Search

This paper presents the results of a pilot interview study investigating the leisure reading habits of 20 practising AI researchers based in the United Kingdom. The interview analysis yields six areas in which literature plays a role in the field of AI: research focus, career choice, community formation, science communication, ethical thinking, and modelling of sociotechnical futures. These categories are proposed as the basis of a systematic taxonomy of the role of literature in AI research, evidencing literature's significance in AI laboratory and professional cultures. The paper presents the results of this preliminary investigation in combination with a synthesis of existing evidence in each category of influence. The aim of this hybrid approach is to cohere research and evidence in this relatively new area of study, and to present new findings contextually, in order to provide the foundations for further qualitative and quantitative research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The British writer John Wyndham (1903–1969) explored societal effects of surprising or mystical events. A paradigmatic example is The Midwich Cuckoos (1957), which portrays identical-looking children born without sexual intercourse. I propose a reading strategy that focuses on the fictional spatial order and analyses how the construction of the children's otherness interferes with the village's demarcation. Furthermore, I interpret the mysterious pregnancies as a reference to basic embryo research in the 1950s – cloning. Finally, I scrutinize Wyndham's negotiation of utilitarianism throughout the novel and his critique of truly utilitarian decisions that are based on constructions of Otherness. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

As one of many contemporary British dystopian novels, P. Anderson Graham's 1923 The Collapse of Homo Sapiens envisaged Britain in the twenty-second century as a devastated society that has largely reverted to a primitive, non-Christian state. However, a remnant of the surviving population has memories of the religious dimensions of national life, helping them to cope with the exigencies of their meagre existence. A modest revival of the faith of their forebears ensues, which in turn triggers a reaction against the re-assertion of Christianity by nationalistic elements that regard it as too charitable a social force to fortify their efforts to revitalise British culture in a hostile geopolitical setting. The narrative perspective of the novel is critical of the truncated state of that religion in Britain in the 1920s and how this was failing to guide and inspire peoples' lives at that time. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Science and Religion Forum (SRF) seeks to be the premier organization promoting the discussion between science and religion in the United Kingdom for academics, professionals, and interested lay people. Each year, the SRF holds a conference tackling a topical issue, and in 2019 focused on artificial intelligence and robotics. This article introduces the thematic section which is made up of three papers from that conference and provides a summary of the event. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses the highlights of two conferences organized by Rhys Williams and Mark Bould hosted at the University of Warwick in Warwickshire, England in the summer of 2014. The "Irradiating the Object" conference on the works of M. John Harrison took place on August 21 while "SF/F Now" was held on August 22 and 23 and focused on science fiction, fantasy, and horror that considered speculative fiction's relationship to critical and political issues facing contemporary societies.

Design-oriented research is an act of collective imagining-a way in which we work together to bring about a future that lies slightly out of our grasp. In this paper, we examine the collective imagining of ubiquitous computing by bringing it into alignment with a related phenomenon, science fiction, in particular as imagined by a series of television shows that form part of the cultural backdrop for many members of the research community. A comparative reading of these fictional narratives highlights a series of themes that are also implicit in the research literature. We argue both that these themes are important considerations in the shaping of technological design and that an attention to the tropes of popular culture holds methodological value for ubiquitous computing. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article focuses on science fiction as a subject of academic studies of British television. The unrest and change in British society due to the political and social upheavals of the 1970s are discussed including their influence on television drama programming particularly with respect to the status of women in work and politics. The analyses of the "Doctor Who" series and "Blake's 7" are presented to illustrate the historical shifts and developments in representational strategies.

Modern sciences share a number of characteristics concerning the kind of knowledge they produce, the communities of scientists who produce such knowledge, and the relation of the motivation behind the research to the discoveries made. From the social scientific point of view, the interesting question is how the discoveries of science are recaptured by the categories of common sense, and put to work in moral descriptions of the world, mappings that are very selective regarding which characteristics of scientific practices they choose to notice. These "moral" employments of science fall under two broad heads. First, there are hybrids of various moral authorities-scientific and religious-that allow us to offer a description of the historical development of "non-standard" religious forms (Fundamentalisms, New Religious Movements, New Age…) in the last century. And second, there is a spectrum of literature, from Fantasy and Science Fiction to popular science, which plays on the same materials and issues, again in a strictly time and context-bound fashion. This latter material (which includes, among others, Dawkins 'discussions of faith and science) may be said to represent an urban folklore, and is both diffuse and influential. The project of critical thinking is, then, less a matter of relating science and faith, and more a matter of comparing the relations of orthodox to popular faith with those of orthodox to popular science. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Eilís Ní Dhuibhne's first novel, The Bray House (1990), is a futuristic, dystopian fantasy that envisions Ireland, Great Britain and most of Western Europe - except for the northern territories - as already laid waste by nuclear disaster in an unspecified near future. In this paper, my intention is to consider how the narrative, like other futuristic and science-fiction stories, displaces the present onto an apocalyptic future so as to bring out and criticise present-day social, cultural and political trends, particularly, the institutional tendency in Ireland to package and market History as Heritage. Some of the issues raised by the novel which will be addressed here are: For what purposes and from what perspective and attitude is the past interpreted and translated? What happens when it is precisely our treasured lifestyles that we see dissected, interpreted and analysed as if they already formed part of an arcane past? How can we feel the sense of nostalgia that heritage-based analyses imply if we are asked to mourn what we have not yet lost? [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Through a detailed analysis of the Cybermen's narrative evolution and changing cyborg appearance, this essay maintains that throughout the decades that spanned its series' run, Doctor Who addressed key fears present in British society: fear of technology, loss of identity, American economic power and totalitarianism. These fears not only evolved alongside the physical appearance of the Cybermen, but also changed in significance as British television audiences accepted the consequences of technological assimilation and looked to the future in anticipation rather than apprehension. The general field of study on the cyborg in popular culture remains transfixed on the products of the big screen; American cinema is the focus for many works which continue to examine the cyborg as a predominantly American reality, for example Star Trek's The Borg dominate the work done by scholars in these fields. Fear of technology, or fear of the automaton, is thus depicted as somehow an inherently American fear. However, this essay attempts to correct this imbalance and bring close attention to bear on the Cybermen as televisual figures of a technological complexity; one that is not necessarily American or cinematic, but rather British and televisual in origin and nature. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The author examines the myth of the island in British science fiction. He explains that Great Britain is an island and notes that the island is almost unknown in the metaphorical language of contemporary American or Australian science fiction. He cites the book "Utopia," by Thomas More as one of the first and greatest of the literary explorations of the island. He also notes the establishment of the island as part of the literary imagination.

This essay examines the reaction and interaction of science fiction fans with the New Wave movement in the nineteen sixties. During the 1960s, science fiction was a small world and the ongoing give-and-take among the scene's various players deserves more careful scrutiny, while New Wave fiction was simply the most publicly visible crystallization of a rhetorical and ideological struggle. The fires of controversy over the New Wave were fanned in Great Britain and the U.S.

News media coverage of biotechnology issues offers a rich source of fictional portrayals, with stories drawing strongly on popular imagery and metaphors in descriptions of the powers and dangers of biotechnology. This article examines how science fiction metaphors, imagery and motifs surface in British newspaper (broadsheet and tabloid) coverage of medical genetic issues, focusing on press reporting of two recent highly publicised news media events; namely, the Hashmi and Whitaker families' plights to use stem cells from a ‘perfectly matched sibling’ for the treatment of their diseased children. It is concerned in particular with the extent to which journalists' use of certain literary devices encourages preferred formulations of medical genetics, and thereby potentially shapes public deliberation about scientific developments and their consequences for society. Understanding how science fiction sustains science fact, and vice versa, and how the former is portrayed in news media, it is argued, would thus seem to be crucial in the effort to understand why people respond so strongly to biotechnologies, and what they imagine their consequences to be. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article focuses on The Ark in Space, a four-part television serial created by producer Philip Hinchcliffe script editor Robert Holmes, starring Tom Baker as the Doctor. Borrowing from Newcomb and Hirsch's cultural forum model of television rhetoric. Newcomb and Hirsch argue that a cultural focus as basis for the analysis and criticism of television is the bridge between a concern for television as a communications medium, central to contemporary society, and television as an aesthetic object, the expressive medium that unites and examines a culture. When viewing a television show as a cultural forum, the historical and cultural context plays an essential role. The future as demonstrated by The Ark in Space has room for British culture, a fear probably arising from England's European Union entrance. Instead of American or continental voices, all characters, including the future prime minister of the planet, have an English accent. The narrative allows a viewer to imagine that no matter how difficult the situation in the present, the English way can still survive if it can develop unfettered by outside, un-British, or alien forces. The key differences between The Ark in Space and other shows of the science fiction genre help to make it more successful than the competing discourses. The Ark in Space willingly uses humor to defuse dramatic situations, unlike Space: 1999 or Star Trek. The cultural forum model illuminates The Ark in Space as a text rich in meaning deriving from and responding to the needs of its viewers.

Presents the comments of several people in the British science fiction pertaining to their views on the science fiction boom. Brian V. Aldiss; Keith Brooke; Colin Greenland; Gwyneth Jones; Paul Kincaid; Ken MacLeod; Patrick Parrinder; Justina Robson.

This article attempts to situate the Boom in terms of several traditions in British fantasy—materialist fantasy, gnostic fantasy, and telefantasy—typically excluded from discussions of sf. It then goes on to argue that one aspect of the British Boom in sf and fantasy is concerned with breaking through the highly artificial distinction between the two genres without losing respect for genre.

Discusses the origins of British science fiction writers. Comparison of the quality of work with earlier writers like H. G. Wells and Arthur C. Clarke; Factors that contributed to the writing styles and skills of these writers; Analysis of the British science fiction boom.

This essay explores the resurgence of British sf in the 1990s in the context of the transformation of British cultural life, in particular following the election of the New Labour government in May 1997. The argument does not propose that the boom starts with this election, only that Blairism consolidates trends in cultural policy that had been nascent throughout the 1990s. In particular, recent political theory about what has been called "cultural governance"—the attempts to discipline culture to operate within a homogenized or "mainstreamed" sphere—helps articulate some of the reasons for the revitalization of sf, fantasy, and the Gothic in Britain in the last few years. An examination of this field of cultural and political theory provides the detailed context for key works of the British Boom by James Lovegrove, Gwyneth Jones, Ken MacLeod, and Justina Robson.

Various observers have suggested that there is currently a Boom in British science fiction. This article attempts to map out various contexts for understanding the Boom, including the on-going long-term history of British sf, the current retreat of American science fiction, the aesthetics of the Boom, and the sense that people have been taking British sf seriously. The point is not so much to pin down the Boom as something strictly defined, but to open up a range of discourse about the Boom and its potential future.

Focuses on the boundaries between scientific fact and science fiction based from the study conducted in Great Britain. Influence of science fiction on public perception towards biomedical sciences; Comparison among the interpretations of scientists, teachers and students on science; Distinction between lay versus scientific or expert knowledge.

The article discusses a project which explores what the main health challenges for the Great Britain population will be in 2040 and the opportunities to address them. Respondents included doctors, medical students and professors whose ideas ranged from the expected to pure science fiction. They were united in their certainty about the changes that were predictable such as the rise in obesity and non-communicable disease and the emergence of antibiotic resistance.

Focuses on science fiction boom in Great Britain in reference to the theme of the November 2003 issue of "Science Fiction Studies." Difference of literary boom from art boom; Role of congenial and creative exchanges between artists and critics in a boom.