Singularities: Technoculture, Transhumanism, and Science Fiction in the 21st Century

Awards:   Commended for Science Fiction and Technoculture Studies Book Prize 2014 Commended for Science Fiction and Technoculture Studies Book Prize 2014.
Author:   Joshua Raulerson
Publisher:   Liverpool University Press
Volume:   45
ISBN:  

9781846319723


Pages:   264
Publication Date:   13 November 2013
Format:   Hardback
Availability:   In Print   Availability explained
This item will be ordered in for you from one of our suppliers. Upon receipt, we will promptly dispatch it out to you. For in store availability, please contact us.

Our Price $422.40 Quantity:  
Add to Cart

Share |

Singularities: Technoculture, Transhumanism, and Science Fiction in the 21st Century


Add your own review!

Awards

  • Commended for Science Fiction and Technoculture Studies Book Prize 2014
  • Commended for Science Fiction and Technoculture Studies Book Prize 2014.

Overview

In a time of protracted economic crisis, failing political systems, and impending environmental collapse, one strand in our collective cultural myth of Progress – the technological – remains vibrantly intact, surging into the future at ramming speed. Amid the seemingly exponential proliferation of machine intelligence and network connectivity, and the increasingly portentous implications of emerging nanotechnology, futurists and fabulists look to an imminent historical threshold whereupon the nature of human existence will be radically and irrevocably transformed. The Singularity, it is supposed, can be no more than a few years off; indeed, some believe it has already begun. Technological Singularity – a trope conceived in science fiction and subsequently adopted throughout technocultural discourse and beyond – is the primary site of interpenetration between technoscientific and science-fictional figurations of the future, a territory where longstanding binary oppositions between science and fiction, and between present and future, are rapidly dissolving. In this groundbreaking volume, the first to mount a sustained and wide-ranging critical treatment of Singularity as a subject for theory and cultural studies, Raulerson draws SF texts into a complex dialogue with contemporary digital culture, transhumanist movements, political and economic theory, consumer gadgetry, gaming, and related vectors of high-tech postmodernity. In theorizing Singularity as a metaphorical construct lending shape to a range of millennial anxieties and aspirations, Singularities also makes the case for a recent and little-understood subgeneric formation – postcyberpunk SF – as a cohesive body of work, engaged in a shared literary project that is simultaneously shaping, and shaped by, purportedly nonfictional technoscientific discourses.

Full Product Details

Author:   Joshua Raulerson
Publisher:   Liverpool University Press
Imprint:   Liverpool University Press
Volume:   45
Dimensions:   Width: 16.30cm , Height: 2.30cm , Length: 23.90cm
Weight:   0.567kg
ISBN:  

9781846319723


ISBN 10:   1846319722
Pages:   264
Publication Date:   13 November 2013
Audience:   College/higher education ,  Tertiary & Higher Education ,  Postgraduate, Research & Scholarly
Format:   Hardback
Publisher's Status:   Active
Availability:   In Print   Availability explained
This item will be ordered in for you from one of our suppliers. Upon receipt, we will promptly dispatch it out to you. For in store availability, please contact us.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments Preface PART I - NAKED SINGULARITIES Introduction 1. The Punchbowl and the Fishbowl 2. Two Posthumanisms, Three Singularities PART II - HOW WE BECAME POST-POSTHUMAN: POSTCYBERPUNK BODIES AND THE NEW MATERIALITY 3. Mind, Matter, Markets 4. Self and Skin: Virtuality and its Discontents 5. The Other Side of the Screen: the Materiality of the Hyperreal PART III - ECONOMICS 2.0 6. The Most Radical Break 7. Cracking the Code 8. Toward a Postsingular General Economy PART IV - THE LAST QUESTION 9. Entropy, Extropy, and Transhumanist Eschatology 10. Beyond Extropy, or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Singularity Notes Bibliography Index

Reviews

Dazzling ideas come flying in quick succession on each page of this manuscript, and the writing itself is absolutely delightful. It promises to become a highly regarded work in science fiction studies, science and technology studies, and cultural studies. -- Professor Colin Milburn Elegant, wry, and profoundly topical, Joshua Raulerson's Singularities is a masterful study of the many connections between postcyberpunk science fiction and posthumanist culture. Examining the historical, philosophical, political and economic dimensions of our most modern technological myth, Raulerson describes how deeply our technology-saturated world is itself saturated by science fiction. If a work of sophisticated literary criticism can be called a thrilling ride, this it is. -- Professor Istvan Csicsery-Ronay


Dazzling ideas come flying in quick succession on each page of this manuscript, and the writing itself is absolutely delightful. It promises to become a highly regarded work in science fiction studies, science and technology studies, and cultural studies. -- Professor Colin Milburn Elegant, wry, and profoundly topical, Joshua Raulerson's Singularities is a masterful study of the many connections between postcyberpunk science fiction and posthumanist culture. Examining the historical, philosophical, political and economic dimensions of our most modern technological myth, Raulerson describes how deeply our technology-saturated world is itself saturated by science fiction. If a work of sophisticated literary criticism can be called a thrilling ride, this it is. -- Professor Istvan Csicsery-Ronay Brilliant, Thought-Provoking, and Original. Joshua Raulerson. Singularities: Technoculture, Transhumanism, and Science Fiction in the 21st Century. LIVERPOOL SCIENCE FICTION TEXTS AND STUDIES 45. Liverpool: Liverpool UP, 2013. x + 254 pp. GBP70.00; $99.95 hc. Distributed in the US by Oxford UP. As far as the sf world is concerned, it all started in 1993, with mathematician and sf writer Vernor Vinge's presentation at the VISION-21 Symposium sponsored by NASA's Lewis Research Center and the Ohio Aerospace Institute. In wide circulation ever since, The Coming Technological Singularity: How to Survive in the Post-human Era famously predicted that [w]ithin thirty years, we will have the technological means to create superhuman intelligence. Shortly after, the human era will be ended (online). In the years following, engineer-inventor Ray Kurzweil developed a more comforting version of the Singularity as exponential techno-evolution into an increasingly powerful posthumanism. By now, the imaginative grip of the technological Singularity, whatever its tenor, is evident in a wide variety of cultural formations-fictional, theoretical, and material-and it is more than time for a full-length study that will do justice to this complex technocultural phenomenon. Singularities succeeds brilliantly in being that study. It is gracefully written, effortlessly wide-ranging, and always interesting. It is thought provoking and original, at once a theoretical study of a multi-faceted concept and a work of literary criticism. In the first instance, it examines the Singularity as a metaphorical figure that signifies the aspirations and anxieties of millennial technoculture across a range of discourses and contexts ; in the second, it aims to highlight contemporary sf's dialogue with nonfiction Singularity discourse and to identity and theorize a subgenre of sf novels and stories as imaginative responses to an event whose very nature necessarily forecloses insight into the future (19-20). Singularities ranges widely, given-as its title suggests-that the Singularity comes in a wide variety of shapes and sizes. In Part 1, Naked Singularities, Raulerson introduces the two most influential versions of Singularity as propounded by Vinge and Kurzweil, and then usefully maps some of their implications for science fiction (problems of extrapolation when faced with a completely unknowable future, for instance). He also introduces the critical analysis of Transhumanism that forms one of the main strands of his study. Part II, How We Became Post-Posthuman: Postcyberpunk Bodies and the New Materiality, is focused on debates about embodiment and the posthuman in both real-world and sf speculations. These include Transhumanist dreams of abandoning the body as well as influential critiques of those dreams such as N. Katherine Hayles's How We Became Posthuman (1999). Raulerson's nuanced discussion of Egan's far-future Diaspora (1998) in this context does justice to a very complex text, focusing on its challenges to the idea of mind as pure substrate-neutral information (59). Part III, Economics 2.0, is perhaps Raulerson's most original contribution, as it examines possible futures of significant difference in both theoretical and fictional constructions of political economy. As Raulerson is careful to note, Singularity fiction is neither necessarily conservative nor leftleaning in its politics. He offers an eye-opening reading, for instance, of Tom Purdom's Bank Run (2006), a post-Singularity story in which free-market economics functions virtually like a transcendent Natural Law (98). In contrast, a novel such as Charles Stross's Accelerando (2005) subverts the very idea of political economy. Raulerson points out the similarities in Stross's novel to radically alternative theories of value and scarcity (117) such as Jean Baudrillard's symbolic exchange and Georges Bataille's general economy, as well as more recent theories of Free Culture and open-source production. Part IV, The Last Question (a nod to the title of Isaac Asimov's classic 1956 story), appropriately concludes Raulerson's study by exploring the Singularity as a kind of eschatological vision responding in part to the entropic anxieties of the twentieth century. He examines such midcentury novels as Nevil Shute's On the Beach (1957) and Philip K. Dick's Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? (1968) and contrasts these expressions of entropy to the escapist techno-fantasies of contemporary Extropians, radical transhumanists who are convinced that technology will eventually deliver us from all the ills of the flesh, including mortality. Raulerson reads Singularity fictions by writers such as Neal Stephenson, Rudy Rucker, Stross, and Cory Doctorow as the satirical conscience of the transhumanist movement, reintroducing the entropic metaphor in ways that contest and subvert eschatalogical fantasies of technological transcendence (198). Echoing critic John Clute's comments about the fate of First SF, Raulerson suggests that the Vingean crisis marks the end of a particular science-fictional mode of logical-positivist predictioneering associated, for example, with earlier writers such as Asimov. Singularity fictions in Raulerson's construction are more phenomenological than extrapolative: they echo and amplify the subjective experience of readers living in a period of extraordinary historical flux and crisis (16-17). For Raulerson, these fictions have their roots in cyberpunk, and he examines their imaginative constructions of embodiment, politics, economics, and technological development as both influenced by and signalling a rupture with the classic cyberpunk texts of the 1980s. Among other things, Raulerson sees a renewed commitment to embodiment in postcyberpunk, as well as a new postsingular materiality, radically transformed and revitalized by a kind of digital fluidity (73). Although I was a bit skeptical at first about such a genealogy, Raulerson makes this case very convincingly, and the trajectory he traces from cyberpunk to Singularity fiction provides an enlightening cultural history within which to reread texts such as William Gibson's Neuromancer (1984) and Bruce Sterling's Schismatrix (1985), as well as constructing a very useful framework through which to read novels such as Egan's Diaspora and Stross's Accelerando. As suggested by the list of writers in whom Raulerson is most interested, postcyberpunk Singularity fiction is overwhelmingly a male-authored subgenre. Raulerson is to be credited for calling attention to gender issues throughout Singularities but, at the same time, I would have liked to see what he would make of the posthuman world of Justina Robson's Natural History (2004). I also wish that he had not relegated postcolonial Singularity fiction such as Geoff Ryman's Air (or, Have Not Have) (2004) to the margins of his study, given its astute examinations of gender and sexuality. Singularities's center is crowded with stories about the post-Singularity future that tend toward the surreal and the absurd, such as Stephenson's Snow Crash (1992), Doctorow's Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom (1993), Sterling's Maneki Neko (1998), Stross's Singularity Sky (2003), and Rucker's Postsingular (2007). I do not think that my own canon of Singularity fiction would have the same center but, then, this is not my book. And any disagreements I might have with Raulerson's selections are negligible given the many brilliant insights he develops in this exciting study of science fiction as contemporary cultural discourse. It is not surprising that Singularities was a runner-up for the 2014 Science Fiction and Technoculture Studies Book Prize presented through the SFTS Program at the University of California, Riverside. I recommend it unreservedly, no matter what your interests are in science fiction in particular or contemporary technoculture in general. Even (or perhaps especially) if you consider the very idea of what Vernor Vinge famously referred to as the coming technological Singularity to be a load of hooey-that infamous rapture of the nerds -you should read this book. The real interest in the idea of the Singularity is what it tells us about ourselves at this particular moment when we have left behind one century and are still uneasily trying to fit ourselves into the current one. The Singularity is the shape of our own particular apocalypse, at once the dream and the nightmare of science-fiction writers, transhumanists, artificial intelligence researchers, nanotechnology proselytzers, and techno-transcendentalists of all stripes. It is firmly ensconsed at the intersections of speculative fiction and technoscientific discourses about the real. As Istvan Csicsery-Ronay notes in his own commentary on the Singularity, it is the quintessential myth of contemporary technoculture (The Seven Beauties of Science Fiction [Wesleyan UP, 2008], 262) and the consummate imaginary novum (264). It is an epochal event of global proportions, an inexorable cataclysm latent in the techno-economic mechanics of our civilization (Raulerson 94). In other words, to quote Csicsery-Ronay, the Singularity is not the next step, but this step (265; emphasis in original). -- Veronica Hollinger Science Fiction Studies, Vol. 42, No. 1 Brilliant, Thought-Provoking, and Original. I recommend it unreservedly, no matter what your interests are in science fiction in particular or contemporary technoculture in general. Science Fiction Studies Vol. 42, No. 1


Dazzling ideas come flying in quick succession on each page of this manuscript, and the writing itself is absolutely delightful. It promises to become a highly regarded work in science fiction studies, science and technology studies, and cultural studies. -- Colin Milburn Elegant, wry, and profoundly topical, Joshua Raulerson's Singularities is a masterful study of the many connections between postcyberpunk science fiction and posthumanist culture. Examining the historical, philosophical, political and economic dimensions of our most modern technological myth, Raulerson describes how deeply our technology-saturated world is itself saturated by science fiction. If a work of sophisticated literary criticism can be called a thrilling ride, this it is. -- Istvan Csicsery-Ronay Singularities is an exhilarating examination of the multiple ways that post-cyberpunk fiction matters, not only for discussions of the posthuman, but also for discussions of the bodily, environmental, political, and socioeconomic implications of Singularity discourses and agendas that 'demand ideological scrutiny' (p.30). -- Mary Catherine Foltz Year's Work in English Studies, Vol. 94, No. 1, 2015


Author Information

Joshua Raulerson holds a PhD from the University of Iowa.

Tab Content 6

Author Website:  

Customer Reviews

Recent Reviews

No review item found!

Add your own review!

Countries Available

All regions
Latest Reading Guide

RGJUNE2025

 

Shopping Cart
Your cart is empty
Shopping cart
Mailing List