Christine Cornea

Science Fiction, Ethics and the Human Condition

This book explores what science fiction can tell us about the human condition in a technological world, with the ethical dilemmas and consequences that this entails. This book is the result of the joint efforts of scholars and scientists from various disciplines. This interdisciplinary approach sets an example for those who, like us, have been busy assessing the ways in which fictional attempts to fathom the possibilities of science and technology speak to central concerns about what it means to be human in a contemporary world of technology and which ethical dilemmas it brings along. One of the aims of this book is to demonstrate what can be achieved in approaching science fiction as a kind of imaginary laboratory for experimentation, where visions of human (or even post-human) life under various scientific, technological or natural conditions that differ from our own situation can be thought through and commented upon. Although a scholarly work, this book is also designed to be accessible to a general audience that has an interest in science fiction, as well as to a broader academic audience interested in ethical questions.

From Isolationism to Globalism: An Overview of Politics and Ethics in the Hollywood Science Fiction Film

The aim of this chapter is to consider the ways in which the Hollywood science fiction film addresses America’s relationship to the world and to look at how the genre can be understood as raising ethical questions concerning US foreign policy, security, international relations, economics, and the environment. In carrying out this aim, my approach is best described as an analytical and historical overview, tracing the development of Hollywood science fiction cinema from the 1930s through to present day in relation to the issues raised above. By concentrating on specific iconography, narratives and characters, my analysis examines how changes in meaning and representational shifts are informed by broader socio-scientific, economic and political contexts.

Introduction: Science Fiction at a Crossroad Between Ethics and Imagination

Somewhere between the sociological and anthropological study of the ethical dilemmas of technological practice and the insistence by certain philosophers and theologians of the universal nature of ethical claims, lies a liminal zone, a space that allows us to imagine the fictive or possible scenarios for future technological practices. These imaginary scenarios can have important bearings on our moral considerations of scientific endeavour, as they may help to clarify both the potential and the risks associated with technological development.

David Cronenberg's Crash and Performing Cyborgs

ince the late 1970s and early 1980s, the cyborg has emerged as a dominant figure in science fiction cinema. Images of this figuration have entered the popular imagination, and the celluloid cyborg has become synonymous with an understanding of contemporary life, a life that is heavily reliant upon the information technologies of our postmodern age. Scott Bukatman rather boldly states that “it is the purpose of much recent science fiction to construct a new subject-position to interface with the global realms of data circulation,” and he famously calls this new subject-position “terminal identity” (8). He also goes on to argue that “[c]inematic style [has] become a part of social and gestural rhetoric, an integral part of the presentation of self in the era of terminal identity” (43). At the least, Bukatman is suggesting that the various behaviors and etiquettes acquired by subjects of a postmodern technological society are highly influenced by cinematic portrayals. In this panoptic era, our selfpresentations are not only becoming increasingly mediated by and through visualization technologies, but postmodern identities are also, somewhat literally, bound up with the performed images presented by cinema. Consequently, given that the cyborg manifestly enacts a form of subjectivity that interacts with technology on the most intimate of levels, close attention to the way in which it is enacted and performed in cinema is very important. In fact, I would argue that presentation of the celluloid cyborg necessarily highlights how aspects of performance are currently part of postmodern living. For instance, the actors involved in depicting a given cyborg can be understood, literally, as cyborg actors, their