Alien Zone II [Paperback]

Annette Kuhn (Editor)

Book Description

Publication Date: December 17, 1999

Science fiction, more than any other film genre, allows cinema to exhibit its own distinctive matters of expression. Whether these be the state-of-the-art special effects technologies of 2001: A Space Odyssey, or the symbolic imagery of ruined cityscapes in Blade Runner, they allow the spectator to experience the totality of the audiovisual thrill. While this remains in many ways the core defining feature of the genre, recent trends in the study of science-fiction cinema have seen a shift of focus away from the specifically cinematic towards the more broadly cultural. New technologies of communication and vision, revolutionary developments in the delivery and reception of moving-image media, the increasing importance of the notion of space: all are forcing new and different ways of thinking about the genre. Alien Zone II presents some of the most exciting new voices in the current debates. A companion volume to Alien Zone, it continues to pursue the critical and theoretical issues opened up in the earlier book and energetically explores fresh territory with an eye which is both reflective and interventionist: visionary cities, psycho-cybernetics, Internet fandom, the convergence of science-fiction literature and science-fiction film, the body and its limits are just some of the subjects brought under its gaze. Contributors: Will Brooker, Scott Bukatman, Catherine Constable, David Desser, Barry Keith Grant, Brooks Landon, Linda Mizejewski, Vivian Sobchack, Claudia Springer, Janet Staiger, Garrett Stewart.

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

In his poem "Ozymandias," Percy Bysshe Shelley imagined discovering a stone torso from millennia past and reading the (ironic) inscription, "Look on me, ye mighty, and dread." According to most of the writers in this probing collection of essays, each generation gets hooked on the utopian and dystopian visions of the future for the same reason--because they offer the chilling insight that our world is the fragments of futures to come. Since Georges Melies's Voyage to the Moon (1902), science fiction movies have speculated about what life in other places and times would be like. Under editor Annette Kuhn's direction, the contributors to Alien Zone 2 have taken it upon themselves to think out loud about how "space" works in sci-fi movies like Brazil, Blade Runner, Total Recall, Metropolis, and the Alien series. The way these films structure cities, conceptualize culture, and imagine psyches generally falls, it turns out, into a category that UCLA professor Vivian Sobchak calls "future noir," featuring terrifying visions of cities in which a faceless multinational power sits atop thrillingly disenfranchised lumps of humanity. Distressing as this scenario sounds, most of the writers take it as an opportunity to reinvigorate our sense of the possibilities of the present, whether political, aesthetic, or otherwise. Writing about race, women, cyborgs, or consumer-culture, they key in on the genius in these movies that has at once invented a three-dimensional world and performed a kind of radical keratotomy on our own vision of things. Some academic jargon in the collection may be off-putting, but razor-sharp insights are here in abundance. --Lyall Bush

About the Author

Annette Kuhn is Reader in Cultural Research at Lancaster University. She is the editor of Alien Zone: Cultural Theory and Contemporary Science Fiction Cinema, and the author of Family Secrets and Women's Picture: Feminism and Cinema, all from Verso.

Product Details

• Paperback: 240 pages
• Publisher: Verso (December 17, 1999)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1859842593
• ISBN-13: 978-1859842591
• Product Dimensions: 7.6 x 7.6 x 0.9 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.7 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1 customer review)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #299,411 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

Customer Reviews

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5.0 out of 5 stars Sci-Fi and motion pictures..., January 8, 2008

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This review is from: Alien Zone II (Paperback)

This book deals with science fiction and the cinema and how they helped each other develop over the decades. With chapters on bodybuilders, the internet, cities, crazy machines, and how new technology has changed how we make movies and how the movies present technology you can't help but look at science fiction in the cinema with a completely different light.