Quotidian Science Fiction: Posthuman Dreams of Emancipation

The Posthuman Ethos in Cyberpunk Science Fiction

In her article "The Posthuman Ethos in Cyberpunk Science Fiction" María Goicoechea explores the posthuman tendencies of Anglo-American popular culture as they are manifested in the representations of the cyborgs, clones, and artificial intelligences that populate cyberpunk science fiction. Choosing the figure of the cyborg as the central myth of cyberculture, Goicoechea exposes the underlying t...

Pure Science and the Posthuman Future

Since the industrial revolution, humans have tended to reduce science to the ancillary role of engine of technology. But the quest for knowledge started two and a half millennia ago with the aim of setting humans free from ignorance. The first scientists and philosophers saw knowledge as the goal, not as the means. The main goal was to understand matter, life, conscience, intelligence, our orig...

Fiction informed by science.

Science Fiction and Macdonald's Polynomials

This work studies the remarkable relationships that hold among certain m-tuples of the Garsia-Haiman modules M and corresponding elements of the Macdonald basis. We recall that in 10], M is deened for a partition`n, as the linear span of derivatives of a certain bihomogeneouspolynomial (x; y) in the variables x 1 ; x 2 conjecturedin 6], 10] that M has n! dimensionsand that its bigraded Frobeniu...

“But Is It Science Fiction?”: Science Fiction and a Theory of Genre

If science fiction is a genre, then attempts to think about the nature of science fiction will be affected by one’s understanding of what genres are. I shall examine two approaches to genre, one (genres as regions of conceptual space) dominant but inadequate, the other (genres as historical particulars) better, but only occasionally making itself seen. I shall then discuss several important, in...