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Since ChatGPT's release in November 2022, artificial intelligence has come into the spotlight. Inspiring both fascination and fear, chatbots have stirred debates among researchers, developers, and policy makers. The concerns range from concrete and tangible ones—which include replication of existing biases and discrimination at scale, harvesting personal data, and spreading misinformation—to more existential fears that their development will lead to machines with human-like cognitive abilities. Understanding how chatbots work and the human labor and data involved can better help evaluate the validity of concerns surrounding these systems, which although innovative, are hardly the stuff of science fiction. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Drawing on Fredric Jameson’s and Monika Kaup’s work, this article analyzes some aspects of utopian and dystopian thinking about religion in contemporary science fiction, taking as an example Ada Palmer’s Terra Ignota series (2016–2021). In these novels set in the twenty-fifth century, religion is restricted to individual counseling with so-called ‘sensayers’, a future equivalent of scholars-of-religion\s-cum-spiritual-advisors. In exploring these visions of future religion, utopia and dystopia prove to be important concepts. Centering religion’s ambivalence as both a centripetal and centrifugal societal force, Palmer presents a continuum of utopian, dystopian, anti-utopian, and anti–anti-utopian religion(s). Nevertheless, in Terra Ignota religion remains conceptualized as an anthropological necessity, limiting the radical difference of her unknown world. In conclusion, drawing on Gayle Salamon and Richard M. Zaner, I argue that speculative fiction’s ‘acts of possibilizing’ can be generative of theoretical insight, providing occasion for fertilizing our ‘ability to fantasy’. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

To provide the current student generation with an innovative online learning method, podcasts with science fiction short stories are introduced to marketing education. Findings from neurology and psychology point to positive effects of storytelling for gaining knowledge and developing interpersonal skills. Science fiction stories challenge common conceptions and enable students to engage with upcoming marketing issues in creative ways. An overview of eight marketing related science fiction stories is provided that are available for download as open access podcasts, with 23 more management and economics podcast stories available in the online appendix. To show how science fiction podcasts can be implemented in class, one of the stories is discussed in more detail. Further suggestions for implementation and possible challenges are outlined. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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Parasitoids — insects that parasitize other insects — have fascinating biologies that have made them darlings of the science fiction genre, owing to their wide array of innovative and often gruesome strategies for living off other organisms. These insects do not sting, but rather lay eggs on or inside their hosts, typically another insect or spider. Unlike parasites, which feed off a host without killing it, parasitoids kill their hosts — and they typically do it slowly. Parasitoids carefully keep their hosts alive for extended periods while they feed on host hemolymph and/or tissues until they are close to completing their own development. The techniques parasitoids use to feed on and manipulate their hosts are wide ranging, demonstrating multiple evolutionary pathways to achieve successful development from egg to adult. Parasitoid wasps are the things of science fiction because of their wide array of innovative and gruesome strategies for living off other organisms. But they are also beneficial insects, silently controlling garden, crop, and forest pests. Burke and Sharanowski highlight the adaptive strategies and economic importance of these fascinating creatures. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay offers a rationale for deploying ecofeminist science fiction stories as object-oriented thought experiments in science and environmental education, with particular reference to developments in genetics and evolutionary biology, and their implications for human (and more-than-human) reproduction and kinship in the period following the determination of the double helical structure of DNA by scientists affiliated with Cambridge University's Cavendish Laboratory in 1953, and the impact of subsequent gene-centric discourses on the biological sciences and the wider culture. The utility and defensibility of this approach is exemplified by reference to two science fiction novels by the late Naomi Mitchison that foreground and anticipate implications of genetic sciences for matters of concern to ecofeminists, including reproductive rights and responsibilities, population control, human relations with the more-than-human, and problematizing gendered (and other) binaries in everyday speech and popular culture. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Predictions and illustrations of life in the future are often integrated in works of science fiction, which could not be immediately proven yet possibly fascinating when looked back on several decades later or at the times predicted in the works. Science fiction authors foretell such events by borrowing theories, concepts, or simply terms used by scientists. Those theories, concepts, and terms can be written in scientific journals or in more popular media. American science fiction works, for instance, illustrate the future by their adaptation in the forms of more popular media such as movies, video games, and the works categorized as the subgenres of cyber literature. All of them are discussed in this paper from the lens of New Historicism, which believes in equality between literary and nonliterary texts in viewing phenomena that exist in society, one of which is the relationship between science fiction works, their writers, their readers, and society. Technology is seen as a product of society, so it becomes broadly part of culture. Meanwhile, emerging technology is sometimes coincidental and random, so it can also be seen that technology determines people’s movements and lifestyles. This study contributes to ongoing discussions on the ethical and societal implications of speculative narratives by highlighting the interconnectedness between literature, science, technology, and society. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A literary criticism of the futuristic science fiction series "Binti" by Nnedi Okorafor is presented. Topics discussed include Okorafor's futuristic concept of people including the black woman protagonist, the expansion of the traditional definition of science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) to the concept of steminism as depicted in the series, and the potential of Black future life as addressed by Black speculative fiction.

A literary criticism of the speculative science fiction novel "Parable of the Sower" by Octavia E. Butler is presented. Topics discussed include the portrayal of the survival of a Black teenager, Butler's re-interpretation of the parable of the sower in the Bible by depicting the Black protagonist as the sower leading the belief system for apocalyptic times called Earthseed, and how Butler illustrated learning as an unpredictable, immersive process that people should submit to.

A literary criticism of the fantasy science fiction novel "The Fifth Season" by N.K. Jemisin is presented. Topics discussed include the literal and figurative relationship between speculative fiction and Black women and girls' experience, the portrayal of the survival of Black women during an apocalypse, and the role of fiction in historical retellings as depicted in the social world of The Stillness in the novel.

A literary criticism is presented of the science fiction novels "An Unkindness of Ghosts" by Rivers Solomon and "Parable of the Sower" and "Parable of the Talents" by Octavia E. Butler. Topics discussed include Solomon's response to the unfinished narrative arc in Butler's novels, the portrayal of Black mother-daughter during a climate change apocalypse in Solomon's novel, and the overrepresentation of science as Reason.

A literary criticism of the speculative science fiction novels "Wild Seed" and "Bloodchild" by Octavia E. Butler is presented. Topics discussed include the portrayal of Afrofuturism, post-human Black women's reproductive experience and slavery in "Wild Seed," the exploration of how humans can live ethically in "Bloodchild," and how Butler illustrated the disruption of reproduction leading to extinction when people refuse to embrace difference and reject power hierarchies.

A literary criticism of the Africanfuturist science fantasy novel "Who Fears Death" by Nnedi Okorafor is presented. Topics discussed include the exploration of Black girlhood in the novel, the tendency of Black women authors' speculative fiction to complicate the boundaries of fiction and truth and the possibilities of blackness, and the portrayal of sexual violence in the novel.

A literary criticism of the speculative narrative-poetic book "M Archive: After the End of the World" by Alexis Pauline Gumbs is presented. Topics discussed include the depiction of the evolution of Black lesbian ecological ethics, the use of short prose poems to describe an apocalypse, and Gumbs' approach to the end of the world through a common science and speculative fiction plot.

Movies and news reports represent for many the first source of interaction with social robots. Congruently, as tools for the dissemination of popular representations of robots, movies can have a direct impact on public perception, acceptance, and discourse about this type of technology. In this article, a content analysis of popular movies and franchises involving (fictional) social robots was conducted (k = 34). With this analysis, we sought to understand a) the main tropes used in movies involving robotic characters, b) the type of human-robot relationships depicted in those movies, and c) how the fictional robots compared with real robots in terms of their abilities. The results suggest that robots tend to be typically depicted in a polarized way that either emphasizes their extreme social abilities or their violent and destructive motives, with the former being slightly more prevalent. As a result, the relations between humans and robots tend to be either friendship or antagonism. Fictional robots are often portrayed as having advanced technical abilities that allow them to navigate multiple complex social settings and engage in different occupations typically performed by humans, in contrast with the abilities held by the most popular commercially available robots we have today. Movies and news reports represent for many the first source of interaction with social robots. Social robots tend to be portrayed in a very polarized way. Recommendations for future research and robot development are discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Résumé: La crise climatique devient de plus en plus souvent le sujet des œuvres de fiction, non seulement dans l'aire culturelle anglo‐saxonne. Le présent article soumet à l'analyse un exemple de fiction climatique postcoloniale francophone, à savoir La fantastique Odyssée de l'Algérien Chérif Arbouz, dans le but de reconstruire la vision du futur y proposée. L'étude des procédés littéraires engagés par l'auteur tels que le héros collectif, l'étendue spatiale et temporelle de l'intrigue, l'insertion des passages essayistiques et scientifiques, démontre que l'écrivain arrive à représenter habilement la crise climatique et ses conséquences, à avertir les lecteurs des dangers y liés, de même qu'à faire partie du débat mondial concernant le futur de notre planète. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Harley Quinn has become an important and popular character in the DC Universe, especially for representations of women scientists in comics and the associated cinematic and TV adaptations. Understandably, much of the analysis of this character has tended to focus on her relationship with the Joker and the gender-based dimensions of this dynamic. However, to distill her identity to these dimensions would be unnecessarily, even unfairly, reductionist, and would narrow our understandings of a rich and complex character. By focussing on her identity as a scientist, this article offers a different analytical lens through which to understand Harley Quinn. Drawing primarily from Stjepan Šejić's Harleen (2020), with supporting insights from appearances in other DC comics, we examine the ways in which her scientific training and aspirations shape her transformation from Harleen Quinzel to Harley Quinn. Specifically, we demonstrate how symmetry, as an orienting concept, is useful for analysing how scientific logics and practices inform and enable this transformation. In doing so, we hope to both enrich understandings of Harley Quinn and foreground science as a potentially useful broader lens through which to understand other significant themes and characters in the DC Universe. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article grapples with the uneasy intimacy between medieval, Indigenous, and queer studies through a reconsideration of Norse-Indigenous relations in Finnboga saga ramma [Saga of Finnbogi the Strong] (c. 1300–50), an understudied Íslendingasaga [Icelandic family saga]. I test the limits of what the strategic anachronisms of "Indigeneity" and "queer" can accomplish by turning to Jodi Byrd and, more specifically, their reading of Samuel Delaney's 1967 science fiction story "Aye and Gomorrah" in order to theorize how Finnboga saga appropriates Indigeneity to potentiate intimacies that run counter to an internalized sense of an ideal masculinity and sexuality. I will begin by briefly considering how medievalists tend to approach depictions of the Sámi within medieval texts to gesture to the potential of a queer, Indigenous turn within Old Norse-Icelandic studies. From there, I will unfold how Finnboga saga may intersect "Indigeneity" with "queer" by situating this text in the context of a medieval Icelandic imaginary that sees a reciprocity between gender nonconformance and racialized bodies. This reading seeks to contribute to the dismantling of persistent assumptions that attestations of Indigeneity are inconsequential in Old Norse-Icelandic literature and also to demonstrate the potential of a critical turn in medieval studies that is both Indigenous and queer. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this article, I suggest that the use of a science fiction short story, 'A Visit to Partition World,' by Tarun K. Saint in The Gollancz Book of South Asian Science Fiction(2019), to fictionalise the experience and after-effects of Partition in the formation of the nation, encourages readers to contemplate the after-life of Partition and re-evaluate its contemporary significance. The article discusses how the policies of the newly formed states, the course of historiography, and the silence around the event has perverted the transmission of memories resulting in violent after-effects, particularly in the form of inter-generational trauma. The short story compels us to re-evaluate the nature of nationalism with respect to a rapidly changing socio-cultural reality due to emerging technologies. Science fiction is used as a mode to address this interface and pitch alternative modes that demonstrate methods of critical engagement and commemoration of the event. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Each of the functions of fantasy described by J. R. R. Tolkien in his essay "On Fairy‐Stories" can be reframed through affordance theory into a kind of re‐visioning. Such re‐visioning is comparable to the formalist notion of defamiliarization or the science fiction technique that Darko Suvin called "cognitive estrangement." Whereas science fiction projects alternative futures, fantasy's affordances allow writers to generate alternative worldviews grounded in real or invented mythic pasts. The initial move away from claiming to imitate reality allows fantasy writers to project inner experience onto an outer storyworld (there is no pathetic fallacy in fantasy), to depict multiple contradictory selves (housed within a single body or spread out over several characters), and to invite readers to consider alternatives to commonsense assumptions and seemingly inevitable social orders. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Lavanya Lakshminarayan is the author of Analog/Virtual and other simulations of your future which has recently been released in the UK and the USA as The Ten Percent Thief as part of a three-book deal. She is a Locus Award finalist and is the first science fiction writer to win the 'Times of India AutHer' Award and the 'Valley of Words Award', both prestigious literary awards in India. Her work has also been longlisted for a BSFA Award. Lavanya has been published in several magazines and anthologies, and her short fiction is forthcoming in the anthologies, The Best of World Science Fiction: Volume 2 and Someone in Time, among other publications. Lavanya's occasionally a game designer, and has built worlds for Zynga Inc.'s FarmVille franchise, Mafia Wars, and other games. She lives between the cities of Bangalore and Hyderabad in India and is currently working on her next novel. Lavanya is in conversation with E. Dawson Varughese is a Snr Fellow at Manipal Centre for Humanities, (MAHE), Manipal, India whose research on post-millennial fiction in English currently focusses on speculative and dystopian fiction. She has recently completed a manuscript for Bloomsbury on Indian speculative fiction in English and ideas of desi dystopias. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study examines the experiences of 10 neurodiverse students in Amsterdam, Netherlands, who all participated within in‐class youth‐led book clubs that centered science fiction. Over a 6‐month period, the researcher conducted pre‐ and post‐interviews and analyzed these along with transcription data from 24 book club sessions. Findings reveal that book clubs, using culturally sustaining science fiction and healing‐centered facilitative practices, provide opportunities to address students' academic and emotional literacies as well as their sense of agency. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Just under five years ago it seemed impossible to be able to use a simple and already widespread camera as a reliable monitoring tool for a design engineer. Today, thanks to the giant strides made by technology and IT evolution, this is no longer the case and what once seemed like science fiction is now reality, thanks to the innovative Photomonitoring technique. But how can you obtain reliable information through two simple images? This article illustrates the general principles of Photomonitoring and the main applicability criteria of this method, also through successful application examples. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Chinese science fiction (sci-fi) draws nutrition from traditional Chinese culture to achieve a modern transformation and promote the development of the national narrative in Chinese sci-fi. There are three ways to realise the transformation. First, adapt and reproduce classic stories, myths, legends and history. By embracing modernity, this unlocks the connections between traditional culture and modern technology, and thus acquires supportive force for modern life. Second, reconstruct history by imagining new routes of technological evolution and thus open up new possibilities for history. By considering contemporary realities, this answers the contemporary call for a more advanced culture. Third, use the national spirit as the soul of Chinese sci-fi. When providing Chinese wisdom and solutions to global challenges, we should balance the relationship between the global vision and the national characteristics of Chinese sci-fi and develop future-oriented national characteristics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Science fiction takes many forms, including academic work that calls on readers to think about social and cultural problems. This paper takes a piece of science fiction, Kirinyaga: A Fable of Utopia, as an example and discusses the conflicts among globalization, modernization and tradition present in the text, thus highlighting the academic meaning of science fiction as a literary form. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This is a creative response to the topic of the special issue, "The Aesthetics of Tinnitus", blending reflections on perception and imagination, race and sociality, sci-fi and sound studies via experimental poetics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article focuses on the winner of the 2022 Speculative Fictions and Cultures of Science Book Award, Nicole Starosielski's "Media Hot and Cold," which offers a groundbreaking examination of the intersections between popular culture, technology, and postwar U.S. society. Topics discussed include the exploration of motherhood in science fiction, the need for critical analysis of science fiction and fantasy comics, and the upcoming conference on graphic/visual science fiction.

In Priya Sarukkai Chabria's science-fiction novel Clone (2019), the central character Clone 14/54/G is a cyborg replica of her Original, named Aa-Aa, an incarcerated dissident writer who met a violent death just before delivering a potentially incendiary public address. Against her programming, the mutant Clone experiences flashbacks (or "visitations") of her Original's past life and fictional oeuvre, which makes it possible for her to revisit disparate temporalities of Indian history. While many existing interventions attempt to extend or apply the familiar conventions of postcolonial analysis to works of postcolonial science fiction, this essay sets out to ask rather how the emergence of the latter serves to both reconfigure and reclaim the affective stakes of an anti-imperialist politics that avoids a straightforward historical determinism. By reading Chabria's sf novel through affective articulations of spectrality and queer temporality, I present the novel as a form of narrative crypt that provides a phantasmal space for the spectral return of those who have been silenced or erased from history, not only as a consequence of their gender, race, and class, but also because of their inability or refusal to comply with the normative temporal rhythms of the society in which they live. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Samuel R. Delany's Dhalgren (1975) moves through different genres and styles of literature in much the same way that Walter Benjamin's flaneur moves through the spaces of the city. Delany as a writer makes contact with any number of other traditions outside of science fiction, but he expresses no radical desire to revolutionize sf or move it into mainstream literature. Delany does not assimilate or synthesize outside influences into his work so much as he encounters them. In Starboard Wine (1984), his book of sf criticism, Delany defines "encounter" in literature as the interpretation of a text associated with one genre through the reading protocols associated with another. I argue that "encounter" is analogous to "contact," a concept from Delany's Times Square Red, Times Square Blue (1999) that relates to the real, physical interaction of individuals in an urban environment. Nowhere is this convergence of literary encounter and urban contact clearer than in his novel, Dhalgren. Dhalgren uses the city as a conceptual framework for encounters among a diverse array of influences including myth, poetry, autobiography, and literary modernism. These types of encounters are also plentiful in Delany's earlier work, but Dhalgren pushes them to a point where even sf itself is decentered and becomes just one more thing to be met in the space of the city. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Science fiction claims Mary Shelley's Frankenstein as a progenitor on the basis of its extrapolation from speculations by Erasmus Darwin and others about the nature and origins of life. An equally strong narrative thread in the novel about extraordinary states of mind is usually taken as evidence of its grounding in supernatural and gothic fiction. The novel applies the same materialist assumptions and reasoned approach to dreaming, however, that it uses to explore biological science. Reading it in the context, first, of David Hartley's eighteenth-century Observations on Man and, second, of contemporary studies of the dreaming brain, we can see that Frankenstein is also science fiction of a different sort than usually supposed, a thought experiment about states of consciousness and unconsciousness and the strange experiences that arise from disrupting the boundary between sleep and waking. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article reconsiders Samuel R. Delany's theory of science fiction as a form of language in order to develop the notion that science fiction is a method of making meaning and reading texts. Three stories by the Argentinian writer Jorge Luis Borges, "The Aleph," "The Library of Babel," and "Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius," are read as science fiction to demonstrate how the method functions. Borges's ambiguous relationship with science fiction during his lifetime is well-documented, but no previous study of Borges as a science-fiction writer exists in English. The notion of science fiction as a way of reading enables a reading that treats the elements of textual playfulness that make Borges's texts so beloved throughout literary studies as science fictional, because they encourage the reader to reconstruct an alternate world around the text and create a comprehensive theory of how that world works. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In 1992, Stephenson described a type of metaverse in his science fiction novel Snow Crash. Through his imagination, Stephenson is said to have directly influenced the makers of Google Earth, and, more recently, Silicon Valley’s “Metaverse”. In addition, there was a spate of literature published 15–20 years ago, related to metaverse concepts with the introduction of Second Life in June 2003 by Linden Labs. Many users experienced virtual spaces, shopped with virtual currency (Linden dollar, L ${\$}$), and even frequented virtual storefronts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Gülten Dayıoğlu is one of our authors, who has contributed many works to our literature. Gülten Dayıoğlu's science fiction works have become widely read in children's and young adult literature, undergoing multiple printings. One of these works is Işın Çağı Çocukları. One of the most important characteristics of works in the science fiction genre is their ability to derive their narrative from science. In these works, it is essential to carefully examine and use concepts in a way that does not lead to misconceptions in the readers' minds. Conceptual misconceptions can make subsequent learning more difficult or even hinder the learning process. In children's literature, it is considered necessary to identify any conceptual misconceptions and, if present, explain them to the child readers to correct these misconceptions. In this work, analysis of Gülten Dayıoğlu's novel Işın Çağı Çocukları is made in the context of conceptual misconcepiton on scientific concept. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study in media practice provides insights on video production for holographic prism projection, which has become more accessible as smart flat screens have become more available. The study reflects on the experiences of producing, installing and viewing a documentary video projected via holographic prism, titled 'FarNearFutureNow.' Engaging the participation of Extinction Rebellion (XR) members, this university-funded production included recording and combining interview footage with energy policy texts in the visual style of the hologram scene from Star Wars, the 1977 science-fiction film. With viewer co-experience, environmental politics and legacies of colonialism in mind, we produced a 5-minute video and prism projection system for public exhibition. FarNearFutureNow was produced through collective processes of gathering, assembling, reviewing, storyboarding, scripting and editing interview footage and other recordings as well as testing and fabricating installation materials. These production processes enabled us to understand the affordances of creative darkness in holographic production for disassociating and recombining visual elements. The hologram's disassociated focus on a single object proved useful in drawing audience attention and for assembling non-fiction elements in sequences referencing popular fiction. It is also useful for showing radically different visual scales in sequence, and for simultaneously juxtaposing audio and visual scales. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This contribution proposes to explore different forms of postcapitalist futures that have been imagined in science fiction and analyze their reflexive potential. The field of studies on diverse economies, those economies often made less visible by the preeminent economic system, should also be concerned with fictional representations oriented towards the future. The article first emphasizes how science fiction can participate in the political imagination, precisely because of its capacities for problematization and exploration. The next step is to exploit a corpus of mainly literary works to show how science fiction can be an original and heuristic vector for the exploration of transformative socioeconomic possibilities. The worlds created in these works allow us to show what a variety of alternative and postcapitalist socioeconomic systems might look like. A typological matrix of postcapitalist futures is then proposed to highlight the hypotheses on which these visions are based and the inspirations they provide. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, we seek to propose a novel solution to the Green Children of Woolpit, a twelfth-century "alien" mystery by approaching the "otherworldly" through a terrestrial, theological lens. In focusing specifically on their otherworldliness, we suggest a congruence between the children's characteristics and the theological threat of early Catharism. When viewed Christologically, the Green Children mystery offers ample opportunity for exotheological discourse, focusing as it does on key Christian theological issues such as Christ's humanity, the Incarnation, and what it means to be human in the Middle Ages. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study proposes that science fiction (sci-fi), a specific entertainment genre or theme, can facilitate self-transcendence (i.e. moving beyond self-boundaries) by inducing epistemic humility (i.e. awareness of one's epistemic limits accompanied by epistemic openness). Through increasing self-transcendence, sci-fi engagement can further promote prosocial intentions in a real-world context. We conducted three studies with different paradigms to test our hypotheses. Through a retrospective design, Study 1 found that sci-fi (vs. comedy or romance) films were recalled as eliciting stronger self-transcendence. Studies 2a and 2b, using an experimental design, revealed that sci-fi (vs. realistic) narratives induced stronger epistemic humility, and consequently led to heightened self-transcendence. Study 3, extending the findings in the pandemic context through a three-wave longitudinal design, demonstrated that sci-fi engagement within one month predicted the subsequent increase in self-transcendence, which in turn promoted coronavirus disease (COVID)-related prosocial intention over time. The potential of sci-fi to foster self-transcendence and prosociality is discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

My aim in this essay is to isolate and describe the eschatological technophobia that is expressed by many popular films in the genre of science fiction. What I have in mind by this designation is the (irrational) fear of advanced technologies with respect to the conjectured likelihood that autonomous systems and programs will inevitably deliver a negative judgment of humankind. In expressing and/or cultivating this fear, I offer, directors in the genre tend to help themselves to the language and imagery of the Biblical Day of Judgment, especially as it is prophesied and characterized in the Abrahamic religions of the global West. This fear, I maintain, is itself an expression of a deeper anxiety pertaining to the possibility (or likelihood) that the achievements of humankind matter very little, if at all, especially when evaluated on a cosmic scale. Following my critique of several films that rely, uncreatively, on the trope of eschatological technophobia, I turn to a consideration of two relatively recent films in the genre: Christopher Nolan's Interstellar (2014) and Denis Villeneuve's Arrival (2016). From these directors, I suggest, we receive subtler and more thoughtful treatments of the judgments of humankind that superior intelligences are likely to pronounce. What emerges in these two films is the exploratory expression of a religiosity or spirituality that I associate with an updated, epoch-appropriate version of humanism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Osmosis (Netflix, 2019) is only the second French television series to be commissioned by Netflix. Set in a near-future Paris and dramatising the final beta-testing and launch of a revolutionary dating application, the programme has frequently been compared to Black Mirror (Channel 4 Television Corporation/Netflix, 2011–19). This article argues that the parallel is unhelpful since Osmosis does not contain the underlying technophobia that characterises the UK series and is largely, though not entirely, optimistic about the implications of artificial intelligence and technological advances for humanity. Nonetheless, the two series do share a common preoccupation with critiquing certain excesses of late capitalism. In its blend of dystopian and utopian elements and allusions to and subversions of Anglophone science-fiction conventions, Osmosis constitutes an original – and unashamedly French – futuristic series whose key characteristic is ambivalence. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Critical analysis of Netflix's hit show Stranger Things has largely emphasized its nostalgic engagement with 1980s Americana, and particularly that decade's science fiction and horror films. However, trappings of the Gothic in Stranger Things do not merely align it with the twentieth century's recent past; they also function in ways that demonstrate Stranger Things' connection to the more distant past of the Romantic period's Gothic novels. This article extends the Gothic inheritance of Stranger Things beyond 1980s' science fiction horror to the Romantic Gothic novel's investment in the found manuscript, the departure point for examining the use of Dungeons & Dragons in Stranger Things alongside Mary Shelley's use of found manuscripts in Frankenstein and The Last Man. This article reads the found manuscript as a collaboratively produced parergon (a framing device sitting both inside and outside of the text), which works through acts of translation and recreation to bring the past to bear on the present. Through examining Stranger Things' conceptual framing of its alternate dimension, the Upside Down, and the monstrous Demogorgon through Dungeons & Dragons, this article argues that Dungeons & Dragons functions in Stranger Things as a Gothic found manuscript, drawing literary and Gothic pasts into the show's present. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A sequence of recent science‐fiction films set in the San Francisco Bay Area suggests that Silicon Valley corporations have become a major concern for Hollywood. These films present Silicon Valley capitalism in thrall to a technological experimentation that prompts disastrous outcomes, which the films collectively argue emerges from the corporations' drive for profit and ignorance of the precautionary principle. Yet Hollywood's response to Silicon Valley involves the valorizing of a kinder, less rapacious capitalism than that of Silicon Valley, a position that prevents a thorough critique of a major challenger to its position within our culture. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses the first Early Researchers' Seminar for Science and Speculative Fiction, which took place at the University of Salamanca in Spain. The seminar featured a series of panels and discussions on various topics related to speculative fiction, including gendered geographies, posthumanism, and contemporary speculative literature. The speakers aimed to deliver accessible talks that catered to a diverse audience, from established researchers to undergraduate students. The seminar provided a welcoming and non-commodified space for the exchange of ideas and fostered discussions on topics such as feminist speculation, posthuman bodies, and the critical potentials of speculative fiction. [Extracted from the article]

"Chinese Science Fiction during the Post-Mao Cultural Thaw" by Hua Li is a scholarly book that examines science fiction in China from 1976 to 1983. The author explores the political and cultural changes of this period and connects Chinese SF to various factors such as mainstream literary perspectives, domestic politics, changing international relations, and Western SF traditions. The book offers a new interpretation of SF in the post-Mao era and contributes to existing scholarship by discussing the "Anti-Spiritual Pollution Campaign" in 1983, the lack of critical awareness of ethical problems in SF, the similarities between post-Mao SF and more recent fiction, and the shift of SF writers to higher social classes. This article discusses the development of Chinese SF during the post-Mao era, exploring themes such as Mars exploration, detective thrillers, alien invasions, posthuman conditions, and genetic engineering. It also examines the impact of media convergence on the popularity and dissemination of Chinese SF, suggesting that it is a genre often supported by the government. Overall, this article provides a comprehensive analysis of Chinese SF during this period and is recommended for readers interested in the history of Chinese SF. [Extracted from the article]

"Age and Ageing in Contemporary Speculative and Science Fiction" is a book review that discusses the intersection of aging studies and science fiction. The review highlights the collection of essays edited by Sarah Falcus and Maricel Oró-Piqueras, which explores how speculative and science fiction texts encode concerns about age and aging societies. The book covers a range of themes, including genre, immortality, biopower, demographic change, temporalities, and transhumanism. The review acknowledges the book's limitation in focusing primarily on anglophone, white-dominated texts and suggests that future research should consider science fiction from other parts of the world. Overall, the book provides critical insight into how aging concerns are portrayed in science fiction and offers a foundation for further exploration of the topic. [Extracted from the article]

In 2013 a group of science fiction authors launched a campaign to reform the Hugos, one of science fiction's most prestigious awards. Dubbing themselves "Sad Puppies," these activists sought to correct what they viewed as a political imbalance. Science fiction, they argued, had moved away from entertaining story telling in favor of heavy-handed message fiction meant to spread pernicious liberal values. This article draws on an analysis of internet posts by actors involved in the movement to examine the Puppies' efforts to reform the science fiction field, reclaiming it as a space for conservative authors and fans. I argue that the leaders of the movement were able to build small fan communities into a larger social movement by framing the movement in such a way as to link their efforts to exogenous political and cultural debates occurring in proximate social fields. This analysis demonstrates the processes by which tournament rituals in popular culture can come to serve as contests of values, arenas within which larger political and cultural conflicts are waged. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

As a genre, science fiction has long played with the idea of all-powerful virtual beings and explored notions of transcendence through technological advancements. It has also been at the forefront of exploring our anxieties and hopes regarding new technologies and the ethical and moral consequences of scientific advancement, raising deeply philosophical and theological concerns about an age-old question, namely: what makes us distinct as human beings and what lies beyond our own existence? This article aims to provide an overview of recent themes that have emerged in science fiction film and television, especially with regard to extending our lives beyond their natural biological age. As the article will outline, these ideas generally appear in notions of cyborgization or mind uploading into cyberspace. Both indicate a deeply human desire to avoid death, and the films and shows discussed in this article offer a range of different ideas on this. As we will see, the final case study, the Amazon Prime television show Upload (2020–), brings both of these elements together, touching on a broad range of ideas about cyber-spirituality along the way. The article concludes that although many shows raise interesting questions about the ethical challenges inherent in transhumanist fantasies of mind uploading, they ultimately remain ambiguous in their critique of the dream of digital immortality. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Atomik Aztex by Sesshu Foster is widely regarded as a paradigm of postcolonial intervention in the genre of the science fiction novel and alternative histories. This article marks a departure from such readings by positing the novel as a study of psychosis in the postcolonial subaltern. Through the employment of psychoanalytic theories of Jacques Lacan with reference to Angelo Bravi's concept of the "psychosis of civilisation," this article contends that the novel's narrator-protagonist Zenzon experiences symptoms of psychosis that result in hallucinations of alternate realities. Through the ideations of Dipesh Chakraborty, Ashis Nandy and Walter Mignolo, the article posits Zenzon as a postcolonial subaltern through his failed attempts to trace a postcolonial history beyond the colonizer's epistemologies. Finally, the article traces the emergence of a subjectless subject from the position of the postcolonial subaltern, who, overwhelmed by his psychotic condition, revels in his subalternity through an avowal of his psychosis. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article provides a concise overview of the life and work of science fiction author Ray Bradbury. Despite facing criticism during his lifetime, Bradbury became a highly popular author in the 20th century. The article explores his correspondence with various writers and artists, as well as his unique position within the science fiction genre. It also delves into Bradbury's longing for enduring values and his changing political views. Additionally, the article discusses the themes and predictions in Bradbury's novel "Fahrenheit 451," highlighting its exploration of censorship and its potential for different political interpretations. Bradbury accurately foresaw the rise of reality television, mobile devices, and the impact of technology on critical thinking. The text also touches on Bradbury's mixed feelings about space travel and his involvement in promoting it. Overall, this article offers valuable insights into Bradbury's creative process, friendships, and appreciation for life. [Extracted from the article]