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"Design Fiction is making things that tell stories. It's like science-fiction in that the stories bring into focus certain matters-of-concern, such as how life is lived, questioning how technology is used and its implications, speculating bout the course of events; all of the unique abilities of science-fiction to incite imagination-filling conversations about alternative futures. It's about reading P.K. Dick as a systems administrator, or Bruce Sterling as a software design manual. It's meant to encourage truly undisciplined approaches to making and circulating culture by ignoring disciplines that have invested so much in erecting boundaries between pragmatics and imagination."

"What has become of this politicized science-fictional trope over twenty years after Haraway's manifesto? Does it still hold any radical potential for redefinition of identity, feminist or not? How do cyborgs now compare to cyborgs as they were first envisioned? In order to examine these questions, we will first take a look at the origin of the cyborg in science fiction. "

"the inevitable result of art responding to the technological milieu that is producing postmodern culture at large"

In the early 1980's SF author Bruce Sterling, under the pseudonym "Vincent Omniaveritas", edited a series of one-page newsletters titled Cheap Truth. (It's usually referred to as a samizdat, after the mimeographed newsletters dissidents circulated among themselves in Communist Eastern Europe.) In them, Bruce Sterling, Lewis Shiner, Rudy Rucker, and other members of a loose-knit group of SF writers (called by themselves "the Movement") attacked what they considered the stagnant state of the time's popular science fiction and hyped their own works. As such, they document the development of the literary consciousness of many of the writers of works later dubbed "cyberpunk".

1. SCREAMS_ SCREENS_ FLATLINES: CYBERNETICS, POSTMODERNISM AND THE GOTHIC 2. BODY IMAGE FADING DOWN CORRIDORS OF TELEVISION SKY: THE MEDIA LANDSCAPE AND THE SCHIZOPHRENIC IMPLOSION OF SUBJECTIVITY 3. XEROX AND XENOGENESIS: MECHANICAL REPRODUCTION AND GOTHIC PROPAGATION 4. BLACK MIRROR: HYPERNATURALISM, HYPERREALITY AND HYPERFICTION