The name is absent

technological confusion between reality and unreality that we are
experiencing today.

In this sense, and according to Isaac Asimov (1984: 2), the concept of
SF emerged and was directly linked to the social change caused by scientific
and technological development. The interest of SF would be to criticize,
extend, review and revolutionize all the scientific models with a core
purpose: to provoke a new vision, a more suitable and appropriate perception
of the world. For Asimov, SF uses arguments as a tool to introduce scientific
concepts to the receptor, raising new theories and discovering what could
happen if they were ever applied in reality. New technologies, specifically
visual, digital and virtual technologies, are the innovations that SF of the last
decades is projecting in the future. And this has devastating consequences for
individuals and the society as we can observe in The Matrix, Total Recall,
eXistenZ and The Lawnmower Man.

Paradoxically, SF has always used ideas and concepts from science but
has also inspired scientists to research and believe in certain possibilities
concerning the evolution of technology in a double feedback process. The
Internet is a good illustration of a fiction which ‘inspired’ or preceded a real
invention. As mentioned in the previous chapter, some years before the
general public had news about the World Wide Web, William Gibson proposed
in his novel Neuromancer the concept of a network that facilitates
connections and communication among humans, what we understand today as
the Internet. SF is therefore the result of speculations that have the potential
to become real, thanks to the impulse of the imagination. In this sense, the
SF films from the end of the 1980s, such as 12 Monkeys, Strange Days, The
Matrix, The Lawnmower Man, eXistenZ and Total Recall, are based on
variations of the technology that we currently have and the fears that they
invoke.

SF productions make a double and paradoxical use of technology: they
apply to the film the most developed technology to denounce the ‘perverted’
side and obscure perspective of technology. Bukatman (1999: 265) identifies
the ‘sublime’, the ‘dark side’ of this technological evolution in SF productions
in which there is a connection between the technological spectacle, as in The

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