scholarly journals Novel·les de ciència. La ciència i la tecnologia en la literatura

2015 ◽  
pp. 83
Author(s):  
Miquel Barceló
Keyword(s):  
Science Fiction ◽  
Essential Role ◽  
Science And Technology ◽  
Modern Technology ◽  
Literary Genre ◽  
Jules Verne ◽  
The Future

Most literature frequently ignores the essential role that science and modern technology play in shaping current societies and how we live in them. Around 150 years ago, Jules Verne started to become aware of the need to actively include science and technology in modern narratives. He named it «the science novel». Later, the literary genre of science fiction seemed to reach the point which Jules Verne’s science novel had pioneered. In this regard, science fiction posits itself as a suitable narrative to learn about the future, as it describes worlds which are possible due to science and technology.

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.

scholarly journals Enabling Science Fiction

2021 ◽  
pp. 399
Author(s):  
Camilla Hrdy ◽  
Daniel Brean
Keyword(s):  
Science Fiction ◽  
Real World ◽  
Science And Technology ◽  
Human Mind ◽  
Time Travel ◽  
Patent Law ◽  
Patent System ◽  
Literary Genre ◽  
Minimum Standard ◽  
Perpetual Motion

Patent law promotes innovation by giving inventors 20-year-long exclusive rights to their inventions. To be patented, however, an invention must be “enabled,” meaning the inventor must describe it in enough detail to teach others how to make and use the invention at the time the patent is filed. When inventions are not enabled, like a perpetual motion machine or a time travel device, they are derided as “mere science fiction”—products of the human mind, or the daydreams of armchair scientists, that are not suitable for the patent system. This Article argues that, in fact, the literary genre of science fiction has its own unique—albeit far laxer—enablement requirement. Since the genre’s origins, fans have demanded that the inventions depicted in science fiction meet a minimum standard of scientific plausibility. Otherwise, the material is denigrated as lazy hand-waving or, worse, “mere fantasy.” Taking this insight further, the Article argues that, just as patents positively affect the progress of science and technology by teaching others how to make and use real inventions, so too can science fiction, by stimulating scientists’ imagination about what sorts of technologies might one day be possible. Thus, like patents, science fiction can have real world impacts for the development of science and technology. Indeed, the Article reveals that this trajectory—from science fiction to science reality—can be seen in the patent record itself, with several famous patents tracing their origins to works of science fiction.

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>

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.

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.

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.

The Meanings of Life and Value Priorities of the Post-Soviet Society in the Republic of Belarus

2020 ◽  
Vol 63 (10) ◽  
pp. 25-37
Author(s):  
Alexander N. Danilov
Keyword(s):  
Sustainable Development ◽  
Role Model ◽  
Human Life ◽  
Modern Society ◽  
Modern Technology ◽  
Soviet Society ◽  
The World ◽  
Value Priorities ◽  
The Future ◽  
The Republic

The article discusses the meanings of life and value priorities of the post- Soviet society. The author argues that, at present, there are symptoms of a global ideological crisis in the world, that the West does not have its own vision of where and how to move on and has no understanding of the future. Unfortunately, most of the post-Soviet countries do not have such vision as well. In these conditions, there are mistrust, confusion, paradoxical manifestation of human consciousness. The main meanings that determine our life-world are: the desire of citizens for social justice and social security, the desire to figure out and understand the basic values of modern society, how honestly and equally the authorities act toward their fellow citizens, and to what extent they reflect their interests. The meanings of life, which are the answers to the challenges of the time, are embodied in the cultural code of each nation, state. The growth points of new values, which will become the basis for the future sustainable development of a new civilization, have yet to be discovered in the systemic transformative changes of the culture. In this process, the emergence of a new system of values that governs human life is inevitable. However, modern technology brings new troubles to humans. It has provided wide opportunities for informational violence and public consciousness manipulation. Nowadays, the scenario that is implemented in Western consumer societies claims to be the dominant scenario. Meanwhile, today there is no country in the world that is a role model, there is no ideal that others would like to borrow. Most post-Soviet states failed to advance their societies to more decent levels of economic development, to meet the challenges of the modern information age, and to provide the population with new high living standards. Therefore, in conditions of growing confrontation, we should realistically understand the world and be ready to implement changes that will ensure sustainable development of the state and society without losing our national identity.

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?

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