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Apocalyptic AI is transmitted to roboticists and AI researchers through science fiction and is expressed in pop science as a means of raising the cultural prestige of research and researchers and justifying funding spent on robotics and AI. Science fiction often uses religious imagery and language to explore culture and several authors have engaged the idea that human beings might upload their minds into machines. The influence of science fiction is widely accepted among roboticists, who gain inspiration from it, as almost certainly happened for Hans Moravec, the pioneer of Apocalyptic AI thinking. Popular science authors in robotics and AI fuse religious and scientific work into a meaningful worldview in order to gain the benefits of both. Such role-hybridization increases the prestige of the researchers and plays a part in military, government and private investment in robotics and AI.

The first great Mormon literature came only with the “Lost Generation” of the 40s, with authors like Maurine Whipple and Virginia Sorensen. The novel has flourished (with Levi Peterson a major figure), as has the short story (Douglas Thayer and Donald Marshall leading the way) poetry, and even science fiction (Orson Scott Card).

This chapter analyzes science fiction and the supernatural in Irish novels. These include books such as H. G. Wells' The Time Machine and Robert Cromie's The Crack of Doom. Several ghost stories are also considered.

The scientific discoveries of the Victorian era enlarged the scope of fantastic fiction. Wells extrapolates from evolutionary theory, geology, temporal physics, and optics to imagine alternate forms of cultural production. Wells’s use of the fantastic does not constitute escapism, however. The irruption of the fantastic into an otherwise realistically narrated fictional world is a reminder that the indefinite passing of history will repeatedly threaten or displace humanity’s misplaced faith in its imagined superior position in the hierarchy of nature. Darwin’s formulation of the theory of evolution, and Wells’s imagining of fictional possibilities, constitute both an opportunity and a warning for humankind: Wells repeatedly insists on the impermanence of the status quo. This chapter also notes the frequency of images of reading and writing in Wells’s fiction: numerous texts include images of defaced or ineffective books and other artworks.

Chapter 2 shows in a compressed, somewhat truncated way, the unique history of science fiction (sometimes called speculative fiction). This chapter also shows some of the myriad theoretical approaches that have been used in the study of science fiction over time. It then demonstrates how those approaches have been used by giving close readings of science fiction texts intended for young adults. This is in an effort to show the difference between science fiction and dystopian literature. It shows that it is a literature directly concerned with the subject’s encounter with the o/Other.

The New Wave movement involved a rising science fiction (sf) avant-garde that sought to remake a genre traditionally inclined towards technocratic scientism and conservative narrative style into a more experimental, counterculturally savvy mode of writing whose perspectives on technological modernity had a subversive critical edge. This chapter examines the imbrication of the New Wave with contemporaneous sf cinema, highlighted by Stanley Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968), but with a special focus on two low-budget films of the 1970s that have developed a cult reputation and had clear links, textually or tonally, with the movement: Dark Star (1974) and A Boy and His Dog (1975). These two works share not only ideological terrain but also a certain mode of cult reception with New Wave fiction, coming to constitute — along with Kubrick's sf films of the period, 2001 and A Clockwork Orange (1971) — a kind of New Wave cinematic canon.

The last decades of the century saw great changes in the writing of fiction. In Britain, where George Moore, Oscar Wilde, and Bram Stoker were among the most prominent novelists, high-culture movements such as naturalism, decadence, and early modernism, vied with popular forms such as detective fiction, the imperial adventure, and science fiction. Authors like B. M. Croker wrote novels of life in India, while Robert Cromie was prominent in science-fiction and future-war fantasies. In Ireland groupings of writers wrote for differing audiences. Ulster fiction began to emerge in the north with Shan F. Bullock and others. Meanwhile, in the south, Anglo-Irish novelists like Somerville and Ross took to comedy and satire, while Catholic-intelligentsia writers began to scrutinize a changed society. Some novels explored the possibilities of the renewal of society while others interrogated the newer sets of relationships that were possible across traditional class lines and the great landlord–tenant divide, now that the latter was in the process of dissolving.

The science fiction film genre is separate from the irrational or unconscious meanderings of the human mind. In line with this, this book regularly pertains to examples of the genre that can found on television, in books, comics, video games and even fine art, as part of the project to locate the films within a wider cultural context. Science fiction has surely adopted material from both the musical and horror film. The genre of science fiction film allows the kind of debate witnessed among critics, writers and aficionados of the written novels. The chapter then looks at what might be called proto-science fiction films. These films came before the science fiction film which boom in the 1950s. It is shown that Metropolis had a huge impact on science fiction. The interwar films evidently address the political and social unrest of their times. Until the 1950s, the science fiction feature film genre actually started in America.

This chapter unpacks what is at stake in Old Futures’ identification of a queer cultural politics for speculative fiction, in terms of both of queer studies’ approaches to time and scholarship on futuristic cultural production. It offers a brief history of intersections between queerness and speculative temporality and their entanglement with gender and race, before describing the book’s archive and its framing of speculative fiction as a cultural logic that exceeds literary and media genre studies. The chapter also articulates the centrality of reproduction to the project, which crafts an alternative discourse around the dominant heteronormative temporalities that Lee Edelman influentially critiqued in his 2004 book, No Future. In queer studies, reproductive futurism has primarily been an object of critique. In contrast, Old Futures argue that there are many reproductive futurisms, often in conflict and contradiction with one another, whose complexities are unpacked throughout the book.

This introductory chapter sets out the book's purpose, namely to track the relationship between the cult film and the science fiction (sf) genre, exploring a connection that has always seemed closer, somehow even more natural than in the case of most other film genres. In fact, sf has typically enjoyed a special version of the relationship between audience and text that critics often cite as one of the defining features of the cult film experience. The chapter then discusses the reasons why is it especially useful or important to focus attention specifically on sf texts for this investigation. This is followed by an overview of the subsequent chapters.

From 1955 to the end of the 1950s, science fiction experienced its most turbulent period. All of the pulp magazines had almost disappeared by the middle of the decade, as their readers began to explore other avenues. Competition for science fiction magazines came from everywhere: comics, digest magazines, paperbacks, men's magazines, cinema, radio, and television. At the same time, science fiction was becoming more topical and relevant every day due to advances in science, especially with the dawn of the space age in October 1957. These factors provided science fiction a wider and more appreciative readership, to which the magazines had to respond while facing the challenge of their opposition. This chapter examines the consequences of all these factors for the turbulent science fiction magazine market from 1956 to 1960. Among the magazines that existed during the period were Astounding Science, Galaxy, The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, Amazing Stories, Science Fiction Stories, Science Fiction Quarterly, Satellite SF, Michael Shayne Mystery Magazine, and Science Fiction Adventures.

This chapter turns to Houellebecq, France's most famous — and controversial — living writer; the affaire Houellebecq; Extension du domaine de la lutte; and Les Particules élémentaires. It discusses Houellebecq's representations of an extension of American‐style neoliberal competition from the material to the sexual economy, attributed to the generation of May 1968 and legitimized by French thinkers, psychoanalysis, and the media. Literary commitment is identified in representations of the struggle of the writer and narrative strategies are assessed, including ‘factual’ injections, autobiographical detail, and tropes from science fiction and marketing. The texts' provocative elements are discussed as both ideological challenges to dominant discourses, and as sleights of hand perpetuating misogynist, sexual, and racial prejudices. Houellebecq's fictions are described as seeking to expose, harness, and question both their own sense‐making narratives and contradictory fin de millénaire crisis discourses, simultaneously foregrounding the notion of the potential, and the need for change.

In contrast to the US and Europe, Brazil lacks a tradition of science fiction research and criticism. The few, short-lived film studios have invested much more in comedies or realist dramas than in monster movies or space operas. Gradually, however, this scene is changing. The Brazilian academy has directed more attention to science fiction, and Brazilian authors and artists are gaining recognition on the international stage. Moreover, the Brazilian science fiction film can be an eloquent ‘key-text’ for further readings of social, political and economic contradictions in the country, its conflicts and idiosyncrasies regarding modernization, and the particularities of the Brazilian film industry. This piece aims to provide a brief overview of Brazilian science fiction cinema, identifying its main trends, challenges, and ‘shapes of apparition’. Thus, this chapter covers a time frame, which starts in the late 1940s and ends in the late 2000s. In addition, this overview is meant to investigate some basic sources, obstacles, and influences affecting Brazilian science fiction cinema, from its beginnings to today.