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This is especially true of the science fiction film--a genre as old as cinema itself--which has rarely received the serious attention devoted to such genres as the western, the film noir and recently, under the aegis of feminist film theory, the so-called "woman's film." Alien Zone aims to bring science fiction cinema fully into the ambit of cultural theory in general and of film theory in particular. The essays in this book--some newly written, others gathered from scattered sources--look at the ways in which contemporary science fiction films draw on, rework, and transform established themes and conventions of the genre: the mise-en-scene of future worlds; the myth of masculine mastery of nature; power and authority and their relation to technology. This material is ordered and contextualized by the editor with a view to exploring how science fiction cinema has been approached critically and theoretically by commentators on the genre: as a mirror of society, as bearing or producing ideology; as caught up in an intertext of media productions, or as expressing unconscious desires. Contributors include Giuliana Bruno, Scott Bukatman, Thomas B. Byers, Barbara Creed, Anne Cranny-Francis, Daniel Dervin, H. Bruce Franklin, James H. Kavanagh, Douglas Kelner, Steve Neale, Judith Newton, Constance Penley, Hugh Ruppersberg, Michael Ryan, Vivian Sobchack, Michael Stern, J. P. Telotte, and Paul Virilio.
This book combines key theoretical statements that have become touchstones for work in the field with more recent theoretical inventions that showcase how theoretical paradigms central to science fiction such as posthumanism and mediation have become central to critical theory overall in the twenty-first century
Selected by Choice as an Outstanding Academic Book of the Year. This innovative cultural critique offers valuable insights into science fiction, thus enlarging our understanding of critical theory. Carl Freedman traces the fundamental and mostly unexamined relationships between the discourses of science fiction and critical theory, arguing that science fiction is (or ought to be) a privileged genre for critical theory. He asserts that it is no accident that the upsurge of academic interest in science fiction since the 1970s coincides with the heyday of literary theory, and that likewise science fiction is one of the most theoretically informed areas of the literary profession. Extended readings of novels by five of the most important modern science fiction authors illustrate the affinity between science fiction and critical theory, in each case concentrating on one major novel that resonates with concerns proper to critical theory. Freedman's five readings are: Solaris: Stanislaw Lem and the Structure of Cognition; The Dispossessed: Ursula LeGuin and the Ambiguities of Utopia; The Two of Them: Joanna Russ and the Violence of Gender; Stars in My Pocket Like Grains of Sand: Samuel Delany and the Dialectics of Difference; The Man in the High Castle: Philip K. Dick and the Construction of Realities.
Science fiction (SF) has existed as a popular genre for around 150 years. This book offers a survey of the genre from 19th-century pioneers to contemporary authors, introducing the plural versions of early SF across the world, before examining the emergence of the "scientific romance" in the 1880s and 1890s. The "Golden Age" of writers' expansive SF pulp was concentrated in the 1930s, consolidated by best-selling writers like Isaac Asimov and Robert Heinlein. The contributors to this volume also track the increasingly diverse forms SF took from the 1950s onwards. Leading international scholars, writing in an accessible style, consider SF as a world literature, referencing works from diverse traditions in Latin America, Europe, Russia and the Far East. This book combines discussion of central figures of the tradition with a new global reach.
In this new and timely cultural history of science fiction, Roger Luckhurst examines the genre from its origins in the late nineteenth century to its latest manifestations. The book introduces and explicates major works of science fiction literature by placing them in a series of contexts, using the history of science and technology, political and economic history, and cultural theory to develop the means for understanding the unique qualities of the genre. Luckhurst reads science fiction as a literature of modernity. His astute analysis examines how the genre provides a constantly modulating record of how human embodiment is transformed by scientific and technological change and how the very sense of self is imaginatively recomposed in popular fictions that range from utopian possibility to Gothic terror. This highly readable study charts the overlapping yet distinct histories of British and American science fiction, with commentary on the central authors, magazines, movements and texts from 1880 to the present day. It will be an invaluable guide and resource for all students taking courses on science fiction, technoculture and popular literature, but will equally be fascinating for anyone who has ever enjoyed a science fiction book.
A fresh approach to the history and shape of science fiction In Science Fiction and the Mass Cultural Genre System, John Rieder asks literary scholars to consider what shape literary history takes when based on a historical, rather than formalist, genre theory. Rieder starts from the premise that science fiction and the other genres usually associated with so-called genre fiction comprise a system of genres entirely distinct from the pre-existing classical and academic genre system that includes the epic, tragedy, comedy, satire, romance, the lyric, and so on. He proposes that the field of literary production and the project of literary studies cannot be adequately conceptualized without taking into account the tensions between these two genre systems that arise from their different modes of production, distribution, and reception. Although the careful reading of individual texts forms an important part of this study, the systemic approach offered by Science Fiction and the Mass Cultural Genre System provides a fundamental challenge to literary methodologies that foreground individual innovation.
A major, groundbreaking intervention into contemporary theoretical debates about SF. It effects a series of vital shifts in SF theory and criticism, away from prescriptively abstract dialectics of cognition and estrangement and towards the empirically grounded understanding of an amalgam of texts, practices and artefacts.
From J.R.R. Tolkien to Star Trek and from Game of Thrones to Battlestar Galactica and from The Walking Dead to Janelle Mone's Afrofuturist concept albums, transmedia world building offer us complex and immersive environments beyond capitalism. Science Fiction, Fantasy and Politics examines the ways in which these popular storyworlds offer tools for anticapitalist theory and practice. Building on Hardt and Negir's theory of global capitalism. Dan Hassler-Forest shows how transmedia world-building has the potential to offer more than a momentary escape from capitalist realism in the age of media a converagence and participator culture. This book feature eight fantastic storyworlds that offer vivid illustration of global capitalism contradictory logic. Approaching transmedia world-building both as a cultural form and as a political economy, Hassler-Forest demonstrates the limitations inherent in fandom and fan culture, which is increasingly absorbed as a form of immaterial labor. At the same time, he also explores the productive ways in which fantastic storyworlds contain a radical energy that can give us new ways of thinking about politics popular culture and anticapitalism.
A collection of essays, bringing science fiction cinema into the ambit of film and cultural theory.
How do digital media technologies affect society and our lives? Through the cultural theory hypotheses of hyper-modernism, hyperreality, and posthumanism, Alan N. Shapiro investigates the social impact of Virtual/Augmented Reality, AI, social media platforms, robots, and the Brain-Computer Interface. His examination of concepts of Jean Baudrillard and Katherine Hayles, as well as films such as Blade Runner 2049, Ghost in the Shell, Ex Machina, and the TV series Black Mirror, suggests that the boundary between science fiction narratives and the »real world« has become indistinct. Science-fictional thinking should be advanced as a principal mode of knowledge for grasping the world and digitalization.