. After the 1980’s, Muslim graduate students studying Education in Western universities have been taught constructivism both as a theory of learning and a philosophy, more specifically, as an epistemological theory. This has impacted these students’ views of the nature of science, scientific argumentation, multiculturalism, and the function of democratic values and practices in education. The scope of this influence raises a number of serious questions: Has constructivism introduced a mode of reasoning into science and science education that is foreign to, and even anathema to, scientific discourse? Why does almost every science education research paper suggest or imply negotiation with clergy and religious NGOs? Such questions are discussed in the present paper. To answer these questions, this paper examines in the context of Enlightenment and secularism theoretical frameworks, the methodologies, and suggestions regarding the teaching of evolution in Muslim countries.

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.

Oberkrainer Communism

2021 ◽  
pp. 51-56
Author(s):  
William Klinger ◽  
Denis Kuljiš
Keyword(s):  
Science Fiction ◽  
Communist Party ◽  
Small Farms ◽  
The West ◽  
Party Leaders ◽  
British Science ◽  
Fiction Writer

This chapter discusses the Sixth Congress, Comintern, which was run by Soviet bigwigs and a few representative party leaders from the West that sat as its steering Political Secretariat. It highlights the Balkan Bureau that was headed by Bohumír Šmeral, one of the founders of the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia. It also mentions British science-fiction writer H. G. Wells, a socialist and communist sympathizer, who visited Moscow in the early 1920s as a guest of Vladimir Lenin and realized that even the highest-ranking officials' clothes were falling apart. The chapter recounts how tried to loosen up the revolutionary course by introducing the NEP, which was supposed to stimulate small farms on private plots to produce basic market supply. It demonstrates how the advance of fascism pushed more parties underground, leading them to become utterly dependent on organizational and material assistance from abroad.

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