Literature and Medicine 20, no. 1 (Spring 2001) 13–25 © 2001 by Eric S. Rabkin *The Genre Evolution Project (GEP) web site (http://www.umich.edu/~genreevo) includes a Team Roster that lists the names of all faculty and students involved in this work from its inception. I particularly want to thank my friend and collaborator Carl P. Simon, Professor of Mathematics, Economics, Public Policy, and ...

In her article "The Posthuman Ethos in Cyberpunk Science Fiction" María Goicoechea explores the posthuman tendencies of Anglo-American popular culture as they are manifested in the representations of the cyborgs, clones, and artificial intelligences that populate cyberpunk science fiction. Choosing the figure of the cyborg as the central myth of cyberculture, Goicoechea exposes the underlying t...

The fear that human creations might backfire and attack their creators has been a mainstay of science fiction at least since Mary Shelley‟s Frankenstein. The misgivings become particularly acute when human-engineered imitations of human beings (i.e., robots and cyborgs) raise questions regarding how humans can be distinguished from machines. Assumptions about gender also infuse the ways humans ...

Although we cannot be certain that science fiction directly influenced the course that computing technology has taken over the past 50 years, the genre has-at the very least-anticipated the technologies we're using and developing. peculation ahout our future relationship to computers-and to technolngy in general-has limn the province of science fiction for at least a hundred years. But riot all...

Hollywood films and CSI-like movies show a technology landscape far from real, both in forensic speaker recognition and other identification-of-the-source forensic areas. Lay persons are used to good-looking scientist-and-investigators performing voice identifications (”we got a match!”) or smart fancy devices producing voice transformations causing one actor to instantaneously talk with the vo...

The cultural and political implications of modern AI research are not some far off concern, they are things that affect the world in the here and now. From advanced control systems with advanced visualizations and image processing techniques that drive the machines of the modern military to the slow creep of a mechanized workforce, ethical questions surround us. Part of dealing with these ethic...

In this paper we describe a process called Diegetic Innovation Templating (DiT) whereby science fiction and fantasy stories are used as a systematic source of ideas for design and product innovation. We also introduce a concept called the Diegetic Gap which acts a metric for assessing how compatible a particular piece of fiction is to a given innovation space. We illustrate the Diegetic Innovat...