American Science Fiction Film and Television (review)

Science fiction film and television have become hot topics for publication, especially among academic presses, as science fiction programming—thanks in part to cable television’s Syfy channel—has multiplied, as college courses on science fiction and media have proliferated, and as cultural critics have recognized that science fiction may be the genre best situated to take the measure of postmodern culture. Lincoln Geraghty’s American Science Fiction Film and Television is very much a part of this wave in its self-described effort at providing a “critical history of late-twentieth-century American science fiction film and television” from the vantage of “cultural, industrial, political and social concerns” (p. 1). It provides a useful survey of the form, links its cinematic and televisual versions, and, while making no pretense at surveying all science fiction films and television series produced over the last fifty to sixty years, it covers far more examples than most texts. At the same time, in keeping with its largely “cultural” overview, it restricts its focus to American films and series, addressing them through a kind of patchwork quilt of commentaries drawn from a wide variety of cultural readings of the form.

The strength of this book lies in the author’s ability to range widely over his stipulated period and, in the process, to draw interesting connections between the films and the series that it addresses. The book is roughly structured around a series of decade portraits, as a chapter on the 1950s addresses how the cold war and the space race shaped science fiction film and early science fiction television. One on the 1960s examines the counterculture’s impact on the genre, noting how, like the nation itself, science fiction film and television were “experiencing the changes and uncertainties” of the era (p. 35). The chapter organized around the 1970s emphasizes not the decade-ending space operas of George Lucas and Steven Spielberg, but the dystopian visions found in such earlier works as Soylent Green (1973), A Boy and His Dog (1975), and Logan’s Run (1976). The one dealing with the 1980s emphasizes the interesting concurrence of benevolent alien narratives such as E.T.: The Extraterrestrial (1982) and the threatening cyborg of The Terminator (1984), as well as the Borg of Star Trek: The Next Generation (1987–94). That difficult cultural combination leads into a more scattered discussion of the form in the 1990s, as Geraghty attempts to draw together big-budget special-effects films, parodies such as Mars Attacks! (1996), paranoia narratives like The X-Files (1993–2002), the malevolent aliens in works like Alien 3 (1992) and Starship Troopers (1997), and the rejuvenation of the space opera in Babylon 5 (1994–98) and other series.

In discussing the first decade of the new century, Geraghty draws on the events of 9/11 as a thematic focus to suggest how American science fiction media both sought to reflect the upheavals and lack of cultural direction that ensued and also tried to compensate for those effects through a “fascination with spectacle as entertainment” (p. 104). As this summary might suggest, this periodization seems largely a structure of convenience and one that packs no surprises. While it allows the book all the more easily to cover large periods and to link media, it is also a structure that constantly forces the author to reach across decades to make a point or to force a characterization on an era, as when he describes the 1970s as “a sustained period of negativity” (p. 69), despite the popularity of works like Star Wars (1977), Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977), and The Six Million Dollar Man (1974–78).

This quibble about structure is a relatively minor one, though, given the book’s larger effort at bringing together two forms of mediated science fiction that have all too often been treated as separate genre entries. That is a solid accomplishment, not mirrored in other current texts on the form. Moreover, that merger lets us...