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"Moralities Fiction."
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Virtual killing
Debates that revolve around the topic of morality and fiction rarely explicitly treat virtual worlds like, for example, Second Life. The reason for this disregard cannot be that all users of virtual worlds only do the right thing while online—for they sometimes even virtually kill each other. Is it wrong to kill other people in a virtual world? It depends. This essay analyzes on what it depends, why it is that killing people in a virtual world sometimes is wrong, and how different virtual killings are wrong in different ways. I argue that killing people online is wrong if it is an instance of deliberately and non-consensually evoking disagreeable emotions in others. Establishing this conclusion requires substantial conceptual work, as virtual worlds feature new kinds of fictional agency, particular emotional responses to fiction, and unique ways in which the fiction of the virtual world relates to the wrongness of the killing.
Journal Article
Bitter orange
\"From the attic of Lyntons, a dilapidated English country mansion, Frances Jellico sees them--Cara first: dark and beautiful, then Peter: striking and serious. The couple is spending the summer of 1969 in the rooms below hers while Frances is researching the architecture in the surrounding gardens. But she's distracted. Beneath a floorboard in her bathroom, she finds a peephole that gives her access to her neighbors' private lives\"--Dust jacket flap.
BOOK
The Morality of Fiction-Making in Our Mutual Friend
\"The Spirit of Fiction,\" an anonymous article published in All the Year Round on 27 July 1867, focuses on the natural propensity of human beings to attach a certain moral value to everything one experiences, hears or reads. According to the article, this disposition significantly affects the way we perceive reality, making the line between \"fact\" and \"fiction\" indistinct. Taking this argument into account, the present paper aims to elucidate the intricate relationship between these two concepts in Our Mutual Friend. In the novel, Dickens also foregrounds their ambiguous borderline, emphasizing that a blind adherence to an individual interpretation of reality can result in moral paralysis. Through the course of Boffin's pious fraud, Bella Wilfer's flexible perception of the world proves to be an essential virtue, which ultimately overcomes the self-destructive egoism represented by Podsnap.
Journal Article
Understanding the Social and Cultural Significance of Science-Fiction and Fantasy Posters
This research was designed to explore science-fiction and fantasy (SFF) posters, specifically those related to films and television shows, from the perspective of their owners, examining their potential as sources of social and cultural significance and meaning. The research explored these in terms of the content of the poster, placement, media texts they reference, morals, behavior, identity, sense of self, well-being and self-expression. Data collection took place between 2020 and 2022 via an online survey (N = 273) and follow-up semi-structured interviews (N = 28) with adult science-fiction and fantasy film and television show poster owners. The significance and meaning of SFF posters were framed by two conceptual models: ‘The Three Significances’—esthetics, functionality, and significance (both spatial and personal)—and ‘The Big Three’—content, design, and color. Among these, content held the greatest significance for owners. Posters served as tools for self-expression, reflecting their owners’ identities, affinities, and convictions, while also reinforcing their connection to the media they reference. Posters helped to reinforce a sense of self and fan identity and evoke emotional responses, and the space in which they were displayed helped shape their meaning and significance. The paper sets out some suggestions for future research in this important topic.
Journal Article
Resonance From the Past to the Future: Mythological Metaphors in Chinese Science Fiction Films
This paper is centered on the extent to which contemporary Chinese science fiction is related to ancient Chinese mythologies according to the previous scholarly discussion and how these ancient mythologies are utilized specifically in the futuristic narratives of modern Chinese science fiction.By referring to academic dialogues, this paper argues that ancient mythologies can be recreated in modern science fiction and create modern mythologies in futuristic narratives to present or deal with modern human fears.Based on this argument, this paper then continues to explore what kinds of modern mythologies science fiction might deliver.The Chinese film The Wandering Earth (2019) will be discussed in terms of its mythological symbols and metaphors.This paper proposes a new approach through which to reconnect past stories with futuristic narratives and builds a frame in which to contextualize ancient mythologies in contemporary Chinese culture.
Journal Article
Unreliable Truths and Buried Traumas: The Craft of Suspense in Dennis Lehane’s Shutter Island and Mystic River
This paper examines the role of suspense in Dennis Lehane’s Shutter Island and Mystic River, focusing on the themes of unreliable truths and buried traumas. Both novels create a sense of uncertainty by employing unreliable narration and fragmented memories, which keep readers questioning the nature of reality. In Shutter Island, the blurring of madness and reality challenges the reader’s perception of truth. In Mystic River, hidden traumas from the past continuously shape the present, creating an underlying tension that unfolds gradually. The construction of suspense is achieved not just through plot developments, but by exploring the emotional and psychological complexities that arise from unresolved past experiences. The paper argues that Lehane’s use of suspense goes beyond traditional thriller tropes, serving as a tool to delve into deeper themes of trauma, identity, and moral ambiguity. The study demonstrates that suspense in Lehane’s work is a means to explore the instability of truth and the long-lasting impact of the past, creating a more profound narrative experience that challenges the boundaries of reality and perception.
Journal Article
Fiction As a Vehicle for Truth
Despite widespread evidence that fictional models play an explanatory role in science, resistance remains to the idea that fictions can explain. A central source of this resistance is a particular view about what explanations are, namely, the ontic conception of explanation. According to the ontic conception, explanations just are the concrete entities in the world. I argue this conception is ultimately incoherent and that even a weaker version of the ontic conception fails. Fictional models can succeed in offering genuine explanations by correctly capturing relevant patterns of counterfactual dependence and licensing correct inferences. Using the example of Newtonian force explanations of the tides, I show how, even in science, fiction can be a vehicle for truth.
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La muerte más perfecta: Días de ocio en la Patagonia de William Henry Hudson
In Idle Days in Patagonia (1893) Hudson offers an alternative to the previous traditions of the trip to Patagonia, and although he collaborates in the temporal investigation of the desert already configured by Darwin and Moreno, his writing explores the tensions between Nature, death and primitive regression as experiences of intensity. To do this, he reconfigures the notion of ancestors, elaborates other appropriations of indigenous remains and, in later texts, reads the modern desecration of death in the typographic differences of the burial mounds, rewriting his own death. Thus, it inscribes in the fiction of the primitive a powerful, intimate and refractory deviation from national and imperial morals, which could produce new rewrites of the subject in contemporary Argentine literature.
Journal Article
(Im)personation and (Im)morality: Investigating the Pramāṇa of Artificial Integrity in Naomi Kritzer's \Cat Pictures Please\
The abiding discussions around the ever-strengthening capabilities of artificial intelligence have reinforced speculations about their general nature and outlook towards human beings in the event of their total domination: a common theme in science-fiction literature. \"Cat Pictures Please,\" a 2015 short format science fiction, has received multiple awards in its category for its audacious and imaginative attempt at the mapping of the mental and moral topographies of artificial intelligence, and AI models' active and incessant engagement with human beings in their daily lives. According to the bio note on Kritzer's blog, she is a science fiction and fantasy writer living in St. Paul, Minnesota who has been writing for twenty years. Working on the preservation of human rights and its future in the hands of AI with a special focus on the utilization of such emerging technologies in social governance, Edward Santow observes that \"(AI's) taking on the labeller's (\"creators\" for our purpose) subjectivity means taking on their personal tastes, culturally-informed preferences, conscious and unconscious biases, and any number of other non-rational factors.
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