Tactile Memories of an Alternate Past in Never Let Me Go

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…

Post-human humanity in Alien: Resurrection

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…

Three Deviations for AI in Spike Jonze’s Her

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…

Alienating the Gaze: The Hybrid Femme Fatale of Under the Skin

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…

Episode 9: Deletion|Deviation

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…