Editorial We are just coming to the end of the season of the cinema blockbuster, dominated by American product and the science fiction spectacle. These science fictions are big pictures in almost every way: big budgets, big special effects, big stars, big cross-overs, distributed in big cinemas to big audiences. However, these bejewelled behemoths to size and…
Sophia Davidson Gluyas, Independent Scholar | THE DOCTOR: … I can dance! ROSE: Actually, I thought Jack might like this dance. THE DOCTOR: I’m sure he would Rose, I’m absolutely certain, but who with?[i] (Doctor Who, 2005) Captain Jack Harkness danced onto our screens in 2005 and was the gale of fresh bisexual air…
Seo-Young Chu | Kafkaesque, Orwellian, eerie, surreal, bizarre, grotesque, alien, wacky, fascinating, dystopian, illusive, theatrical, antic, haunting, apocalyptic: these are just a few of the vaguely science-fictional adjectives that are now associated with North Korea. At the same time, North Korea has become an oddly convenient trope for a certain aesthetic – an uncanny opacity;…
Sue Lange | Five minutes later I stepped off the Chicago to Wyoming line into the stench of Dubuque’s suburbs. Place called Gurwood. I hadn’t had enough time to review the particulars so I inserted the stick into my Slot A and uploaded the info the old-fashioned way: straight to the brain. I perused as…
Mark Bould | One of the least pleasurable things about writing about sf is that non-specialist editors and publishers always want you to begin with a definition. Nowadays, after a few minutes of this kind of thing, I respond by instead discussing the irresolvable fluidity of genres as discursive objects produced by ongoing processes of…