The Memory of Science Fiction
Bethan Jones 2017 has been the year of finales for Doctor Who. Peter Capaldi will be bowing out as the twelfth Doctor in the Christmas special; Steven Moffatt steps down as showrunner at the same time; and the Doctor Who Experience (hereafter DWE) in Cardiff closed its doors. A purpose-built facility which housed a…
Brianna Bullen She logged into her domain, an archive threatening to extinguish itself under its own over-stimulated, under-filtered information swarms. Pottering around for a minute, hyperlink diving, she quickly restrained herself and closed the browser. There was a subtle art to hyperlink diving: an arc into its deep data, not a plonk. A chosen…
CB Harvey You’re absolutely sure? The whole beard? Such a shame. You just don’t see ‘em like this anymore. But, you know. You’re the boss. Snip snip. Snip snip. Honestly, don’t feel you need to talk. Just stare impassively into the mirror, thinking your private thoughts. That’s…
Debra Benita Shaw ‘Tell me what you remember – eveything’. These may be the most significant words in Blade Runner 2049 (2017) evoking, as they do, not only the events of thirty years ago in diagetic time but the central concern of Ridley Scott’s original Blade Runner (1982/92/2007): memory and its relationship to what…
Gerry Canavan From the standpoint of the Anthropocene, memory is a troubled thing. The memories trapped within the skull of a single individual hardly register at all against the vertiginous, multi-million-year perspective of geologic time; art, literature, music, and other cultural achievements all hardly fare better, likewise flickering and disappearing with the rise and…
Roger Luckhurst Science fiction has long been interested in the possibilities of technological developments that might manipulate memory. According to historians of shifting patterns of memory like Eric Hobsbawm or Pierre Nora, memory in the West was increasingly located as the core of personal, collective and national identities through the nineteenth century and beyond.…