A curious sympathy between second-wave feminism and evolutionary theory forged a powerful connection between women and the sea. Speculative nonfiction by Elaine Morgan rewrote humanity’s evolutionary past to be more fluid and more feminist in her Descent of Woman (1972). Later fiction—including Kurt Vonnegut’s Galápagos (1985) and biologist Joan Slonczewski’s A Door into Ocean (1986)—posited alternative futures in which long association with the ocean resulted in the evolution of new forms of biological and social order. The elusive boundary between science and fiction in these narratives highlights both the moral authority of nature and the subversive connotations of the aquatic.
第二波女权主义和进化论之间的奇特同情在女性和海洋之间建立了强有力的联系。伊莱恩·摩根（Elaine Morgan）的推测性非虚构小说在1972年的《女人的后裔》（Descent of Woman）中改写了人类的进化历史，使其更加流畅和女权主义。后来的小说——包括库尔特·冯内古特（Kurt Vonnegut）的《加拉帕戈斯》（Galápagos）（1985年）和生物学家琼·斯朗切夫斯基（Joan Slonczewski）的《通往海洋的门》（1986年）——提出了另一种未来，在这种未来中，与海洋的长期联系导致了新形式的生物和社会秩序的进化。在这些叙事中，科学和小说之间难以捉摸的界限凸显了自然的道德权威和水生生物的颠覆性内涵。
{"title":"Old Woman and the Sea:","authors":"E. Milam","doi":"10.1086/703642","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1086/703642","url":null,"abstract":"A curious sympathy between second-wave feminism and evolutionary theory forged a powerful connection between women and the sea. Speculative nonfiction by Elaine Morgan rewrote humanity’s evolutionary past to be more fluid and more feminist in her Descent of Woman (1972). Later fiction—including Kurt Vonnegut’s Galápagos (1985) and biologist Joan Slonczewski’s A Door into Ocean (1986)—posited alternative futures in which long association with the ocean resulted in the evolution of new forms of biological and social order. The elusive boundary between science and fiction in these narratives highlights both the moral authority of nature and the subversive connotations of the aquatic.","PeriodicalId":54659,"journal":{"name":"Osiris","volume":"34 1","pages":"198 - 215"},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2019-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1086/703642","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"49387046","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"哲学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Postwar environmental concern has been powerfully shaped by projections of ecological catastrophe. Indeed, it can be said that the global environment as an object of social and political concern came into existence in part through narratives of future crisis. This article explores two successive framings of environmental crisis and the kinds of knowledges that made them up. It examines the announcement of ecological limits to economic growth in the early 1970s, the culmination of an early wave of popular green concern that modeled the future as a choice between the catastrophic continuation of business as usual and the prospect of eco-utopian alternatives. It considers the crisis logics of contemporary climate dynamics, where the power of scientific modeling leaves little room for the imagination of radically different futures. Environmental crisis now cannot perform the anticipatory and utopian functions that it once did. The “apocalyptic horizon” of limits has given way to the collapse of crisis into the present and new kinds of colonization of the future. But in both cases, environmental crisis can be read as a science-fictional object, simultaneously descriptive and speculative, scientific and fictional. Science fiction tropes were crucial to early constructions of environmental crisis, and speculative climate fiction will be a vital resource for negotiating the social-natural futures of the Anthropocene.
{"title":"Environmental Futures, Now and Then:","authors":"L. Garforth","doi":"10.1086/703910","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1086/703910","url":null,"abstract":"Postwar environmental concern has been powerfully shaped by projections of ecological catastrophe. Indeed, it can be said that the global environment as an object of social and political concern came into existence in part through narratives of future crisis. This article explores two successive framings of environmental crisis and the kinds of knowledges that made them up. It examines the announcement of ecological limits to economic growth in the early 1970s, the culmination of an early wave of popular green concern that modeled the future as a choice between the catastrophic continuation of business as usual and the prospect of eco-utopian alternatives. It considers the crisis logics of contemporary climate dynamics, where the power of scientific modeling leaves little room for the imagination of radically different futures. Environmental crisis now cannot perform the anticipatory and utopian functions that it once did. The “apocalyptic horizon” of limits has given way to the collapse of crisis into the present and new kinds of colonization of the future. But in both cases, environmental crisis can be read as a science-fictional object, simultaneously descriptive and speculative, scientific and fictional. Science fiction tropes were crucial to early constructions of environmental crisis, and speculative climate fiction will be a vital resource for negotiating the social-natural futures of the Anthropocene.","PeriodicalId":54659,"journal":{"name":"Osiris","volume":"10 4","pages":"238 - 257"},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2019-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1086/703910","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"41306300","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"哲学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Since the turn of the twenty-first century, there has been an increasing number of articles in the popular press on antibiotic resistance, a great many of which present the phenomenon in the science-fictional language of the “post-antibiotic apocalypse.” In an effort to increase public awareness, the Longitude Prize, funded by the United Kingdom’s National Endowment for Science, Technology, and the Arts (NESTA), created the mobile video game Superbugs in 2016. This essay shows how the mobile gaming medium responds to and performs the science fictionality of the antibiotic apocalypse in a way that has consequences for the history of science. Superbugs mediates a shift in the conceptual metaphor of a war between humans and bacteria to an interrelational model of coexistence. By defamiliarizing both the history and current representations of antibiotic resistance, the game gives us a unique way to reflect on the conditions that fostered this survival facility in the bacteria genome.
{"title":"Gaming the Apocalypse in the Time of Antibiotic Resistance","authors":"Lorenzo Servitje","doi":"10.1086/704048","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1086/704048","url":null,"abstract":"Since the turn of the twenty-first century, there has been an increasing number of articles in the popular press on antibiotic resistance, a great many of which present the phenomenon in the science-fictional language of the “post-antibiotic apocalypse.” In an effort to increase public awareness, the Longitude Prize, funded by the United Kingdom’s National Endowment for Science, Technology, and the Arts (NESTA), created the mobile video game Superbugs in 2016. This essay shows how the mobile gaming medium responds to and performs the science fictionality of the antibiotic apocalypse in a way that has consequences for the history of science. Superbugs mediates a shift in the conceptual metaphor of a war between humans and bacteria to an interrelational model of coexistence. By defamiliarizing both the history and current representations of antibiotic resistance, the game gives us a unique way to reflect on the conditions that fostered this survival facility in the bacteria genome.","PeriodicalId":54659,"journal":{"name":"Osiris","volume":"34 1","pages":"316 - 337"},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2019-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1086/704048","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"48514360","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"哲学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
In an 1898 short story titled “From the ‘London Times’ of 1904,” Mark Twain introduced an electrical instrument called the telectroscope. Machines for transmitting vision at a distance, telectroscopes had been speculated about since the invention of the telephone in 1876. Over the next quarter of a century, numerous inventors were credited with its imminent, but never realized, production. No such instrument was ever actually built, and it now usually appears only in footnotes to television’s prehistory. Nevertheless, the telectroscope offers useful insights into the way the Victorian future was constructed out of assemblages of fact and fiction. In this chapter I chart the ways in which the instrument moved back and forth across the boundaries of the real. Precisely because it never existed, I suggest, the telectroscope offers an excellent example of the ways the Victorian future was made out of its own material culture.
{"title":"Looking into the Future:","authors":"I. Morus","doi":"10.1086/704066","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1086/704066","url":null,"abstract":"In an 1898 short story titled “From the ‘London Times’ of 1904,” Mark Twain introduced an electrical instrument called the telectroscope. Machines for transmitting vision at a distance, telectroscopes had been speculated about since the invention of the telephone in 1876. Over the next quarter of a century, numerous inventors were credited with its imminent, but never realized, production. No such instrument was ever actually built, and it now usually appears only in footnotes to television’s prehistory. Nevertheless, the telectroscope offers useful insights into the way the Victorian future was constructed out of assemblages of fact and fiction. In this chapter I chart the ways in which the instrument moved back and forth across the boundaries of the real. Precisely because it never existed, I suggest, the telectroscope offers an excellent example of the ways the Victorian future was made out of its own material culture.","PeriodicalId":54659,"journal":{"name":"Osiris","volume":"34 1","pages":"19 - 35"},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2019-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1086/704066","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"47871136","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"哲学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
I argue for the importance of considering author, director, and producer Michael Crichton (1942–2008) as a critic and student of Cold War cultures of expertise. Though best known for his blockbuster fiction, he shared a sensibility with academics in North America and the United Kingdom who were concerned with scientists’ unchecked authority. These scholars created a new field that would later become known as Science and Technology Studies or STS. Like his contemporaries in STS, and often in anticipation of them, Crichton’s novels relied on a blend of history, sociology, and anthropology to lift back the curtain to reveal the specialized worlds in which scientists worked, and to devote specific attention to the practices, instruments, and values that animated their knowledge-production enterprise. In doing so, his fiction both popularized STS and shaped concerns and fears about the future of science and technology. The “speculative present” is useful for making visible the ironies exploited by Crichton, including his own engagement with ideas about speculation as both a form of conjecture and a form of prospecting value. Inspired by Donna Haraway’s early work on the cyborg, the speculative present helps to pry open forms of world making obscured by adherence to binaries of fact and fiction, nature and culture, with the goal of cultivating a broader array of visions about emerging science and technology.
{"title":"The Speculative Present","authors":"Joanna Radin","doi":"10.1086/704047","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1086/704047","url":null,"abstract":"I argue for the importance of considering author, director, and producer Michael Crichton (1942–2008) as a critic and student of Cold War cultures of expertise. Though best known for his blockbuster fiction, he shared a sensibility with academics in North America and the United Kingdom who were concerned with scientists’ unchecked authority. These scholars created a new field that would later become known as Science and Technology Studies or STS. Like his contemporaries in STS, and often in anticipation of them, Crichton’s novels relied on a blend of history, sociology, and anthropology to lift back the curtain to reveal the specialized worlds in which scientists worked, and to devote specific attention to the practices, instruments, and values that animated their knowledge-production enterprise. In doing so, his fiction both popularized STS and shaped concerns and fears about the future of science and technology. The “speculative present” is useful for making visible the ironies exploited by Crichton, including his own engagement with ideas about speculation as both a form of conjecture and a form of prospecting value. Inspired by Donna Haraway’s early work on the cyborg, the speculative present helps to pry open forms of world making obscured by adherence to binaries of fact and fiction, nature and culture, with the goal of cultivating a broader array of visions about emerging science and technology.","PeriodicalId":54659,"journal":{"name":"Osiris","volume":"34 1","pages":"297 - 315"},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2019-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1086/704047","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"41445757","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"哲学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
This essay makes a detailed analysis of the contents and contexts of a science fiction novel published in Moscow in 1928, and written by gynecologist Fedor Il’in (1873–1959) under the title The Valley of New Life. The analysis illuminates the process of the transformation of the specialized, and often quite arcane, scientific knowledge generated by biomedical research into an influential cultural resource that embodied acute societal anxieties (both hopes and fears) about the powers unleashed by the rapid development of the biomedical sciences. It explores the future scientific advances—bio- and psychotechnologies—portrayed in Il’in’s novel in light of contemporary research, and especially focuses on studies of telepathy. The essay depicts the “translation” of available scientific descriptions and explanations of telepathy into a highly metaphorical language of science fiction, and the resulting formation of a particular cultural resource embedded in such popular notions as “mental energy,” “thought transfer,” “radio-brain,” “nervous waves,” “psychic rays,” and “mind control.” It examines how and for what purposes this cultural resource was utilized by scientists, their patrons, and literati (journalists and writers) in Bolshevik Russia, Britain, and the United States.
{"title":"Thought Transfer and Mind Control between Science and Fiction:","authors":"N. Krementsov","doi":"10.1086/703249","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1086/703249","url":null,"abstract":"This essay makes a detailed analysis of the contents and contexts of a science fiction novel published in Moscow in 1928, and written by gynecologist Fedor Il’in (1873–1959) under the title The Valley of New Life. The analysis illuminates the process of the transformation of the specialized, and often quite arcane, scientific knowledge generated by biomedical research into an influential cultural resource that embodied acute societal anxieties (both hopes and fears) about the powers unleashed by the rapid development of the biomedical sciences. It explores the future scientific advances—bio- and psychotechnologies—portrayed in Il’in’s novel in light of contemporary research, and especially focuses on studies of telepathy. The essay depicts the “translation” of available scientific descriptions and explanations of telepathy into a highly metaphorical language of science fiction, and the resulting formation of a particular cultural resource embedded in such popular notions as “mental energy,” “thought transfer,” “radio-brain,” “nervous waves,” “psychic rays,” and “mind control.” It examines how and for what purposes this cultural resource was utilized by scientists, their patrons, and literati (journalists and writers) in Bolshevik Russia, Britain, and the United States.","PeriodicalId":54659,"journal":{"name":"Osiris","volume":"34 1","pages":"36 - 54"},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2019-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1086/703249","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"41449442","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"哲学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
In the mid-twentieth century, film studios sent their screenplays to the Hays Office, Hollywood’s official censorship body, and to the Catholic Church’s Legion of Decency for approval and recommendations for revision. This essay examines how filmmakers crafted stories involving evolutionary biology and how religiously motivated movie censorship groups modified these cinematic narratives in order to depict what they considered to be more appropriate visions of humanity’s origins. I find that censorship groups were concerned about the perceived impact of science fiction cinema on the public’s belief systems and on the wider cultural meanings of evolution. By controlling the stories told about evolution in science fiction cinema, censorship organizations believed that they could regulate the broader cultural meanings of evolution itself. But this is not a straightforward story of “science” versus “religion.” There were significant differences among these groups as to how to censor evolution, as well as changes in their attitudes toward evolutionary content over time. As a result, I show how censorship groups adopted diverse perspectives, depending on their perception of what constituted a morally appropriate science fiction story about evolution.
在20世纪中期，电影制片厂将他们的剧本送到好莱坞的官方审查机构海斯办公室(Hays Office)和天主教会的道德军团(Legion of Decency)，以获得批准和修改建议。本文考察了电影制作人如何精心制作涉及进化生物学的故事，以及出于宗教动机的电影审查机构如何修改这些电影叙事，以描绘他们认为更合适的人类起源。我发现，审查机构关心的是科幻电影对公众信仰体系和更广泛的进化文化意义的影响。通过控制科幻电影中关于进化的故事，审查机构相信他们可以控制进化本身更广泛的文化意义。但这并不是一个简单的“科学”与“宗教”的故事。在如何审查进化的问题上，这些群体之间存在着显著的差异，同时随着时间的推移，他们对进化内容的态度也发生了变化。因此，我展示了审查机构是如何采用不同的观点的，这取决于他们对道德上合适的关于进化的科幻故事的看法。
{"title":"Darwin on the Cutting-Room Floor:","authors":"D. Kirby","doi":"10.1086/703953","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1086/703953","url":null,"abstract":"In the mid-twentieth century, film studios sent their screenplays to the Hays Office, Hollywood’s official censorship body, and to the Catholic Church’s Legion of Decency for approval and recommendations for revision. This essay examines how filmmakers crafted stories involving evolutionary biology and how religiously motivated movie censorship groups modified these cinematic narratives in order to depict what they considered to be more appropriate visions of humanity’s origins. I find that censorship groups were concerned about the perceived impact of science fiction cinema on the public’s belief systems and on the wider cultural meanings of evolution. By controlling the stories told about evolution in science fiction cinema, censorship organizations believed that they could regulate the broader cultural meanings of evolution itself. But this is not a straightforward story of “science” versus “religion.” There were significant differences among these groups as to how to censor evolution, as well as changes in their attitudes toward evolutionary content over time. As a result, I show how censorship groups adopted diverse perspectives, depending on their perception of what constituted a morally appropriate science fiction story about evolution.","PeriodicalId":54659,"journal":{"name":"Osiris","volume":"34 1","pages":"55 - 80"},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2019-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1086/703953","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"47848058","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"哲学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Science fiction and popular science writing sometimes intersect—authors have written in both genres, and magazines have published their writing side by side. Producing “hard” science fiction depends on getting the known science right and ensuring that predictions seem plausible. There have even been claims that science fiction should be used to make science itself accessible to a wider public. This article uses case studies from mid-twentieth-century Britain to illustrate the range of attitudes adopted by authors and publishers who sought to associate the two genres and to probe the notion of “plausibility” in this context.
{"title":"Parallel Prophecies:","authors":"P. Bowler","doi":"10.1086/703952","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1086/703952","url":null,"abstract":"Science fiction and popular science writing sometimes intersect—authors have written in both genres, and magazines have published their writing side by side. Producing “hard” science fiction depends on getting the known science right and ensuring that predictions seem plausible. There have even been claims that science fiction should be used to make science itself accessible to a wider public. This article uses case studies from mid-twentieth-century Britain to illustrate the range of attitudes adopted by authors and publishers who sought to associate the two genres and to probe the notion of “plausibility” in this context.","PeriodicalId":54659,"journal":{"name":"Osiris","volume":"34 1","pages":"121 - 138"},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2019-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1086/703952","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"43421058","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"哲学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
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