Science Fiction

How science fiction has been a tool for understanding and living through rapid technological change.

The world today seems to be slipping into a science fiction future. We have phones that speak to us, cars that drive themselves, and connected devices that communicate with each other in languages we don't understand. Depending the news of the day, we inhabit either a technological utopia or Brave New World nightmare. This volume in the MIT Press Essential Knowledge surveys the uses of science fiction. It focuses on what is at the core of all definitions of science fiction: a vision of the world made otherwise and what possibilities might flow from such otherness.

Sherryl Vint is Professor of Science Fiction Media Studies at University of California, Riverside. She is the author of Bodies of Tomorrow, Animal Alterity, and Science Fiction: A Guide for the Perplexed, coauthor of the Routledge Concise History of Science Fiction, and coeditor of The Routledge Companion to Science Fiction (2009).

Series Foreword vii
1 Introduction: Whose Science Fiction? 1
2 Th e Utopian Tradition 19
3 Futurology and Speculative Design 37
4 Th e Colonial Imagination 57
5 Robots, AI, and Transhumanism 75
6 Genomics, the Microbiome, and Posthumanism 97
7 Environment, Climate Change, and the
Anthropocene 117
8 Economics and Financialization 137
9 Conclusion: Living in a Science- Fictional World 155
Acknowledgments 171
Glossary 173
Notes 177
Further Reading 193
Index 197