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Introduction
The academic specialization of literature and science is entering its third decade. The Society for Literature and Science (SLS) was founded in 1985; its newsletter grew into the journal Configurations in 1993; and, due to a sustained influx of art scholars and new media artists throughout the 1990s and the early 2000s, the SLS reconfigured itself in 2004 as the Society for Science, Literature, and the Arts (SLSA). The SLS was never just about science fiction, although many panels have been devoted to it; nor nowadays is SLSA devoted to art exhibition or performance, although the society is happy to have in its ranks growing numbers of creative people working in digital multimedia formats. What keeps "literature" at the heart of SLSA is its founding commitment to the textuality and intertextuality of cultural science studies, its continued cultivation and assessment of the interdisciplinary and theoretical discourses that provide terms and conditions for research and criticism wide-angled enough to hold the arts and humanities together with contemporary science, technology, and medicine.
Offering a representative sample of the literary scholarship fostered by SLSA, the contributors to this special number of Intertexts are all at (or, in the case of Antje Pfannkuchen, near) the beginning of their professional careers. All are literature-department-based scholars, with the exception of Minsoo Kang-a scholar of European history whose research combines literature with science and technology. Kang's "Building the Sex Machine: The Subversive Potential of the Female Robot" surveys the female-robot theme across national and generic boundaries, as well as across the boundaries of sexual difference. While his discussion goes most deeply into Villiers de l'Isle Adam's 1886 novel L'Eve future-which brings together a fictionalized Thomas Edison as android-constructor with a matrimonially challenged British aristocrat-it details parallel philosophical and technological backgrounds reaching back to the seventeenth century, and assembles an impressive catalog of related literary and cinematic narratives spanning the last two centuries. Kang reports that "in virtually every story of its kind, the experiment goes...