Temporality
Time can be understood in terms of both scale and complexity. These essays highlight the tensions between past and potential futures, as well as what such non-linear and multiple timelines can tell us about the presents in which they were conceived.
Michelle Murphy
How Does Technoscience Dream?
Written in 1905 Calcutta and one of the first feminist science fiction stories, “Sultana’s Dream” asks how subjects who dream with technoscience might do life, gender, kinship and nation differently.
Colin Milburn
Ahead of Time
The history of tachyon research affirms science fiction as a way of doing science, and a way of constructing the future.
Erika Milam
Evolutionary Futures
During the Cold War, the “Neanderthal mentality” not only represented the evolutionary antecedents of humanity but also presaged a dire potential future.
Frédérique Aït-Touati
Seeing From Afar
How would phenomena that occur on our planet appear to an observer stationed on the Moon? How would our present time appear to a historian of the next millennium? Some questions regarding our common space and time can only be answered through a distance.
Enhancement
Heightened senses, prolonged lives, augmented reasoning—these are stuff of dreams. The essays in this section consider the agents, resources, and machines we reach for in our attempts to be more than human.
Projit Mukharji
Paranimate Science
South Asianists never speak of the undead. Africanists do. Latin Americanists do. But not South Asianists. Favoured by a more fulsome textual archive, South Asian historians dwell upon seemingly weightier matters. Yet one cannot fail to observe the swarming undead of the Raj.
Patrick McCray
Stay Frozen, My Friends
Cryonics – the practice of freezing deceased or “de-animated” people in anticipation of their eventual revival – is a controversial practice resting precariously at the intersection of hope and hubris, science and speculation.
Oliver Gaycken
SuperVision
X rays promised a transformation of vision, allowing for visual access to hitherto invisible realms, but fiction writers foresaw a darker dimension to this powerful new form of sight.
Stephanie Dick
The Future of Thinking
Early Artificial Intelligence researchers wanted to make computers like people. A lesser known field called Automated Reasoning sought to develop new forms of reason that capitalized on what computers could do, but were quite different from the human faculty.
Speculation
Processes of speculation underwrite both fictional and non-fictional accounts of futures. These essays illustrate how fictional and non-fictional narratives mutually inform each other and shape what gets to count as reliable knowledge.
Ruha Benjamin
Black to the Future
I take the idea of a sociological imagination quite literally, and envisage a not-too-distant future where race, science, and subjectivity are reconfigured differently, defiantly, and hope-fully.
Nikolai Krementsov
Between Science and Fiction
In Bolshevik Russia, specialized knowledge generated by biomedical research was transformed into an influential cultural resource and formed a zone of contest at the interface of four major cultural domains: religion, science, philosophy, and literature.
Michael D. Gordin
What to Say After Nuclear War
Once nuclear war became thinkable, both policy intellectuals and writers were confronted with the challenge of how to talk about the aftermath — in the process revealing interesting ways of projecting the evolution of languages.
Joanna Radin
Big Science Fiction
Michael Crichton’s 1969 technothriller The Andromeda Strain anticipated the promise and peril
of the biosciences at a time when many—including those in the nascent field of science
studies—were still fixated on nuclear power.
Survival
Will the human race be able to continue life—on earth or elsewhere? Anxieties about survival fuel efforts to harness science, technology and medicine, and give urgency to accounts of human and non-human futures.
Ruha Benjamin
Black to the Future
I take the idea of a sociological imagination quite literally, and envisage a not-too-distant future where race, science, and subjectivity are reconfigured differently, defiantly, and hope-fully.
Nikolai Krementsov
Between Science and Fiction
In Bolshevik Russia, specialized knowledge generated by biomedical research was transformed into an influential cultural resource and formed a zone of contest at the interface of four major cultural domains: religion, science, philosophy, and literature.
Patrick McCray
Stay Frozen, My Friends
Cryonics – the practice of freezing deceased or “de-animated” people in anticipation of their eventual revival – is a controversial practice resting precariously at the intersection of hope and hubris, science and speculation.
Erika Milam
Evolutionary Futures
During the Cold War, the “Neanderthal mentality” not only represented the evolutionary antecedents of humanity but also presaged a dire potential future.
Animacy
Ghosts, aliens, light particles—all are forms of liveliness that expand conceptions of agency beyond questions of biological life. These essays address both the process of embodiment and also how the vibrancy of matter matters for unorthodox interpretations of action and causation.
Stephanie Dick
The Future of Thinking
Early Artificial Intelligence researchers wanted to make computers like people. A lesser known field called Automated Reasoning sought to develop new forms of reason that capitalized on what computers could do, but were quite different from the human faculty.
Oliver Gaycken
SuperVision
X rays promised a transformation of vision, allowing for visual access to hitherto invisible realms, but fiction writers foresaw a darker dimension to this powerful new form of sight.
Projit Mukharji
Paranimate Science
South Asianists never speak of the undead. Africanists do. Latin Americanists do. But not South Asianists. Favoured by a more fulsome textual archive, South Asian historians dwell upon seemingly weightier matters. Yet one cannot fail to observe the swarming undead of the Raj.
Michelle Murphy
How Does Technoscience Dream?
Written in 1905 Calcutta and one of the first feminist science fiction stories, “Sultana’s Dream” asks how subjects who dream with technoscience might do life, gender, kinship and nation differently.
Transmission
Stories of communication and contact are hallmarks of science fiction as well as history of science. These essays explore how information, organisms, and other objects circulate and are transformed in the process. Germs, practices, and even language may infect subjects of encounter, creating as well as foreclosing relational possibilities.
Frédérique Aït-Touati
Seeing From Afar
How would phenomena that occur on our planet appear to an observer stationed on the Moon? How would our present time appear to a historian of the next millennium? Some questions regarding our common space and time can only be answered through a distance.
Joanna Radin
Big Science Fiction
Michael Crichton’s 1969 technothriller The Andromeda Strain anticipated the promise and peril of the biosciences at a time when many—including those in the nascent field of science studies—were still fixated on nuclear power.
Michael D. Gordin
What to Say After Nuclear War
Once nuclear war became thinkable, both policy intellectuals and writers were confronted with the challenge of how to talk about the aftermath — in the process revealing interesting ways of projecting the evolution of languages.
Colin Milburn
Ahead of Time
The history of tachyon research affirms science fiction as a way of doing science, and a way of constructing the future.