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Michael Winterbottom is the most prolific and the most audacious of British filmmakers in the last twenty years. His television career began in the cutting-rooms at Thames Television, and his first directing experience was on the Thames TV documentaries,
inhabit and, most significantly for the context of the present book, our familial and sexual relations. 3 This chapter looks towards the futures of incest through the lens of science fiction. By examining the depiction of incest in three narratives concerned with different posthuman technologies of reproduction and embodiment – androids ( Abiogenesis ), genetic cloning ( Plan for Chaos ), and artificial
TNWC06 16/11/06 11:26 AM Page 153 6 ‘Damn the photon torpedoes!’ Star Trek and the transfiguration of naval history ‘If any enemy planes appear, shoot ’em down in a friendly fashion.’ (Admiral William Halsey, 1943)1 The science fiction navy While the US Navy’s varied and controversial roles in the Cold War received partial, negative, evasive or allegorical representations in the feature films of that period, a positive and celebratory depiction of the Navy’s activities and traditions can be found in the contemporaneous television series, Star Trek. Initially
science fiction its ontological counterpart (McHale, 1987 : 16), does the modification of the former by the latter in Lethem’s novel represent some kind of evolution of the detective genre, equipping it to navigate its way through and speak more eloquently to a world characterised by hybridity, fluidity, uncertainty, simulation and multiple subjectivities? This is a world, as Adam Roberts observes (Roberts, 2006 : 28
, and while resilience can be a measure of the abiding strengths of natural systems, it can also result in new environmental woes in its own right (such as a preponderance of invasive Phragmites reeds, and the further decline of megafauna like elephants that I hinted at above). Science fiction, speculative fiction and the pre-posterous historical novel That all four of the terms I just spent some time defining are marked, in varying degrees, by ambiguity underscores their structural importance to the narratives in which they are employed as tropes, owing to a
This chapter argues that the US science fiction adventure series The Time Tunnel (1966–67) is about television: about the capabilities of the medium, the experience of watching it and the technological apparatus that television comprises. Visually, the series often adopts a grandiose, excessive visual style, especially in the opening episode focused on here. Key images are characterised by a sense of scale and visual spectacle, and the format seems calculated to advertise the attractions of colour television and the episodic adventure
Much science fiction is pure Romance. Romance is the story of an elsewhere . (Umberto Eco, Reflections on The Name of the Rose ) Among examples in the relatively unusual genre of early works of Russian science fiction are to be found stories by Vladimir Odoevsky. 1 Two works of his are concerned with the impending catastrophic approach of a comet to the Earth. In an early story of just five pages, ‘Two
In this chapter questions about AI that ELIZA foregrounded are explored in new places and times – in science fiction, which has long dealt in AI, singularity, and the computational. SF claims a privileged relationship to the technological future, and the tax on dissenting projections is lower than that for the apostates of computer science and industry. More specifically, it claims the privilege that comes with attention. It attends to the future, it explores, invents, and/or speculates on possible forms of life. Through the form of attention
intersects with existing narrative structures, as often occurs in television. Due to the episodic nature of television serials, adaptations of Frankenstein that appear as part of existing narrative arcs must take a more fragmented approach to translating Shelley’s tale to the small screen. In a number of science-fiction, fantasy, and horror television shows, motivic elements from Frankenstein – characters, plot points, symbols, and themes – tend to appear in one, almost ubiquitous episode. Rather than taking place over the course of the entire
treating subjects of contemporary significance; and there are a road movie, a musical, a science-fiction thriller, a sex drama, and films in the humanist/realist mode. Mere generic diversity would not, of itself, be a matter for critical applause. However, arguably, no other British director, certainly not in recent times, has shown accomplishment over such a genre range. Contemporaries such as Ken Loach, Mike Leigh and Shane