Recent histories and references for science fiction include:

Aldiss, Brian, Trillion Year Spree: A History of Science Fiction (London: Gollancz, 1986).

James, Edward, Science Fiction in the Twentieth Century (Oxford, U.K.: Oxford Univ. Press, 1994).

Clute, J., and P. Nicholls, eds., The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction (New York: St. Martin's, 1995).

Theoretical works include:

Gergen, Kenneth J. "Technology and the Self: From the Essential to the Sublime," chapter draft for Grodin and Lindlof, eds., Constructing the Self in a Mediated World, (Sage, 1996). Swarthmore College, available at http://www.swarthmore.edu/SocSci/kgergen1/text11.html, accessed 5/01/01.

This essay starts by analyzing ways in which we perceive our 'self' and our identity. It moves to make the author’s argument that it is becoming even harder to define our self with the ever-growing expanse of knowledge today offers. I will use this essay for the definitions and claims of self-identity and apply this to some of Connerton's views on identity and how these differences and similarities relate to 'Artificial Life.'

Thacker, Eugene, "The Science Fiction of Technoscience: The Politics of Simulation and a Challenge for New Media Art," Leonardo (34: 2, 2001).

This article sketches some of the relationships between the technosciences (primarily biotechnology biomedicine) and science fiction. Taken as a discursive practice, science fiction constructs futurological narratives of progress as well as conditions the very techniques and research that may have taken place. The tensions and inconsistencies within the biotech industry are considered as a zone science fiction is put to work as negotiator and mode of legitimization. However, as cultural theorists such as Fredric Jameson and Jean Baudrillard suggest, science fiction can also fulfill a critical, highlighting the contingencies and limitations in biotech's self-fulfilling narrative of -medicine. A consideration of the emerging category of "net.art" provides one starting point for a science fiction practice.

Fredric Jameson "Progress versus Utopia or, Can We Imagine the Future." Science Fiction Studies 9.2 (July 1982): 147-58.

Contemporary theories about ideology allow us to view certain abstract ideas and concepts--e.g., ``Progress''--as (narrative) symptoms of a specific orientation to history and to the future (as well as to the past). The emerging genre of science fiction can be seen as a substitute for what the historical novel was for the bourgeois class of the 19th century. Much like the historical novel, the SF narrative gives only the appearance of representing what the future will be (or the past); in reality, its narrative apparatus functions as series of strategies to define our historical moment, more and more inaccessible in our present societies. Such is the function of utopias, this literary form akin to science fiction: their essential nature has never been to represent or imagine a real future but rather to denounce our inability to conceive one, the poverty of our imaginations, the structural impossibility of our being able to generate a concrete vision of a reality that is radically different from our current society.