SF as the "Queering of Realism"

If, as I write in the introduction, SF can be read as the queering of realism, then it is as the dominant culture’s death drive that it does so: SF provides the speculative challenge to our primary definitions of reality, the first step necessary in the creation of fiction as such, even as its movement away from reality is a move away from the understandable, an anti-telos that denies the finality of meaning altogether. If SF is the limit case of reality, the limit case of SF is the truly a...

 SF's Extension of Semiotic Possibilities in Language

Delany—in his equally famous and oft-cited definition of science fiction—argues that science fiction is characterised by an extension of semiotic possibilities in language: that is, he argues that words can simply mean more in science fiction than they can in realist fiction. Delany sees this as a function of the heightened realism of SF, and the materialisation of metaphor involved therein: he uses the phrases “Then her world exploded” and “He turned on his left side” to demonstr...

 Quantifying Information Content Does Not Bring Meaning Fr...

It is perfectly true that redundancy aids recognition of a signal as a language or a code, and this recognition is crucial to SETI. However, Shannon’s method provides only a quantitative measure of the complexity of a language or signaling system—not a translation. And while it is axiomatic in cryptology that redundancy helps in deciphering a text, the task of decipherment/cryptanalysis is to move from an encoded text to the original text—not from text to meaning. To get from text to me...

 Resistance Home

If you’ll allow me to stretch this metaphor, we could say that Old Survivor was too weird or too difficult to proceed easily toward the sawmill. In that way, the tree provides me with an image of “resistance-in-place.” To resist in place is to make oneself into a shape that cannot so easily be appropriated by a capitalist value system. To do this means refusing the frame of reference: in this case, a frame of reference in which value is determined by productivity, the stren...

 Literacy in the Context of an MMORPG

Let us begin with the New London Group (1996) definition – the notion that literacies (plural) crucially entail sense making within a rich, multimodal semiotic system, situated in a community of practice that renders that system meaningful. Figure 1 shows the interface of the MMOG Lineage II, one of the primary virtual world contexts in which the ethnographic data described herein was collected. We might ask ourselves, how many adults (let alone tenured professors) can ‘read’ such a sp...

 Levels of Simulation

Such is simulation, insofar as it is opposed to representation. Representation stems from the principle of the equivalence of the sign and of the real (even if this equivalence is Utopian, it is a fundamental axiom). Simulation, on the contrary, stems from the Utopia of the principle of equivalence, from the radical negation of the sign as value, from the sign as the reversion and death sentence of every reference. Whereas representation attempts to absorb simulation by interpreting it as a f...