Linguistics, Literary Studies and Communication: A Digital Perspective: A Festschrift for
Literature serves many functions in the society. As a mirror of the society, it gives an image of that society, which may be true or distorted, either in reality or perceived as distorted by the society as a whole. As a lamp, literature helps us to imagine alternative realities or new pathways in which we may walk. George Orwell’s 1984, a prognostication of governments’ intrusion into citizen’s privacy has become a reality in our day: with the emergence of the “Internet of Things”, Orwell’s Big Brother is now truly watching us. Against the backdrop of literary imagination becoming scientific reality, this paper investigates how nanotechnology has been and is being imagined in literature. 120 works of fiction in different media: movies and movie series, novel, comics/other media, cartoon, computer games, short story, are analysed to provide answers to the following questions: is nanotechnology imagined as a force for good or evil? How legitimate are these “prognostications” in the light of current realities? Literary conceptualizations of nanotechnology are ambivalent at best, and horrifying at the worst. This leads us to conclude that the prospects of nanotechnology give us a cause to pause.