Cover
Contents
Acknowledgements
Introduction
Challenging Times
Ethics for the Future: From Humanism to Posthumanism
Ethical Criticism in the 21st Century
Aesthetics for the Future: Popular Future Fictions
The Chapters
2 Ethics for the Future through Fiction
A Difficult Heritage: Humanism and Beyond
New Ethics for a New Age: Hans Jonas
Deconstruction, Ethics, and the Anthropocene: Joanna Zylinska
Towards Posthumanist Ethics
Actual Worlds and Possible Futures in Fiction
Existing Ethical Approaches to Literature
Ethical Criticism in Film

Limitations of Existing Approaches
Future Ethical Criticism: Worlds in the Making
3 Future World Ecologies: Kim Stanley Robinson's New York 2140 (2017) and James Cameron's Avatar (2009)
A Political World-Ecology Approach: Kim Stanley Robinson's NewYork 2140
New Realist Utopianism
Ethics through an Aesthetic Unity of Effect
The Capitalocene: Economy-Ecology
Political Organisation through Actor Networks
Back to "Nature" in James Cameron's Avatar
Effective Affection? Ethical Responses to the Fantastic
Ecologies without Nature

The Unobtainium of the Industrial-Military Complex
Are the Scientists also the Good Guys?
Can You See What Is Real?
Conclusion
4 Transhumanist Futures: Christopher Nolan's Interstellar (2014) and Wally Pfister's Transcendence (2014)
Transhumanist Ethics in Christopher Nolan's Interstellar
Directing Viewers' Emotions
The End Times of the Earth's World Ecology Managed by Bureaucrats
Normative Humanity and Border Transgressions
The Scientific, Science Fiction, and Space
The Otherworld in Space: A Fusion of Science and Love

Philosophical Essentialism: Futuristic Technologies and The Humanin Wally Pfister's Transcendence
More than Black and White: Ambiguous Ethics and Aesthetics
Will as a Prototypical Representative of Transhumanist Thought
Technology as a New Form of Secular Spirituality
A Natural Techno-Spirituality
The Classical Substantivist View: Revolutionary Independence fromTechnology
The Resolution? Max as Middle Ground, Love as Reconciling Force
Conclusion
5 Futuristic Digital Neoliberalism: Spike Jonze's Her (2013) and Dave Eggers's The Circle (2013)

The Self and the Other in Digital Neoliberalism: Relationshipsand Identities in Spike Jonze's Her
The Aesthetics of Digital Neoliberalism, the Self and the Other
A Digital Mimicking of Neoliberal Selfhood
Failed Romance: Meeting the Self instead of the Other
Selling Love
A Posthuman(ist) Possibility of an Other(world)
The Economy of Attention in Dave Eggers's The Circle
The Aesthetics of Warning
The Threat of a Digital Economy of Attention
Digital Capitalism and Transhumanism
The Individual Level: Computational Psychologies