ABSTRACT
This chaptcr is concerned not so much with SF literaturc itself as with the use made of it by the Hollywood film industry. My main aim is to give detailed readings of two SF films of the 1980s, but before that I want in this first section to give some gcneral sense of the terms on which those readings will be made. I take as a simplified starting point thc fact that SF has its roots in utopian fiction, a literary genre that looks beneath thc surface of the determining conventions of society, and tests historical contingencies by subjecting its behavioural principles to an experimental relativism. Such a project clcarly renders possible a reconsideration of the nature of sexuality and gcndcr: other chapters in this study suggest the extent to which this has been the case, and how successful it has been. For my purposes it is important to notc that a significant development relevant to the possibility of such a reconsideration was the growing interest in alien or artificial life forms; that this interest was itself focusing on SF literaturc in the 1940s and 1950s, when Hollywood was struggling to establish socioeconomic structures for its survival as an industry; and that it quickly became onc of the first points of contact between that industry and the SF genre. 1 shall not however be discussing SF films of this period: my initial purpose will bc to establish thc preoccupations that underlie the development of this interest in the 1980s. My concern will bc to try to show that narratives about the sexual identity of artificial lifc forms use cinema's increasing self-consciousness about the process of imagcmaking not to test conventional definitions of gender but to consolidate them.
