Introduction

In the opening moments of I Am Legend (Lawrence US 2007), Dr Krippin (Emma Thompson) attempts to explain to a TV newswoman a breakthrough cancer treatment which involves genetically engineering the measles virus. With self-evident pride in what is actually a pretty lousy metaphor, she suggest that we should imagine the bloodstream as a highway along which the virus travels: the measles virus is a car being driven recklessly by a very bad man, but if we take the bad man out of the driver's seat and replace him with a cop… Of course, this 'cure for cancer' turns out to be a devastating, untreatable plague that wipes out 95% of the world's population, transforming most others into darkseekers (a cross between bestial vampires and fast-moving zombies) who feed on the remnants of humanity. Robert Neville (Will Smith), believing himself the sole surviving human, continues to work on a cure, alternately admitting that everything fell apart because nothing went to plan and insisting that he can still fix it.

For many years, the dominant narrative about sf was that it was invented by Hugo Gernsback, the founder in 1926 of the first pulp sf magazine (or perhaps by the fiction of H. G. Wells, or Jules Verne, or Edgar Allan Poe, or Mary Shelley). Arguably it is because the serious study of sf began in literature departments, and included many academics who had read the US pulp and paperback tradition while growing up, that this narrative continued – and continues – to dominate the study of the genre, bringing with it certain assumptions: that sf is primarily a literary form, that it is dominated by ideas (or even cognitive estrangement), that horror, fantasy, and other media and material practices are the debased Other of the 'true' genre. This narrative about strict definitions and rigid borders is what happens when cops drive the car of genre. But sf, like any genre, is profligate and reckless, cutting you up, swerving across lanes, ignoring the lights. Like a virus, genre replicates, mutates and has unexpected consequences. We construct genre from the very tension between everything falling apart and constantly trying to fix it.

Of course, this is not to say that the approaches developed in the study of literary sf are not pertinent to the study of sf film and television. Indeed, the technological imaginary, questions of estrangement and alterity they foreground readily lend themselves to the concerns of film studies and television studies, especially in an era of media convergence and globalisation. While the everyday world increasingly externalises the sf imagination, the genre itself frenziedly proliferates, filling niches in the media ecology wherever it can find them, from the rationalised control of the 'truth' in CSI (US 2000– ) to 'interactive' media, from the digitally manipulated environments and actors in films such as 300 (Snyder US 2006) to genetically engineered chimera species. While not manifestly sf in their subject matter, these are all sf in their materiality.

Audio-visual media and the technological recording of reality were frequently depicted in nineteenth-century fantastic fiction and the American pulp tradition, with Gernsback himself playing a role in the development of American television broadcasting. Sf film can be traced back to the single-reel 'trick' films of the 1890s, and sf television to the BBC's pre-World War II broadcast of a stage production of Karel Čapek's 1920 play Rossum's Universal Robots. For some idea of the scope of sf in these media, consider these figures: Phil Hardy's The Encyclopedia of Film: Science Fiction (1995) details nearly 1600 films; Roger Fulton's The Encyclopedia of TV Science Fiction (2000) details about 300 series and 150 one-off dramas; and neither volume claims to be comprehensive.

Prior to the 2005–2006 season, US television had produced more than eighty prime-time sf series, but in each season since then nearly thirty shows with fantastic content, many of them sf, have been launched. Although many of them were short-lived, the ratings for Lost (US 2004– ) were among the highest and it has won multiple Emmys. The re-visioned Battlestar...