Science Fiction

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Science Fiction

LITERARY ROOTS
THE GOLDEN AGE OF THE 1950s
SOCIAL CRITIQUE
SCHOLARLY CRITICISM
SCIENCE FICTION GOES BIG BUDGET
FURTHER READING

Believing that films were strictly for entertainment, Golden Age film producer Sam Goldywn is reputed to have said, "If you want to send a message, use Western Union." Notwithstanding a handful of so-called social problem films, Hollywood films do tend more toward the innocuous than the politically confrontational. Science fiction films, though, are often notable for their idea-driven narratives; social commentary, although not always profound, is a frequent element of sci-fi. It is not unusual for even low-budget, low-concept science fiction films to "send messages" about human nature or the relationship of humans and machines. Their lessons may be conveyed with all the subtlety of a Western Union telegram, but there is no denying that good science fiction films try harder than other genres to ask "deep" questions: Why are we here? What is our future? Will technology save or destroy us?

Though science fiction films vary widely in their politics and aesthetics, they share some key recurring elements. Stories often center on space travel, encounters with alien life-forms, and time travel. Settings are often futuristic and dystopic. Technology is notably advanced (in many futuristic societies) or absent (in post-apocalyptic societies destroyed by technological forces such as atom bombs). Spectacular sets, costumes, and special effects are common, though by no means de rigueur.

With its frequent focus on alien monsters and fantastic special effects, science fiction overlaps with two other genres, fantasy and horror. Indeed, some movies simultaneously embody both horror and science fiction, such as The Thing (1982), Planet of the Vampires (1965), The Fiend Without a Face (1958), and Alien (1979). It is futile to split hairs debating whether a film is truly science fiction, since so many movies mix elements of SF with horror and fantasy. It makes more sense to consider science fiction (like most genres) as existing on a continuum, where some films are mostly science fiction, and others contain only a few science fiction elements. As a rule of thumb, it is helpful to remember that pure fantasy films, such as The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring (2001), or pure horror films like Dracula (1931) tend to emphasize the power of magic and the supernatural, while pure science fiction films, such as The Andromeda Strain (1971), emphasize both the power of technology and scientific innovation and the power of the rational human mind.

Though science fiction films have a history of criticizing technology, they themselves frequently depend on the most advanced technological innovations. Stanley Kubrick's (1928–1999) 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968), for example, presented a very sophisticated 3-D simulation of outer space and spacecrafts. The film famously opens with apes using bones as tools, thus taking the first step toward evolving into humans. A bone tossed up into the air visually segues into a spinning spacecraft in the year 2001. With its spectacular visual celebration of scientific advancement, the film might initially appear to be pro-technology, but its villain is a murderous computer, HAL. Humankind's greatest technological achievement becomes its undoing, paralleling the earlier technological breakthrough, the bone, which was used by one ape to murder another. Evolution is presented, on some level, as devolution. For many viewers, however, 2001's spectacular effects blunt its negative presentation of HAL; it is hard to interpret such a technologically sophisticated film as offering an unalloyed critique of the dangers of technological achievement.

Arguably, some of the best science fiction critiques of technology are in lower budget films such as Mad Max (1979) and A Boy and His Dog (1975), where wars have desolated the planet. Paralleling Kubrick's apes in their primitive ferocity, survivors are forced to make do with whatever technology they can scrounge up. The Omega Man (1971) is a post-apocalyptic film in which most of humanity has been destroyed by germ warfare. The hero is technologically sophisticated, while his brutal foes use primitive weapons and are explicitly opposed to technological advances. The movie is unique for being both post-apocalyptic and pro-technology. Other post-apocalyptic films, such as On the Beach (1959), deemphasize technological critique in favor of a focus on psychological realism and social analysis. Whether overt or more subtle, most science fiction films include some consideration of the positive or negative implications of technological and scientific achievements.

LITERARY ROOTS

Mary Shelley's (1797–1851) Frankenstein (1818) is often cited as a crucial literary antecedent to sci-fi films. The novel is of particular interest because of its portrayal of creating life from non-living materials and, equally importantly, because of Shelley's investigation of the ethical ramifications of the human (specifically male) creation of life. Later science fiction narratives about robots, cyborgs, artificial intelligence, and cloning clearly owe a debt to Shelley, though few if any authors have surpassed her intense exploration of the sublime natural world. Shelley's legacy can also be found in her tender description of the monster, who is tormented by his own nature. It is here that we find the roots of films in which "unnatural" beings—the replicants of Blade Runner (1982) and the scientist-turned-monster of The Fly (1958, 1986)—question the validity of their very existence. Shelley is one of the few female writers whose ideas have obviously impacted science fiction film; though there are numerous popular feminist authors—such as Ursula K. Le Guin (b. 1929) and Octavia Butler (1947–2006)—and women, in general, are avid science fiction readers, but as a film genre sci-fi has generally targeted a male demographic.

Many credit Jules Verne (1828–1905) as the true creator of modern science fiction, though one can also trace the genre's roots farther back to seventeenth-century imaginary voyage literature, and even further back to Thomas More's Utopia (1516). Verne's nineteenth-century French novels celebrated technological achievement, describing travel beneath the sea and to the moon in language indicating that he believed such fantastic voyages could actually take place. Verne based his writing on research, which lent a nonfiction quality to his work. He clearly influenced French director Georges Méliès's (1861–1938) technologically optimistic films of the early 1900s, and later films based on his books, such as 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea (1954), offered visual celebrations of futuristic machines. Dystopic films such as Soylent Green (1973) and The Terminator (1984) reacted against this earlier celebratory vision, while many more recent science fiction films, such as Independence Day (1996) and George Lucas's (b. 1944) Star Wars franchise, have shifted back towards Verne's vision of technology at the service of humankind.

A number of books by prolific British author H. G. Wells (1866–1946)—such as The Time Machine (1895), The Invisible Man (1897), War of the Worlds (1898), and The Shape of Things to Come (1933)—have been made into films. Wells's War of the Worlds tells the story of a catastrophic alien invasion; with their superior weaponry, the aliens destroy much of the planet until they are finally defeated not by human ingenuity but by their own lacking immune systems: they are killed by earthly bacterial infection. The 1953 film version drains the story of its pessimism, turning it into a Christian allegory. The beleaguered humans hole up in a church and upon emerging and discovering the sickly, fading invaders declare a triumph for God and the human spirit, an ending which no doubt would have appalled Wells, who died a confirmed atheist. Orson Welles's 1938 radio adaptation stays closer to the tone of the original but is less famous as a successful adaptation than as a scandalous event. A number of listeners who tuned into the middle of the program thought that aliens actually had invaded New Jersey, and panic ensued. H. G. Wells himself was heavily involved behind the scenes in the production of Things to Come (1936). The movie pictures a post-apocalyptic world in which primitive technophobic masses are dominated by elite hi-tech rulers who value the state over the individual. Considered a landmark in cinematic design because of its futuristic sets, the film has been read both as a warning about fascism and as a celebration of fascism. The latter seems more plausible, given Wells's own support of the idea of rule by a technocratic elite, which he conceptualized as "liberal fascism."

Many of the sci-fi authors who had some influence on films were first published in American pulp magazines such as Amazing Stories and Science Wonder Stories, which appeared in the 1920s. Comics such as Buck Rogers in the Twenty-Fifth Century and Flash Gordon built on the popularity of the pulps, and the comics were translated to film in the serial shorts of the 1930s and 1940s. Though these futuristic adventure films did not explore the serious themes of science fiction, they did provide some of the character types and visual iconography that would surface in post-war sci-fi cinema. George Lucas tellingly mocks the optimism of the serials by opening his own dark THX-1138 (1971) with a cheery Buck Rogers theatrical trailer.

Isaac Asimov (1920–1992), who wrote hundreds of books, published most of his early work in pulp magazines. Though little of his fiction has been directly translated to film, his conceptualization of the Three Laws of Robotics (see his collection I, Robot [1950]) has been influential. Frustrated by reading endless stories of robots gone amuck, Asimov postulated that: 1) A robot may not injure a human being, or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm; 2) A robot must obey the orders given it by human beings except where such orders would conflict with the First Law; and 3) A robot must protect its own existence as long as such protection does not conflict with the First or Second Law. Filmic robots (or computers) are frequently built on these principles, but something, of course, goes tragically wrong (for example, in West world, 1973), thus propelling the narrative. On television, Star Trek: The Next Generation's Data has been described by some SF readers as an Asimovian robot because of his built-in ethical system, though there are episodes where he does not strictly adhere to the Three Laws.

Robert Heinlein (1907–1988) was one of the earliest sci-fi authors to realistically portray near-future space travel; his novel Rocketship Galileo (1947) was the inspiration for Destination Moon (1950), a showcase for special effects pioneer George Pal (1908–1980). Heinlein was also an innovator in military science fiction; Starship Troopers (1959) is widely criticized (and also praised by fans) for its picture of a future society in which only those who have volunteered for military service are voting citizens. While Heinlein presented his complex sociological world as positive, Paul Verhoeven's (b. 1938) breathtakingly nihilistic film (1997) explicitly reveals the fascism of the story's universe. Heinlein is also notable for having imagined inter-universe travel and the idea of "world-as-myth" (there are multiple universes, all as real as our own, and our own universe may even be a fiction created by another universe). This complex motif is more likely to show up on television programs such as Star Trek: The Next Generation (and also, with great success, on the fantasy program Buffy the Vampire Slayer) than in films. Importantly, though Heinlein's books were rarely translated to film, he was the first to write bestsellers—such as Stranger in a Strange Land (1960)—that were of interest to non sci-fi fans. Although science fiction films were seen as marginal "kid's stuff" for years, and only gained true legitimacy with Kubrick's 2001 in 1968, Heinlein should be seen as having laid the groundwork for the mass popularization of science fiction as a genre.

Since the 1980s, cyberpunk authors such as William Gibson and Bruce Sterling have also found readers in the mainstream fiction market. Gibson's Neuromancer (1984) (which popularized the word "cyberspace") portrays a world in which distinctions between humans and computers are irrevocably blurred, and the existence of a true self is open to debate. Often described as "post-modern," the themes of cyberpunk have appeared in films such as Ghost in the Shell (1995), Akira (1988), Robocop (1987), and The Matrix trilogy (1999, 2003).

Science fiction films were scant before the 1950s. Méliès's Le Voyage dans la lune (A Trip to the Moon, 1902), an exploration story in the Verne tradition, is usually considered the first sci-fi production. Méliès pictures a rocket ship of scientists who fly to the moon, are attacked by its primitive inhabitants, the Selenites, and return to Earth. The film is notable for its special effects (elaborately hand-painted sets and props, cleverly simulated underwater shots taken through a fish tank) and for its colonialist narrative of the natural superiority of the white, rational scientist over the barbaric, violent people of foreign lands.

After Méliès, the most important pre-1950s sci-fi director is Fritz Lang (1890–1976), who made Metropolis (1927) and Woman in the Moon (1929). While Méliès's vision of lunar travel was fanciful and lacking in scientific detail, Lang was more interested in technical minutiae. For Woman in the Moon he consulted Germany's leading rocket expert, Hermann Oberth, and created an elaborate launching sequence for a multiple stage rocket. This vision was much closer to how actual rockets would later be launched than the depiction in films before and after, which showed rockets being shot off ramps or by guns. Lang also gave viewers the first filmic depiction of a crew floating in zero gravity. Metropolis is frequently debated as a schizophrenic proor anti-Nazi text, though, as film historian Tom Gunning convincingly argues, the film's politics, like its convoluted narrative, are impossible to neatly decipher Me one way or the other. The film was written by Lang's wife, Thea Von Harbou (1888–1954), who later joined the Nazi party. In Metropolis, a futuristic city is powered by laborers who toil on machines beneath the surface. The film's powerful visual design—clearly echoed in Blade Runner—combines gothic and medieval elements with futuristic skyscrapers. An allegory of social power, the film literalizes social relations through topography by putting the powerful above ground and the powerless beneath. Like so many science fiction films that have followed it—Escape from New York (1981), Brazil (1985), Dark City (1998)—Metropolis is a film in which the city is as much a character as any of the flesh and blood protagonists.

THE GOLDEN AGE OF THE 1950s

Starting with Destination Moon, the 1950s saw an explosion of sci-fi. This increase can be attributed to several factors. In the post-World War II years the American film industry floundered following a legal decision that dismantled its longstanding monopoly on production, distribution, and exhibition. At the same time, suburbanization and the baby boom kept people at home, away from the old downtown movie theaters, and television stole much of the film audience. To lure viewers from the small screen to the big screen, many Hollywood films were produced in wide-screen formats. As well, they were also increasingly shot in color and featured gimmicks such as 3-D. Science fiction films, along with horror films, had stories that were perfect for exploiting color, 3-D, and other attention-grabbing devices. The spectacular nature of science fiction and horror pictures was seen as appealing to "immature" tastes, which meant these films could be marketed to the newly conceptualized teenage market. Universal-International became well known for making some of the more prestigious science fiction films of the era, such as The Incredible Shrinking Man (1957). At the same time, science fiction and horror became the preferred genres of a newly emerging low-budget independent movement, of which Roger Corman (b. 1926) (Monster from the Ocean Floor [1954]; The Wasp Woman [1960]) was the most important figure.

The popularity of sci-fi films at that time was strongly linked to mounting nuclear anxieties and the Cold War. Movies like Them! (1954) and Tarantula (1955) pictured nature run amuck with giant irradiated insects. In splitting the atom, these films show, humankind has released forces it can neither control nor understand. Though humans are responsible for the advent of giant, murderous bugs and other animals, these films do not posit any means for humans to take responsibility for their actions. Nature takes revenge on the atomic age in the bug movies, even if American military forces usually win a temporary

JACK ARNOLD
b. Jack Arnold Waks, New Haven, Connecticut, 14 October 1916, d. 17 March 1992

Jack Arnold began as a Broadway stage actor and broke into the film industry as a director of short subjects before moving on to feature films in 1953. In science fiction films of the 1950s, alien attacks were often thinly veiled metaphors for Communist invasion. Jack Arnold's films deviated from the formula by combining aesthetic subtlety with ambitious ideas about humanity's place in the universe.

It Came from Outer Space (1953) tells the story of alien replacement of human bodies. The film was shot in 3-D, but Arnold avoided the typical ham-handed approach to the technology, using it more to stage in depth than to make objects fly at the camera. The Creature from the Black Lagoon (1954) and Revenge of the Creature (1955), notable for their underwater photography, were also restrained 3-D ventures. Both emphasize that the creature may be murderous, but that this comes from his nature, not from cruel motivations. Humans, conversely, are driven by ignoble impulses. In Revenge, Arnold uses 3-D to great thematic effect when the Gill Man looks directly at the camera, then falls toward the viewer. It turns out this cardboard advertisement for the creature—3-D, a marketing gimmick, is thus employed to critique marketing hype.

In The Space Children (1958) an alien telepathically forces children to sabotage a super-weapon the military is developing. At first this seems like a standard Cold War parable, with the alien standing in for the Russians, but a twist ending reveals that children all over the world have been similarly manipulated, resulting in global disarmament. The film closes not on an anti-Russian note but rather with a strong pacifist message. Tarantula (1955), conversely, is probably the least politically complex of Arnold's films. The film is most remarkable for its avoidance of the evil scientist stereotype, and for its eerie use of the desert as a mysterious primordial landscape.

Arnold is best known for The Incredible Shrinking Man (1957). Exposed to a radioactive cloud, the protagonist begins to slowly shrink, and as his size diminishes so does his manly self-confidence. No longer a breadwinner, and reduced to living in a dollhouse, he is attacked by the family cat and presumed dead, but is actually trapped in the basement. The movie then takes an innovative aesthetic turn: the second half has no dialogue and is narrated by a voice-over monologue. The hero's Robinson Crusoe-style tale of survival culminates in the heroic murder of a spider with a sewing needle. He ultimately makes peace with his diminished stature, realizes he is visible to God, and shrinks away into oblivion. Here, Arnold shows that good science fiction, at its base, is not really about worlds beyond but about worlds within.

The latter part of Arnold's career was spent working in television, directing episodes of such series as Gilligan's Island (1964), Wonder Woman (1976), and The Love Boat (1977), taking his penchant for the stories of the fantastic in a different direction entirely.

RECOMMENDED VIEWING

It Came from Outer Space (1953), The Creature from the Black Lagoon (1954), Revenge of the Creature (1955), Tarantula (1955), The Incredible Shrinking Man (1957), Space Children (1958)

STEVEN SPIELBERG
b. Steven Allan Spielberg, Cincinnati, Ohio, 18 December 1946

Steven Spielberg, one of Hollywood's most prominent filmmakers, has won his highest honors—including two Academy Awards^® for Best Director (1994 and 1999) and one for Best Picture (1990)—for movies not connected with science fiction. However, he is perhaps best known by audiences for his innovative sci-fi films.

By the 1970s, science fiction had developed into one of the most politically progressive genres, and SF films were frequently critical of environmental destruction, government corruption, and commercialism. Steven Spielberg changed that, starting with Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977) in which peaceful aliens come to Earth to return previous abductees and take away new volunteers. Whereas many movies before it had combined state-of-the-art special effects with anxieties about technological developments, Close Encounters celebrates technological accomplishment with a childlike awe. The film justifies the hero's abandonment of his family for the sake of the higher goal of communing with aliens.

In E.T. The Extra-Terrestrial (1982), a friendly alien stranded on Earth befriends a little boy. The one moment of true menace in this feel-good movie occurs when police draw their guns to search for the alien, but Spielberg digitally eliminated the guns from the twentieth anniversary rerelease in 2002. E.T. is notable for its innovation in product placement; after Spielberg used Reese's Pieces™ as a plot point, sales skyrocketed. With Jurassic Park (1993), which featured sophisticated computer-generated imagery, Spielberg created a lucrative franchise centered on dinosaurs run amuck in an amusement park; like George Lucas, he had found that films could make as much or more money on toys, videogames, and fast-food tie-ins than could be made at the box office. Though not friendly like Spielberg's aliens, the rapacious carnivores of the three Jurassic Park films function as catalysts for mending broken human relationships.

Spielberg's more recent science fiction films have also labored to mend the family. Artificial Intelligence: A.I. (2001) is about a robot boy who wants to become real and be reunited with his upper-class adoptive mother. The environment has been destroyed by global warming and children can be borne only by government license, but these plot points are incidental to the film's focus on the nature of love. Only when robots are cruelly destroyed is there a hint of the dystopian impulse that fueled so much previous science fiction. In Minority Report (2002) Spielberg again nods to this earlier tradition. It is a tightly crafted futuristic thriller in which people are arrested for "pre-crimes," misdeeds that powerful psychics have foreseen. Spielberg adds family melodrama to the mix, ending the bleak film on a false happy note when the protagonist is reunited with his wife, who quickly conceives a child. In Spielberg's version of War of the Worlds (2005) family relationships are again central.

RECOMMENDED VIEWING

Jaws (1975), Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977), Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981), E.T. The Extra-Terrestrial (1982), Jurassic Park (1993), Schindler's List (1993), Saving Private Ryan (1998), Artificial Intelligence: A.I. (2001), Minority Report (2002), Munich (2005), War of the Worlds (2005)

SOCIAL CRITIQUE

Though some 1950s films contained anti-war messages, science fiction turned much more sharply to the left in the 1960s and 1970s, addressing issues such as corporate corruption, government duplicity, and ecological destruction. In 1971's Godzilla vs. the Smog Monster, nuclear anxieties have receded, Godzilla has become heroic, and the Smog Monster is the product not of the military but of the private corporations that have dumped toxic chemicals into Tokyo Bay. In Silent Running (1972), humans have destroyed all of the natural vegetation on Earth, and the only trees left are in giant greenhouses floating in space. The story is set in motion when the protagonist is ordered to destroy the greenhouses and return to Earth.

The film portraying the greatest ecological disaster is surely Soylent Green, in which the greenhouse effect has made Earth into an inferno and overpopulation is extreme. Only the rich have access to fresh food, while the rest of the population is forced to eat government-produced wafers that turn out to be made of dead people. The only thriving business is a posh suicide service, which is affordable for poor people because their bodies are needed to feed the living. High-class hookers are furnished with apartments. In fact, prostitutes are literally called "furniture," and though the protagonist (Charlton Heston) briefly connects emotionally with one piece of furniture, the film offers no hope that love or family can assuage the agony of this dystopian world. Pointedly, the film opens with the murder of Joseph Cotton, an actor from the Golden Age of Hollywood, and ends with the suicide of Edward G. Robinson, another star of that era. In this cruel world, there is no room to respect old heroes. The new era is embodied by the sweaty, virile Charlton Heston. Symbolizing neither old Hollywood nor the method actor of the 1950s, this swaggering dimwit is the star of the future.

In addition to tackling ecology, science fiction films of the 1960s and 1970s reacted to two important social movements of that era, civil rights and feminism. In Planet of the Apes (1968), American astronauts land on a planet run by apes who have enslaved humans. The apes see humans as inferior beings with no rights, and the police apes are significantly darker than the rulers and scientists. These darker, armed apes can easily be read as symbols of the black power movement, and their domination of men (whites) as positive or negative, depending on the politics of the viewer. To drive home the film's civil rights subtext, in one scene fire hoses are turned on unruly humans. Years later in The Brother from Another Planet (1984)—which is, with John Carpenter's (b. 1948) They Live! (1988), one of the few progressive science fiction films of the 1980s—a humanoid black alien slave fleeing white alien bounty hunters crash lands in New York City and takes up residence in Harlem. Taking a more literal approach than Planet of the Apes, John Sayles uses his black alien character to probe race relations in contemporary America.

Though criticism of racially motivated injustice has been allegorized in a number of science fiction films, the genre has been less progressive in its response to the feminist movement. In Demon Seed (1977) a woman is raped by a computer. In Logan's Run (1976), sexual liberation and the hippie credo "never trust anyone over thirty" have created an amoral and totalitarian society; "free love" is clearly shown as a destructive force. In A Boy and His Dog, a sexually uninhibited woman is eaten. The men of The Stepford Wives (1975) replace their troublesome, outspoken wives with docile robots devoted to housecleaning and sex-on-demand; this male

chauvinist fantasy is presented in the most negative terms, and many viewers have interpreted the film as feminist. In what is probably the most overtly feminist science fiction film, Born in Flames (1983), women unite to seize media control after a failed peaceful revolution. Though less overtly feminist, Liquid Sky (1982) is notable for its critical representation of sexual relations; aliens come to Earth looking for heroin but instead get hooked on the pheromones released by the brain during orgasm. In extracting the pheromones they kill the orgasmic individual, but the film's heroine survives each attack because her lovers are callous (or are simply rapists) and care nothing about her sexual satisfaction.

Though science fiction films of the 1980s were generally conservative in their representations of the family and women. James Cameron's (b. 1954) The Abyss (1989) offers a perfect example of the punishment and rehabilitation of the outspoken "bitch" wife, while the Ripley character from the Alien series is clearly a product of feminism. First introduced in Ridley Scott's (b. 1937) Alien (1979), and reappearing in Aliens (1986) and two more installments in the 1990s, this powerful female character challenged previous representations of women in science fiction (and horror and action) cinema. Earlier women of science fiction were most often docile romantic leads, or occasionally resourceful like Patricia Neale's character in The Day the Earth Stood Still. Ripley, though, was consistently strong and smart. The third Alien film even took a pro-choice stance: denied a metaphorical abortion of the alien growing inside of her by the powerful men who control the corporate future, Ripley deliberately plunges to her death to defeat them.

SCHOLARLY CRITICISM

Critical writing on science fiction films is generally traced back to Susan Sontag's 1965 essay "The Imagination of Disaster," which argued that sci-fi fantasies "normalize what is psychologically unbearable," the real Cold War specter of "collective incineration and extinction which could come at any time, virtually without warning" (p. 112). Sontag contended that, "the interest of the films, aside from their considerable amount of cinematic charm, consists in this intersection between a naïve and largely debased commercial art product and the most profound dilemmas of the contemporary situation." What was novel here was that Sontag took the films seriously as manifestations of cultural consciousness; at the same time, she poked fun at their hackneyed dialogue and was dismissive of low-budget productions.

In 1980 Vivian Sobchack's The Limits of Infinity laid out a rigorous taxonomy of the key audiovisual elements of science fiction. In 1988 the book was rereleased as Screening Space, and a new chapter was added applying postmodern theory to the new wave of science fiction that followed in the wake of 1977's Star Wars and Close Encounters of the Third Kind. Sobchack is also well known for her essay "The Virginity of Astronauts: Sex and the Science Fiction Film," which uses psychoanalytic theory to consider the repression of sexuality in sci-fi and the apparent asexuality of most of the male heroes.

First published in 1985, Sobchack's essay was reprinted in Annette Kuhn's 1990 anthology Alien Zone: Cultural Theory and Contemporary Science Fiction Cinema, a seminal volume that marked the growing scholarly interest in science fiction films. The volume included essays by J. P. Telotte, Barbara Creed, and Scott Bukatman, who would publish the influential Terminal Identity: The Virtual Subject in Postmodern Science Fiction in 1993. As Telotte aptly explains in Science Fiction Film, in Terminal Identity Bukatman examines films such as Metropolis, Invasion of the Body Snatchers, Blade Runner, and Tron (1982) and "suggests that the genre 'narrates the dissolution of the very ontological structures that we usually take for granted,' and that in the wake of this 'dissolution' it offers striking evidence of 'both the end of the subject and a new subjectivity constructed at the computer station or television screen"' (p. 56).

Kuhn's volume also reprinted an important essay by Constance Penley, "Time Travel, Primal Scene and the Critical Dystopia," which had first appeared in 1986 in a special issue of the feminist journal Camera Obscura. Penley took Freud's primal scene as a template for understanding time travel in the mainstream Terminator as well as in Chris Marker's avant-garde classic La Jetée (1962, remade as Twelve Monkeys by Terry Gilliam in 1995). The emergence of feminist interest in science fiction was a striking turn of events, as the genre had long been considered the terrain of male fans, geeks, and cultists. If Blade Runner could almost single-handedly take credit for the postmodernist turn in science fiction criticism, it was in large part the "monstrous-feminine" (as Barbara Creed put it) of Alien that inspired feminist interest in science fiction films in the 1980s and 1990s. Alien included not only the first female action hero but also a monster explicitly marked as female, whose motivation was not world domination, as in the classic "bug-eyed monster" movies of the 1950s, but rather procreation. (A similar maternal twist had appeared in a 1967 Star Trek episode, "The Devil in the Dark.")

The early twenty-first century critics most interested in science fiction can be split into two camps. New media theorists are less interested in science fiction as a genre per se than they are in theorizing the cultural impact of new digital technologies. Cronenberg's eXistenZ (1999), for example, is of interest for its blurring of the boundaries between digital representation/gaming and reality. The other dominant strain of critical writing comes from authors doing ethnographic research on fan cultures. This research, again, is not always genre specific. Henry Jenkins's Textual Poachers: Television Fans and Participatory Culture included significant work on Star Trek fans, and he continued the topic with Science Fiction Audiences: Watching Doctor Who and Star Trek, co-authored with John Tulloch.

SCIENCE FICTION GOES BIG BUDGET

In THX 1138, a gently amplified female voice tells the tranquilized population to "buy now, buy more." Lucas's tepid critique of capitalism is ironic, of course, since a few years later he would reinvent toy licensing, famously taking a salary cut in exchange for the merchandising rights for Star Wars. Star Wars was an innocuous film with no well-known actors and an inflated special effects budget—a film doomed to fail, most people reasoned, because everyone knew that science fiction was only for nerds. Of course, this was really an adventure movie set in outer space, and it had wide appeal not only to nerds but also to the cooler set who had never been interested in science fiction. The film was followed by two sequels.

The third, Return of the Jedi (directed by Richard Marquand, 1983), was a feel-good movie, while the second, The Empire Strikes Back (directed by Irvin Kershner, 1980), was darker and more compelling. As a character in Kevin Smith's Clerks (1994) explains, "Empire had the better ending. I mean, Luke gets his hand cut off, finds out Vader's his father, Han gets frozen and taken away by Boba Fett. It ends on such a down note. I mean, that's what life is, a series of down endings. All Jedi had was a bunch of Muppets."

Following Star Wars, the 1980s saw the decline of the politically engaged science fiction film. In keeping with the wider political landscape of the Reagan years, much 1980s sci-fi turned to love and family values (E.T. The Extra-Terrestrial, 1982; Enemy Mine, 1985; Starman, 1984). Though there were exceptions, like The Terminator, films such as The Last Starfighter (1984) celebrated spectacle more than ideas. Notably, The Running Man (1987) was a spectacular action movie, but within its visual excess lurked a critique of the gaudy, exploitative nature of television culture.

Beginning with Paul Verhoeven's RoboCop (1987) and Total Recall (1990), science fiction became increasingly violent, and began to merge with the action film. Whereas low-budget science fiction had been common in the 1950s, 1990s films like Armageddon (1998), Deep Impact (1998), and Men in Black (1997) wore their immense budgets on their sleeves and were more about awing spectators with technological prowess than provoking thought. Similarly, the return of the Star Wars franchise with Star Wars: Episode I—The Phantom Menace (1999) and Star Wars: Episode II—Attack of the Clones (2002) disappointed many fans who would have liked more character development and fewer video-game sequences. Notwithstanding the turn towards a big-budget action aesthetic, social critique has not completely disappeared from science fiction: The Day After Tomorrow (2004) revisited the ecological themes of the 1960s and 1970s; Gattaca (1997) recalled the nightmares of totalitarian biological control of the 1970s, merging them with contemporary fears about genetics; and Code 46 (2003) merged the old theme of population control with a timely critique of globalization.

Though there seems to be more interest in idea-driven science fiction films in the twenty-first century, such as the first Matrix installment, most fans of the genre would agree that since the 1990s the most provocative sci-fi narratives have emerged not in theaters but on television in series such as Star Trek: The Next Generation (1987–1994), Babylon 5 (1993–1999), and Star Trek: Deep Space Nine (1993–1999). In keeping with the genre's literary roots, fans of such programs have produced thousands of their own works of fiction, as well as videos, which are widely available

on the Internet. Women have been in the forefront of fan fiction, producing some of the earliest Star Trek writings and creating "slash," homoerotic stories originally focused on Star Trek characters. Though the technology of digital effects has driven the move toward sci-fi-as-action-cinema, the technologies of television and the Internet have enabled the cultivation of the genre, so that in the early twenty-first century the most creative science fiction is found not on the big screen but on TV and computer screens.