Science Fiction Film, Television, and Adaptation: Across the Screens ed. by J. P. Telotte and Gerald Duchovnay (review)

Science Fiction Film, Television, and Adaptation is a welcome and timely collection of essays that draws together cognate critical discourses in its analysis of the migration of visual texts across various media screens. As such, it will be of particular interest to scholars and students of sf, adaptation and cross-media intertextuality. An explicit editorial direction ensures that its contents demonstrate a coherence and consistency sometimes absent from such anthologies. In his introduction, Telotte circumscribes the text's theoretical location between John Ellis's Visible Fictions (1982; 1992), the 'touchstone' for the collection, Catherine Johnson's Telefantasy (2005), with its stress on the importance of fantastic television in understanding how the accepted boundaries of the medium can be challenged, and Henry Jenkins's Convergence Culture (2006). Most contributors work within these parameters with several acknowledging subsequent scholarship and the industrial changes that have impacted upon Ellis's seminal study.

Telotte is an intellectually rigorous editor and his introduction establishes the text's ambitious aims: to investigate how adaptations between film and television are doubly 'screened', both in terms of exhibition and filtration; to explore the 'complex calculus involved in the movement across the media screens' (xiv), which determine an adaptation's conceptual, narrative and/or aesthetic success; to make explicit the 'problems and possibilities inherent in all instances of cross-media adaptation' (iv); and to provide further insights into sf film and television, particularly their stylistic and aesthetic attempts to 'escape the screen of fiction, to argue for their possible reality' (xix). Credit is due both to editors and contributors for producing an anthology that satisfies these aims in a series of largely stimulating case studies organised in four parts.

Structured historically, the first section concentrates on early examples of cross-media adaptation. It opens with Cynthia J. Miller's fascinating 'Domesticating Space: Science Fiction Serials Come Home', an assessment of how the 1930s cinema serial form was later exploited by television. Arguing that such texts were not simply low-budget imitations of their predecessors, Miller reads the 1940s television sf serial industrially and culturally, seeing it as a '"Material Articulation" of the era's domestic consumerism' (12). Her account of the serials' blurring of narrative and advertising, of their expansive merchandising and of their employment of moral messages is commendable, and invites further investigations into the cross marketing of sf and of telefantasy's problematic role in moral education.

In the first of two essays, Telotte considers the adoption of film aesthetics by television in 'The Cinematic Zone of The Twilight Zone'. He sees this as symptomatic of a greater contemporary convergence of visual styles that has hitherto been partly unacknowledged (23). Providing forensic analyses of 'Time Enough at Last' (20 Nov 1959), 'Nightmare at 20,000 Feet' (11 Oct 1963) and 'The Monsters Are Due on Maple Street' (4 Mar 1960), he suggests that Serling's series often requires not the televisual glance proposed by Ellis but a more cinematic gaze. Locating each episode in 'the media-haunted nature of the contemporary US' (22), he argues persuasively that they demonstrate a reflexive dimension that points to 'the larger self-reflexive thrust of the entire series' (27). In addition, he draws attention to how the series' synthesis of language and image possessed an emotive power unrealised by American television of the period. Accordingly, he invites the reader to re-evaluate one of the most lauded, yet arguably least fully appreciated, sf anthology series.

Concluding the first part of the collection, Mary Pharr's 'Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea: Big Screen Spectacle and Compressed Television Images' assesses the tension between a film's potential for series adaptation and the difficulties of achieving comparable spectacle on television's intimate screen. Focusing on Irwin Allen's 1961 underwater adventure, Pharr's wide-ranging essay précises Allen's career, the film's production history, its adaptation and the narrative, formulaic and...