Dystopic urbanites: civilian cyborgs in transcanadian speculative fictions
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This chapter considers two remarkable Canadian examples of dystopic speculative fiction that imaginatively 'foresee' such cataclysmic effects in the neoliberal globalized transnational hubs of Toronto and Vancouver, respectively: Nalo Hopkinson's Brown Girl in the Ring and Larissa Lai's Salt Fish Girl. It examines how both novels imaginatively depict the conflation of time and space characteristic of postmodern globalization and the new forms of community they envision in response to late capitalism. It is the main thesis of the chapter that the grim futures that they project in their dystopic novels constitute powerful destabilizing ideological tools that may be instrumental in the construction of alternative social spaces and practices in global cities. Ingrid Thaler has pointed out that 'writers identified as and identifying themselves as speculative fiction authors tend to be more interested in philosophies of time and communal organization rather than the effects of science and technology in future worlds'.
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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 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.013 | 0.034 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.009 | 0.004 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.005 | 0.001 |
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".