From Alien To The Matrix - Reading Science Fiction Film
Originally, what I wanted to do as a follow up to the first edition of Reading the Vampire Slayer was a book of interviews with the writers. Bits of that project found their way into the second edition I ended up doing, but Joss Whedon really does not want to talk to me, for whatever reason, so that was shot.
My editor asked for a book on sf film, and I said, yes, as long as it can be individual essays rather than a history, because there are lots of histories. FAttM became a bit more than a book of essays, mostly at the last moment when I sat down and thought about what I had done and gave it a theoretical underpinning.
Chapters:
- Waking into Dream
- Competence Cascades, Thick Texts and the Universalization of the Geek Aesthetic
- Director as Parodist
- Paul Verhoeven's Starship Troopers
- Comedy 1
- Galaxy Quest
- The Decline and Fall of the Alien Invasion
- Comedy 2
- Small Soldiers and the Joke of the Robot
- Who Are You?
- Cognitive Dissonance and Lots of Really Big Guns
- The Mirrored Gaze
- James Cameron's and Kathryn Bigelow's Strange Days
- Creation as Product
- The Paradox of Franchises
- A Franchise Case Study
- Alien and its Sequels
- Alien
- Aliens
- Alien3
- Alien Resurrection
Read an excerpt from the first chapter, Waking Into Dream: Competence Cascades, Thick Texts, and the Universalization of the Geek Aesthetic
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