Living in Technical Legality: Science Fiction and Law as Technology

Through detailed readings of popular science fiction, including the novels of Frank Herbert and Octavia E. Butler and television’s Battlestar Galactica and Doctor Who, this is the first sustained examination of legality in science fiction. Kieran Tranter includes substantive worked examples of the law and legal concepts projected by these science fiction texts, such as Australian car culture, legal responses to cloning and the relationship between legal theory and science fiction. By examining science fiction as the culture of our total technological world, it journeys with the partially-consumed human into the belly of the machine. What it finds is unexpected. Rather than a cold uniformity of exchangeable productive units, there is warmth, diversity and ’life’ for the nodes in the networks. Through its science fiction focus it argues that this life generates a very different law of responsibility that can guide living well in technical legality.

Kieran Tranter is Associate Professor at Griffith Law School, Griffith University. He has a background in science, law and the humanities. He is fascinated by the ways that culture imagines, mediates and disrupts legal and technological change. He has written widely on law and technology and law and popular culture.