Do Androids Sleep with Electric Sheep?: Monochrom's Arse Elektronika Anthology: Critical Perspectives on Sexuality and Pornography in Science and Soci - Paperback

by Thomas Ballhausen (Editor), Johannes Grenzfurthner (Editor), Daniel Fabry (Editor)

Provocative and
penetrating, Do Androids Sleep with Electric Sheep? reveals a wealth of
depictions of the future and shows the many ways in which they also address the
present. As the official artists' collective
representing Vienna at the São Paulo Art Biennial in 2002, the monochrom group
-- Johannes Grenzfurthner, Günther Friesinger, and Daniel Fabry -- invented an
artist called Georg Paul Thomann and carried off the exhibition as a very
elaborate prank. The trio, aided by philosopher Thomas Ballhausen, brings that
same sense of the cutting-edge and the carnivalesque to this collection
exploring erotica, science fiction, and technology. A bracing mix of literary
forms, the book shows why the fantasy genre is especially suited to the
investigation of the transgressive realms of sexuality and pornography. Here
questions of science, research, and technologization are examined, along with
the complex surrounding urbanism, artificiality, and control (or the loss of
control).

Back Jacket

The genre of the "fantastic" is especially well suited to
the investigation of the touchy area of sexuality and pornography: actual and
assumed developments are frequently depicted positively and approvingly, but
just as often with dystopian admonishment: Here the classic, and continuingly
valid, themes of modernism represent a clear link between the two aspects: questions
of science, research and technologization are of interest, as is the complex
surrounding urbanism, artificiality and control (or the loss of control).
Depictions of the future, regardless of the form they take, always address the
present as well. Imaginations of the fantastic and the nightmarish give rise to
a thematic overlapping of the exotic, the alienating and, of course, the
pornographic/sexual as well.

Author Biography

Rudy Rucker is computer scientist and science fiction author, and is one of the founders of the cyberpunk literary move-
ment. The author of both fiction and non-fiction, he is best known for the novels in the Ware Tetralogy, the first two of
which (Software and Wetware) both won Philip K. Dick Awards. At present he edits the science fiction webzine Flurb.