American Science Fiction Film and Television

摘要

Science fiction film and television have become hot topics for publication, especially among academic presses, as science fiction programming— thanks in part to cable television's Syfy channel—has multiplied, as college courses on science fiction and media have proliferated, and as cultural crit-ics have recognized that science fiction may be the genre best situated to take the measure of postmodern culture. Lincoln Geraghty's American Sci-ence Fiction Film and Television is very much a part of this wave in its self-described effort at providing a "critical history of late-twentieth-century American science fiction film and television" from the vantage of "cultural, industrial, political and social concerns" (p. 1). It provides a useful survey of the form, links its cinematic and televisual versions, and, while making no pretense at surveying all science fiction films and television series pro-duced over the last fifty to sixty years, it covers far more examples than most texts. At the same time, in keeping with its largely "cultural" overview, it restricts its focus to American films and series, addressing them through a kind of patchwork quilt of commentaries drawn from a wide variety of cultural readings of the form.