{"title":"A very contemporary, very desperate battle between two visions of biological life on Earth: Sherryl Vint, Biopolitical Futures in Twenty-First-Century Speculative Fiction","authors":"Benjamin Schultz-Figueroa","doi":"10.3828/sfftv.2023.11","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3828/sfftv.2023.11","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":42550,"journal":{"name":"Science Fiction Film and Television","volume":"16 1","pages":"191 - 196"},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2023-06-29","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"41562277","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Abstract:The motion picture Charly (1968) stars Cliff Robertson as a cognitively impaired bakery worker who undergoes an experimental intelligence-enhancing neurosurgical procedure that temporarily grants him superhuman intelligence. Although Charly may seem merely to endorse the dominant sf trope of cure for disability, it offers a complex and equivocal engagement with the growing "normalization" agenda in the 1960s US, by which cognitively impaired persons were moved out of institutions in order to lead lives as close to culturally normative as possible. The movie partly affirms normalization and its social critique through the narrative continuity between Charly before and after his neurosurgery, and by the inclusion of cognitively impaired children within the cast. Robertson's performance also conveys Charly's deliberate performance as an object of ridicule within his workplace. However, Charly also gestures to ongoing anxieties about the sexuality of cognitively impaired persons, and it questions the normative valorization of intelligence in modern society. Although the movie's plural visual style was criticized by contemporary reviews, its aesthetic offers a dialogic model of the self, and resists the centripetal tendency to filmmaking within a single authoritative or neutral style.
{"title":"\"Science fiction without gadgets\" and the normalization of cognitive impairment: Reassessing Charly (1968)","authors":"G. Miller","doi":"10.3828/sfftv.2022.13","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3828/sfftv.2022.13","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:The motion picture Charly (1968) stars Cliff Robertson as a cognitively impaired bakery worker who undergoes an experimental intelligence-enhancing neurosurgical procedure that temporarily grants him superhuman intelligence. Although Charly may seem merely to endorse the dominant sf trope of cure for disability, it offers a complex and equivocal engagement with the growing \"normalization\" agenda in the 1960s US, by which cognitively impaired persons were moved out of institutions in order to lead lives as close to culturally normative as possible. The movie partly affirms normalization and its social critique through the narrative continuity between Charly before and after his neurosurgery, and by the inclusion of cognitively impaired children within the cast. Robertson's performance also conveys Charly's deliberate performance as an object of ridicule within his workplace. However, Charly also gestures to ongoing anxieties about the sexuality of cognitively impaired persons, and it questions the normative valorization of intelligence in modern society. Although the movie's plural visual style was criticized by contemporary reviews, its aesthetic offers a dialogic model of the self, and resists the centripetal tendency to filmmaking within a single authoritative or neutral style.","PeriodicalId":42550,"journal":{"name":"Science Fiction Film and Television","volume":"15 1","pages":"145 - 168"},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2022-06-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"43175212","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2022-01-01DOI: 10.1007/978-3-030-91605-3
E. Choi
{"title":"Just Like Being There","authors":"E. Choi","doi":"10.1007/978-3-030-91605-3","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-91605-3","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":42550,"journal":{"name":"Science Fiction Film and Television","volume":"46 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2022-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"82648544","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Abstract:Three narratives from different historical moments – the US film The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms (1953), the US/Canadian film The Thaw (2009) and the first season of the British television series Fortitude (2015) – disclose shifts in the imagining of prehistoric creatures emerging from thawing ice, and all three thus intervene in evolving discourses surrounding climate change, nature and agency (both human and nonhuman). Beast was released at what many scientists have declared the very beginning of the ‘Anthropocene’ – that geological era marked by humans as primary shapers of planetary life. An iconic film of the Atomic Age, Beast features a thawed creature from Earth’s prehistory, and the fault-lines are sharply drawn between it and the humans who unknowingly unleashed it. Although the consequences of nuclear testing (along with the notion of the ‘Anthropocene’) were decades in the future, Beast imagines those consequences with startling and destructive clarity. In the twenty-first century, the long-term effects of nuclear energy, and industrial global capitalism more generally, have become strikingly evident. The thawed creatures of both Fortitude and The Thaw have neither the visibility nor the separateness of the ‘Beast’ from 1953, however. Tracing increasingly entangled notions of existence, culpability and responsibility in the Anthropocene era, these twenty-first-century creatures incubate within human hosts, becoming interwoven with the human, and thus complicate familiar notions of agency.
{"title":"Climate change, ‘Anthropocene unburials’ and agency on a thawing planet","authors":"Dawn Keetley","doi":"10.3828/sfftv.2021.26","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3828/sfftv.2021.26","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:Three narratives from different historical moments – the US film The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms (1953), the US/Canadian film The Thaw (2009) and the first season of the British television series Fortitude (2015) – disclose shifts in the imagining of prehistoric creatures emerging from thawing ice, and all three thus intervene in evolving discourses surrounding climate change, nature and agency (both human and nonhuman). Beast was released at what many scientists have declared the very beginning of the ‘Anthropocene’ – that geological era marked by humans as primary shapers of planetary life. An iconic film of the Atomic Age, Beast features a thawed creature from Earth’s prehistory, and the fault-lines are sharply drawn between it and the humans who unknowingly unleashed it. Although the consequences of nuclear testing (along with the notion of the ‘Anthropocene’) were decades in the future, Beast imagines those consequences with startling and destructive clarity. In the twenty-first century, the long-term effects of nuclear energy, and industrial global capitalism more generally, have become strikingly evident. The thawed creatures of both Fortitude and The Thaw have neither the visibility nor the separateness of the ‘Beast’ from 1953, however. Tracing increasingly entangled notions of existence, culpability and responsibility in the Anthropocene era, these twenty-first-century creatures incubate within human hosts, becoming interwoven with the human, and thus complicate familiar notions of agency.","PeriodicalId":42550,"journal":{"name":"Science Fiction Film and Television","volume":"14 1","pages":"375 - 393"},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2021-10-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"43299929","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Abstract:Godzilla is one of the most famous de-extinct monsters in global popular cinema. Fan loyalty to the original Toho Studios conception of the creature as a super-powered, dinosaur-like creature helps explain the negative response to Roland Emmerich’s 1998 Hollywood version, which re-imagines Godzilla as a giant, irradiated twentieth-century iguana. Emmerich’s film is plotted around the monster’s attempt to use subterranean New York City as a spawning ground. The creature lays eggs that later hatch into baby Godzillas that look suspiciously like Jurassic Park-style velociraptors. Indeed, the movie plays like an expanded version of the last twenty minutes of The Lost World: Jurassic Park (1997): a dinosaur-like creature runs amok in a major American city and is eventually defeated by a plan involving its offspring. Emmerich’s Godzilla is famous for being ‘Godzilla in name only’, yet its extensive intertextuality with The Lost World foregrounds de-extinction themes and imagery. Furthermore, Godzilla (1998) emphasises human action – in this case, 1950s French nuclear tests in French Polynesia – as the cause of the mutant creature’s emergence. Humans causing de-extinction is a key feature of the entire Godzilla franchise and of similar creature features from the 1950s to the present. Akin to its 1950s predecessors, Godzilla’s light, intentionally (and sometimes unintentionally) comedic tone open it to camp readings of the kind analysed by Bridgitte Barclay, who writes that the narrative and aesthetic shortcomings of schlocky sf B movies ‘disengage the audience from the filmic world and expose the mechanics of storytelling, making the master narrative a story and thereby resisting it by showing it as such’. Godzilla does just that, deflating its own anthropocentrism and rampant pro-militarism via its blatantly derivative story, shoddy digital effects and ham-handed dialogue.
{"title":"Godzilla (1998) as camp de-extinction narrative","authors":"Carter Soles","doi":"10.3828/sfftv.2021.22","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3828/sfftv.2021.22","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:Godzilla is one of the most famous de-extinct monsters in global popular cinema. Fan loyalty to the original Toho Studios conception of the creature as a super-powered, dinosaur-like creature helps explain the negative response to Roland Emmerich’s 1998 Hollywood version, which re-imagines Godzilla as a giant, irradiated twentieth-century iguana. Emmerich’s film is plotted around the monster’s attempt to use subterranean New York City as a spawning ground. The creature lays eggs that later hatch into baby Godzillas that look suspiciously like Jurassic Park-style velociraptors. Indeed, the movie plays like an expanded version of the last twenty minutes of The Lost World: Jurassic Park (1997): a dinosaur-like creature runs amok in a major American city and is eventually defeated by a plan involving its offspring. Emmerich’s Godzilla is famous for being ‘Godzilla in name only’, yet its extensive intertextuality with The Lost World foregrounds de-extinction themes and imagery. Furthermore, Godzilla (1998) emphasises human action – in this case, 1950s French nuclear tests in French Polynesia – as the cause of the mutant creature’s emergence. Humans causing de-extinction is a key feature of the entire Godzilla franchise and of similar creature features from the 1950s to the present. Akin to its 1950s predecessors, Godzilla’s light, intentionally (and sometimes unintentionally) comedic tone open it to camp readings of the kind analysed by Bridgitte Barclay, who writes that the narrative and aesthetic shortcomings of schlocky sf B movies ‘disengage the audience from the filmic world and expose the mechanics of storytelling, making the master narrative a story and thereby resisting it by showing it as such’. Godzilla does just that, deflating its own anthropocentrism and rampant pro-militarism via its blatantly derivative story, shoddy digital effects and ham-handed dialogue.","PeriodicalId":42550,"journal":{"name":"Science Fiction Film and Television","volume":"14 1","pages":"297 - 314"},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2021-10-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"42319610","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
The experience of game intrinsic space is an architectural mode of perception more congruent to actual experiences of physically real architecture than to filmic space. This paper thus centres on the aesthetics of production, concerning the game worlds’ geometry, level structures and game mechanics, within the broader context of how sf and computer games are inextricably merged. This is to investigate how game intrinsic spaces communicate properties of sf or a media-specific ‘science fiction-ness’ through their aesthetics and digital condition. By first building a foundation on the topic of singular space and its liminality, I will then proceed with a few remarks on sf theory, sf imagery and the staging of (im)possible worlds in relation to the concept of ontological possibility space. For this purpose, I refer to two authors of sf theory: Vivian Sobchack and Simon Spiegel. Based on these two sections, I will give an introductory overview on game intrinsic space, its non-linear properties and the incorporation of the player. Here, differences between filmic and game intrinsic space will also be emphasised through a brief discussion. Thus, sf theory and film theory are interwoven with spatial theory and game studies in order to analyse the ontological possibility space that goes beyond the player-character’s everyday experience in actuality. Several examples clarify the theoretical groundwork while Portal 2 (2011) and Echo (2017) function as case studies.
{"title":"How sf is embodied in level structures","authors":"M. Bonner","doi":"10.3828/SFFTV.2021.14","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3828/SFFTV.2021.14","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000The experience of game intrinsic space is an architectural mode of perception more congruent to actual experiences of physically real architecture than to filmic space. This paper thus centres on the aesthetics of production, concerning the game worlds’ geometry, level structures and game mechanics, within the broader context of how sf and computer games are inextricably merged. This is to investigate how game intrinsic spaces communicate properties of sf or a media-specific ‘science fiction-ness’ through their aesthetics and digital condition. By first building a foundation on the topic of singular space and its liminality, I will then proceed with a few remarks on sf theory, sf imagery and the staging of (im)possible worlds in relation to the concept of ontological possibility space. For this purpose, I refer to two authors of sf theory: Vivian Sobchack and Simon Spiegel. Based on these two sections, I will give an introductory overview on game intrinsic space, its non-linear properties and the incorporation of the player. Here, differences between filmic and game intrinsic space will also be emphasised through a brief discussion. Thus, sf theory and film theory are interwoven with spatial theory and game studies in order to analyse the ontological possibility space that goes beyond the player-character’s everyday experience in actuality. Several examples clarify the theoretical groundwork while Portal 2 (2011) and Echo (2017) function as case studies.","PeriodicalId":42550,"journal":{"name":"Science Fiction Film and Television","volume":"14 1","pages":"209-234"},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2021-06-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"45143718","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
This interdisciplinary article discusses fictional games, focusing on those appearing in works of sf. ‘Fictional games’ are playful activities and ludic artefacts that were conceptualised to be part of fictional worlds. These games cannot - or at least were not originally meant to - be actually played. The article’s objective is to explore how fictional games can function as utopian devices. Drawing on game studies, utopian studies and sf studies, the first half of the article introduces the notion of fictional games and provides an initial articulation of their utopian potential. The second half focuses, instead, on the analysis of one (science-)fictional game in particular: the game of Azad, described in Iain M. Banks’s 1988 sf novel The Player of Games. This analysis is instrumental in clarifying the utopian qualities that are inherent in the activity of play such as its being uncertain and contingent. By presenting relationships of power through a game (and, finally, as a game), utopian fictional games such as Azad serve as a reminder that every socio-political situation - even the most dystopian ones - is ultimately indeterminate and retains the possibility of change.
这篇跨学科的文章讨论了虚构的游戏，重点是那些出现在科幻作品中的游戏。“虚构游戏”是一种有趣的活动和有趣的人工制品，它们被概念化为虚构世界的一部分。这些游戏不能——或者至少最初不是打算——真正玩。本文的目标是探讨虚构游戏如何作为乌托邦装置发挥作用。在游戏研究、乌托邦研究和科幻小说研究的基础上，本文的前半部分介绍了虚构游戏的概念，并初步阐述了它们的乌托邦潜力。而后半部分则专注于分析一款(科学)虚构游戏:Iain M. Banks在1988年的科幻小说《The Player of Games》中描述的Azad游戏。这种分析有助于澄清游戏活动中固有的乌托邦特质，比如它的不确定性和偶然性。通过游戏呈现权力关系(最终作为游戏呈现)，《Azad》等乌托邦式虚构游戏提醒人们，每一种社会政治情境——即使是最反乌托邦的情境——最终都是不确定的，并保留了改变的可能性。
{"title":"Fictional games and utopia","authors":"S. Gualeni","doi":"10.3828/SFFTV.2021.13","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3828/SFFTV.2021.13","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000This interdisciplinary article discusses fictional games, focusing on those appearing in works of sf. ‘Fictional games’ are playful activities and ludic artefacts that were conceptualised to be part of fictional worlds. These games cannot - or at least were not originally meant to - be actually played. The article’s objective is to explore how fictional games can function as utopian devices. Drawing on game studies, utopian studies and sf studies, the first half of the article introduces the notion of fictional games and provides an initial articulation of their utopian potential. The second half focuses, instead, on the analysis of one (science-)fictional game in particular: the game of Azad, described in Iain M. Banks’s 1988 sf novel The Player of Games. This analysis is instrumental in clarifying the utopian qualities that are inherent in the activity of play such as its being uncertain and contingent. By presenting relationships of power through a game (and, finally, as a game), utopian fictional games such as Azad serve as a reminder that every socio-political situation - even the most dystopian ones - is ultimately indeterminate and retains the possibility of change.","PeriodicalId":42550,"journal":{"name":"Science Fiction Film and Television","volume":"14 1","pages":"187-207"},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2021-06-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"46158833","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"‘Allowing ourselves to be more diverse’","authors":"Cameron Kunzelman, Darshana Jayemanne","doi":"10.3828/SFFTV.2021.15","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3828/SFFTV.2021.15","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":42550,"journal":{"name":"Science Fiction Film and Television","volume":"14 1","pages":"235-242"},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2021-06-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"46634866","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2021-06-01DOI: 10.3828/sfftv.2021.14.issue-2
{"title":"Science Fiction Film & Television: Volume 14, Issue 2","authors":"","doi":"10.3828/sfftv.2021.14.issue-2","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3828/sfftv.2021.14.issue-2","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":42550,"journal":{"name":"Science Fiction Film and Television","volume":"137 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2021-06-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"89248125","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"‘Retellings and reversions’","authors":"Darshana Jayemanne, Cameron Kunzelman","doi":"10.3828/SFFTV.2021.17","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3828/SFFTV.2021.17","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":42550,"journal":{"name":"Science Fiction Film and Television","volume":"14 1","pages":"251-256"},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2021-06-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"45270524","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
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