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How science fiction films in the 1950s were marketed and helped create the broader genre itself. For Hollywood, the golden age of science fiction was also an age of anxiety. Amid rising competition, fluid audience habits, and increasing government regulation, studios of the 1950s struggled to make and sell the kinds of films that once were surefire winners. These conditions, the leading media scholar J. P. Telotte argues, catalyzed the incredible rise of science fiction. Though science fiction films had existed since the earliest days of cinema, the SF genre as a whole continued to resist easy definition through the 1950s. In grappling with this developing genre, the industry began to consider new marketing approaches that viewed films as fluid texts and audiences as ever-changing. Drawing on trade reports, film reviews, pressbooks, trailers, and other archival materials, Selling Science Fiction Cinema reconstructs studio efforts to market a promising new genre and, in the process, shows how salesmanship influenced what that genre would become. Telotte uses such films as The Thing from Another World , Forbidden Planet , and The Blob , as well as the influx of Japanese monster movies, to explore the shifting ways in which the industry reframed the SF genre to market to no-longer static audience expectations. Science fiction transformed the way Hollywood does business, just as Hollywood transformed the meaning of science fiction.

On the centenary of the Nobel laureate’s birth, Patrick French explores her science-infused series Canopus in Argos. On the centenary of the Nobel laureate’s birth, Patrick French explores her science-infused series Canopus in Argos. Doris Lessing in 1990

Claire G. Coleman’s science fiction novel The Old Lie (2019) evokes the blemished chapters of Australia’s history as the basis of a dystopian futuristic Earth. By using the metaphor of a secular apocalypse (Weaver) wrapped in the form of a space opera, she interrogates historical colonialism on a much larger scale to bring to the fore the distinctive Indigenous experience of Australia’s terra nullius and its horrific offshoots: the Stolen Generations, nuclear tests on Aboriginal land and the treatment of Indigenous war veteran, but this time experienced by the people of the futuristic Earth. Following a brief introduction of the concept of the “Native Apocalypse” (Dillon) in the framework of Indigenous futurism, the paper discusses Coleman’s innovative use of space opera embedded in Wilfred Owen’s famous WWI poem “Dulce et Decorum Est”. The analysis focuses on four allegedly separate stories in the novel which eventually interweave into a single narrative about “the old lie”. In keeping with the twenty-first-century Indigenous futurism, Coleman’s novel does not provide easy answers. Instead, the end brings the reader to the beginning of the novel in the same state of disillusionment as Owen’s lyrical subject.

Marianne de Pierres’s Transformation Space (2010) is a rare example of an Australian novel set in an apocalyptic and dystopic interstellar future where pregnancy, childbearing and nursing have a presence that is quite uncommon in Science Fiction (SF). Despite the fact that the genre of SF and that of space opera in particular have been traditionally quite male-oriented, in the last years feminist theories of several kinds have been an undeniable transformative influence. This article intends to analyse not only how these specifically female issues related to motherhood/mothering are presented in the novel, but also to explore their function and role. A close reading of these topics will show whether they endorse a solid feminist stance or are just colourful feminist details in a male-dominated space opera and, in turn, if they have a specifically narrative purpose in the context of the dystopic subgenre.

James White was a Northern Irish science fiction author working in the subgenre of medical science fiction from the mid-1950s to the end of the twentieth century. The aim of this article is to introduce White to scholars working in the medical humanities, pointing to features of interest and critiquing the more excessive utopian impulses of the author. The article covers White's Sector General series, set on a vast intergalactic hospital, as well as the author's standalone fictions.

When applying the category of \"mythology\" to a contemporary new religious group like the Church of Scientology (CoS), one has to choose from among several different categories of narratives which could be regarded as mythological. If we set aside the body of tales surrounding L. Ron Hubbard, CoS's founder (which could arguably be classified as mythology), one of Scientology's key stories is the so-called Xenu narrative (also referred to as the ot-iii teachings). Although this story is only revealed after one has tread the \"Bridge\" for some time, it is arguably a foundational myth, which sets the Scientology enterprise into a cosmological framework. While the present article will focus on the Xenu story, it also discusses Hubbard's self-mythologizing, including his \"discovery\" of Incident Two (the Xenu narrative) as a hero myth.

A presente dissertação foca-se no estudo da arquitetura presente no cinema de ficção científica, pretendendo mostrar a sua pertinência e a forma como, não só, esta se apresenta na arquitetura como conhecemos, mas como também afeta o modo como experienciamos a história no ecrã.Para além de compreender a sua importância no contexto cinematográfico, procuro também destacar a sua conexão com a arquitetura. Essa relação pode ser observada de maneira mais direta, através da aparição obras como cenários no cinema, ou de maneira mais subtil, através da presença discreta de referências arquitetônicas no cinema, assim como do cinema na arquitetura.No entanto, para além de se tornar relevante para o presente, este tipo de arquitetura mostra-se significativa para uma arquitetura futura, correspondente à arquitetura do espaço, uma nova disciplina que está em constante desenvolvimento, chamando a atenção de firmas de arquitetura tais como Foster & Partners e a BIG. O papel do arquiteto torna-se crucial nesta nova disciplina, conseguindo conciliar as necessidades para o bem-estar humano com as exigências de um ambiente extremo.Através de um projeto no final, relaciono todo o estudo anteriormente feito, tendo um maior contacto com a influência que o desenho fictício tem na arquitetura mas, também, conceber um primeiro conceito para uma arquitetura do futuro, a arquitetura do espaço.

Cyberpunk science fiction has been an important empirical base of the critique of modernist conceptions of science and technology and their relationship to magic and religion. Novelists such as William Gibson, Vernor Vinge, and Neal Stephenson have helped to create a popular imagination in which digital technology erases the distinctions between religion, magic, and science and/or technology. They picture, respectively, “space cowboys” confronting godlike or voodoo artificial intelligences in cyberspace; electronic identification tags as magical “true names”; and a computer virus as a language as well as a religion.¹ By thus encouraging a conception of travel in cyberspace that identifies