The Cybernetic Imagination in Science Fiction

Overview:

  • Title: The Cybernetic Imagination in Science Fiction
  • Author: Patricia S. Warrick
  • Year: 1980
  • ISBN-10: 026223100X
  • Publisher: The MIT Press
  • Price: $15.00
  • Pages: xvii+282
  • Binding: Hardcover
  • Type: Non-fiction
  • Title Reference: The Cybernetic Imagination in Science Fiction
  • Notes: Price from Locus #232 (April 1980). No price printed on either flap of dust wrapper.
    First printing (March 1980) and second printing (July 1980) were identical.

    TABLE OF CONTENTS
    Acknowledgements
    Introduction
    1. The Cybernetic Imagination
      Science Fiction as a Form of the Literary Imagination
      Information Theory and Computer Technology
      Social and Philosophical Implications of Cybernetics
    2. Germinal Literary Images and Early Technologies
      The Myths
      Early Automata
      Frankenstein and His Nineteenth-Century Followers
      Twentieth-Century Antecedents
    3. Science Fiction Images of Computers and Robots
      Isaac Asimov Develops the Genre
      The Role of Consciousness
    4. An Aesthetic and an Approach
      An Aesthetic of Complementary Perception
      The Problem: Too Much Material
      A Systems Approach Using Isolated, Closed, and Open Systems
      Advantages of the Systems Approach
    5. The Isolated-System Model
      Creation as an Ongoing Process
      The Robot as Metaphor
      Machine Intelligence as a Tool
      Conclusion
    6. The Closed-System Model
      Dystopian Literature
      An Automated Society
      Who Controls a Totalitarian World?
      The Choice: A Natural or an Aritficial World?
      Vision of the End
      Conclusion
    7. The Open-System Model
      The Speculative Transforming Imagination
      A Complementary Mode
      Genetic Information Codes
      The Computer and the Community
      Man-Machine Symbiosis
      Transformations and Reversals
      Stanislaw Lem's Robot Fables and Ironic Tales
      Conclusion
    8. Into the Electronic Future
      The Transformation of Man and Machine
      Philip K. Dick's Robots
    Conclusion
    Some Critical Questions and Speculations
    Notes
    Nonfiction Bibliography
    Fiction Bibliography
    Index