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'Tranter leverages his prior work to produce a masterful examination of what it means to be living in an era that seems infused with sci-fi tropes from the past. This is a valuable contribution to law and technology studies.'
Arthur Cockfield, Queen's University, Ontario
Through detailed readings of popular science fictions, including the novels of Frank Herbert and Octavia E. Butler and television's Battlestar Galactica and Doctor Who, this book presents the first sustained examination of the legality of science fiction.
Successive transformations have resulted in the emergence of a total technological world where old separations about 'nature' and 'culture' have declined. With this, the tendency towards technicity within modern law has flourished. There has often been identified a mechanistic essence to modern law in its domination of human life. Usually this has been considered an 'end' and a loss, the human swallowed by the machine. However, this innovative book sets out to re-address this tendency.
By examining science fiction as the culture of our total technological world, Living in Technical Legality journeys with the partially consumed human into the belly of the machine. What it finds is unexpected: rather than a cold uniformity of exchangeable productive units, there is warmth, diversity and 'life' for the nodes in the networks. Through its science-fiction focus, it argues that this life generates a very different law of responsibility that can guide living well in technical legality.
Kieran Tranter is Associate Professor at Griffith Law School, Griffith University.
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edinburghuniversitypress.com
ISBN 978-1-4744-2089-1
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List of contents
List of Figures
Preface
Introduction: Living in Technical Legality
Science Fiction and Law
The Chapters to Come
Part I: Technical Legality1. From Law and Technology to Law as Technology
Cloning Law
Frankenstein Myth
Law as Technology
2.
Dune, Modern Law and the Alchemy of Death and Time
Sand, Spice and Empire
The Illusion of Control
Sovereignty as the Alchemy of Death and Time
3.
Battlestar Galactica, Technology and Lfe
Battlestar Galactica Redux
Sovereigns and Subjects in Battlestar Galactica
The Metaphysics of Technology
Part II: Living in Technical Legality4. Xenogenesis and the Technical Legal Subject
Biopower and Natureculture on an Alien Rehabilitated Earth
The Technical Legal Subject of Xenogenesis
Living Well as a Technical Legal Subject
5. The Doctor and Technical Lawyering
Time and a Blue Box
Death and the Doctor
The Doctor as the Paradigm Technical Lawyer
6.
Mad Max and Mapping the Monsters in the Networks
Identity, Myth and Biopower in Mad Max 2
The Australian Human-automobile
Cartographies of Technical Legality
7. Deserts and Technical Legality
Bibliography
Notes
Index
About the author
Kieran Tranter is Associate Professor at Griffith Law School, Griffith University. He has a background in science, law and the humanities. He is fascinated by the ways that culture imagines, mediates and disrupts legal and technological change. He has written widely on law and technology and law and popular culture.
Summary
Through detailed readings of popular science fiction, including the novels of Frank Herbert and Octavia E. Butler and television's Battlestar Galactica and Doctor Who, this is the first sustained examination of legality in science fiction.
