Science Fiction Images: Media and Technologies

While some scholars trace the origins of science fiction (SF) back to antiquity, April 1926 is generally regarded as its symbolic genesis, marking the publication of the first issue of Amazing Stories, edited by Hugo Gernsback. The genre’s burgeoning popularity in the first half of the 20th century was intrinsically linked to the profound shifts of the “long 19th century” (1789–1914), characterized by rapid civilizational progress, scientific development, and, above all, technological advancement. These processes were inextricably bound to economic transformations – specifically the Industrial Revolution – and the emergence of new discourses such as capitalism, Marxism, and empiricism. Consequently, the status of the “second culture” (science) rose relative to the historically privileged “first culture” (the humanities).

During the 19th century, Western societies experienced rapid civilizational acceleration; perhaps for the first time in history, the world was transforming before the observer’s very eyes. The subsequent century – the “short 20th century” (1914–1989) and the dawn of the 21st – ushered in even more dynamic changes. The post-Industrial Revolution, strongly associated with postmodernity, commenced as early as the 1960s, eliciting individual and collective reactions best described by American futurologist Alvin Toffler as “future shock.” This phenomenon profoundly influenced science fiction (indeed, the first cyberpunk authors drew inspiration from Toffler), driving its evolution from pulp narratives aimed at popularizing science among young men into a sophisticated mode of thought closely linked to visuality in its broadest sense.

Reflecting on the pulp and engineering-educational magazines crucial to SF’s development, one might ask whether these publications influenced the integration of scientific and futuristic narratives into serious discourse on the human condition, as well as the incorporation of anticipatory scientific futures within Charles Taylor’s “modern social imaginaries.”¹ It is within these imaginaries that scientific theories and methods “leak” into conceptions of the ordinary and how the world ought to function. Thus, it has become commonplace to envisage the future as a scientific-technological transformation characterized by the tremendous development of transport and communication. As John Rieder would likely argue, these means are derived from the imperial and colonial ambitions of Western culture: to encompass overseas territories within sight and sound, synchronizing them with metropolitan rhythm through the establishment of time zones. It is, therefore, unsurprising that the cover of this issue depicts flying cars racing into the future – alongside robots and spaceships, these remain iconic images of the technological horizon.

Reflection on science fiction, although increasingly present in academic discourse, is essential today for at least two reasons. SF is currently experiencing a renaissance, likely because we inhabit a period of unprecedented civilizational acceleration. In a sense, our chronotope is precisely “science fictional” – so “scientific” that it appears “fantastic” – making a comprehensive understanding of current changes nearly impossible, as trends influence one another in ambiguous ways, requiring both specialized and general knowledge. Since the COVID-19 pandemic, we have navigated a tangle of crises and progress, an atmosphere of secular apocalypse (driven by the creeping effects of the Anthropocene) and intensified technological acceleration, evidenced by the emergence of AI agents and the algorithmization of reality. Scenarios familiar for decades are beginning to materialize, though rarely in the manner we imagined. Predicting the future is not the primary goal of science fiction; rather, critical and academic discourse must comment on this phenomenon. Secondly, in an emerging post-literate order, where reading literature is becoming an elitist practice or a niche pastime, science fiction is predominantly realized through images. Whereas a century ago images illustrated literature, today literature complements figurative art; indeed, video games, films, TV series, and nascent VR technologies may soon dispense with literature in the traditional sense entirely.

From this perspective, SF constitutes a practice wherein media play a distinct role, both in the broad McLuhanesque sense (as extensions of humanity) and, more narrowly, as communication technologies. SF as a practice and aesthetic eludes confinement to a single medium, constantly addressing communication technologies and the human presence at their center. Even speculation regarding contact with alien civilizations is fundamentally an issue of communication. The development of these technologies and the fantasies surrounding them is concurrent and cybernetic, based on a feedback loop. The media and technologies depicted in SF are simultaneously the result of the current, transient media landscape and a prefiguration of the next. Consequently, the boundaries between fiction and science are frequently blurred.

Certain cultural productions transform SF visual codes, disrupting established aesthetic and ideological patterns, thereby activating new critical apparatuses. A prime example is the TV series Mr. Robot (2015–2019), which – assuming William Gibson was correct that “the future is already here – it’s just not very evenly distributed” – employs an SF mode of thinking to map significant contemporary trends. Literary and non-literary speculation is increasingly utilized to prototype social solutions or human-friendly technology. Aligned with the “speculative turn,” there are calls for “fictionalizing facts” and “factualizing fiction.” Such practices are instrumental in formulating new ways of thinking in the Anthropocene, serving to develop necessary solutions.

The articles published in this issue of Widok largely illustrate this proliferation of science fiction thinking. However, the phenomena observed today are not entirely novel. On the contrary, they possess a cultural (and perhaps civilizational) longue durée, which nevertheless does not diminish the groundbreaking nature of specific intensifications. This suggests an archaeology of concepts or even the history of ideas, because, as Weronika Nawrocka demonstrates in her analysis of Jacek Dukaj’s thinking about art, contemporary transmedia and post-media practices in virtual reality are rooted in the Romantic synthesis of the arts, and arguably even earlier in ut pictura poesis (section: Panorama, “Correspondence of the Arts in the Post-Literate Era: Jacek Dukaj’s Thinking About Art”). This connects to the phenomenon of immersion – submersion in a story and its world – whether an oral narrative or a video game. As Piotr Gorliński-Kucik argues in his essay “The Possibility of Community: Stories in the World of The Invincible” (section: Close-Up), immersion must be balanced by “emersion” – a surfacing that allows for critical distance from the aesthetics and ideologies that new media, through powerful polysensory instruments and interactivity, more or less consciously proliferate.

Computer games, viewed here as metonymies of contemporary SF, may criticize contemporary capitalism while inadvertently reinforcing its mechanisms. In his essay “Virtual Investigations, or Visions of Future Detective Work in the Polish Video Games Observer, Cyberpunk 2077, and Nobody Wants to Die” (Panorama), Marcin Chojnacki examines the figure of the future detective in Polish games, inquiring about how investigative technology alters player perception. In turn, Kacper Lipski’s “Cruelty Squad: Masochistic Gaming as a Subversive Practice” (Close-Up) offers a critical reading, positioning video games as tools of technocapitalism that imperceptibly shape our imagination, actions, and mentality.

Another example of technology exerting power over human bodies, this time ultimately determining the life or death of an individual, are drones. In her text “The Visual Economy of Reaper Drones from a Critical Perspective” (Panorama), Paulina Dudzińska describes how they transform battlefield visibility, resulting in the extreme dehumanization of the body and its reduction to an object of necropolitical power. Military technology remains at the forefront of innovation, confirming the thesis that “the future is already here.”

While referring to both computer games and examples of military technology, we should not forget other forms of science fiction media often marginalized in academic discourse, such as theater, playwriting, comics, and fashion. It is comics – today, and in Poland perhaps always, marginalized by SF scholars – that have shaped the science fiction perspective, usually very masculine and colonial, as in Alex Raymond’s Flash Gordon, which is almost forgotten in Poland (in inter-war Poland, the character appeared under Polonized names such as Jacek Żegota). It was in comics that visual imagination could be given free rein, while cinematic technology did not yet allow for much. In the Viewpoint section, artist Krzysztof Nowak reinterprets the tradition of SF comics in Poland in an original way – with his Futuro Darko, he dusts off the futuristic potential of the Polish People’s Republic, and at the same time shows how independent SF comics in the age of the Internet can develop into a transmedia project.

On the opposite side of comics stands theater, which for years has been marginalized due to visual deficiencies (according to historians of classic science fiction such as Smuszkiewicz and Niewiadomski) and a lack of visual documentation. In Perspectives, we publish a conversation between Jerzy Stachowicz and Michał Kmiecik, where they try to reverse this trend, at least a little, by showing how deeply contemporary Polish theater is immersed in science fiction practices.

The workings of science fiction, or the use of speculative thinking, are demonstrated in the article in the Close-Up section by Alicja Raciniewska and Piotr Szaradowski (“Fashion as Science Fiction?”), who analyze the designs of Rick Owens, Marine Serre, and Yuima Nakazato as creative laboratories and forms of social critique. These dystopian fashion projects employ utopian logic to propose new solutions, utilizing the strategy of “worlding” – building alternative worlds that enter into dialogue with our own. Worlding, as a description of building relationships between people and the culture that surrounds them, is one of the most important strategies today.

Speculative thinking also guides the Eclipse 2.0 project by Magda Szpecht and Dominicka Janicka, presented in the Viewpoint section. By visually seizing Roman Abramovich’s superyacht – interweaving its opulent interior with vibrant pop-culture collages and meme aesthetics – they create a “Dadaist photomontage” that mocks rigid convention and demonstrates how political fiction can function within restorative justice, as Tytus Szabelski-Różniak argues.

In the Snapshots section, we publish two reviews. The first, by Jerzy Stachowicz, refers to dystopian visions of the future in architecture, using the example of an exhibition of works by Dutch artist Rob Voerman. Tomasz Rawski, on the other hand, discusses Yanis Varoufakis’s controversial book Technofeudalism: What Killed Capitalism?, which heralds the end of capitalism and the emergence of a new economic and social formation based on feudal relations in a new, digital guise.

Science fiction is a bundle of entangled discourses, much like the issues raised in this volume. It encompasses the longue durée of cultural concepts, transmediality, world-building, and the construction of alternative worlds for constructive criticism and action. While this understanding blurs the genre’s boundaries, we believe that SF – equipped with mechanisms developed over a century to tame the unknown – has become a necessary and pragmatic discourse for diagnosing and critiquing the contemporary world.