This article argues that John Wyndham’s postwar novels represent a sustained attempt to analyze and problematize the relationship between knowledge, expertise, and society. Wyndham held vigorous opinions on the critical role that science fiction (SF) could and should play in modernity, even as his novels dissected the ultimate unsustainability of industrial urban democracies. He believed that it was the role of the SF writer to show that the pace and path of scientific and technological developments were not predetermined, but potentially subject to collective decision-making regarding the human future. This article explores Wyndham’s depiction of “experts” and “amateurs” in the context of his deployment of scientific and social-scientific concepts as he examined prospective futures, and argues that aspects of SF can be understood as practical STS or applied history of science that are firmly situated in an affective moral context.
{"title":"From Technician’s Extravaganza to Logical Fantasy:","authors":"A. Rees","doi":"10.1086/704015","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1086/704015","url":null,"abstract":"This article argues that John Wyndham’s postwar novels represent a sustained attempt to analyze and problematize the relationship between knowledge, expertise, and society. Wyndham held vigorous opinions on the critical role that science fiction (SF) could and should play in modernity, even as his novels dissected the ultimate unsustainability of industrial urban democracies. He believed that it was the role of the SF writer to show that the pace and path of scientific and technological developments were not predetermined, but potentially subject to collective decision-making regarding the human future. This article explores Wyndham’s depiction of “experts” and “amateurs” in the context of his deployment of scientific and social-scientific concepts as he examined prospective futures, and argues that aspects of SF can be understood as practical STS or applied history of science that are firmly situated in an affective moral context.","PeriodicalId":54659,"journal":{"name":"Osiris","volume":"34 1","pages":"277 - 296"},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2019-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1086/704015","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"43431164","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}
Looking back at his research on tachyons in the 1960s and 1970s, the physicist Gerald Feinberg recalled that he started thinking about particles that go faster than light after reading James Blish’s 1954 science fiction story “Beep.” While the technical conceits of Blish’s tale may have stirred Feinberg’s curiosity, its literary implications were yet more significant. As a story about faster-than-light messages that travel backward in time, “Beep” thematizes the capacity of speculative fictions to affect the present and reorient the future. For Feinberg, stories like “Beep” and Arthur C. Clarke’s 1953 novel Childhood’s End offered conceptual resources as well as models for practice, affirming a science fiction way of doing science. By attending to Feinberg’s work on tachyons as well as his ventures in futurology, such as The Prometheus Project, this essay shows how Feinberg’s reading of science fiction reinforced a speculative approach to knowledge and innovation, an understanding of theoretical science as intimately aligned with science fiction, and a conviction that science fiction was a vital instrument for science policy and social change.
{"title":"Ahead of Time:","authors":"C. Milburn","doi":"10.1086/703511","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1086/703511","url":null,"abstract":"Looking back at his research on tachyons in the 1960s and 1970s, the physicist Gerald Feinberg recalled that he started thinking about particles that go faster than light after reading James Blish’s 1954 science fiction story “Beep.” While the technical conceits of Blish’s tale may have stirred Feinberg’s curiosity, its literary implications were yet more significant. As a story about faster-than-light messages that travel backward in time, “Beep” thematizes the capacity of speculative fictions to affect the present and reorient the future. For Feinberg, stories like “Beep” and Arthur C. Clarke’s 1953 novel Childhood’s End offered conceptual resources as well as models for practice, affirming a science fiction way of doing science. By attending to Feinberg’s work on tachyons as well as his ventures in futurology, such as The Prometheus Project, this essay shows how Feinberg’s reading of science fiction reinforced a speculative approach to knowledge and innovation, an understanding of theoretical science as intimately aligned with science fiction, and a conviction that science fiction was a vital instrument for science policy and social change.","PeriodicalId":54659,"journal":{"name":"Osiris","volume":"34 1","pages":"216 - 237"},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2019-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1086/703511","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"44266424","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}
Fans of science fiction offer an unusual opportunity to study that rare bird—a “public” view of science in history. Of course science fiction fans are by no means representative of a “general” public, but they are a coherent, interesting, and significant group in their own right. In this article, we follow British fans from their phase of self-organization just before World War II and through their wartime experiences. We examine how they defined science and science fiction, and how they connected their interest in them with their personal ambitions and social concerns. Moreover, we show how the war clarified and altered these connections. Rather than being distracted from science fiction, fans redoubled their focus upon it during the years of conflict. The number of new fanzines published in the midcentury actually peaked during the war. In this article, we examine what science fiction fandom, developed over the previous few years, offered them in this time of national trial.
{"title":"War and Peace in British Science Fiction Fandom, 1936–1945","authors":"C. Sleigh, Alice White","doi":"10.1086/703986","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1086/703986","url":null,"abstract":"Fans of science fiction offer an unusual opportunity to study that rare bird—a “public” view of science in history. Of course science fiction fans are by no means representative of a “general” public, but they are a coherent, interesting, and significant group in their own right. In this article, we follow British fans from their phase of self-organization just before World War II and through their wartime experiences. We examine how they defined science and science fiction, and how they connected their interest in them with their personal ambitions and social concerns. Moreover, we show how the war clarified and altered these connections. Rather than being distracted from science fiction, fans redoubled their focus upon it during the years of conflict. The number of new fanzines published in the midcentury actually peaked during the war. In this article, we examine what science fiction fandom, developed over the previous few years, offered them in this time of national trial.","PeriodicalId":54659,"journal":{"name":"Osiris","volume":"34 1","pages":"177 - 197"},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2019-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1086/703986","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"48541745","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}
The relation of science to science fiction in the history of Chinese science fiction has been closely linked to both the influence of Western science and to ideals of progress, nationalism, and empire. But when we turn to China’s long history of philosophical speculation, a rather different story needs to be told. This article examines the ways in which the indigenous Chinese sciences have fed into fiction, and considers the consequences for our understandings of the genre of science fiction itself and its broader social and historical contexts, as well as relationships between modernity, progress, and science in a non-Western, but globally crucial, context.
{"title":"Chinese Science Fiction:","authors":"L. Raphals","doi":"10.1086/703867","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1086/703867","url":null,"abstract":"The relation of science to science fiction in the history of Chinese science fiction has been closely linked to both the influence of Western science and to ideals of progress, nationalism, and empire. But when we turn to China’s long history of philosophical speculation, a rather different story needs to be told. This article examines the ways in which the indigenous Chinese sciences have fed into fiction, and considers the consequences for our understandings of the genre of science fiction itself and its broader social and historical contexts, as well as relationships between modernity, progress, and science in a non-Western, but globally crucial, context.","PeriodicalId":54659,"journal":{"name":"Osiris","volume":"34 1","pages":"81 - 98"},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2019-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1086/703867","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"45571952","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 article investigates the ways in which the history of technology has been modeled in “4X strategy” games, especially in a series called Civilization (which comprises six games and expansions introduced from 1991 to 2016). Although there have been various studies interrogating the ideological biases in strategy games’ modeling of civilization and society, to date there has only been partial exploration of the ideological biases within their models of technological and scientific development involving “technology trees.” Moving from discrete analysis of individual instances of technology trees within strategy games, the aim of this article is to demonstrate not only the fundamental issues behind the notion of these trees in all of the Civilization games, but also to demonstrate ways in which they can reveal particular historicized perceptions of technologies over the period they were developed. This investigation furthermore reveals that many players of the games may bring assumptions embedded in their sense of the history of technology, and that these present a particular problem for those who might uncritically accept the games’ underlying axioms.
{"title":"Playing Games with Technology:","authors":"Will Slocombe","doi":"10.1086/703828","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1086/703828","url":null,"abstract":"This article investigates the ways in which the history of technology has been modeled in “4X strategy” games, especially in a series called Civilization (which comprises six games and expansions introduced from 1991 to 2016). Although there have been various studies interrogating the ideological biases in strategy games’ modeling of civilization and society, to date there has only been partial exploration of the ideological biases within their models of technological and scientific development involving “technology trees.” Moving from discrete analysis of individual instances of technology trees within strategy games, the aim of this article is to demonstrate not only the fundamental issues behind the notion of these trees in all of the Civilization games, but also to demonstrate ways in which they can reveal particular historicized perceptions of technologies over the period they were developed. This investigation furthermore reveals that many players of the games may bring assumptions embedded in their sense of the history of technology, and that these present a particular problem for those who might uncritically accept the games’ underlying axioms.","PeriodicalId":54659,"journal":{"name":"Osiris","volume":"34 1","pages":"158 - 174"},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2019-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1086/703828","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"41347963","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 volume ofOsiris had, as its inspiration, the question of what science fiction could do for the history of science. Or, to put it another way, to what historiographical, intellectual, and pragmatic uses have historians of science put science fiction, and how might these strategies develop in the future? Initial efforts to answer these questions were sketchy, to say the least. Despite the fact that the intellectual significance of fiction, literature, and the imaginaries has increasingly been recognized by the humanities in general and by science studies in particular, science fiction itself has seemed— until recently—to remain on the disciplinary sidelines. However, in the past few years, this has begun to change. Panels on science fiction (SF) have begun to appear at conferences organized by societies devoted to different aspects of the history and cultures of science; symposia and workshops that have as their focus the relationship between SF and science studies have been held; and the role that science fiction plays in both lay and professional understanding of, and engagement with, scientific knowledge is being seriously interrogated by scholars. This volume of Osiris, then, seeks to bring together scholars involved in these recent developments to consider how the history of science should position itself in relation to SF. The first question that might be asked is, “Why?” Why should historians worry about stories—fantastical, fictional accounts—of the future? There are a number of reasons, but the most important is that the future itself has a history, and that history is deeply entangled in the relationship between science and society.
{"title":"Presenting Futures Past:","authors":"A. Rees, I. Morus","doi":"10.1086/704131","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1086/704131","url":null,"abstract":"This volume ofOsiris had, as its inspiration, the question of what science fiction could do for the history of science. Or, to put it another way, to what historiographical, intellectual, and pragmatic uses have historians of science put science fiction, and how might these strategies develop in the future? Initial efforts to answer these questions were sketchy, to say the least. Despite the fact that the intellectual significance of fiction, literature, and the imaginaries has increasingly been recognized by the humanities in general and by science studies in particular, science fiction itself has seemed— until recently—to remain on the disciplinary sidelines. However, in the past few years, this has begun to change. Panels on science fiction (SF) have begun to appear at conferences organized by societies devoted to different aspects of the history and cultures of science; symposia and workshops that have as their focus the relationship between SF and science studies have been held; and the role that science fiction plays in both lay and professional understanding of, and engagement with, scientific knowledge is being seriously interrogated by scholars. This volume of Osiris, then, seeks to bring together scholars involved in these recent developments to consider how the history of science should position itself in relation to SF. The first question that might be asked is, “Why?” Why should historians worry about stories—fantastical, fictional accounts—of the future? There are a number of reasons, but the most important is that the future itself has a history, and that history is deeply entangled in the relationship between science and society.","PeriodicalId":54659,"journal":{"name":"Osiris","volume":"34 1","pages":"1 - 15"},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2019-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1086/704131","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"44248219","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 this article, I examine historical representations of sleep found in both medical and fictional narratives of the second half of the nineteenth century. I draw primarily on medical cases constructed as narratives for specialist medical periodicals, on the one hand, and on utopian fictions (or utopian science fictions, as they might also be called), on the other. I place these narratives in dialogue with my own ethnographic writing of experiences within a contemporary sleep laboratory. The aim of this unusual conflation of past and present, and of employing different methodological approaches to the study of a specific subject, is to understand sleep better, in the first instance, but also ultimately to examine how an interrogation of science fiction might be repurposed as an interrogation of the methodology of science fiction. Science fiction is a genre that draws upon the past to imagine a future. My article considers how reimagining such temporal disjunctions as critical practice might allow for new insights, both for future methodologies bridging the sciences and the humanities, and for specific objects of study, such as pathologies of sleep, or any other that has social, cultural, and scientific purchase.
{"title":"Sleeping Science-Fictionally:","authors":"Martin Willis","doi":"10.1086/703562","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1086/703562","url":null,"abstract":"In this article, I examine historical representations of sleep found in both medical and fictional narratives of the second half of the nineteenth century. I draw primarily on medical cases constructed as narratives for specialist medical periodicals, on the one hand, and on utopian fictions (or utopian science fictions, as they might also be called), on the other. I place these narratives in dialogue with my own ethnographic writing of experiences within a contemporary sleep laboratory. The aim of this unusual conflation of past and present, and of employing different methodological approaches to the study of a specific subject, is to understand sleep better, in the first instance, but also ultimately to examine how an interrogation of science fiction might be repurposed as an interrogation of the methodology of science fiction. Science fiction is a genre that draws upon the past to imagine a future. My article considers how reimagining such temporal disjunctions as critical practice might allow for new insights, both for future methodologies bridging the sciences and the humanities, and for specific objects of study, such as pathologies of sleep, or any other that has social, cultural, and scientific purchase.","PeriodicalId":54659,"journal":{"name":"Osiris","volume":"34 1","pages":"261 - 276"},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2019-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1086/703562","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"49005745","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}
Kexue xiangsheng (science crosstalk) features comic dialogues aimed at popularizing knowledge in the physical and social sciences. This genre emerged in the late 1950s in the People’s Republic of China (PRC) as part of a massive effort in the state-supervised culture industry to promote science. The genre shared many of the hallmarks of PRC instrumentalist science fiction, as both were based on a Soviet model. Authors and literary theorists like Guo Moruo, Ye Yonglie, and Gu Junzheng reiterated developmental narratives of socialism and of the power of science as a tool for mastery of nature developed by authors like Maxim Gorky and Mikhail Il’in. These works of socialist realism narrated transformations in the consciousness of their characters as they came to understand guiding principles of the world around them, including basic science, evolution, and dialectical materialism. Dramatic forms like kexue xiangsheng worked in concert with other socialist-realist representative modes, including popular performance, reportage, fiction, film, song, and reappropriations of premodern literary forms. In the process, notions of scientific thinking were conflated with political orthodoxy in promoting public health and political campaigns, and science was dismantled as a professional institution, shifting from a rationalized bureaucratic endeavor to grassroots efforts aimed at solving pragmatic problems. Through education in what I term the “quotidian utopian”—small health and hygiene measures that had the potential to ameliorate major health challenges—these popular science genres also straddled the line between Frederic Jameson’s “Utopian form and Utopian wish,” between what was part utopian text and part expression of the impulse to enact utopia through changes in policy and reconfigurations of the collective body.
{"title":"Locating Kexue Xiangsheng (Science Crosstalk) in Relation to the Selective Tradition of Chinese Science Fiction","authors":"Nathaniel Isaacson","doi":"10.1086/703827","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1086/703827","url":null,"abstract":"Kexue xiangsheng (science crosstalk) features comic dialogues aimed at popularizing knowledge in the physical and social sciences. This genre emerged in the late 1950s in the People’s Republic of China (PRC) as part of a massive effort in the state-supervised culture industry to promote science. The genre shared many of the hallmarks of PRC instrumentalist science fiction, as both were based on a Soviet model. Authors and literary theorists like Guo Moruo, Ye Yonglie, and Gu Junzheng reiterated developmental narratives of socialism and of the power of science as a tool for mastery of nature developed by authors like Maxim Gorky and Mikhail Il’in. These works of socialist realism narrated transformations in the consciousness of their characters as they came to understand guiding principles of the world around them, including basic science, evolution, and dialectical materialism. Dramatic forms like kexue xiangsheng worked in concert with other socialist-realist representative modes, including popular performance, reportage, fiction, film, song, and reappropriations of premodern literary forms. In the process, notions of scientific thinking were conflated with political orthodoxy in promoting public health and political campaigns, and science was dismantled as a professional institution, shifting from a rationalized bureaucratic endeavor to grassroots efforts aimed at solving pragmatic problems. Through education in what I term the “quotidian utopian”—small health and hygiene measures that had the potential to ameliorate major health challenges—these popular science genres also straddled the line between Frederic Jameson’s “Utopian form and Utopian wish,” between what was part utopian text and part expression of the impulse to enact utopia through changes in policy and reconfigurations of the collective body.","PeriodicalId":54659,"journal":{"name":"Osiris","volume":"34 1","pages":"139 - 157"},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2019-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1086/703827","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"46717715","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}
Imperial ideology identified “science” and “progress” as the prerogative of the “West,” while “religion” and “spirituality” were located in the “East.” Yet, in practice, these neat dichotomies were far more difficult to sustain. Science and religion were braided together by spiritually inquisitive scientists as much in the West as in the East. Various strands of hylozoic thought that undermined the dichotomy of matter and spirit were located in the liminal space between these orthogonal categories. One such strand of hylozoism, engendered in electromagnetic ideas, was articulated in the early science fiction of authors like Edward Bulwer-Lytton. Dinendrakumar Ray, a Bengali novelist, inserted this science-fictional hylozoism into his translations of the novels of the Australian author Guy Boothby. By selectively adapting and blending Boothby’s international plot lines with Lytton-like electromagnetic hylozoism, Ray was able to craft a “hylozoic anticolonialism” that resonated emphatically with the thought of Sri Aurobindo, a revolutionary nationalist turned neo-Hindu spiritual master.
{"title":"Hylozoic Anticolonialism:","authors":"P. Mukharji","doi":"10.1086/703864","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1086/703864","url":null,"abstract":"Imperial ideology identified “science” and “progress” as the prerogative of the “West,” while “religion” and “spirituality” were located in the “East.” Yet, in practice, these neat dichotomies were far more difficult to sustain. Science and religion were braided together by spiritually inquisitive scientists as much in the West as in the East. Various strands of hylozoic thought that undermined the dichotomy of matter and spirit were located in the liminal space between these orthogonal categories. One such strand of hylozoism, engendered in electromagnetic ideas, was articulated in the early science fiction of authors like Edward Bulwer-Lytton. Dinendrakumar Ray, a Bengali novelist, inserted this science-fictional hylozoism into his translations of the novels of the Australian author Guy Boothby. By selectively adapting and blending Boothby’s international plot lines with Lytton-like electromagnetic hylozoism, Ray was able to craft a “hylozoic anticolonialism” that resonated emphatically with the thought of Sri Aurobindo, a revolutionary nationalist turned neo-Hindu spiritual master.","PeriodicalId":54659,"journal":{"name":"Osiris","volume":"34 1","pages":"101 - 120"},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2019-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1086/703864","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"42397286","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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