How science fiction has been a tool for understanding our anxieties about rapid technological change.
Rather than compiling a chronological history of a literary genre, or defining it in literary terms, in this volume in the MIT Press Essential Knowledge series, Sherryl Vint focuses on what is at the core of all definitions of science fiction: a vision of the world made otherwise and what possibilities might flow from such otherness.
After surveying the genre's origins, Vint considers how and why contemporary science fiction is changing, exploring anxieties in current science fiction over such key sites of technological innovation as artificial intelligence, genomic research and commodified biomedicine, and climate change. Connecting science fiction with speculative design and futurology, she argues that science fiction does not merely reflect these trends, it has a role in directing them.
