The Oxford Handbook of New Science Fiction Cinemas

Abstract For the contemporary film audience, science fiction (sf) has become a key locus for displaying—and imaginatively addressing—its most pressing concerns. Those concerns increasingly surface not just as displaced subjects, injected into conventional sf narratives, but as inflections in the very nature of the genre. We might describe these issues that bulk so large in our everyday world as angling into the world of science and technology, becoming a kind of slant presence in the genre, and in the process altering the thrust of our sf films and other screen media, resulting in what seems like a proliferation of subgenre labels that mark off a substantially “new” group of sf cinemas. These cinemas challenge us to view or “read” them differently, from perspectives that are just coming into focus. Through an introductory overview and series of articles on various of these contemporary “slants” and the theories that drive them, this volume offers a guide to both what the new sf cinemas are about and how we have come to think about or “read” them differently. In the process, the book also links these fragments of the constantly growing sf supertext to our changing sense of how genres function as a process, marked by consistent growth and evolution, and discussed in ways that reflect contemporary culture’s own constant changes.