Science Fiction

A theme that has come to the fore in advanced planning for long-range space exploration is the concept of "propellantless propulsion" or "field propulsion." One version of this concept involves the projected possibility that empty space itself (the quantum vacuum, or space-time metric) might be manipulated so as to provide energy/thrust for future space vehicles. Although such a proposal has a certain science-fiction quality about it, modern theory describes the vacuum as a polarizable medium that sustains energetic quantum fluctuations. Thus the possibility that matter/vacuum interactions might be engineered for space-flight applications is not a priori ruled out, although certain constraints need to be acknowledged. The structure and implications of such a far-reaching hypothesis are considered herein. Comment: Paper withdrawn. Author Ibison does not subscribe to some of the speculations in this document

Last year, at this conference, I discussed how distinctions between nature and culture, and humans and animals, can arise from the technical processes of food production (see "Food as an object of cultural technical study "). Drawing on the work of cultural techniques (e.g. Siegert 2015; Vismann 2013) and Levi-Strauss' The Raw and the Cooked (1970), I argued that the relationship between humans and food is primary to how the human understands itself and forms part of the ground of human ontological systems. I'd like to take this argument further today, to a system-level perspective of food production and beyond, to a posthuman future where food no longer resembles what we know it as today, and because of this, where the human as such arguably ceases to exist, as the ground upon which it has defined self and species is transcended. I'm responding both to fictional future food visions and aspirations towards technical solutions to our current food-related crises.

This essay focuses on the salient place given to staging both the modern regime of translation and the institution of literature alongside a dramatization of anthropological difference in Liu Cixin's acclaimed science fiction trilogy, Remembrance of Earth's Past (also known as The Three Body Problem). These are concerns that are, I would argue, not only historically central to twentieth-century Chinese literature, but also place twentieth-century Chinese literature squarely at the crux of some of the most fundamental questions about aesthetic modernity. These questions revolve around the way in which the type or the figure plays a crucial role in the construction of the nation-state. As quintessentially modern social institutions, both the regime of translation and the institution of literature converge around aesthetic ideology, in which the figure and the type play a paramount role. This is not just any figure, but rather the figure of the human, configured through the logical economy of genus, species, and individual. As a kind of abstraction that is intimately woven into the fabric of everyday life (or what Marx calls a "real abstraction"), this "logical economy" is most evident in that experience of identity peculiar to modernity: being an individual who belongs to a national community within that community's membership in a larger, single species among other species. Together, these two institutions form an inherently comparative biopolitical infrastructure that I call the apparatus of area and anthropological difference.

International conference. Trieste, Novembre, 13-15 2014
This conference aims at analyzing the history of Italy’s nuclear energy policies during the Cold War, by placing the Italian case in a comparative perspective and highlighting the importance of the international context in shaping the country’s specific experience. It builds upon a previous conference, organized by Elettra-Sincrotrone Trieste S.C.p.A and the University of Trieste in 2012 (Nuclear Energy in Italy after the Second World War: Research, Culture, Politics - http://www.elettra.trieste.it/Ippolito/). This conference proposes to examine the ways in which international politics and economics, technological and scientific exchanges, as well as social and cultural movements, influenced Italian nuclear energy policies, both civilian and military. Furthermore, it seeks to understand how the Italian case compares to other national histories, in Western and Eastern Europe, the U.S., Latin America, Asia and Africa.
With few important exceptions, the Italian case has largely remained on the margins of a growing scholarship on the history of nuclear energy. This conference intends to provide a venue for work-in- progress by junior and senior scholars, with the aim of consolidating a national and international research group on this topic. We are particularly interested in fostering an interdisciplinary dialogue and encourage papers that use a variety of approaches, such as history, science and technology studies, physics, engineering, political science, economics, international relations, anthropology, and geography.
Some of the issues that the conference will address are:
1. The ways in which the Cold War shaped Italian civilian and military nuclear policies.
2. The role public opinion, social and cultural groups, anti-nuclear and pro-nuclear movements, had in shaping Italian nuclear policies.
3. The ways in which an interdisciplinary approach such as that of Science and Technology Studies (STS) might provide a new understanding about the history of nuclear energy in Italy.

This conference is organized by Elettra-Sincrotrone Trieste S.C.p.A., the Department of Humanities of the University of Trieste, the Department of Political Sciences of the University of Roma Tre, and the Department of Documentary, Linguistic-Philological and Geographic Sciences of the University of Rome “La Sapienza”.
The working group responsible for the conference programme includes professors and researchers from the University of Trieste – Humanities Department; University of Roma Tre – Political Science Department; Machiavelli Center for Cold War Studies – CIMA; University of Rome “La Spaienza” - Physics Department and Departments for Documentary, Linguistic-Philological and Geographical Sciences; Elettra-Sincrotrone Trieste S.C.p.A.


Scientific Committee:
Giovanni Battimelli (University of Rome “La Sapienza”)
Elisabetta Bini (University of Trieste)
Igor Londero (Elettra-Sincrotrone Trieste S.C.p.A.)
Leopoldo Nuti (University of Roma Tre)
Giovanni Paoloni (University of Rome “La Sapienza”)
Carlo Rizzuto (Elettra-Sincrotrone Trieste S.C.p.A.)
Elisabetta Vezzosi (University of Trieste).


Organizing offices: Giulia Iannuzzi (University of Trieste)
Contacts: nuclearitaly@gmail.com
Web: www.elettra.eu/Conferences/2014/NuclearItaly

This article explores space imagery in the music of George
Clinton and David Bowie and argues that different horizons of Black and
white terrestrial experience give rise to divergent astral imaginaries.
Analysis of song lyrics, liner notes, and statements by the artists in light
of their social contexts and the theoretical lens of Bakhtin’s grotesque
body shows that Bowie models white imaginations of evolutionary
transcendence in contrast to Clinton as provocateur of a Black
carnivalesque seeking liberation from lived inequality.

Quentin Meillassoux, "Metafísica y ficción extracientífica, seguido de "La bola de billar" de I. Asimov. Santiago: Roneo, 2020. Traducción y notas de Meillassoux por Jean-Paul Grasset B. Prólogo de Jean-Paul Grasset B. y Mario Teodoro Ramírez.
Traducción de 'La bola de billar" por Cristóbal Carrasco y Nicolás Vargas.

Maps out the practice of fictioning as a new field of study for art and philosophy. Fictioning in art is an open-ended, experimental practice that involves performing, diagramming or assembling to create or anticipate new modes of existence. In this extensively illustrated book containing over 80 diagrams and images of artworks, David Burrows and Simon O'Sullivan explore the technics of fictioning through three focal points: mythopoesis, myth-science and mythotechnesis. These relate to three specific modes of fictioning: performance fictioning, science fictioning and machine fictioning. In this way, Burrows and O'Sullivan explore how fictioning can offer us alternatives to the dominant fictions that construct our reality in an age of 'post-truth' and 'perception management'. Through fictioning, they look forward to the new kinds of human, part-human and non-human bodies and societies to come.

'This is a book about loops, the fictional and the real, the virtual and the actual, the past that never was and the people yet to come-and how to occupy them, to live in the in-between, summon demons, talk to cats, compose new temporalities, all in the name of building a future so alien that none of us could even imagine what it might be like.' Laboria Cuboniks

Science fiction is a genre in which anything is possible. It therefore comprises the perfect litmus test of any given culture’s prevailing hopes and fears about the future. One such source of anxiety that has been particularly conspicuous in works of fiction since the Industrial Revolution is the development of automata and other machines – specifically, whether they might eventually become strong or intelligent enough to overthrow their creators. As I will try to elucidate in this essay, fears about some sort of robot uprising fit into a more general worry among dominant groups about a reversal of fates between them and an oppressed group. The cyborg character, however, complicates this formula because it is a hybrid of human and machine, a boundary figure. This is a clear, perhaps uncomfortable reminder that the Other is also the Same.
In this thesis, I will be looking at five key examples from the last five decades of literature about cyborgs, namely: The Ship Who Sang by Anne McCaffrey; ‘The Girl Who Was Plugged In’ by James Tiptree Jr.; Proxies by Laura J Mixon; ‘Silently and Very Fast’ by Catherynne M Valente; and Ancillary Justice by Ann Leckie. Though these texts I will seek out ways in which cyborgs might disrupt binary understandings of identity and thereby challenge real-life social hierarchies. Most important to this investigation is the potential of cyborg disembodiment – that is, any kind of cybernetic separation of the consciousness from an organic body – to confuse how identities are perceived and constructed.

This paper examines a variety of cyborg figures in science fiction and art, and investigates how these posthuman subject’s perceptual capacities are altered through their “cyborging,” how this might lead to greater intersubjective understanding and empathy, and advocates an embodied phenomenology for these figures. The cyborg and the posthuman are not necessarily synonymous but share similar political and ethical goals in theory: to radically redefine the human and the humanities, in order to see a way to better intersubjective and interspecies relations.
Ghost in The Shell, Anne McCaffrey, Neil Harbisson.

Da Matrix a Star Wars, da Harry Potter al Trono di spade: i grandi
successi dell’entertainment contemporaneo si basano sempre
più sulla creazione di esperienze di fruizione unificate
e trasversali, che hanno il proprio fulcro in storie e mondi
narrativi che si espandono e si dispiegano su molteplici canali
mediali. Si parla a riguardo di transmedialità: una logica ormai
centrale nelle produzioni mediali contemporanee, ma anche
un modo coordinato di organizzare i contenuti che negli ultimi
anni si è diffuso negli ambiti più diversi, dal marketing
all’informazione, dal documentario all’educazione, fino
a permeare il nostro stesso modo quotidiano di comunicare.

Contemporary Paganism’s emphasis on sacred story and narrative has led to an interdependent relationship with popular media. Pagans draw inspiration from fiction and also bring their practices to life in popular novels. Robert Heinlein’s 1961 Stranger in a Strange Land has had a major impact on the practice of ethical nonmonogamy in the Pagan community, an impact that is reflected in Starhawk’s 1993 The Fifth Sacred Thing. Along with liturgical echoes from Stranger, Starhawk’s novel contains sacred sex practices similar to those Heinlein describes. Unlike Heinlein, however, Starhawk is writing from life; The Fifth Sacred Thing reflects the developing real-life norms of her San Francisco-based Pagan community. Both novels also follow the generic conventions of the American utopian novel, a literary form that has influenced communal and millennial movements of the past. Together, Heinlein and Starhawk’s novels demonstrate how fiction can inspire religious practice that then appears again in fiction.

Modern dönemde bilim ve teknolojideki yeniliklerin edebiyatı da etkilemesinin bir neticesi olarak ortaya çıkan Bilim kurgu edebiyatı, günümüzde dünya çapında takip edilen ve popüler kültürde kendisine yer bulan bir tür olmuştur. Bilimkurgu, her ne kadar bilim ve teknolojiye dair öngörüler ve hayal gücü çerçevesinde tesis edilse de bu tür aynı zamanda toplumsal bilimlere yönelik söylemler de ortaya koymaktadır. Bilim kurgu edebiyatının en çok bilinen ve sevilen serilerinden biri olan Isaac Asimov’un Vakıf Serisi de bu doğrultuda bilimkurgu ögelerinin yanında ve onlara göre daha fazla olacak şekilde toplum ve siyasetle alakalı söylemler inşa etmiştir. Asimov’un, Edward Gibbon’un Roma İmparatorluğunun Gerileyişi ve Çöküşü serlevhalı eserinden mülhem bir şekilde kaleme aldığı Vakıf Serisi, bu manada bir bilimkurgu eseri olmanın yanında siyasetname olarak da okunabilecek niteliğe bürünmektedir. Bu hususta Asimov’un hususi katkısı, onun Vakıf Serisi’nde ürettiği ve toplumsal hareketlerin matematiksel bir dille formüle edilmesine dayandırdığı psikotarih bilimi çerçevesinde ortaya koyduğu zihniyette kendisini göstermektedir. Vakıf Serisi’nde insanlık dünyadan çıkmış, evrenin her yerindeki gezegenlere yerleşmiş ve bütün evren bir imparatorluk olarak yönetilir hâle gelmiştir. Bireylerin değil fakat toplumların tarihsel süreç içerisindeki değişim
ve dönüşümlerini matematiksel olarak ortaya koyan psikotarih bilimi doğrultusunda evreni yöneten imparatorluğun yok olacağı gözlemlendiğinden medeniyetin devam ettirilebilmesi amacı ile evrenin iki noktasındaki gezegenlere “Vakıf” adı verilen yapılar kurulmuştur. Bu yapılar öncelikli olarak diplomasi, din, bilim ve ticaret gibi ögeleri kullanarak başlangıçta varlıklarını muhafaza etmiş; ardından etkinlik alanlarını genişletmiştir. Bu doğrultuda çalışma, Asimov’un Vakıf Serisi’nin temel metni olan ve 1951-1953 yılları arasında neşredilmiş üçleme ile sınırlandırılmış ve bu seride siyaset ve toplum üzerine ortaya koyulan söylemlerin söylem analizi yöntemi ile tetkik
edilmesi amaçlanmıştır. Çalışmanın neticesinde varılan sonuç, edebiyat sahasındaki akademik çalışmalarda görece ihmal edilmiş bir tür olan bilim kurgu edebiyatının fantastik ögelerin yanında siyaset ve toplum gibi alanlar üzerine söylem ürettiği ve Asimov’un Vakıf Üçlemesi’nin bu hususta özel bir örnek teşkil ettiği olmuştur.

Etyka troski rozwija teorię uogólnionej troski poprzez wyjście od naturalnych (biologicznych) praktyk opiekuńczych. Jednak ze względu na jej uwikłanie w naturalizm (stanowisko głoszące, że natura jest źródłem ładu ontologicznego, etycznego i politycznego) efektem
często jest zarówno wąska definicja kobiecości, jak i wąskie rozumienie troski – może ona dotyczyć tylko ludzi. Przyjęcie opieki nad dzieckiem jako paradygmatu sprawia też, że etyka troski powiela reprodukcyjny futuryzm (termin Lee Edelmana) – fantazmatyczne ujęcie
polityczności jako jednolitej wspólnoty ucieleśnianej przez postać Dziecka. By pokazać, że etyka troski nie musi być naturalistyczna, konfrontuję ją z postulatem Donny Haraway, by ograniczyć reprodukcję w imię dbałości o inne niż ludzie istoty, oraz z pojawiającym się
w powieściach Octavii Butler motywem opieki nad dzieckiem, które nie jest ludzkie – „potwornego macierzyństwa” – by zarysować nieantropocentryczną etykę troski.

Author using nineteenth century science fiction as an example tries to convince that the genre studies after cultural turn could be very effective for Literary History. Firstly he analyzes two traditional branches of genre theory: the structural and cognitive one. As he shows both turns out problematic due to their assumptions and their erroneous practice research. The cultural genre-theory overcomes all this obstacles. Researchers repeat after Bachtin that a genre is a kind of an utterance about fears and needs of the society. Thanks to its constructivism and appreciation of the historical context the cultural genre-theory go beyond the hegemonic and authoritative discourse of the traditional genology and provides the tools needed to understand „the positive state of mind”.

Soutenu par le Labex ICCA, ce séminaire entend contribuer à fédérer, dans une perspective pluridisciplinaire, un ensemble de travaux se proposant d’étudier les films ou les cinémas dits « de genre », tout en réfléchissant aux différents sens de ce qualificatif polysémique et à la variété de ses usages créatifs, professionnels et cinéphiliques.
Il déroulera une fois par mois le vendredi (15h-17h) à la Maison de la Recherche de la Sorbonne Nouvelle. Les propositions sont à envoyer avant le 15/09.

Why, in literary studies, is science fiction so trivial, while in anthropology it seems so vital? The answer, I suggest, lies in the project of anthropology and its methodological insufficiency to answer the questions it poses. In the context of literary studies, SF is just another genre—and, like all genre literature, is tarred with its history of being popular. But for anthropologists, SF provides a natural laboratory that has long been the basis of the cross-cultural ethnographic project.

Sede di civiltà tecnologicamente avanzatissime e illuminate oppure luogo di provenienza di minacciosi estranei invasori, Marte rappresenta, da oltre un secolo, una alternativa alla Terra, un altro mondo sul quale proiettare le nostre speranze e le nostre paure. Da quando, nel Diciannovesimo secolo, gli astronomi Giovanni Schiaparelli e Percivall Lowell osservarono sulla superficie marziana quelli che ritennero essere una rete di canali artificiali, i sogni e gli incubi degli esseri umani sembrano aver conservato una speciale connessione con il Pianeta Rosso. "L’altra Terra" è la storia di questa connessione, la vicenda di un vero e proprio mito moderno capace di raccontare, nella letteratura e nel cinema, nella ricerca e nella scienza, i timori e le aspettative della nostra specie, piena di entusiasmo all’arrivo delle macchine, terrorizzata dall’incombenza della guerra nucleare o minacciata dalla natura che non sembra più obbedirle. Dai romanzi di Wells e Asimov ai primi film di fantascienza, dall’osservazione astronomica al progetto SpaceX con il quale Elon Musk prevede di fondare entro pochi anni la prima colonia umana su Marte, la storia raccontata in questo libro è, in fondo, la nostra stessa storia - quella, cioè, di un’umanità affascinata dal sogno di fuggire altrove, un sogno che oggi sembra finalmente prossimo a divenire realtà.

Cuban culture has long been available to English speakers via translation. This study examines the complex ways in which English renderings of Cuban texts from various domains—poetry, science fiction, political and military writing, music, film—have represented, reshaped, or amended original texts. Taking in a broad corpus, it becomes clear that the mental image an Anglophone audience has formed of Cuban culture since 1959 depends heavily on the decisions of translators. At times, a clear ideological agenda drives moves like strengthening the denunciatory tone of a song or excising passages from a political text. At other moments, translators’ indifference to the importance of certain facets of a work, such as a film’s onscreen text or the lyrics sung on a musical performance, impoverishes the English speaker’s experience of the rich weave of self-expression in the original Spanish. In addition to the dynamics at work in the choices translators make at the level of the text itself, this study attends to how paratexts like prefaces, footnotes, liner notes, and promotional copy shape the audience’s experience of the text.

THE SPEECH METZ 1977
Guest of honor at the 1977 International Science Fiction Festival, the famously unpredictable American writer upheld his reputation. While his exceptional presence in Lorraine captured all the attention, his lecture, both mystical and predictive, disconcerted the audience.
Considered an author who had participated in the creation of a counter-culture since the sixties, French literature was no stranger to him, he recognized that he had been enormously influenced by Flaubert, Stendhal and Balzac, in particular.
The “Philip K. Dick lecture was very bizarre. It was a mystical speech that put people off. I saw the room empty gradually… ”indicates Phillipe Hupp, the organizer of the festival in 1977 (https://www.republicain-lorrain.fr/culture-loisirs/2020/09/23/le -speech-by-philip-k-dick-is-still-in-the-story)
Guest of honor at the International Festival of Science-Fiction and Imagination in Metz in September 1977, the reputedly unpredictable author “capsizes” his audience during a conference as brilliant as it is openly mystical and paranoid and sometimes in many ways prescient.
Between a relatively confidential but nevertheless historical moment, the author offers a vision of his orthogonal time through a reference to God and to technology as magic or as a prophecy of our world in a Matrix suggesting the place of man. , of the writer of his universe and of an environment that he thinks of as a world ultimately shaped by powers both so near and so far from human comprehension.
Orthogonal time.

A produção serial cinematográfica Star Trek: Voyager (1995-2001) se apresenta como espaço privilegiado para a análise e problematização das relações entre coletivos, assim como as interações entre homens e máquinas. O objetivo deste paper orienta-se para a inserção da personagem Seven of Nine (Jery Ryan) na série. Se Seven of Nine se apresenta como Borg, a proposta que apresento é problematizar essa emergência através das reflexões sobre o cyborg, tais como propostas por Donna Haraway. Através da observação da interação entre a crew de Voyager com Seven of Nine, se-jam através dos personagens humans, aliens, holograms e outros borgs, sugiro que é possível visualizar a construção da síntese disjuntiva, tal como entendida por Gilles Deleuze. Com isso, se torna possível clarificar o papel da individuação na percepção do que é tratado como individualidade na série. Em outros termos, para que a interação entre cyborgs e humanos ocorra, é necessário a existência de uma pré-concepção sobre o que é a humanidade. Palavras-chave: Ficção Científica. Síntese Disjuntiva. Cyborgs.

While the far-fetched ideas brought up with imagination are shedding lights on Science Fiction Movies, occasionally ever-growing technology has been fuelled by these creative inspirations and imaginations. This article reflects on the findings of the data visualization project Dystopia-Utopia (www.dystopia-utopia.com) and investigates the existence of a common discourse that would stand out in Science Fiction Movies as a significant social modifier. In this approach with the use of a built interactive Circular Hierarchial Edge Bundling Data Visualization system, the data provided by the online participants have been analyzed and the results show that Dystopia theme has been more frequently spoken in the discourse of mainstream Science Fiction Movies.

RESUMEN
La relación interna entre filosofía, literatura y arte permite examinar con propiedad qué significan la pluralidad y complejidad en los usos de la razón. Posibilita la aproximación a esos usos y figuras desde un ángulo privilegiado. El interés por lo literario y artístico no tendría por qué significar un apresurado abandono del modelo discursivo y analítico -que es característico de la filosofía-, sino más bien el acceso a un punto de vista más completo, un nuevo método reflexivo, otro límite crítico. Esta perspectiva facilita la puesta al día de las tesis modernas sobre la filosofía como emancipación, esto es, como su salida de la minoría de edad.
Espacios ficcionales, campos de proyección de la experiencia, métodos y perspectivas trasdisciplinarias constituyen los distintos niveles a través de los cuales se trata de definir un nexo complejo entre discursos. La ficción como conocimiento, subjetividad y texto, así como la relación entre mundo y lenguaje pretenden acotar algunas dimensiones de esa relación.
A través de la literatura llegamos a estar familiarizados con situaciones, sentimientos, formas de vida, obteniendo así una mirada desde dentro -epistemológicamente empática-. Cada nueva visión del mundo constituye un nuevo tipo de conocimiento, un conocimiento que puede incluir aspectos cognitivos y emotivos y que demandará, probablemente, algún tipo de lógica paraconsistente. De modo que a la par que por nuestras narrativas creamos o descubrimos mundos (dependiendo del estatuto ontológico otorgado a la ficción) también establecemos o desentrañamos la legislación lógica, según la cual tal curso de sucesos o tal tipo de entidades son o no admisibles al interior de este particular mundo posible.
Precisamente, es en la constante re-creación de sus objetos, práctica que surge en una comunidad de problemas -un espacio de representación colectiva- el espacio en que se da la ciencia. Es, precisamente, en una particular forma de hablar y de referirse a objetos, creándolos con el habla, el que funda a la medicina -por ejemplo- como cuerpo autónomo de conocimientos, vale decir como ciencia de primer orden. Las disciplinas, pues, en tanto discursos, están, literalmente, constituidas por él. Por ello es necesario estudiar el discurso científico en tanto que discurso, hay que reflexionar sobre sus orígenes y modo de constitución, hay que aceptar que no es sólo un producto sino una fuerza productiva. La realidad es una narrativa exitosa. Es aquello que se hace hablando. Las comunidades científicas son comunidades de problemas y, sobre todo, de retóricas, reconstrucciones de objetos que sólo existen en tanto se habla de ellos de una determinada manera,
Hasta los mundos narrativos más imposibles tienen como fondo lo que es posible en el mundo que concebimos como real. Las entidades y situaciones que no son explícitamente nombradas y descritas como diferentes del mundo real son entendidas a partir de las leyes que aplicamos a la comprensión del mundo real.
Así, pues, la narración de ficción construye un modelo análogo del universo real, una proyección...lo que permite conocer la estructura y los procesos internos de la realidad y manipularla cognitivamente. Se otorga así un valor cognoscitivo a la ficción, de modo tal que todas las posibles connotaciones, no expresadas directamente por el texto, sino -más bien- mostradas implícitamente o implicadas contextualmente en lo allí dicho, iluminan aspectos de la realidad que sin estas extrapolaciones ficcionales permanecerían en penumbras.
La perspectiva crítica -propia de la filosofía- puede hallarse así implícita en escritos de ficción, de la misma manera como las teorías filosóficas pueden aceptar como suyos a los argumentos procedentes del discurso literario. La reflexión filosófica se articula, pues, desde distintos ámbitos y modalidades discursivas.
Dr. Adolfo Vásquez Rocca

This collection was inspired by the observation that film remakes offer us the opportunity to revisit important issues, stories, themes, and topics in a manner that is especially relevant and meaningful to contemporary audiences. Like mythic stories that are told again and again in differing ways, film remakes present us with updated perspectives on timeless ideas. While some remakes succeed and other fail aesthetically, they always say something about the culture in which-and for which-they are produced. Contributors explore the ways in which the fears of death, loss of self, and bodily violence have been expressed and then reinterpreted in such films and remakes as Invasion of the Body Snatchers, Night of the Living Dead, and Dawn of the Dead. Films such as Rollerball, The Ring, The Grudge, The Great Yokai Wars, and Insomnia are discussed as well because of their ability to give voice to collective anxieties concerning cultural change, nihilism, and globalization. While opening on...

El Seminario Estéticas de Ciencia Ficción elaboró una serie de textos donde reflexiona sobre estos días aciagos y distópicos. Este compendio va desde los ensayos hasta los relatos, pasando por textos experimentales. Esperamos que nuestras visiones del mañana les ayuden a sobrellevar estos días y hallar un poco de esperanza en el porvenir, que siempre es incierto.

The article examines some of the ties between
science and cinema, for example, how movies can
serve as a tool of observation, as teaching
material in the field of science, and especially as a
means of expressing and shaping the social
imaginary of science. To this end, it takes up a
conceptual discussion of the notions of
‘imaginary’ and ‘social representation’. It also
endeavors to sketch a differentiation between types
of movies and to summarize some analyses of
images of scientific practice and stereotypes of
scientists. Although there are challenges in
evaluating how movies have influenced the
scientific imaginary, the study of this topic is
important to the history of science.

UFOs, ESP, Bigfoot, often the subjects of folk science, are rarely investigated by normal science. Additionally, the methods of and rationale for folk science are neglected by folklorists perhaps because, as David Hufford writes in "Traditions of Disbelief," academics have presumed at the onset that the beliefs held by its proponents are in error.  Whether or not the beliefs held by folk science are in error is less relevant to the study of folklore than an understanding of the import of those beliefs, the relationship between folk science and belief legend, and the conflict between folk science and normal science.

Resumo: Black Mirror é uma série criada originalmente para o canal britânico Channel 4. No Brasil, tornou-se popular na plataforma de streaming Netflix. Produzida por Charlton "Charlie" Brooker, seus atuais 19 episódios se apropriam de temas como a Cibernética, a WEB 2.0 e as Inteligências Artificiais, conectando-se ao amplo espectro da ficção científica e, em consequência, da utopia e distopia. "The Entire History of You" ("Toda a sua história", 2011) é o terceiro episódio da primeira temporada. Nele, implantes servem para guardar todas as lembranças visuais e sonoras, registrando os pormenores dos acontecimentos cotidianos. Conhecidos como "grãos", os pequenos dispositivos são injetados próximo do ouvido dos personagens da história. A partir disso, a narrativa se centra em um advogado buscando se realocar no mercado de trabalho e traumatizado pela revelação da infidelidade de sua esposa. Dentre as várias possibilidades de entendimento deste exemplar, o elemento narrativo da angústia e da ruína do personagem, conduzida pelo acesso a um dispositivo de registro de memórias nos chama atenção. Desta tensão entre experiência e o presente vivido, o protagonista entra em conflito com a realidade que o circunda. Ignorando as imposições ao real, seu semblante entra em colapso. Com as definições de ficção científica propostas por Darko Suvin e João Camillo Penna, vamos amparar nossa breve discussão nas reflexões de Alain Badiou a respeito do real, esperando evidenciar atualidade do debate em torno desse seriado.

This paper analyses the human encounters with the alien other in Vandermeer's Annihilation and Burke's Semiosis with the help of post-colonial literary theory where it is argued that the human protagonists position themselves as superior in relation to the alien other which has to adapt itself to the human culture which is perceived as more cultivated and thus superior. The analysis focuses in general on human-alien encounters and the interstellar communication problem in particular. It is also hinted at the fact that this kind of human-alien encounter will prevent successful intercultural communication and cooperation.