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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
, 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
[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
informed debate. Openness about how we arrive at conclusions on the basis of evidence is what enables the type of empirical self-corrective knowledge creation that science has (often rightly) claimed to be. Why is it, then, that openness – in science, but also in other domains of life – has become such a buzzword in the twenty-first century? There 1 Dave Eggers’s 2013 novel The Circle is a stark illustration of this, particularly since it was meant as science fiction and yet seems to describe the cult of transparency as a solution to social problems. 98 Science and
. (2011). Does climate change knowledge really matter? Climate Change, 2(4), 475–481. Sharman, A. (2014). Mapping the climate sceptical blogosphere. Global Environmental Change, 26, 159–170. Spencer, R. W. (2007). An Inconvenient Truth: Blurring the lines between science and science fiction. GeoJournal, 70(1), 11–14. Steig, E. J. (2008). Another look at An Inconvenient Truth. GeoJournal, 70(1), 5–9. Tufte, E. R. (2003). The Cognitive Style of PowerPoint. Cheshire, CT: Graphics Press. Turnbull, A. (2011). The really inconvenient truth or ‘it ain’t necessarily so
ideas are often disregarded as ‘they lack knowledge’ or ‘they have too vivid an imagination’ in the same way that mentally ill people’s are called delusions. A young person thinking they can fly is put down to lack of knowledge of gravity whereas an adult discussing astral projection or a science fiction writer’s character defying gravity is categorised as ‘scientific phenomena’ or ‘creativity’. The child’s status or the mentally ill person’s status warrants their ideas as ‘invalid’, often without prior consideration. However, children can and have covertly taken part
some of the overlapping relationships between millenarianism, environmentalism and anarchism. The history of anarchism has been periodically peppered with advocates of non-aligned or anti-institutional forms of religious belief. Of the classical anarchists, Leo Tolstoy was perhaps the most Why anarchism still matters 17 sympathetic to religious beliefs, although some of his ideas are problematic (Hopton, 2000). More recently Taoism has become linked to anarchist ideas by a number of thinkers (Clark, 1984; Rapp, 1998) and in the science fiction novels of Ursula