New TV Series Looks at the History of Science Fiction
The Wonderland factual television series returns to Sky Arts next month with an all-new four-part series Science Fiction in the Atomic Age.
Premiering on April 3 at 8pm, it will celebrate the earliest stories as well as the modern voices of the genre in all media, including literature, plays, and film via the work of authors such as H.G. Wells, Ursula le Guin, Octavia Butler, Kurt Vonnegut, J.G. Ballard, and Arthur C. Clarke. It also explores Kim Stanley Robinson’s The Ministry for the Future about the consequences of climate change and how the world can work to prevent further disasters.
The four episodes will be:
Episode I - Mary Shelley to Isaac Asimov (April 3)
The creation and detonation of two atomic bombs developed by science fiction reading scientists is followed by an exploration of early science fiction writers including Mary Shelley, Jules Verne, and H.G. Wells. It also features Kurt Vonnegut’s experience of being firebombed in 1944 in a prison in Dresden (Slaughterhouse Five) and J.G. Ballard's war experiences in the Far East (Empire of the Sun). The fear of nuclear apocalypse is portrayed in a range of work including Nevil Shute’s On the Beach. The episode concludes with the work of Isaac Asimov.
Episode II - Arthur C. Clarke to Ray Bradbury (April 10)
The work of Isaac Asimov leads to the sense of wonder that surrounded 1960s’ space exploration, embodied in the work of Arthur C. Clarke such as Childhood’s End and The Nine Billion Names of God. Also included are J.G. Ballard’s concern with “inner space” and apocalyptic events (Crash, The Atrocity Exhibition, The Drowned World), the work of Robert A. Heinlein (The Moon is a Harsh Mistress), and Stanislaw Lem (Solaris). The episode concludes with discussions of the menacing alternative worlds of Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World, George Orwell's 1984 and Ray Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451.
Episode III - Margaret Atwood to Ted Chiang (April 17)
Writers like Ursula le Guin and Octavia Butler challenged conventional notions of gender. Margaret Atwood’s A Handmaid's Tale created a more political, dystopian model to illustrate relations between genders becoming oppressive. Samuel Delaney (Babel-17, Dhalgren) questioned in the late 1960s and 1970s what it meant to be a person as the complexion of science fiction is seen to have changed, becoming less white and straight and American and British than it used to be in the Golden Age or the age of the pulps or even in the New Wave.
Episode IV - Quatermass to Christopher Nolan (April 24)
Discussion of the success of John Wyndham’s Day of the Triffids is followed by the long running and immensely successful Dr Who. Science fiction’s prescient concern with cyberspace and artificial intelligence is illustrated through the work of writers like William Gibson, William Burroughs and Philip K. Dick.
