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An in-depth analysis of Richard Linklater’s film adaptation of the semi-autobiographical Philip K. Dick novel, examining the film’s importance in the history of science fiction cinema.

From Blade Runner and Minority Report to The Man in the High Castle, the works of Philip K. Dick have been fertile ground for screen adaptation. Among the most visually and intellectually compelling, however, is the release that has received the least attention: Richard Linklater’s A Scanner Darkly.

In this revelatory work of criticism, scholar-novelist D. Harlan Wilson burrows deep inside Linklater’s meditation on identity and surveillance, addiction and the instability of perception. A Scanner Darkly features groundbreaking use of rotoscopy—filming live-action scenes, then drawing over the footage to animate it. Wilson argues that the technique captures the splintered consciousness of Dick’s protagonist and extends this psychological disintegration beyond the world on screen, inviting viewers into a fractured sense of self. More broadly, Wilson places the film in conversation with Linklater’s oeuvre, the history of science fiction cinema, and contemporary debates about technology, identity, and surveillance. A Scanner Darkly—the novel, the film, and now the critical interpretation—yields powerful insight into the forms of social control that define our era of digital selfhood, algorithmic monitoring, and artificial intelligence.

In After Capitalism, Jo Lindsay Walton uses speculative fiction to tackle some of the largest, most urgent, and strangest political questions of our time. Is climate science itself a speculative practice, even as it conveys some of the hardest facts we know? Does the end of capitalism require the end of money, or might money mutate into something new—a currency based on time, labor or reputation? As AI threatens to take over more aspects of social life, might we think of money itself as a kind of AI, one that could be reprogrammed? Why do ecological forms of calculation—from real world carbon credits to speculative energy currencies—fail to protect the planet that sustains us?

Drawing on the works of Edward Bellamy, Octavia Butler, Samuel R. Delany, Cory Doctorow, Ursula K. Le Guin, Yoon Ha Lee, Karen Lord, Malka Older, Nnedi Okorafor, Marge Piercy, Adam Roberts, Joanna Russ, Wole Talabi, and more, Walton explores whether science fiction can create space for fugitive dreams to thrive, or whether it serves merely as a laboratory for capitalism’s own reinvention.Weaving together literary criticism, critical political economy, and perspectives from the environmental humanities, After Capitalism argues that the worlds beyond capitalism are neither unimaginable nor entirely elsewhere. 

Jad Smith traces the career of the unlikeliest of SF icons. Winner of the first Hugo Award for The Demolished Man, Bester also worked in comics, radio, and TV, and his intermittent SF writing led some critics to brand him a dabbler. In the 1960s, however, New Wave writers championed his work, and his reputation grew. Smith follows Bester's journey from consummate outsider to an artist venerated for foundational works that influenced the New Wave and cyberpunk revolutions. He also explores the little-known roots of a wayward journey fueled by curiosity, disappointment with the SF mainstream, and an artist's determination to go his own way.

Though set in other worlds populated by alien beings, science fiction is a site where humans can critique and re-imagine the paradigms that shape this world, from fundamentals such as the sex and gender of the body to global power relations among sexes, races, and nations. Feminist thinkers and writers are increasingly recognizing science fiction's potential to shatter patriarchal and heterosexual norms, while the creators of science fiction are bringing new depth and complexity to the genre by engaging with feminist theories and politics. This book maps the intersection of feminism and science fiction through close readings of science fiction literature by Octavia E. Butler, Richard Calder, and Melissa Scott and the movies The Matrix and the Alien series.

Patricia Melzer analyzes how these authors and films represent debates and concepts in three areas of feminist thought: identity and difference, feminist critiques of science and technology, and the relationship among gender identity, body, and desire, including the new gender politics of queer desires, transgender, and intersexed bodies and identities. She demonstrates that key political elements shape these debates, including global capitalism and exploitative class relations within a growing international system; the impact of computer, industrial, and medical technologies on women's lives and reproductive rights; and posthuman embodiment as expressed through biotechnologies, the body/machine interface, and the commodification of desire. Melzer's investigation makes it clear that feminist writings and readings of science fiction are part of a feminist critique of existing power relations—and that the alien constructions (cyborgs, clones, androids, aliens, and hybrids) that populate postmodern science fiction are as potentially empowering as they are threatening.

A study of Denis Villeneuve’s genre-transcendent film.

In Denis Villeneuve’s Arrival (2016), scientists must decipher the language of and peacefully communicate with aliens who have landed on Earth before the world’s military attacks. In this first book-length study of the film, scholar David Roche argues that it is one of the most important films of this century, and the most brilliant science fiction film since Blade Runner. Roche posits Arrival as a blockbuster with artistic ambitions—an argument supported by the film’s several Academy Award nominations—and looks closely at how the film engages with theoretical questions posed by contemporary film studies and philosophy alike. Each section explores a central aspect of the film: its status as an auteur adaptation; its relation to the science fiction genre; its themes of communication on narrative and meta-narrative levels; its aesthetics of time and space; and the political and ethical questions it raises. Ultimately, Roche declares Arrival a unique, multifaceted experience in the world of hard science fiction films, placing it in context with works like 2001: A Space Odyssey, Close Encounters of the Third Kind, and Contact while also examining how it bridges the gap between genre and art house cinema.

Gary Westfahl closely examines Clarke's remarkable career, ranging from his forgotten juvenilia to the passages he completed for a final novel, The Last Theorem. As Westfahl explains, Clarke’s science fiction offered original perspectives on subjects like new inventions, space travel, humanity’s destiny, alien encounters, the undersea world, and religion. While not inclined to mysticism, Clarke necessarily employed mystical language to describe the fantastic achievements of advanced aliens and future humans. Westfahl also contradicts the common perception that Clarke’s characters were bland and underdeveloped, arguing that these reticent, solitary individuals, who avoid conventional relationships, represent his most significant prediction of the future, as they embody the increasingly common lifestyle of people in the twenty-first century.

Asian American writers have long produced literary works of speculative fiction, the supergenre that employs science fictional, fantastical, or supernatural elements. Stephen Hong Sohn’s Asian Ameritopias is the first book-length study to consider how these aesthetically complex and wildly imaginative representations offer writers a way to explore themes of race and identity, as well as alternate futures and other planets.

Sohn examines how various novels and stories enable Asian American writers to engage with and reimagine issues of social justice, revisualize the bounds of social collectives, and create new pathways for precarious subjects. Asian Ameritopias assesses speculative fictions that spotlight supernatural horror and fantasy, such as ghosts and magical objects, to excavate racialized histories of oppression. Moving to science fiction, Sohn shows how Asian American cyborgs employ their technological powers to offer protection for socially marginalized groups, including sex workers, the undocumented, the poor, and the injured. He ends by analyzing three novels featuring extraterrestrials who look like Asian Americans in order to address issues of xenophobia and ostracization.

The speculative fictions Sohn unpacks in Asian Ameritopias provide a ripe opportunity to reflect on and confront our current, turbulent reality.