Deletion|Deviation: The Perversions of Science Fiction
Jack Sargeant | Freely adapted from notes written for a lecture and towards a forthcoming project. These are intended as introductory notes only. In 1967 JG Ballard was best known as a writer associated with the new wave of science fiction, a writer whose short stories had started to collapse the genre’s fascination with distant…
Diana Sandars, University of Melbourne | Wearing flying goggles, headphones, shiny silver leather jacket, black Pink Floyd T shirt and an expression of mischievous arrogance, we watch a teenaged Quicksilver causally jogging pakour-style along the walls of a steely industrial kitchen. Armed Officers, X-men, food and bullets are all held hostage to bullet-time motion and…
Djoymi Baker, University of Melbourne | Kazui Ishiguro’s 2005 novel Never Let Me Go is a science-fictional memoir of an alternate timeline, a temporal reimagining that has been a mainstay of science fiction (Singles 2013). Both the novel and Mark Romanek’s 2010 film version (either of which you should go off and experience now before…
Patricia Di Risio, University of Melbourne | The character of Ellen Ripley (Sigourney Weaver) and the way she develops across the four films that form the Alien series demonstrate how her evolution as a post-human character becomes decidedly queer. Each Alien film has a different director and, as the franchise progresses, Weaver takes on increasingly…
Thao Phan, University of Melbourne | Spike Jonze’s film Her (2014) is an unusual departure to popular representations of Artificial Intelligence on screen. Like most science fiction motifs, AI and other fantasies of future technologies often manifest as conjectures of present anxieties. Where films such as The Terminator (1984), released in the mid-1980s, featured themes…
Ian Dixon, SAE Institute | What if two children were trapped in a forest under a deadly, invisible dome? This is the premise for the horror/science fiction feature film The Perimeter currently in production, written by AWGIE award winner Stephen Mitchell (2015) and directed by Ian Dixon. This exegetic research outlines several years of gestation,…
Alicia Byrnes, New York University | In her seminal essay ‘A Manifesto for Cyborgs: Science, Technology and Socialist Feminism in the 1980s,’ Donna Haraway adopts the cyborg as a feminist icon because it undermines the identity-related binaries governing patriarchal order. Irrespective of the merit of Haraway’s theory, films such as The Island of Lost Souls…
Anne Cranny-Francis, UTS | This paper locates many of the features of science fiction that make it such a pleasure to read, watch, and be part of, and at the same time maps the way that science fiction entered the critical and theoretical landscape. I’m going to do this also as a personal journey as…
Deletion’s two-day symposium, Deletion/Deviation, presented a constellation of new perspectives on contemporary science fiction and its many perversions. As organizer Dr. Grady Hancock wrote in her introduction to the conference programme, Science Fiction exists in a state of tension between the pleasurable and the perverse — of the pleasure gained from its fictive forms, and…