Cyborg e dintorni. Le formule della fantascienza

Like all genres in popular culture, science fiction is defined and built around its formulas. Science fiction stereotypes, endlessly moulded and reshaped by the dynamics of culture, harbour potential contradictions which can be solved by specific training of our critical eye. Attending to the formulaic as a mode of thematic and linguistic articulation means therefore highlighting the ties and the constraints a given culture imposes on its own representations and on the margins of freedom that these representations entail. Science fiction may thus be studied not merely as a fixed and stereotypical consumer good, but also as an ever-changing cluster of conflicting discourses that existed beforehand: a sort of microcosm partaking of the same dynamics and the same fluidity to be found among literary forms, series and diverse systems.
This book examines works which rework the motifs of the robot or cyborg at different historical junctures and in different epistemic contexts, tracing a course of transformation which reveals both the firmness and yet the malleability of genre formulas. The book traces the various phases of a gradual process of metamorphosis, going from the archetypal matrix of the science fiction genre (monsters, hybrids, automatons) to the extension of its formulas well beyond its literary boundaries, into the current cultural context (Haraway). The book may therefore be said to proceed along two paths: on the one hand, the path that goes from machine to organism by way of the robot and the android (Čapek, Binder, Asimov, Del Rey, Dickson, Budrys, Williamson, Sheckley, Padgett, Sladek, Anderson, Silverberg); and conversely the path that leads from organisms to machines by way of the cyborg (Wells, Odle, Hamilton, Jones, Siodmack, Smith, Knight, Tiptree, Compton, Ballard, Gibson, Sterling, Dick). The latter ultimately culminates in Philip Dick's notion of the simulacrum from which Baudrillard derives his own theory of hyper-reality. Since stereotypes are pragmatic features quite inseparable from their communicative setting, the book puts together a historical-cultural overview with an analysis of the linguistic strategies at work in the texts and of the margins for negotiation set up in the narrative pact with the reader.