Exploring the Limits of the Human through Science Fiction [Hardcover]

Through its engagement with different kinds of texts, Exploring the Limits of the Human through Science Fiction represents a new way of approaching both science fiction and critical theory, and its uses both to question what it means to be human in digital era.Introduction The Genre of the Non-Place: Science Fiction as Critical Theory 1. Variables of the Human: Gender and the Programmable Subject in Samuel R. Delany's Triton 2. The Human as Desiring Machine: Anime Explorations of Disembodiment and Evolution 3. The Eversion of the Virtual: Postmodernity and Control Societies in William Gibson's Science Fictions of the Present 4. The Spectacle of Memory: Realism, Narrative, and Time Travel Cinema Conclusion Beyond the Human: Ontogenesis, Technology, and the Posthuman in Kubrick and Clarke's 2001

Gerald Alva Miller, Jr. is currently an English Instructor at Alamance Community College.'A timely and multi-faceted work that is so much more than a study of science fiction. What we have here is an innovative synthesis of theories of gender, posthumanism, and postmodernism and works as varied and diverse as Samuel Delany's oeuvre, Japanese anime, and the widely known novels of William Gibson and films of Stanley Kubrick. Miller's entertaining suggestion that certain literary and cinematic works evoke their own critical theories that dialogue with and critique established canons of gender and postmodernist theory focuses our attention on how literary and cinematic works engage with critical theory and socio-political phenomenon in such a way as to open new routes of discussion about culture, society, and politics. Best of all, Miller manages to write about complex theoretical issues with clarity and precision a feature that will only add to his study's appeal. Exploring the Limits of the Human through Science Fiction will be of great use to scholars and teachers of science fiction, dystopian fiction, film studies, critical theory and gender studieslƒ