{"id":139,"date":"2011-07-11T11:11:58","date_gmt":"2011-07-08T19:06:29","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/nancyannroth.com\/?p=139"},"modified":"2020-06-19T16:22:30","modified_gmt":"2020-06-19T16:22:30","slug":"science-fiction","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/nancyannroth.com\/?p=139","title":{"rendered":"science fiction"},"content":{"rendered":"

I became a bit unruly at a dinner party recently when my hostess asserted that science fiction was “license to just do anything you want, no rules”. \u00a0I guess it’s a common enough bit of bigotry, and I’m not sure why it seems so particularly irritating just now. Disappointed expectations figure in, no doubt, along with a lingering admiration for a book I’d just finished a few days before,\u00a0Robert Heinlein’s\u00a0The Moon is a Harsh Mistress. <\/em><\/p>\n

The story, which I would call generally optimistic, involves a computer that achieves consciousness (need I add, male consciousness–although at one point, when it is “young,” there is a moment of flexibility on the gender issue). \u00a0It seems a pity that such a book, that in some sense “proposes” the idea of an artificial consciousness, fleshing it out with rich implications, never enters into the same discussion with, say, Hayles’ \u00a0How We Became Posthuman<\/em>, where the possibility of disembodied consciousness is emphatically and persuasively rejected. \u00a0In Heinlein’s work, in fact, the computer loses its consciousness at the same time one of the main human characters dies. \u00a0So…maybe there always had been a connection that the narrator didn’t fully understand \u00a0— even though Heinlein did. \u00a0The computer only seemed<\/em> to him to function independently. \u00a0Maybe. \u00a0The point, though, is that the “argument” by plausibility, by fictional adequacy satisfies hearts and minds that will never encounter Hayles.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I became a bit unruly at a dinner party recently when my hostess asserted that science fiction was “license to just do anything you want, no rules”. \u00a0I guess it’s a common enough bit...<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":1613,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"bgseo_title":"","bgseo_description":"","bgseo_robots_index":"index","bgseo_robots_follow":"follow","_exactmetrics_skip_tracking":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1,209],"tags":[143],"class_list":["post-139","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-art","category-fiction","tag-fiction"],"post_mailing_queue_ids":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/nancyannroth.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/139","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/nancyannroth.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/nancyannroth.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nancyannroth.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nancyannroth.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=139"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/nancyannroth.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/139\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1944,"href":"https:\/\/nancyannroth.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/139\/revisions\/1944"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nancyannroth.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/1613"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/nancyannroth.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=139"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nancyannroth.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=139"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nancyannroth.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=139"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}