Science Fiction

Literary and cultural critics call science fiction the premiere story form of modernity because it relates the adventures of educated men and women who use science and technology to reshape the material world and build new, hopefully better societies. As such, it is no surprise that many authors working in this popular genre explore how educated men and women might use science and technology to reshape the physical body and build new, hopefully better versions of humanity itself. Yet, lingering even in the most optimistic imaginings of a posthuman future is the doubt that these transformations will be evenly distributed or desired. In the first part of this essay, Yaszek and Ellis show how the stories of nineteenth century proto science fiction authors such as Mary Shelley and Nathaniel Hawthorne responded to the founding principles of the emergent modern scientific community--especially as they pertained to the treatment of human subjects--with stories about the often-disastrous results of scientific experiments designed to alter human bodies and life processes. In the second part of this essay, Yaszek and Ellis explore how early and mid-twentieth-century sf writers responded to the ascendancy of engineering and cybernetics and early attempts to seize control over evolution itself with stories about part-organic, part-technological cyborgs. While authors such as C.L. Moore and directors such as Fred McLeod Wilcox generally treated individual cyborg characters sympathetically, they also depicted them as one-off, isolated beings created before their time had really come. Finally, Yaszek and Ellis demonstrate how new technologies of simulation and replication have engendered a wide range of stories about the meaning and value of post humanity over the past 50 years. Beginning with New Wave sf, Philip K. Dick and other sf writers leveraged psychopharmacology and the neurosciences to explore how various technologies transform the inner space of the human mind to make humanity more like machines and our posthuman offspring more like humanity. Later, with the exponentially progressing developments in personal computing, nanotechnology, and genetic engineering, sf shifted to ask how these sciences and technologies might remake humanity. On the one hand, cyberpunk tales by artists including William Gibson and the Wachowskis explore the promises and perils of disembodied virtual life, while on the other hand post singularity stories such as those created by Charles Stross consider how infinite life extension might change our understanding of humanity as well. Meanwhile, science fiction writers associated with various social justice movements, including feminist Joanna Russ, Afrofuturist Octavia Butler, and environmentalist Kim Stanley Robinson, ask readers to think about how allying ourselves with the post human (and even nonhuman) might produce new modes of psychological and social organization that do a better job of securing justice for all than earlier, human-oriented modes of civil rights activism

Not Lost in Space: Science and Technology as Women's Work in Postwar Science Fiction

Presentation given in the Wilby Room of the Georgia Tech Library and Information Center.The new technologies that proliferated after World War II — including everything from atomic bombs and communication satellites to deep freezers and automatic coffee makers — radically transformed American thinking about science, society, and gender. In the first study of its kind, Professor Lisa Yaszek explains how women writing for the postwar science fiction community created the earliest body of literature to systematically explore these transformations. Yaszek begins by reviewing how cold war domestic industrialization fostered new notions of women’s work as the technoscientific management of home and family. At the same time, she contends, anxiety about early Soviet successes in the space race led to a growing conviction that American women should leave their homes and serve their country as mathematicians, scientists, and engineers. Yaszek then demonstrates how Judith Merril, Kay Rogers, and Marion Zimmer Bradley merged these seemingly contradictory ideas in stories that celebrated women's domestic lives as inspiration for scientific and technological discovery. Thus these authors figured women's work in both the home and the laboratory as essential to the ongoing development of technoscientific society in particular and human progress as a whole

An Afrofuturist Reading of Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man

This article examines Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man in light of recent thinking about Afrofuturism. As an international aesthetic movement concerned with the relations of science, technology, and race, Afrofuturism appropriates the narrative techniques of science fiction to put a black face on the future. In doing so, it combats those whitewashed visions of tomorrow generated by a global 'futures industry' that equates blackness with the failure of progress and technological catastrophe. Although Ellison claimed that his novel was not science fiction, I propose that he none-the-less deploys a range of science fictional tropes and references throughout his work in ways that profoundly anticipate later Afrofuturist thinking about the future of black history and culture. In the novel proper, Ellison uses these tropes and references to signify a number of dystopic futures where blackness is technologically managed. However, the opening and closing scenes of Invisible Man hold forth the possibility of a different relationship between technology, race, and art: by hiding out under New York City and stealing electricity to power his turntables, Ellison's protagonist creates a space outside linear time where he can begin to rewire the relations between past and present and art and technology. In doing so, he becomes, however tentatively, the figurehead for a hopeful new Afrofuture

A Brief History of Nanotechnology in Science Fiction

Presented on February 25, 2020 at 12:00 p.m.-1:00 p.m. in the Pettit Microelectronics Building, Rooms 102 A&B, Georgia Tech.Lisa Yaszek is Professor in the School of Literature, Media, and Communication, where she explores science fiction as a global language crossing centuries, continents, and cultures. Yaszek’s books include Galactic Suburbia: Recovering Women’s Science Fiction (Ohio State, 2008); Sisters of Tomorrow: The First Women of Science Fiction (Wesleyan 2016); and The Future is Female! 25 Classic Science Fiction Stories by Women (Library of America, 2018). Her ideas have been featured in The Washington Post, Food and Wine Magazine, and USA Today, and she has been an expert commentator for the BBC4’s Stranger Than Sci Fi, Wired.com’s Geek’s Guide to the Galaxy, and the AMC miniseries James Cameron’s Story of Science Fiction. A past president of the Science Fiction Research Association, Yaszek currently serves as a juror for the John W. Campbell and Eugie Foster Science Fiction Awards.Runtime: 52:07 minutesPhysicist Richard Feynman is generally credited with formulating the concepts that seeded nanotechnology in his 1959 talk, “There’s Plenty of Room at the Bottom.” In this talk, Feynman claims that “there is nothing in the laws of physics” that prevents us from engineering at a very small—perhaps even molecular—scale. But of course Feynman was not the first person to speculate about exploring and engineering things below human perception. In this presentation, science fiction studies professor Lisa Yaszek maps a rich history of stories about small-scale engineering that extends back to Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels (1726). This has been a particularly rich area of speculation for science fiction authors, who have been telling such tales since the inception of genre fiction in the 1800s. Yaszek proposes that such stories can be organized into four broad chronological categories that correspond with specific phases of scientific and social history. In particular, while stories written before the formal development of nanoscience and technology emphasize the exploration and engineering of miniaturized worlds, those written since Feynman’s famous speech focus on the new kinds of engineers and tools that may be produced by nanoscience and technology itself

Galactic suburbia: recovering women's science fiction

(print) xii, 234 p. : ill. ; 24 cmList of Illustrations p. ix -- Acknowledgments p. xi -- Introduction Strange Reading p. 1 -- Ch. 1 Writers p. 19 -- Ch. 2 Homemakers p. 66 -- Ch. 3 Activists p. 106 -- Ch. 4 Scientists p. 150 -- Conclusion Progenitors p. 195 -- Works Cited p. 211 -- Index p. 225Item embargoed for five year

Author Discussion with 2021 Eugie Award Winner, Elaine Cuyegkeng

Presented online via Bluejeans Events on March 29, 2022 at 6:00 p.m.Elaine Cuyegkeng is a Chinese-Filipino writer. She grew up in Manila, where there are many, many creaky old houses with ghosts inside them. She writes about eldritch creatures, monsters with human faces. She now lives in Melbourne with her partner, their tiny faerie daughter and their cat familiars. Elaine has been published in Pseudopod, Strange Horizons, Lackington’s, The Dark, Rocket Kapre. You can find her on @layangabi on Twitter.Runtime: 58:36 minutesJoin us for a virtual author discussion with Elaine Cuyegkeng, the 2021 Eugie Award recipient for "The Genetic Alchemist's Daughter." Read Elaine's work in "Black Cranes: Tales of Unquiet Women" edited by Lee Murray and Geneve Flynn

What Science Fiction Got Wrong...and Right! (and how you make the future)

Presented in-person and online via Bluejeans Events on October 14, 2021 at 11:00 a.m.Gideon Marcus s the founder of the Serling-Award winning and Hugo-nominated web project, Galactic Journey, the mission of which is to recover the lost voices of SFF and the Space Race, making the past relevant to today. He is a professional space historian, author, and public speaker with a passion for teaching.Runtime: 76:33 minutesIn the 1950s and '60s, scientists and engineers were hailed as saints of progress. People believed that technology would solve all of the world's problems. But the science fiction and mainstream prognosticators of the same era also foresaw technology causing the world's imminent end: by nuclear war, overpopulation, global unemployment, environmental catastrophe ... and plague. How accurate were the futurists and science fictioneers of the last century? What predictions didn't materialize, and what visions may yet come true? And do we, today, have the ability to change tomorrow? This event is part of the 50 Years of Science Fiction Celebration at Georgia Tech

Science Fiction Research and Teaching at Georgia Tech

Presented on September 19, 2014 in the Stephen C. Hall building, room 102 from 12:00 p.m. to 1:30 p.m.Runtime: 78:01 minute

Geeks Who Can Talk to Normal People

J.C. Reilly and Lisa Yaszek discuss Georgia Tech's unique program on Science Technology and Culture (STAC). This program integrates science and technology with humanities to produce individuals with some unique skills important in our technology-oriented society

Science Fiction

Lost in the Stacks podcast #5Podcast version of March 19th, 2010, broadcast of Lost in the Stacks. Hosted by Ameet Doshi and Charlie Bennett. Produced by Kyle Tait. Includes interviews with Lisa Yaszek (LCC professor and coordinator), Paul Clifton (Georgia Tech student and host of Science Fiction Lab Radio show), and Jon Bodnar (reference librarian at the Georgia Tech Library)