The Islamic Framing in Donald Moffitt’s Science Fiction Series<i>The Mechanical Sky</i>
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract: American author Donald Moffitt’s science fiction (SF) series The Mechanical Sky, consisting of two books, Crescent in the Sky (1989) and A Gathering of Stars (1990), portrays a universe where various religious denominations exist, and where an Islamic caliphate is established, aiming at universal Islamic dominance. The purpose of this article is to analyze the series pertaining to its representations of Islam and Muslims, and to explain the Islamic framing in contextualizing the series in the historical situation when the series was produced. Moreover, another aim of the article concerns the methodological problems that such an analysis of the Islamic framing may entail. The article calls for the need to reflect seriously on interpretative perspectives when a scholar in the study of religions enters the field of SF, which has its own definitional problems and genre-specific traits that must be taken into consideration.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
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 | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| 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 itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".