Biopunk Dystopias

Biopunk Dystopias

Author: Lars Schmeink

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 2016

Total Pages: 280

ISBN-13: 1781383766

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

'Biopunk Dystopias' contends that we find ourselves at a historical nexus, defined by the rise of biology as the driving force of scientific progress, a strongly grown mainstream attention given to genetic engineering in the wake of the Human Genome Project (1990-2003), the changing sociological view of a liquid modern society, and shifting discourses on the posthuman, including a critical posthumanism that decenters the privileged subject of humanism. The book argues that this historical nexus produces a specific cultural formation in the form of "biopunk", a subgenre evolved from the cyberpunk of the 1980s. Biopunk makes use of current posthumanist conceptions in order to criticize contemporary reality as already dystopian, warning that a future will only get worse, and that society needs to reverse its path, or else destroy all life on this planet.


Science Fiction and Posthumanism in the Anthropocene

Science Fiction and Posthumanism in the Anthropocene

Author: Jonathan Hay

Publisher:

Published: 2024-12-26

Total Pages: 0

ISBN-13: 135046595X

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

With science fiction stories imagining futures and worlds vastly different from our own, and posthuman philosophies radically reconceptualising our species' place within our own world, this book is a deep dive into the similarities between science fiction studies and critical posthumanism and how they can be read together. Both fields fantasise about future technologies, envisage alienness through conversation with everyday life and both anticipate the Anthropocene as a dire source of rupture from the present. Drawing inspiration from these and other consonances, this book establishes a common theoretical ground between the two fields, upon which the two currents of future-oriented thought can meet and begin to share a common language. An investigation that draws critical currency from the everyday condition of our species in relation to technology and our perilous situation in the Anthropocene, the book observes posthumanism not just as a theoretical framework that may be applied to science fictional ideas, but also as an integral part of how it is that science fiction is generated. Featuring case studies of the work of prominent authors Isaac Asimov, Ursula K. Le Guin and Kim Stanley Robinson, alongside the BBC television series Doctor Who and the cult videogame Outer Wilds, Science Fiction and Posthumanism in the Anthropocene formulates a new critical paradigm which recognises the value of such works to posthumanist thought. Addressing those with an interest in either academic discipline, it demonstrates that urgent discourses around our shared future are more imperative now than ever before.


Staying with the Trouble

Staying with the Trouble

Author: Donna J. Haraway

Publisher: Duke University Press

Published: 2016-08-25

Total Pages: 228

ISBN-13: 0822373785

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

In the midst of spiraling ecological devastation, multispecies feminist theorist Donna J. Haraway offers provocative new ways to reconfigure our relations to the earth and all its inhabitants. She eschews referring to our current epoch as the Anthropocene, preferring to conceptualize it as what she calls the Chthulucene, as it more aptly and fully describes our epoch as one in which the human and nonhuman are inextricably linked in tentacular practices. The Chthulucene, Haraway explains, requires sym-poiesis, or making-with, rather than auto-poiesis, or self-making. Learning to stay with the trouble of living and dying together on a damaged earth will prove more conducive to the kind of thinking that would provide the means to building more livable futures. Theoretically and methodologically driven by the signifier SF—string figures, science fact, science fiction, speculative feminism, speculative fabulation, so far—Staying with the Trouble further cements Haraway's reputation as one of the most daring and original thinkers of our time.


Posthumanism in Young Adult Fiction

Posthumanism in Young Adult Fiction

Author: Anita Tarr

Publisher: Univ. Press of Mississippi

Published: 2018-04-27

Total Pages: 327

ISBN-13: 1496816706

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

Contributions by Torsten Caeners, Phoebe Chen, Mathieu Donner, Shannon Hervey, Angela S. Insenga, Patricia Kennon, Maryna Matlock, Ferne Merrylees, Lars Schmeink, Anita Tarr, Tony M. Vinci, and Donna R. White For centuries, humanism has provided a paradigm for what it means to be human: a rational, unique, unified, universal, autonomous being. Recently, however, a new philosophical approach, posthumanism, has questioned these assumptions, asserting that being human is not a fixed state but one always dynamic and evolving. Restrictive boundaries are no longer in play, and we do not define who we are by delineating what we are not (animal, machine, monster). There is no one aspect that makes a being human—self-awareness, emotion, artistic expression, or problem-solving—since human characteristics reside in other species along with shared DNA. Instead, posthumanism looks at the ways our bodies, intelligence, and behavior connect and interact with the environment, technology, and other species. In Posthumanism in Young Adult Fiction: Finding Humanity in a Posthuman World, editors Anita Tarr and Donna R. White collect twelve essays that explore this new discipline's relevance in young adult literature. Adolescents often tangle with many issues raised by posthumanist theory, such as body issues. The in-betweenness of adolescence makes stories for young adults ripe for posthumanist study. Contributors to the volume explore ideas of posthumanism, including democratization of power, body enhancements, hybridity, multiplicity/plurality, and the environment, by analyzing recent works for young adults, including award-winners like Paolo Bacigalupi's Ship Breaker and Nancy Farmer's The House of the Scorpion, as well as the works of Octavia Butler and China Miéville.


Philosophical Posthumanism

Philosophical Posthumanism

Author: Francesca Ferrando

Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing

Published: 2019-06-27

Total Pages: 291

ISBN-13: 1350059498

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

The notion of 'the human' is in need of urgent redefinition. At a time of radical bio-technological developments, and in light of the political and environmental imperatives of our age, the term 'posthuman' provides an alternative. The philosophical landscape which has developed as a response to the crisis of the human, includes several movements, such as: Posthumanism, Transhumanism, Antihumanism and Object Oriented Ontology. This book explains the similarities and differences between these currents and offers a detailed examination of a number of topics that fall under the “posthuman” umbrella, including the anthropocene, artificial intelligence and the deconstruction of the human. Francesca Ferrando affords particular focus to Philosophical Posthumanism, defined as a philosophy of mediation which addresses the meaning of humanity not in separation, but in relation to technology and ecology. The posthuman shift thus emerges in the global call for social change, responsible science and multispecies coexistence.


Posthuman Legal Subjectivity

Posthuman Legal Subjectivity

Author: Jana Norman

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2021-08-12

Total Pages: 195

ISBN-13: 1000424847

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

This book provides a reimagining of how Western law and legal theory structures the human–earth relationship. As a complement to contemporary efforts to establish rights of nature and non-human legal personhood, this book focuses on the other subject in the human–earth relationship: the human. Critical ecological feminism exposes the dualistic nature of the ideal human legal subject as a key driver in the dynamic of instrumentalism that characterises the human–earth relationship in Western culture. This book draws on conceptual fields associated with the new sciences, including new materialism, posthuman critical theory and Big History, to demonstrate that the naturalised hierarchy of humans over nature in the Western social imaginary is anything but natural. It then sets about constructing a counternarrative. The proposed ‘Cosmic Person’ as alternative, non-dualised human legal subject forges a pathway for transforming the Western cultural understanding of the human–earth relationship from mastery and control to ideal co-habitation. Finally, the book details a case study, highlighting the practical application of the proposed reconceptualisation of the human legal subject to contemporary environmental issues. This original and important analysis of the legal status of the human in the Anthropocene will be of great interest to those working in legal theory, jurisprudence, environmental law and the environmental humanities; as well as those with relevant interests in gender studies, cultural studies, feminist theory, critical theory and philosophy.


The Stone Gods

The Stone Gods

Author: Jeanette Winterson

Publisher: HMH

Published: 2009-05-06

Total Pages: 229

ISBN-13: 0547416261

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

The Whitbread Prize–winning author of Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit delivers a novel that “transports us to something like the future of our own planet” (The Washington Post Book World). On the airwaves, all the talk is of the new blue planet—pristine and habitable, like our own was sixty-five million years ago, before we took it to the edge of destruction. Off the air, Billie Crusoe and the renegade Robo sapien Spike are falling in love. Along with Captain Handsome and Pink, they’re assigned to colonize the new blue planet. But when a technical maneuver intended to make it inhabitable backfires, Billie and Spike’s flight to the future becomes a surprising return to the distant past—“Everything is imprinted forever with what it once was.” What will happen when their story combines with the world’s story? Will they—and we—ever find a safe landing place? Playful, passionate, polemical, and frequently very funny, The Stone Gods will change forever the stories we tell about the earth, about love, and about stories themselves. “Scary, beautiful, witty and wistful by turns, dipping into the known past as it explores potential futures.” —The New York Times Book Review “[A book] that you don’t so much read as drink in, refuse to put down, cast inside of like a hunting dog, seeking against all odds the insight that will illuminate everything, a true answer to the fix we’re in.” —Los Angeles Times “A vivid, cautionary tale—or, more precisely, a keen lament for our irremediably incautious species.” —Ursula K. Le Guin, bestselling author of Changing Planes


After the Human

After the Human

Author: Sherryl Vint

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2020-12-10

Total Pages: 289

ISBN-13: 1108836666

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

It showcases how posthumanism has transformed the humanities and what new work is now possible in light of this unsettling.