Philosophy and science fiction share a sense of wonder. Here, reason is driven by a mania to advance ever-more complex rationales and reality itself appears to brim with possibilities. Part of me wishes this were hyperbole, but the recent publication of Science Fiction and Philosophy: From Time Travel to Superintelligence, edited by Susan Schneider, has recently confirmed my concerns. Sadly, mania tends to disabuse people of the notion that something performs its function incredibly well. The mania of Schneider's compilation, however, is precisely this: reason engaging cogitation with flair, variety, and incredible energy.
The volume is comprised of an assortment of important texts that discuss themes from philosophy of science and science fiction to philosophy of mind, rationality, consciousness, and reality-testing, to name but a few. Looking over the pages one can see Schneider's attention to detail, with the selections fitting coherently together in five parts: Could I be in a "Matrix" or Computer Simulation?; What Am I? Free Will and the Nature of Persons; Mind: Natural, Artificial, Hybrid, and "Super"; Ethical and Political Issues; and Space and Time. The included authors come from a variety of analytic and creative fields, and Schneider has wisely included Plato's cave allegory and René Descartes' meditation on doubt in the opening section, which give the collected texts a sense of inheritance from Classical Antiquity and through the European Enlightenment to today.
The more contemporary inclusions clearly show a preference for including thinkers of a more calculative and technical rationality such Daniel Dennett, Derek Parfit, and Nick Bostrom. No editor can avoid selectivity functioning as a type of bias (how else are editors to decide?), but including some extracts from Martin Heidegger, Walter Benjamin, or Paul Virilio, for example, may have offered Science Fiction and Philosophy some balance, especially around topics such as the phenomenology of spatial systems or the unabashed faith in science and technology to make our lives better while they simultaneously make our lives more complex. That said, Schneider has obviously made her choices for their accessibility and we should applaud her for this, as both science fiction and philosophy have been guilty of conjuring flighty thoughts that require extensive explanation and interpretation.
Science Fiction and Philosophy brings two areas together and into a dialogue: philosophy holds the fantasmatic enjoyment of science fiction to account for its illusions and awesome possibilities while science fiction reminds philosophy that all reason and no play makes thought a very dull thing indeed. Hopefully, this volume will find its way into the hands of those who wish to discover something about the highly technological world-view and horizon of meaning of our current epoch. The collection stands as an important and provocative dialogue between two very rich areas of contemporary cultures and societies. To paraphrase one of the godfathers of cyberpunk, Bruce Sterling: there is nothing especially scientific to science fiction; it is more of an offshoot of entertainment and popular culture that is spurred on by science. Science Fiction and Philosophy gives us a chance to redeem science fiction of its stupefying populism and take the questions it poses seriously and with a critical gaze. This volume will be of interest to audiences read in science fiction, philosophy of science, philosophy of time, philosophy of mind, consciousness studies, epistemology, robot ethics and bio-ethics and biotechnology and general audiences alike.
Daniel Hourigan teaches philosophy, psychoanalysis, aesthetics, and film studies at Griffith University, Australia. He writes on philosophy, psychoanalysis, ideology-critique, technology, and culture.
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