Bøger af Sherryl Vint

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.

Technologies of Feminist Speculative Fiction: Gender, Artificial Life, and the Politics of Reproduction explores how much technology has reshaped feminist conversations in the decades since Donna Haraway's influential "e;Cyborg Manifesto"e; was published. With sections exploring reproductive technologies, new ways of imagining femininity and motherhood via artificial means, queer readings of gender as a social technology, and posthuman visions of a world beyond gender, this book demonstrates how feminist speculative fiction offers an urgently needed response to the intersections of women's bodies and technology. This collection brings together authors from Europe, Japan, the US and the UK to consider speculative films and texts, reproductive technologies and food futures, and opportunities to rethink family, aging, gender and sexuality, and community through feminist speculative fiction, a social technology for building better futures.

Anxieties about embodiment and posthumanism have always found an outlet in the science fiction of the day. In Bodies of Tomorrow, Sherryl Vint argues for a new model of an ethical and embodied posthuman subject through close readings of the works of Gwyneth Jones, Octavia Butler, Iain M. Banks, William Gibson, and other science fiction authors. Vint's discussion is firmly contextualized by discussions of contemporary technoscience, specifically genetics and information technology, and the implications of this technology for the way we consider human subjectivity. Engaging with theorists such as Michel Foucault, Judith Butler, Anne Balsamo, N. Katherine Hayles, and Douglas Kellner,Bodies of Tomorrow argues for the importance of challenging visions of humanity in the future that overlook our responsibility as embodied beings connected to a material world. If we are to understand the post-human subject, then we must acknowledge our embodied connection to the world around us and the value of our multiple subjective responses to it. Vint's study thus encourages a move from the common liberal humanist approach to posthuman theory toward what she calls 'embodied posthumanism.' This timely work of science fiction criticism will prove fascinating to cultural theorists, philosophers, and literary scholars alike, as well as anyone concerned with the ethics of posthumanism.

Animal Alterity uses readings of science fiction texts to explore the centrality of animals for our ways of thinking about human.

Since the publication of his first novel in 1998, China Mieville has distinguished himself as one of the most exciting and inventive writers working in any genre in contemporary British fiction. The author of nine novels and two short story collections to date, as well as comics script-writing, numerous critical works on science fiction, and legal scholarship, Mieville is a critically acclaimed writer who has also achieved popular success. The chapters in this collection respond to the range of interests that have shaped Mieville's fiction from his influential role in contemporary genre debates, to his ability to pose serious philosophical questions about state control, revolutionary struggle, regimes of apartheid, and the function of international law in a globalized world. This collection demonstrates how Mieville's fictions offer a striking example of contemporary literature's ability to imagine alternatives to neoliberal capitalism at a time of crisis for leftist ideas within the political realm. "e;A major critical engagement with a major contemporary writer: absolutely essential reading."e; (Adam Roberts, author of New Model Army [2010], Jack Glass [2012] and Bete [2014], and winner of the British Science Fiction Award). "e;This critical anthology, the first devoted exclusively to the works of China Mieville, sets a high standard for the other such volumes that will surely follow. All the chapters in this collection should be highly recommended to the large and growing number of readers who rightly regard Mieville as one of the pre-eminent imaginative writers of the 21st century."e; (Carl Freedman, Russell B. Long Professor of English at Louisiana State University and author of Critical Theory and Science Fiction [2000] and Art and Idea in the Novels of China Mieville [2015]). "e;An exemplary addition to the Gylphi Contemporary Writers: Critical Essays series, this challenging and fascinating collection is as demanding as its subject. Crucial for those interested in the weird, in science fiction and in the turns of contemporary British fiction."e; (Robert Eaglestone, Professor of Contemporary Literature and Thought, Royal Holloway, University of London).

"Drawing on examples from literature, film and TV, this book helps students grapple with and master the often perplexing question, 'what is science fiction?'"--

Bodies of Tomorrow argues for the importance of challenging visions of humanity in the future that overlook our responsibility as embodied beings connected to a material world.