British media scholars examine a range of issues of identity in relation to the shifting historical context while considering social class, ethnicity, race, gender, sexuality, and national/diaspora identity as manifested in television over the past 35 years. They generally find that in the 1990s, identity is becoming more subject to change and innovation and more individual. Distributed in the US by ISBS. Annotation copyrighted by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR

"24 Frames into the Future: Scalzi on Science Fiction Film is the 2012 Boskone Book by Guest of Honor John Scalzi. John Scalzi's first job was not actually writing a science fiction novel; rather, he was a film critic for the Fresno Bee. Only years later did he write Old Man's War, his critically acclaimed first novel. In this book, collecting many of his essays on Science Fiction films, you can read Scalzi's thoughts on movies, how they're produced, and how storytelling differs between movie and print. You'll get to read his prognostications about the Oscars and Hugos, and what he felt about how the awards actually turned out not to mention why "show business" is not "show art". Scalzi also has a lot to say about that rarified universe outside SF, and he also puts into perspective the way it has both taken from SF's culture and fashioned it"--Publisher.

This book explores popular culture representations of gender, offering a rich and accessible discussion of masculinities and femininities in 21st-century popular media. It brings together contributors from various European countries to investigate the workings of gender in contemporary pop culture products in a brave, original, and rigorous way. This volume is both an academic proposal and an exercise of commitment to a serious analysis of some of the media that influence us most in our everyday lives. Representation matters, and the position we take as viewers or consumers during reception matters even more.

The book examines the difficulty of adapting from one screen medium to another by looking at both successful and unsuccessful efforts in the area of science fiction. Those difficult efforts at moving from film to TV and from TV to film reveal much about the technologies involved and this highly technological genre as well.

First published in 1990, Popular Fiction looks at popular fiction in its literary, filmic, and televisual forms. They range across the main genres of popular fiction: science fiction, soap opera, detective fiction, the spy-thriller, the western, film noir, and comedy. Grouped into sections, the essays explore major themes in the study of popular fiction: the functioning of popular fiction within technologies of cultural regulation, the relations between popular fiction and nationalism; the connections between popular fictions and relations of power and knowledge; and the social and ideological factors moulding both the production and reading of popular fictions. Designed especially as a student text, this book will be invaluable to students of English and literary studies, media studies, film and TV studies, communication studies, and cultural studies.

First published in New Zealand in 1957, Owls Do Cry, was Janet Frame's second book and the first of her thirteen novels. Now approaching its 60th anniversary, it is securely a landmark in Frame's catalog and indeed a landmark of modernist literature. The novel spans twenty years in the Withers family, tracing Daphne's coming of age into a post–war New Zealand too narrow to know what to make of her. She is deemed mad, institutionalized, and made to undergo a risky lobotomy. Margaret Drabble calls Owls Do Cry "a song of survival"—it is Daphne's song of survival but also the author's: Frame was herself misdiagnosed with schizophrenia and scheduled for brain surgery. She was famously saved only when she won New Zealand's premier fiction prize. Frame was among the first major writers of the twentieth century to confront life in mental institutions and Owls Do Cry is important for this perspective. But it is equally valuable for its poetry, its incisive satire, and its acute social observations. A sensitively rendered portrait of childhood and adolescence and a testament to the power of imagination, this early novel is a first–rate example of Frame's powerful, lyric, and original prose.

This collection reads the science fiction genre and television medium as examples of heterotopia (and television as science fiction technology), in which forms, processes, and productions of space and time collide – a multiplicity of spaces produced and (re)configured. The book looks to be a heterotopic production, with different chapters and “spaces” (of genre, production, mediums, technologies, homes, bodies, etc), reflecting, refracting, and colliding to offer insight into spatial relationships and the implications of these spaces for a society that increasingly inhabits the world through the space of the screen. A focus on American science fiction offers further spatial focus for this study – a question of geographical and cultural borders and influence not only in terms of American science fiction but American television and streaming services. The (contested) hegemonic nature of American science fiction television will be discussed alongside a nation that has significantly been understood, even produced, through the television screen. Essays will examine the various (re)configurations, or productions, of space as they collapse into the science fiction heterotopia of television since 1987, the year Star Trek: Next Generation began airing.