New Imaginaries in English-Speaking Audiovisual Science Fiction Works of the 21st Century (Montpellier)

In a form of science fictional ars poetica, Arthur C. Clarke exposed three laws in 1973, meant to explicit his views about how science might nourish the way future(s) can be imagined. The third law, summed up as “any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic”, announces the questions that surround the state of the SF genre in the mid-2020s. Science fiction, which imagines what the future development of science may allow, is ontologically doomed to an ephemeral condition: scientific progress, in fields like space travel, genetics, computer engineering or so-called “artificial intelligence”, often transformed speculative projections of previous science fiction works into actual accomplishments. This collusion, however, has kept increasing over the early years of the 21st century. Technology in its broadest sense indeed seems to have come to a point where the inventions posited by science fiction works appear less and less speculative, and more and more attune with the effective possibilities offered by technological progress. This journal issue can therefore be seen as an opportunity to explore and question the possibility for contemporary science fiction audiovisual works to propose new imaginaries and to reinvent past and well-established imageries through formal and aesthetic innovations and experiments, while opening onto potential studies of 20th century works in relation to the more recent evolution of the genre.  

The relevance of science fiction and its imaginaries in a more and more science fictional world was already questioned in the 1990s, when J.B. Ballard, who had offered seminal literary works to the genre himself (Crash, adapted by David Cronenberg in 1996; High Rise, adapted by Ben Wheatley in 2016), declared science fiction dead. More specifically, Ballard stated that science fiction as he defined it had been essentially confined to the 20th century, being born at its dawn and having shaped the “psychology of [its] last decades”. The future that science fiction had been announcing had finally come, and its speculations had been realized, or were about to. The genre did however endure in the following years all around the world and until now, and confirmed its importance by becoming both a laboratory for English speaking art cinema, and one of the dominant genres of mainstream film industry, especially as far as Hollywood is concerned.

In that respect, 21st century science fiction also is a way to explore varied levels of the cinematic industry, from the economic center Hollywood embodies to more marginal places of creation; similarly, it opens onto an analysis of the relations between dominant and more modest industrial spheres, and the way they may influence each other – in that regard, the issue of robotics and androids is a telling example, since it was at the core of 2010s independent and low-budget films (Robot and Frank [Jake Schreier, 2012], Ex Machina [Alex Garland, 2015]) and series (Humans [Channel 4, 2015-2018]), as well as blockbusters in both medium (films like Avengers: Age of Ultron [Joss Whedon, 2015] or Blade Runner 2049 [Denis Villeneuve, 2017], and series like Westworld [HBO, 2016-2022] or Altered Carbon [Netflix, 2018-2020]). More globally, whether it be in the field of cinema alone, or in TV series, science fiction works have kept appearing over the last two decades, from literary adaptations like Minority Report (Steven Spielberg, 2002) or The Handmaid’s Tale (Hulu,  2017-2025) to original creations like For All Mankind (Apple TV+, 2019-) or Avatar and its sequels (James Cameron, 2009-2025) or transmedial reenactments of cult audiovisual works, from TV to film with Star Trek (J.J. Abrams, 2009) and the other way around in Westworld. This abundance of new installments was the occasion for both an updated perspective on themes already dealt with previously, such as the frontier between humanity and artificial intelligence in A.I. (Steven Spielberg, 2001) or Ex Machina (Alex Garland, 2015), and the exploration of issues whose topicality kept increasing from 2000, on top of which global warming and its consequences in The Road (John Hillcoat, 2009) or Interstellar (Christopher Nolan, 2014).

Within this blend of reinterpretations of earlier works and new proposals, the late 1990s and the first quarter of the 21st century saw the expansion of science fictional imagery toward less expected domains. Stylistic features of the genre were indeed to be found in several audiovisual creations, not only in film or TV fiction, but also in fields like music videos (from Rankin and Chris Cottam’s videoclip for Marina and the Diamond’s “I Am Not a Robot” in 2009 to Johan Renck’s for David Bowie’s “Blackstar” in 2015) or advertising (from the series of PS3 commercials based on a post-2001 aesthetics in 2007 to 2025’s “Take Your Time” Schweppes campaign that mixed a parody of Ridley Scott’s The Martian with a cover of David Bowie’s “Space Oddity”). Meanwhile, the technical advances in the realms of CGI and filming devices led several science-oriented documentaries to reprise elements of science fictional imagery, in such varied examples as Terrence Malick’s Voyage of Time (2017) or Sara Dosa’s Fire of Love (2022). Based on these observations, science fiction imaginaries seem to be yet again standing on an edge: on the one hand, science fiction is still thriving and continues to be a site of creation, echoing the “existential attitude of the contemporary science fiction film” analyzed by Vivian Sobchack, but on the other hand, it is being increasingly treated as an immutable reservoir for identifiable, popular images that pervade every sphere of representation, rather than a place of reflection on past, present and future times. This potential science-fictionalizing of images raises a third question, lying in the evolution of the status of moving images themselves: while the expansion and democratization of technical resources for image creations may pave the way for an ever-growing imaginary, the importance taken by AI generated image marks a shift from the representation of artificial intelligence on screen to representations from artificial intelligences, designating the possibility of intrinsically science fictional posthuman images.

We therefore encourage proposals dealing with the following issues from a variety of perspectives (aesthetic, cultural, economic, historical, etc.) in English-speaking audiovisual works of the new millennium, with the possibility of comparative studies between earlier and more recent works.

• Science fiction now as compared to 20th century science fiction, exploring the rich history of SF film, how contemporary films and series echo the aesthetic and ideological traditions of the genre, notably through comparative studies between literature and film, or between new and canonic works, as well as new perspectives on the classics of the genre.
• Mapping the present time, imagining the future: we encourage proposals that deal with the ways in which the future is imagined (and imaged) through SF. This is to say, how, in the course of the last century, SF territorialized our present time and, by extension, populated our daily lives with themes and devices that build our present reality. This would allow a broad questioning of the way science fiction of the past has been imagining times that have since then come and even passed.
• Reformulating the genre: new media technologies generate transmedia, adaptative phenomena and new aesthetic and figurative possibilities that naturally modify genres. From this perspective, proposals could analyze diverse forms of speculative fiction and/or attempt to identify new narrative forms and aesthetic experiments and to map, in the genre’s universe, new topoi that could be identified as new declensions of SF.
• Adaptation and transmediality: analyzing the ways in which the complex narrative structure of SF is adapted to the screen. Proposals centered on the on-screen transposition of speculative technologies described in literature are also welcome, as well as those focusing on the narrative and aesthetic variations implied by the transition from series to film or vice versa.
• Cyberpunk: we would like to open a space for the discussion of social problems and phenomena related to technological developments. We encourage scholars to deal with the main topics of cyberpunk, and to identify them in our current audiovisual production. We welcome analyses of the ways that the main cyberpunk topoi (e.g., dystopia, A.I. societal collapse, among others) have been reformulated after the Digital Revolution.
• Theoretical formulations and re-formulations of the genre, its limits and its intersections with other genres are also welcome.
• The ontological science fictionality of contemporary cinematic images: proposals exploring the aesthetic, economic and industrial consequences of the incorporation of formerly science fictional technologies (robots, AI, remote control…) into the production of images  

Selected Bibliography 

Berman, Judith. « Science Fiction Without the Future ». The New York Review of Science Fiction (New York), 2001. 
Bernardi, Franco (Bifo). Dopo il futuro. Dal Futurismo al Cyberpunk: L’esaurimento della Modernità. DeriveApprodi, 2013. 
Freedman, Carl. Critical Theory and Science Fiction. EBL-Schweitzer. Wesleyan University Press, 2013. 
Gomel, Elana. Postmodern Science Fiction and Temporal Imagination. Continuum, 2012. 
Hachet, Élodie. 2025 l’Odyssée de l’IA. Représentation et usage de l’intelligence artificielle au cinéma. Passage(s). Focale(s), 2026. 
Kimak, Izabella, et Julia Nikiel. Spaces of Expression and Repression in Post-Millennial North-American Literature and Visual Culture. New Americanists in Poland. Peter Lang, 2017. 
King, Geoff, et Tanya Krzywinska. Science Fiction Cinema: From Outerspace to Cyberspace. Short Cuts 3. Wallflower, 2006. 
Langlet, Irène. Le temps rapaillé : science-fiction et présentisme. Médiatextes. PULIM, 2020. 
Sobchack, Vivian. Screening Space: The American Science Fiction Film. Rutgers Univ. Press, 2004. 
Suvin, Darko. Metamorphoses of Science Fiction: On the Poetics and History of a Literary Genre. Ralahine Utopian Studies 18. Peter Lang, 2016. 
Telotte, J. P. Science Fiction TV. Routledge Television Guidebooks. Routledge, 2014. 
Telotte, J. P. Science Fiction Film. Genres in American Cinema. Cambridge University Press, 2001.  

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Merci d'envoyer vos propositions (300 mots, en anglais), ainsi qu'une courte bio-bibliographie, à jonas.fontaine@outlook.fr et/ou billaudelg@gmail.com