Overview

Science Fiction looks at the key themes and issues at work within films in this genre and then examines popular and famous films that demonstrate these concerns. Areas discussed with sample films include: Utopia/Dystopia - Just Imagine (1930); V for Vendetta (2005) Outer Space - 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968); Voyage a travers l'impossible (1904) Apocalypse - Mad Max (1979); The Matrix (1999) Mad Science - Frankenstein (1931); Jurassic Park (1993) Monsters and Aliens - King Kong (2005); Alien (1979) Replication - Blade Runner (1982); I, Robot (2004) Time Travel - The Time Machine (1960 & 2002); Back to the Future (1985) Mark Bould also considers science fiction film and its relation to culture and offers a historical overview with chronology, contextualising science fiction within a socio-cultural, political or national landscape.

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9780415458115

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'Its scope is amazing...It seems as if Bould has seen every science-fiction film ever made-and also, even more impressively, that he vividly remembers pretty much everything that he has seen...There is something wonderfully manic about how the book works through its argument... Mark Bould's account of sf cinema is so rich, and so cognitively and affectively estranging, that it approaches the status of a superior sf text in its own right. While obviously a work of criticism need not mimic the condition of that which it examines and to which it refers-and indeed, the attempt to do so is often fraught with peril-I think that in this case Bould has succeeded. Once I started reading, I found the book difficult to put down; and I quickly populated my Netflix queue with many of the films described in its pages that I had not already seen. In what other text can one peruse an account of orgiastic gender-role reversals in British psychedelic fantasies of the 1960s and 1970s, followed in the space of just a few pages by a summary of the alienating, depressing, and sterile non-spaces of neoliberal late modernity, as described by the anthropologist Marc Auge? Mark Bould has produced a consummate work of careful and sober scholarship, one that at the same time induces in the reader a condition of dizziness and delirium.' Steven Shaviro, Science Fiction Studies

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Mark Bould

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