Living in Technical Legality: Science Fiction and Law as Technology

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.

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, 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.

Key Features

• Moves law and technology beyond law needing to catch-up with technology to a more embedded account of technical legality
• Provides a framework for thinking law and technology as similar, not opposites
• Connects legal theory to recent theorising about life and living in technological culture by showing the intersections between recent legal theory and wider social theory
• Demonstrates the strength of law and the humanities for thinking about law and the world