Science Fictions and Cyber Myths: or, Do Cyborgs Dream of Dolly the Sheep?

Abstract

For most science writers and theorists, the history of the cyborg begins in 1960 with a neologism coined by the research scientist Manfred Clynes and the clinical psychiatrist Nathan Kline to refer to a technologically enhanced man or ‘cybernetic organism’ — a fusion of organism, machine, and code — capable of surviving and working in hostile alien environments. This chapter examines what constitutes feminist science by dissecting the work of Donna Haraway and the modern myth of the ‘cyborg’. It shows how the utopia of feminist science fiction is modelled upon ancient myths of hybridity, but at the same time seeks to distance itself from that ancient legacy. In her ground-breaking and now ‘classic’ analysis of feminism in the post-modern Western world, ‘A Cyborg Manifesto’, Haraway proposes some provocative ways of rethinking human subjectivity, invoking the term ‘cyborg’ as a metaphor for the late 20th-century subject.

Artificial Life, Divinity, and Mythology in Star Trek

“…7 There are a number of other ancient myths that involve creation that could be applicable to studying contemporary machines: Prometheus, Pandora, the bronze giant Talos, and Hephaestus' metallic helper maidens in Iliad 18. These have been fruitfully explored in other scholarly treatments (Liveley 2006;Raphael 2015;Rogers and Stevens 2015;Stevens 2015;Keen 2017;Mayor 2018;Matz Forthcoming) and so I prioritize Pygmalion's statue here because of its more direct evocation of the concept of imitation and the simulacrum.…”

“…The science fiction (SF) genre has been a fruitful place to reconsider the narratives, characters, and ideas from the ancient Mediterranean (Keen 2006;Liveley 2006;Brown 2008;Gloyn 2015;Rogers and Stevens 2015;Keen 2017;Wenskus 2017;Clare 2022). This approach, called classical reception, traces the influence of ancient Greece and Rome and the wider ancient Mediterranean to later time periods and across media (for example, music, art, theater, literature, film, television, comics, video and tabletop games).…”