The Post-Apocalyptic Imaginary: Science, Fiction, and the Death Drive
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This article considers why the relatively new genre of post-apocalyptic fiction is proliferating in the twenty-first century and argues that its compulsive return to scenes of the destruction of the world is symptomatic of a traumatized culture. The violence of World War I– where the co-option of science by the military and state in the name of civilization made possible industrial-scale killing – persists in haunting the collective psyche even as, on a ‘rational’ level, we continue to invest in the contrary hope that this technology is future-orientated and will solve the problems of the world. The latest concerns around artificial intelligence and autonomous killer robots highlight the ways in which what Freud referred to as ‘the death drive’ and ‘the destructive impulse’ govern the logic of both our anxiety about and celebration of this technology. The second part of the article reviews the complicated relationship between science and fiction, where on the one hand science uses fiction to promote its inventions and on the other warns that the fears fuelled by the ‘hype’ of fiction hinder its progress and thus must be exiled from ‘serious’ discussions of science. I conclude that, on the contrary, science needs fiction to assist in restoring an ethical impulse to this technology.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.004 | 0.012 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it