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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
24 25 Readings of World Politics (Lexington, KY: Free Press, 1989); J. Weldes (ed.), To Seek Out New Worlds: Exploring Links Between Science Fiction and World Politics (Houndmills: Palgrave, 2003); S. Chan and P. Mandaville, ‘Introduction: Within International Relations Itself, a New Culture Rises up’, The Zen of International Relations (London: Palgrave, 2001), pp. 1–16. H.G. Gadamer, Truth and Method (London: Continuum, 2004); P. Ricoeur, The Conflict of Interpretations (London: Continuum, 2004). J. Baudrillard, ‘From Symbolic Exchange and Death’, in L
-first-century fiction, the novel has been described by Alison Flood as ‘the best novel of the 21st century to date’.3 Critics credit Díaz with having crafted a novel that fuses ‘science fiction, fantasy, and testosterone’.4 Similarly, in his review of the novel, Christopher Taylor notes Díaz’s success in ‘coupling the book’s interest in genre to the creolisation he values in Caribbean culture’.5 Taylor is perhaps simplistic in his appeal to creolisation, but he is right in identifying the hybrid character of the novel, which is foregrounded by Díaz from the outset. Indeed, as the
isolation of inner-city Johannesburg, particularly in relation to HIV/AIDS, can be found in Phaswane Mpe’s novel Welcome to Our Hillbrow . I want to conclude by briefly looking at District 9 (2009) as a counterpoint to the other three texts discussed in this chapter to see if the extremes offered by science fiction can be utilised to further emphasise my point. The film begins in 1982, when a space ship bearing a sick and malnourished alien population, nicknamed ‘Prawns’, appears over Johannesburg, South Africa. Twenty-eight years later, the
Science Fiction Discourses (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2009), pp. 53–79. 79 G. K. Chesterton, The Napoleon of Notting Hill (London: William Clowes, 1904), pp. 14–15. 80 Carnegie, The Reunion of Britain and America, p. 8. 81 Carnegie, ‘Americanism versus imperialism’, p. 8. 82 Carnegie, The Reunion of Britain and America: A Look Ahead, p. 31. 83 A. Carnegie, The Autobiography of Andrew Carnegie (London: Penguin, 2006 [1920]), Chapters 22 and 25; Nasaw, Andrew Carnegie, C hapter 12. 84 J. Morley, Recollections (London: Macmillan, 1917), vol. 2, p. 111. 85 Carnegie
’s CISOs the ‘clearest, most up-to-date intelligence’ so that the ‘general on the cyber-battlefield … will have the tools they need to win the war’ ( Bernick, 2013 ). ‘Cyber warrior’, once a term from science fiction, has become a job classification essential to internet security ( Judge, 2013b ) and ‘governments around the world are recruiting these cyber warriors to fight against the growing threat of both cybercrime and state-sponsored attacks’ ( Waugh, 2013b ). This has culminated in a scenario where, by 2011, almost all of the world’s major nations had
to let one’s imagination run “free.” The everyday has acquired new dimensions, where the imagination is no longer restricted to grandmother ’s stories or a Jules Verne novel, but instead runs free across a series of different levels of representation: from reality shows, to science fiction, to the travel channel, to abstract representations such as political cartoons. Sifting through this information is difficult enough for people who grew up with it. For those who started to experience it all at once unexpectedly, one can only imagine the kind of shock they must