Article ID: CBB001200682

The Ridicule of Time: Science Fiction, Bioethics, and the Posthuman (2013)

unapi

The boundary between science fiction and fact is often at issue in contemporary debates over the posthuman. Genetic enhancement and longevity research provoke fervent debate between those who favor such research and others who think it is wrong to tamper with fundamental aspects of the human. Each side thinks that distinguishing realistic possibilities from wild speculations is a priority. Comically, though, each side uses the epithet science fiction as a way of trivializing the positions of the other, while proclaiming that the research they cite is on the verge of transforming human nature and that the future scenarios they describe are plausible and impending. This article brings the bio-ethical debate about posthumanism into contact with a massive, culturally significant body of writing on the topic, popular science fiction from the midtwentieth through the twenty-first centuries. The nightmares of science fiction haunt the bioethical imagination, exerting a pervasive but unexamined influence on its analyses. But the failure of bioethicists to examine the images, metaphors, and storylines of the science fiction that they so frequently invoke distorts their findings and recommendations.

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Citation URI
https://data.isiscb.org/isis/citation/CBB001200682/

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Authors & Contributors
Ljudmilla Chapovalova
Franz Haas
Trainque, Jarrod
Raffaella Vassena
Francesca Ripamonti
Marco Castellari
Concepts
Science and culture
Science and literature
Science and ethics
Science fiction
Science and entertainment; science and spectacle
Human genetics
Time Periods
20th century
21st century
Modern
19th century
20th century, late
10th century
Places
Europe
United States
Russia
Germany
Soviet Union
Sweden
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