Science Fiction Archives - Public Seminar

Philosophy

How Science Fiction Can Address the Crisis of Political Imagination

Making a case for revising the future

February 22, 2022 • by Lina Nasr El Hag Ali

Imagining alternative futures could help breach some of today’s most pressing political and philosophical concerns: for example, the Anthropocene and environmental catastrophe, renewed calls for decolonization against the rise of fascism(s) around the world, our complicity with imperialist violence abroad and political impotence at home. ...

How Science Fiction Can Address the Crisis of Political Imagination

Multi Media

The AHCA, Children’s Sleep, and Planets

Past Present Episode 77

April 7, 2017 • by Natalia Mehlman Petrzela, Neil J. Young and Nicole Hemmer

In this week's episode, Niki, Neil, and Natalia debate the fate of the American Health Care Act, the constructed nature of children's sleep, and Pluto's place among the planets.

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Fury Road

May 22, 2015 • by McKenzie Wark

Australian film-maker George Miller is a master of the horizontal in cinema, of a certain kind of movement-image, where the landscape sliding away across the screen is a double of the movement of the frames of celluloid through the projector. At his best, Miller makes a cinema of pure kinetics, ...

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Anthropo{mise-en-s}cène

December 10, 2014 • by McKenzie Wark

So this is the Anthropocene: An historical time, perhaps even a geological time, in which what we think of as separate entities, the human and the natural, find their fates entwined. What was once a separate nature or environment is no in place to ground us as us. Not only is ...

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William Gibson’s The Peripheral

November 2, 2014 • by McKenzie Wark

The new Gibson novel seems to me to be about three things: space, time and class. In classic Gibsonesque style, it threads together stories that begin in two different places. One is the kind of landscape I recognize from spending time in upstate New York. A rural, mostly working class, mostly ...