Science Fiction, Ethics and the Human Condition

Christian Baron is assistant professor at Center for Bioscience and Techo-Anthropology at the Department of Chemistry and Bioscience, Aalborg University Copenhagen.  Originally trained in evolutionary biology and the history and philosophy of science, his areas of interest include the dynamics of biological controversies, the role of expertise and counter-expertise in in policy-advising and public debates on science and the premises for making moral claims. He is also the author of several science fiction short stories that has been published in DanishPeter Nicolai Halvorsen is student vicar at the Faculty of Health, University of Copenhagen and chairman of the Copenhagen University Network on Science and Religion. His mains areas of interest include naturalism Christine Cornea is a Lecturer with the Department of Film, Television and Media at the University of East Anglia. She is the author of Science Fiction Cinema: Between Fantasy and Reality (co-published RUP/EUP, 2007) and has published widely on science fiction film and television, including articles for Velvet Light Trap, Genders and the Quarterly Review of Film and Video journals. Christine has also published two previous edited collections and is currently completing a further monograph book for Rutgers University Press that focuses upon the post-apocalyptic television drama.

“Science Fiction, Ethics and the Human Condition is a consistently solid, often astute, collection. It achieves a commendable balance between discussing prose fiction and the visual media, longer and shorter narrative forms, broad ideas and their embodiments in specific narratives, genre sf (aimed at a specialized sf audience) and sf by predominantly mainstream authors, and so on.” (Russell Blackford, Science Fiction Studies, Vol. 46, 2019)

• 1. Introduction: Science Fiction at a Crossroad between Ethics and Imagination; Christian Baron, Peter Nicolai Halvorsen and Christine Cornea.- Section I: Science, Technology and Science Fiction.- 2. The Perfect Organism: the intruder of the Alien films as a bio-fictional construct; Christian Baron.- 3. Science Fiction at the Far Side of Technology: Vernor Vinge's singularity thesis vs. the limits of AI-research; Mikkel Willum Johansen.- 4. A Greenhouse on Mars; Peter Westermann.- 5. Fascinating! Popular Science Communication and Literary Science Fiction: the shared features of awe and fascination and their significance to ideas of science fictions as vehicles for critical debate about scientific enterprises and their ethical implications; Gitte Meyer.- Section II: Identity and the Post-Human Condition.- 6. Our Serial (and Parallel) Selves: identity in the age of the trans-human; Stig W. Jørgensen.- 7. Commodified Life: post-humanism, cloning and gender in Orphan Black; Sherryl Vint.-8. Religion in a World of Androids and Aliens: life and death in Ridley Scott's Blade Runner and Prometheus; Peter Nicolai Halvorsen.- 9. I Am Omega Man: religious repositioning of the secular apocalypse film in I Am Legend; Tony Degouveia.- Section III: The Politics and Ethics of Science Fiction.- 10. From Isolationism to Globalism: an overview of politics and ethics in the Hollywood science fiction film; Christine Cornea.- 11. Reinventing Utopia: politics and ethics of choice in the works of Kim Stanley Robinson; Niels Dalgaard.- 12. The Final Frontier: survival ethics in extreme living conditions as portrayed in Tom Godwin's The Cold Equations and Ridley Scott's Alien; Christian Baron.- 13. The Politics of Post-Apocalypse: ideologies on trial in John Wyndham’s The Day of the Triffids; Jerry Määttä.- 14. On Ustopias and Finding Courage in a Hopeless Situation; Mickey Gjerris and Maud M. L. Eriksen.