Excavating the Future: Archaeology and Geopolitics in Contemporary North American Science Fiction Film and Television by Shawn Malley

646 SCIENCE FICTION STUDIES, VOLUME 46 (2019) 2018]). The wormholes also provide a clever device, first, for situating texts when the relationships between them are complicated—when a text could make equal claim to being included in either of two chapters or in no chapter at all—and, second, for leaning into the eclectic nature of the archive as a whole. A wormhole taking us from nineteenth- and early twentieth-century feminist utopian literature to Afrofuturism by way of a contemporary British film, oddly enough, works. It affords connections across seemingly disparate things and in doing so reflects the argument of Old Futures in its form. For this book’s argument is, after all, one of unexpected connection —between the futurity of sf’s speculative impulses and the pastness and anti-futurity of queer temporalities. Lothian is working against the grain of sf practices of disconnection (the concept of the Singularity standing in for the thinking we cannot do to connect the dots between Now and Then) and queer theory practices of disconnection (where a “no future” philosophy detaches queers from speculative discourses and situates us as pillars of salt facing the past). But while in conversation with those impulses, Lothian does something else entirely and opens up a new vantage point on the future by looking at it sideways, from outside its own timeline. That vantage point allows her (and us) to see the continuities, to see the way the leftover stuff of the past’s futures persists in and enlivens our present.—Elizabeth Lundberg, University of Iowa Digging for Readers. Shawn Malley. Excavating the Future: Archaeology and Geopolitics in Contemporary North American Science Fiction Film and Television. Liverpool UP, 2018. xv+228 pp. £85 hc. Shawn Malley has written a challenging book. Its subtitle tells you whether you are part of the target audience and, despite my interest in the topic of the book, I suspect I am not the person Malley is really writing for. Since I identify as an archaeologist who lives in contemporary Canada, has a keen interest in politics, watches a lot of film and television, and reads a lot of sf, it makes me wonder who will read this book. Despite being well qualified on paper to review the work, I frequently felt lost, accompanying the author on a journey that he clearly enjoys and knows well, but one whose twists and turns I had difficulty in following and that were unable to enthrall me. “This study examines how archaeology bequeaths to SFTV a critical vocabulary with which to speak about the past, theorize our relationships with material culture, and excavate the discursive strata between cognition and estrangement” (13); if you like that sentence, you will probably enjoy this book. Malley knows how to write, but he was unable to persuade me of the coherence of his vision. Perhaps most importantly, despite the subtlety in the writing and argumentation, I was not convinced about the methodology. The selection of nine recent US films and television series to pursue three topics themes (Babylon, Ancient Aliens, Cyborgs) gives the book a certain coherence. Following a useful introduction, the first section tackles its topic by examining the 2005 film Manticore, the Stargate SG-1 television series (1997-2007), and the 2009 film Transformers-2: Revenge of the Fallen, critically panned though making money. The second section looks at the Ancient Aliens television series (2010-), the 2008 647 BOOKS IN REVIEW film Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull, and the television series Smallville (2001-2011). The third section covers the 2001 film AI: Artificial Intelligence, the rebooted television series Battlestar Galactica (2003-2009), and the 2012 film Prometheus. Each section has an introduction that outlines some of the themes to be discussed. Malley writes well about these various productions, especially in chapter 8 on Prometheus, by far the strongest chapter in the book, convincingly detailing the film’s deep engagement with Lawrence of Arabia (1962). Listing the chapters in this fashion, however, helps to clarify that the book is really about Hollywood’s view of sf. This is a challenging group of productions to tie together into a monograph, and I wonder how many...

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