Singularities

(Liverpool science fiction texts and studies) In a time of protracted economic crisis, failing political systems, and impending environmental collapse, one strand in our collective cultural myth of Progress – the technological – remains vibrantly intact, surging into the future at ramming speed. Amid the seemingly exponential proliferation of machine intelligence and network connectivity, and the increasingly portentous implications of emerging nanotechnology, futurists and fabulists look to an imminent historical threshold whereupon the nature of human existence will be radically and irrevocably transformed. The Singularity, it is supposed, can be no more than a few years off; indeed, some believe it has already begun. Technological Singularity – a trope conceived in science fiction and subsequently adopted throughout technocultural discourse and beyond – is the primary site of interpenetration between technoscientific and science-fictional figurations of the future, a territory where longstanding binary oppositions between science and fiction, and between present and future, are rapidly dissolving. In this groundbreaking volume, the first to mount a sustained and wide-ranging critical treatment of Singularity as a subject for theory and cultural studies, Raulerson draws SF texts into a complex dialogue with contemporary digital culture, transhumanist movements, political and economic theory, consumer gadgetry, gaming, and related vectors of high-tech postmodernity. In theorizing Singularity as a metaphorical construct lending shape to a range of millennial anxieties and aspirations, Singularities also makes the case for a recent and little-understood subgeneric formation – postcyberpunk SF – as a cohesive body of work, engaged in a shared literary project that is simultaneously shaping, and shaped by, purportedly nonfictional technoscientific discourses.PART I. NAKED SINGULARITIES (The Punchbowl and the Fishbowl ; Two Posthumanisms, Three Singularities). - PART II. HOW WE BECAME POST-POSTHUMAN: POSTCYBERPUNK BODIES AND THE NEW MATERIALITY (Mind, Matter, Markets ; Self and Skin: Virtuality and its Discontents ; The Other Side of the Screen: the Materiality of the Hyperreal). - PART III. ECONOMICS 2.0 (The Most Radical Break ; Cracking the Code ; Toward a Postsingular General Economy). - PART IV. THE LAST QUESTION (Entropy, Extropy, and Transhumanist Eschatology ; Beyond Extropy, or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Singularity) - Bibliography