| This thesis uses the novels Ender's Game, by Orson Scott Card, and Neuromancer, by William Gibson, as well as other literary and academic sources to analyze 1980s American cultural anxieties with the aim of developing an idea of the science fiction genre's ability and effectiveness in addressing causes and symptoms of these anxieties. These anxieties center on cultural tension in this decade involving the Cold War and rapidly developing computer technology. The analysis addresses concepts of identity, individuality, isolation, invasion, binary ideology, computers, internet, artificial intelligence, and various works of literary critique. The method of analysis that is described creates a multi-generational, sci-fi human construction schematic for early Cold War era anxiety treatment, classified as superhuman, late Cold War era anxiety treatment, classified as trans-human, and post-Cold War era anxiety treatment, classified as post-human. This method is then, after an in-depth analysis of Card's and Gibson's work, briefly applied to the science fiction of the generations before by recruiting Frank Herbert's Dune and Phillip K. Dick's Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, and the generation after by recruiting M.T. Anderson's Feed and Ann Leckie's Ancillary Justice, as a demonstration of its literary and analytical validity. |
