Download or read book The Cybernetic Imagination in Science Fiction written by Patricia S. Warrick and published by MIT Press. This book was released on 1980 with total page 304 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Science-fiction criticism. Focuses on literary & scientific material.
Download or read book The Soft Machine written by David Porush and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2018-05-15 with total page 254 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Soft Machine, originally published in 1985, represents a significant contribution to the study of contemporary literature in the larger cultural and scientific context. David Porush shows how the concepts of cybernetics and artificial intelligence that have sparked our present revolution in computer and information technology have also become the source for images and techniques in our most highly sophisticated literature, postmodern fiction by Barthelme, Barth, Pynchon, Beckett, Burroughs, Vonnegut and others. With considerable skill, Porush traces the growth of "the metaphor of the machine" as it evolves both technologically and in literature of the twentieth century. He describes the birth of cybernetics, gives one of the clearest accounts for a lay audience of its major concepts and shows the growth of philosophical resistance to the mechanical model for human intelligence and communication which cybernetics promotes, a model that had grown increasingly influential in the previous decade. The Soft Machine shows postmodern fiction synthesizing the inviting metaphors and concepts of cybernetics with the ideals of art, a synthesis that results in what Porush calls "cybernetic fiction" alive to the myths and images of a cybernetic age.
Download or read book SCIENCE FICTION THE WONDER OF HUMAN IMAGINATION written by Andreas Sofroniou and published by Lulu.com. This book was released on 2017-09-19 with total page 117 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Science Fiction explores the probable consequences of some improbable or impossible transformation of the basic conditions of human (or intelligent non-human) existence. This transformation need not be a technological invention, but may be some mutation of known biological or physical reality: artificial or extraterrestrial life-forms and travel through time are favourite subjects. Science Fiction stories may involve Utopian political speculation, or satire, but most rely on the marvellous appeal of fantasy. The term Science Fiction was first given general currency by Hugo Gernsback, editor of the popular Amazing Stories magazine from 1926. Once uniformly dismissed as pulp trash, SF gained greater respect from the 1950s, as writers like Isaac Asimov, Ray Bradbury, Arthur C. Clarke, and John Wyndham expanded its range; themes of alien invasion and brain-washing became especially popular at the height of the Cold War.
Download or read book The Cybernetic Brains written by Raymond F. Jones and published by . This book was released on 1962 with total page 232 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Reading Science Fiction written by James Gunn and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2018-01-19 with total page 256 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Science Fiction is illuminated by world class scholars and fiction writers, who introduce the history, concepts and contexts necessary to understanding the genre. Their groundbreaking approach provides insights into today's SF world and makes learning how to read Science Fiction an exciting collaborative process for teachers and students.
Download or read book Historical Dictionary of Science Fiction Literature written by Brian M. Stableford and published by Scarecrow Press. This book was released on 2004 with total page 512 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This reference tracks the development of speculative fiction influenced by the advancement of science and the idea of progress from the eighteenth century to the present day. The major authors and publications of the genre and significant subgenres are covered. Additionally there are entries on fields of science and technology which have been particularly prolific in provoking such speculation. The list of acronyms and abbreviations, the chronology covering the literature from the 1700s through the present, the introductory essay, and the dictionary entries provide science fiction novices and enthusiasts as well as serious writers and critics with a wonderful foundation for understanding the realm of science fiction literature. The extensive bibliography that includes books, journals, fanzines, and websites demonstrates that science fiction literature commands a massive following.
Download or read book Teaching Science Fiction written by A. Sawyer and published by Springer. This book was released on 2011-03-24 with total page 266 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Teaching Science Fiction is the first text in thirty years to explore the pedagogic potential of that most intellectually stimulating and provocative form of popular literature: science fiction. Innovative and academically lively, it offers valuable insights into how SF can be taught historically, culturally and practically at university level.
Download or read book Great Themes of Science Fiction written by John J. Pierce and published by Praeger. This book was released on 1987 with total page 286 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The most comprehensive work of its kind, Great Themes of Science Fiction looks at the most important elements of the genre and shows how each has evolved over time. Among the topics examined are aliens and alien worlds, supermen and adapted men, immortality and paranormal powers, robots and computers, space civilizations and colonies, wars on earth and in space, worldwide disasters, time travel, and parallel worlds. Selected examples of each theme are discussed together with changes that have become apparent with shifts in popular attitudes and the increasing sophistication of readers. The impact and significance of each type of science fiction scenario is considered, and the challenges it poses to human ingenuity, understanding, and responsibility are discussed.
Download or read book Science Fiction and Computing written by David L. Ferro and published by McFarland. This book was released on 2011-09-29 with total page 327 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The prevalence of science fiction readership among those who create and program computers is so well-known that it has become a cliché, but the phenomenon has remained largely unexplored by scholars. What role has science fiction played in the actual development of computers and computing? And likewise, how has computing (including the related fields of robotics and artificial intelligence) affected the course of science fiction? The 18 essays in this critical work explore the interrelationship of these domains over the span of more than half a century.
Download or read book Transmedia Creatures written by Francesca Saggini and published by Rutgers University Press. This book was released on 2018-10-19 with total page 297 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: On the 200th anniversary of the first edition of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, Transmedia Creatures presents studies of Frankenstein by international scholars from converging disciplines such as humanities, musicology, film studies, television studies, English and digital humanities. These innovative contributions investigate the afterlives of a novel taught in a disparate array of courses - Frankenstein disturbs and transcends boundaries, be they political, ethical, theological, aesthetic, and not least of media, ensuring its vibrant presence in contemporary popular culture. Transmedia Creatures highlights how cultural content is redistributed through multiple media, forms and modes of production (including user-generated ones from “below”) that often appear synchronously and dismantle and renew established readings of the text, while at the same time incorporating and revitalizing aspects that have always been central to it. The authors engage with concepts, value systems and aesthetic-moral categories—among them the family, horror, monstrosity, diversity, education, risk, technology, the body—from a variety of contemporary approaches and highly original perspectives, which yields new connections. Ultimately, Frankenstein, as evidenced by this collection, is paradoxically enriched by the heteroglossia of preconceptions, misreadings, and overreadings that attend it, and that reveal the complex interweaving of perceptions and responses it generates. Published by Bucknell University Press. Distributed worldwide by Rutgers University Press.
Download or read book The Cybernetics Moment written by Ronald R. Kline and published by JHU Press. This book was released on 2015-07-15 with total page 351 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: How did cybernetics and information theory arise, and how did they come to dominate fields as diverse as engineering, biology, and the social sciences? Winner of the CHOICE Outstanding Academic Title of the Choice ACRL Outstanding Academic Title, Choice Cybernetics—the science of communication and control as it applies to machines and to humans—originates from efforts during World War II to build automatic antiaircraft systems. Following the war, this science extended beyond military needs to examine all systems that rely on information and feedback, from the level of the cell to that of society. In The Cybernetics Moment, Ronald R. Kline, a senior historian of technology, examines the intellectual and cultural history of cybernetics and information theory, whose language of “information,” “feedback,” and “control” transformed the idiom of the sciences, hastened the development of information technologies, and laid the conceptual foundation for what we now call the Information Age. Kline argues that, for about twenty years after 1950, the growth of cybernetics and information theory and ever-more-powerful computers produced a utopian information narrative—an enthusiasm for information science that influenced natural scientists, social scientists, engineers, humanists, policymakers, public intellectuals, and journalists, all of whom struggled to come to grips with new relationships between humans and intelligent machines. Kline traces the relationship between the invention of computers and communication systems and the rise, decline, and transformation of cybernetics by analyzing the lives and work of such notables as Norbert Wiener, Claude Shannon, Warren McCulloch, Margaret Mead, Gregory Bateson, and Herbert Simon. Ultimately, he reveals the crucial role played by the cybernetics moment—when cybernetics and information theory were seen as universal sciences—in setting the stage for our current preoccupation with information technologies.
Download or read book Nineteen Eighty Four Science Between Utopia and Dystopia written by E. Mendelsohn and published by Springer Science & Business Media. This book was released on 2012-12-06 with total page 308 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Just fifty years ago Julian Huxley, the biologist grandson of Thomas Henry Huxley, published a book which easily could be seen to represent the prevail ing outlook among young scientists of the day: If I were a Dictator (1934). The outlook is optimistic, the tone playfully rational, the intent clear - allow science a free hand and through rational planning it could bring order out of the surrounding social chaos. He complained, however: At the moment, science is for most part either an intellectual luxury or the paid servant of capitalist industry or the nationalist state. When it and its results cannot be fitted into the existing framework, it and they are ignored; and furthermore the structure of scientific research is grossly lopsided, with over-emphasis on some kinds of science and partial or entire neglect of others. (pp. 83-84) All this the scientist dictator would set right. A new era of scientific human ism would provide alternative visions to the traditional religions with their Gods and the civic religions such as Nazism and fascism. Science in Huxley's version carries in it the twin impulses of the utopian imagination - Power and Order. Of course, it was exactly this vision of science which led that other grand son of Thomas Henry Huxley, the writer Aldous Huxley, to portray scientific discovery as potentially subversive and scientific practice as ultimately en slaving.
Download or read book Science Fiction Collections written by Lee Ash and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2013-08-21 with total page 181 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Science/Fiction Collections offers different views and attitudes toward Science Fiction and Fantasy Literature and descriptions of a variety of collections. Written during a time when Science Fiction and Fantasy writings had just gained widespread popularity, it offers suggestions and considerations for approaching any special collection dealing with a relatively new field.
Download or read book The Cambridge Companion to American Science Fiction written by Eric Carl Link and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2015-01-26 with total page 291 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This Companion explores the relationship between the ideas and themes of American science fiction and their roots in the American cultural experience.
Download or read book Cybernetic Aesthetics written by Heather A. Love and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2023-09-30 with total page 223 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In Cybernetic Aesthetics, Heather A. Love makes a new contribution to ongoing debates about modern communication networks and information culture. This book draws from cybernetics theory and terminology to interpret experimental modernist texts, illustrating how cybernetic approaches to communication emerged long before World War II.
Download or read book Modern Science Fiction A Critical Analysis written by James Gunn and published by McFarland. This book was released on 2018-05-25 with total page 213 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: James Gunn—one of the founding figures of science fiction scholarship and teaching—wrote in 1951 what is likely the first master’s thesis on modern science fiction. Portions were in the short-lived pulp magazine Dynamic but it has otherwise remained unavailable. Here in its first full publication, the thesis explores many of the classic Golden Age stories of the 1940s and the critical perspective that informed Gunn’s essential genre history Alternate Worlds and his anthology series The Road to Science Fiction. The editor’s introduction and commentary show the historical significance of Gunn’s work and its relevance to today’s science fiction studies.
Download or read book Science Fiction and Innovation Design written by Thomas Michaud and published by John Wiley & Sons. This book was released on 2020-11-03 with total page 240 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Science fiction is often presented as a source of utopia, or even of prophecies, used in capitalism to promote social, political and technoscientific innovations. Science Fiction and Innovation Design assesses the validity of this approach by exploring the impact this imaginary world has on the creativity of engineers and researchers. Companies seek to anticipate and predict the future through approaches such as design fiction: mobilizing representations of science fiction to create prototypes and develop scenarios relevant to organizational strategy. The conquest of Mars or the weapons of the future are examples developed by authors to demonstrate how design innovation involves continuous dialogue between multiple players, from the scientist to the manager, through to the designers and the science fiction writers.
