Looking at the stars in the twenty-first century: Lotman's semiotics, progress and utopia

ABSTRACT In the article, we consider special cases of technological progress and social dystopia studied by Yuri Lotman from the point of view of the inhabitants of the first quarter of the twenty-first century. The analysis is illustrated by works of literary fiction: Kazuo Ishiguro's dystopian novels Never Let Me Go (2005) and Klara and the Sun (2021). Among the central issues discussed are the limits of technological progress, the ethics of the relationship between man and a highly intelligent artificial device, the revival of archaic models of human consciousness, the prospect of (im)possible worlds. At the end of the article, we point out the problem of maintaining the ethical memory of mankind as the mission of a scientist and humanities writer, indicated by Lotmanian perspective.