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the street with a suitable handheld device – transformed the fundamentals of human connectivity in the electronic age. Significantly, in explaining the impact of the Net on our lives and consciousness, not only architects and urbanists but also writers in other fields commonly fall back on metaphors originating in the physical and spatial world of cities and urban communities, as well as other analogies with familiar cultural and social concepts. Even when the most fervent devotees of the Net, including science fiction writers like the much-quoted William Gibson,1
Things are becoming less and less impossible. ( Collected Stories , 60) C HARACTERISING Carey’s stories takes us to the heart of his fictional practice. Most adopt a mixture of narrative modes, a central feature of his writing. They contain elements of science fiction, fantasy, fable and satire. Like much science fiction, many are explorations of ideas and possibilities, experiments in subversive thinking or ‘cognitive estrangement’. 1 Carey has described them as ‘a collection of “what if” stories’, 2 which
confusions of an individual mind. Caligari is a both/and character: both head of the asylum and its most dangerous inhabitant, both scientist and necromancer, both villain and hero, a series of individually simple identities made complex by their plurality and combination. This reference to Caligari lurches the sequence sideways into an alternative world. Early Doctor Who stories are often divided according to a simplistic critical schema into either science fiction adventures or historicals. According to this taxonomy, ‘The Gunfighters’ is a
perhaps not quite as simply structured. … [W]e may for now at least have found the illusion, the effect, of controlling, reversing, slowing, speeding and repeating time.’42 The technology of capitalism, then, those inventions which are driven by an economy’s insatiable need 204 Thomas Pynchon to create and market, can also bring about transgressions in its fundamental laws. Against the Day, with its self-conscious awareness of science-fiction conventions and time-travelling possibilities, offers up a challenge to linearity’s dominance, formally and thematically
working on numbered episode OL Off-line 2An 2 teams of animators working Sci-fi Recording day for science- fiction fantasy sequences CS Director completes camera script PR (Executive) Producers’ run AC1 Autoconform and episode number TR Technical run FX Digital video effects session FC Fine cut off-line with Executives’ notes Mu1 Composer writing and recording music to picture for numbered episode Studio (no.) Studio recording day; two episodes recorded over the two days TL Tracklay sound effects
critically judged or characterised by it. Lanark: A Life in Four Books (1981) Lanark, a large (561 pages) and complex novel, has been included in discussions of Scottish literature, urban writing, science fiction and postmodernism. The last of these terms is most problematic, especially if we follow Fredric Jameson’s description of postmodernism as ‘an alarming and
Truth In the late 1930s, Orson Welles already had a distinguished and exceptionally brilliant career in theatre and in radio theatre while still in his late teens and early twenties. He became famous, indeed infamous, by a radio play based on the science fiction novel The War of the Worlds by the British novelist H.G. Wells. Welles dramatised the H.G. Wells novel as a radio documentary of an invasion by Martians of the United States that parodied the form: the report of the fictional invasion was presented as a news event taking place at the moment of broadcast
decade after Barbados Quest, the intervening years having been occupied with television series, he ventured into the science-fiction genre, which must have seemed remote from his Gainsborough days. The first of the two, Frozen Alive, was a surprisingly effective example of the genre on a presumably limited budget, while Spaceflight shows more obvious signs of straitened circumstances. However, these two and the thrillers reveal a certain generic dexterity on Knowles’s part and the first three particularly reveal his story-telling skills to be still intact. They belong
, Dark angel ’s characters were all ostensibly in their late teens or early twenties, trying to earn a living and work out where they fit in a post-apocalyptic Seattle in the aftermath of an Electro-Magnetic Pulse that cripples the United States of America. One of the most interesting aspects of the series is its mix of various generic tropes, from detective and crime fiction to science fiction (hereafter referred to as ‘sf’). This is perhaps not surprising: Cameron’s film credits included Terminator, Aliens and Strange days , whereas Eglee
possibilities spanning the history of cinema that includes all manner of stories, from early serials to the most recent science fiction, via ‘minor Z movies’ à la Samuel Fuller (Godard 1965: n.p.). When scouting locations, Godard resembles a scrap metal merchant with a keen eye for sites that can inspire miniature scenes like the one of the Joinville circus or the night-time scene ‘in front of a “New Wave” shop window near Pigalle’ (de Baecque 2010: 257), both in Bande à part. Week-end, for that matter, opens with the announcement: ‘A film found on the scrap heap.’ Mirroring