Category: Science Fiction Studies

  • What is hyper-modernism?, by Alan N. Shapiro

    Text of keynote lecture at the same-named conference held at  at the National Center of Scientific Research (CNRS) in Paris, March 20th, 2016. Performance by Regan O’Brien: “Bounding with UNknown Others” * * * * * * * * Lecture: What is hyper-modernism? Alan N. Shapiro   In the age that we are living in…

  • Star Trek: 20 Basic Principles

    Star Trek Basic Principle #1: Radical Uncertainty Captain’s Log, Supplemental: “We are seeing things that cannot possibly exist, yet they are undeniably real.” In its indeterminacy and paradox, the object discovers us. Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle holds that the degrees of my knowing the position and speed of quantum particles are inversely proportional to each other.

  • Star Trek: Technologies of Disappearance, by Alan N. Shapiro

    Does Star Trek’s worldview coincide with the unbridled high-tech enthusiasm of recent years? Or is there a tension between the show’s originality and the Borg-like assimilation of its creativity by the Star Trek industry? Focusing on the stories themselves, the author reveals the basic principles behind Star Trek that contest the ideology of mainstream technoscience.

  • “Twelve Monkeys” (film), by Alan N. Shapiro

    In a time of momentous and accelerated changes (for example, in a few brief decades we are dismantling a book culture which took centuries to construct), it is a great comfort to know that time travel will soon be available to bring us back to critical junctures in case we made a mistake.

  • “Desperate Living” (film): John Waters’ Science Fiction Dystopia, by Alan N. Shapiro

    Maybe it was the mono sound of my budget-priced video recorder, which the salesperson at Saturn Hansa had dubbed the ‘Trabant’ (der Trabi, das Symbol eines verschwundenen Landes, the symbol of a disappeared country, hat heute längst Kultstatus erreicht, has long since attained cult status) of VCRs.

  • “Jurassic Park” (film): Newman Eaten by a Dilophosaurus, by Alan N. Shapiro

    Steven Spielberg’s stated goal for the film Jurassic Park (1993) is to achieve what he calls “total realism.” He wants to make cinema coincide with the real. This is a symptomatic fantasy that Jean Baudrillard diagnoses in The Evil Demon of Images as “cinema attempting to abolish itself in the absolute of reality.”