The Essential Science Fiction Television Reader

"...A particular strength of this volume is the judicious way in which Telotte and his contributors balance theoretical perspectives with a solid grounding in historical context. The tone is set by Telotte’s introductory chapter, mapping ‘The trajectory of science fiction television’, which provides a contextualized history of the genre’s emergence and development, highlighting key themes and landmark series, whilst also addressing some of the intellectual issues arising from the study of science fiction. He highlights a tension within science fiction studies between its status as a cultural artefact – science fiction ‘has simply become a text of choice for a postmodern world’ (p. 4) – and its relationship to the wider culture. Thus, on the one hand, science fiction is about the ideological construction of a future society that ‘often seem[s] less a continuation of our own historical circumstances than, to evoke one of the more popular series, a quantum leap to another history’ (p. 4). On the other hand, however, science fiction has often been understood as a vehicle for exploring the political and cultural anxieties of the time,from the Cold War in the 1950s to the post-millennial anxieties of the present. To this extent television science fiction has often been more immediate than science fiction cinema, providing ‘evidence of its growing importance as a tool of cultural deliberation and ideological exploration’ (p. 5)."