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A Distant Technology: Science Fiction Film and the Machine Age J. P. Telotte, A Distant Technology: Science Fiction Film and the Machine Age. Hanover: Wesleyan UP, 1999. 218 pp. $45 cloth; $19.95 paper.
Most genre connoisseurs are familiar enough with the big films-Metropolis (1926), Paris qui dort (1924), Frankenstein (1931), and so on-but few scholarly texts deal specifically with the international science fiction of the 1920s and '30s. Author J. P. Telotte finally addressed that problem with the introduction of A Distant Technology: Science Fiction Film and the Machine Age (1999), a book that offers a comprehensive analysis of the technological spirit of the Machine Age. Although A Distant Technology unfortunately has its share of shortcomings, Telotte's singular text is generally an impressive recollection of the international opinion on scientific advancement as expressed through the art, architecture, literature, and cinema of the times. This marks Telotte's second analysis of technological attitudes and science fiction film, the first being an exploration of the "android" in Replications: A Robotic History of the Science Fiction Film (1995).
The years sandwiched between the World Wars boasted a wealth of science fiction literature and cinema that expressed the complex relationship between technological achievement, on one hand, and a society that had an entire generation of boys decimated by machine guns in the killing fields of the Great War, on the other. Telotte takes this fundamental relationship and combines it with other contemporary attitudes and literary theory to describe a reoccurring phenomenon that he sees in the technology-related cinema of the Machine Age, what Robert D. Romanyshyn calls a "dream of distance." For Telotte and his frequently quoted source, Romanyshyn, technology has several "distancing" qualities. On one hand, technology makes life more comfortable and eases the advancement of knowledge, mobility, and livelihood in modern society. On the other, this same technology has the power to alienate humans from each other and from nature. In A Distant Technology-perhaps, better titled "A Distancing Technology"-Telotte and Romanyshyn's philosophy of "distance" is used as the skeleton key for unlocking the various themes of Machine Age science fiction.
Telotte's book is divided up into sections according to the nationality-Russian, German, French, American, and English-of the discussed movies and filmmakers. One or two model films...