Imperial Gothic and Neo-Victorian Adaptations: the Supernatural in Dan Simmons's Novel The Terror (2007) and its Tv Adaptation
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The article analyses the ways in which the supernatural, as an element of the Victorian genre of imperial Gothic, is used in Dan Simmons's neo-Victorian novel The Terror (2007) and its 2018 TV adaptation. Simmons's The Terror is based on historical facts about the 1845 Franklin Expedition which set out towards what is now Arctic Canada in search of the North-West Passage and then disappeared without a trace. Simmons reconstructs the historical events and introduces elements of the supernatural in order to imagine the destinies of the crew of the expedition's ships, Erebus and Terror. The article focuses on how the supernatural is employed in the depiction of the colonial Other in the novel and its TV adaptation by analysing the ways in which the Victorian imperial Gothic elements of Simmons's novel bring to life Victorian values and worldview. Simmons's use of the imperial Gothic is compared to the 2018 screen adaptation of the novel written by Dan Kajganich and produced by Ridley Scott for AMC. It is argued that the adaptation deconstructs Simmons's use of the supernatural and puts the focus instead on questions of personal and group responsibility within a wider frame of imperialist expansionist policies and the repercussions of these for the environment.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.004 | 0.002 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".