Episode 9: Deletion|Deviation

Deletion’s two-day symposium, Deletion/Deviation, presented a constellation of new perspectives on contemporary science fiction and its many perversions. As organizer Dr. Grady Hancock wrote in her introduction to the conference programme, Science Fiction exists in a state of tension between the pleasurable and the perverse — of the pleasure gained from its fictive forms, and…

Astro Boy, Science-fictionality and Japanese Robotics

Angela Ndalianis | Over the last few decades, special effects and technological creations generated in the name of entertainment have given rise to a ‘science-fictionality’ that brings the technologies that have been imaged and imagined by science fiction films closer to our everyday reality. Above all, it is the robot and cyborg – the former…

The Drowning Man

Horst Sarubin | When asked to write about ‘the drowning man’ for the inaugural episode of Deletion, I immediately started to formulate my intellectual response. My mind went back to the key ideas from the thesis in which it originated. Phrases such as “Liquid Modernity” and  “Expanded Cinema” began to trickle back into my consciousness. …

Deletions and Other Pleasures

Christy Dena | This creative response began as a completely different story and form. What excited me in the end was the concept of deletion and how it could be an interesting mechanic: where the only thing you can do in the world is delete. I thought about deleting parts of robots to make them better. Healing…

Welcome: the age of deletion

In cultural terms, we are experiencing an age of deletion: files expunged, identities stolen and wiped, terrorists and undesirables locked away in ‘no place’ detention centres with no records kept of who or where they are. Science fiction in all its forms recognises this dematerialisation of records through paranoid and conspiratorial narratives in which people…