Cyberfiction: After the Future explores a world where cybernetics sets the terms for life and culture - our world of ubiquitous info-tech, instantaneous capital flows, and immanent catastrophe. Economics fuses with technology to create a new kind of speculative fiction: cyberfiction. Paul Youngquist reveals the ways in which J. G. Ballard, Philip K. Dick, Samuel Delany, Octavia Butler, and William Gibson, among others, map a territory where information reigns supreme and the future is becoming a thing of the past.

"Whereas science fiction asks What if? questions about technology and the human future, Youngquist asks What if? questions about the genre itself. What if the essential discourse of science fiction is less apparent than commonly supposed? What if, beyond their overt extrapolations, our most valuable SF authors have been concomitantly conducting Gedanken experiments designed to illuminate capitalism s discontents, the semiotics of eroticism, the limits of consensus reality, the mutability of the body, and the intricate web of power relationships that constitute postindustrial society? Youngquist s insightful and philosophically grounded answers will beguile students of Mary Shelley, Alfred Bester, J. G. Ballard, Philip K. Dick, Samuel R. Delany, William Gibson, Octavia Butler, and a dozen other supreme practitioners of speculative literature." - James Morrow, author of The Last Witchfinder and Shambling Towards Hiroshima

Autorentext

PAUL YOUNGQUIST, Professor of English at Penn State, USA.

Inhalt
A Preface to Apocalypse PART I: YESTERDAY'S TOMORROW Fictions of Science Speculative Futures Cyberfiction PART II: OTHER SPACE Crash Body Score, Scan, Schiz Queer Science Space Machine PART III: AFTERLIFE Interstellar Low Ways We Can Breed You Stealth