ABSTRACT
Visions of “futuristic” buildings, cities, and societies exist long before the modern period as evidenced in various images of New Jerusalem, the Tower of Babel, Renaissance ideal cities, and Utopian literature to name only a few examples. SF imagery therefore did not begin with the advent of film and is indisputably inclusive of such drawings as Grandville’s Gulliver looking up to the flying city of Laputa, for instance.2 However, it is evident that rapid progress in engineering and manufacturing technology during the nineteenth century made the previously impossible, increasingly possible. It also highlighted the progressive nature of Enlightenment ideology and a growing optimism in science, and I will therefore begin during this early modernist period when film was also emerging as a prominent means of cultural expression.3
