Since early cinema, the power to present marvelous effects and visions of societies in future time and distant space has made film a choice medium for science fiction. While these possibilities often have been realized as serializations of war/adventure dramas with rockets and exotic creatures (like the 1930s Buck Rogers), science-fiction cinema also has envisioned society and its possibilities through prisms of horror, philosophy and fantasy—the power of Blade Runner (1982) or Alien Nation (1988). At the end of the century computers and related technologies have revitalized epic science-fiction filmmaking at the same time that they have become the subjects of ominous speculation (The Matrix, 1999).

Postwar science fiction reflects many images and concerns of the Cold War. It shows a continuing fascination with new technology and its impacts—whether in George Pal’s Destination Moon (1950) or the more ominous Forbidden Planet (1956). Yet technology also had an edge, disrupting the natural order in the creation of monstrous ants (Them!, 1954), spiders, shrews and even women (Attack of the 50 Foot Woman, 1958). Especially chilling were situations in which technological advances combined with extra-terrestrial control, whether aimed at world conquest (The Thing, 1951, remade 1982; Invaders from Mars, 1953; Invasion of the Body Snatchers, 1956) or world peace (The Day the Earth Stood Still, 1951). These films evoke concerns with the speed and motives of scientific changes, especially nuclear energy, and the scientist, who often ends fighting some heroic heterosexual couple who restore order.

Science fiction remained a genre to meditate on the present and future throughout the 1960s, as evidenced in Stanley Kubrick’s very different visions of the future in the antinuclear war Dr Strangelove (1964), the spaceship meditations of 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) and the alternative society of Clockwork Orange (1971). Indeed, moral dimensions of science-fiction arguments rather than science itself also pervade more popular series like those that envisioned humans replaced and enslaved by apes (Planet of the Apes, 1968 and sequels). These movies also drew on important authors like Arthur C. Clarke and Anthony Burgess. Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451 was also transformed into a movie by French director François Truffaut.

Science fiction began to experience a rebirth in the late 1970s through George Lucas and Steven Spielberg, who produced blockbuster combinations of visionary plots, human engagements with the limits of their possibilities on Earth, and off it, and fantastic special effects. Close Encounters of the Third Kind (Spielberg, 1977), Star Wars and sequels (Lucas, beginning 1977) and E.T. (Spielberg, 1982) changed the ways in which moviegoers saw the future, and underpinned a renaissance of sciencefiction movies for the decades that followed.

Despite technological inventiveness and exotic characters, however, many sciencefiction movies replicate stereotypic themes of gender, race and American idealism, and coincide with wellestablished genres and scenarios of Hollywood. There remains a strong, sometimes xenophobic relationship with horror films, suggesting that what’s out there will hurt us. Masculine heroism, teamwork and democratic ideals also underpin the action of Total Recall (1990) and the Star Trek series. Hence, dreams, fears and memories meet on the sci-fi screen for spectators in the US and the world.