The Cybernetic Imagination in Science Fiction

Notes

Price from Locus #232 (April 1980). No price printed on either flap of dust wrapper.
First printing (March 1980) and second printing (July 1980) were identical.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Acknowledgements
Introduction

1. The Cybernetic Imagination

   Science Fiction as a Form of the Literary Imagination
   Information Theory and Computer Technology
   Social and Philosophical Implications of Cybernetics

2. Germinal Literary Images and Early Technologies

   The Myths
   Early Automata
   Frankenstein and His Nineteenth-Century Followers
   Twentieth-Century Antecedents

3. Science Fiction Images of Computers and Robots

   Isaac Asimov Develops the Genre
   The Role of Consciousness

4. An Aesthetic and an Approach

   An Aesthetic of Complementary Perception
   The Problem: Too Much Material
   A Systems Approach Using Isolated, Closed, and Open Systems
   Advantages of the Systems Approach

5. The Isolated-System Model

   Creation as an Ongoing Process
   The Robot as Metaphor
   Machine Intelligence as a Tool
   Conclusion

6. The Closed-System Model

   Dystopian Literature
   An Automated Society
   Who Controls a Totalitarian World?
   The Choice: A Natural or an Aritficial World?
   Vision of the End
   Conclusion

7. The Open-System Model

   The Speculative Transforming Imagination
   A Complementary Mode
   Genetic Information Codes
   The Computer and the Community
   Man-Machine Symbiosis
   Transformations and Reversals
   Stanislaw Lem's Robot Fables and Ironic Tales
   Conclusion

8. Into the Electronic Future

   The Transformation of Man and Machine
   Philip K. Dick's Robots

Conclusion

Some Critical Questions and Speculations

Notes
Nonfiction Bibliography
Fiction Bibliography
Index