#140 = Volume 47, Part 1 = March 2020
Michael Nicholson
A Singular Experiment: Frankenstein’s Creature and the Nature of Scientific Community
Abstract. -- Victor Frankenstein fails in his profession because he consistently contravenes three basic tenets of scientific community: observation, repetition, and transparency. Critics of Frankenstein have generally failed to recognize the socially responsible scientific values that Shelley attempts to define through the character of the creature. This article argues that Shelley’s novel puts forward the idea of socially responsible science: cooperative forms of experimentation that reimagine the scientist’s materials and instruments as agents, involve multiple points of view, and pursue mutually beneficial discoveries. Shelley depicts the creature’s trial-and-error tests as the natural and instinctual antithesis of Victor’s unnatural and artificial laboratory work; the creature’s empiricism satisfies needs and solves specific human problems. Shelley’s farsighted fiction promotes this vision in an age when the scientific revolution had made science truly popular. Her fictional experiments with the idea of socially responsible science enable us to read Frankenstein as a work of science fiction that offers both a utopian ethic of intellectual partnership and a critique of singular science. If Shelley’s vision of a more open and reflective scientific community aspired to a potentially impossible ideal, it is one toward which she thought her age should aspire.
J.P. Telotte
Pondering the “Pulp Paradox”: Pal, Paramount, and the SF Pulps
Abstract. -- This essay reconsiders what genre historian Bradley Schauer terms the “pulp paradox,” that is, the film industry’s supposed reluctance to produce sf films because of a fear that doing so would associate the movies with “the less reputable variations of the genre” often associated with pulp literature. It examines this notion by considering a partnership in the 1950s between producer George Pal, major film studio Paramount Pictures, and the most respected of the sf pulps, Astounding Science Fiction. In this period Astounding published a series of articles sponsored by Pal and Paramount designed to help market a group of films: Destination Moon (1950), When Worlds Collide (1951), The War of the Worlds (1953), and Conquest of Space (1955).The articles, however, would reveal a level of irony in this industry strategy, for while they initially sought to stress the scientific and technological accuracy to be found these films, they—in concert with the films themselves and other marketing strategies—would also increasingly suggest a kind of pulpiness in the films. During the course of this decade the film industry, with its emphasis on special effects, what Susan Sontag refers to as an “imagination of disaster,” and a sensationalistic and at times lurid imagery, became the real purveyor of a pulp vision.
Jaak Tomberg
Morality and Amorality in Ba(udri)llard’s Crash: A Poetic Perspective
Abstract. -- This article revisits a well-known discussion about morality in J.G. Ballard’s Crash that surrounded the appearance of Jean Baudrillard’s essay of the same name in a special section of SFS (Nov. 1991). In this debate, N. Katherine Hayles and Vivian Sobchack strongly oppose Baudrillard’s claim that there “is no affectivity behind [the world that Crash depicts]: no psychology, no ambivalence or desire, no libido or death drive” (314) to Ballard’s novel, and, accordingly, no moral point or warning either. In contrast, Hayles and Sobchack argue that the novel warns us about the transformative influence of contemporary technology. I undertake a thorough analysis of Crash’s main poetic features: the prevalence of showing over telling, the recurrence of accounts over descriptions, the thoroughly technical vocabulary, allusions to transcendence, and the interpretive anxiety created by a first-person narrator that bears the author’s name. I map the contrast between Ballard’s disinterested style of writing and the apparent affective charge of his characters while showing how this contrast generates a deep ambivalence that enables both moral and morally indifferent interpretations of the novel. The reader is never told what to think about the obscene events that occur and this provokes her to make difficult moral decisions about the novel.
Sunyoung Ahn
The Everyday Life of Artificial Intelligence: The Humanism of Ted Chiang’s The Lifecycle of Software Objects
Abstract. -- Ted Chiang’s The Lifecycle of Software Objects shows how life and the lifecycles of human and nonhuman artificial life are dictated by technological determinism and market primacy. Such social forces, however, are not absolute, as Chiang explores the ways in which his characters can make choices that do not always follow the principles of utility and economy. For Chiang, such possibilities emerge from everyday life—a site that enables the gradual accretion of knowledge and experience, fostering intelligence and friendship that favor the humanist values of development, codependency, and solidarity. The characters learn to cooperate and commit themselves to each other, defying the deterministic narrative that binds nonhuman life to a short-lived, programmed lifecycle, on the one hand, and subjects human life to the future of super-artificial intelligence on the other. In times when everyday life appears to be under the impervious rule of the market and technology, Chiang’s story reflects on the porosity through which more viable transspecies social relations and visions can arise.
Paul Scott
From Contagion to Cogitation: The Evolving Television Zombie
Abstract. -- The figure of the zombie is as versatile as it is enduring, and this article analyses two recent television shows featuring versions of the undead that belong to a worldwide wave of conscious, sentient zombies. The returned of Resurrection (US, 2014-2015) and Glitch (Australia, 2015-2019) are humane, ostracized figures who encounter prejudice and suspicion from localized communities in rural Missouri and in the Victorian outback. In their respective reconfigurations of the classic zombie narrative of menacing invaders, these shows cast the undead as sympathetic protagonists who stand as powerful metaphors for socioeconomic migration and marginalization.
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