Hugo Gernsback and the Pulps (11/29/2009)
(...) The term science fi ction comes from Gernsback's fi rst attempt in 1924 at producing a magazine devoted to what he called ‘Scientifi ction'. Stories from the likes of Jules Verne and H. G. (...)

H G Wells and The War of the Worlds Radio Play (11/29/2009)
(...) For Adam Roberts, the panic caused by Welles's radio broadcast ‘expresses the truth that [science fi ction], its assumptions and icons were now part of the mental furniture of most Americans. The decades to follow, known as the golden age of science fi ction, were in no small part ushered in by the popularity and impact of Welles's War of the Worlds' (Roberts 2005: 193). Radio as a medium drew the nation together during the fi rst half of the twentieth century. (...)

The Cold War and the Space Race (11/29/2009)
(...) The domestic model of masculinity became hegemonic. TV shows like Father Knows Best (1954 -1962) and Leave it to Beaver (1957-1963) instructed middle-class suburban men how to live and behave in their new domestic environment. For Martin Halliwell, the standardization of new corporate architecture and suburban developments in the 1950s offi ce blocks and white picket fenced houses was keenly felt in popular literature, fi lm and television of the time. (...)

Nuclear Horror and Science Gone Mad (11/29/2009)
(...) Robert Wise's contribution to the oeuvre was inspired by American fascination with UFOs and is considered one of the best of the saucer fi lms alongside Earth vs. the Flying Saucers (1956). In the fi lm an alien ship lands in Washington, DC, and the pilot, called Klaatu, has come to Earth to offer a warning that humanity's drive to make more and more nuclear weapons is attracting attention from Earth's extraterrestrial neighbours. (...)

Television Grows Up (11/29/2009)
(...) Freedom. Freedom from drudgery for the housewife. And democracy, the opportunity to choose' (Marling 1994: 243). (...)

Pushing the Limits (11/29/2009)
(...) The pilot episode ‘The Galaxy Being' (1963), originally titled ‘Please Stand By', emphasised the eerie nature of the Control Voice's now famous opening monologue and showed how the series would come to view the human and alien body throughout the fi rst season visually distinctive yet perhaps ideologically linked. Lowly radio station owner and inventor Allan Maxwell (Cliff Robertson) struggles to prove to his wife that the time that he has spent on research have not been wasted, although others see his search for alien life in the galaxy as an infantile project. Instead of using his radio equipment solely to provide advertising and entertainment, Maxwell would rather use it in an attempt to contact extraterrestrial life. (...)

Science Fiction and the Counterculture (11/29/2009)
(...) 2001's infl uence and impact (see boxed text) has long been debated and defended within academia, yet other fi lms in this New Hollywood period deserve further exploration. Indeed, if Hollywood was struggling to maintain audience appeal by experimenting with form and style, it was also still producing more traditional genre features that relied on special effects and B-movie themes. For example, Fantastic Voyage (1966) depicts humans achieving miniaturisation and entering the human body using the latest in effects technology. (...)

The Nuclear Threat (11/29/2009)
(...) The location of Dr. No's secret base in the Caribbean offered a direct parallel to the threat posed to American soil by the Soviet presence in Cuba during the Missile Crisis and clearly associates Bond with its Cold War contexts. Whether the fi rst few Bond features of the 1960s can be seen as real science fi ction is open to debate Brosnan (1978: 150) describes Dr. (...)

Television Thinks Big (11/29/2009)
(...) Not content with garish and colourful yarns produced by the likes of Irwin Allen, viewers could still watch stories written and inspired by established science fi ction authors in the anthology series The Twilight Zone and The Outer Limits. Inspired by the success of prime time anicoms such as The Flintstones (1960-1966), networks also saw potential for targeting both adults and children in the animated series market. In what is described as ‘television's fi rst animation boom' ABC introduced The Jetsons to American audiences (Mittell 2003: 46). (...)

Technological Nightmares (11/29/2009)
(...) For example, Anna Krugovoy Silver (2002: 109) sees The Stepford Wives as ‘a feminist allegory that stems from the ideological and political concerns of feminists' such as Betty Friedan and Pat Mainardi. The fi lm draws attention to the insidious nature of the very same things that Second Wave Feminism and the Women's Liberation Movement critiqued and fought against in the late 1960s and early 1970s: namely sexism and inequality in the workplace and the ideologies of female beautifi cation, domesticity and the nuclear family. The contradictory nature of The Stepford Wives' popular reception in the mid- 1970s gives us a little insight into how science fi ction fi lm at this time was being used as a form of political discourse. (...)

Science Fictions New Hope (11/29/2009)
(...) The fi ctional world of Star Wars that had kept young and old engrossed for two hours also had underlying marketing advantages: ‘The fi lm's novel environment and characters have been so striking that Kenner Toys has been able to go beyond the fi gures in the fi lm by adding new characters to the Star Wars line in keeping with the fi lm's mythological world' (Wyatt 1994: 153). The infi nite potential for expansion kept the fi gures and toys popular throughout the 1970s and 1980s as children continued to watch and rewatch the movies and play with their own make-believe worlds. While Star Wars was infl uencing children playing, it was also having a profound effect on American politics . (...)

Aliens Cyborgs and the Science Fiction Blockbuster (11/29/2009)
(...) However, it should be stressed that many of the key examples of cinematic radicalism in the late 1960s and early 1970s were themselves examples of the nostalgic fi lm: The Wild Bunch (1969), Bonnie and Clyde (1967), Chinatown (1974) and The Godfather (1972), and even 2001, were revisionist interpretations of the Hollywood western, noir, gangster and science fi ction fi lm. In addition, so-called nostalgic fi lms shared much of the political paranoia of the early 1970s: the Empire in Star Wars represents bureaucratic, ruthless, imperialism; and Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977) clearly plays on anxieties about the relationship between the state and the individual citizen. Between 1977 and 1988, there is a clear historical period in which enlightened alien beings bring salvation to America after the 1970s and its rash of dystopian science fi ction fi lms. (...)

The Monstrous Alien (11/29/2009)
(...) From Alien to Species (1995), science fi ction horror hybrid fi lms have created and recreated ever-more-terrifying extraterrestrials to play on our fear of the unknown. The eponymous alien has epitomised our idea of the alien ever since the fi rst fi lm, spawning three sequels and a number of imitations. In Close Encounters, humanity's curiosity about the alien visitors is rewarded; the extraterrestrial visitors share their galactic knowledge with Roy Neary as he ascends with them in their spaceship. (...)

Politics and Identity in Science Fiction (11/29/2009)
(...) More recently, Putnam saw decline in almost every area of American community life: local politics, clubs, organisation membership, church groups, sport and social societies, parent-teacher associations. The number of people willing to get involved with these kinds of groups and actively participate in local affairs had grown signifi cantly smaller. However, Putnam recorded an increase in mass membership of national organisations, where ‘the only act of membership consists of writing a check for dues'. (...)

Special Effects and Science Fiction Spectacle (11/29/2009)
(...) The notion of cinema as a form of spectacle was becoming increasingly important as it battled with newer forms of media and entertainment for an audience. Pierson cites many of the ways Hollywood tried to reinvigorate itself, including adapting many of the popular video games of the time such as Mortal Kombat (1995) and Street Fighter (1994) for the big screen. Taking advantage of its primary assets, the ‘temporal privilege' of the blockbuster cinema event and ‘the social and public dimension' of theatre exhibition (Pierson 2002: 122) meant that fi lm could still compete with other media especially if it had spectacular, special effects-driven stories and visual panoramas to offer. (...)

American Science Fiction Post-9/11 (11/29/2009)
(...) The knock-on effect of this trend was that Hollywood started to take less risks on the sorts of fi lm it made. Science fi ction would still be a popular genre, but only those stories and features that had a proven track record of success would be continued. Hollywood wanted immediate returns on its movies, as if the potential for seeing what the future might bring proved too scary or unnervingly close to real life, so the more creative and original projects would ‘be replaced with an assembly line of factory-tooled genre vehicles that deliver predictable thrills to increasingly unsophisticated audiences' (Dixon 2004: 15). (...)

Television and Intertextuality (11/29/2009)
(...) Scenes between Tim and his fl atmate Daisy, where they talk about how bad the fi lm was, are interwoven with fantasy scenes that depict Tim dressed up as Luke Skywalker burning his Star Wars collectibles in a form of silent protest toward Lucas. Brooker calls this an example of the series's ‘dual address' whereby it speaks to the popular audience of the time and offers a more subversive reading to those fans who are able to understand the reference within the joke and sympathise with Tim, and also Pegg (Brooker 2002: 79-85). Pegg as intertextual referent occurs in Shaun of the Dead too as he reprises the archetypal role of middle-age cult fan and uses his knowledge of zombie horror fi lms to help him and his friends escape hordes of zombies in the streets of London. (...)

Epilogue The Repeated Pleasures of Science Fiction Film and Television (11/29/2009)
(...) Separating the science fi ction television series from the confi nes of a weekly episodic format enables viewers to construct their own narrative as they can watch episodes in whatever order they want, as many times as they want, and often with extras, deleted scenes and documentaries that add new readings and contexts to the viewing experience.Moreover, the entire narrative history that can be created and maintained through the series/serial format, as I have already outlined with regard to Battlestar Galactica, is destabilised as the audience assumes control of their viewing contexts. Watching episodes out of order, viewing favourite episodes that bare no relation to the overarching chronological timeline or metanarrative or listening to directors' commentary upsets the fl ow of regular television that keeps the series locked in the viewer's present. (...)

Edward Bellamys Looking Backward (11/18/2009)
(...) Written at a time when the Progressive Movement and religious groups aimed to reform urban American society by returning to community values of the small town, ‘Looking Backward anticipated the movement for reform not through the rousing rhetoric of revolution but by espousing rationalist principles and proposing a national bureaucracy and a disciplined industrial army as answers to “the labor problem” ’ (Tallack 1991: 12). The Progressive Era in American history can be defi ned as a largely city-based movement, focused on the reform of the social inequities of the nineteenth century looking forward to a new liberalism concerned for the working classes, wider social responsibility and the modernisation of the economy and industry. Much like the Puritan concern with the past and how it should infl uence the present, Bellamy (1888: 2) stressed in his preface that the American utopia was achievable through faith and hard work: ‘Nowhere can we fi nd more solid ground for daring anticipation of human development during the next one thousand years, than by “Looking Backward” upon the progress of the last one hundred. (...)

Georges Meliess Voyage dans la Lune (11/18/2009)
(...) For Tom Gunning, the ‘cinema of attractions’ presented audiences with a series of views, and they were fascinated by the ‘power’ of ‘magical illusion’ (1990: 57). Film was not used merely to tell a story but to show off the creative, scientifi c and artistic talents of the fi lmmaker: ‘the cinema of attractions directly solicits spectator attention, inciting visual curiosity, and supplying pleasure through an exciting spectacle—a unique event, whether fi ctional or documentary’ (1990: 58). The history of early cinema had been constructed under a hegemonic bias toward narrative fi lm, as that is the dominant form of fi lmmaking still produced today. (...)