Author: Alan N. Shapiro

  • Ayesha Mubarak Ali Podcast About My Book

    This is a transcript of Ayesha Mubarki AIi’s podcast about “Decoding Digital Culture with Science Fiction” that was part of her “Human Reimagined” series, January 2025.

  • Reply to a Critical Review of My Book

    In his review of my book Decoding Digital Culture with Science Fiction: Hyper-Modernism, Hyperreality, and Posthumanism in the journal Science Fiction Studies (July 2025), Miguel Sebastián-Martín makes many disparaging claims that are factually incorrect.

  • Reviews of Star Trek: Technologies of Disappearance

    Here are excerpts from three reviews of my book “Star Trek: Technologies of Disappearance,” beginning with the long review-essay in Science Fiction Studies, and some other quotations about the book.

  • Prominente: Groß und Klein

    Die Amerikaner träumen groß. Die größten Hamburger. Die größten Hot Dogs. Zum Mond und Mars. Der Football Super Bowl und die Baseball World Series. Die größten Prominenten. Marilyn Monroe, Elvis Presley, Michael Jackson, Madonna. Sie waren groß. Sie waren die Stars. Das waren die Prominente im Zeitalter der Massenmedien.

  • Donna J. Haraway’s “A Manifesto for Cyborgs”

    Donna Haraway’s text “A Manifesto for Cyborgs” was written in 1985, but it reads as if itwere written yesterday. A cyborg is a hybrid of living organism and machine. The cyborg is a person whose body has been supplemented by artificial components. The term is anacronym derived from “cybernetic organism.”

  • A New Alternative to Capitalism

    Let us reconsider two of the main arguments for the alleged superiority of capitalism over socialism. Both of these arguments were indeed valid in the past. But now we have advanced informatics and digital media technologies such as Artificial Intelligence, Virtual Reality, Augmented Reality, ubiquitous computing, blockchain, and the Brain-Computer Interface.