Extrapolation articles

Recent articles from Extrapolation

Rachel writes back: racialised androids and replicant texts.
December 22, 2008... Larissa Lai uses fantasy, myth, realism, and speculation to highlight the generational divides between first-generation immigrants and their children, and to explore the alienation of living in a society which questions your authenticity and your claim to a cultural heritage. She draws on her...

Humanity's scarred children: the Cylons' oedipal dilemma in Battlestar Galactica.
December 22, 2008... The new Battlestar Galactica series is constantly being praised for what Mary McDonnell likes to call "stones that contain relevance to our own world" (Bassom, Companion Season Two 6). Unlike the political, social, and military allusions, however, the psychological themes in the show have...

The violence of the name: patronymy in Earthsea.
December 22, 2008... The Earthsea novels of Ursula K. Le Guin pit two visions of language and subjectivity against one another. On the one hand, the fantasy cycle is based upon the myth of a magical language, and the texts imitate this myth in the very rhetoric of the novels by way of carefully constructed names....

Just like so but isn't: musical consciousness in Richard Powers's Galatea 2.2.
December 22, 2008... The if-feeling would have to be compared with the special 'feeling' which a musical phrase gives us... But can this feeling be separated from the phrase? And yet it is not the phrase itself, for that can be heard without the feeling. --Wittgenstein, Philosophical...

Asimov's Foundation trilogy: from the fall of Rome to the rise of cowboy heroes.
December 22, 2008... Writing the Foundation trilogy, Asimov based the idea of a declining empire on Edward Gibbon's The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (1776-1789). Because of this the trilogy is often read as re-enacting the fall of the Roman Empire on a galactic scale. In this paper I...