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When HARLIE Was One deals with an artificial intelligence and incorporates many of the key themes that interest cyberpunk authors: the nature of the human; the role of body augmentation (in this case, through drug use) in identity formation; the importance of (post)modern art in interpreting the experience of (late) capitalism; and the importance of corporate personhood. The concept of artificial intelligence almost demands this mind-body split, as the Al's intelligence is clearly defined primarily by patterns of information rather than interactions between the electric signals of the synapses with organic flesh.The desire to project the metaphor of the computer-as-mind onto human beings, to fantasise about an impossible split between the information in the brain and its fleshy substrate, has been seductive and continues to be attractive to transhumanists wishing to leave the body behind and live forever in the Cloud. Culture has become the most dynamic component of our civilisation, outreaching the dynamism of technology itself.There is now in art - as there has increasingly been for the past hundred years - a dominant impulse towards the new and the original, a self-conscious search for future forms and sensations, so that the idea of change and novelty overshadows the dimensions of actual change. [...]Bell points to the changing prerogative of the artist.

This is a slipstream psychological horror novella about maternal love, maternal guilt, and maternal failure, simultaneously exploring the supernatural as a sort of psychosis. Following a tragic accident in which a mother chooses herself over her child, the mother is haunted by an unending guilt embodied by a demonic entity. As the lines between reality, dream, and hallucination blur, her life unravels.

This dissertation was developed in response to a long-standing imperative for teachers and scholars of writing: the need to meet students where they are (technologically) and keep up with emerging writing technologies. Said differently, when an emerging writing technology comes on the scene, teachers of writing tend to develop theoretical and pedagogical approaches for students' use of that technology in the writing classroom. While the imperative to keep up is well-meaning, the attempt can feel futile or, at the very least, pedagogically frustrating. This frustration is often fueled by permanent innovation, or when a culture’s technological innovation outpaces its ability to adapt to and for those technologies. To address the ever-evolving difficulties inherent within the relationship between writing, developing technologies, and teaching writing, this dissertation offers the field of Composition a path through the futility and frustration represented by keeping up. I call this intervention Composition’s “Technological Boneyard,” or more simply, “the boneyard.” The boneyard is first and foremost a metaphor, an imagined dumping ground that contains the obsolete, trashed, and forgotten technologies of writing that Composition has used and discarded in its move toward its raison d'être: the study and teaching of writing. Brimming with obsolete and discarded technologies of writing—like the first personal computers, floppy and hard disks, keyboards, and early mobile devices—the boneyard allows Composition to (re)investigate its technological and techno-pedagogical history, as well as its current relationships with developing technologies and writing. Through two qualitative case studies, this dissertation investigates the technologies in the boneyard and considers how abandoned, obsolete, and forgotten writing tools have shaped (and continue to shape) the teaching of writing in higher education, as well as Composition’s own history.

Since 1995, American newspapers have trimmed 65 percent of their jobs, leaving new media companies with their savvy digital business plans as the last great hope for a stable job market in written journalism. (TV news job numbers have held steadier.) But layoffs rocked the whole journalism world late last month, devastating legacy and new media companies alike. Investors are realizing, Sterling surmised, that even with great effort and years to build audiences, digital profits may always be modest, \"with no clear path to further growth.\" [...]just as I never dreamed in my first newsroom 38 years ago that I'd be writing stories read on mobile phones, today's digital journalists may be shocked by some paradigm-shifting business model or technology just over the horizon.

Steampunk is the subject of increasing scholarly scrutiny. Some scholars argue steampunk provides a progressive analysis of past, present, and future social conditions. But it is also nostalgic for empire, ignores the historic reality of the Victorian era, and fetishizes technology. This article analyzes five short stories by Caitlín R. Kiernan, who creates a steampunk world centered in the fictional city of Cherry Creek (Denver), Colorado, in the 1890s and early 1900s. In these stories Kiernan works against the typical way four signature steampunk themes (status of women, industrialization, technology, and colonization) are portrayed in steampunk, especially American West steampunk.

This project explores the rhetorical and affective power of narratives containing what I term as affective engineering tropes. An offshoot of a god-like, authorial power fantasy common to science fiction narratives, in this narrative model elite characters (engineers, managers, politicians, executives, etc.) feel compelled and authorized to engineer human emotions at the level of the individual, the population, or the species. Coinciding with the rise of mass media and fears regarding technology’s power to manipulate human emotion, the trope grew from nineteenth-century roots and became established in the American pulps, which emerged at a time when the proliferation and power of mass media technologies captured the imaginations of both the science fiction community and the general public. Spurred by a looming sense of disaster coupled with the promise of realizing their own version of utopia, when this fantasy concerns population management, elite characters express a fear that, left to their own emotional devices, humans will face some apocalyptic “end,” whether that end represents species extinction due to mismanagement of the environment or, just as often, a technological and then economic collapse. The solutions offered by elite characters often reinforce both neoliberal and biopolitical rhetoric regarding the purported need for (intellectually, economically) elite “savior” figures to manage the emotional lives and affective energies of the governed without their consent. Given the enduring popularity of such narratives with both genre and mainstream audiences, as well as the rise in the last decade of anti-democratic discourses, growing fears of economic and climate collapse, calls for the intervention of tech-billionaire saviors, and the real-life development of technology that seeks to track and manipulate human emotions, the affective power of such narratives warrants a closer examination.

[...]the compositor's work was complex and not easily replicated by machines. Composing machines have received some attention from feminist, printing, and trade union historians. 8 However, these studies have focused on linear narratives of invention and assimilation rather than on locating the pianotype in its cultural context.\\n Rather, pianotype is interesting in its own right as a tactile invention that relied on human interaction to create readable texts.

Between the late 1980s and early 1990s, interest in the cyberpunk genre peaked in the Western world, perhaps most evidently when Terminator 2: Judgment Day became the highest-grossing film of 1991. It has been argued that the translation of Katsuhiro Ōtomo’s manga Akira into several European languages at just that time (into English beginning in 1988, into French, Italian, and Spanish beginning in 1990, and into German beginning in 1991) was no coincidence. In hindsight, cyberpunk tropes are easily identified in Akira to the extent that it is nowadays widely regarded as a classic cyberpunk comic. But has this always been the case? When Akira was first published in America and Europe, did readers see it as part of a wave of cyberpunk fiction? Did they draw the connections to previous works of the cyberpunk genre across different media that today seem obvious? In this paper, magazine reviews of Akira in English and German from the time when it first came out in these languages will be analysed in order to gauge the past readers’ genre awareness. The attribution of the cyberpunk label to Akira competed with others such as the post-apocalyptic, or science fiction in general. Alternatively, Akira was sometimes regarded as an exceptional, novel work that transcended genre boundaries. In contrast, reviewers of the Akira anime adaptation, which was released at roughly the same time as the manga in the West (1989 in Germany and the United States), more readily drew comparisons to other cyberpunk films such as Blade Runner.

[...]on 31 August 1985, the first cyberpunk panel took place at NASFiC (The North American Science Fiction Convention) in Austin, Texas, featuring writers in Sterling’s circle: [...]Brown’s editorship also opened up a heated discussion among feminist speculative fiction writers and critics such as Connie Willis, Pat Murphy, Karen Joy Fowler, Lucy Sussex, and Mari Kotani. [...]the cyberpunk movement very naturally initiated me into the rise of cyborg feminism, as presaged by the proto-feminist and proto-cyberpunk writer James Tiptree, Jr in the 1970s, and firmly established by distinguished historian of science Donna Haraway of the University of California, Santa Cruz in the 1980s. [...]cyberpunk refreshed not only the science fiction criticism that had been cultivated by Anglo-American academic journals such as Extrapolation, Foundation, and Science Fiction Studies, but also critical theory as such in the wake of Franco-American structuralism, semiotics, and deconstruction, championed by Roland Barthes, Tzvetan Todorov, Michel Foucault, Paul de Man, and others. [...]this collection, which itself transgresses the boundaries between the literary and the visual, will undoubtedly provide you with the most concise introduction to cyberpunk criticism in the 21st century.

This dissertation focuses on the fiction of three women of color – Octavia E. Butler, N.K. Jemisin, and Nnedi Okorafor – who deploy and develop cyberpunk themes related to the body, gender, race, and hybridity in their fiction. Each author radically reconfigures the human and the human condition, creating counter-hegemonic texts that disrupt western theories of personhood which privilege the mind over the body. Butler, Jemisin, and Okorafor anticipate and interrogate current global political and social problems from non-dominant positions, providing a valuable counterpoint to the hegemonic features of cyberpunk itself. Butler’s fiction is biopunk, a subtype of cyberpunk that focuses on biological posthumanism. Octavia Butler’s Xenogenesis trilogy (1987-1989) explores the legacies of western hegemony, exposing the infrastructure of Empire through an alien species. In similar fashion, Jemisin atomizes the mind/body problem by personifying core cyberpunk tropes In the DC comic series Far Sector (2019-), deconstructing both cyberpunk and a mass culture icon—Green Lantern. Nnedi Okorafor synthesizes cyberpunk and space opera to problematize radical individualism and hybridity simultaneously in her Binti (2015-2019) novellas. All three authors and their texts reassemble the mind and body as an inseparable unit, rejecting the disembodied consciousness privileged in Enlightenment thought (and some cyberpunk).