1st Edition

Science Fiction as Legal Imaginary

Edited By Alex Green, Mitchell Travis, Kieran Tranter Copyright 2025
366 Pages 1 B/W Illustrations
by Routledge

366 Pages 1 B/W Illustrations
by Routledge

366 Pages 1 B/W Illustrations
by Routledge

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... Read more

1. The legal imaginary and science fiction 

Alex Green, Mitchell Travis and Kieran Tranter 

Part I: Law of space(s) 

2. Towards an impossible polis: Legal imagination and state continuity 

Alex Green 

3. Playing Loki? International law, decision-making and intertemporality through the Marvel multiverse 

Kritika Sharma 

4. Life on the front line: The lives of child soldiers in Neon Genesis Evangelion 

Emily Muir 

5. Science fiction and interstellar rights and institutions 

Erika TecheraRenae Barker and Meredith Blake 

6. International law in outer space: Protecting against ‘evil’ corporate actors 

Stacey Henderson and Melissa de Zwart 

7. Society is just people, and the law is just their club rules: What utopian science fiction can teach us about legal vulnerability and exploitation in off-world human settlements 

Evie Kendal 

Part II: Dealing with the digital 

8. Artificial intelligences and legal persons as rule of law subjects in The Lifecycle of Software Objects 

Paul Burgess and Daniel Chia Matallana 

9. AI Capone, or the criminal masterminds of the future: The imagined possibilities of malevolent artificial intelligence, with an emphasis on money laundering 

Georgios Pavlidis 

10. Analysing the portrayal of AI and the law-making process in science fiction: A comparative study of Isaac Asimov’s Laws of Robotics and Philip K Dick’s Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? 

Yeliz Figen Döker and Habibe Deniz Seval 

11. Science fiction, science and fiction of and for algorithmic agents in law 

AM Waltermann 

12. Buying and selling the Metaverse: Science fiction speculation, modern technologies and digital data economies 

Katie Szilagyi and Christina Fawcett 

Part III: We are Borg: Imagining the corporate form 

13. Political theology, 1001 cars long: Emblems of corporate sovereignty in Netflix’s Snowpiercer 

Timothy D Peters and Thomas Giddens 

14. The spatio-legality of corporate sovereignty in AppleTV+’s Severance 

Dhiraj Nainani 

15. Merging AI technology with the corporate form: Purpose, personhood and data in ‘Autofac’ 

Jordan Aleksander Belor

Biography

Alex Green is Senior Lecturer in Law at the University of York, UK.

Mitchell Travis is Director of the Centre for Law and Social Justice at the University of Leeds, UK.

Kieran Tranter is Chair of Law, Technology and Future at the School of Law, Queensland University of Technology, Australia.