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This chapter investigates the science fiction films of the 1950s in America. The 1950s was the decade that marked the beginning of the end for the Hollywood studio system when the oligopoly of the major studios began to break down. The alien invasion films and the science fiction/horror films of that era exhibited an overwhelming concern with the family. Like so many of the American and Japanese films of the time, the British science fiction/horror films of that time ostensibly dealt with the destructive potential of atomic weaponry and concerns surrounding the development and future use of nuclear power. The British films presented largely substitute the female with the monster in their fight to retain an orderly, masculine realm. Finally, an interview with Billy Gray regarding his role in a science fiction film is provided.

This chapter examines the interconnections between British television, radio and film companies in relation to science fiction, particularly with regard to the numerous film adaptations of science fiction dramas in the 1950s by companies such as Hammer. This period saw the rise of television as a dominant domestic medium, and a growing backlash against the perceived threat of American soft power, as typified by the alluring shine of science fiction with its promise of a bright technological future. There was therefore a tension within the uses of domestically produced British material in a popular genre that was perceived as American. The interaction between film and broadcast media in relation to science fiction was therefore crucial at this historical juncture, in helping promote the identities of filmmakers like Hammer, but also in supporting the identity of the BBC, and in acting as a nexus for debates on taste and national identity.

This chapter discusses some representations of nation and ethnicity, beginning with an account of the reactions that surrounded Howard Brenton's play, The Romans in Britain, and then identifies the components of the national conjuncture and tries to determine whether a literary work can cover a nation. It also examines other techniques used by writers who wanted to document the condition of England in the 1980s, Black British and Asian fiction and poetry, and writers who self-consciously set themselves outside ethnic groupings.

This chapter on the crime fiction of Arthur Conan Doyle, Satyajit Ray and Cheng Xiaoqing examines the central role of adaptation in the international development of the crime fiction genre in order to present a more complex understanding of the genre’s international connections and mobility. The chapter questions the distinction between original and reproduction that has typically informed critical studies on the genre’s international spread through an analysis of the works of these three writers from Britain, India (Bengal) and China. In demonstrating the ways in which Ray and Cheng adapt what is typically considered an archetypically British genre to their local settings, the chapter deconstructs the preeminent position granted to Holmes as the originator and, instead, draws attention to how Doyle himself adapted the genre in a transnational dialogue with his literary forebears.

The first chapter of part 1 (A History of No Future: Feminism, Eugenics, and Reproductive Imaginaries), argues that distinctions between queer and straight time are not always uncomplicated or obvious. The chapter takes up feminist utopian fiction that revolves around the racial and national politics of reproduction, focusing on two little-read British novels—New Amazonia (1889) by Elizabeth Burgoyne Corbett and Woman Alive (1936) by Susan Ertz—while contextualizing the many utopian fictions published by white US- and UK-based women in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. Critiquing the tendency to associate reproducing bodies and reproductive labor with maintenance of the status quo, the chapter uncovers ambiguous queer possibilities within the futures imagined by middle-class white women reckoning with what it meant to be charged with the eugenic reproduction of modernity, Englishness, and empire. These speculative narratives highlight breaks and bends in normative time articulated through the intersection of class, colonial, and racial imaginaries with questions of gender and desire. They have much to tell us about how feminist politics of reproduction and gendered embodiment function at the intersection of gender, sexuality, and race with mechanisms of white supremacy and state power.

Building on the insights of the previous chapter, the second chapter of part 1 turns to feminist dystopian fiction written by antifascist British women between the First and Second World Wars. Man’s World (1926) by Charlotte Haldane and Swastika Night (1937) by Katharine Burdekin use divergent strategies to route modernity’s futures through reproductive bodies, troubling oppositions twenty-first-century critical theory tends to naturalize: between heteronormativity and its others, queer and straight time, futurity and negativity, deviant and normative pleasures. Both novels revolve around the production of futurelessness—not just an undesirable world for some, but the notion that the future could end altogether. This negative speculation resonates with the queer project of articulating a politics that might not rely on reproduction: a futureless politics. At the same time, both Haldane and Burdekin insist that same-sex desire can all too easily appear as one of the various interlocking forces that set in place politically horrifying futures. This convergence of reproductive oppression with homoerotic nationalism calls forth concerns and conflicts in queer studies over the ways in which nonheterosexual bodies, communities, and politics have participated in the perpetuation of racial and colonial violence.

This chapter details the early life of John Brunner. Brunner had first meaningful encounter with science fiction (SF) when grandfather's rare 1898 Heinemann edition of H. G. Wells' The War of the Worlds (1898) ended up misshelved in his playroom. At six and a half years old, Brunner read it, adorned its endpapers with Martian fighting-machines, and that was that. By nine, Brunner was a full-fledged SF addict. During his final term at Cheltenham College in the fall of 1951, Brunner's first printed story appeared alongside fiction by A. Bertram Chandler, Kenneth Bulmer, and Manly Banister in Walt Willis' celebrated fanzine Slant. Though only a page long, “The Watchers” (1951) leaves little doubt that the seventeen-year-old Brunner began his career as a devoted idealist. In April 1966, Brunner became the first recipient of the British Science Fiction Association's Fantasy Award.

This chapter examines the interconnections between British television, radio and film companies in relation to science fiction, particularly with regard to the numerous film adaptations of science fiction dramas in the 1950s by companies such as Hammer. This period saw the rise of television as a dominant domestic medium, and a growing backlash against the perceived threat of American soft power, as typified by the alluring shine of science fiction with its promise of a bright technological future. There was therefore a tension within the uses of domestically produced British material in a popular genre that was perceived as American. The interaction between film and broadcast media in relation to science fiction was therefore crucial at this historical juncture, in helping promote the identities of filmmakers like Hammer, but also in supporting the identity of the BBC, and in acting as a nexus for debates on taste and national identity.

This chapter explores some issues in black British and British Asian fiction since the 1980s. It shows certain key characteristics of the white British apprehension of those non-white imperial subjects who, after decolonization, were to arrive, in increasing numbers, on British shores. This chapter takes a sample of five writers — three women and two men — and explores those key recurring themes that give a unity to their otherwise very different novels. Through the work of Caryl Phillips, Andrea Levy, Zadie Smith, Hanif Kureishi, and Monica Ali, this chapter traces the persistence of issues of race and racism. The chapter also considers the importance of recuperating black history, the rise of identity politics, and the tenacity with which the gaze of the racial Other — whether white on black or black on white — fixes its object in the expectation of certain forms of limiting and supposedly ‘authentic’ behaviour.

This chapter argues that Iris Murdoch’s view that the fiction of the 1950s and early 1960s could not address evil is narrow and hence incorrect. Several important writers, such as William Golding, Muriel Spark, J. R. R. Tolkien, were precisely imagining evil in a range of different ways. Indeed, it was exactly as a response to the question of evil that they chose different forms (fantasy, fable, allegory). Importantly, for each of these writers, evil was not simply an abstract thing: the abstract was bound ineluctably into the historical reality of the Holocaust. It also raises the issue of the problem of evil as the fundamental question of post-war Europe. Each of these writers thus addressed this fundamental problem in different ways.