There is an argument to be made that one of science fiction’s key concerns is the question of what it is to be human, and that thus a form of (post)humanist thinking lies at the heart of the genre. After all, one school of sf scholarship holds Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818) as the genre’s origin text, dealing prototypically with “the search for a definition of man and his status in the universe” (Aldiss 8; cf. Freedman).
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Enemy Mine is based on Barry B. Longyear’s 1980 Hugo- and Nebula-award winning novella of the same name, originally published in Isaac Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine and later rewritten into a novel and even expanded into a trilogy. It is also Wolfgang Petersen’s US-debut film direction, after his international breakthrough with the German World War II movie Das Boot (1981), which received six Academy Award nominations, and the well-received fantasy film The NeverEnding Story(1984).
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The origins of the X-COM game series lie with the 1994 game titled UFO: Enemy Unknown, whose success spawned a rebranding into X-COM: UFO Defense and the launch of five further game titles under the same brand until changes in the ownership of the franchise stopped its development in 2001. After a hiatus, the franchise was bought by 2K Games to be rebooted and reimagined in 2012 as XCOM: Enemy Unknown, so far spawning two more games and additional download contents. The main entries in the series are round-based strategy games, in which players move tactical units over conflict maps in order to fulfill strategic objectives.
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The genre of science fiction is not the most reliable source for predicting the future. And yet, when one engages in prophecy, be it political, social, ecological, or economic, science fiction seems to be a staple for the visualization of one’s prognostication. In fact, culturally speaking science fiction seems to be our most reliable resource to drive home the point that purely statistical predictions are unable to transport to mainstream audiences.
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A translation of my DayZ article from Science Fiction Studies into French…
Lars Schmeink, « « Piller, Tuer, Survivre » : Apocalypse zombie, exploration et expérience vécue dans DayZ », ReS Futurae [En ligne], 12 | 2018, mis en ligne le 19 décembre 2018, consulté le 02 mars 2019. URL : http://journals.openedition.org/resf/2140 ; DOI : 10.4000/resf.2140
Angesichts der weitreichenden Veränderungen unseres Lebens, der fortschreitenden Digitalisierung, der massiven Wandlungen ausgelöst durch Biotechnologie und die immer größer werdende Komplexität globaler Systeme ist es kaum verwunderlich, dass man eigentlich überall dem Begriff des Posthumanismus begegnet. Denn wer wir sind, das steht im 21. Jahrhundert mehr denn je in Frage – sowohl der Status „Mensch“ als auch der Status „Person“ müssen angesichts sich verändernder sozialer Bedingungen und technologischer Entwicklungen neu gedacht werden. Und genau das ermöglicht uns der Posthumanismus.
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According to Dutch cultural historian Johan Huizinga the concept of play is a cultural phenomenon which permeates social activity and can be found as an element of almost everything humans do, from the way we construct language to the way we enact our beliefs: “law and order, commerce and profit, craft and art, poetry, wisdom, and science. All are rooted in the primaeval soil of play” (5).
Read MoreThe relation of science fiction and the utopian tradition has been a point of some contention among critics of either field—Darko Suvin, for example, famously argued that “utopia is not a genre but the sociopolitical subgenre of science fiction” (61). And Peter Fitting refutes Suvin’s simplistic conflation, instead arguing “that there is not a necessary connection between utopia and science fiction” (149) as suggested by the subgenre attribution, while nonetheless sf brings to the utopian imagination specific qualities, such as “its ability to reflect or express our hopes and fears about the future, and more specifically to link those hopes and fears to science and technology” (138). Especially in its “punked” variations, sf tends towards social and individual fears about technological developments, preferring a dystopian vision of the future. Cyberpunk, as Tom Moylan argues, presents a “negative portrayal of the brave new world of late-twentieth-century capitalism” (197). A similar argument holds for biopunk, a form of sf established in close proximity with cyberpunk, but which has evolved in a different trajectory. As I have argued in Biopunk Dystopias, biopunk is a cultural representation of the socio-economic and political changes brought about by biotechnological progress in the 21st century. And popular culture has mostly addressed fears and anxiety about research in the biological and life sciences via the dystopian imagination. […]
You can find the full article on Deletion:
Schmeink, Lars. „The Utopian Potential of Biopunk.“ Deletion. On Punking Speculative Fiction. Episode 14. Web. Ed. Sean Guynes-Vishniac.
Link: Deletion, Episode 14
From its inception, the Fallout series has been entrenched in feelings of nostalgia for an era long gone, or one might argue, for an era once imagined to come. In effect, Fallout is a case of “retrofuturism,” a cultural form that “highlights nostalgia, irony, and time-bending dislocation … engaging the relationship between the future and the past.”[1]
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With the rapid changes in computer technology, popular discourses reflect an anxiety about the future and the role of humans in the world. Cyberpunk—a mode of science fiction highlighting information technologies and degrees of social disorder—in some ways captures these anxieties.
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