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The motif of the insect became widely used in science fiction as an "abject human/insect hybrids that form the most common enemy" in related media. [11] Bugs or bug-like shapes have been described as a common trope in them, and the term 'insectoid' is considered "almost a cliche" with regards to the "ubiquitous way of representing alien life".
The ship's navigation computer in "Misfit", a short story by Robert A. Heinlein (1939) The Games Machine, a vastly powerful computer that plays a major role in A. E. van Vogt's The World of Null-A (serialized in Astounding Science Fiction in 1945)
Archy was a cockroach who had been a free verse poet in a previous life, and took to writing stories and poems on an old typewriter at the newspaper office when everyone in the building had left. Archy would climb up onto the typewriter and hurl himself at the keys, laboriously typing out stories of the daily challenges and travails of a cockroach.
Insects have equally been used for their strangeness and alien qualities, with giant wasps and intelligent ants threatening human society in science fiction stories. Locusts have represented greed, and more literally plague and destruction, while the fly has been used to indicate death and decay, and the grasshopper has indicated improvidence.
The title refers to the sterile insect technique, a technique of eradicating the population of screwflies by the release of large amounts of sterilized males that would compete with fertile males, thus reducing the native population more with each generation this is done. This story concerns a similar distortion of human sexuality with ...
The social anthropologist Marika Moisseeff argues that Hollywood science fiction favours insects as villain characters because of their parasitism and their swarming behaviour. Such films, she continues, depict a ceaseless war of culture and nature as involving extraterrestrial species somewhat resembling insects, with humans as their hosts." [4]
"BLIT" (acronym of Berryman Logical Image Technique) is a 1988 science fiction short story by the British writer David Langford. It takes place in a setting where highly dangerous types of images called "basilisks" (after the legendary reptile) have been discovered; these images contain patterns within them that exploit flaws in the structure of the human mind to produce a lethal reaction ...
Apocalyptic fiction is a subgenre of science fiction that is concerned with the end of civilization due to a potentially existential catastrophe such as nuclear warfare, pandemic, extraterrestrial attack, impact event, cybernetic revolt, technological singularity, dysgenics, supernatural phenomena, divine judgment, climate change, resource depletion or some other general disaster.