Positions and Presuppositions in Science Fiction, and: Talking Across the World: The Love Letters of Olaf Stapledon and Agnes Miller, 1913-1919 (review)

1989 ◽  
Vol 35 (2) ◽  
pp. 400-401
Author(s):  
Curtis C. Smith
Keyword(s):  
Science Fiction ◽  
The World ◽  
Love Letters ◽  
Olaf Stapledon

Speculative Realism and Science Fiction

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Brian Willems
Keyword(s):  
Science Fiction ◽  
Identity Formation ◽  
Cormac Mccarthy ◽  
Doris Lessing ◽  
Speculative Realism ◽  
Neil Gaiman ◽  
The World ◽  
The Difference ◽  
Quentin Meillassoux

A human-centred approach to the environment is leading to ecological collapse. One of the ways that speculative realism challenges anthropomorphism is by taking non-human things to be as valid objects of investivation as humans, allowing a more responsible and truthful view of the world to take place. Brian Willems uses a range of science fiction literature that questions anthropomorphism both to develop and challenge this philosophical position. He looks at how nonsense and sense exist together in science fiction, the way in which language is not a guarantee of personhood, the role of vision in relation to identity formation, the difference between metamorphosis and modulation, representations of non-human deaths and the function of plasticity within the Anthropocene. Willems considers the works of Cormac McCarthy, Paolo Bacigalupi, Neil Gaiman, China Miéville, Doris Lessing and Kim Stanley Robinson are considered alongside some of the main figures of speculative materialism including Graham Harman, Quentin Meillassoux and Jane Bennett.

A Compact Embodiment of Pluralities and Denial of Origins: Atwood’s The Year of The Flood

2016 ◽  
Vol 1 (3) ◽  
pp. 141
Author(s):  
Rana Sağıroğlu
Keyword(s):  
Science Fiction ◽  
21St Century ◽  
Social Order ◽  
Margaret Atwood ◽  
Rapid Change ◽  
The Novel ◽  
The World ◽  
Narrative Techniques ◽  
Why Questions ◽  
Near Future

Margaret Atwood, one of the most spectacular authors of postmodern movement, achieved to unite debatable and in demand critical points of 21st century such as science fiction, postmodernism and ecocriticism in the novel The Year of The Flood written in 2009. The novel could be regarded as an ecocritical manifesto and a dystopic mirror against today’s degenerated world, tending to a superficial base to keep the already order in use, by moving away from the fundamental solution of all humanity: nature. Although Atwood does not want her works to be called science fiction, it is obvious that science fiction plays an introductory role and gives the novel a ground explaining all ‘why’ questions of the novel. However, Atwood is not unjust while claiming that her works are not science fiction because of the inevitable rapid change of 21st century world becoming addicted to technology, especially Internet. It is easily observed by the reader that what she fictionalises throughout the novel is quite close to possibility, and the world may witness in the near future what she creates in the novel as science fiction. Additionally, postmodernism serves to the novel as the answerer of ‘how’ questions: How the world embraces pluralities, how heterogeneous social order is needed, and how impossible to run the world by dichotomies of patriarchal social order anymore. And lastly, ecocriticism gives the answers of ‘why’ questions of the novel: Why humanity is in chaos, why humanity has organized the world according to its own needs as if there were no living creatures apart from humanity. Therefore, The Year of The Flood meets the reader as a compact embodiment of science fiction, postmodernism and ecocriticism not only with its theme, but also with its narrative techniques.

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.

scholarly journals Rat Cities and Beehive Worlds: Density and Design in the Modern City

2011 ◽  
Vol 53 (4) ◽  
pp. 722-756
Author(s):  
Jon Adams ◽  
Edmund Ramsden
Keyword(s):  
Science Fiction ◽  
Social Structure ◽  
Short Story ◽  
Social System ◽  
Human Life ◽  
The Other ◽  
Efficient Operation ◽  
The People ◽  
The World ◽  
The City

Nestled among E. M. Forster's careful studies of Edwardian social mores is a short story called “The Machine Stops.” Set many years in the future, it is a work of science fiction that imagines all humanity housed in giant high-density cities buried deep below a lifeless surface. With each citizen cocooned in an identical private chamber, all interaction is mediated through the workings of “the Machine,” a totalizing social system that controls every aspect of human life. Cultural variety has ceded to rigorous organization: everywhere is the same, everyone lives the same life. So hopelessly reliant is humanity upon the efficient operation of the Machine, that when the system begins to fail there is little the people can do, and so tightly ordered is the system that the failure spreads. At the story's conclusion, the collapse is total, and Forster's closing image offers a condemnation of the world they had built, and a hopeful glimpse of the world that might, in their absence, return: “The whole city was broken like a honeycomb. […] For a moment they saw the nations of the dead, and, before they joined them, scraps of the untainted sky” (2001: 123). In physically breaking apart the city, there is an extent to which Forster is literalizing the device of the broken society, but it is also the case that the infrastructure of the Machine is so inseparable from its social structure that the failure of one causes the failure of the other. The city has—in the vocabulary of present-day engineers—“failed badly.”

scholarly journals Doris Lessing’s Science Fiction

2020 ◽  
Vol 8 (7) ◽  
pp. 167-176
Author(s):  
Ms. Shikha Sharma
Keyword(s):  
Welfare State ◽  
Science Fiction ◽  
Short Story ◽  
Nobel Laureate ◽  
Doris Lessing ◽  
Feminist Movement ◽  
The World ◽  
Private Problems ◽  
Post War ◽  
Story Writer

Doris Lessing, the Nobel Laureate (1919-2007), a British novelist, poet, a writer of epic scope, playwright, librettist, biographer and short story writer. She was the “most fearless woman novelist in the world, unabashed ex-communist and uncompromising feminist”. Doris has earned the great reputation as a distinguished and outstanding writer. She raised local and private problems of England in post-war period with emphasis on man-woman relationship, feminist movement, welfare state, socio-economic and political ethos, population explosion, terrorism and social conflicts in her novels.

Jurassic Park

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Paul Bullock
Keyword(s):  
Science Fiction ◽  
Men And Women ◽  
Steven Spielberg ◽  
The Third ◽  
Close Encounters ◽  
The World ◽  
The Impact

‘Constellations: Jurassic Park’ explores how Steven Spielberg used the film to investigate several key themes that have been important to him across his career. These themes are: nature and humankind’s relationship with it, the importance of cinematic fantasy and how it shapes our view of the world, and the impact of toxic masculinity on both men and women. The book also looks at how Spielberg blends genres across his career as a whole and Jurassic Park specifically. This is particularly true of the science fiction and horror genres, which are used in Jurassic Park to create a film that is both cathartically scary and thematically satisfying. These points are contextualised within the wider scope of Spielberg’s life and career to understand how Jurassic Park acted as bridging point between the light entertainments he had been known for up to that point (Close Encounters of the Third Kind and E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial, for example) and the more serious filmmaking he focused on after its release (Saving Private Ryan and Lincoln).

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