Science Fiction Film and Television

Cryptozoology is a term that generally denotes the vocation of “monster hunter” with the most prized quarries being such legendary beasts as Bigfoot and the Yeti, the Loch Ness Monster, sea serpents, various “living dinosaurs,” gigantic thunderbirds, and such decidedly weirder and less biologically plausible sounding creatures as the vampiric Chupacabra and more recently so-called Dog-men. The beginnings of cryptozoology are typically traced to the mid-1950s/early-1960s and the activities of two men: Scottish naturalist Ivan T. Sanderson and French-Belgian zoologist Bernard Heuvelmans. Both men originally hoped that cryptozoology would eventually be recognized as a legitimate science; however for a variety of very good reasons this dream has never come to pass and today cryptozoology is regarded as a pseudoscience by the scientific and academic mainstream. This labeling of cryptozoology as a pseudoscience has led some critics, like Donald Prothero, to characterize self-professed cryptozoologists as being fundamentally anti-science. However other researchers such as Darren Naish, who has spent considerable time interacting with cryptozoologists in the field, dispute this claim writing that cryptozoologists largely have a very positive view of science and want themselves to be considered part of the scientific establishment. The problem however, as outlined by Sharon Hill who has conducted ethnographic research on cryptozoological communities, is that very few cryptozoologists have any formal scientific training and instead draw their ideas about how science works from pop-culture. While Hill primarily focuses on popular TV shows like Finding Bigfoot when making this claim, this essay will argue that cryptozoology as a whole is largely patterned after the kind of “two-fisted tales” which once dominated turn-of-the-century pulp-magazines and later men’s magazines of the 1970s in which strapping, square-jawed, bare-knuckle white men would travel to exotic locals and contend with savage ape-men and marauding dinosaurs. And while stories of this nature have largely fallen out of favor with mainstream readers of fantastic literature they nevertheless remain popular among cryptozoologists via the work of dedicated “crypto-fiction” writers like Dallas Tanner, Roland Smith, and Steve Alten. Drawing on the work of scholars including Tanya Luhrmann, Lynn Schofield Clark, Peter Dendle, Joseph Laycock, Andrew May, John Miller and others I will show how stories of this type were a key component in the formulation of cryptozoology as a lived practice, not only serving as sources of inspiration but also as templates for the kind of monsters cryptozoologists would peruse, the kind of theories they would endorse about what such creatures might be, and how they – the cryptozoologists – should conduct themselves. Moreover I will discuss how cryptozoologists used the language and imagery of pulp-fiction to make their claims attractive and how in more than a few cases stories that were originally pieces of science-fiction became re-contextualized as actual events by cryptozoologists! In doing all of this I will endeavor to show that rather than being anti-science cryptozoologists instead long for an enchanted, comic book-style version of science which would allow them to fulfill their desires to be heroic explores of the unknown in a world which often seems too small and too well trotted.

Russell T. Davies, the head writer for the 2005 reboot of Doctor Who, changed many aspects of the show in order to modernize it to ensure cultural relevance. One of these updates incorporated the presence of GLBTQ characters and non-heteronormative characters, most notably the character of Captain Jack Harkness. This paper analyzes how the Russell T. Davies era of Doctor Who portrays queer characters, specifically Jack’s character and his place in the show by arguing that he is used both in a positive and negative way. It finds that Jack is used to provide positive examples of homosocial bonding, rooted in Eve Sedgwick’s theories from her book Between Men, while also finding that writers negatively use Jack’s character only using him to further the development of the Doctor and Rose’s relationship, supported by Judith Halberstam’s theory about heteronormative conversion fantasies in “The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly.” By studying the representation of queer characters written by a Queer writer, such as Russell T. Davies, one can advance discussions about if Queer characters are portrayed to negatively reinforce or positively undermine the patriarchal heteronormative male character. These conversations can hope to cause reform where writers create representations that fuel troubled on-screen identity representations among the GLBTQ community.

Very few contemporary television programs provoke spirited responses quite like the dystopian series Black Mirror. This provocative program, infamous for its myriad apocalyptic portrayals of humankind's relationship with an array of electronic and digital technologies, has proven quite adept at offering insightful commentary on a number of issues contemporary society is facing. This timely collection draws on innovative and interdisciplinary theoretical frameworks to provide unique perspectives about how confrontations with such issues should be considered and understood through the contemporary post-media condition that drives technology use.

THIS IS A PREPRINT OF THE CHAPTER PUBLISHED IN ASCARI, BAIESI, PALATINUS (EDS.): GOTHIC METAMORPHOSES ACROSS THE CENTURIES: CONTEXTS, LEGACIES, MEDIA. BERN: PETER LANG, 2020.

This chapter re-assesses the role Gothic legacy plays in contemporary film and television narratives of the Anthropocene, especially as regards human-machine interaction and possible interpretations of the (post-)human condition. The past decade has seen a proliferation of narratives depicting intersections between human and nonhuman (machine and / or animal). Such metamorphoses, both at a conceptual as well as a bio-technological level, render the future of the embodiment of the Uncanny par excellence – something that is both familiar/homely, and alien/fearful. This juxtaposition of the “tremendum” and the “fascinosum” mobilizes the iconographic and narrative legacy of the Gothic. Apart from mobilizing the formulas of Gothic-infused sci-fi fantasy, they shift attention from what intelligent machines can do to us to what humans can do to intelligent / sentient machines. I will argue that films like Blade Runner, Blade Runner 2049 and Ex Machina, or television programs like Humans, Extant, Westworld shift the focus from a future entity that will have learned to adapt to and navigate a radically changed ecosystem to the re-inscription of the all-too-human practices of racial and colonial stereotyping of hybridinal entities that are always-already haunted by the spectre of the Gothic.

From its comedic treatments of the 1960s original series, to the utopian endorsements of The Next Generation (1987–94), Voyager (1995) and Enterprise (2001–2005), and the more complex and often dystopian explorations of Deep Space Nine (1993–99), Discovery (2017–) and Picard (2020–); alternative meats and their implications for animal ethics have always been a prominent feature of Star Trek. Yet, while often alluded to throughout scholarship concerning alternative meat technology and science fictional animal ethics, the consistent engagement with these important themes within science fiction and utopia’s longest-running and most culturally prevalent property is yet to receive an extended scholarly examination. My article fills this gap by presenting a comprehensive analysis of the representation of alternative meats and animal ethics in Star Treks various series, showing an increasingly complex engagement with future food technology that incorporates differing cultural contexts and evolving animal ethics philosophies.

Sid Meier’s Civilization VI is a multi-player, turn-based strategy computer game in
which each new match rewrites the history of Earth’s Anthropocene. The recent release of the Civilization VI: Gathering Storm expansion introduced new civilisation avatars and broadened Civilization VI’s portrayal of the environment by adding weather and geological events that complicate gameplay. The shift in ecological representation that Gathering Storm introduced may be of particular interest to humanities researchers and instructors, for when gameplay is informed by recent research in postcolonial ecocriticism and the environmental humanities it becomes apparent that the game’s vision of the world is characterised not so much by a twenty-first-century global consciousness aimed at social justice and humane reform, as by a more inclusive version of the Eurocentric imperialism of nineteenth-century thinkers. For this reason, Civilization VI: Gathering Storm is potentially a powerful teaching tool, because its representational shortcomings open its assumptions to questioning and critique informed by recent humanities research.

Steven T. Brown, Tokyo Cyberpunk: Posthumanism in Japanese Visual Culture. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010. ix + 256pp. US$31.00 (pbk).Now four years old, Steven T. Brown's Tokyo Cyberpunk remains one of the two or three best resources in English for those interested in sf anime. The others - Christopher Bolton, Istvan Csicsery-Ronay, Jr and Takayuki Tatsumi's Robot Ghosts and Wired Dreams (2007), Brown's own Cinema Anime (2006) - are essay collections, making Tokyo Cyberpunk the only extended study of sf anime to date. Although each of its chapters focuses on a different set of texts, the conclusion pulls together arguments and insights from all of them to reach some large-scale conclusions about how the posthuman is envisioned and theorised in Japanese anime. For in-depth explorations of important anime films and series from the last thirty years, there really is nothing comparable.Brown's study presents sf anime the way most viewers experience it: as part of an sf-inflected discursive field that includes related media forms, such as live action films (especially those in which CGI blurs the boundaries between animation and live action), and visual art, such as the work of Hans Bellmer and H.R. Giger, and related cinema genres, such as body horror and surrealism. Some readers might prefer a tighter focus on the anime medium and the sf genre, but Brown contends in his introduction that to understand the 'lines of flight that [Japanese sf films] set into motion in response to the mechanisms of advanced capitalism, globalization, and emerging imaging and telecommunications technologies' they must be analysed 'through their rhizomatic connections with other anime, other films, other works of art, and other discursive formations' (9). Particularly because of the 'network of small narratives' (8) that characterises most sf anime, he argues that a non-hierar- chical, non-teleological approach is more appropriate than one that attempts to unearth deep meanings or grand narratives.What this sexily theoretical, postmodern-sounding methodology allows Brown to do is, in fact, an old standby of literary studies: a series of close readings of a small number of narrative texts. The majority of the slim volume (185 pages excluding notes and index) is taken up with close readings of selected sf Japanese films and their rhizomatic connections. The chapter on the (live-action) film Tetsuo: The Body Hammer (Tsukamoto Japan 1992), for example, provides detailed plot summaries and scene-by-scene analyses of David Cronenberg's The Fly (USA 1986) and Videodrome (Canada 1993) as well as Tetsuo. With brief but important exceptions, only cursory attention is given to the media characteristics of anime, CGI or live-action film, and there is little analysis of cinematic technique. (Brown does, however, consider the sound design of several of the films under discussion - a heretofore understudied aspect of the cinematic experience.)The recent work of Thomas LaMarre and Thomas Looser insists that an intensive focus on the technology of the medium is a necessary part of any study of anime; all else is characterised as 'book reports'. While LaMarre and Looser do not mention any names, it is possible that Brown's penchant for close readings and relative inattention to details of media technology would cast this study into the 'book report' bin, but this would be an unfair dispar- agement of Brown's approach. Brown's focus is on cultural and philosophical posthumanism - 'posthumanism as critical theorization of analytical or ontological positions' as it 'enters into cultural forms and practices' (159), and particularly the ways those cultural forms and practices transcend national boundaries while also being inflected by specific national histories. Exploring the ways that sf anime (and live-action) films defamiliarise and challenge the philosophical underpinnings of technoscience and global capitalism, as this study does, is surely a worthwhile goal. …

Animation and special effects studios today are making increasing use of motion capture, computer-generated imagery (CGI), and digital puppetry in television, theatre, commercial films, and videogames. As CGI grows ever more capable and pliant, it is not only changing the way actors and puppets show up in various media, it is enabling animated characters to perform like puppets and vice versa. Actors are controlling cartoon characters, while visual-effects teams are seamlessly mingling objects with images, blurring the lines between acting, animation, puppetry, and special effects. Hybrids are appearing in a range of environments, including live theatre, theme parks, and - most commonly - fantasy films. In the latter, animation and puppetry are sometimes combined to achieve human likeness through motion capture technology. In this essay, I will argue that successful hybrids are radically transforming what puppetry and animation can do. In some cases, however, where these fusions are used to achieve naturalistic human likeness, their creators are setting aside what is most advantageous about puppetry and animation, thus diminishing their creative impact.
Published in The Routledge Companion to Puppetry and Material Performance (2014), ed. Dassia N. Posner, Claudia Orenstein, and John Bell.

Popular culture could be understood as a political battleground where conflicting meanings are inscribed into the "ordinary objects" that constitute that public sphere. This is also true for science fiction television series. This article critically examines how political matters and ethical agencies are represented within The Expanse, a series that takes place within a speculative twenty-fourth century milky way. Firstly, I will situate The Expanse within its generic "system of reference." Then, I will illustrate how political matters are represented as conjoined with the ethical. While the ethical refers to actions of persons, politics refers to fictional conceptions of what Tristan Garcia's terms we-ourselves, understood as conflicting and overlapping conceptions of "we." The conjunction between the political and the ethical in The Expanse is spatiotemporal: the characters, the events they are entangled in, and the spaces that connect discrete events develop through fictional and literal time. I argue that the science fictional representations of "we-ourselves," and the specific spatiotemporal representational capacities of the television series format, can be understood through the application of Mikhail Bakhtin's concepts of the chronotope and the dialogic. That is, The Expanse's we-representations are chronotopic and the refractive rhetoric of television is dialogic.

Songs play a significant role in the narrative and thematics of Suzanne Collins’s The Hunger Games (2008), its 2012 film adaptation of the same name and ancillary media texts released to support the film. One particular diegetic composition, known as ‘The Meadow Song’, plays an important role in the novel’s and film’s audioscapes, serving to evoke the complex cultural associations of the Appalachia region that has transitioned into District 12 in The Hunger Games’ dystopian future. Ancillary media texts, particularly the film’s lead promotional single, Taylor Swift and The Civil Wars’ performance of ‘Safe and Sound’ (and its accompanying music video), reinforce this connection. Additionally, the melody of ‘The Meadow Song’ plays a key role in representing the interaction of humans with the bio-engineered woodland arena in which extended combat tournament occurs (particularly through the futuristic conceit of biologically engineered birds that imitate human song). In this manner, songs represent an unusually important thematic element of the early franchise’s various media texts, demonstrating how song elements can be closely integrated with plot and thematics, rather than simply serving as peripheral sonic adornments.

The figure of the astronaut mother in sf represents a site of confluence between the seemingly incompatible cultural ideals and archetypes of the astronaut and the mother. These two identities are perceived to exist on opposite ends of the continuum between traditional binary conceptions of science and nature, masculinity and femininity, rationality and irrationality, detachment and attachment, technology and biology, and of course – space and the Earth. Contemporary sf stories struggle to merge these identities without breaking the mother in the process of making her an astronaut. In order to explore the complexities of the astronaut-mother figure, this article provides a close reading of four female astronaut characters in sf whose motherhood stories are constructed in strikingly similar ways: Ellen Ripley (Sigourney Weaver) in James Cameron’s special edition of Aliens (1992), Dr Ryan Stone (Sandra Bullock) in Alfonso Cuarón’s Gravity (2013), Dr Molly Woods (Halle Berry) in the television series Extant (2014–15) and Ava Hamilton (Gugu Mbatha-Raw) in The Cloverfield Paradox (2018). Each of these narratives features a female protagonist who goes to space, whose job is the impetus for her space journey, and whose backstory features a dead child.

The experience of game intrinsic space is an architectural mode of perception more congruent to actual experiences of physically real architecture than to filmic space. This paper thus centres on the aesthetics of production, concerning the game worlds’ geometry, level structures and game mechanics, within the broader context of how sf and computer games are inextricably merged. This is to investigate how game intrinsic spaces communicate properties of sf or a media-specific ‘science fiction-ness’ through their aesthetics and digital condition. By first building a foundation on the topic of singular space and its liminality, I will then proceed with a few remarks on sf theory, sf imagery and the staging of (im)possible worlds in relation to the concept of ontological possibility space. For this purpose, I refer to two authors of sf theory: Vivian Sobchack and Simon Spiegel. Based on these two sections, I will give an introductory overview on game intrinsic space, its non-linear prop...

Why study television acting? While works focusing on cinema performance have increased in recent years, small screen drama has been largely neglected – despite the fact that developments in acting style provide as valuable an index of the times and places in which they were created as any other aspect of production. The Changing Spaces of Television Acting addresses this lack by providing an overview of historical changes in performance style from the live era to the present day.

Utilised as case studies are programmes from three diverse eras of television production: The Quatermass Experiment (BBC, 1953), which was transmitted live; Doctor Who (BBC, 1963-89), pre-recorded ‘as live’ on videotape; and Survivors (BBC, 1975-77), which swiftly adopted an Outside Broadcast ‘rehearse/record’ model. Each was also re-made in the 2000s, allowing for both a chronological study and a ‘then-and-now’ comparison of television acting. Archive research into production and reception is combined with textual analysis and interviews with actors and production personnel to examine the effects of the shift from multi-camera studio production to single camera film location work.

The result is the first book to investigate not only changes in acting style for television drama, but also the underlying factors which influenced them, from production process and technology to direction, actor training and experience. Only by fully comprehending the conditions under which performances are produced can we understand and appreciate the resulting acting style; The Changing Spaces of Television Acting is the first book to comprehensively address this neglected area of research.

Sponsored by The Association for the Advancement of Scholarship and Teaching of the Medieval in Popular Culture, the Medieval Studies on Screen blog (formerly Medieval Studies at the Movies) supplants an earlier discussion list and is intended as a gateway to representations of the medieval on film, television, computers, and portable electronic devices.

Eric Cazdyn, The Already Dead: The New Time of Politics, Culture, and Illness. Durham: Duke UP, 2012. 204pp. US$23.95 (pbk).Eric Cazdyn's The Already Dead discusses how three areas of Western society - illness, politics and the arts, particularly in the US and Canada - are completely engrained in the logic, as well as symptoms, of capitalism. His thesis is quite complex, requiring more than half of the book to set up the terms of his discussion. And given his point that these areas work in consort, affect one another and are affected by one another, there is more than a single aim to the book. If there is a central point to the book, however, it is probably a hope for the death of society as we know it - a move to end the chronic management of illness and capital, to accept that we are 'already dead' and that revolution is conceptually possible to imagine if not currently accessible. Cazdyn argues that by managing the symptoms of the disease of capital, such as corrupt business officials and financial crises, in the same way that we do terminal illnesses like cancer and HIV/AIDS, we get caught up in the management of the disease, thus making it chronic and forgetting about the cure - the end of capitalism itself. Cazdyn makes his case by examining the management of illness in the US and Canada and its sociopolitical ramifications, especially for immigrants and people seeking permanent residency in either country. Along with political theory and a practical examination of the medical system in the West, Cazdyn makes use of psychoanalytic theory, referring to a variety of visual narratives to complement his analysis of the multifaceted problem of crisis management and its application in the nation-state as well as the global economy. The Already Dead is organised into three chapters that highlight the new terms Cazdyn establishes in the introduction: The New Chronic, The Global Abyss and The Already Dead.It is essential to remember when reading The Already Dead that Cazdyn is, at all times, speaking simultaneously of the medical, political and artistic realms of Western culture. While each chapter can be linked more explicitly to one of these areas ('The New Chronic' to the medical, 'The Global Abyss' to the political and 'The Already Dead' to the arts), Cazdyn takes pains to make clear how each area functions within and as part of the others. While some might find Cazdyn's argument somewhat repetitive, I found his frequent return to the key points of each section to be imperative in keeping track of his complex presentation style. It may be for this reason that I found the first and longest chapter, 'The New Chronic', to be the strongest.The New Chronic as a concept speaks to the current society of management in which we fail to search for a cure, or accept death or revolution in the name of maintaining the status quo. Management is privileged over cure or fixing the root cause of the problem, and Cazdyn sees this at work in both medical and political practice. Underlying Cazdyn's entire argument is the fact that, when all is said and done, management is more lucrative than cure. The circular nature of this perpetual chronic - in which one symptom is managed while another creeps up - may be a reflection of capital's tendency to reproduce itself. Cazdyn speaks of this in terms of dependency on the system: 'Every level of society is stabilized on an antiretroviral cocktail. Every person is safe, like a diabetic on insulin' (13). If we understand this to be true - and it is hard not to - we can also see that if something in the system fails, so too does the stability of that system. The chronic patient becomes terminal. The chronic society collapses. In this way, it is easy to understand capitalism as a sickness - one that plagues its society with a refusal to suffer, to feel, to die.Having established the idea that crisis is no longer a short-term event but a long-haul condition to be managed, Cazdyn speaks to how this new chronic affects the global economy (and, from that, the social experience that is affected by the capitalist-dominated economy). …

This article examines several 2011 art/indie films that feature depressed protagonists, their families and homes, in science-fictional end-of-the-world scenarios. Along with locating their narratives in personal and domestic frameworks, these films alter sf’s conventional scale and shift its epistemological orientation from the scientist to the depressive. They thereby revise the genre according to neoliberal logic wherein all issues come down to the individual and family. At the same time, the looming world’s end suspends any credible reference to neoliberal values of utility and instrumentalism. With no future, there is no utility. A trenchant critique of neoliberal futurity thus emerges from the personal and domestic frameworks represented in these films.