Shifting Concepts of the Other in Modern Science Fiction

This paper explores gender and power relationships between self and Other in science fiction using a two-pronged approach. First the author uses a respected, established text in the science fiction genre, Frank Herbert\u27s Dune, in order to show that when looked at with a critical eye it contains aspects that are colonialist in nature, especially with regards to the portrayal of the Fremen - the natives of the planet Arrakis and the way female identities are constructed in the Dune universe with an emphasis on the character of lady Jessica. Second, using the themes explored in Dune as a jumping off point, the authors will explore Octavia E. Butler\u27s Xenogenesis trilogy to show how gender, identity, and power in this trilogy deconstruct the paradigms expressed in Dune

Changing planets and climates in select fantastic literature

This thesis is concerned with literature’s engagement with the environment, specifically ecosystems and climate change. Literature of the fantastic, works that break from the tradition of mimetic literature and the limits of realism, are the focus of this thesis, which argues, alongside ecocriticism, that literature must be part of the interdisciplinary drive towards greater ecological awareness. Speculative literature adds fantastic elements or draws on scientific extrapolations into the future, and offers a platform to engage with the science of environmental issues alongside philosophical engagements with the relationship between humans and the more-than-human world around them. This thesis draws on ecocriticism to examine the role of reading and criticism in constructing more ecologically sustainable societies. From this position, it asks how fantasy can be used to convey these themes. As a result, this thesis is interested in definitions of fantasy, drawing on science fiction and fantasy to examine Kathryn Hume’s framework of the fantastic impulse. Placing fantastic texts on two axes, Hume examines the ways texts support or subvert the reader’s expectations, and encourage or discourage reflection on their extratextual worlds. This thesis contends that, texts that encourage engagement are most transformative, but that the spectrum of engagement and disengagement challenges authors to navigate between didacticism and emotive imagery. To show this, this thesis examines four series of novels drawing on the fantastic impulse. Frank Herbert’s Dune Chronicles, Kim Stanley Robinson’s Mars Trilogy and Science in the Capital, and George R.R. Martin’s A Song of Ice and Fire. The first two are on opposite ends of both of Hume’s axes, and imagine the challenges of constructing Earth-like ecosystems on other planets, asking questions about the sustainability of such a project as well as the possibilities of transforming society. The latter two engage with rapid climate change, Robinson’s looking at contemporary climate change and Martin’s engaging with historical climate change. They interrogate the impact of the climate on human and more- than-human life, and reveal the tension between comforting didactic revisions of human- environment interactions and framework-disturbing alternate ways of relating to the environment. This tension is where the fantastic is powerful, allowing alternate visions to pierce sceptical readers’ defences

From Science as Solution to Science as Suspect:: Science Fiction and the Canonical Decline of Technoidealism

Edified in Isaac Asimov's canonical Foundations trilogy, the exemplification of science as a panacea to human quandaries--herein referred to as technoidealism--is a central element of the 1950's science-fiction canon. Faced with a period of upheaval and a wave of new science fictions authors, this article explores the manner in which this assumption is modified, complicated, and popularly rejected. Drawing on the work of authors such as Isaac Asimov, Frank Herbert, Philip K. Dick, Jeff Somers, and Iain Reid, the technoidealist impulse serves to highlight the utopian current undergirding Asimov's work and the genre's complication of the human-science relationship. In drifting from its nascent futurist idealism, the literary endorsement of "science as solution" has veered toward "science as suspect" through a complication and reproval of the technoidealist assumption.

World-Building Warnings: Depth in Creative Art To Consider Societal Paths

Addressing the issue of artists often failing to visually communicate through world-building concepts, this paper seeks to inform a design piece demonstrating the potential effectiveness of a message communicated through visual world-building in a manner that minimises audience disengagement and maximises articulate artistic communication. Questions arise as to what dangers a future society may face that could be worth using as a framework to address this communication problem, whether techniques surrounding visual world-building can be successful in this task, and where artists go astray in their own attempts. Research conducted suggests that psychology, culture, and semiotics play an important role in effective visual communication, where harmony must be achieved between aesthetic engagement and message-bearing signifiers. Artists fail when the scales are tipped too far one way or the other, or when they either play it too safe within established stereotypes or venture too far into new conceptual ideas that audiences have no foundation to connect with. Focus on technical skill rather than visual communication in education hinders artistic success, but a visual solution is possible to demonstrate ways in which inter-disciplinary communication and awareness can address limitations

The Anchor (1977, Volume 71 Issue 18)

https://digitalcommons.ric.edu/the_anchor/1731/thumbnail.jp

Mirrors of the past : versions of history in science fiction and fantasy

The primary argument of this Thesis is that Science Fiction (SF) is a form of Historical Fiction, one which speculatively appropriates elements of the past in fulfilment of the ideological expectations of its genre readership. Chapter One presents this definition, reconciling it with some earlier definitions of SF and justifying it by means of a comparison between SF and the Historical Novel. Chapter One also identifies SF's three modes of historical appropriation (historical extension, imitation and modification) and the forms of fictive History these construct, including Future History and Alternate History; theories of history, and SF's own ideological changes over time, have helped shape the genre's varied borrowings from the past. Some works of Historical Fantasy share the characteristics of SF set out in Chapter One. The remaining Chapters analyse the textual products of SF's imitation and modification of history, i.e. Future and Alternate Histories. Chapter Two discusses various Future Histories completed or at least commenced before 1960, demonstrating their consistent optimism, their celebration of Science and of heroic individualism, and their tendency to resolve the cyclical pattern of history through an ideal linear simplification or 'theodicy'. Chapter Three shows the much greater ideological and technical diversity of Future Histories after 1960, their division into competing traditional (Libertarian), Posthistoric (pessimistic), and critical utopian categories, an indication of SF's increasing complexity and fragmentation

SCIENCE FICTION AND ITS CONNECTION TO PAST EMPIRES

Introduction to Empire in Science fiction, Interview with Scholar Patricia Kerslak

Science Fiction and Fantasy: The Cosmic Players

This presentation gives an overview of science fiction and fantasy, including its origins, the prominent writers in each era, and its many subgenres and variations

Terraforming

Terraforming is the process of making other worlds habitable for human life. Its counterpart on Earth—geoengineering— is receiving serious consideration as a way to address climate change. Contemporary environmental awareness and our understanding of climate change is influenced by science fiction, and terraforming in particular has offered scientists, philosophers, and others a motif for thinking in complex ways about our impact on planetary environments. This book asks how science fiction has imagined how we shape both our world and other planets and how stories of terraforming reflect on science, society and environmentalism. It traces the growth of the motif of terraforming in science fiction from H.G. Wells's The War of the Worlds (1898) to James Cameron's blockbuster Avatar (2009), in stories by such writers as Olaf Stapledon, Ray Bradbury, Robert Heinlein, Arthur C. Clarke, Frank Herbert, Ursula K. Le Guin, Ernest Callenbach, Pamela Sargent, Frederick Turner and Kim Stanley Robinson. It argues for terraforming as a nexus for environmental philosophy, the pastoral, ecology, the Gaia hypothesis, and the politics of colonisation and habitation. Amidst contemporary anxieties about climate change, terraforming offers an important vantage from which to consider the ways humankind shapes and is shaped by their world