thesis on science fiction

The Posthuman in Contemporary Black African Diasporic Science Fiction

--> Wilby, Liam Harry (2021) The Posthuman in Contemporary Black African Diasporic Science Fiction. PhD thesis, University of Leeds.

My thesis investigates narrative theorisations of the posthuman in fictions by three Black African diasporic science fiction writers: Nalo Hopkinson’s Brown Girl in the Ring (1998) and Midnight Robber (2000); Nnedi Okorafor’s Binti trilogy (Binti, 2015, Binti: Home, 2017 and Binti: The Night Masquerade, 2018); and Anthony Joseph’s The African Origins of UFOs (2008). I outline how these six texts contribute to and, importantly, disrupt critical posthumanism’s reconfiguration of liberal humanism’s conception of ‘the human’. In dialogue with Black feminist scholarship by those such as Zakiyyah Iman Jackson, Katherine McKittrick, Christina Sharpe and Sylvia Wynter, the thesis explores how fictional narratives can be employed to denaturalise the hegemonic conception of Western Man, which continues to rest on the ontological negation of Black life. I describe the three writers discussed as continuing and extending a legacy of work by Black scholars and artists who, positioned as abject within Western modernity, have always disrupted the epistemic tenets of Man. I also situate these texts within scholarship on the ‘new animism’ (Laack, 2020) in order to highlight how tenets of African and African diasporic epistemologies and cultures exist as possible alternative genealogies for critical posthumanist discourses, which can disrupt the Euro-Western and white-centric tendencies that currently dominate the discipline. Hopkinson, Okorafor and Joseph’s writing, as well as the Black intellectual tradition drawn on throughout the thesis, inhabit ‘demonic grounds’ (Wynter, 1989; McKittrick, 2006) within critical posthumanism: absent presences that disrupt and transform tenets of the disciplines’ prevailing scholarship, ultimately reshaping conceptions of the posthuman.

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Filename: Wilby LH School of English PhD 2021 .pdf

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Literary Theory and Criticism

Home › Science › Introduction to Science Fiction

Introduction to Science Fiction

By NASRULLAH MAMBROL on July 26, 2018 • ( 2 )

Literary and cultural historians describe science fiction (SF) as the premiere narrative form of modernity because authors working in this genre extrapolate from Enlightenment ideals and industrial practices to imagine how educated people using machines and other technologies might radically change the material world. This kind of future-oriented technoscientific speculation lends itself to social and political speculation as well. While authors working in other literary modes can represent the past and present from new perspectives, only those allied with speculative fiction show us how intervening into the material world can change human relations and generate new futures as well. Thus SF enables authors to dramatize widespread cultural hopes and fears about new technoscientific formations as they emerge at specific historical moments.

The history of SF is very much bound up with the history of modern technoscientific development and the proliferation of writing that accompanied it. By means of the first scientific journals, scholars associated with the scientific academies of seventeenth-century France and Great Britain disseminated new ideas about the quantifiable nature of the material world and the importance of human agents within that world. By the eighteenth century such ideas had become central to the philosophical writings of Immanuel Kant and David Hume and the socio-political treatises of Adam Smith and Voltaire. These ideas inspired the public imagination as well. This was particularly apparent in books such as Charles Leadbetter’s Astronomy (1727), periodicals such as Eliza Haywood’s The Female Spectator (1744–46), and natural histories such as René-Antoine Ferchault de Réaumur’s Histoire Naturelle des Insects (1734–42). While books and periodicals introduced scientific ideas to the newly literate middle class, natural histories inspired readers to become amateur scientists themselves by applying close observation skills to the world around them.

The late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries also saw the publication of the first proto-science fiction stories. The authors of these stories were often science enthusiasts who engaged new scientific ideas in their fiction. For example, Voltaire’s passion for physics led to the creation of a fully functional laboratory at Château de Cirey and the 1752 publication of Micromégas, a fantastic voyage story in which human scientist-explorers learn about galactic physics from a Jovian space traveler whom they encounter at the North Pole. In 1818 British author Mary Shelley drew upon her reading in pre-Darwinian evolutionary theory and her experience with public demonstrations of galvanism to create Frankenstein , which follows the tragic adventures of an isolated young scientist who uses electricity in a misguided attempt to create a new race of beings that will worship him. Despite their apparent differences, Voltaire and Shelley ’s stories both insist that science can yield great rewards as long as it is practiced according to the established methods of the scientific community. They also mark the emergence of SF’s two oldest archetypes: the heroic scientistexplorer who shares knowledge with his intellectual brethren and the mad scientist who makes disastrous decisions that wreak havoc.

The next generation of speculative fiction writers turned their attention to what would become the central interest of SF: the creation of machines that could transform both the material and social worlds. This new interest emerged at the height of the Industrial Revolution, when steam-powered technologies enabled new modes of locomotion and new methods of production. These developments fostered the proliferation of new trade routes, factories, and urban spaces. They also fostered the rise of a new professional: the engineer. Engineering schools, including the National School of Bridges and Highways in France and Rennselaer Polytechnic Institute in the U.S., first opened their doors at the turn of the nineteenth century; by the mid-nineteenth century graduates of these schools could join specialized organizations dedicated to civil, mechanical, and mining engineering. While engineering was an overwhelmingly masculine profession, in the late nineteenth century technical institutes began granting degrees to the female students who would go on to create the discipline of scientific home management, or domestic engineering.

New technologies and professions were central to the speculative stories that authors on both sides of the Atlantic published in the nineteenth century. These authors conveyed their ideas about the future of industrial society by updating older fantastic narrative traditions. The European leaders of this experiment were Jules Verne and H.G. Wells . Like Voltaire before him, Verne used the extraordinary voyage to spark a sense of wonder in readers regarding the marvels of the physical universe. However, he updated this story type in 1867’s From the Earth to the Moon , 1871’s A Journey to the Center of the Earth , and 1872’s Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea by extrapolating from contemporary transportation technologies to show how humans (rather than aliens) might travel to exotic locales on the Earth and amongst the stars. In Great Britain, Wells used the future war story – a narrative form often employed by government officials to argue for increased spending on war technologies – to show how submarines, airplanes, and bombs might herald the end of war altogether. This is particularly evident in 1903’s “The Last Ironclads,” 1908’s The War in the Air , and 1914’s The World Set Free , where warring nation-states destroy themselves by underestimating new military technologies, thereby paving the way for the emergence of peaceful, scientifically managed global civilizations. In the stories of both Verne and Wells, the success of new technocultural endeavors depends on the action of a new technocultural hero: the creative engineer who works for the good of all people, rather than the benefit of any individual person, business, or nation.

The principles of creative engineering were even more central to the technological utopias of American authors Edward Bellamy and Charlotte Perkins Gilman . Bellamy’s 1888 novel Looking Backward 2000–1887 depicts a future America reorganized along lines later associated with the Fordist factory, with all work parceled out amongst specially trained individuals. In contrast to the often overworked and underpaid factory workers of his own day, however, Bellamy imagined that the citizens of America 2000 who volunteered for menial labor would be rewarded with drastically reduced hours and that all workers would enjoy high pay, abundant goods, and early retirement at the age of 45. In a similar vein, the female citizens of Gilman’s 1915 Herland enjoy unprecedented living standards because their wide-scale application of the principles of domestic engineering transform their hostile tropical land into a fertile paradise. They also extend the scientific management of the home to the scientific management of people, combining eugenics with education to create perfectly adjusted children. Thus Bellamy and Gilman built upon the utopian tradition extending back to Sir Thomas More by demonstrating how new and better societies might be created not just by the application of rational thought, but also by the application of rational industrial processes.

The first four decades of the twentieth century marked the consolidation of engineering as the premiere profession of the modern era. They also marked the height of excitement about engineering in the public imagination, especially as it was expressed in the philosophy of technocracy, a pseudo-populist movement that emerged in reaction to the Great Depression and that, at its height, boasted over half a million followers. Led by engineer Howard Scott and the professors of Columbia University’s Industrial Engineering department, technocrats advocated the creation of a scientifically educated and technically skilled populace whose best and brightest would naturally rise to the top. This technoscientific elite would apply scientific and engineering principles to political and economic problems, thereby mitigating the woes of the Great Depression and laying the foundation for a utopian, post-scarcity society.

This period also saw the consolidation of SF as a distinct genre complete with its own literary community, publishing outlets, and stylistic conventions. The birth of genre SF is associated with the founding of Amazing Stories in 1926 and Astounding Stories in 1930. These two magazines – printed on the cheap wood-pulp paper that would give this period of SF history its name – were the first dedicated solely to speculative fiction. While authors, editors, and fans worked collaboratively to establish SF, one man is generally recognized as the father of the genre: Luxembourg-American author, inventor, and technocrat Hugo Gernsback . As the first editor of Amazing Stories , Gernsback developed three rules to ensure that speculative fiction would get readers excited about science and technology: “good” SF would be organized around a prophetic vision of the technoscientific future; it would didactically explain how that future came to be; and it would do so in an entertaining way, with approximately 25 percent of each SF narrative dedicated to science and technology and 75 percent dedicated to adventure. These rules inform Gernsback’s own writing, most notably in 1911’s R alph 124C 41+: A Romance of the Year 2660 . Like other utopias, Gernsback’s is comprised of dialog between a native of the utopia in question (here, the world-famous superscientist Ralph 124C) and a naïve visitor who stands in for the reader (Ralph’s love interest, Alice 212B). But Gernsback departed from the staid utopian tradition by framing his characters’ conversations about the marvels of New York City 2660 with action sequences featuring avalanches, invisible assailants, and battles in outer space.

The elements that Gernsback added to the utopian narrative tradition – depictions of scientists and engineers as action heroes, the celebration of fantastic gadgets, and planet-spanning adventures – became central to the pulpera space opera. The two authors who perfected this sub-genre were Edmond Hamilton and E.E. “Doc” Smith . In the linked Interstellar Patrol stories which ran from 1928 to 1930 and stand-alone tales such as 1934’s “Thundering Worlds,” Hamilton imagines far-off futures where humans create intergalactic technocracies while battling with rogue stars, invading aliens, and even the death of their own sun. Meanwhile, Smith’s 1928–63 Skylark and 1934–48 Lensman series follow the adventures of a human technoscientific elite who ventures into space only to learn that they are key to the outcome of billion-year-old battles between good and evil. Unlike Gernsback before them, neither Hamilton nor Smith spent much time explaining how their characters created their technocivilizations. However, what science they did include tended to be relatively accurate. Most importantly, the triumphant tone of much space opera neatly conveyed the technoscientific optimism central to early SF.

Technocratic ideals also permeated pulp-era thought-variant stories, which were driven by speculative ideas rather than gadgets. This is particularly apparent in Stanley G. Weinbaum ’s The Adaptive Ultimate ,  which updated the Frankenstein narrative for the modern scientific era. Weinbaum’s 1935 story follows the adventures of two scientists who develop a serum based on insect hormones that enables wounded organisms to heal themselves. After serious ethical debate, the overly enthusiastic scientists decide to skip standard testing protocols and inject the serum into a dying young woman. When she turns into an amoral creature bent on conquering the world, Weinbaum’s scientists recognize that they cannot simply, as Victor Frankenstein did, reject their creation. Instead, they take responsibility for their actions and contain the threat of the young woman, thereby transforming themselves from mad to heroic scientists. The principles of technocracy were also fundamental to John W. Campbell ’s 1939 Forgetfulness , which takes place on a far-future Earth where humans live in modest glass domes situated on the outskirts of ruined megacities. At the end of the story readers learn that these humans have not lost control of science and technology, but have actively chosen telepathic over technoscientific ways of being to avoid repeating their war-torn history. Thus Campbell’s protagonists apply engineering techniques to the problem of human history and gain control over evolution itself.

The middle decades of the twentieth century seemed to epitomize the technocratic ideals of the pulp-era SF community. The new connections forged with industry and government during World War II led to a period of record growth for American science in the Cold War era. Much of this growth occurred in the two areas of research seen as key to national defense: atomic energy and space exploration. The expansion of defense spending, combined with the consumer demands of a newly affluent public, spurred the rapid development of American technology as well, especially as it pertained to the creation of automated machines designed to run complex industrial operations. Indeed, while atomic energy and space exploration research promised to transform the American future, automation seemed poised to transform America in the present as factory workers began working with robots and computer experts swelled the ranks of the technoscientific elite. The technocratic transformation of labor extended to women’s work as well. During World War II women were encouraged to express their patriotism by working in laboratories and factories while men went overseas to fight. Afterward, they were encouraged to continue serving their country by applying their technoscientific expertise to life in the suburbs. In particular, women were expected to prepare their homes for the possibility of nuclear attack and foster family togetherness through the judicious consumption of domestic goods. Thus men and women alike were figured as essential to the United States’s development as a technocultural world leader.

Much like science, SF experienced a Golden Age in the 1940s and 1950s. Prior to World War II, SF authors were often dismissed for writing about impossible sciences and technologies. Afterward, they were hailed as visionary prophets and invited to consult with entertainment, industry, and government leaders alike. This period also marked the appearance of the first SF anthologies, the beginning of the SF paperback novel trade, and the explosion of SF storytelling across radio, film, and television. Even with all these changes, magazines remained the heart of the SF community. The most important magazine editor of this period was physicist-turned-pulp SF author John W. Campbell, who took over Astounding Science Fiction (formerly Astounding Stories ) in 1939. Campbell believed that SF was an important part of the larger scientific discourse already changing history. As such, he insisted that authors write stories that were logically extrapolated from current knowledge about the physical world and that they carefully consider the impact of new sciences and technologies on society. While Campbell’s editorial vision dominated SF for years to come, two other editors made equally lasting contributions to the development of the genre: Anthony Boucher, who co-founded the Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction in 1949, and H.L. Gold, who launched Galaxy Science Fiction in 1950. Boucher was a respected mystery writer and translator who published experimental stories of high literary quality, while Gold was a fantasy and comic book writer who excelled at fostering socially satiric SF. Taken together, these three editors shaped SF as a modern genre.

The new story types that proliferated throughout this period underscore the literary and cultural maturity of Golden Age SF. This is particularly evident in the future histories of Robert Heinlein and Isaac Asimov. Heinlein’s future history stories (originally published in Astounding between 1930 and 1960, then reprinted in The Past Through Tomorrow in 1967) tell the tale of a determined humanity that automates travel on Earth and then, over the course of the next three millennia, goes on to colonize the stars. Meanwhile, Asimov’s future history sequence (including the stories collected in 1950’s I, Robot, the Robot novels published between 1947 and 1958) predicts that humans’ robotic creations will eventually become their caretakers, fostering the flame of civilization in even the darkest of times. With their emphasis on galaxy-spanning futures populated by sleek space ships and autonomous robots, such Golden Age stories were clear successors to their pulp-era counterparts. However, both Heinlein and Asimov dramatized technoscientific change in ways that spoke to the lived experience of mid-century readers, treating it as something that comes from the collaborative effort of scientists, soldiers, businesspeople, and government officials and that provokes both hope and fear in the individuals living through ages of wonder that are not necessarily of their own making.

While Heinlein and Asimov used future histories to celebrate technocratic ideals, other Golden Age authors used other SF story forms to critically assess the relations of science, technology, and society. The most significant of these was the nuclear-war narrative. In Judith Merril’s 1950 novel Shadow on the Hearth, Walter Miller’s 1960 novel A Canticle for Leibowitz, and Nevil Shute’s 1957 novel On the Beach, nuclear war is not – as popular thinking then held – something that can be either limited or won. Instead, even the most minor atomic explosions reverberate through space and time, destroying families, plunging nations into savagery, and wiping out humanity altogether. Meanwhile, the media landscape story – which explored worlds dominated by images of advertising and the popular arts – seemed to be a relative lighthearted mockery of American consumerism. And yet short stories such as Fritz Leiber’s 1949 “The Girl with the Hungry Eyes” and Ann Warren Griffith’s 1953 “Captive Audience,” as well as Frederik Pohl and C.M. Kornbluth’s 1953 novel The Space Merchants, turn out to be almost as frightening as their atomic-themed counterparts. As media landscape authors insisted time and time again, the midcentury tendency to protect corporations at the expense of consumers might well lead to the rise of a surveillance state where individuals would be stripped of their civil rights and required to purchase indiscriminately in the name of national security.

Both science and SF developed in new directions in the 1960s and 1970s. One of the most important events influencing the former was the institutional ascendancy of the social sciences. Throughout this period sociologists, psychologists, and anthropologists sought to legitimate their work by emphasizing the scientific nature of their subject matter (the quantifiable world of social relations) and methodologies (including the techniques of statistical inquiry and group research). These efforts were so successful – and so popular with students looking for socially relevant classes – that even the most conservative technical institutes made room for social science courses in their curricula. But social scientists were not the only new players in the technoscientific arena. Supported by Cold War legislation that guaranteed educational funds for talented youth, women flooded science, math, and engineering departments in record numbers. When these women found themselves blocked from graduate school and the best professional careers, they took action. Leading scientists joined the National Organization for Women and led the first class-action lawsuits against sexual discrimination in public university hiring practices. Such efforts led to the ratifi- cation of the 1972 Educational Amendment Acts, whose Title IX guaranteed equal pay for men and women working in higher education, while banning sex discrimination in all federally funded educational programs.

The initial challenge to speculative writing in this period came from a group of transatlantic authors and editors associated with what would eventually be called New Wave SF. The New Wave movement coalesced around Michael Moorcock’s New Worlds magazine in Great Britain in the mid-1960s and debuted in the U.S. with the publication of Harlan Ellison’s Dangerous Visions anthology in 1967 and Judith Merril’s England Swings SF anthology in 1968. New Wave authors maintained that the characters, story types, and technocratic ideals of earlier SF were no longer adequate for dramatizing life in the modern world. As such, it was necessary to make SF new by turning from the hard to the soft sciences and exchanging stories about outer space for those focusing on the inner spaces of individuals and their societies. Other challenges came from the scores of new women writers who joined SF during this period. Feminist author-critics Joanna Russ, Pamela Sargent, and Samuel R. Delany all readily acknowledged that women had always written speculative fiction. But they also maintained that even the best SF remained trapped in “galactic suburbia”: an imaginary space of dazzling technoscientific extrapolation where, oddly enough, social relations still looked like those of 1950s middle-class America. Accordingly, feminist writers called for their comrades to rethink their aesthetic practices and fulfill the Campbellian ideals of good SF by writing fiction that complicated mainstream notions about the future of scientific, social, and sexual relations.

Although they sometimes differed in their ideas about the relations of modern SF to its generic traditions, both New Wave and feminist SF authors used their chosen genre to explore how humans might grapple with alienation from themselves and their worlds. This is particularly apparent in the natural and urban disaster novels of British New Wave author J.G. Ballard. Ballard’s 1962 novel The Drowned World imagines that humans might greet apocalypse (caused, in this case, by solar radiation that transforms Europe and North America into boiling lagoons) as an opportunity to give up technoscientific mastery and embrace devolution. Meanwhile, his 1973 Crash explores a near future where people come to terms with their media-saturated world by restaging and starring in famous car accidents. Much like Ballard, American author Harlan Ellison used the setting of a radically transformed world to explore the inner space of individuals and their societies. This is particularly apparent in Ellison’s infamous 1967 short story “A Boy and His Dog,” which explores the impact of nuclear war on the nuclear family. In its broad outline, Ellison’s story seems much like the conventional Golden Age nuclear-war narrative, but Ellison takes his critique in surprising new directions, insisting that the instigators of war are not impersonal bureaucrats, but hypocritical fathers whose adherence to Cold War sociopolitical ideals decimates the land and drives their children to rape, murder, and cannibalism.

Feminist SF authors of the 1960s and 1970s tended to be more optimistic about the future than their New Wave counterparts. This is apparent in Ursula K. Le Guin’s 1969 novel The Left Hand of Darkness, which uses anthropology, sociology, and psychology to demonstrate how androgynous cultures might distribute childbearing responsibilities and thus power relations more equitably than cultures grounded in sexual division. It is even more evident in Marge Piercy’s 1976 Woman on the Edge of Time and Joanna Russ’s 1975 The Female Man, which illustrate how reproductive technosciences might reform social relations among men and women. In Piercy’s mixed-sex utopia, babies are gestated in mechanical wombs while both men and women use hormone therapy to produce breast milk and enjoy the experience of mothering. Meanwhile, technologically enabled reproduction in Russ’s single-sex utopia liberates women to engage in everything from romance to dueling. Like Bellamy and Gilman before them, feminist SF authors celebrated the possibility of creative social engineering. Drawing inspiration from their politically charged counterparts in the technoscientific professions, however, they insisted that such engineering would be not just a natural side effect of industrial production, but the deliberate achievement of men and women striving to change science and society alike.

New Wave and feminist ideas are still central to SF, but in recent decades the genre has evolved in response to two new technocultural events: the massive expansion of information technologies and the emergence of a transnational economic system supported by these technologies. In the early 1980s home video games and personal computers encouraged users to combine work and leisure in new ways within the privacy of their own homes; the development of the World Wide Web a decade later enabled users to reach out from those homes and forge new kinds of community based on affinity rather than biology or geography. Modern people have been further encouraged to rethink their relations to the larger world by virtue of their position within increasingly global networks of industrial production. The advent of such networks requires people – especially Western people – to reconsider who and what counts within the practice of science and technology. On the one hand, the dominance of industrial production suggests that Western ways of knowing the world are highly successful ones. But gaining access to a global stage allows people to share other technoscientific traditions with one another and even experiment with using those traditions (alone or in tandem with their Western counterparts) as templates for building new and truly more equitable global futures as well.

The premiere narrative form of the information age has no doubt been cyberpunk, the stylish mode of SF storytelling that merges strong interest in cybernetics and biotechnology with generally left-wing or libertarian politics and the do-it-yourself attitude of the early punk rock scene. The term “cyberpunk” was coined by SF author Bruce Bethke in his 1983 story of the same name, but was immediately taken up by editor Gardner Dozois to describe much of the fiction he was publishing in Isaac Asimov’s SF Magazine at that time. Firstgeneration cyberpunk fiction, including William Gibson’s celebrated 1984 novel Neuromancer and the short stories collected in Bruce Sterling’s 1986 Mirrorshades anthology, drew energy from the technocultural events of its time, providing SF with new character types and settings. In cyberpunk, creative engineers and faithful robots give way to amoral but usually good-hearted hackers and willful but usually benign artificial intelligences, all of whom struggle to survive and even transcend the conditions of their existence as tools of a transnational economy. Much of this drama takes place in cyberspace, a sphere of artificial or virtual reality where human and machine intelligences can interact with one another and with the flows of information that comprise modern capitalist practice itself. In the 1990s a new generation of SF novels – including Pat Cadigan’s 1991 Synners, Neal Stephenson’s 1992 Snow Crash, and Melissa Scott’s 1996 Trouble and Her Friends – built upon the cyberpunk tradition by exploring how people (and machines) who recognize the value of raced and gendered bodies within the abstract world of computation might exchange the old dream of transcendence for the new one of material engagement, thereby transforming bad corporate futures into new and more egalitarian ones.

The technoscientific and social ideals endemic to cyberpunk have inspired the development of other SF sub-genres. The artificial intelligences of cyberpunk are predicated on what computer scientist and SF author Vernor Vinge has described as the technological singularity: a near-future moment when computational power enables the creation of superhumanly intelligent machines that change the world in ways that pre-singularity humans cannot even begin to imagine. This has not stopped Vinge trying to imagine such worlds in the 1981 novella True Names and the 1984 and 1986 novels The Peace War and Marooned in Real Time, all of which are told from the perspective of pre-singularity humans who survive the transition to a post-singularity society. Other notable books to explore this theme include Cory Doctorow’s 1996 Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom and Charles Stross’s 2005 Accelerando. Still other SF authors have seized upon the tension between cybernetic and biological enhancement, driving cyberpunk to imagine startling new “wet” futures. Key works in this vein include Kathleen Ann Goonan’s 1994–2000 Nanotech Quartet, Paul Di Filippo’s 1996 Ribofunk, and Margaret Atwood’s 2003 Oryx and Crake. Although these works are very different in tone (Goonan’s books are cautiously utopic, Atwood’s novel is largely dystopic, and Di Filippo makes a playful end run around the whole issue), all three authors are, like their post-singularity counterparts, profoundly interested in the fate of human values, emotions, and aesthetic productions in a posthuman world.

The development of global socioeconomic networks has drawn attention to the fact that SF is no longer the exclusive province of white, Western people. Indeed, it turns out that this has never been the case. Over the course of the twentieth century that other great industrial nation, the Soviet Union, developed an SF tradition parallel to its anglophone counterpart. As early as 1970 Englishspeaking readers could learn about that tradition in Isaac Asimov’s Soviet Science Fiction anthology; today, new anthologies such as Alexander Levitsky’s 2008 Worlds Apart: An Anthology of Russian Science Fiction and Fantasy attest to the continued evolution of Russian SF. The SF community has also recently become aware of an alternate speculative fiction within the transatlantic region itself: Afrofuturism. Early Afrofuturist works include Edward Johnson’s 1904 utopia Light Ahead for the Negro, W.E.B. Du Bois’s 1920 disaster story “The Comet,” and George Schuyler’s 1936–38 serialized future war stories Black Internationale and Black Empire. Since the 1960s Afrodiasporic authors including Samuel R. Delany, Octavia E. Butler, Nalo Hopkinson, and Minister Faust have become luminaries within the SF community; stories by these and other notable Afrofuturists are collected in Sherree R. Tepper’s 2000 and 2004 Dark Matter anthologies and Hopkinson and Uppinder Mehan’s 2004 So Long Been Dreaming: postcolonial science fiction and fantasy collection.

SF has flourished in countries as diverse as China, Japan, and Brazil since the late nineteenth century as well. Perhaps not surprisingly, authors from these countries began writing speculative fiction at the same time that merchants began using industrial technologies. The earliest of these publications include Huang Jiang Diao Sou’s 1904 “Lunar Colony,” Oshikawa Shunro’s 1900 Undersea Warship, and Joachim Felício dos Santos’ 1868–72 Pages from the History of Brazil Written in the Year 2000. Anglo-American readers can learn about contemporary Chinese, Japanese, and Latin American SF in Dingbo Wu and Patrick D. Murphy’s 1989 Science Fiction from China, Gene van Troyer and Grania Davis’s 2007 Speculative Japan: outstanding tales of Japanese science fiction and fantasy, and Andrea L. Bell and Yolanda Molina-Gavilan’s 2003 Cosmos Latinos: an anthology of science fiction from latin America and Spain. Like their Russian and Afrodiasporic counterparts, Chinese, Japanese, and Brazilian SF authors have both revised Western genre conventions and developed new ones in light of their own fantastic literary traditions to better dramatize the processes of industrialization and globalization in their own societies. Taken together, these speculative writing traditions demonstrate that SF is the literature not just of engineers, but of all people living in the modern world.

Source: Clarke, Bruce, and Manuela Rossini. The Routledge Companion To Literature And Science . London: Routledge, 2012. Print.

Bibliography

Alkon, P.K. (1994) Science Fiction Before 1900: imagination discovers technology, New York and London: Routledge. Barron, N. (ed.) (2004) Anatomy of Wonder: a critical guide to science fiction, 5th edn, Westport, CT: Libraries Unlimited. Bould, M., Butler, A.M., Roberts, A. and Vint, S. (eds) (2009) The Routledge Companion to Science Fiction, New York and London: Routledge. Csicsery-Ronay Jr., I. (2008) The Seven Beauties of Science Fiction, Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press. Donawerth, J.L. (1997) Frankenstein’s Daughters: women writing science fiction, Syracuse: Syracuse University Press. Luckhurst, R. (2005) Science Fiction, Cambridge: Polity Press. Melzer, P. (2006) Alien Constructions: science fiction and feminist thought, Austin: University of Texas Press. Roberts, R. (1993) A New Species: gender and science in science fiction, Urbana: University of Illinois Press. Seed, D. (1999) American Science Fiction and the Cold War: literature and film, Chicago: Fitzroy Dearborn. Stableford, B. (2006) Science Fact and Science Fiction: an encyclopedia, New York and London: Routledge. Vint, S. (2007) Bodies of Tomorrow: technology, subjectivity, science fiction, Toronto: University of Toronto Press. Wolmark, J. (2000) Cybersexualities, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Yaszek, L. (2008) Galactic Suburbia: recovering women’s science fiction, Columbus: Ohio State University Press.

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Tags: A Journey to the Center of the Earth , Amazing Stories , Anthony Boucher , Antoine Ferchault de Réaumur , Astounding Stories , Astronomy , Ben Bova , Charles Leadbette , Charlotte Perkins Gilman , Cybercriticism , cybernetics , E.E. "Doc" Smith , Edmond Hamilton , Edmund Hamilton , Edward Bellamy , Eliza Haywood , Fantastic Fiction , Frankenstein , From the Earth to the Moon , Galaxy Science Fiction , H.G. Wells , Herland , Hugo Gernsback , Interstellar Patrol , Introduction to Science Fiction , Jules Verne , Larry Niven , Literary Theory , Looking Backward 2000–1887 , Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction , Poul Anderson , Ralph 124C 41+ , Sci Fi , Science Fiction , Science Fiction Criticism , SF , Stanley G. Weinbaum’ , The Adaptive Ultimate , The Female Spectator , The War in the Air , The World Set Free , Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea , Utopian Literature

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Imagining the Anthropocene: science fiction cinema in an era of climatic change

Neilson, Toby (2020) Imagining the Anthropocene: science fiction cinema in an era of climatic change. PhD thesis, University of Glasgow.

This thesis explores contemporary science fiction cinema through the concept of the Anthropocene. The literature review suggests that science fiction film studies doesn’t engage with ecological concerns as much as it could, that ecocinema studies tends to ignore the genre, and that the broader field of the environmental humanities similarly overlooks the genre’s uses. By bringing science fiction cinema into conversation with emergent Anthropocene debates, it makes useful contributions to science fiction film studies, ecocinematic understanding and the wider environmental humanities field. This thesis is split in two. Part one suggests a trend within a number of science fiction films of the 21st century, which are shown to respond to the ecological concerns of this era marked by rapid environmental change. Chapters two and three in particular are concerned with showcasing how legacy forms of representation in the genre undergo Anthropocene-inflected alterations. These chapters showcase a movement from technological to ecological concern in a selection of contemporary science fiction films. Beyond demarcating this shift towards the ecological that’s being borne out in the genre, this thesis also suggests science fiction cinema as a uniquely placed framework for mediating and experiencing certain aspects of this era. In part two, comprising chapters four and five, this thesis argues for the importance of science fiction films in lending aesthetic and experiential consideration to the dwarfing nonhuman timescales and objects that pervade human experience in the Anthropocene. Through an analysis of the representation of time and planets across a range of films, this thesis argues for the uses and importance of the genre in wider ecocritical discourse and understanding.

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China’s Pluralistic Studies of English Science Fiction: Doctoral Dissertations as Examples

⮌ SFRA Review , vol. 51, no. 2

Symposium: Chinese SF and the World

China’s Pluralistic Studies of English Science Fiction: Doctoral Dissertations as Examples

In globalized sf culture, sf in English has been dominant ever since the birth of modern sf in the 19 th century. As a popular genre, sf development relies heavily and inevitably upon the marketplace, where academic studies would help explore and establish the values obscured by commercial shrouds. In the field of English-language sf study, Chinese scholars have published numerous significant papers, many of which are extracted or extended from their doctoral dissertations, which have got or would be published in book form, constituting in turn the major part of the book publishing in this field. And in terms of academic strength, in China Master’s theses are incomparable to doctoral dissertations, due to their different program requirements. The brief review of this paper thus focuses on doctoral dissertations, together with relevant academic books, as they stand out not only as crystallization of existing relevant research interests, but representing the most comprehensive and highest level of standards.

Searching science fiction or sf as the keyword in the ChinaInfo (万方) thesis database, the results are 293 Master’s theses, 12 doctoral dissertations and 1 post-doctoral report from 2001 to 2019. The results of the same word as the subject in the CNKI (中国国家知识基础设施) thesis database show that, from 1992 to 2019 there are 641 Master’s theses and 45 doctoral dissertations. The results combining these two major academic engines are by no means complete, as studies in Hong Kong, Macao, and Taiwan are not included, and even in the mainland some dissertations choose non-disclosure for up to 5 years upon submission, which means they could only be accessed via university internal libraries. For these inadequacies  in statistics, the survey tries to compensate with the author’s knowledge. Generally, studies of English sf in China involve scholars not only of English literature, but also of Chinese, art, and history, presenting an overall picture of interdisciplinary study, and highlighting the increasingly widened academic attention to the genre.

Studies on SF Translation

Among the search results, many have low or no relevance to the subject. For example, the earliest result of doctoral dissertations is the one by Wang Hongqi (王宏起) in 2002, which is a study of Mikhail Bulgakov’s writing, just mentioning there is influence from H. G. Wells’ books. The earliest dissertation with high relevance appears in 2006, details as below: [1]

This debut is not overdue, as the first doctoral dissertation on Chinese sf by Wang Weiying (王卫英) is completed in the same year. And translation study is a proper beginning, as sf appears in China first as Western import in the early 20 th century. The dissertation takes a descriptive mode of translation studies, the main part including an introduction of the genre and its developmental phases in China, the case study of the translation of five sf stories, three being English, and their impact on the selection and translation of sf, and subsequently upon Chinese sf writing. The analysis centers on the socio-cultural, literary, and translation norms of different historical periods, confirming  the turn from linguistic to cultural approach in China’s translation studies since the late 1990s. During that period, some scholars have turned to the translation of Western popular fictions since the late Qing Dynasty and focused on the working of translation in the target culture, including Kong Huiyi (孔慧怡) from Hong Kong Chinese University, Yang Chengshu (杨承淑) from Fu Jen Catholic University, and Guo Jianzhong (郭建中) who has co-edited with James Gunn the Chinese six-volume The Road to Science Fiction (1997-1999) and published the monograph Translation of Popular Science Works and Science Fiction: Theory, Technique and Practice (2004). Guo is Jiang’s MA supervisor and one advisor of her Ph. D. dissertation.

Studies with Focus on SF Utopianism

As utopia, dystopia and anti-utopia are significant classic achievements in intellectual and literary history, quite a few dissertations have taken these angles to cut in sf studies, as listed below:

As Sargent identifies the three broad directions of utopianism as “utopian thought or philosophy, utopian literature, and the communitarian movements”(222), a lot of dissertations with the keyword utopia are theoretical studies of utopian philosophy, and even the literary study of Utopian Thought in Some British and American Fiction (2008) by Niu Hongying (牛红英) is actually a study of utopian thought in some classical non-sf writers, and thus they are not included in Table 2. Mai Jinghong’s dissertation, though included in the table, has weak relevancy to sf, as it interprets Morris’s work as a daily artistic theory.

Li Xiaoqing’s dissertation was completed several months earlier than Jiang Qian’s, but its focus is on establishing and sorting the British tradition of utopian literature, with no awareness of the overlapping and converging of sf and utopia. It mainly outlines the development and variation of this tradition, tracing its origin back to the ballad The Land of Cokeygne in the 14 th century, and including not only many proto- and modern sf works, but many classical works like William Black’s poetry, Philip Sidney’s pastoral romance, and William Shakespeare’s drama into the tradition. For the representative works of eutopia, dystopia, critical utopia, and female utopia, it offers brief interpretations mainly in terms of their historical contexts.  

Ou Xiangying’s dissertation takes the feminist utopian sf in Europe and America between 1950s and 1990s as its subject, and its method is an integration of literary criticism and cultural studies with a focus on political critique aided by content and form analysis. After expounding how the second wave of feminism influenced utopian writing, and how feminist utopias reformed sf tradition, it goes to a systematic account of significant feminist utopias in terms of single-sex worlds, two-sex worlds, and feminist dystopias, and then sums up the views of science and ethics, political design, and female subjectivity in those feminist utopias. 

Gu Shaoyang discusses some utopian and anti-utopian literature, but the differences are simply relegated to the abstract opposites of ideal and reality, freedom and bondage, good and evil. Tan Yanhong studies the environmental narratives of Oryx and Crake , The Year of Flood , The Hunger Games and Uglies , all published in the 21st century in the US and Canada, and her approach is more a literary criticism than Ou’s with one focus upon the point-of-view narratives in those “dystopias.” Tan generally regards dystopian fiction as a subgenre of sf, but she equals dystopia to anti-utopia. About the notoriously controversial disagreement over the uses of utopia, dystopia and anti-utopia, etc., under the umbrella term utopianism, Yu Yunling and especially Wang Yiping have made detailed clarifications based on discussions of some prominent utopia scholars like Lyman Sargent, Darko Suvin, and Krishan Kumar, which makes their argumentation more solid and forceful. They both follow the specific definitions of the several textual forms of the literary utopia made by Sargent in his famous “The Three Faces of Utopianism Revisited” (1994), and hold that literary anti-utopia is a parody of utopia, depicting a nightmare world with utopian agenda put into practice, while dystopia is not necessarily a negative extension of the previous utopia. Accordingly, Wang regards Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale as a dystopia, the same as Yu does, while classifying her Oryx and Crake , which Tan labels a dystopia, as an anti-utopia in the tradition set by Brave New World .

Wang Yiping’s dissertation aims to study anti-utopian literature as an independent tradition as she deems that in the 20 th century it has become the mainstream imagination of the future, replacing utopia with its alerting attitude to “social progress.” In order to establish such a tradition, she first expounds the transition from utopia to anti-utopia, and defines the responses to the scientific and high-tech world state by H. G. Wells as tide-turning, then goes on to explore the multi-development of the basic themes established in the early 20 th century. For literary studies as a whole, doctoral dissertations in China are usually combinations of historical, theoretical, and textual studies to different degrees, and the latter two approaches are foregrounded respectively by Wang’s and Yu Yunling’s dissertations. Wang finds that the anti-utopian writings are congruent with modern anti-utopian thought, and she draws upon the anti-utopian philosophy, political science and sociology of Karl Popper, F. A. Hayek, Isaiah Berlin, and J. L. Talmon for her fiction analysis. Yu Yunling focuses on the devices intended to achieve textual stability including allegories, authoritative text, monolithic text and patriarchal text, and the counteraction in the process of interpretation which ultimately leads to textual instability. Whilst Tan Yanhong makes use of narrative strategies in her textual analysis, Yu intends to explore some general narrative principles underlying utopian and dystopian writings, which is more narratology oriented. It is not accidental as Yu’s supervisor Qiao Guoqiang (乔国强) is a renowned scholar of narratology in China. 

Yu Yunling’s study represents one tendency in contemporary narratology studies, scholars in this field being increasingly interested in sf especially when addressing issues of postmodern narratives, world building, possible worlds, unnatural narratives and narratology itself. One example is David Wittenberg’s Time Travel: The Popular Philosophy of the Narrative (2012), which argues that time travel fiction can be viewed as “a narratological laboratory,” literalizing many of the basic theoretical questions of storytelling (2). Among many reviews of this book, the renowned sf scholar Adam Roberts made several harsh but pertinent criticisms, one of which is that “Whilst Wittenberg engages with a good spread of primary texts, his knowledge of the secondary criticism of science fiction is thin,” since he positions Bellamy’s Looking Backward as the first time travel fiction, born of Darwinistic prognostication of utopian romances, but his Darwinian thesis “relates less to the ‘utopian’ and rather more to the ‘scientific romance’ mode of the late century” (732-733). Insufficiency in comprehensive knowledge of sf and its criticism, if I might say so not without prejudice, is not uncommon in some narrative studies of sf, as most of their concerns fall ultimately on narrative norms or theories, which likely results in using SF texts as simple exemplifications for their argumentation as well. [2] But still, such studies would benefit sf studies by offering different perspectives. 

Studies with Focus on Science and Technology Narratives in SF

The third type of English SF studies highlights science and technology narratives, as the following table shows:

Mu Yunqiu’s dissertation holds that sf could be regarded as a part of scientific activities because of extraterrestrial exploration constantly involving interstellar fictions, some astronomers having authored sf works, and some astronomical theories containing imaginary content from the 17th to the early 20th century. The underlying position of re-establishing a new history of science based on cultural narratives, is expanded in her postdoctoral report The Study of Science Fiction in the Perspective of the History of Science (2012), which focuses on the narratives about Mars and the Moon, and sf works on the journal Nature . Mu’s cultural perspective of science comes from her supervisor Jiang Xiaoyuan (江晓原), who has published Are We Ready: Science in Fantasies and Reality (2007) and co-authored with Mu A New History of Science: A Study of Science Fiction (2016). In terms of sf study, they explore major themes through the lens of scientific discourse construction.

Yu Zemei’s dissertation argues that cyberpunk fiction is the convergence of SF writing in a postmodernist context and a theoretical turn to body concern. Its five chapters deal with two major issues, the postmodernist characteristics of cyberpunk fiction, and the ideological change of human subjectivity and selfhood brought about by the hybrid fusion of body and technology. Its merit and demerit are equally noticeable. It is a hard-edged study with an extensive literature review of the academic scholarship on cyberpunk. In 2012, Fang Fan (方凡) of Zhejiang University also published a literary study on cyberpunk titled American Postmodern Science Fiction , which is relatively weak in its theoretical grounding compared with Yu’s dissertation. But alongside Yu’s acute observations, there exist some mistakes of negligence. For example, she makes the inaccurate statements “Science Fiction is the genre of technological impact,” and “Body starts occupying increasingly important status in SF since the 1950s” without supportive argument or notes (2-3). 

Guo Wen’s dissertation is quite lucid in language and thinking. She has noticed science and technology has changed the traditional definition of the human, but unlikeYu Zemei focusing on posthumanism and cyborgism, she is mainly concerned with the ethical reflections of technological alienation and human materialization in 16 sf works on cloning from Europe, America and Asia, including Never Let Me Go , Cloud Atlas , Brave New World , etc.. After elucidating the relationship and influence between the development of biotechnology, genetic engineering, and sf writing, her dissertation addresses three ethical situations: individual clones’  copy-of-the-origin status, group of human cloning with individual clones reduced to simulacra and signs, and the failure of utopias of human cloning to solve technological and ecological crises. Her main methodology is “ethical literary criticism”, a paradigm of literary criticism grounded in Western ethical criticism and Chinese moral criticism, first proposed by her doctoral supervisor Nie Zhenzhao (聂珍钊) in 2004. Recently Liu Xiaohua (刘晓华) of Cangzhou Normal University, has published Science and Technology Ethics in Anglo-American Science Fiction (2019), which discusses ethical problems in sf depictions of life intervention, cloning, cyberspace, robots, cyborgs, and the environment, on a much broader scale. 

Studies on Individual SF Writers

The fourth type of studies is on sf writings of individual writers. Among the search results, quite a few studies on George Orwell, William Golding, Kurt Vonnegut, Doris Lessing and Margaret Atwood are not relevant to their sf writings. The below table shows the studies of high relevance to sf:

Studies on individual sf writers start with Ursula K. Le Guin, who has contributed admirably to the genre development, and who, far from denying connection to sf by some writers of similar literary prestige like Vonnegut and Atwood, had a deep sense of identification with the genre. In 1981, “The Dairy of the Rose” (1976) is translated in the namesake collection of sf short stories, and in 1982, an sf introductory anthology translated from the 1978 Japanese original includes introductions to the Earthsea trilogy and The Left Hand of Darkness . [3] During the 1990s, translations of her short stories and novel excerpts appear in the magazine Science Fiction World (《科幻世界》). The first full-length translations of her novels are in mainland China the Earthsea stories in Jan. 2004, and in Taiwan The Left Hand of Darkness Dec. 2004. Le Guin starts to attract academic attention in the late 1990s. Ye Dong’s doctoral supervisor Yang Renjing (杨仁敬) includes sf into classic literary history in A History of Twentieth-Century American Literature (1999), and offers a special part on Le Guin in the co-authored A Concise History of American Literature (2008) (Ye 16-17) .

Ye Dong and Liu Jing both take some sf and fantasy stories of Le Guin as their subjects, though Liu’s title calls it sf inaccurately. Both hold the basic claim that Taoism constitutes one constant influence on Le Guin’s thought and writing, and she is unique in using distinctly Western art forms to communicate primary tenets of Taoism, such as Non-action (无为)，Mutual Generation (相生), Balance (均衡), Yin and Yang(阴阳). Liu discusses representations of Taoist influence from man-nature relation, political ideology, and individual life value, whilst Ye from gender relation, social collective relation, and human-nature relationship. Two out of three their discussions roughly overlap in terms of perspectives, but Ye Dong argues with more clarity and force, in that she consciously discusses Taoist influence in interaction with feminist sf, utopianism, and ecocriticism. And to further fortify her proposal, she adds a chapter on Le Guin’s translation of Tao Te Ching (《道德经》) against the background of the Western understanding of Taoism. 

Wang Shouren (王守仁), Cheng Jing’s doctoral supervisor, devotes a chapter to elucidate the contemporary development of popular literature such as western fiction, crime fiction, sf, and high-tech thriller in The New History of American Literature Vol. 4 (2002), where he mentions that Le Guin is one representative of the  New Wave Movement. This might be one reason for Cheng Jing to choose the subject, since research subjects usually have to be permitted or supported by supervisors. Compared with Ye Dong and Liu Jing, Cheng Jing limits her study to Le Guin’s sf writings, and proposes that Le Guin opposes techno-determinism, technophobia or misuse of technology and advocates for a Taoist deference to the natural development of technology. 

Doris Lessing is introduced and translated in China as early as in the 1950s, with full translations of Hunger (1953), The Grass is Singing (1950) and A Home for the Highland Cattle (1953) published respectively in 1955, 1956 and 1958, and academic study mainly starts in the early 1980s (Wang 172). There are 20 doctoral dissertations or so on her writings since 2005. 

All three in Table 4 focus on Lessing’s five space fictions. Tao Shuqin thinks, somewhat simplistically, that Lessing claims colonization as the real drive of and path to civilization, and the genre “Space Fiction” itself is also a failure, since historical narrative, critical realism, and science fiction are contradictory to one another. Zhang Qi also takes postcolonialism as her major approach, and interprets Lessing’s depiction of the colonial, the female and the diasporic Other as profound revealing of identity crises, which are influenced by her traumatic family experience, life in Africa and identification with Marxism. As she discovers, Lessing’s attention to S&T, her reading of sf works, and conscious adapting sf for social criticism, would explain why she writes those space fictions (180-181).

Generally, Zhang Qi reads those space stories mainly as reflections of power operation in politics, military affairs and culture in the 20 th century, and this implicit interpretation strategy is clarified and defined by Yin Bei as allegorical metaphors, a position foregrounding and also conforming  the thought-experiment features of Lessing’s space fictions especially compared with her earlier writings. Yin Bei focuses on Lessing’s innovative use of sf for cultural and philosophical pondering over the historical interaction of language, cognition and reality, and accordingly she draws on the conceptual metaphor theories proposed by George Lakoff and others. Yin Bei goes deep to explore Lessing’s sophisticated thought-experiments. For example, after examining the two metaphoric paradigms on morality of “The Strict Father Model” and “The Nurturant Parent Model” in Chapter Three, she goes on in Chapter Four to analyze two overlapping but different rationalist ethical views derived from the first paradigm, namely, the Lamarckian Evolutionary Metaphor and the Social Darwinistic Evolution Metaphor. And she concludes that Lessing has revealed  some metaphoric paradigms once derived from concrete life experiences have become entrenched in subconsciousness and cultural norms.

Graduating together with Yin Bei, Li Chan mainly studies H. G. Wells’s sf  against the contemporary culture and the sf tradition. Her dissertation is built up on the basis of Wellsian studies, Western Marxist sf criticism, and literature and science studies, with the main body addressing the evolutionary imaginations in Wells’s sf, the historical isomorphic imaginations of anthropology and Wells’s sf, the two-dimensional depiction of the machines as the symbol of technology and that of mechanism, and the cultural development of Well’s dynamic utopia and its failure. One merit of her dissertation is that the textual analysis is embedded in the discussion of (pseudo-)scientific and cultural construction of evolution discourses and their transmutation into a diachronic model of progress.

Theoretical Studies of Sf

The fifth type is theoretical studies of or related to sf, with two dissertations as listed below:

Ran Dan’s research is a philosophical study, and it is included here as it could help to  understand  the broad context of related discussions. Ran thinks cyborgism has become one of the most influential cultural thoughts in Western academic circles, and it enters the field of posthumanism with its breaking of dualism and challenging of the ontological purity of human subject. The main body discusses the theories of Andrew Pickering, Donna Haraway, and N. Catherine Hayles with an attempt to establish an internal logical connection among them. He Xinye focuses solely on the sf poetics of Darko Suvin, as she finds Suvin is widely referred to but in China there is no in-depth and systematic expounding of his theories. Actually the first chapter of Li Chan’s dissertation interpretes three key concepts of Western Marxist SF study, namely, utopia, estrangement, and cognition, for which Suvin is the cardinal representative. Li’s discussion doesn’t enter He’s investigation, because, as explained earlier, the author chooses non-disclosure. One chapter might be sufficient for the study of Suvin’s theories in relation to sf writing, but it needs a full dissertation to establish its position in the related theoretical history. For example, one section of He’s dissertation is on Suvin’s continuation and development of the classical Marxist concept of cognition, truth and practice. 

In the aspect of theoretical study, Wu Yan (吴岩) has made significant contributions in spite of the fact that  his major concern is Chinese sf. Under his national research project, he has organized the translation of sf theories by Suvin, Brian Aldiss, and Isaac Asimov, and published Literary Theories and Discipline Construction of Science Fiction (2008) and An Outline Study of Science Fiction (2011). The first book offers a comprehensive review of basic theories, critical perspectives and practices, teaching methods and resources of sf study, and the second studies major sf groups of different identities and argues the genre’s legitimacy arises from its cultural marginality.

In this brief survey of doctoral dissertations and related books on English sf in China, we can find the overall research evolves with increasing force. With profound and innovative studies along with some mistakes and limits, what could be strengthened, in the author’s view, is first studies of more significant sf writers. The present studies all engage in those writers canonized in mainstream literary history, but it will take time to expand the scope. Secondly, sf narratives of S&T could be further explored based on more pertinent  theoretical study. For in the contemporary techno-scientific world, S&T is no longer restricted to laboratories or factories, but in Bruce Sterling’s words, pervasive and utterly intimate (xiii), and sf is almost the only genre of abiding interest in S&T embedded in value-loaded social life. Besides, with such studies, the academic stereotype of sf as minor and idiosyncratic might get dispelled.

Academic study is never independent of its institutionalization, as shown here by how Jiang Qian, Yu Yunling, Mu Yunqiu, Guo Wen, Ye Dong and Cheng Jing were guided or inspired by their supervisors in their writing. Most of the doctors discussed in the paper have gained the positions of associate professor or professor at universities, and are supervising graduate students now. With years of intensive research on sf for their dissertations, they have laid a sound foundation in the field and most probably developed genuine devotion to the genre. With these advantages, a promising future of study might be reasonably expected.

[1] For the dissertations and books discussed, I follow their original English titles or translate the Chinese when there are no English ones.

[2] Another typical example is Jan Alber’s Unnatural Narrative: Impossible Worlds in Fiction and Drama (2016). According to Alber, the unnatural narrative in sf becomes “a bona fide concern,” different from the postmodernist “illusion-breaking” unnatural narrative, and the conventionalized sf impossibilities could be explained “through technological progress or simply by associating them with a potential future.” See Jan Alber. Unnatural Narrative: Impossible Worlds in Fiction and Drama . University of Nebraska Press, 2016, pp. 42-43, p. 107.

[3] See Shao Bo (邵柏) and Fu Shen (符申) eds. Meigui Riji 玫瑰日记 [ The Diary of Rose ]. Chongqing Branch of Science and Technology Literature Press, 1981, pp.1-30; Takashi Ishikawa, Norio Ito eds. Shijie zhuming kexue huanxiang xiaoshuo xuanjie 世界著名科学幻想小说选介 [ An Introductory Anthology of World’s Science Fantasy Masterpieces ]. Trans. Gao Qiming (高启明), Pan Liben (潘力本), Wang Lian’an (王连安), Shan Yang (山杨), Su Zhengxu (苏正绪), Jilin People’s Press, 1982, pp. 204-208, pp.341-345. This information is gained from Wang Wen (王文), a big sf fan, who is currently building a comprehensive Chinese sf database.

WORKS CITED

Roberts, Adam. “ Time Travel: The Popular Philosophy of the Narrative .” Textual Practice , vol. 28, no. 4, 2014, pp. 730-734.

Sargent, Lyman Tower. “The Three Faces of Utopianism.” Minnesota Review , vol.7, no. 4, 1967, pp. 222-230.

Sterling, Bruce. “Preface.” Mirrorshades: The Cyberpunk Anthology , edited by Bruce Sterling, Ace Books, 1986. 

Wang, Jiaqi (王嘉琦). Duolisi laixin zuopin de fanyi ji yanjiu zongshu多丽丝·莱辛作品的翻译及研究综述 [“A Brief Review of Translation and Research of Doris Lessing”]. Heilongjiang shizhi [《黑龙江史志》], no. 21, 2013, pp. 172-173.

Wittenberg, David. Time Travel: The Popular Philosophy of the Narrative . Fordham University Press, 2012.

Ye, Dong. Ursula K. Le Guin’s Quest for Tao in Her Science Fiction and Fantasy World . Xiamen University Press, 2017.

Yu, Zemei (余泽梅). Saibopengke kehuan wenhua yanjiu—yi shenti wei shijiao 赛博朋克科幻文化研究——以身体为视角 [“ The Culture of Cyberpunk Science Fiction—A Study from the Perspective of Body ”]. Diss., Sichuan University, 2011.

Zhang, Qi (张琪). Lun duolisi laixin taikong xiaoshuo zhong de wenhua shenfen tanxun论多丽丝·莱辛太空小说中的文化身份探寻 [“ On Cultural Identity in Doris Lessing’s Space Fictions ”]. Diss., Xiangtan University, 2014.

Li Chan , Ph. D. of English language and literature, associate professor at College of Foreign Languages and Cultures of Sichuan University, China. Her research interests include modern and contemporary literature, literary theories and sf study. She has published “The Utopian Vision of the Marxist Science Fiction Criticism” (2013), “On the Characteristics of the Unnatural Narrative in Science Fiction” (2018), Estranged Cognition: A Study of H. G. Wells’s Science Fiction (2019), and “The Rise of Techno-culture Criticism in SF Theories” (2021). 

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Science Fiction as Moral Allegory

Journal of Futures Studies, March 2020, 24(3): 105–112

Timothy Dolan, Policy Foresight, 1258 Munson Drive, Ashland, Oregon, U.S. Tel.: 1-541-499-5593

* Web Text version of each JFS paper here is for easy reading purpose only, for the valid and published context of each article, please refer to the PDF version. 

Keywords:  Science Fiction, Ethics, Classic Science Fiction, Influences on Futures Studies, Popular Science Fiction

Introduction

An extraordinary amount of science fiction (SF) carries significant content of a moralistic nature consistently reflecting concerns about social becoming nested within the context of the times the works were written (Blackford, 2017). As a rule it is perilous to lump an entire genre into any single orientation, but in the case of SF and ethics there are strong connections especially in the classic works familiar to the general public. It makes a lot of sense when one considers that ethics is much about consequences and SF is much about illuminating them.

“Moral literature” is a term likely to set off associations with various scripturally based “just so” stories, often written for children as digestible lessons in the faith, or as with Aesop’s fables, intended to carry explicit principles of human relations. These tales were explicitly meant to justify existing conventions as well as highlight key social principles. The favored genres of this literature are fable and apologue through which the normative world is justified in contradistinction to parable (“It has been written, but I say unto you…”) and satire; which are the genres of subversion.

Layered over this stratum of edification literature were the now archaic studies in character development that held popular attention in the 18 th and through to the early 20 th century. These were exemplified in the works of Charles Dickens, and in America through the Horatio Alger stories. These coincided with a strain of “muscular Christianity” that manifested itself in both the YMCA and Boy Scouts in response to the societal consequences of concentrating large numbers of young men in the manufacturing centers where drunkenness, gambling and prostitution were corroding civilization itself in the eyes of the churchmen of the day. These series relentlessly pressed the theme of triumph over adversity. Weakness of the flesh rigorously suppressed through sport was also a well-worn theme persisting well into more recent times as this author recalls arguments in favor of school athletics programs for males as a means to dampen sexual impulse. Thus this moralistic literature was much shaped as a response to industrialization and its resulting initial in-migration of young single men.

These emphases on moral virtue would wax and wane as industrial urbanism began to mature and new mediums were introduced. A kind of dialectical struggle for hearts and minds would play out in the early 20 th century with the rise of the novel. The novel itself as a literary form had a reputation for titillation in the eyes of the straight- laced, but its broad popularity determined that titillation might be okay if it was well written by, say, a D.H. Lawrence. In Europe surrealism and the explosive works of Sigmund Freud would mark the contradictory shadow side of imperial order, and rigid rationality that marked a wide swath of Western Europe from Victorian London to Vienna. Ultimately it would be World War I that would bring the biggest challenge to moralist apologue. Overtly ambivalent novels began showing up in the works of the likes of Fitzgerald, Hemingway, Orwell and Steinbeck that gave voice to the random nature of human experience and fate independent of character both good and bad. 1

Then there were the cinematic treatments of moral themes generally framed as cautionary tales to justify the popular bourgeois sentiments largely in reaction to the near pornographic period of movie making in the early 1900s (Grievenson, 2004). The cinematic flipside of Horatio Alger were the gangster films of the 1930s and 40s becoming somewhat more refined in the Film Noir genre of the 1940s and 1950s. The standard Noir theme involved some poor male (the “sap” as known in the nomenclature of the day) falling for an evil “dame” who would prove to be the undoing of them both. While the message of Horatio Alger was the affirmation of the Protestant work ethic, Film Noir demonstrated the violent dark-side consequences of yielding to temptation and taking both material and carnal shortcuts.

Science fiction as Ethical Instruction

An important caveat moving forward is that the “science fiction” referred throughout this piece is the genre as popularly perceived. “Literature” is also broadly drawn to include numerous film productions both cinematic and for television. This is also not science fiction as sometimes defined by literary scholars. To this point is the case of Jules Verne, who is conventionally seen as an early science fiction writer reflecting a popular view that is disputed by Verne scholar William Butcher, 2005. He points out that Verne’s books almost never contain any innovative science whatsoever, but merely extended known technologies, like the submarine and rocketry, beyond the limitations of their day. However, projection of the present is a key feature of most science fiction. In that regard, at least two of his most prominent works, 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea , and Journey to the Moon , might qualify at least nominally as science fiction though the latter work is now relegated to space fantasy.

There are many familiar industrial era writers like Mary Shelly (Frankenstein), and Robert Lewis Stevenson (Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde) that some see as straddling the fuzzy boundaries of genre. For instance, Frankenstein simultaneously described as a gothic novel and the earliest work of science fiction (Aldiss, 2005). They are in the science fiction genre for having an unambiguous moral content stamped into their work that ran counter to the scientific optimism that was de rigueur among the intelligentsia of that time. The message of unease over the mischievous potential of rogue science leading to abominations had common cause with the character literature that ran contemporaneously with it. 2 The impulsiveness of Prometheus, and the recklessness of Icarus are recapitulated in Shelly’s as well as in Robert Lewis Stevenson’s main character.

In similar fashion, the next generation of classical SF writers, H.G. Wells, Aldous Huxley, and his Eton pupil, Eric Blair (aka George Orwell), would also emerge to transform the genre by infusing it with more overt dystopian social commentary. Their overarching messages were of deep skepticism over the technological optimism embedded in modernism. This ranged from genetic and pharmacological manipulations in Brave New World, and The Island of Dr. Moreau, to the pernicious potential of collective mind control and the prospect of television to watch us in 1984 , which anticipated our entanglement in the “world-wide web” by several decades. Their com- mon vehicle for expressing concerns over the then present-day prospects of their respective societies was that of allegory. The use of allegory was a splendid hook to engage serious literary elites in speculative projection that was not simple fantasy, but spoke to very real and very rising trends.

H.G. Wells personified ambivalent contrasting futures as with the utopianism of The Shape of Things to Come and the dark projections of The Time Machine , and his prescient concerns with genetic manipulation in The Island of Dr. Moreau . Wells was an especially seminal figure in exploiting the tensions between utopian and the dystopian. Yet echoes of consequence for human transgression goes back to Gilgamesh, Genesis, Homer and Dante. He is also arguably the progenitor of Futures Studies as an academic discipline, arguing for establishing “foresight” in university pedagogy (BBC 4, 2019) 3 .

A final note about Wells and the use of SF as social allegory manifested in The Time Machine where he presents a vision of a system so polarized as to manifest two species, the refined, elegant, pastoral but passive, almost bovine bubble culture of the Eloi; and the brutish literal underclass of the Morlocks who feed on the flesh of the beautiful but thoroughly domesticated prey. It was allegorical critical commentary on the aesthetic movement of late 19 th century England that promoted art for art’s sake promoted by the likes of Oscar Wilde. One can perceive presnt-day parallels in the rise of “Hipsterism” and the reactions of a resentful working class that would metaphorically like nothing better than to eat these influencer wannabe-trust fund babies.

The rise of feature film heralded a new means to project contemporary angst into SF casings. The earliest and arguably most influential for its day was Fritz Lang’s magnum opus, Metropolis (1927) that captured that critical period between the World Wars when political polarization in Germany split the nation between Bolshevik Marxism-Leninism and rising NAZI nationalism. It is a model for SF moral allegory in projecting 1927 to 2027 and extrapolating class tensions to a remarkably accurate portrayal of high-tech mechanization manifesting impressive urban landscapes, but at the cost of the misery of workers. It is a lesson in how the gap between the top 1 percent literally on top and rest would lead to profound conflict. Lang was not at all nuanced in his use of Christian metaphor with the film’s apex-corporatist father “Joh” (a German play on “Jehovah”) being very Old- Testament in his determination to hold power. The film’s heroine, “Maria” (literally a virgin mother as caretaker for the workers’ children) would meet and love-smite Fredor, the son of Joh and from their unlikely encounter launch his romantic quest where he would encounter and then take on the trappings and suffering of his fellows complete with a magnificently stylized crucifixion scene. An iconic mad scientist complete with gloved hand (a stock prop in all subsequent evil genius stereotypes) would create an AI/android clone of Maria, purposefully designed (by Lang) with asymmetrical eyes to convey the imperfection of all human artifice. The real Maria, kidnapped to create the imposter, would predictably be rescued, but the fake would incite the masses to violent revolution, who did not realize until almost too late, that they were to flood their own abodes and in so doing kill their own children (a not unsubtle message by Lange who was ever the bourgeois moderate trying to find a humane middle path to reconcile the classes. Hardly anyone knows the intent of the movie now as much of it has been lost to poor preservation. Yet, almost everyone has seen the images with the film’s special effects, which are still amazing 93 years later.

Fig. 3 is especially chilling for its coincidental resemblance to the Holocaust made more apparent when the full scene is observed. This uneasy relationship with the industrial era and the persistence of often very gross social inequities is a running theme that is with us to this day. Bringing moral and ethical guidance to historical process is a powerful theme in SF, especially in its popular classical corpus of works.

The mid-twentieth century generation of SF writers would elaborate on this thread, led by Isaac Asimov and his Foundation Trilogy and his “I Robot” corpus, the latter core element being a robotic ethical code, “The Three Laws of Robots”. Arthur C. Clarke’s works were more about science writing, very much representing a kind of therapeutic technological optimism, HAL 9000, and his “treaty” with Isaac Asimov notwithstanding (McAleer, 1992). When he did venture into the transcendent moral theme such as in Childhood’s End, (1953), it was through the trope of encounter with advanced alien forms that were wisely not over described, but transcendently beneficent in overall tone. Clarke did more than write morally informed SF. He famously testified against the Reagan administration’s “Strategic Defense Initiative” (SDI) in the early 1980s earning him the wrath of program proponent Robert Heinlein. Ray Bradbury, another eminent writer of popular science fiction of that generation, was often identified as intensely moralistic (Bloom, 2010). Even Frank Herbert, author of what is often considered to be the greatest science fiction novel ever written, embedded a deep ecological sensibility in the tapestry of Dune (Cappel, 2012). The movie Avatar (2009) would invert Dune’s environmental thread with a plot in which an Eden was about to become a wasteland whereas in the Dune , a wasteland would become, at least ecologically, an Eden.

Fig. 1: Selected Iconic Images from Metropolis

Fig. 2: Fredor’s Stylized Crucifixion from Metropolis

Fig. 3: Fredor’s Vision of Mass Slaughter in Service to Industrialism

Both works were allegories with Herbert particularly prescient is envisioning exploitation of an essential resource (spice as petroleum) in a desert place (Arrakis as Iraq) leading to a messianic uprising by the indigenous “Freman” (The quest to establish a caliphate in all its forms).

Then comes the problematic Robert Heinlein. Robert Heinlein, was viewed by many as holding the most dubious of moral codes, yet it turns out that he did hedge his near Ayn Randian views according to Wight, 2005:

Robert Heinlein, who strenuously insists that “selfishness is the bedrock on which all moral behavior starts” completes this same sentence by noting that such behavior” can be immoral only when it conflicts with a higher moral imperative” (2004). Hence, he explicitly acknowledges that a higher moral imperative exists, and sometimes must be operative.

Heinlein grudgingly acknowledged a “higher moral order” that trumps the radical individualist views he was known to espouse. While acknowledged as one of the “big three” of mid-to-late 20 th century SF writers (with Asimov and Clarke) his approach did not deal with issues of social justice or “right conduct” in any meaningful way and his work is thus an anomaly to the prevailing connections between SF and ethics.

The other noteworthy element of the moralistic strain of the science fiction genre is how much of it has been driven by the Anglo-American tradition, quite likely because being at the cutting edge of technological invention for much of the past century alerted its literati to its perils. Sensitivity to the consequences flowing from innova- tion is supported beyond the Anglo-American perspective. There is Japanese science fiction led by Godzilla and its variants, almost all of which rooted in the horrible mutations that came from exposure to nuclear radiation, of which the people of Japan had first-hand experience. Marxist/Leninist socio-economic determinism undergirding the Soviet project would generate a cadre of writers who would use science fiction to mask their critique of that ideology (World Futures Studies Federation, 1986). First among the Soviet SF was Yevgeny Zamyatin’s We , (1921), often cited as the touchstone for dystopian SF.

The fear of extra-terrestrial invasion, a theme first brought to the public imagination by H.G. Wells in The War of the Worlds (Hughes and Geduld, 1993) would later be resurrected in a classic 1938 radio broadcast that unintentionally resonated with the American public’s skittishness over the rise of fascist militarism. This fear of the foreign ideological other bent on invasion would yield bastard spawn with the rise of the Cold War. After all, Anglo Americans had visited policies of displacement and extermination, mostly by exposure to disease, on the native peoples of North America, and thus had a collective unconscious terror of the same fate for them. In a remarkably ironic twist, Well’s had turned that fear on its head by having the invaders die off from exposure to the microbes instead of visa versa.

The crude alien-invasion kitsch of B-movie Hollywood that fed on the Red-scared American imagination of the 1950s into the mid-1960s made that sub-genre an easy premise to sell. This was especially true to a tide of baby boomer teens looking for visceral thrills of what were more monster movies than science fiction proper. To the extent that there was any edifying messages, they were either proto-environmental with portrayals of the consequences of our pollution, nuclear and otherwise, assaulting nature and having its mutant minions reeking vengeance in return, or appeals to unify in the face of larger external threats echoing the allied response to Axis predations, Soviet containment, United Nations idealism, or good old human xenophobia.

In the midst of the tabloid made-for-teens fluff of pop SF, a classic would emerge in the American film The Day the Earth Stood Still (1951), a thinly veiled appeal for universal demilitarization that resonated well beyond the generation that first viewed it. The undergirding theme of seeking to understand the “other” was in a grand tradition of SF that goes all the way back to Shelly’s Frankenstein. In this, it again provided instruction that harkened back to the fates of scriptural prophets and even messiahs that contradicted the attitudes of their times to later earn vindication. What made this movie particularly impressive was its clear confrontation over the prevailing attitudes of those times that were resolutely hostile to that most alien of threats to Americans, the two headed monster of Stalinism and Maoism.

Well over a decade later would come, via the television screen, and the next prophet of social justice in the person of the American writer and television producer, Rod Serling, and most incisively in his Twilight Zone television series. He was very much the contrarian but in every sense one based upon a moralist perspective.

Serling’s deeply held sense of social justice infused his scripts often set beyond of this world’s time and space (a literal “Twilight Zone”) with political and social allegory not seen since Orwell. Serling’s work coincided with the social upheavals of the 1960s and the moral questions showcased in his series mirrored the times. Civil rights, social alienation, the manipulative power of fear, the Vietnam War, the early space program, were all addressed as moral issues under the veneer of science fiction.

The next wave of popular television SF was Roddenberry’s Star Trek . It’s first incarnation only lasted 3 seasons, but perhaps even more than Serling, shaped a generation in its view of frontiers, both still existing and being a mixed bag of beneficent discovery and unambiguous threat. It’s tropes were, in fact, quintessentially American as a futuristic version of the old west with cowboys and Indians, outlaws and settlers. Its bastard offspring Battlestar Galactica was likewise seen to have emulated the themes of classic westerns. (Porter, Lavery, & Robson, 2008).

The climatic model of SF allegorical film that seemed to forecast the current rise of xenophobia (It has always been around in either latent or active) was Blade Runner . Here the xenophobia was reframed as “terraphobia” insofar as the humanoid “replicants” were consigned to off-world exile to do the dirty work of their progenitors. The core moral issues addressed in this now classic film derived from a novel by Philip K. Dick is an articulate treatment of a well-established SF trope concerning what it is to be human. In this it aligns with those earlier clas- sics like Frankenstein and the Island of Doctor Moreau . The movie itself also makes use of Christian metaphor where the arguably most favored son replicant returns to confront his father, killing him in frustration over his mortality. The final scenes have him saving and forgiving the man who was pressed into killing him and his kind. The use of eyes (windows to the soul) were also a constant presence throughout the movie.

A key point regarding the moral dimensions of science fiction is that it often rises to the level of classic literature because it exposes the contradictions of prevailing norms in its investigation of the moral ambiguities that arise from the socio-technological nexus. These include such themes as genetic engineering, surveillance societies, AI, space exploration, and again, what it means to be human. In this there is a resonance with many of those drawn to futures studies where finding normative contradictions and anticipating the transformations that come from them is a vital part of the field. Good science fiction is never about building utopias as much as about warning of the dystopias seeded in their attempt. So too is the implicit charge of the futures studies/foresight communities to explore alternative structures and processes are employed towards its end. “Justice” is of course, part of the moral amalgam with “honor”, “responsibility”, and “wisdom” being three other ingredients with other values that might be added to individual cognitive taste. “Freedom” is a trace element. At best it’s the freedom to choose futures wisely. The timeless lessons of consequence to innovations and policies over the long-term exemplified in classic SF is thus a useful and even essential resource in foresight/futures studies.

Virtue (moral sensibility by another name) is not an antiquated relic of Confucian-Greco-Christian thought though the word itself might be seen as such. The sentiment persists in deep in the cultural ether and invoked in other ways. This is evidenced by its high “cited by” metrics on Google Scholar for works like MacIntyre, 2013; (26,321 as of April 30, 2019 + 1 with this author’ s reference) that deals with the question of what is described as “after virtue”. One can reasonably intuit that in an age of institutional and ethical compromise at the highest levels of government seemingly all over the world, there is a countermovement arising. It is led by the likes of first-year congressperson Alicia Ocasio-Cortez, the barely-teen environmental activist Greta Thunberg, and still teenage gun control advocate and Parkland High School mass shooting survivor David Hogg among the countless other advocates for human dignity worldwide. As foresight/futurists, we would do well to maintain a moral compass as our work may come to make a difference in the coming inflections of humanity and its anticipated variants.

The moral dimensions of SF provide guardrails, or better, highway lane reflectors that the high beams of foresight illuminate as historical process moves at ever greater velocities, and thus to ever greater risks. A rising generation of activists have exposure to the moral underpinnings of SF, if only through the complex storylines in the Marvel Universe cinema and the better multiplayer gaming platforms that require mutual cooperation and trust in scenarios that challenge the lure of expediency. It is in this sense that as the paradigm of religion holding a monopoly over ethical conduct has morphed, first by Enlightenment and now popular SF visions.

Futurists, particularly those involved in public policy areas, would be well served to be cognizant of the influ- ences of SF and its metaphors in the Causal Layered Analysis (CLA) sense. They are useful points of departure for imagining and implementing alternative futures. In this Inayatullah’s work in anticipatory action learning is a useful guide (Inayatullah, 2005; 2006). Given that SF tends to examine themes in a form of storytelling that throws the socio-technological nexus into a critical light, often removed from current time and space, its ability to break out of convention and go to the mythic levels of discourse makes it a unique literary genre. More then that, however, is its capacity to consider and develop the moral dimensions of these alternatives. Without such considerations there is a risk of drift towards a mindset to engage in practices simply because they can be done without rigorous review of potential consequences. After all, nearly every technological innovation has either been first developed or subsequently found military applications. The military implications of technology are one strain of SF, but only one. Larger societal and even deeper cultural alternatives are another rich vein to mine with an eye less towards achieving a homogenous preferred future, but as ethical guidance in the quest to create preferred futures justice. SF may not be the only moral literature left but the best of it is that.

• Except for the comeuppance of Jay Gatsby in Fitzgerald’s magnum opus, it is notable that the banal ignorance that come of privilege in the person of Daisy got away scot (pardon the pun) free.
• A useful primer on the relationship between science and literature is Clarke, B., & Rossini, M. (Eds.). (2010). The Routledge companion to literature and science. Routledge.
• Pay particular attention to the bonus segment of the “Time Machine” podcast at about the 49-minute mark where he is quoted as appealing for developing a university pedagogy in “foresight”.

Aldiss, B. W. (2005) “on the origin of species: Mary Shelley”.  speculations on speculation: theories of science fiction . eds. James Gunn and Matthew Candelaria. Lanham, Maryland: Scarecrow.

BBC Radio 4, (2019), In Our Time, “The time machine”, (Broadcast and Podcast) https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m0009bmf (Retrieved, November 28, 2019)

Blackford, R. (2017).  Science fiction and the moral imagination: visions, minds, ethics . Springer.

Bloom, H. (2010). Ray Bradbury . Infobase Publishing.

Butcher, W. (2005). Hidden treasures: the manuscripts of” twenty thousand leagues”. Science Fiction Studies , 43-60.

Cappel, R. (2012). Science fiction is a humanism: the “open universe” ethics of Frank Herbert’s Dune. Crisis , 75 , 71.

Clarke, B., & Rossini, M. (Eds.). (2010). The Routledge companion to literature and science . Routledge.

Grievenson, L. (2004). Policing Cinema: Movies and Censorship in Early-Twentieth-Century America . Univ. of California Press.

Hughes, D. Y., & Geduld, H. M. (1993). A Critical Edition of The War of the Worlds: HG Wells’s Scientific Romance.  Bloomington: Indiana UP . p. 1.

Inayatullah, S. (2006). Anticipatory action learning: Theory and practice.  Futures ,  38 (6), 656-666.

MacIntyre, A. (2013).  After virtue . A&C Black.

McAleer, N. (1992). Arthur C. Clarke: The Authorized Biography . Chicago, Contemporary Books.

Porter, L. R., Lavery, D., & Robson, H. (2008). Finding Battlestar Galactica: An Unauthorized Guide . Sourcebooks, Inc..

Wight, J. B. (2005). Adam Smith and greed. Journal of Private Enterprise , 21 (1), 46.

World Futures Studies Federation, IX WFSF World Conference & General Assembly: Who Cares? – And How? (conference proceedings) Honolulu, Hawaii, May 1986.

Zamyatin, Y. (1993). We. 1921. Trans. & Intro. Clarence Brown. New York: Penguin Books .

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(Thesis) The End of the World as We Know It: Theoretical Perspectives on Apocalyptic Science Fiction

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science fiction

What is science fiction definition, usage, and literary examples, science fiction definition.

Science fiction  (SIGH-innss FICK-shun) is a type of literature that deals with inventive technologies, futurism, space travel and exploration, and other science-based components. Technically, science fiction is a subgenre of the larger  genre  of fiction, but because science fiction is such a vast and broad category on its own, most writers and readers consider it a standalone genre.

Science fiction blends authors’ imaginative creations with scientific ideas, theories, predictions, and conjectures. Authors often utilize science fiction to explore the complexities and limitations of human nature in extraordinary circumstances.

The term  science fiction  was first used in 1851, but it wasn’t until 1929, when it appeared in advertisements for an early sci-fi magazine  Air Wonder Stories , that the term entered the public lexicon .

The History of Science Fiction

The wonders of the unknown have long sparked the imagination. Writers have broken down the barrier between  mythology  and known facts since ancient times. Assyrian  satirist  Lucian wrote one of the first science fiction works,  A True Story , in the second century; it was about space travel, extraterrestrial life, and interplanetary battles.

The Scientific Revolution brought forth new ideas and discoveries that inspired writers to imagine what lay beyond the ever-increasing known world. The emphasis on knowledge during the Age of Enlightenment enhanced science fiction further, with writers crafting complex worlds and stories that drew from evolving understandings about science and human nature.

Once the novel became the preeminent literary form in the 19th century, detailed science fiction tales emerged. Mary Shelley’s  Frankenstein  and Jules Verne’s  Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea  were among the most widely read science fiction novels.

As space exploration—first as a dream, then as a reality—took centerstage during the latter-19th and 20th centuries, science fiction continued to expand and imagine what was possible.

During the 1960s and 1970s, science fiction writers began to experiment with the form, infusing it with heavily literary sensibilities and more creative storytelling devices. Socially conscious sci-fi works also emerged during this period, touching upon issues such as feminism, civil rights, and class disparities. Social themes that reflect the times continue to interest sci-fi writers, with much attention paid to 21st-century issues like environmental destruction, the repercussions of the Internet and seemingly limitless information, and the ethics of human cloning.

Common Themes in Science Fiction

One of the hallmarks of science fiction is the considerable creative freedom it allows the author. However, there are certain themes that sci-fi authors tend to examine more than others:

• Alternative worlds : These  settings  are hypothetical planes of existence that subsist parallel with a known one. Also called parallel universes and/or alternate realities, these worlds can include alternative versions of actual historical events or different scientific laws.
• Extraterrestrials : An extraterrestrial is any life form that doesn’t come from Earth. Popular extraterrestrial themes in science fiction include aliens and Martians, alien invasions and abductions, and interplanetary warfare between humanoids and other life forms.
• Outer space : Space has fascinated science fiction authors since the  genre ’s earliest days, serving as the setting for countless novels. Space exploration, travel, and warfare are common science fiction subjects.
• Scientific possibilities : Obviously, science—whether real or speculative—plays a significant role. The science, in most cases, serves as a crucial lynchpin in the story, propelling the action and often creating challenges along the way. Teleportation, time travel, mind control, and warp drives are popular scientific possibilities incorporated in many sci-fi works.
• Technology : Technology in science fiction encompasses a wide range of equipment often designed with super-intelligent capabilities. This technology might currently exist, be a predicted invention with a basis in current technology, or be entirely speculative. Robots, supercomputers, holograms, and speed-of-light space travel are just a few types of technology seen in sci-fi novels.

Types of Science Fiction

Science fiction is a part of the larger umbrella of speculative fiction. Speculative fiction contains several subgenres that feature futuristic, fantastical, or supernatural plot elements; basically, any imagined components that don’t exist in the context of the everyday world. Other types of speculative fiction include  fantasy , horror, paranormal, and apocalyptic literature.

Science fiction itself comes in two main types: hard sci-fi and soft sci-fi. Hard science fiction is based on scientific accuracy and known facts and logic. Put another way, it tells stories rooted in the concepts of natural science. This approach can enhance the authenticity of the story and the idea that the  plot ’s event could, conceivably, happen. Examples of hard science fiction include  The Andromeda Strain  by Michael Crichton,  The Martian  by Andy Weir, and Kim Stanley Robinson’s  Mars  trilogy .

Soft science fiction places greater emphasis on the human aspects of the story, integrating sciences of human behavior, like psychology, sociology, and politics. Mary Shelley’s  Frankenstein ,  Robert A. Heinlein’s  Stranger in a Strange Land , and Ursula K. Le Guin’s  The Left Hand of Darkness  are all soft science fiction novels.

Some readers prefer another definition of soft science fiction, one that serves as a counterpoint to hard science fiction. This definition views soft sci-fi as any story not rooted in known scientific logic, accuracy, or plausibility.

Subgenres of Science Fiction

There are multiple subgenres in the world of science fiction, such as the following:

• Dystopias and utopias :  Dystopias  takes place in future or near-future societies where life and social structures are in catastrophic decline, and humans fight for survival in often violent and oppressive conditions. Utopias are the opposite: idealized worlds in which life and social structures are idyllic, and any  conflict  stems from human fallibilities.
• Fantasy : Science fantasies occur in  settings  that defy known, natural scientific laws; they draw inspiration from  myths and folktales  and usually utilize magic to some extent.
• Space operas : These are epic adventures and/or romances set in outer space.
• Supernatural : Science fiction in this vein incorporates mystical phenomena like psychic abilities, occultism, witchcraft, or wizardry

Functions of Science Fiction

The purpose of this genre is to explore the possible and speculate about the unknown. It gives readers an idea of what might happen in the future if certain events—such as scientific breakthroughs or technological advances—come to pass and how humans might respond accordingly. Given its imaginative nature, science fiction inspires readers to envision a more advanced, innovative, and adventurous future.

The opposite can also be true. An author might use science fiction to delve into the unsavory consequences of scientific advancement. They might look at how this progress endangers humans and the environment; upsets the natural balance of the universe; or triggers discord between communities, leaders, or planets. This perspective would make a work of science fiction a cautionary tale.

Some works of science fiction are  allegories  for current or past events. The genre allows the author to examine and reinterpret these events in an imaginative way that resonates with readers and compels them to consider larger issues.

Science Fiction in Popular Culture

Science fiction is fertile creative ground for filmmakers. It’s hard to imagine the current popular cultural landscape without  Star Wars , which set the standard for all sci-fi movies to come. Those movies include juggernauts like  Alien ,  Blade Runner ,  Ex-Machina,   Interstellar , and  The Matrix .

On television, science fiction has an equally prominent role.  Star Trek  is an undisputed classic of the  genre .  Doctor Who ,  Firefly ,  Lost in Space ,  Stargate , and  The Twilight Zone  are just a sampling of popular small-screen science fiction programs.

Science fiction themes are customary in graphic novels and comic books. Everything from Superman to the X-Men fall under the category of sci-fi. Many serve as the source material for popular film franchises.

Notable Science Fiction Writers

• Douglas Adams,  The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy
• Isaac Asimov,  I, Robot
• Margaret Atwood,  Oryx and Crake
• Ray Bradbury,  The Martian Chronicles
• Octavia E. Butler,  Kindred
• Arthur C. Clarke,  2001: A Space Odyssey
• Philip K. Dick,  Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?
• Ursula Le Guin,  The Left Hand of Darkness
• Jules Verne,  Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea
• G. Wells,  The Time Machine

Examples of Science Fiction Literature

1. H.G. Wells,  War of the Worlds

Wells’s 1898 classic, narrated by an unnamed man, follows the Martian takeover of Earth, from the first flashes in the night sky to their complete destruction of human social structures and norms. It begins as follows:

The Eve of the War No one would have believed in the last years of the nineteenth century that this world was being watched keenly and closely by intelligences greater than man’s and yet as mortal as his own; that as men busied themselves about their various concerns they were scrutinized and studied, perhaps almost as narrowly as a man with a microscope might scrutinize the transient creatures that swarm and multiply in a drop of water.

Though a deadly pathogen eventually destroys the Martians, their visit leaves the narrator—and the planet as a whole—in tatters.

2. Doris Lessing,  Shikasta

Lessing’s 1979 novel is a history of the planet Shikasta—a symbolic Earth—told through the reports of explorers from the nearby planet of Canopus. The following opens the novel:

I have been sent on errands to our Colonies on many planets. Crises of all kinds are familiar to me. I have been involved in emergencies that threaten species, or carefully planned local programmes. I have known more than once what it is to accept failure, final and irreversible, of an effort or experiment to do with creatures who have within themselves the potential of development dreamed of, planned for…and then—Finis! The end! The drum pattering out into silence…

The first portion of the book details the prehistory of Shikasta; the second part the destruction of the planet in the 20th century; and the third the apocalyptic war that ultimately decimates it.

3. Ted Chiang, “The Story of Your Life”

Chiang’s short story about the arrival of extraterrestrials—which was adapted into the 2016 film  Arrival —beings with linguist Dr. Louise Banks reflecting on the events of the story:

I know how this story ends; I think about it a lot. I also think a lot about how it began, just a few years ago, when ships appeared in orbit and artifacts appeared in meadows. The government said next to nothing about them, while the tabloids said every possible thing.

And then I got a phone call, a request for a meeting.

As Banks works with the aliens and learns their language, she begins to understand and process time as they do—and their idea of time is much different than that of humans. She soon sees her future and the daughter who hasn’t yet been born but will, at a young age, die of a terminal disease. Knowing her future, Dr. Banks risks heartbreak to have a family and the chance to love.

Further Resources on Science Fiction

The Atlantic  looks at  how science fiction inspired scientific progress .

NPR has  a list of the 100 science fiction and fantasy books , as chosen by readers.

Looking to write science fiction? Check out these  six tips from  Writer’s Digest .

Project Gutenberg has many  classic sci-fi works available online .

The Conversation explores  how science fiction builds mental resiliency in young readers .

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Whether you are a science or literature student, you have one task in common:

Writing an essay about science fiction!

Writing essays can be hard, but writing about science fiction can be even harder. How do you write an essay about something so diverse and deep? And where do you even start?

In this guide, we will discuss what science fiction is and how to write an essay about it. You will also get possible topics and example essays to help get your creative juices flowing.

So read on for all the information you need to ace that science fiction essay.

• 1. What Is Science Fiction?
• 2. What Is a Science Fiction Essay?
• 3. Science Fiction Essay Examples
• 4. How to Write an Essay About Science Fiction?
• 5. Science Fiction Essay Topics
• 6. Science Fiction Essay Questions 
• 7. Science Fiction Essay Tips

What Is Science Fiction?

Science fiction is a genre of literature that often explores the potential consequences of scientific, social, and technological innovations. These might affect individuals, societies, or even the entire human race in the story.

The central conflict in many science fiction stories takes place within the individual human mind, addressing questions about the nature of reality itself. 

It often follows themes of exploration, speculation, and adventure. Science fiction is popular in novels, films, television, and other media.

At its core, science fiction uses scientific concepts to explore the human condition or to create alternate realities. It often asks questions about the nature of reality, morality, and ethics in light of scientific advancements.

Now that we understand what science fiction is let's see some best essays on science fiction!

What Is a Science Fiction Essay?

Science fiction essays are written in response to a specific prompt, often focusing on a particular theme or idea. 

They can be either creative pieces of writing or analytical works that examine the genre and its various elements.

It is different from a science essay , which discusses scientific topics in detail. 

Science fiction essay aims to explore the implications of science fiction themes for our understanding of science and reality.

For science students, writing about science fiction can be useful to enhance their scientific curiosity and creativity.

Literature students get to write these essays a lot. So it is useful for them to be aware of some major scientific concepts and discoveries.

Here’s a video about what is science fiction:

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Science Fiction Essay Examples

It can be helpful to look at examples when you're learning how to write an essay. 

Here are some sample science fiction essay PDF examples:

Essay on Science Fiction Literature Example

Example Essay About Science Fiction

Short Essay About Science Fiction - Example Essay

Science Fiction Short Story Example

How to Start a Science Fiction Essay

Le Guin Science Fiction Essay

Pessimism In Science Fiction

Science Fiction and Fantasy

The Peculiarities Of Science Fiction Films

Essay on Science Fiction Movies

Looking for range of science essays? Here is a blog with some flawless science essay examples .

How to Write an Essay About Science Fiction?

Writing an essay on science fiction can be fun and exciting. It gives you the opportunity to explore new ideas and worlds.

Here are a few key steps you should follow for science fiction essay writing.

Know What Kind of Essay To Write

Science fiction essays can be descriptive, analytical, or exploratory. Always check with your instructor what kind of essay they want you to write.

For instance, a descriptive science fiction essay topic may describe the story of your favorite sci-fi novel or tv series.

Similarly, an analytical essay might require you to analyze a concept (e.g., time travel) in the light of science fiction literature.

On the other hand, explanatory essays require you to go beyond the literature to explore its background, influence, cultural impact, etc.

So different types of essays require different types of topics and writing styles. So it is important to know the type and purpose of your science fiction essay.

Find an Interesting Topic

There is a lot of science fiction out there. Find a movie, novel, or science fiction concept you want to discuss.

Think about what themes, messages, and ideas you want to explore. Look for interesting topics that can help make your essay stand out.

You can find a good topic by brainstorming the concepts or ideas that you find interesting. For instance, do you like the idea of traveling to the past or visiting futuristic worlds?

You'll find some great science fiction topics about the ideas you like to explore.

Do Some Research

Read more about the topic or idea you have selected.

Read articles, reviews, research papers, and talk to people who know science fiction. Get a better understanding of the idea you want to explore before diving in.

When doing research, take notes and keep track of sources. This will come in handy when you start writing your essay.

Organize Your Essay Outline

Now that you have done your research and have a good understanding of the topic, it's time to create an outline.

An outline will help you organize your thoughts and make sure all parts of your essay fit together. Your outline should include a thesis statement , supporting evidence, and a conclusion.

Once the outline is complete, start writing your essay.

Start Writing Your First Draft

Start your first draft by writing the introduction. Include a hook , provide background information, and identify your thesis statement.

Here is an example of a hook for a science fiction essay:

Your introduction should be catchy and interesting. But it also needs to show what the essay is about clearly.

Afterward, write your body paragraphs. In these paragraphs, you should provide supporting evidence for your main thesis statement. This could include quotes from books, films, or other related sources. Make sure you also cite any sources you use to avoid plagiarism.

Finally, conclude your essay with a summary of your main points and any final thoughts. Your science fiction essay conclusion should tie everything together and leave the reader with something to think about.

Edit and Proofread

Once your first draft is complete, it's time to edit and proofread.

Edit for any grammar mistakes, typos, or errors in facts. Check for sentence structure and make sure all your points are supported with evidence.

After that, read through your essay to check for flow and clarity. Make sure the essay is easy to understand and flows well from one point to the next.

Finally, make sure that the science fiction essay format is followed. Your instructor will provide you with specific formatting instructions. These will include font style, page settings, and heading styles. So make sure to format your essay accordingly.

Once you're happy with your final draft, submit your essay with confidence. With these steps, you'll surely write a great essay on science fiction!

Read on to check out some interesting topics, essay examples, and tips!

Science Fiction Essay Topics

Finding a topic for your science fiction essay is a difficult part. You need to find something that is interesting as well as relatable. 

That is why we have collected a list of good topics to help you brainstorm more ideas. You can create a topic similar to these or choose one from here. 

Here are some possible essay topics about science fiction:

• The Evolution of Science Fiction
• The Impact of Science Fiction on Society
• The Relationship Between Science and Science Fiction
• Discuss the Different Subgenres of Science Fiction
• The Influence of Science Fiction on Pop Culture
• The Role of Women in Science Fiction
• Describe Your Favorite Sci-Fi Novel or Film
• The Relationship Between Science Fiction and Fantasy
• Discuss the Major Themes of Your Favorite Science Fiction Story
• Explore the themes of identity in sci-fi films

Need prompts for your next science essay? Check out our 150+ science essay topics blog!

Science Fiction Essay Questions 

Explore thought-provoking themes with these science fiction essay questions. From futuristic technology to extraterrestrial encounters, these prompts will ignite your creativity and critical thinking skills.

• How does sci-fi depict AI's societal influence?
• What ethical issues arise in genetic engineering in sci-fi?
• How have alien civilizations evolved in the genre?
• What's the contemporary relevance of dystopian themes in sci-fi?
• How do time travel narratives handle causality?
• What role does climate change play in science fiction?
• Ethical considerations of human augmentation in sci-fi?
• How does gender feature in future societies in sci-fi?
• What social commentary is embedded in sci-fi narratives?
• Themes of space exploration in sci-fi?

Science Fiction Essay Tips

So you've been assigned a science fiction essay. Whether you're a fan of the genre or not, this essay can be daunting.

But don't fear!

Here are some helpful tips to get you started on writing a science fiction essay that will impress your teacher and guarantee you a top grade.

Choose a Topic That Interests You

When it comes to writing a science fiction essay, it’s important to choose a topic that interests you. 

Not only will this make the writing process more enjoyable, but it will also ensure that your essay is more engaging for the reader. 

If you’re not sure what topic to write about, try brainstorming a few science fiction essay ideas until you find one that feels right.

Make Sure Your Essay is Well-Organized

Another important tip for writing a science fiction essay is to make sure that your essay is well-organized. 

This means having a clear introduction, body, and conclusion. It also means ensuring that each paragraph flows smoothly into the next. 

If your essay is disorganized or difficult to follow, chances are the reader will lose interest quickly.

Use Strong Verbs

When writing any type of essay, it’s important to use strong verbs. However, this is especially true when writing a science fiction essay.

Using strong verbs will help add excitement and energy to your writing, making it more engaging for the reader. Some examples of strong verbs include “discover,” “create,” and “explore.”

Be Creative

One of the best things about writing a science fiction essay is that you have the opportunity to be creative. This means thinking outside the box and coming up with new and innovative ideas.

If you’re struggling to be creative, try brainstorming with someone else or looking at other essays for inspiration. 

Use Quotes Appropriately

While quotes can be helpful in supporting your argument, it’s important not to rely on them too heavily in your essay.

If you find yourself using too many quotes, chances are you’re not doing enough of your own thinking and analysis. 

Instead of relying on quotes, try to paraphrase or summarize the main points from other sources.

To conclude the blog,

Writing a science fiction essay doesn’t have to be overwhelming. With these steps, examples, and tips, you can be sure to write an essay that will impress your teacher and guarantee you a top grade. 

Whether it’s an essay about science fiction movies or novels, you can ace it with these steps! Remember, the key is to be creative and organized in your writing!

Don't have time to write your essay? 

Don't stress! Leave it to us! Our science essay writing service is here to help! 

Contact the team of experts at our essay writing service . We can help you write a creative, well-organized, and engaging essay for the reader. We provide free revisions and other exclusive perks!

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Betty is a freelance writer and researcher. She has a Masters in literature and enjoys providing writing services to her clients. Betty is an avid reader and loves learning new things. She has provided writing services to clients from all academic levels and related academic fields.

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May 16, 2024

How New Science Fiction Could Help Us Improve AI

We need to tell a new story about AI, and fiction has that power, humanities scholars say

By Nick Hilden

Andrey Suslov/Getty Images

For the past decade, a group called the Future of Life Institute has been campaigning for human welfare in public conversations around nuclear weapons, climate change, artificial intelligence and other evolving threats. The nonprofit organization aims to steer technological development away from the dystopian visions that so frequently haunt media. But when it comes to discussions about artificial intelligence, its team has had to face one especially persistent foe: the Terminator .

“When we first started talking about AI risk, every article that came out about our work had a Terminator in it,” says Emilia Javorsky, director of the institute’s Futures program. The Terminator film franchise’s specter of a powerful and antagonistic robot that is driven only by ruthless logic is hard to dispel. Ask people to imagine a powerful artificial intelligence, and they tend to think of the fictional archetype of a machine with a “Machiavellian soul,” Javorsky adds—even though actual AI systems inherently “have no malevolence, no human intent to them whatsoever.”

Recognizing the influence that popular narratives have on our collective perceptions, a growing number of AI and computer science experts now want to harness fiction to help imagine futures in which algorithms don’t destroy the planet. The arts and humanities, they argue, must play a role to ensure AI serves human goals. To that end, Nina Beguš, an AI researcher at the University of California, Berkeley, advocates for a new discipline that she calls the “artificial humanities.” In her upcoming book Artificial Humanities: A Fictional Perspective on Language in AI, she contends that the “responsibility of making these technologies is too big for the technologists to bear it alone.” The artificial humanities, she explains, would fuse science and the arts to leverage fiction and philosophy in the exploration of AI’s benevolent potential.

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“The humanities simply have to be part of the conversation, or this new world advances without our input,” says cultural historian Catherine Clarke of the University of London, who has studied the intersection of literature and AI.

Entertainment strongly shapes people’s perceptions of AI, as a recent public opinion study by researchers at the University of Texas at Austin shows. These depictions, however, frequently ignore positive technological potential in favor of portraying our worst fears. “We need fictional works that consider machines for what they are and articulate what their intelligence and creativity could be,” Beguš says. And because fiction is “not obliged to mirror actual technological developments,” it can be a “public space for experimentation and reflection.”

Importantly, it also turns out that our entertainment-fueled negative impressions of AI can, in turn, influence how the technology performs in the real world; the stories we tell ourselves about AI prime us to use it in certain ways. Preconceptions that an AI chatbot will answer like a manipulative machine initiate a hostile feedback loop so that the bot acts as expected, according to a recent study by researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Media Lab. A user’s internalized fears can be self-fulfilling, seasoning an algorithm with adversarial ingredients. So it may be that if fiction trains us to expect the worst from AI, that’s exactly what we’ll get.

But if we treat AI models with some finesse, they will respond in kind. Clarke, along with Murray Shanahan of Imperial College London and Google DeepMind, recently sought to determine whether a text-generating AI could be coached to deliver human-quality prose. They provided the beginning of a story to a chatbot and used prompts of varying detail and complexity to ask it to complete the narrative. As their preprint results found, stories composed by an AI that was given crude prompts fell flat, but more elegant and creatively refined prompts led to more literary prose. This suggests that what we give to a generative AI is returned to us.

“Why do we always imagine science fiction to be a dystopia? Why can’t we imagine science fiction that gives us hope?” — Pat Pataranutaporn, M.I.T. Media Lab

If these patterns hold true for more intelligent forms of AI, we need to instill them with scruples before we flip their “on” switches. The University of Oxford’s AI doomsayer Nick Bostrom has called this need “philosophy with a deadline.”

To pull more artists and thinkers into that discussion, the Future of Life Institute has sponsored multiple initiatives linking fiction writers and other creatives with technologists. “You can't mitigate risks that you can’t imagine,” Javorsky says. “You also can’t build positive futures with technology and steer toward those if you’re not imagining them.” The institute’s Worldbuilding Competition , for example, brings together multidisciplinary teams to conceptualize various friendly-AI futures. Those imagined tomorrows include a world in which a centralized AI manages the equitable distribution of goods. A second scenario suggests a system of digital nations that are free of geographic bounds. In yet another, artificial governance programs advocate for peace. In a fourth, AI helps us achieve a more inclusive society .

Merely imagining such worlds, where growth and innovation no longer depend on conventional human labor, allows fiction writers and other thinkers to ask provocative questions, Javorsky says: “What does meaning look like? What does aspiration look like? How do we rethink human purpose and agency in a world of shared abundance?”

The Future of Life Institute has also joined forces with an organization called Hollywood, Health & Society and other organizations to form the Blue Sky Scriptwriting Contest , which awards writers for creating television scripts that depict fair and equitable applications for artificial intelligence.

“We’ve all seen lots of dystopian and postapocalyptic futures in popular entertainment,” says Hollywood, Health & Society’s program director Kate Langrall Folb. There are “very few depictions of a greener, safer, more just future.” The inaugural contest was held in 2022, with prizes awarded last year. In that competition, the winning entry was set in a town where AI equally serves the needs of all residents, who are shaken when a once-in-a-generation murder complicates their potential techno-utopia. In another, AI-powered advisers equipped with Indigenous wisdom support a more sustainable society. Another tells of an Earth where AI has moved all manufacturing and heavy infrastructure off-planet, regenerating the terrestrial ecosystems below.

To further inspire these lines of thinking, the Future of Life Institute is in the process of producing a free, publicly available “Worldbuilding” course to train participants in hope rather than doom when it comes to AI. And once a person has managed to escape the doom loop, Javorsky says, it can be difficult to know where to direct efforts at developing positive AI. To address this, the institute is developing detailed scenario maps that suggest where different trajectories and decision points could lead this technology over the long run. The intention is to bring these scenarios to creative, artistic people who will then flesh out these stories, pursuing the crossover between technology and creativity—and providing AI developers with ideas about where different courses of action may take us.

This moment desperately needs “the power of storytelling and the humanities,” Javorsky says, to steer people away from the Terminator and toward a future where they’d be excited to live alongside AI—in peace and felicity.

“We need to come up with a new story,” says Pat Pataranutaporn, a researcher at the M.I.T. Media Lab and a co-author of the study on AI user preconceptions. “Why do we always imagine science fiction to be a dystopia? Why can’t we imagine science fiction that gives us hope?”