I. The wonder of science fiction : Images of wonder: the look of science fiction / Vivian Sobchack -- "You've got to be fucking kidding!": Knowledge, belief and judgement in science fiction / Steve Neale -- Sensuous elaboration: reason and the visible in the science fiction film / Barry Keith Grant -- Between science fact and science fiction: Spielberg's digital dinosaurs, possible worlds and the new aesthetic realism / Warren Buckland -- II. Science fiction's disaster imagination : The imagination of disaster / Susan Sontag -- Technophobia/dystopia / Michael Ryan and Douglas Kellner -- Human artifice and the science fiction film / J.P. Telotte -- Dream girls and mechanic panic: dystopia and its others in Brazil and Nineteen eighty-four / Linda Ruth Williams -- III. Spatial abyss: the science fiction city : Cities on the edge of time: the urban science fiction film / Vivian Sobchack -- Dark city: white flight and the urban science fiction film in postwar America / Eric Avila -- On the edge of spaces: Blade runner, Ghost in the shell and Hong Kong's cityscape / Wong Kin Yuen -- IV. The origin of the species: time travel and the primal scene : Back to the future: Oedipus as time traveller / Andrew Gordon -- Time travel, primal scene and the critical dystopia / Constance Penley -- Another time, another space: modernity, subjectivity and the time machine / Jonathan Bignell -- With eyes uplifted: space aliens as sky gods / Carol Schwartz Ellis -- V. Liquid metal: the cyborg in science fiction : A manifesto for cyborgs: science, technology and socialist feminism in the 1980s / Donna J. Haraway -- Technophilia: technology, representation and the feminine / Mary Ann Doane -- Machine as messiah: cyborgs, morphs and the American body politic / Doran Larson -- Ghosts and machines: the technological body / Susan J. Napier -- VI. Imitation of life: postmodern science fiction : Postfuturism / Vivian Sobchack -- Who programs you?: the science fiction of the spectacle / Scott Bukatman -- Prosthetic memory: Total recall and Blade runner / Alison Landsberg -- Akira, postmodernism and resistance / Isolde Standish -- VII. Poaching the universe: science fiction fandom : Star trek rerun, reread, rewritten: fan writing as textual poaching / Henry Jenkins III -- 'We're only a speck in the ocean': the fan as powerless elite / John Tulloch -- New hope: the postmodern project of Star wars / Will Brooker -- Web of Babylon / Kurt Lancaster -- VIII. Look to the skies!: 1950s science fiction invasion narratives : The Russians are coming, aren't they? Them! and The thing / Peter Biskind -- Re-examining the 1950s invasion narratives / Mark Jancovich -- We're the Martians now: British SF invasion fantasies of the 1950s and 1960s / Peter Hutchings.