Liquid Metal: The Science Fiction Film Reader

	Preface
	*Sean Redmond*

We live in a science fiction textured world. A world where a sense of the impossible, the fantastic, the spectacular finds its way into the architecture and design of everything from shopping malls, hospitals and office blocks to art galleries, restaurants and nightclubs. In these futuristic places and spaces, aluminium clad interiors, (hidden) surveillance cameras, robotic displays, retro sci-fi design and ‘impossible’ lines, shapes and vanishing points seemingly allow the wanderer to time travel and see beyond or rather to enter into the future. For example, in the modern nightclub interior, space can suddenly change or metamorphose, creating the impression that one is caught in a state of spatial flux. Floors move, lighting and laser rigs are in perpetual motion, video projection creates the sense that one is being immersed in the holodeck, and ‘special effects’, whether it be water emerging from beneath the floor or a space craft descending from the rotating ceiling, make the club space unstable – outside the physical laws of gravity. Of course, the cyborg clubber ‘plugs’ herself into this liquid machine and by so doing becomes a vital part of its futuristic circuitry.

We live in a world where the everyday stories that people tell one another – over dinner, in the school playground, on the front of newspapers and in the soundbites of television – border on the wondrous and the terrifying in equal measure. For example, tabloid and broadsheet newspapers are full of ‘science fiction’ stories such as the alien invasion scenarios that make it into print on almost a daily basis. The mysterious and scientifically unexplainable appearance of corn circles in England is one ‘seasonal’ example. Or newspapers are full of science fact stories that are written as impossible stories so they become interchangeably science fact/fiction narratives. The recent, although still unconfirmed, genetic cloning of baby girl ‘Eve’ by the Raelians (a religious cult who believes that Aliens begat the human race), is one example where elements of science fact and fiction collide. It is an example that points to the way the borders of science fiction and science fact actually merge and ultimately collapse in the postmodern world – where the real is as much (science) fiction as the fiction itself, and where the (science) fiction is – or becomes – as credible or authentic as fact. Through this type of simulation, even Jean Baudrillard’s (1994) meta-concept of hyperreality, from which this idea is borrowed from, seems little removed from the pages of Philip K. Dick or Robert A. Heinlein.

The television representation of war is another example of the way in science fiction’s codes and conventions in part provide the audio soundtrack, the special effects and the spectacular action sequences for the ‘actual’ conflict that takes place. Computer-generated missiles, spectacular explosions, doomsday scenarios and evil dictators planning biological attacks, are borrowed or re-imagined from the science fiction lexicon and drawn into the way war is imaged and narrated on factual television programmes. As this Reader was being composed, news programmes across the world spectacularly prepared their people for another horrifying invasion narrative as the US and UK fire-up for a terribly real sci-fi war in Iraq.

We live in a world where the mass media in general calls upon the science fiction text to sell cinema seats, boost ratings or to connect or engage people from across the globe. Today when one goes to the multiplex or to the video/DVD rental store, or when one switches on the television or scans the latest listings magazines, one expects to find either the latest science fiction blockbuster showing, or a recent science fiction hit or television series being rented or premiered, or a golden oldie sci-fi flick getting a repeat airing, often as part of some sci-fi mini-season, on late-night television. Whole digital channels are dedicated to its fare. Numerous magazines and journals speak its name. Bookshops dedicate whole sections to the science fiction text. Science fiction websites connect millions of fans across the globe. Science fiction-based conventions and conferences populate the entertainment and academic landscape, for many people structuring or mapping out the year for them. Science fiction is a religion for some, a big, fat dollar sign for others. Science fiction is everywhere in the postmodern world.

Science fiction film and television is everywhere and yet never really totally at home in the academic world today, ignored or scorned and critiqued as it so often is. In terms of cinema, science fiction is often in part blamed for the infantilism of New Hollywood and named as the motor for childish and vulgar cinematic display. As Thomas Schatz naively bemoans:

From The Godfather to Jaws to Star Wars, we see films that are increasingly plot-driven, increasingly visceral, kinetic, and fast-paced, increasingly reliant on special effects, increasingly ‘fantastic’ (and thus apolitical), and increasingly targeted at younger audiences. (1993: 23)

Or else science fiction is seen as one of the apocalyptic catalysts for real cinema’s imminent death. So the argument runs, science fiction film fills the movie world with too many special effects and set-piece moments at the expense of narrative development or meaningful characterisation, or so relies on CGI or the digital aesthetic that reel film dies in the antiquated chemical process to which it clings to. Or finally, science fiction cinema is seen as the ultimate commodity intertext, a marketplace for selling games, toys, theme park rides and product tie-ins, and its own endless stream of remakes and sequels – in what therefore becomes an over-determining and all-devouring franchise system. Television-based science fiction is seen to be central to this commodity-synergy footprinting: uniting the second, third, fourth etc. series of say, Star Trek, with their cinematic interpretations, year after year after year.

And yet science fiction film and television is in another sense valorised by the academic community since it is seen as a cohering genre that is best able to articulate contemporary fears, such as those that presently exist over genetic engineering and nuclear war, and to play out ideological tensions around class, race, gender and sexuality. As Annete Kuhn summarises,

… there is the idea that science fiction films relate to the social order through the mediation of ideologies, society’s representation of itself in and for itself – that films speak, enact, even produce certain ideologies, which cannot always be read directly off films’ surface contents. (1990:10)

The science fiction text, so seemingly far fetched and non-realistic, is here seen as an allegorical or metaphorical or mythical meaning-making system that directly interprets or questions or provides healing solutions to the everyday issues and problems that people face on the planet. Here the argument runs: if you want to know what really aches a culture at any given time don’t go to its art cinema, or its gritty social realist texts, but go to its science fiction. This is precisely the destination of this Reader.

Liquid Metal: The Science Fiction Film Reader is the very first extended collection of previously published essays on science fiction film and, to a lesser extent, television. The Reader brings together a great number of what are regarded to be ‘seminal’ essays that have opened up the study of science fiction to serious critical interrogation. The essays in this collection understand science fiction either as a destructive genre, in the senses outlined above, or as culturally central to the transmission of dominant ideology or counter-hegemony, to identity formation, and to the political wounds that mark any age or society at any given time.

The essay choices in this Reader have not only been made on the quality and the importance of the writing to an understanding of how science fiction functions, but in terms of a loose histography, so that arguably the ‘best’ of the writing on science fiction, over the last thirty or so years, is represented. However, choices have also been predicated on two other factors. First, essays have been chosen so that across the Reader the film and television texts that are discussed cover science fiction from America, Europe and Asia – although, as might be expected, American cinema dominates. Second, essays have been chosen in terms of their centrality to the themes that structure and sub-divide the book, themes that themselves have been chosen on the basis of how they have come to dominate the major concerns of science fiction writing in recent academic history.

The Reader is divided into eight distinct themed sections, each section containing three or four key essays that explore in different and sometimes contradictory ways the theme that heads the section. The Reader, forgive the pun, takes the reader on an intellectual, textual and contextual journey, beginning with an exploration of the generic specificities of its form, and ending with a historically specific case-study section: the 1950s invasion narratives. Along the way cyborgs are encountered and dispatched; great metropolis are visited and destroyed; the world ends and is reborn; fan’s poach around for deeper meaning; aliens arrive and issue grave warnings; and people stand and stare, in awe and wonder, at the liquid textures of the science fiction text.

References

Baudrillard, Jean (1994) Simulacra and Simulation. London: University of Michigan Press.

Kuhn, Annette (1990) Alien Zone. London: Verso.

Schalz, Thomas (1993) ‘The New Hollywood’, in Jim Collins, Hilary Radner and Ava Preacher Collins (eds) Film Theory Goes to the Movies. London: Routledge.