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Moon (1995), which collides the road narrative with dystopian science fiction, the road performs this metaphorical function. Mikhail Bakhtin cites the road as an example of a literary chronotope, something he defines as ‘the primary means for materializing time in space … providing the ground essential for the showing forth, the representability of events’ (Bakhtin, 2004 : 250). On the road, he
of Resnais’s films commercially (Monaco 1979 :121) (for Prédal it is a testing and stifling film (Prédal 1996 :175), for Kreidl it is told ‘lethargically’ (Kreidl 1977 : 155)). Resnais collaborated with Jacques Sternberg, a writer of science fiction, whom he met at a mutual friend’s house. Sternberg’s script sometimes creates a self-conscious ‘Resnais’ film where Ridder is asked, for example, ‘Où étiez-vous l
10 Behind the Erin curtain In his 1959 science fiction novel Ossian’s Ride Fred Hoyle imagined a near-future Ireland that has perplexed the outside world.1 The year is 1970. How could, a young scientist is asked by the British secret service, such an apparently backward country suddenly manifest bewilderingly advanced technology? The answer seems to lie beyond a mysterious cordon that extends from Tarbert on the Shannon Estuary via Kanturk and Macroom to the south Kerry coast. Every nation on earth was directing 95 per cent of its undercover activity to Ireland
Luc Besson’s Le Cinquième Elément appears in some respects to mark both a new departure in his work and the closure of a circle. Closure because in this film Besson returns to the generic form that launched his career, the science fiction. New departure or beginning of a new cycle because of the size of the undertaking (the budget of $90 million, cast size and the huge number of technical staff
Chapter 5 Iain Banks: improbable possibilities One of the reasons I loved Kafka was his ability to describe, in very naturalistic, very controlled prose, a situation beyond belief. (Ian McEwan in Grimes, 1992) Since his disturbing debut The Wasp Factory in 1984 Iain Banks’s fiction has often encompassed the taboo and excessive. While simultaneously establishing himself as award-winning science fiction writer Iain M. Banks, Banks’s ‘mainstream’ fiction, which provides the focus for this chapter, is notable for its grotesque use of horror, black humour and games
disappeared, and the new writers of adventure stories preferred to work in the more traditional mode of historical romance, or to experiment in fantasy and science fiction. It is significant that even the one great exception to this decline, W. E. Johns, who did retain his popularity into the 1960s, himself turned to writing science fiction from 1954. 6 The earliest writers in the pre-1914 phase owe a good deal
strategy for bringing about social change. To be a socially responsible person, Nero must ‘kick the habit’, turn away from the private prison world of memory in order to live productively in the public world. This negative depiction of memory is more than just the conceit of a science fiction film. The image of memory as an obstacle to, rather than a catalyst for, progressive
. 5 Ibid., p. 90. 6 Ibid., p. 103. 7 The 1992 Lambda Award for Gay Men’s Science Fiction/Fantasy went to China Mountain Zhang by Maureen F. McHugh. See www.lambdaliterary.org/awards/previous_winners/paw_1992_1995.html
crudely homogenises the diversity of his output. One way of marking this range comes from understanding that Gilliam employs an extraordinary variety of genres: medieval comedy; children’s historical adventure; dystopian satire; the fantastic voyage; science fiction; Gonzo Journalism; fairy tale; and gothic horror. Each genre rejects or reworks the norms of realism, but in distinct ways, so that the
, they have continued to need, despise and adore each other in their tale of creation, destruction, and pursuit. Just as the old seafarer in Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s Rime of the Ancient Mariner (1798) is cursed to tell his sorry tale again and again – and burden the listener in the process – so popular culture has endlessly retold the story of Frankenstein . Like all great myths and legends, Frankenstein thrives through its adaptability. Frankenstein has straddled the modern genres of horror and science fiction more successfully than any other single tale, but