Neo-Frontier Spaces in Science Fiction Television

ISBN-13: 9781476690896 / Angielski / Miękka / 2023 / 221 str.

Sebastian J. M?ller

Opis

The frontier--the mythical idea of a geographical borderline moving further and further West across the North American continent--has shaped American science fiction television since its very beginnings. Television series have long adapted the frontier myth to outer space and have explored American Wests in the future. This work takes a deeper look at the futuristic frontiers within series including Star Trek, Firefly, Terra Nova, Defiance and The 100, revealing how they rethink colonialism, the environment, spaces of risk and utopian/dystopian worlds. By harnessing forms of speculation and the post-apocalyptic imagination, these series engage with problems and risks of the present, reaching from the legacies of colonialism to climate change and the increasing integration of humans and technologies. In doing so, these series question the very idea of borders and reshape cultural binaries such as Self/Other, wilderness/civilization, city/nature, human/non-human and utopia/dystopia in novel ways that explore how spaces are created in the 21st century.