“One of Descartes’ students asked the master how he would know when an automaton had become a true man.
“‘When he tells me so himself,’ Descartes said.”
– “Cybernauts in Cyberspace: William Gibson’s Neuromancer” by David Porush
Robots, androids (and gynoids), and other assorted automatons have been a stable of science fiction since before it officially became science [...]
Posts from ‘August, 2007’
Robots in Science Fiction
Shooting Off Into Space
Once upon a time — it was 1866 — Jules Verne wrote an adventure story in which a group of Americans build a large cannon to shoot the first men to the Moon.
Later, Sir Isaac Newton developed a thought experiment that placed a cannon on a very high mountain that, with the right amount of [...]
Is Fandom Dying?
Loyd Case of Extreme Tech thinks so. In an article he wrote posted Aug. 6, 2007, he claims that the ease of which fandom can be procured is part of the poison killing it. The Internet is also to blame.
“Today, of course, anyone with a credit card can trumpet his or her obsession. You can [...]
The Obsession with Time Travel
A few years ago, I read a couple of book by Paul Nahin: Time Travel and Time Machines: Time Travel in Physics, Metaphysics and Science Fiction. I was so captivated by these books that I actually sent Dr. Nahin an email asking him about this time travel thought I had: If got into a time [...]
Politics and Science Fiction
It seems to me that quite a lot of science fiction — in fact speculative fiction as a whole — is used to comment on the current political climate when it was written. On television, Star Trek, Babylon 5 and the re-imagined Battlestar Gallactica are good cases in point. In literature, I could probably list [...]
