LEAVING GAIA BEHIND: THE ETHICS OF SPACE MIGRATION IN CIXIN LIU’S AND NEAL STEPHENSON’S SCIENCE FICTION

• Authors: Kaminski Johannes D.
• Languages of publication: EN

Abstracts

EN

In Cixin Liu’s trilogy Remembrance of Earth’s Past (2008–2010) and Neal Stephenson’s Seveneves (2015), the surface of planet Earth becomes uninhabitable amid global states of emergency, and central governments devise radical plans to ensure the survival of the human species. In contrast to the Old Testament, where human emancipation from nature is punished, Chinese antiquity’s narratives of large-scale engineering projects are surprisingly compatible with the modern mindset which regards nature in utilitarian terms. Contemporary science fiction does not simply inherit this techno-optimistic stance, but fleshes out possible futures that are shaped by bio-political decisions. In Stephenson’s and Liu’s prose, the proposed escape plans only benefit small segments of the population. While such procedure is incompatible with human rights, which emphasize the value of the individual over the collective, contemporary pragmatic ethics interprets such behaviour as rational. Applied to more tangible scenarios, such as our increasingly depleted livelihoods on Earth, both texts document our somewhat diminished expectations regarding the future. In a world where eating human protein is “reasonable” and its rejection merely “respectable”, the preservation of humankind in space sets in motion a return to Hobbes’s “natural state of man”.

Keywords

EN

SCIENCE FICTION; ETHICS; CIXIN LIU; NEAL STEPHENSON; SPACE EMIGRATION

• Publisher: Institute of World Literature, Slovak Academy of Sciences
• Journal: World Literature Studies
• Year: 2021
• Volume: 13
• Issue: 2
• Pages: 3 - 18

Contributors

author

Kaminski Johannes D.

• Institute of World Literature, Slovak Academy of Sciences, Dúbravská cesta 9, 841 04 Bratislava, Slovak Republic

• https://orcid.org/0000-0002-9357-1149

Identifiers

DOI

https://doi.org/10.31577/WLS.2021.13.2.1