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Science-fiction criticism. Focuses on literary & scientific material.
Fantasy and science fiction are both involved in the process of innovation in techno-scientific societies. Long regarded as a hindrance to rationality, and to science, science fiction has become the object of praise in recent decades. Innovative organizations use science fiction to stimulate the creativity of their teams, and more and more entrepreneurs are using its influence to develop innovation. Scientific practice relies in part on an imaginary dimension. The mapping of the technical imagination of science fiction has become an important strategic issue, as has its patentability. The conquest of space, the construction of cyberspace and virtual reality, biotechnologies and nanotechnologies are all at the center of futuristic fictions that participate in scientific speeches and discoveries.
Science fiction is often presented as a source of utopia, or even of prophecies, used in capitalism to promote social, political and technoscientific innovations. Science Fiction and Innovation Design assesses the validity of this approach by exploring the impact this imaginary world has on the creativity of engineers and researchers. Companies seek to anticipate and predict the future through approaches such as design fiction: mobilizing representations of science fiction to create prototypes and develop scenarios relevant to organizational strategy. The conquest of Mars or the weapons of the future are examples developed by authors to demonstrate how design innovation involves continuous dialogue between multiple players, from the scientist to the manager, through to the designers and the science fiction writers.
The prevalence of science fiction readership among those who create and program computers is so well-known that it has become a cliche, but the phenomenon has remained largely unexplored by scholars. What role has science fiction played in the actual development of computers and computing? And likewise, how has computing (including the related fields of robotics and artificial intelligence) affected the course of science fiction? The 18 essays in this critical work explore the interrelationship of these domains over the span of more than half a century.
In Cybernetic Aesthetics, Heather A. Love makes a new contribution to ongoing debates about modern communication networks and information culture. This book draws from cybernetics theory and terminology to interpret experimental modernist texts, illustrating how cybernetic approaches to communication emerged long before World War II.
Since Mary Shelley drew inspiration for Frankenstein from the scientific speculations to which she attended as a 'nearly silent listener' at the now famous chateau in Switzerland, many other women have been similarly motivated to produce works informed by scientific theory. Successive chapters trace the history of women's science fiction writing from the turn of the century to the early 1990s, analysing how women writers have utilised the genre to critique the ideology that informs what counts as scientific knowledge.
How did cybernetics and information theory arise, and how did they come to dominate fields as diverse as engineering, biology, and the social sciences? Winner of the CHOICE Outstanding Academic Title of the Choice ACRL Outstanding Academic Title, Choice Cybernetics—the science of communication and control as it applies to machines and to humans—originates from efforts during World War II to build automatic antiaircraft systems. Following the war, this science extended beyond military needs to examine all systems that rely on information and feedback, from the level of the cell to that of society. In The Cybernetics Moment, Ronald R. Kline, a senior historian of technology, examines the intellectual and cultural history of cybernetics and information theory, whose language of “information,” “feedback,” and “control” transformed the idiom of the sciences, hastened the development of information technologies, and laid the conceptual foundation for what we now call the Information Age. Kline argues that, for about twenty years after 1950, the growth of cybernetics and information theory and ever-more-powerful computers produced a utopian information narrative—an enthusiasm for information science that influenced natural scientists, social scientists, engineers, humanists, policymakers, public intellectuals, and journalists, all of whom struggled to come to grips with new relationships between humans and intelligent machines. Kline traces the relationship between the invention of computers and communication systems and the rise, decline, and transformation of cybernetics by analyzing the lives and work of such notables as Norbert Wiener, Claude Shannon, Warren McCulloch, Margaret Mead, Gregory Bateson, and Herbert Simon. Ultimately, he reveals the crucial role played by the cybernetics moment—when cybernetics and information theory were seen as universal sciences—in setting the stage for our current preoccupation with information technologies.
For decades, films such as WarGames and The Terminator have warned that the combination of artificial intelligence and nuclear weapons might be a recipe for an apocalypse. Might these prophecies of doom become reality in coming decades? Using insights from computer science, Deterrence under Uncertainty: Artificial Intelligence and Nuclear Warfare evaluates how AI could make nuclear war winnable, and whether that possibility is likely. Detailed chapters explain how the landscape of nuclear deterrence is changing and debunks the myths of machine intelligence and nuclear weapons. This book gives a practitioner's perspective on how artificial intelligence and other emerging technologies could change the role of nuclear weapons in international relations.
The best single-volume anthology of science fiction available—includes online teacher's guide The Wesleyan Anthology of Science Fiction features over a 150 years' worth of the best science fiction ever collected in a single volume. The fifty-two stories and critical introductions are organized chronologically as well as thematically for classroom use. Filled with luminous ideas, otherworldly adventures, and startling futuristic speculations, these stories will appeal to all readers as they chart the emergence and evolution of science fiction as a modern literary genre. They also provide a fascinating look at how our Western technoculture has imaginatively expressed its hopes and fears from the Industrial Revolution of the nineteenth century to the digital age of today. A free online teacher's guide at http://sfanthology.site.wesleyan.edu/ accompanies the anthology and offers access to a host of pedagogical aids for using this book in an academic setting. The stories in this anthology have been selected and introduced by the editors of Science Fiction Studies, the world's most respected journal for the critical study of science fiction.
“What Kafka was to the first half of the twentieth century, Philip K. Dick is to the second half.”—Art Spiegelman, author of MAUS Philip K. Dick was both our most brilliant science fiction writer and a visionary philosopher who chose to couch his speculations in fiction. For, as he wrote about androids and virtual reality, schizophrenic prophets and amnesiac gods, Dick was also posing fundamental questions: What is reality? What is sanity? And what is human? This unprecedented collection of Dick’s literary and philosophical writings acquaints us with the astonishing range and eloquence of his lifelong inquiry. The Shifting Realities of Philip K. Dick includes autobiography, critiques of science fiction, and dizzyingly provocative essays such as “The Android and the Human” and “If You Find This World Bad, You Should See Some of the Others.” Readers will also find two chapters of a proposed sequel to Dick’s award-winning novel The Man in the High Castle and selections from the metaphysical Exegesis that inspired his classic VALIS. Witty, erudite, and exploding with intellectual shrapnel, this is the last testament of an American original. This collection confirms Dick’s reputation as one of the foremost imaginative thinkers of the twentieth century. “A wide-ranging selection of free-wheeling philosophical essays, and journal entries; humorous, thoughtful speeches; and plot scenarios. . . . For both casual and serious Dick fans, The Shifting Realities unearths some gems.”—Boston Phoenix