LSE Festival
I was invited to participate in a panel discussion as part of the LSE Literary Festival 2015, titled "Visions of Future Humans: Science Fiction and Human Enhancement." The panel consisted of Professor Adam Roberts (Royal Holloway), Dr Andres Sandberg (Future of Humanity Institute, Oxford) and Imre Bard who chaired the session. My short talk considered the human-robot boundary, outlining the early 20th century historical context for influential science fictions such as H. G. Wells' The War of the Worlds (1898), Karel Čapek's play Rossum's Universal Robots (1921) and Fritz Lang's Expressionist film Metropolis (1927). It then considers more contemporary cyborgs including recent films and TV shows such as Limitless, Her, Lucy, Fringe, and Continuum.
Click here to view the slideshow that accompanied my talk.
See below for a podcast of the panel:
Dr Caroline Edwards is Senior Lecturer in Modern & Contemporary Literature at Birkbeck, University of London. Her research and teaching specialisms are in 21st century literature and critical theory, science fiction and post-apocalyptic narratives, Marxist aesthetics, and utopianism.
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