Author Archive for: ‘Merv Bendle’

Roz Kaveney, From Alien to The Matrix: Reading Science Fiction Film. London & New York: I.B.Tauris, 2005. ISBN: 1 85043 806 4 208pp £9.99 (pb) (Review copy supplied by I.B.Tauris) Roz Kaveney has written a very accessible and informative book that provides a useful discussion of many science fiction films over the past 25 years. She has a clear and engaging style and …

Jan Johnson-Smith, American Science Fiction TV: Star Trek, Stargate and Beyond. London & New York: I.B.Tauris, 2004. ISBN 1 86064 882 7 320pp £12.99 stg. (pb) (Review copy supplied by I.B.Tauris) This book offers a valuable overview of the recent history of science fiction television, with a primary focus on narrative, imagery and ideology. It offers many insights and helps …

R.L.Rutsky, High Technê: Art and Technology from the Machine Aesthetic to the Posthuman. Minnneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999. ISBN 0 8166 3356 8 (pb) 192pp US$17.95 (Review copy supplied by University of Minnesota Press) Uploaded 1 March 2001 How is one to situate this book? Does it look forward or back? Is it of this century or the last? …

James B. Twitchell, Lead Us into Temptation: The Triumph of American Materialism. (Columbia University Press, 1999) ISBN 0 231 11518 0 310pp US$28.50(paper) (Review copy supplied by Columbia University Press) Uploaded 1 March 2000 “THINGS R US” James Twitchell is very excited about consumption, and he has done us the service of writing a book so that we can be …

Terrie Waddell (ed.) , Cultural Expressions of Evil and Wickedness: Wrath, Sex, Crime. Amsterdam/New York, NY: Rodopi, 2003. ISBN: 9 042 01015 0 226pp US$50.00 (pb) (Review copy supplied by Rodopi publishers) Starting with the tabloid maxim that “if it bleeds it leads” (p.ix), this book sets out to explore the representation of evil in popular culture and Western history. Composed …

Slavoj Zizek, The Parallax View. Cambridge Massachusetts: MIT Press, 2006. ISBN: 0 262 24051 3 528pp US$24.95 (hb) (Review copy supplied by MIT Press) My dream is to combine an extremely dark, pessimistic belief that life is basically horrible and contingent, with a revolutionary social attitude. (Slavoj Zizek) The Parallax View is Zizek’s 25th book published since 1989 (excluding co-authored or edited …

J.P. Telotte, Science Fiction Film. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 2001. ISBN 0 521 59647 9 254pp AU$49.95 (pb) (Review copy supplied by Cambridge University Press) Uploaded 20 September 2002 It says something of the science fiction film genre that it reaches from Metropolis (Lang, 1926, Germany) to Metropolis (Rintaro, 2001, Japan). There were earlier science fiction films of course (eg., Melies’s A Trip to the …