Programming the Future: Politics, Resistance, and Utopia in Contemporary Speculative TV

by Sherryl Vint, Professor Jonathan Alexander

"Dystopia is alive and well in contemporary American society, and not least of all on the small screen. Long studied as a mass means of shrouding the headlines and the nightly news in affect in order to render intelligible an increasingly chaotic and terrifying world (removing any potential for panic or revolutionary action) television has certainly not lacked for material of late, furnishing allegorical retellings of events from the paranoid, corporatized world created by 9/11, the 2008 economic collapse, 2016 election and other traumatic events. These pessimistic dystopian tales, however, are not the full story. More and more frequently, these television shows also attempt to visualize an alternative world - one in which the pressures of dystopia create an imperative for change. Programming the Future takes a close look at this phenomenon and provides close studies of some of its prime examples. Grounding their analysis in Ernst Bloch's conceptualization of the role of utopia as either abstract (and diversionary) or concrete (and revolutionary), Vint and Alexander explore the long-form SF narrative's emerging role as a generative space of political imagination about the future. Examples include "alien" invasion narratives such as Threshold and Falling Skies, which endorse a jingoistic/nationalistic response to post-9/11 fears of invaders of various stripes; The Man in the High Castle, as a fully-formed, alternate "fake America," that eerily resembles reality despite positing a Nazi victory in WWII; and the hopelessness in the face of corporate power evoked by Mr. Robot, in which the fall of an evil corporation only results in greater suffering for ordinary people"--

256 pages, Paperback

Published November 1, 2022

About the author

Sherryl Vint is Professor of Media and Cultural Studies and of English at the University of California, Riverside. She is the author of Bodies of Tomorrow, Animal Alterity, and Science Fiction: A Guide for the Perplexed, coauthor of the Routledge Concise History of Science Fiction, and coeditor of The Routledge Companion to Science Fiction.