American Science Fiction Television and Space

This collection explores how American science fiction television reflects, produces, and reconfigures the physical, imaginative, and cultural spaces we inhabit. It reads the proliferation of science fiction television and screen technologies as colliding heterotopias (impossible emplacements of space and time) that increasingly shape our world. With our growing awareness of population growth, the threat of ecocide, volatile geopolitics, and the rapid technological developments transforming media, we have become a “space conscious” age, with our lives increasingly mediated through the screen. Analyzing a plethora of science fiction television shows, the contributors explore science fiction’s engagement with the contested nature of inhabiting space; consider science fiction and screens as mirrors reflecting and refracting our world, its politics and conflicts; examine the nature of intersecting media and the importance of screens as science-fictional devices; and assess the transformative effects of science fiction spaces on communities and bodies. Joel Hawkes lecturers in English at the University of Victoria, Canada. His research examines the practices and performances that create the physical and literary spaces we inhabit. His work is increasingly interested in how (television) screens shape our world. Recent papers appear in Surveillance, Architecture and Control: Discourses on Spatial Culture, Critical Approaches to ‘Twin Peaks: The Return’ and Screening American Nostalgia. Alexander Christie is Assistant Professor of Digital Prototyping at the Centre for Digital Humanities, Brock University, Canada. He has published internationally in a number of journals and collections, including Digital Humanities Quarterly, Social Knowledge Creation in the Humanities, and Reading Modernism with Machines. In addition to creating warped 3D maps of literary spaces (z-axis research), he is currently completing a book on modern manuscripts and humanities computing. Tom Nienhuis is an instructor in English at Camosun College in Victoria, Canada. His research examines religiosity and the supernatural in twentieth-century American literature. He is increasingly focused on science fiction storytelling, particularly cyber punk narratives.