Alien Zone: Cultural Theory and Contemporary Science Fiction Cinema (Probability; 36)

Book Overview

This is especially true of the science fiction film--a genre as old as cinema itself--which has rarely received the serious attention devoted to such genres as the western, the film noir and recently,... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0860919935
• ISBN13: 9780860919933
• Release Date: May 1990
• Publisher: Verso
• Length: 240 Pages
• Weight: 0.85 lbs.
• Dimensions: 9.0" x 0.5" x 6.0"

Customer Reviews

Mostly scholarly, still interesting.

To be perfectly honest, it's quite unlikely many people will be buying this book as anything else than a textbook for a science fiction literature or science fiction film class. That said, it's still a very interesting read on the most part. A collection of semiotic essays on various Science Fiction texts and their discursive meanings, this book is both informative and useful for taking science fiction a bit further. If you know neither what semiotic or discursive means, don't even bother. Even the most poorly written essays in this collection use pretty thick grammar to present their theses. Despite their largely academic conceit, this book is not saved from the occassional bad essay. The last one in particular, "Feminist Futures, A Generic Study" was an exercise in redundancy and circular reasoning. Thus, for the oddball exhibitionist out there, don't expect to place this book on your shelf and use it to seem smarter or anything. It definitely is a book that deserves a read-through in order to develop some ideas. It's a resource material, not a literary piece. --PolarisDiB