Science fiction
Abstract
Book synopsis: In this new and timely cultural history of science fiction, Roger Luckhurst examines the genre from its origins in the late nineteenth century to its latest manifestations. The book introduces and explicates major works of science fiction literature by placing them in a series of contexts, using the history of science and technology, political and economic history, and cultural theory to develop the means for understanding the unique qualities of the genre. Luckhurst reads science fiction as a literature of modernity. His astute analysis examines how the genre provides a constantly modulating record of how human embodiment is transformed by scientific and technological change and how the very sense of self is imaginatively recomposed in popular fictions that range from utopian possibility to Gothic terror. This highly readable study charts the overlapping yet distinct histories of British and American science fiction, with commentary on the central authors, magazines, movements and texts from 1880 to the present day. It will be an invaluable guide and resource for all students taking courses on science fiction, technoculture and popular literature, but will equally be fascinating for anyone who has ever enjoyed a science fiction book.
In May 1950 L. R. Hubbard published in a science fiction magazine “Dianetics: The Evolution of a Science”, which would later form the basis of Scientology. Emerging from the technocratic mindset typically associated with the periodical, the article considered the human brain as a computer in need of rewiring, giving birth to a peculiar kind of utopian thinking whose aim was not the creation of a ‘new man’, but the return to an original perfection of the mind. Through an examination of this text and its context, I propose to investigate the relationship between engineering culture and literary fictions, trying to understand how the mind-computer analogy shaped the vision of a regenerated society.
This is the final version of my MRes Dissertation, completed at Edge Hill University in 2019. This research focuses on the representation of class within the Star Wars universe.
The Syfy television series The Expanse (2015-) transposes a form of combined and uneven development from Earth to the solar system, making the human reality of life lived in space a central concern. The Expanse envisions a colonized solar system, replete with a United-Nations-controlled Terra and Luna, a military dictatorship on Mars, and a densely populated asteroid belt. This essay proposes that The Expanse offers an image of a worlds-system, by which we mean an interplanetary system of capital accumulation that reproduces the structure of twentieth-century geopolitical-economy at the level of the solar system. At one and the same time, The Expanse imagines a new cycle of accumulation founded in the planetary system and premised on ecological crisis on Earth and it provides a re-narration of the end of the cycle of accumulation that has been called the long twentieth century or the American century, which exasperated the climate crisis in the first instance. The Expanse is a pivotal narrative that promises a new interplanetary cycle of accumulation and its decline all at once, a fantasy of continuity that simultaneously dramatizes the contemporary crisis of futurity.
Despite almost forty years separating Manuel de Pedrolo’s novel Mecanoscrit del segon orígen (1974, trad. Typescript of the Second Origin) and the brothers Àlex and David Pastor’s film “Los últimos días” (2013, US tit. “The Last Days”), it is not difficult to find several socio-political areas of intersection which converge on a biological issue at the end of both works: the pregnancy of one of the characters at the end of each story.
Yet, such an interpretation would be rather limited as it ignores the socio-political landscape from which each work originated. Published in the aftermath of the first oil crisis, and only two years before the death of dictator Francisco Franco, Pedrolo’s novel has an undeniable flavour of political tabula rasa where Catalan nationalist aspirations could have a place. “Los últimos días”, on the contrary, is one more production in the line of the recent dystopia fad which has invaded the cinema screens all over the world.
Both works greatly differ in tone. Whereas in Pedrolo’s case the pre-postmodern pessimism is counterbalanced by a horizon of possibilities (at least from a Catalan perspective), the Pastors’ film faintly suggests that a new society can be (re)constructed if individuals abandon the political and economic doctrines that led the world to its present plight.
SF can be used as a mechanism for social commentary in situations where a direct statement of the
author's beliefs might be met with an unreceptive or minimal audience; it is a form of social
experimentation. Rather than establishing a commune or taking over a country and instituting a regime,
rather than creating dry theoretical experiments composed of nameless individuals who act according to a
statistical norm, an author can develop a theoretical societal scenario and implant characters who act
according to the author's observations and assumptions. The resultant novel inevitably reflects the author's
personal beliefs far more than a scientist's dispassionate study, but is also likely to be more engaging -
that engagement is what makes the novel more effective; the results of a theoretical study can be
summarized in brief and considered by someone with the desire to implement change in society, but a
novel will be read by a much wider audience, all of whom will, having immersed themselves in an
alternate reality for a short time, carry the beliefs and understandings of the author away with them and
might use that alternate perspective on their own life. Furthermore, it is genuinely impossible to
enumerate every possible variable within a system as complex as human society; fiction encompasses
society as a matter of course, and any elements which are left out are as telling of the author's focus as
those which are included.
PHANTASMAGORIC IMAGINATION IN XXI-CENTURY LATIN AMERICAN
CINEMA: FIGURES OF TRAUMA AND CRISIS IN THE CONTEMPORARY CITY
Carolina Rueda, PhD
University of Pittsburgh, 2012
My dissertation is dedicated to an innovative theme that is underrepresented in Latin American cultural studies and beyond: Phantasmagoric Imagination in Post-2000 Latin American Cinema. I have chosen a heterogeneous group of films from Argentina, Colombia, Mexico, Brazil, and Peru, all of them produced after two thousand. While speaking of the insertion of Latin American film productions in today's global culture market, these films reflect
on particular socio-psychological, economic and political phenomena that have been emerging from the megacities of the Global South. The accent is placed on the urban/metropolitan setting and its function in the production of significations. Within this setting, my project focuses on everyday life turned into situations of conflict, unprecedented forms of alienation, and a shocking variety of experiences of crisis, as well as survival. Trauma imprinted in the body, the idea of besieged cities, scenarios of informal economy, issues associated with diaspora, and science fiction and post-catastrophe cinema are the subjects discussed in the six chapters of this dissertation.
Walter Benjamin's “Phantasmagoria” is the central theoretical concept used to examine patterns of affective and psychological processes that remain hidden in the historical individual and collective unconscious. These patterns can be identified by observing people's behavior, and by reflecting upon the materiality of the surfaces that the film images provide. I place the accent
on the global aspect as well as on the unconscious, considering the “invisible hand” of advanced globalization and its effects on life and imaginaries in the megacities of the Global South today.
More specific issues associated with Latin America and the urban space in the new millennium are discussed in dialogue with Mike Davis’ writings on globalization, the theoretical studies of Latin American culture provided by Angel Rama in The Lettered City, Hermann Herlinghaus’ concept of “affective marginalization,” and Aníbal Quijano’s post-colonial approach to Latin American culture, among others.
MLA Citation of this article:
Jannessari-Ladani, Zahra. "The Rise of the Pulps (1900s-1930s)." A Virtual Introduction to
Science Fiction. Ed. Lars Schmeink. Web. 2012. <http://virtual-sf.com/?page_id=153>. 1-12.
The following paper analyzes the representation of the imbunche, as well as other fragmented or symbiotic beings that are present in the novel Ygdrasil (2005) by Jorge Baradit, as a manner of imagining subjectivities. One of the most important characters of this novel is the religious and syndical leader of a global megacorporation named "el Imbunche", from which we can find readings to look for characteristics of monstrosity in the rest of the characters of the novel. This analysis will allow us to conclude that this figure portrays, once more, Baradit's productivity, since he uses this strategy to represent the enslaved subject in late Capitalism, especially the one that, connected to computer networks, is exposed to the colonization of the body regarding informatics and biotechnology.
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