Week Fourteen: Science Fiction Parody and Satire

by - 5:51 PM

This week I am asking you to listen to the original radio version of Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy or alternatively, to some Firesign Theater, the masters of absurdist speculative audio. As with the other genres we have studied this semester, satiric uses of genre codes serve as excellent examples in which to see those codes more clearly.  We become more aware of the limits of genre and often the absurdist qualities of the codes themselves.

This week's suggested film is Idiocracy an increasingly popular cult favorite that uses tropes of science fiction and the rhetorical figure of exaggeration to make visible a number of the inherent contradictions and fallacies of our current cultural assumptions. This highlights one of the larger roles that science fiction plays in our society and reminds us that science fiction is really never about the future but always about the present.

Perhaps one of the best speculative satires is the recent Matt Damon movie, Downsizing, which, if you haven't seen it, is an excellent work of social criticism with dead pan humor and penetrating observation.  The recent television series Braindead, available for streaming is also an excellent near future sci-fi parody of current politics. If you would consider watching a speculative RomCom that is charming and smart I suggest About Time, an unjustly overlooked film from the makers of Four Weddings and a Funeral.


Here is a link to the Activity Page for this week which has a number of works to listen to or to read.

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