Structural Fabulation: An Essay on Fiction of the Future, and: Science Fiction: A Collection of Critical Essays, and: Science Fiction: History —Science —Vision, and: The Fantastic: A Structural Approach to a Literary Genre, and: The Fantastic in Literature (review)

1979 ◽  
Vol 4 (2) ◽  
pp. 9-11
Author(s):  
Susan R. Gannon
Keyword(s):  
Science Fiction ◽  
Structural Approach ◽  
Literary Genre ◽  
The Future ◽  
The Fantastic

Imagining the Future

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Simon Torok ◽  
Paul Holper
Keyword(s):  
Science Fiction ◽  
Technological Breakthrough ◽  
The Future ◽  
3D Printed ◽  
The Fantastic ◽  
Changing World

Flying through time and flying in cars. Living underwater and living forever. Robot servants. 3D printed food. Wouldn’t it be amazing if science fiction became science fact? We’re living in a rapidly changing world. Hardly a week passes without an exciting technological breakthrough. That’s the power of human innovation – it never stops happening. Inventors keep inventing. Get prepared for the fantastic future with this guide to the unbelievable and incredible inventions just over the horizon. Invisibility, instant transportation, holograms and lots of gadgets were once the dreams of science fiction … now they might become science fact! Imagining the future is the first step in arriving there. If you can dream it, perhaps one day you can invent it. Strap yourself in and get ready for the future! Imagining the Future is perfect for kids aged 9-13.

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.

How the Ray Gun Got Its Zap! Part II—Handheld Ray Guns

2021 ◽  
pp. 182-190
Author(s):  
Stephen R. Wilk
Keyword(s):  
Science Fiction ◽  
Real Life ◽  
Pop Culture ◽  
Washington Irving ◽  
The World ◽  
The Future ◽  
Fiction Writers ◽  
The Fantastic ◽  
Century Science

The earliest “ray guns” in fiction were large, unwieldy devices that might more appropriately be called “ray cannons.” The devices used in stories by Washington Irving, H.G. Wells, and early 20th century science fiction writers were large devices that required their own mounts. This reflected the reality of real experimental ray devices and the various experimental “death rays” that inventors were trying to develop and sell to armies all over the world. The idea of the small, handheld ray gun changed the nature of the device in fiction and its place in pop culture forever. Now the ray gun could be a futuristic sidearm and both symbolize the future and provide a shorthand way to signal the fantastic nature of the stories.How and why did this development take place? What were the results of the change, in both Pop Culture and Real Life?

The Fantastic: A Structural Approach to a Literary Genre

1976 ◽  
Vol 20 (2) ◽  
pp. 186
Author(s):  
Roberta Reeder ◽  
Tzvetan Todorov ◽  
Richard Howard
Keyword(s):  
Structural Approach ◽  
Literary Genre ◽  
The Fantastic

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.

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?

scholarly journals Me, My Bot and His Other (Robot) Woman? Keeping Your Robot Satisfied in the Age of Artificial Emotion

Robotics ◽  
2018 ◽  
Vol 7 (3) ◽  
pp. 44 ◽  
Author(s):  
Rebekah Rousi
Keyword(s):  
Artificial Intelligence ◽  
Information Technology ◽  
Science Fiction ◽  
Sexual Partners ◽  
Sex Robots ◽  
Artificial Emotions ◽  
The Future ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
And Robotics

With a backdrop of action and science fiction movie horrors of the dystopian relationship between humans and robots, surprisingly to date-with the exception of ethical discussions-the relationship aspect of humans and sex robots has seemed relatively unproblematic. The attraction to sex robots perhaps is the promise of unproblematic affectionate and sexual interactions, without the need to consider the other’s (the robot’s) emotions and indeed preference of sexual partners. Yet, with rapid advancements in information technology and robotics, particularly in relation to artificial intelligence and indeed, artificial emotions, there almost seems the likelihood, that sometime in the future, robots too, may love others in return. Who those others are-whether human or robot-is to be speculated. As with the laws of emotion, and particularly that of the cognitive-emotional theory on Appraisal, a reality in which robots experience their own emotions, may not be as rosy as would be expected.

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