Science Fiction Across Media: Alternative Histories, Alien Futures
An international workshop exploring the complex representation of natural and technological ecologies in science fiction in and across its varied media – novels, short stories, films, animation, comic books, computer games.
Science Fiction Across Media: Alternative Histories, Alien Futures
Umeå University, Sweden
April 23-24, 2012
Science fiction is becoming a mainstream and increasingly popular genre in fiction and film, as demonstrated by recent novels by Kazuo Ishiguro, Michel Houellebecq, Junot Diaz and William Gibson as well as the global success of James Cameron's Avatar. Yet science fiction is more than simple entertainment. This workshop considers science fiction as multi-medial explorations of alternative histories and alternative futures and invites scholars across the humanities to present their ongoing work on science fiction either in the form of full-length 20-minute papers, or as shorter papers on work in progress or mini-presentations on crucial concepts or ideas (8 minutes).
The workshop will take place in HUMlab, Umeå University’s digital humanities laboratory, and will emphasize informal, yet critical discussion of papers and presentations.
The workshop is arranged by Finn Arne Jørgensen (Umeå University) and Ursula K. Heise (Stanford University) on behalf of Umeå Studies in Science, Technology, and Environment (USSTE), the Nordic Environmental History Network (NEHN), and the Nordic Network for Interdisciplinary Environmental Studies (NIES).
The workshop is open for non-presenting participants; please register with Finn Arne Jørgensen by April 19 if you are interested in attending.
Preliminary Program
Monday, 23 April
9:00 – 9:15 Coffee and registration
9:15 – 9:30 Finn Arne Jørgensen, “Blueprint for a workshop”
9:30 – 10:00 Ursula K. Heise: “Science fiction across media”
10:00 – 11:30 Session 1: “Domesticating the future”
11:30 – 12:30 Lunch
12:30 – 14:00 Session 2: “Don’t worry, it’s just the end of the world; and other dystopian futures”
14:00 – 14:15 Coffee break
14:15 – 15:45 Session 3: “Exploring future social orders”
15:45 – 16:30 Keynote: Lisa Swanstrom – “Welcome to the Green House: Science Fiction, Conservation, and the Future of Domestic Space”
18:00 – Dinner at Rex Bar & Grill
Tuesday, 24 April
9:00 – 10:30 Session 4: “Other than human”
10:30 – 10:45 Coffee break
10:45 – 12:15 Session 5: “Future ecologies”
12:15 – 12:45 Concluding discussion
12:45 – 14:00 Lunch
14:00 – 17:00 “Stalking Across Media”: Post-workshop panel on Roadside Picnic (the book); Stalker (computer game); Stalker (the movie); etc.
- Mike Frangos, Umeå University
- Ursula K. Heise, Stanford University
- Tomas Karlsson, Umeå University
Session overview
* indicates a short paper with an 8-minute presentation
Session 1
Domesticating the future
- Cynthia J. Miller, Emerson College: “Domesticating Space: Science Fiction Serials Come Home”
- Ekaterina Kalemeneva, European University Institute at St. Petersburg: “City under the dome: from scientific fiction to the reality?”
- Ingrid Wållgren, Lund University: “Freeze, wait, reanimate: An exploration of science fiction and science facts”
Session 2
Don’t worry, it’s just the end of the world; and other dystopian futures
- Camilla Ulleland Hoel, Norwegian University of Science and Technology: “The end of the world as defining moment of ethical action”
- Andreas Nyström, Karlstad University: “Echoes of civilization's past” *
- Asa Ekengren San Andres, “Neo-Luddism in the United States: Thinkers, Movements and Pop-Culture Against Technology” *
- Steven Hartman, Uppsala University/Royal Institute of Technology: “What's in a Mode?: The Troubling Entanglement of Literary Logics in T.C. Boyle's A Friend of the Earth and Why It May Matter to Sort Them out”
Session 3
Exploring future social orders
- Mike Frangos, Umeå University: “The future is here; it's just not evenly distributed yet” *
- Anna Åberg, Royal Institute of Technology: “Witnessing Our Energy Future” *
- Fredrik Andersson, Association of Swedish Higher Education: “Cyberbroke? – Dystopian and Utopian Visions of the Future Economy in Popular Culture”
- Martin Hultman, Umeå University: “Terminator and Governator: Arnold Schwarzenegger and the question of ‘virtual’ and ‘real’ identities”
Session 4
Other than human
- Joe Trotta, University of Gothenburg: “Do linguists dream of electric sheep? A look at alien languages, future Englishes and linguists in Speculative Fiction”
- Adam Dodd, University of Oslo: “The virtual reality of the UFO”
- Henriette Cederlöf, Södertörn University: “The Strugatsky brothers' unacknowledged meetings with the posthuman”
Session 5
Future ecologies
- Dolly Jørgensen, Umeå University: “What have whales done for me lately? Ecosystem services in science fiction”
- Alexa Weik von Mossner, Rachel Carson Center: “Science Fiction and the Future of Ecological Citizenship”
- Tony Thorström, Uppsala University: “Digitalised bodies and new technologies: reconfigurations of human ‘nature’ in the wake of the information revolution” *
- Finn Arne Jørgensen, Umeå University: “Does the Empire recycle? Waste and scrap recycling in the Star Wars movies” *
Abstracts
Keynote
Lisa Swanstrom
Welcome to the Green House: Science Fiction, Conservation, and the Future of Domestic Space
“They walked down the hall of their soundproofed Happylife Home, which had cost them thirty thousand dollars installed, this house which clothed and fed and rocked them to sleep and played and sang and was good to them...”
—Ray Bradbury, “The Veldt” (1950)
In the realm of environmental activism, where the commandment to “think globally, act locally” functions as powerful and persistent mantra, the domestic sphere is of paramount importance, for what could be more “local” than the space of one’s home? Energy saving appliances, ecologically friendly insulation, and “green” architecture all promise to make the home a more efficient space for living. This type of home-based activism consists not only with the xeriscaped landscaping of one’s very own back yard, with the nurturing of native plants, and with the strategic deployment of technologies that limit energy consumption, but with the building of conservation precepts into the home’s very architectural bones. Indeed, the modern house is conceived as a fundamental partner in conservation. Yet the same labor saving devices and processes that are built into the modern home have, historically, been associated with the troubling side effect of social alienation. In dystopian science fiction, in particular, although the “Smart Home” has been envisioned as a model of conservation, it has also served to disconnect its inhabitants completely from the real world.
In this presentation I argue that digitally-enabled Smart Houses of today have an as-yet untapped potential to turn this tendency around by democratizing conservation efforts. Before we can consider how well this new technology makes good on the Smart Home’s promise to streamline conservation, however, we need to examine how such technologized domestic spaces have been imagined and received in the past. Through an examination of key works of science fiction—including, for example, Ray Bradbury’s “The Veldt” and Dean R. Koontz’ Demon Seed—I demonstrate that dystopian narratives have pre-figured Smart Homes as a hostile technology. In such works, Smart Houses have perverted nature, produced anxiety about subjective boundaries, and isolated their inhabitants from the rest of the world. After looking at such examples, I then consider to what extent contemporary domestic technologies—such as the Shaspa Corporation’s “Smart House” and Bryon Green’s “World of Greencraft” game—manage to challenge and supersede the domestic framework that post-WWII dystopian science fiction imagines.
Lisa Swanstrom
Florida Atlantic University
swanstro@gmail.com
Papers
Fredrik Andersson
Cyberbroke? – Dystopian and Utopian Visions of the Future Economy in Popular Culture
“We must lay hold of the fact that economic laws are not made by nature. They are made by human beings.” – this statement by Franklin D. Roosevelt in his nomination address for the 1932 U.S. presidential elections is seemingly self-evident. But in the current political and economic debate the notion that the society is free to choose how to organise its production and reproduction is highly controversial. Today focus is not on choice, but rather on how society adapts and bends to the deterministic forces of the “Free Market”.
If it is somewhat lacking in contemporary politics and economics, there is another sphere where discussions of alternative economic systems flourishes. In science fiction and other similar forms of popular culture, whether it is in literature, film and TV or games, explicit or implicit theories of future economics are displayed and tested. This paper therefore aims to explore some different examples of how the economy of the future is envisioned in popular culture.
A common embarkation point for the visions of the economic future is the rapid technological and economic transformation that took off in the late 20th century. Technological change, with digitalisation, miniaturisation, information technology and robot technology, intertwined with structural change on a scale probably not seen since the industrialisation of the 18th and 19th centuries. The effect was to profoundly change modes and patterns of production. But it also began to dissolve societal boundaries – between and within nations; between man and machine; and between the corporate sector and the rest of the society.
When envisioning a future society these trends are generally extended forward in time and taken to their logical conclusion. Interestingly enough this results in fundamentally varied visions of the economy to come. I have analysed and categorised how a number of works of science fiction depicts a future economic system and found several distinct models. These are caused by differences in focus on the cause and impact of the driving forces for economic change. To begin with there is a question on whether the future economy will be centralised or de-centralised. Moreover there are different approaches to whether the new possibilities opened up by technological and economic change will be emancipating or oppressing for individuals and society. Finally there is a question whether this development strengthens or weakens the capitalist system.
It is perhaps a trivial comment that visions of the future primarily reflect the time when they are produced. This notwithstanding, without envisioning a different future no change will ever occur. If you believe that the society is free to choose its own economic destiny, and the laws of economy are ours to mould, perhaps the visions in popular culture of the future economy are good vantage points to begin the search for the path ahead.
Fredrik Andersson
Association of Swedish Higher Education, Stockholm
fredrik.andersson@suhf.se
Henriette Cederlöf
The Strugatsky brothers' unacknowledged meetings with the posthuman
In the Soviet Union, the 1960s were a time of high hopes for the future. As the hopes the technological-scientific revolution had awoken were not realized, towards the end of the decade optimism turned into pessimism and the irrational replaced the rational as focus of interest.
The subject of my dissertation is how this shift in cultural paradigm is reflected in Soviet science fiction. My material is three novels by the Strugatsky brothers, Arkady (1925-1991) and Boris (1933-): Inspector Glebsky’s Puzzle (1970), The Kid (1971) and Roadside Picnic (1972).
The novels were intended as a trilogy about first contact - or “unacknowledged meetings” - between humans and extraterrestrials. However, in the novels no such meetings actually take place. As opposed to in earlier works by the Strugatskys, there are no extraterrestrials. Instead the human, represented by an anti-hero, is confronted with the posthuman, represented as a member of the younger generation. Behind the anti-hero there is the shadow of the more traditional, but now defunct, hero.
I want to discuss how the meeting between the human and the posthuman can be interpreted as the expression of a crisis in male subjectivity that came as a result of the cultural paradigm shift.
Henriette Cederlöf
Södertörn University, Sweden
henriette.cederlof@sh.se
Adam Dodd
The Virtual Reality of the UFO
Since its appearance in the late 1940s, UFO literature has maintained an uneasy relation to what is recognized by scholars as ‘science fiction,’ even while “it’s only science fiction” continues to function as a conventional, if disingenuous dismissal of UFO literature itself. It seems clear that the formal categories of science, fiction, and science fiction are incapable of accounting for the appearance and content of UFO literature. Nor are they able to facilitate productive discussion of UFOs themselves, either as objects or non-objects. In this paper I suggest that UFOs ought to be considered as virtually real, as always approaching the attainment of physical objecthood. I connect the controversial proliferation of UFO lore in the twentieth century, and the emergence of what can be called ‘the UFO taboo,’ to the increasingly exposed limits of anthropocentric sovereignty in modern Western societies, and to the epistemic and ontological uncertainties involved in the escalating reliance upon testimony and images for the verification of extraordinary events occurring outside the direct sensory parameters of the human observer. This involves examining modern UFO accounts, and their reception, in relation to a diversity of modern media forms, from micrographs to images of ‘outer space,’ in order to clarify how UFOs have become emblematic of ‘wilderness’ in its broadest sense.
Adam Dodd
University of Oslo, Norway
a.p.dodd@ikos.uio.no
Asa Ekengren San Andres
Neo-Luddism in the United States: Thinkers, Movements and Pop-Culture Against Technology
While the world has become increasingly reliant on technology since the Industrial Revolution, science fiction has revealed itself to be an accepted medium for critiquing modern technology and it's relationship with society. Conflict driven storyline in science fiction has been frequently based on technophobic themes ranging from threat of technological advance and dependence, dehumanization through automatization and mechanization, deterioration of the environment, loss of traditions, imperfect robotics, cyber-prisons, and the idea of technology as God. Although fiction usually exaggerates for entertainment purposes, these concerns have coincided with neo-Luddism, a diverse and scarcely studied contemporary perspective based on a critical analysis of technology. Within a historical framework, these dystopian works of science fiction and neo-Luddite sources of thought serve as reflections of the techno-anxieties of each period; by the 1920s science fiction and horror made frequent use of what Isaac Asimov termed “the technophobes Frankenstein complex,” and the tendency has continued to today, varying based on the changes and concerns of each generation. Focusing on American cinema and novels, I propose to discuss how malevolent representations of science, technology, and what they entail, are indicative of a dialectical relationship in which techno-dystopian works of science fiction have supported and fostered neo-Luddite perspectives in the United States.
Asa Ekengren San Andres
Universidad Complutense de Madrid
aekengren@gmail.com
Mike Frangos
“The future is here; it's just not evenly distributed yet.”
How do we understand this famous line attributed to Canadian science fiction writer William Gibson and repeated numerous times across a range of media? This mini-presentation offers a brief history of Gibson's proclamation of the arrival of the future in the present and its connection with digital culture and social media, and then attempts to provide a reading of its significance. Specifically, I propose three frameworks with which to understand Gibson's statement: 1) time-space compression, 2) the end of history, and 3) rupture. Cultural theorist David Harvey has described the “time-space compression” by which the acceleration of production and distribution processes attempts to overcome spatial distance as a barrier to profit. This generalized speeding up can also be seen in the “planned obsolescence” in which products become obsolete as soon as they hit the market. Here, the arrival of the future in the present would indicate a limit-point of the intensification of time-space compression. So too, postmodern conceptions of the end of history also indicate the arrival of the future in the present in the sense of a final coming into being of neoliberalism as the inevitable end-point of global capitalism's processes of development. This arrival of the future involves also a transformation of the concept of history itself and the role of archival and storage media: no longer are media archives maintained for the sake of an absent future addressee, but rather are their contents available for immediate circulation and consumption. Finally, the unevenly distributed arrival of the future in the present can reflect an unforeseen rupture of what Walter Benjamin referred to as “homogeneous empty time.” The time of the future can thus be understood as the revelation of the genuinely new in the present, an emergence that must be sought after and discovered in the midst of modern consumer culture's eternal repetition of the same.
Mike Frangos
Umeå University
mfrangos@umail.ucsb.edu
Steven Hartman
What's in a Mode?: The Troubling Entanglement of Literary Logics in T.C. Boyle's A Friend of the Earth and Why It May Matter to Sort Them out
This paper examines T.C. Boyle's novel A Friend of the Earth (2000), set partly in a climate-altered near future and partly in a recent past before accelerated environmental decline has radically transformed California (along with most of the earth). The novel makes use of alternating chronological narratives (encompassing the years 1989-1997 and 2025-2026, respectively) to tell the story of Tyrone (‘Ty’) O'Shaughnessy Tierwater, his family and his circle of direct-action environmental activists. Climate change is central, albeit in different ways, to each of these narratives: in the late 20th century narrative it is one potential catastrophic outcome that Tierwater and his fellow direct-action Earth Forever! members are working to stave off, an ambition that can only be regarded by the reader as futile with the benefit of the hindsight brought front and center in the novel’s opening, and framing, 21st-century narrative; in this chronologically later (but structurally antecedent) narrative an actual climatic and ecological regime shift has already occurred, catalyzing a host of extreme environmental effects that now define the conditions of life on the planet (among them the earth’s sixth mass extinction of species). Yet for the most part the novel does not read as a futuristic cautionary tale in the mold of many speculative works of apocalyptic science fiction. Rather, the novel comports more clearly with the literary mode of the elegy than it does with the Jeremiad, with satire or with other generic/modal variations on the wake-up call. This paper considers some of the functional implications of the competing literary modes that come into play demonstrably in this novel and why it may matter to disentangle them from one another. My hope is that such an effort would inform a compelling reading of this particular novel and in the process open up some interesting questions about challenging modal/generic hybrids within the larger literary tradition / discourse of science fiction.
Steven Hartman
Uppsala University/KTH Royal Institute of Technology
steven.hartman@engelska.uu.se
Camilla Ulleland Hoel
The End of the World as Defining Moment of Ethical Action
The novels of Nick Harkaway, The Gone-Away World (2008) employs an apocalyptic science fiction scenario as a testing ground for ethical principles. To a great extent, these principles are the same as those set out by his father, John Le Carré in books like The Constant Gardener (2001), but the difference in genre involves a difference in scale. Moreover, the Apocalypse itself acts out the ethical concerns of Harkaway’s book: the problem of surrendering one’s moral autonomy to an authority in the name of “the greater good”, thereby abdicating the responsibility for the moral choice to an impersonal entity which in The Gone-Away World takes the shape of a corporation.
This paper has a comparative element, in that it contrasts Harkaway’s treatment of the ethical with Le Carré; but the focus is on a reading of Harkaway’s apocalyptic scenario, the structures that lead to it and the viability of those structures as a way of saving the world. It will show that the ethical action in Harkaway is that which embraces the individual and idiosyncratic, favouring heterogeneity over the homogenous and the living person over abstractions.
Camilla Ulleland Hoel
University of Edinburgh/Norwegian University of Science and Technology
camilla.hoel@gmail.com
Martin Hultman
Terminator and Governator: Arnold Schwarzenegger and the question of ‘virtual’ and ‘real’ identities
This paper takes a look at overlapping identities and analyzing their interconnectedness. The character of Arnold Schwarzenegger as a politician and a science fiction actor are in focus as intertwined identity configurations. His identity as Arnold goes beyond the role he plays in movies in an obvious way (Indiana, 2005:69). Schwarzenegger has become a kind of intimate stranger in Maxwell T. Boykoff and Michael K. Goodman’s terminology. This is someone who has achieved such a status that s/he can use this to promote politics using the leverage of his popularity (Boykoff & Goodman, 2008).
Arnold Schwarzenegger’s both/and character as a politician and actor has by several scholars been used as a litmus paper to interpret identity in the U.S. and the West. Scholars have shown that Arnold change when the culture is changing, as he always seems to have the ability to be at the forefront, or placed in the front, of the changes (Messner, 2007; Boyle, 2010; Jefford, 1994).
In this article a will prolong the analysis of Schwarzenegger’s as a prominent figure who uses his roles in science fiction movies when doing politics into the environmental policy field. The empirical analysis will have a special focus on how he promoted the technology fuel cells.
Martin Hultman
Umeå University
martin.hultman@idehist.umu.se
Dolly Jørgensen
What have whales done for me lately? Ecosystem services in science fiction
This paper explores the ways in which science fiction presents conservation measures within an anthropocentric framework. At first glance, we might think that a battle against species extinction would be for the benefit of the directly threatened species. But upon closer inspection, the motivations for saving endangered species often focus on those doing the saving rather than those being saved. Using two stories of whale endangerment and salvation—Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home and the Doctor Who episode “The Beast Below”—the paper will argue that the concept of ecosystem services might be a valuable tool for understanding the relationship between humans and the environment in science fiction.
Ecosystem services, which cover the plethora of resources and process supplied by the environment which humans benefit from, have become a popular scientific label since the turn of the millennium. The Millennium Ecosystem Assessment broadly divided ecosystem services into four categories: provisioning (e.g. the production of food, water, fuel), regulating (e.g. control of climate and disease), supporting (e.g. nutrient cycles), and cultural (e.g. aesthetic enjoyment, recreation, spiritual meaning). Human changes to the ecosystem can affect the ability of the environment to provide the expected or desired ecosystem service. Thus the scientific community has advocated ecological conservation, sustainable management, and restoration to ensure that humans can continue to benefit from needed services.
The paper will use ecosystem services as a way of explaining how these two films frame the issue of whale endangerment anthropocentrically. Even in stories nominally about animal extinction, the concern for the service whales provide to humanity remains paramount. This approach has potential wider application to the ways we think about the human-environment relationship constructed in science fiction.
Dolly Jørgensen
Umeå University
dolly@jorgensenweb.net
Finn Arne Jørgensen
Does the Empire Recycle? Waste and Scrap Recycling in the Star Wars Movies
The Star Wars movies abound with scenes of waste and scrap recycling, of creative use of discarded resources and of wasteful use of precious materials. Using the direct question of whether the Empire recycles as a pedagogical organizing principle, this essay will explore the question of resources and recycling in the Star Wars movies, with the two very specific historical examples of ragpicking and war-time recycling as the background.
The movies give us a good insight into what we can call informal recycling practices, seemingly modeled after pre-World War II rag pickers, scavengers, scrap workers, and junk dealers. These have in common that they are scruffy and unruly elements, marginalized and standing outside of (but yet interfacing with) the rest of society. One example is the Jawa Sandcrawlers on Tatooine – they are giant mobile recycling stations where material that the Jawas have scavenged is sold for profit. In The Phantom Menace, young Anakin Skywalker was a slave owned by the junk dealer Watto. Such recycling practices were very prevalent in American and European cities at least until WWII, and can still be found among homeless people in the west today. At the same time, the creative use of such resources represents some form of freedom and resistance to the Empire. One example is the Millennium Falcon, “the fastest hunk of junk in the Galaxy.”
The other historical context is government-organized wartime recycling. Although the Star Wars movies to a large degree are about wars, we see very few hints at governmental, organized recycling activities, but many small-scale scavenger-type examples. This is somewhat surprising, considering that authoritarian regimes often had very strict recycling policies in wartime, as demonstrated by the recent book How Green Were The Nazis? (by Brüggemeier, Cioc, and Zeller, Ohio University Press, 2005). We see some, but not as many, traces of organized, institutional or governmental recycling practices in the movies. In Cloud City on Bespin, C-3PO seemed destined for disassembly and reprocessing in a recycling facility after being shot by Stormtroopers. At the same time, Luke ends up hanging at the end of a Cloud City garbage chute, so we know that plenty of waste must be ejected rather than reused. The Empire itself seems little concerned with waste and recycling. We know that Star Destroyers jettison garbage, including metals, before entering hyperspace. We also know that the first Death Star had magnetically sealed garbage compactors, but the composition and destination of this garbage is uncertain.
By discussing these central scenes, the article would attempt to answer the question of whether the Empire recycles, and its possible motivations for doing, or not doing, so. The article would thus use Star Wars to give readers an insight into the roots of modern recycling and how those practices are included (or not) in the movies. In an even larger perspective, it would allow us to discuss and question some of the underlying principles of the contemporary environmental debate about values, materials, and resources.
Finn Arne Jørgensen
Umeå University
fa@jorgensenweb.net
Ekaterina A. Kalemeneva
City under the dome: from scientific fiction to the reality?
The idea of a city covered by transparent dome attracts interest of people for many years. This plot was widespread among science fiction writers during the 20th century (E.Hamilton City at World’s End, A.Klark Startown etc). Generally in those novels the main aim of building a covered city was to protect people from harmful influence of severe environment or from the consequences of catastrophe. Nevertheless some authors emphasized a negative impact of the closed space on society and striving some of them to become free from the dome above the city. However this idea turned out to be in a significant demand from scientists and architects, especially in the USSR, well-known for its inclement nature in the Far North - one of the hardest places for life. So since the 1960s they work up several projects on creation of such closed Northern cities. In this study I’m going to consider the development of this fantastic intention of scientists in the USSR and modern Russia and several failed attempts of its implementation. So the crucial poser is where is the line between science and fiction in some environmental projects.
Ekaterina A. Kalemeneva
European University at Saint-Petersburg
ekalemeneva@eu.spb.ru
Cynthia J. Miller
Domesticating Space: Science Fiction Serials Come Home
Science fiction series of early television are typically cast as impoverished imitations of the action-packed movie house serials that defined youth entertainment of the 1920s-1950s. This paper, however, refocuses the discussion of these early televised science fiction series, to illustrate the ways in which programs such as Captain Video, Commando Cody, Space Patrol, Tom Corbett: Space Cadet, and others comprised a uniquely domestic form of entertainment, propelling characters, images of advanced technology, and tales of other worlds across media.
Adapting the familiar and successful “serial” format found in theaters, these series extended the genre of speculative fiction made popular in radio, movies and comics, using seriality and intertextuality to create new narratives that combined fantasy, real-world scientific advances, nationalism, and consumerism, to create a new generation of Cold War Americans. These programs became quickly interwoven with family life in ways that not only shaped the viewing habits of American families, but also created a new domestic culture that bridged the gap between the fantastic worlds on the television screen and the world of everyday family life.
Cynthia J. Miller
Emerson College
cynthia_miller@emerson.edu
Alexa Weik von Mossner
Science Fiction and the Future of Ecological Citizenship
In my paper I will discuss how American science fiction writers have used ecological risk scenarios as starting points for their imagining of new forms of citizenship. I will first consider two dystopian satires— Norman Spinrad’s Greenhouse Summer and T.C. Boyle’s A Friend of the Earth—which both critically examine the future of citizenship in the context of complex global systems. As I will show, both texts throw an interesting light on Patrick Hayden’s concept of world environmental citizenship and Ulrich Beck’s hopes for a cosmopolitan vision that emerges from the global environmental threats creating the world risk society. My paper will then turn to Kim Stanley Robinson’s Pacific Edge, one of the few (critical) utopian novels that dare to imagine a near-future in which global ecological risk has indeed, as Beck suggests it might, led to cosmopolitan forms of governance. Drawing on Andrew Dobson’s concept of “post-cosmopolitan” ecological citizenship, I will examine how in Robinson’s novel the ever-faster degradation of ecosystems has been stopped and even reversed because “two working generations” of citizens have insisted on their environmental rights and taken on their ecological responsibilities. The narrative strategies of these three novels, I will argue, offer readers an affective engagement with their own future and invite them to reflect on the potential consequences of their current actions as consumers and citizens.
Alexa Weik von Mossner
University of Fribourg, Switzerland/Rachel Carson Center, Munich
alexa.weik@unifr.ch
Andreas Nyström
Echoes of civilization's past
In post-apocalyptic narratives, there is a constant preoccupation with the search for remainders from the world before the catastrophe. And in many post-apocalyptic representations, the remainders—the physical artifacts—of the world before the devastation are consumer goods: Not books. Not music. Not pictures. But candy, clothes, and vanity products. For example, The Man and the Boy in Cormac McCarthy’s The Road push a shopping cart with their few belongings laboriously south, constantly on the lookout for shoes and edible remains from the world before the end. Canned fruit and Coca-‐cola cans are treated by the Man with reverence and nostalgia—the artifacts working as passages of memory to another world. And in Margret Atwood’s The Year of the Flood, one character survives the apocalypse by hiding in a spa, finding sustenance in beauty products; she eats skin cream to survive. By understanding the remainders we can understand what is destroyed and what parts of civilization have endured. What survives unscathed, what is in need of repair, and what can be left behind when the world begins anew? I propose a study of contemporary post-apocalyptic novels, focusing on memories and defamiliarized remainders of the pre-apocalypse, in an effort to improve understanding of the cultural significance of stories of new beginnings set in a world after the End in a post-9/11 occidental context.
Andreas Nyström
Karlstad University
andreas.nystrom@kau.se
Tony Thorström
Digitalised bodies and new technologies: reconfigurations of human ´nature´ in the wake of the information revolution.
Recent revolutions in the fields of biotechnology, medicine, and informatics have come to question the status of the human body, no longer considered a stable organic entity, but rather raw material waiting to be transformed to better suit the future development of the human species. The ambiguous role of the contemporary body, on the one hand, a constituent par excellence and the defining characteristic of human ontology and identity, and on the other, perceived as obsolete, superfluous and thus an obstacle that at every price has to be overcome, has in the past few decades strongly influenced the literary imagination.
A presentation of a work in process, this paper proposes to explore and problematize the obsolescence of the human body and the concept of dematerialisation as they are expressed in contemporary works of French speaking science fiction literature. What status do these works of fiction accord to the organic body vis-à-vis hybrid life forms (techno bodies)? Do cyberspace and virtual environments represent the beginning of the ultimate end of the human organic body? And what are the ontological consequences brought forth by these changes?
Tony Thorström
Uppsala University
tony.thorstrom@moderna.uu.se
Joe Trotta
Do linguists dream of electric sheep?: a look at alien languages, future Englishes and linguists in Speculative Fiction
In this interdisciplinary presentation, I explore SF as a unique meeting point for linguistics, literature studies and cultural studies. The talk surveys subjects like: 1) the basic mechanics and significance of constructed languages (or ‘ConLangs’, which may be either imagined ‘alien’ languages or future versions of English), 2) the tension between the ‘linguist-as- author’ and ‘author-as-linguist’, 3) the salient linguistic themes/theories underlying many SF stories (like, for example, the versions of Chomskyan theories found in books like Neal Stephenson’s Snow Crash or Ian Watson’s The Embedding, or the many interpretations of the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis found in stories like Samuel Delany’s Babel-17, or China Miéville’s Embassytown).
During the course of the discussion, I sketch out some the most striking features of languages like Láadan (developed by Suzette Haden Elgin for her Science Fiction series Native Tongue) and Klingon (developed by the linguist Marc Okrand for the Star Trek TV series and films) with a view to understanding the background to their development and their use and popularity outside the fictional world for which they were created.
Joe Trotta
University of Gothenburg
joe.trotta@eng.gu.se
Ingrid Wållgren
Freeze, wait, reanimate: An exploration of science fiction and science facts
Cryonics is the process of freezing legally dead humans in the hope that future science would one day restore them to life, youth and health. The cryonics field is thus seeking a solution to death. This controversial practice has given rise to a heated biopolitical debate on life, death, suspended animation and ethics.
My analysis maps out the occurring ideas that constitute the field of cryonics, ideas reaching further back in history than the practice itself and often found in the fiction preceding the facts. The ambition is to understand how these occurring ideas are dealt with in the modern cryonics debate: Pinpointing the ideas, putting them in a historical context, as well as pursuing a critical analysis of the given premises. Awareness is given of occurring myths, such as the concept of hubris, and how these myths and metaphysical arguments intermingle with science facts and political statements.
The paper investigates how the science of cryonics is grounded in science fiction movies, literature and games. It further looks into the challenges that emerge from these ideas when science fiction turns into science facts – and how mans perception of what is science fiction, what is reality and where the line should be drawn is debated.
Ingrid Wållgren
University of Lund
ingridwallgren@hotmail.com
Anna Åberg
Witnessing our energy future
Fossil fuels power a large part of our society, but they also pollute and are sometimes extracted at large human costs. Nuclear power is efficient and powerful, but the consequences of using it could be potentially fatal. Ethanol is described both as environmental saviour and villain. The energy issue is a jungle of pros and cons in which we need to navigate in order to make decisions about what we want our future to look like. One place where different ways to navigate the energy dilemma is often discussed is in science fiction, (i.e the Day of the Triffids, Moon, the Matrix) and I want to explore some of these narratives and the way they handle the issue over time. Science fiction has for the past 100 years been a platform where societal issues have been been brought out to the public, discussed, and interpreted. But what can we learn from looking at the energy issue from a science fiction perspective? How can we go further than a mere text/image analysis? Are there threads leading from fictional narratives into the “real” world, and what do these threads look like? Can popular culture expressions help us decide anything about our future, and in that case, is it possible to find out how?
Anna Åberg
Royal Institute of Technology
aberg2@kth.se
For more information, please contact:
Finn Arne Jørgensen
Associate Senior Lecturer, History of Technology and Environment
Department of Historical, Philosophical, and Religious Studies
Umeå University
901 87 Umeå
Sweden
finn.jorgensen@idehist.umu.se
