Estética, técnica y dialécticala representación de la ingeniería civil en el cómic europeo de ciencia ficción de los siglos XX y XXI : aplicación a los sistemas de transporte en general y al ferrocarril en particular

Resum

The following doctoral thesis has been planned as a investigation project to study the relationship between the general Engineering, the transportation Engineering and, specially, the Railway Transportation, and its representation in the Science-Fiction European comic books of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. The methodology used consists in the compilation and analysis of the comic drawings, constantly comparing the reality with its vision showed in the comic strips. From the selected stuff, after an exhaustive investigation in the 30.000 sources studied, we succeed confirming and developing in the different chapters the departure thesis: that there is a bidirectional connection between the transportation engineering and the comic books, that the first one has exert a very important influence in the second one and viceversa, that the comic books have inspired, just as literature and films have, all the generations of engineers of the last century and the actual one. We will also propose several examples of futuristic technologies that appear in the studied documents, analyzing their possible applications in the engineering real world. We will travel over the comic strips showing their authors� new vision about the developpment of the future transportation engineering. This prospective scenario proposed, predictable or unreal, utopian or dystopian, placed in earth or in other planets, with humans or aliens, etc; will be the frame for new concepts, inventions �some of them master pieces�,surprising points of view and new reformulations of old concepts. All of which, doubtless, could be very helpful to the actual society and their engineers, as a model or as a way of reflection about the human adaptation in the world we live. The author alerts in this thesis about the necessity a second perusal of the comic strips, one much more deep, in which we shall catch all the ideas and thoughts hidden in the drawings and the plot, that discover us, sometimes, conceptual developments worthy of the most clairvoyant engineers and architects.