Loading...
Quotidian Science Fiction: Posthuman Dreams of Emancipation
Hay, Jonathan
Hay, Jonathan
Advisors
Editors
Other Contributors
Affiliation
EPub Date
Publication Date
2019-06-13
Submitted Date
Collections
Files
Loading...
Main article
Adobe PDF, 309.03 KB
Other Titles
Abstract
This article argues that Science Fiction is a posthuman art form, whose texts posit a utopian dream which emphasises that the process of becoming posthuman is both incremental, and conditional upon the equitable cultural, social, and environmental evolution of our societies. The genre provides a transient dreamscape for visitation by the (post)human mind, by which the reader gains an expanded perception of not only their own empirical environment, but also of posthuman possibility. This posthuman dream however, is not a simply literalised by SF’s estranging narrative strategy, but rather is located in the intersection between the SF narrative and its generic form. Through the decay of their initially defamiliarizing nova into data which are cognitively explicable by their (post)human audience, SF texts dramatize our species’ continuous journey of becoming posthuman. This fundamentally posthuman model of the SF genre therefore challenges the model of cognitive estrangement proposed by Darko Suvin, and so proposes that SF exerts a pragmatic utopian dream that avoids being deterministic or teleological.
Citation
Hay, J. (2019). Quotidian Science Fiction: Posthuman Dreams of Emancipation. Iowa Journal of Cultural Studies, 19, 29-46.
Publisher
University of Iowa
Journal
Iowa Journal of Cultural Studies
Research Unit
DOI
PubMed ID
PubMed Central ID
Type
Article
Language
en
Description
Series/Report no.
ISSN
2168-569X
EISSN
2168-5738