Science Fiction, Ethics and the Human Condition [Hardcover]

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.

1. Introduction: Science Fiction at a Crossroad between Ethics and Imagination; Christian Baron, Peter Nicolai Halvorsen and Christine Cornea.- Section I: Science, Technology and Science Fiction.- 2. The Perfect Organism: the intruder of the Alien films as a bio-fictional construct; Christian Baron.- 3. Science Fiction at the Far Side of Technology: Vernor Vinge's singularity thesis vs. the limits of AI-research; Mikkel Willum Johansen.- 4. A Greenhouse on Mars; Peter Westermann.- 5. Fascinating! Popular Science Communication and Literary Science Fiction: the shared features of awe and fascination and their significance to ideas of science fictions as vehicles for critical debate about scientific enterprises and their ethical implications; Gitte Meyer.- Section II: Identity and thl³—