While doing research for my sabbatical project, I discovered that Patricia Warrick had passed away on 23 Feb. 2023. She was 98 years old.
I never met her, but her work has had a profound influence on my professional development and thinking throughout my academic career.
As an undergraduate at Georgia Tech, her words guided my first research project on artificial intelligence for the Sci Fi Lab in 2004, supported my presentation on robots for the Monstrous Bodies Symposium in early 2005, and provided a model for my senior thesis on networks of SF and technology during the Cold War in late 2005.
When I left to spend a year overseas as the University of Liverpool earning my MA, my annotated copy of Warrick’s The Cybernetic Imagination in Science Fiction (1980) is one of the books that I brought with me. And, I’m glad that I did, because returning to it helped my thinking while writing my MA thesis on Cold War and post-Cold War identities reflected in the original and re-imagined Battlestar Galactica series.
And when I was earning my PhD at Kent State University, I turned to Warrick’s work again. First, her Cybernetic Imagination and Mind in Motion: The Science Fiction of Philip K. Dick (1987) both proved helpful in my semiotics seminar paper on deconstructing the human/robot dichotomy in the works of Isaac Asimov and Philip K. Dick in 2007, three iterations of a paper (here, here, and here) on images of women in Dick’s Ubik (1969). And, her ideas helped me through my PhD exam on Philip K. Dick and my dissertation Brains, Minds, and Computers in Literary and Science Fiction Neuronarratives, which includes a chapter on Dick’s work.
When I first read Warrick’s The Cybernetic Imagination in Science Fiction, I thought to myself that I want to write a book like that. Her writing and thinking have been and continue to be a guide for me. The book project that I am currently working on is very much modeled on her work. When it is done, she will certainly be a part of it.
Dynamic Subspace 