Science Fiction as Legal Imaginary

Book excerpt: This book examines how science fiction informs the legal imagination of technological futures. Science fiction, the contributors to this book argue, is a storehouse of images, tropes, concepts and memes that inform the legal imagination of the future, and in doing so generate impetus for change. Specifically, the contributors examine how science fictions imagine human life in space, in the digital and as formed and negotiated by corporations. They then connect this imaginary to how law should be understood in the present and changed for the future. Across the chapters, there is an urgent sense of the need for law – as it is has been, and as it might become – to order and safeguard the future for a multiplicity of vulnerable entities. This book will appeal to scholars and students with interests in law and technology, legal theory, cultural legal studies and law and the humanities.