Alien Zone II

Science fiction cinema is too often left at the margins of serious critical film study. While a handful of films are the subject of general theoretical works, the genre as a whole, and especially its cinematic aspects, are neglected in favor of straightforward considerations of character and narrative. Alien Zone 2 redresses this imbalance by looking at the ways in which contemporary science fiction cinema transforms the themes and conventions of the genre itself. In many ways a companion volume to Alien Zone, it pursues theoretical issues opened up in the earlier book but also explores fresh territory with an eye that is both reflective and interventionist. Visionary cities, psycho-cybernetics, internet fandom, the convergence of science fiction literature and science fiction film, and bodybuilder stardom are all brought under its gaze.

Contributors: Will Brooker, Scott Bukatman, Catherine Constable, David Desser, Barry Keith Grant, Brooks Landon, Linda Mizejewski, Vivian Sobchack, Claudia Springer, Janet Staiger, Garrett Stewart.

In his poem "Ozymandias," Percy Bysshe Shelley imagined discovering a stone torso from millennia past and reading the (ironic) inscription, "Look on me, ye mighty, and dread." According to most of the writers in this probing collection of essays, each generation gets hooked on the utopian and dystopian visions of the future for the same reason--because they offer the chilling insight that our world is the fragments of futures to come. Since Georges Melies's Voyage to the Moon (1902), science fiction movies have speculated about what life in other places and times would be like. Under editor Annette Kuhn's direction, the contributors to Alien Zone 2 have taken it upon themselves to think out loud about how "space" works in sci-fi movies like Brazil, Blade Runner, Total Recall, Metropolis, and the Alien series. The way these films structure cities, conceptualize culture, and imagine psyches generally falls, it turns out, into a category that UCLA professor Vivian Sobchak calls "future noir," featuring terrifying visions of cities in which a faceless multinational power sits atop thrillingly disenfranchised lumps of humanity. Distressing as this scenario sounds, most of the writers take it as an opportunity to reinvigorate our sense of the possibilities of the present, whether political, aesthetic, or otherwise. Writing about race, women, cyborgs, or consumer-culture, they key in on the genius in these movies that has at once invented a three-dimensional world and performed a kind of radical keratotomy on our own vision of things. Some academic jargon in the collection may be off-putting, but razor-sharp insights are here in abundance. --Lyall Bush

This book deals with science fiction and the cinema and how they helped each other develop over the decades. With chapters on bodybuilders, the internet, cities, crazy machines, and how new technology has changed how we make movies and how the movies present technology you can't help but look at science fiction in the cinema with a completely different light.