STYLISTIC MEANS OF EXPRESSING TRANSHUMANISM IN “SPRAWL” TRILOGY BY WILLIAM GIBSON
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The article examines stylistic devices in which American-Canadian writer William Gibson expresses transhumanist ideas. The author is famous for being one of the pioneers and brightest representatives of science fiction subgenre, known as cyberpunk. His debut trilogy “Sprawl”, which touches upon social, moral and ethical issues of using advanced technologies, has been chosen as an object to be studied. It is found out that the message translated by the author is controversial: while having some obvious transhumanist indications, it also has various alarmist traits, which can be observed at stylistic and lexical level. In its simplest form, this is manifested in the special use of epithets, metaphors, similes, hyperbolas and other stylistic means. In some cases the series rather opposes transhumanism than reproduces its techno-optimistic discourse. It follows the warning trends of modern English-language science fiction, relying on such classic dichotomies as “natural / artificial” and “human / non-human”. The tropes and figures of speech used by the author are in most cases emotionally expressive, that is, they contain elements of value (both positive and negative).
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.004 | 0.018 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.004 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 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 source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), 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".