Laboratory experiments are the type of study that most people have in mind when talking about experiments. In this chapter, we first discuss the strengths of laboratory experiments, which offer the highest degree of experimental control as compared to other types of experiments. Single factors can be manipulated according to the requirements of theories under highly controlled conditions. As such, laboratory experiments are well-placed to test theories. We then introduce a sociological laboratory experiment as a leading example, which we use as a reference for a discussion of several principles of laboratory research. Furthermore, we discuss a second goal of laboratory experiments, which is the establishment of empirical regularities in situations where theory does not provide sufficient guidance for deriving behavioral expectations. The chapter concludes with a short discussion of caveats for the analysis of sociological data generated in laboratory experiments.

At the heart of Kazuo Ishiguro’s 2021 novel Klara and the Sun is a singular act of imitation, in which Klara, a synthetic human, is asked to take the place of her owner, the sick child Josie.

This essay addresses this moment, in order to ask how far the novel form is able to perform this kind of ventriloquism, to undertake acts of imitation that might replace or supersede those that they imitate.

In order to respond to this question, the essay suggests, we need to put Klara and the Sun in conversation with the rest of Ishiguro’s oeuvre, which is itself in conversation with the longer history of the novel form. From Artist of the Floating World to The Unconsoled to Klara, Ishiguro has been concerned with the capacity of art to become the reality it imitates, and particularly with the capacity of the novel voice to pass through the boundary between original and copy. Klara might suggest that contemporary technologies have made this boundary newly porous; but the essay argues that the novel form has always sat at the difficult junction between voice and its replications. When he makes an artificial being speak in the voice of its owner, Ishiguro does not depart from the protocols of narrative voice, but rather gains access to its interior mechanisms, in a way that is illuminating for the critical power of fiction under contemporary biopolitical conditions.

This Introduction outlines the theoretical, historical and technological contexts against which the exploration of the prosthetic imagination will unfold, in the chapters that follow. It develops an account of the relationship between mimesis and prosthesis, by teasing out a theoretical relationship with Auerbach’s Mimesis. It then demonstrates the ways in which the emerging prosthetic condition requires us to rethink the legacies of twentieth-century thought, and our conception of the historical function of the novel in imagining our lifeworlds.