Contact us on (02) 8445 2300
For all customer service and order enquiries

Woodslane Online Catalogues

9781477335215 Academic Inspection Copy

Before Trek

Building American Science Fiction Television
Description
Author
Biography
Table of
Contents
Google
Preview
Long before Star Trek became synonymous with televised science fiction, a generation of space operas and anthology programs laid the groundwork for the genre's cultural legitimacy. With Before Trek, J. P. Telotte reexamines the formative decades of science fiction television, the late 1940s through the mid-1960s, when both the medium and genre were defining themselves. At a moment when science fiction was often dismissed as juvenile escapism, early programs such as Captain Video, Space Patrol, Tales of Tomorrow, and Science Fiction Theatre worked to reshape audience and industry expectations, establishing the genre as a vehicle for serious storytelling. Tracing the evolution of the genre through The Twilight Zone, The Outer Limits, and ultimately Star Trek, Telotte reveals how television and science fiction developed in tandem, each helping to articulate the technological anxieties of the postwar era. These programs offered viewers new ways of seeing: approaches to social critique, political tension, and cultural change that conventional broadcasting often could not accommodate. By situating early televised science fiction within broader debates about media, modernity, and what Guy Debord termed the "Society of the Spectacle," Telotte reclaims a largely overlooked body of work and demonstrates its foundational role in shaping both contemporary television and the imaginative vocabulary of modern culture.
J. P. Telotte is a professor emeritus of film and media studies at the Georgia Institute of Technology. He is the author or editor of many books, including Selling Science Fiction Cinema: Making and Marketing a Genre, Science Fiction Theatre, and The Oxford Handbook of New Science Fiction Cinemas.
List of Illustrations Introduction: Relativity, Science Fiction, and Television 1. Space Opera TV: Learning to See Tomorrow 2. Science Fiction on Trial: Tales of Tomorrow 3. Watching Science Fiction Theatre, Seeing Television 4. The Cinematic Mode of The Twilight Zone 5. Television and Its Limits: The Outer Limits 6. To Star Trek and Beyond the Infinite Acknowledgments Notes Works Cited Index
Google Preview content