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"Bioengineering Fiction."
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Embodied Intelligence at the Intersection of Science Fiction and Reality
Science fiction has long functioned as a conceptual laboratory for testing the limits of emerging technologies. From Jules Verne to Philip K. Dick, speculative narratives have anticipated developments in robotics, neural interfaces and synthetic biology while unsettling the assumptions that organise them. This study examines predictive motifs in novels and films, including The Matrix , and sets them alongside current work in embodied artificial intelligence. The analysis shows that fictional depictions of human–machine integration track technological trajectories yet expose tensions in physical–cognitive systems. Embodied intelligence frameworks hold that effective artificial cognition depends not solely on computation but on dynamic coupling with material and social environments, a principle that speculative fiction renders concrete by following hybrid agents as they adapt or fail. Beyond offering local predictions, science fiction advances cross-disciplinary reflection by treating questions of moral agency and mind–body relation as problems of design as much as of metaphysics. These narratives create a shared imaginative space in which engineering and neuroscientific perspectives come under ethical and political scrutiny, allowing the consequences of embodied AI to be tested at the level of imagined worlds. This indicates that science fiction shapes debates about technological convergence and offers a disciplined resource for conceptualising future directions in robotics and bioengineering.
Journal Article
The Monster as the Precarious Other: Positioning the Posthuman in the Malayalam Film Athisayan
The concept of the posthuman, or rather the superhuman entity, is a fascinating element that several film industries have dabbled in over the years. The Malayalam film industry, too, has tried its hand in depicting posthumanism through science fiction genre films. The 2007 Malayalam film Athisayan is one such successful attempt at bringing to the Malayalee audience the idea of a superhuman entity capable of destruction. However, Athisayan portrays a superhuman, or rather a monster, with whom the audience empathises. Moreover, the film opens up the idea that the monster, despite its enhanced capabilities, will always be othered by the anthropocentric society. To put this argument into perspective, this paper will analyse the monster in Athisayan as the \"other\" -by looking into the dynamics of the monster's positionality within the film. Borrowing from Pramod K Nayar's book Posthumanism and Judith Butler's definition of the state of precarity, this paper establishes the monster, or rather the superhuman entity, as the precarious other despite its physical strength and advantage. The paper also looks into bioethics, as portrayed in the film, to analyse ethical practices involved in human experimentation.
Journal Article
Playing God in the Anthropocene: Bioengineering and the Ethics of Creation in the Jurassic World Franchise
The Jurassic World (2015-2025) franchise offers a critical reflection on the entanglement of bioengineering, capitalism, and the ethics of creation in the Anthropocene. By situating the series within the intersecting discourses of ecocriticism, bioethics, and the Anthropocene, this paper argues that more than being just a spectacle-driven science fiction, Jurassic World is a cautionary tale about the commodification of life, and the moral costs of exploiting nature for capitalist ends, metaphorised by the various genetically mutated dinosaurs created by the company InGen. This paper examines how the franchise dramatizes the ethical dilemmas of playing God in an era where technological innovation is inseparable from corporate greed. In depicting the collapse of ecosystems engineered for corporate short-term profit, the franchise raises pertinent questions about humanity's role in the current Anthropocene and in shaping futures that may prove to be too unlivable and collapsible to be sustained. Every act of artificial creation is entangled in social, political, and ecological complexities while simultaneously leaving undesired consequences. By employing Donna Haraway's concept of the cyborg the fascinating and terrifying acts of creation in the films can be seen not just as Frankensteinesque endeavours but also as products of an ineludible future. The franchise additionally appears to engage with Rob Nixon's notion of slow violence, illustrating how the biocapitalistic quest for profit slowly disrupts ecosystems and threatens collective existence. Ultimately, the Jurassic World films compel their spectators to confront the ethical limitations of bioengineering practices and to reconsider the responsibilities we must hold toward nonhuman life in an age wrought with severe planetary crisis.
Journal Article
Creative Anticipatory Ethical Reasoning with Scenario Analysis and Design Fiction
This paper presents an experimental approach for engaging undergraduate STEM students in anticipatory ethical reasoning, or ethical reasoning applied to the analysis of potential mid- to long-term implications and outcomes of technological innovation. The authors implemented two variations of an approach that integrates three key components—scenario analysis, design fiction, and ethical frameworks—into five sections of an introductory course on the social contexts of science and technology that is required of STEM majors. The authors dub this approach
Creative Anticipatory Ethical Reasoning,
or CAER. Scenario analysis is a strategy emerging from business consulting for grounded analysis of plausible future trajectories to inform planning. Design fiction is a creative hands-on activity that blends science fiction and design prototyping to facilitate critical thinking with respect to the societal dimensions of a plausible future technology. The authors present the following findings: in each of the variations, students demonstrated significant engagement with CAER and a substantive shift in their conception of what constitutes responsible innovation and ethical conduct in science and technology. Specifically, their integration of ethical reasoning with stakeholder perspectives and scenario analysis reframed technologies, from unproblematic solutions for societal problems to socially-embedded forms of life that might diverge from designers’ intentions. This suggests that CAER could be a useful pedagogical intervention for expanding students’ ethical engagement to consider the potential unintended consequences of technological innovation.
Journal Article
An Anticipatory Approach to Ethico-Legal Implications of Future Neurotechnology
This paper provides a justificatory rationale for recommending the inclusion of imagined future use cases in neurotechnology development processes, specifically for legal and policy ends. Including detailed imaginative engagement with future applications of neurotechnology can serve to connect ethical, legal, and policy issues potentially arising from the translation of brain stimulation research to the public consumer domain. Futurist scholars have for some time recommended approaches that merge creative arts with scientific development in order to theorise possible futures toward which current trends in technology development might be steered. Taking a creative, imaginative approach like this in the neurotechnology context can help move development processes beyond considerations of device functioning, safety, and compliance with existing regulation, and into an active engagement with potential future dynamics brought about by the emergence of the neurotechnology itself. Imagined scenarios can engage with potential consumer uses of devices that might come to challenge legal or policy contexts. An anticipatory, creative approach can imagine what such uses might consist in, and what they might imply. Justifying this approach also prompts a co-responsibility perspective for policymaking in technology contexts. Overall, this furnishes a mode of neurotechnology’s emergence that can avoid crises of confidence in terms of ethico-legal issues, and promote policy responses balanced between knowledge, values, protected innovation potential, and regulatory safeguards.
Journal Article
Editing the Soul
Personal genome testing, gene editing for life-threatening
diseases, synthetic life: once the stuff of science fiction,
twentieth- and twenty-first-century advancements blur the lines
between scientific narrative and scientific fact. This examination
of bioengineering in popular and literary culture shows that the
influence of science on science fiction is more reciprocal than we
might expect.
Looking closely at the work of Margaret Atwood, Richard Powers,
and other authors, as well as at film, comics, and serial
television such as Orphan Black , Everett Hamner shows how
the genome age is transforming both the most commercial and the
most sophisticated stories we tell about the core of human
personhood. As sublime technologies garner public awareness beyond
the genre fiction shelves, they inspire new literary categories
like \"slipstream\" and shape new definitions of the human, the
animal, the natural, and the artificial. In turn, what we learn of
bioengineering via popular and literary culture prepares the way
for its official adoption or restriction-and for additional
representations. By imagining the connections between emergent gene
testing and editing capacities and long-standing conversations
about freedom and determinism, these stories help build a cultural
zeitgeist with a sharper, more balanced vision of predisposed
agency.
A compelling exploration of the interrelationships among
science, popular culture, and self, Editing the Soul sheds
vital light on what the genome age means to us, and what's to
come.
eBook
H. P. Lovecraft, Photography, and the Transhumanist Imagination
This essay explores photography’s relationship to the transhumanist imaginary of American weird fiction writer H. P. Lovecraft; transhumanism refers to the belief that humans can evolve through technological advancements. I argue that Lovecraft’s seemingly naïve conception of photography as unerringly “objective” actually reflects his understanding of photography as a transhuman technology that can transform human consciousness. However, Lovecraft’s transhumanist vision is plagued by the recognition that the endpoint of transhumanist evolution is the annihilation of the individual body and the specific desires on which one’s sense of self is grounded—a vision Lovecraft is attracted to but finally cannot embrace.
Journal Article
Why Frankenstein is a Stigma Among Scientists
As one of the best known science narratives about the consequences of creating life, Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus (1818) is an enduring tale that people know and understand with an almost instinctive familiarity. It has become a myth reflecting people’s ambivalent feelings about emerging science: they are curious about science, but they are also afraid of what science can do to them. In this essay, we argue that the Frankenstein myth has evolved into a stigma attached to scientists that focalizes the public’s as well as the scientific community’s negative reactions towards certain sciences and scientific practices. This stigma produces ambivalent reactions towards scientific artifacts and it leads to negative connotations because it implies that some sciences are dangerous and harmful. We argue that understanding the Frankenstein stigma can empower scientists by helping them revisit their own biases as well as responding effectively to people’s expectations for, and attitudes towards, scientists and scientific artifacts. Debunking the Frankenstein stigma could also allow scientists to reshape their professional identities so they can better show the public what ethical and moral values guide their research enterprises.
Journal Article