Popular Culture and Science Fiction


In 1984 William Gibson wrote the popular science fiction, Neuromancer. The novel predicted the rise of the Internet and the word “cyberspace” thus entered the modern lexicon. Thus popular culture directly impacted the real world and eventually the Internet became a big part of everyday culture. Today it is one of the necessary fronts of social and political change. Here are some musings on science fiction and popular culture theory.

On a side note, popular culture is almost unexplored by modern political theory. Except for Marxist critical theory that calls it the “culture industry,” there are few words written about its benefits. Adorno and Horkheimer, critical Marxists from the 1940s, theorized that mass culture was a political weapon to ensure the continued obedience of the masses to market interests. They predicted the rise of popular mass media, firmly controlled by large corporations and class interests for monetary purposes. There was no purely “public” sphere where people had freedom of choice and opinion. Except of course, in recent time, cyberspace. This explanation of popular culture itself, seems dystopian. Something science fiction is very comfortable about when describing futures. Almost, art imitating life.

Science fiction its self at the outset seems to be a product of the merging of popular culture and scientific innovation.The Atomic Age starts with the year 1903 when Ernest Rutherford, a British chemist and physicist, born in New Zealand, started discussing the possibility of atomic energy. Following this, the first pop culture reaction was in 1914, with the publishing of H.G. Wells‟ science fiction novel entitled The World Set Free in which he describes the finding of unlimited energy locked inside atoms, and presents a story of how atomic bombs are deployed around the world. Such examples, just relating to the bomb are continually repeated. In 1945 the first atomic bombs were created. In 1986 the graphic novel, Watchmen, reimagined the past from the world war to the Vietnam War to Nixon’s America (with one of the protagonists being in total control of atomic and subatomic particles).

*Fan girl tears* Whattay novel.
*Fan girl tears* Whattay novel.

Then the robot is “that place in science fiction texts where technological and human are most directly blended. The robot is the dramatization of the alterity of the machine, the paranoid sense of the inorganic come to life,” as explained by a theorist*. The confrontation/cooperation between man and machine thus becoming an archetype which has been almost exhaustively explored. This brings me back to the brilliance of Neuromancer, merging so many nodes of technology, before its time, creating fodder for future popular culture. Movies reminiscent of this novel include Elysium… future dystopias with class structure, and small almost mercenary vanguard like resistances. Love.

**Roberts, A. (2000) – “Science Fiction – The New Critical Idiom” Routledge Publishing


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