FUTURI speciale 2026 – The Otherness Within Us. The (Post)human Condition in Times of Crisis
Robots, androids, cyborgs, sentient computers, and other products endowed with human-like intelligence have crowded and still crowd popular culture. The advent of a new digital understanding, achieved by the development of forms of artificial intelligence, has rapidly transformed human society, becoming an increasingly widespread everyday presence. Popular culture has always played a key role in helping people understand these and other complex situations: it provides tools for resistance, as even the darkest narrative can invoke awareness, mobilization, challenge to the status quo, and imagination of a utopian future. Therein, the posthuman represents a dream and a nightmare, a possibility of progress and a sentence, a medium of freedom or an act of exploitation. It embodies both an otherness to be embraced and an enemy to be feared.
How do novels, short stories, films, television series, comic books, video games, and other hybrid narrative forms depict the relationship between humans and artificial intelligence and what solutions do they propose in this regard? How do the concepts of posthuman and transhuman shape culture and the collective imagination? How have speculative fiction, science fiction, and fantasy changed during and after the advent of machines and algorithms in our everyday lives and what impact have they generated on the world around us? These are just some of the questions addressed in the essays in this special issue of Futuri, based on the international conference Electridreams.
Editors: Elisabetta Di Minico, Stefano Locati.
Contents
EDITORIALS
God is with us: The Future on the Counterattack
Adolfo Fattori
The Otherness Within Us. The (Post)human Condition in Times of Crisis
Elisabetta Di Minico
Stefano Locati
The Otherness Within Us. The (Post)human Condition in Times of Crisis
Black Holes as the Cardinal Objects of Speculative Nihilism
Ondřej Váša
Do Clones Dream of Being Humans? Cinematic Fictions around Transhumanist Dehumanisation
Francisco José Martínez Mesa
Posthuman Aesthetics and the Critique of Transhumanism in the Cinema of Neill Blomkamp
Paola Dalla Torre
Crimes of the Present Future. From trans-humanism to the post of humanity and society
Dario Altobelli
Virtual post-apocalypses between Flame-hair Saviours and useless heroes. Analysing the future of humanity and nature in the video game series Horizon and The Last of Us
Marco Favaro
Tales of Times to Come in Marissa Meyer’s The Lunar Chronicles: The Contribution of Fairy Tales in the Transglossic Hour
Silvia Storti
Human, this ever-changing creature. Oshiko’s Default Standard by Yukiko Motoya
Hiroko Inose
The Mother, the Other and the Posthuman: Speculating Motherhood as a Posthuman Condition through Jessamine Chan’s The School for Good Mothers
Anwesha Maiti
Posthuman Perspectives: Identity, Environmentalism, and Biology in Atwood’s MaddAddam Trilogy
Javier Álvarez
Exploring Post- and Transhumanism in Tales from the Loop
Valerio Moccia
Robots, Animals, and Generative Images. Understanding Fear and Promethean Shame in Human/AI Interaction through Film and Media
Pierandrea Villa
AI for (un)Sustainability
Maria Raffa
Cultivating Seriousness: Science Fiction, Authority, and the Rise of AI
Ciarán Kavanagh
Virtual and Space Communities as Utopias
Teuvo Peltoniemi
AUTHORS
