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The Philosophy of Science Fiction Film Steven M. Sanders, Ed. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2008.
To speak of the philosophy of science fiction is to waste words on a redundancy; as sci-fi enthusiasts-you may call them "geeks" -have long understood, spaceships and time travel are merely the door prizes that permit audiences to consider the human condition unencumbered by the laws of nature. As for science fiction film, fans of sci-fi's copious print literature have long scoffed at cinephiles for their lazy eyeballs and empty book bags, treating the film adaptations of their favorite tomes as cartoonish trash. Many efforts to translate sci-fi print literature into movie magic have been unsuccessful, but this fact owes less to any objective deficiencies of the genre than to cinema's own complex and demanding rules. The worst sci-fi films (and even some of the best) are little more than filmstrips: staggering visual sequences held together by celluloid and run through the projector as if the clock wasn't ticking on the audience's bladders. If some sci-fi films are genuinely bad, though, the whole genre, Steven Sanders notes, is too often dismissed as pretentious and emotionally unsophisticated (in a word, adolescent)-a criticism he blames less on the movies themselves than on critics willing...