Kieran Tranter Is Associate Professor at Griffith Law School, Griffith N
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TRANTER layout with new pic.qxp_Layout 1 29/05/2018 10:28 Page 1 EDINBURGH CRITICAL STUDIES IN LAW, LITERATURE AND THE HUMANITIES l EDINBURGH CRITICAL STUDIES IN LAW, LITERATURE AND THE HUMANITIES i v i ‘Tranter leverages his prior work to produce a masterful examination n of what it means to be living in an era that seems infused with sci-fi g tropes from the past. This is a valuable contribution to law and i technology studies.’ n Arthur Cockfield, Queen’s University, Ontario t e Through detailed readings of popular science fictions, including the c novels of Frank Herbert and Octavia E. Butler and television’s h Battlestar Galactica and Doctor Who, this book presents the first n i sustained examination of the legality of science fiction. c a Successive transformations have resulted in the emergence of a total l technological world where old separations about ‘nature’ and ‘culture’ l have declined. With this, the tendency towards technicity within e Science Fiction and Law modern law has flourished. There has often been identified a g mechanistic essence to modern law in its domination of human life. a as Technology Usually this has been considered an ‘end’ and a loss, the human l i swallowed by the machine. However, this innovative book sets out to t re-address this tendency. y By examining science fiction as the culture of our total technological world, Living in Technical Legality journeys with the partially consumed human into the belly of the machine. What it finds is unexpected: k i rather than a cold uniformity of exchangeable productive units, there e r is warmth, diversity and ‘life’ for the nodes in the networks. Through a its science-fiction focus, it argues that this life generates a very different n law of responsibility that can guide living well in technical legality. t r a Kieran Tranter is Associate Professor at Griffith Law School, Griffith n University. t e r Cover image: TBC Cover design: www.hayesdesign.co.uk edinburghuniversitypress.com Kieran Tranter Living in Technical Legality Science Fiction and Law as Technology Kieran Tranter For Sophia and Alexander Edinburgh University Press is one of the leading university presses in the UK. We publish academic books and journals in our selected subject areas across the humanities and social sciences, combining cutting-edge scholarship with high editorial and production values to produce academic works of lasting importance. For more information visit our website: edinburghuniversitypress.com © Kieran Tranter, 2018 Edinburgh University Press Ltd The Tun – Holyrood Road 12 (2f) Jackson’s Entry Edinburgh EH8 8PJ Typeset in 11/13pt Adobe Garamond Pro by Servis Filmsetting Ltd, Stockport, Cheshire and printed and bound in Great Britain A CIP record for this book is available from the British Library ISBN 978 1 4744 2089 1 (hardback) ISBN 978 1 4744 2090 7 (webready PDF) ISBN 978 1 4744 2091 4 (epub) The right of Kieran Tranter to be identified as author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 and the Copyright and Related Rights Regulations 2003 (SI No. 2498). Contents List of Figures vii Preface viii Introduction: Living in Technical Legality 1 Science Fiction and Law 4 The Chapters to Come 9 PART I TECHNICAL LEGALITY 1 From Law and Technology to Law as Technology 17 Cloning Law 18 Frankenstein Myth 27 Law as Technology 33 2 Dune, Modern Law, and the Alchemy of Death and Time 43 Sand, Spice, and Empire 44 The Illusion of Control 48 Sovereignty as the Alchemy of Death and Time 58 3 Battlestar Galactica, Technology, and Life 76 Battlestar Galactica Redux 77 Sovereigns and Subjects in Battlestar Galactica 80 The Metaphysics of Technology 93 PART II LIVING IN TECHNICAL LEGALITY 4 Xenogenesis and the Technical Legal Subject 109 Biopower and Natureculture on an Alien Rehabilitated Earth 111 The Technical Legal Subject of Xenogenesis 120 Living Well as a Technical Legal Subject 127 vi living in technical legality 5 The Doctor and Technical Lawyering 133 Time and a Blue Box 135 Death and the Doctor 146 The Doctor as the Paradigm Technical Lawyer 152 6 Mad Max and Mapping the Monsters in the Networks 164 Identity, Myth, and Biopower in Mad Max 2 166 The Australian Human-automobile 173 Cartographies of Technical Legality 183 7 Deserts and Technical Legality 190 Bibliography 194 Index 238 figures vii Figures 2.1 John Schoenherr, ‘Defeat of the Sardaukar’, for Analog Magazine, 1966 55 5.1 TARDIS on location. ‘The Caves of Androzani’ (1983) 138 6.1 Tortured Colonists. Mad Max 2: The Road Warrior (1981) 173 viii living in technical legality Preface This book has had a complicated, cosmopolitan gestation. Its genesis was at the 2000 Critical Legal Studies Conference in Helsinki in Finland, where, as a young junior academic from a small Catholic law school in Fremantle, Western Australia, I presented some half-conceived ideas about 1950s American science fiction and international space law on a panel titled ‘Law and Popular Culture’ alongside William P. MacNeil. A slightly better thought-out iteration of that paper was eventually published by Law and Critique,1 and it gave impetus to two further papers on science fiction and the car, and the cloning narratives in Star Trek.2 However, my thematic exploration of law, technology, and science fiction would almost certainly have remained a passing distraction from what may be seen as the more serious scholarly tasks if it had not been for the oppor- tunity to present on another ‘Law and Popular Culture’ panel at the 2006 Law and Society Association Conference in Baltimore, Maryland, United States. By this stage, I was slightly less young and less junior, and due to serendipity found myself working alongside William MacNeil at Griffith Law School in Australia. For this panel, I wrote a paper that looked at the jurisprudential articulations of the technical in the fabulously reimagined Battlestar Galactica. The reception of this paper, the enthusiasm with which it was published by Law and Literature, the sheer personal joy at being able to be what Henry Jenkins has termed an ‘aca-fan’,3 and the understanding that I had hit on a rich insight concerning the essential relations between law, technology, and science fiction were revelatory. My doctorate – which until then was plodding along as a study of Australian responses to emergent technology over the twentieth century – morphed, under the supervision of MacNeil, into an examination of the science fictionality of law and technology scholarship. It is from that work that this book has mutated. 1 Tranter, ‘Terror in the Texts: Technology – Law – Future’. 2 Tranter, ‘Mad Max: The Car and Australian Governance’; Tranter and Statham, ‘Echo and Mirror’. 3 Jenkins, ‘Confessions of an Aca-Fan’. preface ix Ultimately, this book is a celebration of monsters. It is a monster of a book and its final message is for the monsters that have inherited the West to live well – to live as responsible for becoming – in their technical existence. Monsters, too, have complicated origins. Intra-myth they often owe their existence to many progenitors, and as stories of profanity, horror, and hybrid- ity they have relied on all those who have shared their stories around fires, in texts, and on screens for them to live in the world. Likewise, this book owes its monstrous being-in-the-world to many. I wish to thank Lyndal Sleep, whose companionship, encouragement, love of speculative fiction, and own theoretical orientation have very much helped to make this book what it is. I also must mention our children, Sophia and Alexander Tranter-Sleep, who have grown into Doctor Who and Star Trek as this book has developed, and whose commentary and insights were very important for Chapter 5. I also must thank William MacNeil, whose work, support, and encour- agement have made this book. His pioneering work in law and popular cul- ture is clearly the laboratory from which this book has escaped. However, it also would not have been possible without the long and dedicated support he has shown me as a colleague, a doctoral supervisor, and an editor. This is the moment to credit the institutional context of my creating. The idea of seri- ously pursuing the relationships between law, technology, and science fiction is novel and creative, and would not be possible in many law schools. I have been extremely fortunate to have been working at Griffith Law School during the formation and writing of this book, and to have had the opportunity to work with such creative, theoretically sophisticated, and serious scholars as Shaun McVeigh, Sandra Berns, Paula Baron, Rob McQueen, Allan Ardill, Charles Lawson, Edwin Bikundo, Jay Sanderson, Chris Butler, Roshan de Silva, Karen Crawley, Tim Peters, and Ed Mussawir, all of whom have had an impact on the ideas, tone, and orientation of the text that follows. I also need to thank my own PhD students, particularly Robbie Skyes, Samuli Haataja, Skye O’Dwyer, Jing-Yueh Hsu, and Mark Brady, whose energy, struggles, and triumphs directly and indirectly informed the book. However, this book has benefited from the input of scholars beyond Griffith Law School. David Caudill (Villanova University in Pennsylvania, United States) and Sherryl Vint (University of California, Riverside in United States) deserve credit as the examiners of my doctoral thesis, whose comments critically informed the development of Chapters 3 and 4. Maria Aristodemou (Birkbeck University in London in the United Kingdom) and Vicky Saker Woeste (American Bar Association) deserve special mention as facilitators of my presentations at Helsinki and Baltimore respectively. Martha Merrill Umphrey (the University of Massachusetts Amherst in the x living in technical legality United States) and Peter Goodrich (Benjamin N.