Endangering Science Fiction Film explores the ways in which science fiction film is a dangerous and endangering genre. The collection argues that science fiction's cinematic power rests in its ability to imagine ‘Other’ worlds that challenge and disturb the lived conditions of the ‘real’ world, as it is presently known to us. From classic films such as 2001: A Space Odyssey and Solaris to modern blockbusters including World War Z and Gravity, and directors from David Cronenberg to Alfonso Cuarón, contributors comment on the way science fiction film engages with dangerous encounters, liminal experiences, sublime aesthetics, and untethers space and time to question the very nature of human existence. With the analysis of a diverse range of films from Europe, Asia, North and South America, Endangering Science Fiction Film offers a uniquely interdisciplinary view of the evolving and dangerous sentiments and sensibility of this genre.

Endangering Science Fiction Film explores the ways in which science fiction film is a dangerous and endangering genre. The collection argues that science fiction's cinematic power rests in its ability to imagine ‘Other’ worlds that challenge and disturb the lived conditions of the ‘real’ world, as it is presently known to us. From classic films such as 2001: A Space Odyssey and Solaris to modern blockbusters including World War Z and Gravity, and directors from David Cronenberg to Alfonso Cuarón, contributors comment on the way science fiction film engages with dangerous encounters, liminal experiences, sublime aesthetics, and untethers space and time to question the very nature of human existence. With the analysis of a diverse range of films from Europe, Asia, North and South America, Endangering Science Fiction Film offers a uniquely interdisciplinary view of the evolving and dangerous sentiments and sensibility of this genre.

Contemporary American Science Fiction Film explores and interrogates a diverse variety of popular and culturally relevant American science fiction films made in the first two decades of the new millennium, offering a ground-breaking investigation of the impactful role of genre cinema in the modern era. Placing one of the most popular and culturally resonant American film genres broadly within its rich social, historical, industrial, and political context, the book interrogates some of the defining critical debates of the era via an in-depth analysis of a range of important films. An international team of authors draw on case studies from across the science fiction genre to examine what these films can tell us about the time period, how the films themselves connect to the social and political context, how the fears and anxieties they portray resonate beyond the screen, and how the genre responds to the shifting coordinates of the Hollywood film industry. Offering new insights and perspectives on the cinematic science fiction genre, this volume will appeal primarily to scholars and students of film, television, cultural and media studies, as well as anyone interested in science fiction and speculative film.

This book offers the first specific application in film studies of what is generally known as ecology theory, shifting attention from history to the (in this case media) environment. It takes the robot as its subject because it has attained a status that resonates not only with some of the key concerns of contemporary culture over the last century, but also with the very nature of film. While the robot has given us a vehicle for exploring issues of gender, race, and a variety of forms of otherness, and increasingly for asking questions about the very nature and meaning of life, this image of an artificial being, typically anthropomorphic, also invariably implicates the cinema’s own and quite fundamental artificing of the human. Looking across genres, across specific media forms, and across closely linked conceptualizations, Telotte sketches a context of interwoven influences and meanings. The result is that this study of the cinematic robot, while mainly focused on science fiction film, also incorporates its appearance in, for example, musicals, cartoons, television, advertising, toys, and literature.

This book provides students and other interested readers with a comprehensive survey of science fiction history and numerous essays addressing major science fiction topics, authors, works, and subgenres written by a distinguished scholar. This encyclopedia deals with written science fiction in all of its forms, not only novels and short stories but also mediums often ignored in other reference books, such as plays, poems, comic books, and graphic novels. Some science fiction films, television programs, and video games are also mentioned, particularly when they are relevant to written texts. Its focus is on science fiction in the English language, though due attention is given to international authors whose works have been frequently translated into English. Since science fiction became a recognized genre and greatly expanded in the 20th century, works published in the 20th and 21st centuries are most frequently discussed, though important earlier works are not neglected. The texts are designed to be helpful to numerous readers, ranging from students first encountering science fiction to experienced scholars in the field.

Long before flying saucers, robot monsters, and alien menaces invaded our movie screens in the 1950s, there was already a significant but overlooked body of cinematic science fiction. Through analyses of early twentieth-century animations, comic strips, and advertising, Animating the Science Fiction Imagination unearths a significant body of cartoon science fiction from the pre-World War II era that appeared at approximately the same time the genre was itself struggling to find an identity, an audience, and even a name. In this book, author J.P. Telotte argues that these films helped sediment the genre's attitudes and motifs into a popular culture that found many of those ideas unsettling, even threatening. By binding those ideas into funny and entertaining narratives, these cartoons also made them both familiar and non-threatening, clearing a space for visions of the future, of other worlds, and of change that could be readily embraced in the post-war period.

The New Routledge Companion to Science Fiction provides an overview of the study of science fiction across multiple academic fields. It offers a new conceptualisation of the field today, marking the significant changes that have taken place in sf studies over the past 15 years. Building on the pioneering research in the first edition, the collection reorganises historical coverage of the genre to emphasise new geographical areas of cultural production and the growing importance of media beyond print. It also updates and expands the range of frameworks that are relevant to the study of science fiction. The periodisation has been reframed to include new chapters focusing on science fiction produced outside the Anglophone context, including South Asian, Latin American, Chinese and African diasporic science fiction. The contributors use both well- established critical and theoretical approaches and embrace a range of new ones, including biopolitics, climate crisis, critical ethnic studies, disability studies, energy humanities, game studies, medical humanities, new materialisms and sonic studies. This book is an invaluable resource for students and established scholars seeking to understand the vast range of engagements with science fiction in scholarship today.

This collection reads the science fiction genre and television medium as examples of heterotopia (and television as science fiction technology), in which forms, processes, and productions of space and time collide – a multiplicity of spaces produced and (re)configured. The book looks to be a heterotopic production, with different chapters and “spaces” (of genre, production, mediums, technologies, homes, bodies, etc), reflecting, refracting, and colliding to offer insight into spatial relationships and the implications of these spaces for a society that increasingly inhabits the world through the space of the screen. A focus on American science fiction offers further spatial focus for this study – a question of geographical and cultural borders and influence not only in terms of American science fiction but American television and streaming services. The (contested) hegemonic nature of American science fiction television will be discussed alongside a nation that has significantly been understood, even produced, through the television screen. Essays will examine the various (re)configurations, or productions, of space as they collapse into the science fiction heterotopia of television since 1987, the year Star Trek: Next Generation began airing.

An exploration of the fundamental bond between cinema and the cosmos The advent of cinema occurred alongside pivotal developments in astronomy and astrophysics, including Albert Einstein’s theories of relativity, all of which dramatically altered our conception of time and provided new means of envisioning the limits of our world. Tracing the many aesthetic, philosophical, and technological parallels between these fields, Stardust explores how cinema has routinely looked toward the cosmos to reflect our collective anxiety about a universe without us. Employing a “cosmocinematic gaze,” Hannah Goodwin uses the metaphorical frameworks from astronomy to posit new understandings of cinematic time and underscore the role of light in generating archives for an uncertain future. Surveying a broad range of works, including silent-era educational films, avant-garde experimental works, and contemporary blockbusters, she carves out a distinctive area of film analysis that extends its reach far beyond mainstream science fiction to explore films that reckon with a future in which humans are absent. This expansive study details the shared affinities between cinema and the stars in order to demonstrate how filmmakers have used cosmic imagery and themes to respond to the twentieth century’s moments of existential dread, from World War I to the atomic age to our current moment of environmental collapse. As our outlook on the future continues to change, Stardust illuminates the promise of cinema to bear witness to humanity’s fragile existence within the vast expanse of the universe.

Science fiction is perhaps the most effective genre to explore the concerns of the present whilst reflecting on the possibilities of the future. But what precisely can it tell us about present and future by setting these two timeframes in the same critical space?