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cuteness, to science fiction level body machine melding’. Wearables range from ‘the eminently practical’ to the ‘utterly fantastical’. The functions of these digital technologies are not necessarily novel: paper maps have existed for centuries; pedometers date back to the eighteenth century; devices measuring distances cycled or walked, spectacles, prosthetic devices and wristwatches are further examples of historical wearable technologies ( Carter et al. , 2018
too irrational to abide by the rules of the game. Star wars, science fiction, NMD Don’t Worry, It’s Only Science Fiction. (Franklin 1988, 131) The intimate correlation between popular culture and the textual practices of US foreign policy has been attended to by a number of IR scholars with a particular focus on fiction in film. Much of it stems from the notion, as Prince (1992, xv) aptly puts it, that ‘movies are vehicles 9780719074707_4_C06.qxd 124 10/06/2008 11:16 AM Page 124 National missile defence and the politics of US identity revealing the
, and two notions of time and politics: first, the notion that the future is something that can be produced or at least influenced by our actions; and second, the idea that the future is in some sense predetermined – and we cannot escape it. The first is, if you like, a linear, progressive notion of time; the second could be seen as a more circular picture. Crucially though, both see time as an external background against which events unfold; time exists independently of us, and the film postulates a science fiction world where we can travel through this external time
on specific issues. Instead of giving a mandate to an elected representative to take a decision, the decision is taken by the citizen him- or herself. At first sight this seems to be true. And our computer age could, indeed, make things a lot easier, enabling citizens, while staying at home, to cast their votes online. In a book first published in 1984, the Italian political scientist Norberto Bobbio considered this option still to be “science-fiction,” writing: “As concerns the referendum, which, in the end, is the only device of direct democracy which can be
neuropharmacology, new ways – which are sometimes as far-fetched as the one of John Channon – are being studied in order to reach this goal. Numerous armies are now aiming to increase combatants’ cognition and their capacities to learn and train as well as developing human–machine interfaces to ameliorate their psychological and physical weaknesses. In many respects, these science-fiction-esque developments raised the prospect of a ‘Human
( 2003 ), ‘“ A useful knowledge of the present is rooted in the past”: Memory and Historical Reconciliation in Ursula K. Le Guin’s The Telling ’ in Raffaella Baccolini and Tom Moylan (eds), Dark Horizons: Science Fiction and the Dystopian Imagination ( London : Routledge ), pp. 113 – 34 . ( 2013 ), ‘ Ursula K. LeGuin’s Critical Dystopias ’ in M. Keith Booker (ed.), Critical Insights: Dystopia ( Ipswich : Salem Press ), pp. 37 – 53 . Baker , David and Pauline Schnapper ( 2015 ), Britain and the Crisis of the European Union ( Basingstoke
, globalisation might well have begun in 6 November 1872, when Jules Verne published the first instalment of Le Tour du monde en quatre-vingts jours, soon translated to Around the World in Eighty Days. It was first serialised in the popular newspaper, Le Temps, and then published as a book the following January. This novel was a departure for Verne, who was best known for his science fiction; speculations on the impact of future technologies. For once he found that the present had caught up with his imagination, as he built his adventure story around the revolution in
, sometimes with terrible and harmful consequences for the soldiers. Nowadays, this trend has reached a science-fiction-like nature through the development and use of body armours and medicines that will soon allow service personnel to perform their duty in similar fashion to Iron Man, Batman, or Captain America. However, before discussing the problems associated with the question of super soldiers, it is first necessary to
[1897]), the fearless vampire hunters must turn to ancient religious rites to defeat a monster that has descended upon an unsuspecting and technologically advanced London on the cusp of a new century. A distrust of scientists, who have turned away from morality and religion to dabble disastrously in questions of creation, runs through classic science fiction stories of biological horror and hybridity, like H. G. Wells’s The Island of Dr Moreau (1996 [1896]) and Robert Louis Stevenson’s The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (2000 [1886]), respectively. Playing God
This book explores the reasons and justifications for the Chinese state’s campaign to erase Uyghur identity, focusing, in particular, on how China’s manipulation of the US-led Global War on Terror (GWOT) has facilitated this cultural genocide. It is the first book to address this issue in depth, and serves as an important rebuttal to Chinese state claims that this campaign is a benign effort to combat an existential extremist threat. While the book suggests that the motivation for this state-led campaign is primarily China’s gradual settler colonization of the Uyghur homeland, the text focuses on the narrative of the Uyghur terrorist threat that has provided international cover and justification for the campaign and has shaped its ‘biopolitical’ nature. It describes how the People’s Republic of China (PRC) was able to successfully implicate Uyghurs in GWOT and, despite a lack of evidence, brand them internationally as a serious terrorist threat within the first year of the war. In recounting these developments, the book offers a critique of existing literature on the Uyghur terrorist threat and questions the extent of this threat to the PRC. Finding no evidence for the existence of such a threat when the Chinese state first declared its existence in 2001, the book argues that a nominal Uyghur militant threat only emerged after over a decade of PRC suppression of Uyghur dissent in the name of counterterrorism, facilitating a ‘self-fulfilling prophecy’ that has served to justify further state repression and ultimately cultural genocide.