This paper explores a possible future of postdigital education in 2050 using the means of social science fiction. The first part of the paper introduces the shift from 20th century primacy of physics to 21st century primacy of biology with an accent to new postdigital--biodigital reconfigurations and challenges in and after the COVID-19 pandemic.…

Literature has been an imitator of life for generations on this earth, this literature has voiced the voiceless. Recent contemporary and postmodern literary theories have catered to burgeoning notions of logic that go beyond human survival on the planet. Science fiction is a genre of fiction that encompasses imaginative concepts like futuristic…

Possibilities for a different form of education have provided rich sources of inspiration for science fiction writers. Isaac Asimov, Orson Scott Card, Neal Stephenson, Octavia Butler, and Vernor Vinge, among others, have all projected their own visions of what education could be. These visions sometimes engage with technologies that are currently…

A spectre is haunting contemporary technoculture: the spectre of Singularity. Ten years into a century thus far characterized chiefly by the catastrophic failure of global economic and political systems, deepening ecological anxieties, and slow-motion social crisis, the only sector of our collective cultural myth of Progress still vibrantly intact…

While nature is often claimed to be a space of harmonized balance or an antidote to the chaos of the modern world, we need a more grounded assessment of nature as endlessly changing and much less predictable than we like to assume. In this essay, I explore Karen Traviss' provocative exploration of unbalanced nature and unbounded bodies in her…

Creating memory during and after wartime trauma is vexed by state attempts to control public and private discourse. Science fiction author Iain Banks' novel "Look to Windward" proposes different ways of preserving memory and culture, from posthuman memory devices, to artwork, to architecture, to personal, local ways of remembering.…

In a satiric chapter of David Foster Wallace's novel "Infinite Jest," a mock media expert reports how American consumers of the near future recoil from a new communication device known as "videophony" and return to the voice-only telephone of the Bell Era. This article explores the said chapter in the framework of media theories reading the…

Fictional account of educational procedures in the year 2184 A.D. (including "laser projected holoschooling") and of the wide variety of spectacular changes that will have occurred worldwide as a result of advanced behavior modification and new technology available in the first two hundred years after 1984. (JBM)

Considers science fiction as a literary genre and as a predictor of technological advances, particularly in the information industry. An annotated bibliography is included of 11 science fiction titles and 1 nonfiction book that suggest possible information futures. (LRW)

"Battlestar Galactica," ABC-TV's prime-time science fiction series for 1978-79, illustrates how popular, mass media entertainment can communicate contradictory meanings that correlate with unresolved cultural tensions. The ambiguity of visual design is especially confusing because it is contrapuntal to the simplicity and clarity of the…

Uses the metaphor of the beehive as a well-ordered, each-in-his-own-niche society to represent the outcome of utopian thinking. Cites twentieth-century dystopia films and literature as explicit criticisms of overreliance on planning and technology. Examines "Star Wars,""Clockwork Orange," and the works of Huxley, Forster,…

Children can explore future concepts through literature. A selection of books is listed that offers information on the brain, conservation, cloning, space technology, and nuclear energy. (DF)

Includes two articles that discuss science fiction and future possibilities in information technology: "'Jurassic Park' and Al Jolson: Thinking about the Information Revolution" (Connie Willis) and "The Good and the Bad: Outlines of Tomorrow" (David Brin). (LRW)

Argues that television convention mitigates against depictions of technology as socially destructive. Argues that the presentation of science as television fiction is a conservative act. Concludes that television reinforces the socially constructed technological imperative of industrial societies, effacing its own role in the preservation of the…

Both the Russian novel "We" and the Anthony Burgess novel "A Clockwork Orange" offer frightening glimpses of a future society. But the contrast between these visions is striking. "We" is concerned with the misuse of technology, Burgess's book with the misuse of psychology. Both warn about the misuse of state power.…