Utopian Film Studies

Abstract

304 SCIENCE FICTION STUDIES, VOLUME 47 (2020) makes a strong case that these and similar mechanics should be analyzed closely for the role they play in popular understandings of science and technology. Falling under “Inspiring Science,” Erika Lorraine Milam’s essay “Old Woman and the Sea: Evolution and the Feminine Aquatic” is also noteworthy. Like Willis’s analysis of sleep, Milam’s article compares works of sf literature with scientific discourses to understand better their interrelationships. But unlike Willis, Milam is interested in speculative science, mostly in the form of Elaine Morgan’s controversial Descent of Woman (1972), which “imbued agency in humanity’s female ancestors by adding a controversial aquatic phase to the narrative of human evolution” (199). Milam reads this revisionist take on evolution alongside two works of sf that imagine how oceans and aquatic life can transform evolutionary trajectories—specifically, Kurt Vonnegut’s Galapagos and Joan Slonczewski’s A Door into Ocean, both published in 1985. She finds that the novels share Morgan’s interest in imagining “in the aquatic a realm of conceptual possibility that potentially avoided the violence of terrestrial landscapes” (199-200). For Slonczewski in particular, this was part of a feminist conceptualization that freed women from the constraints of patriarchy, capitalism, and biological reproduction. Milam closes her article with the suggestion that envisioning aquatic pasts and futures could be highly relevant in the age of climate change and the Anthropocene, since these and similar efforts help us to “conceptualize ourselves as part of the natural world rather than independent of it” (215). By using sf as a tool to think beyond the conventional histories of science, the other articles in this volume of Osiris can be seen to do something quite similar, and this is important work. In fact, the current trajectory of devastating climate transformation, unfettered capitalism, and uncontainable viral outbreaks, all of which can be tied to a particular history of technoscience, makes it clear that new concepts and fictions are required to make sense of how we got here. We may very well live in desperate times, a reality that demands we take hold of even more desperate futures to orient ourselves and plot a path forward. Whether readers are interested in this broader humanist project, or more simply in the various and complex ways in which sf can contribute to the history of science, this is a vital collection that demands attention from sf researchers, historians of science, and especially those who travel freely across such disciplinary boundaries.—Chad Andrews, Independent Scholar Utopian Film Studies. Simon Spiegel. Bilder einer besseren Welt. Die Utopie im nichtfiktionalen Film [Images of a Better World: The Utopia in Nonfiction Film]. Marburg: Schüren, 2019. 432 pp. €48 pbk. Open online access at . There are tons of dystopian sf films, but utopian sf films seem to be nonexistent . Utopian studies scholars have tried repeatedly to find utopia in fictional films, but to no avail. Sf films narrate alternative technologies, times, places, and beings, and of course they can also narrate alternative social 305 BOOKS IN REVIEW orders. There is no logical reason why these should always be horrific. Better societies can certainly be imagined, as the genre of utopian literature shows, but while literary dystopias have often been adapted for film, utopias have been neglected by the film industry. Why is this? Utopian scholars have long known that fictional films need a narrative plot with conflict at its core and that utopias lack this core because they are discursive rather than narrative and address harmonious societies without conflict. So a fictional utopian film would be quite boring and nobody has bothered to shoot one yet. At this point the scholarly debate on utopian film is usually aborted. Simon Spiegel, on the contrary, uses this finding as a starting point for an extensive study of utopian film. His idea is that if fictional film is incapable of depicting utopias, one should start looking for nonfictional utopian films. He has analyzed documentaries and propaganda films and actually found a quite diverse set of filmic utopias, and now he shows them to us—literally. Spiegel has hyperlinks to many of them on his website (). In Bilder einer...