The Cambridge Companion to Science Fiction Quotes

“Science fiction is full of stories about harvesting humans and clones for their parts.”
― Edward James, The Cambridge Companion to Science Fiction

“In this liminal space, subjectivities multiply and a teenage hacker can become beautiful leather-clad Silk, the sex between ‘her’ and Cerise as real as it is illusionary, a performance that lasts only as long as the machine code that translates and enables it.”
― Edward James, The Cambridge Companion to Science Fiction

“The American Psychiatric Association classified homosexuality as a mental illness until 1973 and remnants of that categorization remain in the contemporary diagnosis of ‘gender identity disorder’, particularly when applied to children.”
― Edward James, The Cambridge Companion to Science Fiction

“Disneyland is there to conceal the fact that it is the ‘real’ country, all of ‘real’ America, which is Disneyland . . . Disneyland is presented as imaginary in order to make us believe that the rest is real, when in fact all of Los Angeles and the America surrounding it are no longer real, but of the order of the hyperreal and of simulation. It is no longer a question of a false representation of reality (ideology), but of concealing the fact that the real is no longer real, and thus of saving the reality principle.”
― Edward James, The Cambridge Companion to Science Fiction

“We expected to find aliens who were different from us, really different. We didn’t expect to find aliens who are very similar with some striking differences. It has us off balance’.”
― Edward James, The Cambridge Companion to Science Fiction

“Contemporary Marxist sf theory from the European tradition can be accused of paying insufficient attention to the ways technoscientific innovations have transformed social life globally – to their potential to transform the means of production, and with them world models, cultural values and human bodies. Jameson has taken on the challenge, after a fashion, in his work on postmodernism and Third World cinema, but his interest in this area is primarily in the effect of technology on art, drawing conclusions about world-currents through elite artefacts.”
― Edward James, The Cambridge Companion to Science Fiction

“The specific difference between sf and other estranging genres, such as fantasy, is that sf’s displacements must be logically consistent and methodical; in fact, they must be scientific to the extent that they imitate, reinforce and illuminate the process of scientific cognition.”
― Edward James, The Cambridge Companion to Science Fiction

“From its earliest forms, utopian fiction has depicted imaginary just and rational societies established in opposition to exploitative worldly ones. Marx was famously reluctant to describe the utopian society that would succeed the successful proletarian revolution, describing it only in the vaguest terms in the conclusion of the Communist Manifesto. Nonetheless he affirmed its importance as an historical goal. Marx also valued technology as a vital tool of human liberation. He believed that in a just world technological innovations were the guarantors of human freedom from toil, just as they were also the means of mass enslavement in an exploitative order. These ideas were forged in Marxist thought into a story of social and technological liberation that had clear affinities with the basic stories of sf.”
― Edward James, The Cambridge Companion to Science Fiction

“From its earliest forms, utopian fiction has depicted imaginary just and rational societies established in opposition to exploitative worldly ones. Marx was famously reluctant to describe the utopian society that would succeed the successful proletarian revolution, describing it only in the vaguest terms in the conclusion of the Communist Manifesto. Nonetheless he affirmed its importance as an historical goal. Marx also valued technology as a vital tool of human liberation. He believed that in a just world technological innovations were the guarantors of human freedom from toil, just as they were also the means of mass enslavement in an exploitative order. These ideas were forged in Marxist thought into a story of social and technological liberation that had clear affinities with the basic stories of”
― Edward James, The Cambridge Companion to Science Fiction

“Japanese anime such as Akira (Otomo, 1988), Oneamisu No Tsubasa (Wings of Honneamise, Yamaga, 1987/1994) and Kokaku kidotai (Ghost in the Shell, Oshii, 1995), and strange live-action movies such as Ganheddo (Gunhed, Harada, 1989), Tetsuo (The Iron Man, Tsukamoto, 1989) and Tetsuo II: Body Hammer (Tsukamoto, 1991) found international success.”
― Edward James, The Cambridge Companion to Science Fiction

“There have also been a number of movie cycles, of which the most populous featured Alien imitators, cyborgs or post-holocaust road warriors. Such trends are to be expected in a global cinema dominated by the particular production, distribution and exhibition practices of the New Hollywood, with its drive to produce event movies to be resold in various forms in multiple markets. Pre-sold titles, exploitable contents and images, and hybrid narratives with an ability to appeal to multiple audience segments have become the goal.”
― Edward James, The Cambridge Companion to Science Fiction

“neither of them could match Stanley Kubrick’s success in rendering the genre so utterly cinematic. Doctor Strangelove (1964), A Clockwork Orange (1971) and, especially, 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) demonstrate a darkly comic vision and a suspicion of technology counterpointed by a determination to explore the formal limits of filmmaking and its apparatuses.”
― Edward James, The Cambridge Companion to Science Fiction

“Only the darkest of them, Captain Scarlet and the Mysterons (1967–8), ever seemed in tune with a decade of civil disobedience and anti-imperialist guerrilla wars, although the series inevitably sided with a global military and Euro-cool consumerism.”
― Edward James, The Cambridge Companion to Science Fiction

“This opportunistic shift from Nazis to communists, both typically depicted as producing terrorized and mindlessly conformist hierarchical societies, suggests that the propaganda and ideology of the period generated and played upon deep-seated anxieties about regimentation and dehumanization, the sources of which can as easily be found in Eisenhower’s placid decade.”
― Edward James, The Cambridge Companion to Science Fiction

“eating dog food at the foot of the rich man’s table.”
― Edward James, The Cambridge Companion to Science Fiction

“What better way to destroy a civilization, society or a race than to set people into the wild oscillations which follow their turning over their judgment and decision-making faculties to a superhero?”
― Edward James, The Cambridge Companion to Science Fiction

“Another pioneer of the scientific revolution, Johannes Kepler, was the first to couch an earnest scientific argument – a representation of the Copernican theory of the solar system – as a visionary fantasy. His Somnium (A Dream, 1634) also includes an ingenious attempt to imagine how life on the moon might have adapted to the long cycle of day and night.”
― Edward James, The Cambridge Companion to Science Fiction

“polysemic”
― Edward James, The Cambridge Companion to Science Fiction