Part allegory, part space opera, and part technological dystopia, the re-imagined Battlestar Galactica series presents a future rife with twenty first century concerns. The show, a remake of the 1978 series of the same name, consisted of a two-part miniseries (2003) followed by four full seasons (2005-2009); I will focus on the events of the [...]
Part 1: “Sixty minutes,” intones the Deputy Head Historian of London, “is all it took to bring humanity to the very brink of extinction” (Trailer). That was thousands of years ago, when a doomsday nuclear event annihilated most of the world’s population and rendered the earth inhospitable. After the Sixty Minute War, continents were desolated, [...]
In Utopia and Science Fiction, Raymond Williams outlined four different types of dystopia: the hell, the externally altered world, the willed transformation, and the technological transformation (204). This last category forms the basis of the world depicted in The Maze Runner by James Dashner. We follow Thomas, our protagonist, as he awakens inside a metal [...]
Science fiction, as a genre, seems determined to defy classification. Sometimes realistic, and sometimes so extraordinary as to be literally out of this world, science fiction encourages its audience to ask questions and addresses the anxieties and fears of the unknown brought on by change, but can also deal in the hope that humanity can [...]
