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. Kieran Tranter includes substantive worked examples of the law and legal concepts projected by these science fiction texts, such as Australian car culture, legal responses to cloning and the relationship between legal theory and science fiction. By examining science fiction as the culture of our total technological world, it 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. 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.
List of FiguresPrefaceIntroduction: Living in Technical LegalityScience Fiction and LawThe Chapters to ComePart I: Technical Legality1. From Law and Technology to Law as TechnologyCloning LawFrankenstein MythLaw as Technology2. Dune, Modern Law and the Alchemy of Death and TimeSand, Spice and EmpireThe Illusion of ControlSovereignty as the Alchemy of Death and Time3. Battlestar Galactica, Technology and LfeBattlestar Galactica ReduxSovereigns and Subjects in Battlestar GalacticaThe Metaphysics of TechnologyPart II: Living in Technical Legality4. Xenogenesis and the Technical Legal SubjectBiopower and Natureculture on an Alien Rehabilitated EarthThe Technical Legal Subject of XenogenesisLiving Well as a Technical Legal Subject5. The Doctor and Technical LawyeringTime and a Blue BoxDeath and the DoctorThe Doctor as the Paradigm Technical Lawyer6. Mad Max and Mapping the Monsters in the NetworksIdentity, Myth and Biopower in Mad Max 2The Australian Human-automobileCartographies of Technical Legality7. Deserts and Technical LegalityBibliographyNotesIndex
I most love the way Tranter constantly looks beyond the obvious appearances of lawyers and courtrooms to unearth the idea of law and its technical function in society.
Ashley Pearson, Thomas Giddens, Kieran Tranter, UK) Giddens, Thomas (St Mary's University College, Twickenham, Australia) Tranter, Kieran (Griffith University
Cristy Clark, John Page, University of Canberra Law School) Clark, Cristy (Associate Professor of Law, Australia) Page, John ('Professor of Law, University of New South Wales
Cathrine O. Frank, USA) Frank, Cathrine O. (Professor of English and Director of Interdisciplinary Studies in the Humanities major, University of New England, Maine, Cathrine O Frank