Speculative Fiction

The 2012 film The Hunger Games and its three sequels, appearing quickly over the following three years, represent one of the most successful examples of the contemporary popularity of youth-oriented speculative film and television series. This book considers "The Hunger Games" as an intertextual field centred on this blockbuster film franchise but also encompassing the successful novels that preceded them and the merchandised imagery and the critical and fan discourse that surrounds them. It explores the place of The Hunger Games in the history of youth-oriented cinema; in the history of speculative fiction centred on adolescents; in a network of continually evolving and tightly connected popular genres; and in the popular history of changing ideas about girlhood from which a successful action hero like Katniss Everdeen could emerge.

Introduction only uploaded.

In March 2015 Allahyari & Rourke released The 3D Additivist Manifesto, a call to push creative technologies to their absolute limits and beyond into the realm of the speculative, the provocative and the weird.

The 3D printer is a profound metaphor for our times. A technology for channeling creative endeavour, through digital processes, into the layering of raw matter excavated from ancient geological eras. Considered as a tool for art, design and engineering, and gesturing towards a forthcoming era of synthetic chemistry and biological augmentation, 3D fabrication technologies are already a site of common exchange between disciplines and material modalities. 3D fabrication can be thought of as the critical framework of #Additivism: a movement that aims to disrupt material, social, computational, and metaphysical realities through provocation, collaboration, and ‘weird’ / science fictional thinking.

#Additivism is a portmanteau of additive and activism, gesturing to the scale at which new forms of action and intervention take place. Our Manifesto and Cookbook question whether it’s possible to change the world without also changing ourselves, and what the implications are of taking a position. We are concerned with critiquing the role ‘radical’ new technologies might have in these changes, from fablabs, workshops, and classrooms, through to social, ecological, and global scales.
We embrace the 3D Printer in the same way that Donna Haraway embraced the figure of the Cyborg in her influential text A Cyborg Manifesto (1983). By considering the 3D printer as a technology for remodeling thought into profound, and often nightmarish, new shapes #Additivism aims to expose in-betweens, empower the powerless, and question the presupposed.

by Morehshin Allahyari and Daniel Rourke

How do we make sense of the Earth at a moment in which it is presented in crisis? To live in an epoch that is shaped by extensive environmental transformations is to be confronted with risks and uncertainties at scales larger than that of the planet. Paradoxically, while we worry that the sky may be falling on our heads, we remain so immobilized in part maybe because of our failures to comprehend the scales of a story that is difficult both to tell and to hear. Two Cosmograms mediates the dissonance between the environmental question at stake and the narrow repertoire of emotions and imaginations with which we try to understand these issues by exploring speculative fiction as the political art that integrates the story of the cosmos into our own life stories. In response to the expansion of infrastructural systems and resource exploitation beyond the Earth, the two projects - Neck of the Moon and Love your Monsters- engage the architectural imaginations of the Cosmos. The speculative fictions probe the politics and aesthetics of technological systems, both in the extra-planetary environment as well as here on Earth.

As the scale of climate change, ocean acidification, mass species extinction, and other ongoing processes become increasingly undeniable and unavoidable, progress in the realms of policy, infrastructure, and technology must ultimately be matched by a cultural revolution. If another world is possible, as activists frequently claim, what might it look, taste, and feel like?

Through the concept of the loanword, a term that is adopted into one language without translation, An Ecotopian Lexicon presents a kaleidoscopic window into the ecological multiverse: not what is, but what could or even should be. Each of thirty suggested loanwords—from other languages, speculative fiction, and subcultures of resistance—helps us imagine how to adapt and even flourish in the face of the socio-ecological adversity that characterizes the present moment and the future that awaits.

From "Apocalypso" to "Qi,"  "~*~" to "Total Liberation," thirty authors from a range of disciplines and backgrounds assemble a grounded yet vertiginous lexicon that expands the limited and limiting European and North American conceptual lexicon that many activists, policymakers, scholars, and citizens have inherited.

As author Kim Stanley Robinson writes in his foreword, "So many new words gathered together like this, each bringing with it a new concept and system, creates a dizzying effect. This is good and right, because we live in a dizzying time. What we do now as a global civilization will create one future out of a vast array of possible futures, an array which ranges from utmost disaster to lasting peace and prosperity. But we can do things, if we can figure out what they are. Various good futures are achievable, even starting from our current moment of high danger. So some really comprehensive analysis, destranding, and remapping is now part of our necessary work. Inevitably new concepts and new words will emerge—lots of them. So this book’s profusion is an accurate foretelling of what will come. It’s a kind of science fiction story in the form of a lexicon, and it postulates and helps to create a future culture more articulate and wiser than we are now. Thus by definition it is a utopian science fiction story."

Language can only take us so far, of course. To add an additional imaginative layer, we challenged fourteen artists from eleven countries to respond to selected entries with original artwork, which is included in full color in the book. The result is a transmedia conversation between the originary author, culture, or subculture; a critical thinker; and an artist.

See more info at www.ecotopianlexicon.com, and buy the book at https://www.upress.umn.edu/book-division/books/an-ecotopian-lexicon.

Within this anthropocenic evolution, the most effective socio-technical ecosystems who bio-
diversify their everyday life, have empirically shown that a prerequisite for this bio-diversification
process is the developing of a metabolism based on bio-techno-political symbiosis. The total
sensorization of linguistic and performative manifestations that SIMULACRUM© will manage, allows us
to project in short term the implementation of a planetary governmentality platform, essential for the
creation of a Social Algorithmic Contract between all entities, humans and nonhumans.