Reviews for Soundings in French Caribbean Writing, 1950-2000: The Shock of Space and Time

The average rating for Soundings in French Caribbean Writing, 1950-2000: The Shock of Space and Time based on 2 reviews is 3 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2010-07-15 00:00:00 Stacy R Barton Considering that the author is a college professor and the publisher is an academic press, this is a shamefully shallow book. The introduction and first chapter are a thirty-page rant against transhumanists and similar techno-utopians. The other chapters are basically a list with summaries of science fiction movies and books that treat futuristic technology in a negative or positive light. Dinello is interested in only one thing about these works, whether they are dystopian - that is, they're with him - or utopian - that is, they're against him. That has to lead to all sorts of oversimplifications. Without thinking too hard about it I notice this one, that a lot of the works that have human-posthuman struggles lead you to sympathize with the posthuman side at least as much as the humans, but Dinello just classifies them according to whether the conflict ends well or not. I can't even trust the new factual information I ran into here and there, because the book gets facts wrong too often: it says that Gnosticism is older than Christianity, and that the Turing Test is supposed to tell humans apart from artificial intelligences, and it garbles the plot of Asimov's "The Evitable Conflict."

Review # 2 was written on 2019-09-13 00:00:00 John Flood I think this book was made for me- for anyone with an academic-level interest in scifi and the moral conflicts of the future. Thought-provoking and an easy read. He explores various possible moral stances on topics as wide as cybernetics, the singularity, cloning, designer babies and a host of other moral conflicts explored in scifi but condensed and compared with one book. Theologians and philosophers may be reading this book if and when scifi tech becomes reality.