Escape Velocity: American Science Fiction Film, 1950-1982 by Bradley Schauer

Abstract

200 SCIENCE FICTION STUDIES, VOLUME 46 (2019) More aspires is conceivable only within a post-biological, post-ecological order indifferent or even hostile to the survival of the larger biosphere. More’s anthropochauvinism is the product of an inward turn that Pilsch figures, provocatively, as the basis for transhumanism’s revolutionary potential: “an internalization of technology” (7) that marks it as something more than a naïve “religion of technology.” Where religion entails belief in something external (the hope of technological transcendence, in this case), here the divine object is fully absorbed into the transhuman subject; the self is everything, there is no outside. Pilsch proposes that by reframing utopia in such individualistic terms, transhumanism makes possible the conception of “spaces beyond the current configuration of power” (13). But this call to “[shift] our attention from the state to the body as the needed site of utopian investment” (13) never really makes clear whose body is to be thus invested. The transhumanist project of indefinite life-extension, for example, supposes that aging and death are evolutionary errors that advanced biotechnology can correct, yet it takes little interest in the larger economic, infrastructural, and otherwise resource-dependent systems that make the technology possible in the first place. Even presuming that such a precarious arrangement could remain more or less viable in the face of civilizational collapse, the back-of-envelope math makes clear that it would benefit at best only a handful of extremely wealthy individuals. This outcome hardly seems compatible with a utopian vision, though it does recall the class-defined transhumanity of William Gibson’s Count Zero (1986), in which “the exceedingly rich were no longer even remotely human” (New York: Arbor House, 1986 [18]). The absence of satisfying answers to these questions involving class and the unfolding planetary crisis—and related ones concerning race and gender that take on added urgency in a time of resurgent fascism—prevents Transhumanism from realizing the full potential of what is otherwise a deeply informed and elegantly expounded work of scholarship. Despite these quibbles, I enthusiastically recommend Pilsch’s book and look forward to his further development of the ideas it introduces.—Joshua Raulerson, Pittsburgh, PA Light Industry. Bradley Schauer. Escape Velocity: American Science Fiction Film, 1950-1982. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan UP, 2017. x+269pp. $26.95 pbk, $17 ebk. In May 1977, everyone figured George Lucas’s space-opera folly, Star Wars, would be a massive flop; just weeks before its release TwentiethCentury Fox even tried to offload it onto a tax-shelter group. Within days of its limited opening in just thirty-two theaters, however, it was clear that it would be a hit, though no one could anticipate quite how massive—thirty-five years later, Disney would buy Lucasfilm for four billion dollars. Schauer’s fascinating critical history of American sf film begins with this strange conjuncture. Until that summer, pulp elements were box-office poison for big budget sf. Since then, costly spectacles that draw on the pulpiest, most juvenile elements of the genre (not a priori a bad thing) have increasingly dominated our screens. To explore this transition, Schauer eschews the more familiar textual, contextual, and/or theoretical approaches to sf film that 201 BOOKS IN REVIEW analyze how a film creates meaning, relates to and illustrates cultural trends, or exemplifies or falls short of certain critical-theoretical expectations. Escape Velocity instead pursues an industry analysis; that is, it works from the “impact” of industrial “determinants ... on the production strategies of filmmakers and studios” (3) to understand how and why particular films and cycles of films were made. (Other such analyses of potential interest to SFS readers are Nick Heffernan’s Ghouls, Gimmicks, and Gold: Horror Films and the American Movie Business, 1953–1968 [2004], Richard Nowell’s Blood Money: A History of the First Teen Slasher Film Cycle [2011], Blair Davis’s The Battle for the Bs: 1950s Hollywood and the Rebirth of Low-Budget Cinema [2012], and James Chapman and Nicholas J. Cull’s Projecting Tomorrow: Science Fiction and Popular Cinema [2013].) In addition to exploring the relationships among broader economic trends, industry strategies, and production histories, Schauer combs through reviews in industry presses and...