Author: sfrarev

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In The Boom & The Boom, Lyu Guangzhao’s intention is both to close the intellectual distance between two national zones of global sci-fi, and to widen a breach in its established discourse and structure. Two previously disconnected movements within the genre are beginning to speak to each other without US-mediation. Chinese works have already gone global, and modern British works are finding readership in China (5). Academic discourse can, perhaps, facilitate further and deeper mutual recognition.

His subtitle is a straightforward promise: political and historical analysis of sci-fi from two nations. As for the title, Lyu’s ‘booms’ are two ‘new waves’ from broadly parallel historical moments: China’s transition from Maoist communism to growth-oriented ‘post-socialism,’ and Britain from postwar social democracy to post-industrial neoliberalism. The title’s syntax is an intentional invocation of China Mieville’s The City and the City (3), in which two worlds exist side by side, each never recognising the other. (China isn’t chosen for his name: he’s the closest thing to a figurehead of the ‘New Weird’ strain in the British ‘boom.’)

Lyu’s thesis is that key works in each boom built a space to respond to a national and global swing from state socialism to market capitalism. He lays out how British and Chinese writers publishing at the supposed end of history (and later, ‘capitalist realism’) rallied to form critiques and imagine alternative societies. Steering clear of denial and wishful thinking, Lyu underscores how different works lament, subvert, or even imagine accelerations of a turn away from the security and grandeur of a society with socialist ambitions. He dwells much upon questions of coming together, or shattering apart.

In Lyu’s approach, ‘Chinese sci-fi’ and ‘British sci-fi’ are two national literatures unfolding against a historical and political backdrop. Other identities and languages within each state fall outside the fame. The first two of Lyu’s five chosen British authors are Scots, but this fact proves incidental. Appended to Lyu’s broadly left political approach is the use of theorists from the critical canon—Marx, Jameson, Foucault, etc—but also of figures and schools such as Mark Fisher, Gilles Deleuze, and Object Oriented Ontology. Deleuze in particular bridges orthodoxy and the weirder theorists.

Lyu also draws on literary specialists. Examples concerning China: David Der-wei Wang for Sinophone literature, and Li Hua, Song Mingwei, and Nathaniel Isaacson for Chinese science fiction. Concerning Britain, Stuart Hall for politics and culture in the neoliberal era, and Roger Luckhurst and Andrew M Butler for commentary on UK sci-fi and its boom—not to mention choice quotes from the politicians Tony Benn, Tony Blair, Nigel Lawson, and (naturally) Margaret Thatcher.

Each chapter pairs one novel or series from the British boom with a correspondent from the Chinese boom. Lyu’s selected texts also mix intuitive and niche choices. Of the five British authors selected, Iain M Banks and China Mieville are the celebrities, Ken MacLeod a rung or two lower, James Lovegrove a could-have-been who receded into IP tie-ins, and M John Harrison a dark star. Of the five Chinese novels selected, two of the five are not published in English translation. One author, Long Yi, has had none of his works released in English.

The introductory chapter, Mapping the Field, sets the model for the book’s pleasingly symmetrical approach. After defining ‘boom’ and introducing each of them, Lyu sets the historical context for one nation, and then the other. Britain goes first. The section A Journey to the Right: The Rise of Thatcherism is a detailed political timeline starting with the end of Britain’s postwar consensus and progressing to the present. Those familiar with the terrain could skip it, but whether as a refresher or introduction, the marriage of detail and flow is commendable. Next comes Challenging the Narrative: British SF Boom as Left-Wing Responses, discussing Thatcher’s legacy in British culture, and how it relates to sci-fi. In Lyu’s telling, the left’s material defeat shifts resistance to culture, which is in turn neutered by institutions (31), yet sci-fi maintains an edge due to its low status (32). In the book’s concluding chapter, Chinese sci-fi faces a similar conundrum. When you are nobody, there is no need to become respectable. But when you are somebody, the reverse [277].

Next, China. In the section Before the SF Boom: Spiritual Pollution and “Top-down” Elitism, Lyu details the first attempt at a post-Mao emergence of sci-fi, and how it fell victim to an intellectual pile-on in which a new cultural elite resorted to a moralistic backlash that favoured science writing over science fiction. Lyu’s summary brings this history into English—extremely helpful for readers previously unfamiliar with the names of key players and publications. Chinese sci-fi’s complicated relationship with liberalisation continues in the next section, The Cat’s Colour Does Not Matter: Deng’s Reform and the Dawning of the Chinese Boom. Lyu first details how, despite pushback, China’s opening up continued, albeit with a heavy skew toward marketisation. The decoupling of publishing houses from state protection forced them to consider the tastes of readers, thus freeing sci-fi from the judgements of once-dominant intellectual elites (49). Lyu pins the start of the Chinese boom to 1991, when the magazine Science, Art and Literature changed its name to Science Fiction World, an indicator of collective insistence on the value of applying fiction, and not just educational writing, to scientific topics (52).

Lyu finishes the introduction with a claim sitting on the verge where academia falls away into esoterica: that the parallel emergence of the UK and PRC booms is not coincidental, but rather two local expressions of the same hyperobject. Or in plainer English, products of a force/system so massive that it resides on the edges of human comprehension (53).

More concretely, Lyu tees up his next task: to initiate dialogue between the booms (54). In his words, they are family: “Fraternal twins already separated for too long.” (53) In Chapter 1, The Ones Who Walk Away, Lyu’s first attempt to connect the twins brings in Han Song’s Red Star Over America (火星照耀美国) (2000) and Iain M Banks’ Culture series. The topic is ‘disrupted utopias.’ At the opening of Red Star (also translatable as ‘Mars’), China is governed by a benevolent AI named Amanduo, whose collapse triggers massive chaos. The main character, a Chinese go champion, sets out across America to seek a replacement utopia. Lyu argues that Amanduo represents various aspects of China’s authoritarian model, from grand-narrative Marxism to post-Mao humanism: secure, static, suffocating. Though it was never perfect nor sustainable, once dead it can be mourned as a lost utopia. But in its collapse, the innocent optimism necessary to conceive another utopia dies (76). Thus, nothing subsequent can suffice.

Lyu ends his discussion of post-utopian China by noting that a search for a ‘new form of sovereignty’ could look to Iain Banks’ Culture: “the other utopia that exists in the shadow of its own disruption” (79). Lyu then introduces the Culture (series) as something less grand: as Banks’ vengeance against Thatcherism (84), taken by modelling a new form of space opera centred on a society running on what we might call “fully automated luxury communism” (Bastani). Then, citing Sherryl Vint’s use of Hardt and Negri’s Empire, Lyu details how a close reading of the series indicates that the Culture in fact reflects the real-world shift from classical forms of imperialism (power secured through force, territory, conquest, hierarchy, purity) to the American (90) postmodern form (power secured through values, lifestyle, assimilation, decentralisation, hybridity). He guides the reader to note a fundamental contradiction in both the Culture and the US: a society that vaunts freedom, plurality, and noble ethics, but practices confrontation and homogenisation, driven by a fundamental belief in the value of itself over all alternatives (96). Lyu closes with comparisons of Han Song’s dying utopia and Banks’ contradictory utopia, focusing particularly on a comparison of their respective AI governors: the centralised Amanduo and the distributed, autonomous Minds. Scarcity is also discussed, which leads into the next chapter.

Chapter 2, What’s Past is Prologue, concerns ideological options for building an ideal society, operating under the constraints and dilemmas of political reality. Lyu’s chosen texts are Hao Jingfang’s Vagabonds (流浪苍穹) (2016) and Ken MacLeod’s Fall Revolution series. Lyu starts with Vagabonds, which follows youths torn between a high-minded collectivist society built on Mars, and a hyperindividualist consumer society on Earth. The former offers a managed life of intellectual and technical pursuits; secure but solemn. The latter promises personal freedom and self-expression, but a constant fight to sink or succeed. Lyu’s focus is to evaluate this Martian variant of utopia. In comparing one of its key mechanisms with China’s once-foundational work unit (danwei) system, he brings in insight those less familiar with China would surely miss (106). He also dwells on the characters’ feelings of disenchantment, and notes that the Martian society’s noticeably academic system of funding and citation bears a similarity with Earth’s capitalism: both systems motivate their subjects through competition and personal ambition rather than solidarity and collective enrichment (116). So, as Hao Jingfang intends, Lyu reads her Mars as an ambiguous utopia.

Lyu then brings in Robert Nozick’s concept of meta-utopia to deal with MacLeod’s Fall Revolution series: that is, a zone in which contrasting utopian models can be attempted and administered, leaving individual humans free to migrate and participate in their preferred version of society. MacLeod’s series features and explores both socialist and libertarian ideas, yet for Lyu the series’ fascination with the market—imagined to its extremes, and safe from consignment to the scrapheap of history—suggests the “historical exhaustion” (135) of the neoliberal era in Britain. Capitalist realism in space, legislated by a weary socialist. Earlier, Lyu notes that MacLeod’s characters are luckier than Hao’s (122). The former don’t need to forge or overthrow societies to find their ideological home. The latter are orphans forever. But at the chapter’s end he evens the score, noting that both authors’ characters live in universes where no conclusive utopia can exist (136).

Chapter 3, Long Live the Vampire, returns from space to consider how China Mieville’s Perdido Street Station (2000) and Chen Qiufan’s Waste Tide (2013) use elements of speculative genre, chaos, and the weird to approach social issues and dynamics as they exist on Earth today: foremost the exploitation of the weak and the marginal, hybrid identity, and collective resistance. In Chen’s words, spoken in 2007 at a conference in Chengdu (Dongmei): “reality has surpassed science fiction.” The vampire in question is capitalism, not any lone predator. Neither author leads: Lyu’s analyses the books in tandem. The theory he deploys here is Foucault’s heterotopia, concerning marginal places of otherness and difference – worlds in words, opposite but adjacent, again mirroring Mieville’s The City and the City (2009). Cities and symbols are Lyu’s starting point. He explains that the Silicon Isle (硅屿, guī yǔ) of Waste Tide stands in for the real town of Guiyu (贵屿, guì yǔ), a massive e-waste recycling hub on the edge of Chen’s native Shantou (141). Perdido Street Station’s New Crobuzon stands for London: colossal, mongrel, fluid, and vastly unequal (149). The exploited of the former are, just as in real Chinese cities, domestic migrants from poorer provinces. The exploited of the latter are a diverse array of humanoid species, standing in for London’s globalised, multiethnic populace.

Lyu’s analysis begins following the natural fault lines for each group, considering class foremost for the migrant workers and identity for the ‘xenoid’ species. But as the chapter progresses, he weaves this back around. Concerning the waste people, he analyses how social demarcations and anxieties form a social caste for them, blocking them from integration or synthesis with the ‘natives’ of Silicon Isle (152), and thus allowing class exploitation for profit to continue. Concerning New Crobuzon, he explores how the technocratic aristocracy work in conjunction with organised crime to engineer the vampiric conversion of citizens’ dreams into a commodity: a drug. The distinction here is that in Waste Tide, exploitation has arisen without conspiracy, whereas in Perdido Street Station the elite use weird forces to force it on the populace (164). The reader may decide for themself which world is more frightening and chaotic.

Chapter 4, From Consumption to Prosumption, deals with worlds where market logic and consumer psychology have achieved total dominance, and to do so brings the reader into less-mapped literary space. James Lovegrove’s Days is an early entry (1999) from an author who departed from the British boom to write less ambitious works: mostly teen fiction, pastiche and IP tie-ins. Long Yi’s Earth Province is far more recent (2018), but is not available in English translation. Lyu uses each to move from class society to consumer society: another mirror, this time reflecting Britain and China’s journey across the new millennium. The former from postwar democratic socialism of unions and nationalised industries to a financialised and individualist service economy, and the latter from revolution, rigid Maoism, and the ‘iron rice bowl’ to market reforms, an expanded personal freedom, and burgeoning inequality.

Days is a satire focusing on a middle Britain fixated upon an all-encompassing department store. Earth Province is something darker: a depiction of our planet under the thumb of an alien race who harvest us for food. In Days, the store is the locus of prestige and desire. In Earth Province, every aspect of society is up for sale, purchase, and taxation. Life ends at 45 for men and 40 for women, but that too can be prolonged by a purchase. This pair clicks perfectly with Lyu’s titular concept, presumption: a mode of consumerism in which the consumer pays to contribute to production (203). Aided by Days, Earth Province, and his chosen theorists, Lyu demonstrates how, in both British and Chinese novels, the desirous and defanged consumer-citizen will now volunteer their own energies to feed the machine,  whether tapping at the McDonald’s self-service screen, or handing over cookies and content to Meta and Meituan.

In Chapter Five, Past the Point of No Return, Lyu uses two trilogies, Liu Cixin’s Three Body and M John Harrison’s Kefahuchi Tract, to characterise opposing visions of despair and possibility. The former is the logic underpinning the war for survival in Three Body: the universal ‘dark forest’ in which (A) trust is not possible and therefore that which is not self is enemy (214), and (B) everything which is not strictly economic and strategic is a liability that must be jettisoned (224). Lyu interprets the titular zone of Harrison’s series as the opposite (238), not in the sense that it is safe and cheerful, but that it is pluralistic rather than reductive (241), and impossible to capture in any conceivable law or system (240). Lyu frames the dark forest’s conversion of social subjects into objects of capital and enterprise as emblematic of post-socialism and neoliberalism, and documents how in China capitalism’s beneficiaries (corporate elites) (219) and proponents (the online right) (228) have embraced the aspects of Three Body that favour a bleak and narrow will to power. Inability to see beyond the market, recast as virtue.

Lyu finds a line of dialogue in Harrison’s series to summarise his proposed opposition: “Uncertainty is all we have. It’s our advantage. It’s the virtue of the day” (Harrison, 21). Sticking to this line of thinking, Lyu uses Deleuze and Guattari’s concepts to characterise the series: a drama of and journey toward radical multiplicity, decentralisation, and perpetual flux. Lyu is not afraid to use Deleuze and Guatarri’s internal language, either, to frame the series as one in which the principal characters become ‘haecceities’ rocket along ‘rhizomatic’ ‘lines of flight’ to be ‘reterritorialised’ in a blinding light. He returns to the topic of capitalism at the close, suggesting that Harrison’s stories orbiting the Kefahuchi Tract model a way to move beyond capitalism, rather than defeat it through binary war and resistance (255). Readers are free to ponder the length of such a road relative to their own lifespan.

In the conclusion, A Confession of Breach, Lyu considers the breach in literary culture where these two national booms have begun to speak to each other. Lyu devotes the most words to the Chinese boom. As he makes clear, the British boom has conclusively ended, while its Chinese counterpart persists. Lyu’s personal confessions here—really, they’re anecdotes—are illuminating. He recounts conversations with British readers which revealed that their understandings and valuations of the Three Body trilogy were remarkably different from his own, leading him to surmise that the contrast hinged on foreign readers’ desire to experience “Chinese-ness” (261). This prompts a digression on questions of Orientalism, ‘world literature’, and an opportunity for Lyu to synthesise the thoughts of key academics such as David Der-wei Wang and Song Mingwei, and his own: suppose world science fiction is a hyperobject (267), or a planetary literature (279)? The polyphonic planet is a pleasing note to end on, and suitable. Consider the Earth as a hard limit (for the time being), but one host to teeming, cross-pollinating multiplicities.

The Boom and The Boom joins a small but growing cohort of English language academic works on Chinese sci-fi, and is the first to bring in another country on equal terms. The Boom and The Boom is verbose but easily penetrable, and flush with enthusiasm, and thus could serve as a great step up for Anglophone readers who devoured the essays in the Invisible Planets and Broken Stars anthologies edited and translated by Chinese-American writer Ken Liu (or perhaps more appropriately Sinopticon, whose assembler Xueting C Ni is British-Chinese). Lyu’s words can take the reader to places these titles’ paratexts can only tease. Sino-specialism aside, the book will also be of genuine interest for those keen to explore readings of British science fiction, and more broadly how the worldwide turn to market economics ushered in by the likes of Thatcher, Deng, and Reagan has rippled through world cultures.

If I were to reach for a critique of the book I might point to its asymmetries. For example, Lyu is far stronger on context and details for Chinese works: take his run-through of Chinese internet culture wars over Three Body (228), which is of the top rank of all available in English, or his footnote on Chengdu’s botched Worldcon (276). His engagements with British sci-fi skew more broadly, more likely to engage with Britain’s literary figureheads and already-archived discourse than beating-pulse intricacies around, say, household registration laws (143) or uproar over crowdsourced marketing for the Tangdaren instant noodle brand (210). In dealing with Days, for example, we find no mention of Britain’s greatest lost middle class utopia: Debenhams. But whether or not the mirror is askew, and though it is hard to say if one academic can link two worlds, Lyu certainly succeeds in widening the breach, and creating a strange and pleasurable portal for the critical and curious to dive into.

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WORKS CITED

Bastani, Aaron. Fully Automated Luxury Communism! Novara Media, 2014.

Ren, Dongmei (translated by Xu, Chenmei). Interpreting Folding Beijing through the Prism of Science Fiction Realism. Chinese Literature Today. 7:1, 54-57. 2018.

Harrison, M John. Nova Swing. Gollancz, 2006.

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Angus Stewart is a Dundonian living in Greater Manchester who writes occasional strange stories and essays. His fiction has appeared in various small publications including Ab Terra, Necksnap, and Dark Horses. His writing on Chinese literature and culture has featured in Asian Cha, the Asian Review of Books, and Crumble. He holds a BA Hons in English Literature and Creative Writing from Manchester Metropolitan University, and an MSc in Publishing from Edinburgh Napier University. He spent several years teaching in China, and currently works as an editor within the bowels of the University of Manchester. His show, the Translated Chinese Fiction Podcast, is on hiatus.

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Jesús “Jess” Franco (1930–2013) occupies a unique position within European genre cinema, navigating the boundaries between exploitation, auteur filmmaking, and underground aesthetics. The years 1953 to 1966 mark Franco’s formative period, laying the foundation for his later cult status. Despite directing over two hundred films, Franco has remained a marginal figure in mainstream film scholarship, though his work has garnered considerable attention within cult cinema circles. Academic engagement with his body of work remains uneven and often polarized, oscillating between celebratory fan discourses and outright critical dismissal. Notable contributions include Obsession: The Films of Jess Franco (1993) by Lucas Balbo, Peter Blumenstock, Christian Kessler, and Tim Lucas, which combines biographical insights with an accessible, albeit non-academic, exploration of Franco’s recurring motifs and aesthetic tendencies. Similarly, Alain Petit’s The Strange Case of Jesús Franco (1998) provides filmographic detail and personal recollections, though its critical perspective is limited. More recently, Stephen Thrower’s two-volume work, Murderous Passions: The Delirious Cinema of Jesús Franco (2015), has become a key reference for both scholars and fans, offering production histories and in-depth analysis. However, its coverage of Franco’s early films remains cursory, focusing predominantly on his later, more sensational output. Within the broader context of European exploitation cinema, Cathal Tohill and Pete Tombs’ Immoral Tales: European Sex & Horror Movies 1956–1984 (1995) situates Franco alongside contemporaries such as Jean Rollin and José Ramón Larraz, emphasizing his transgressive role within genre traditions. Nevertheless, focused academic attention on Franco’s early career (1953–1966) remains notably scarce—a gap that The Films of Jesús Franco, 1953–1966 directly addresses.

Primary sources authored by Franco himself offer valuable insights into his creative process and self-perception as a filmmaker. His statements, dispersed across interviews and liner notes for home video releases, reveal his resistance to genre classifications and his commitment to artistic subversion. Notably, La noche pasa demasiado lenta (1991), Franco’s semi-autobiographical and poetic work, provides a glimpse into his personal mythology and creative psyche, blending fiction with reflections on his cinematic preoccupations. Further interviews compiled in Balbo et al.’s Obsession and Thrower’s Murderous Passions illuminate Franco’s views on censorship, genre hybridity, and his complex relationship with commercial and avant-garde cinema. Although often anecdotal, these sources are essential for understanding the idiosyncratic trajectory of Franco’s early artistic development.

The Films of Jesús Franco, 1953–1966 offers a timely, well-researched examination of Franco’s often overlooked early films, situating them within two intersecting frameworks: the political and cultural conditions of Francoist Spain, and the industrial dynamics of European co-productions. By focusing on his formative years—characterized by genre experimentation, musical influences, and subversive elements—the book fills a significant gap in Franco critical studies. It challenges the prevailing assumption that his career began solely within exploitation cinema, instead of foregrounding his engagement with diverse genres and artistic aspirations. As discussed in Obsession: The Films of Jess Franco (1993), these early films provided fertile ground for experimentation, wherein Franco explored musical motifs and genre hybridity, foreshadowing the more defined horror and erotic aesthetics of his later work. The book offers critical reassessment through archival research, primary sources, and detailed film analysis.

Authors Francesco Cesari and Roberto Curti engaged in rigorous archival work, drawing on censorship records, contemporary reviews, and production documents to construct a comprehensive portrait of Franco’s artistic development. Their approach significantly deepens the understanding of Franco’s early output, demonstrating that his subversive tendencies and experimentation were present from the outset.

While The Films of Jesús Franco, 1953–1966 provides an academically grounded, contextual analysis of his early work, Cesari and Curti’s earlier publication, The Jess Franco Files – Vol. 1: Cuatro guiones y una sinopsis de Jesús Franco (2017), offers a complementary perspective through its use of primary sources. This volume presents four of Franco’s screenplays and one synopsis, granting unprecedented access to his creative process through previously unpublished materials. As an archival resource, The Jess Franco Files is invaluable for researchers focused on textual analysis and script development.

In contrast, The Films of Jesús Franco, 1953–1966 prioritizes critical interpretation, situating Franco’s early films within the socio-political and industrial contexts of post-war Spain and Europe. It combines scholarly argumentation with insights from secondary sources, production histories, and interviews, rather than relying exclusively on Franco’s unmediated creative documents. Its strength lies in connecting these early films to broader discourses on genre cinema, censorship, and transnational production, while The Jess Franco Files provides raw textual material without substantial analytical framing.

One of the book’s most compelling contributions is its examination of Franco’s relationship with national identity and international co-productions. The authors demonstrate how his collaborations with French, German, and Portuguese producers enabled him to transcend the constraints of Spanish cultural policy, resulting in films that defy straightforward categorization. In doing so, the book aligns with contemporary scholarship that reframes European exploitation cinema as inherently transnational. Rather than portraying Franco as merely a purveyor of low-budget cinema, Cesari and Curti present him as a director who actively negotiated the boundaries of artistic freedom within restrictive political and commercial environments. Their research underscores Franco’s ongoing experimentation with narrative form and genre conventions as central to understanding his evolution as an artist, preceding the more sensational elements that would later define his reputation.

However, the book offers limited exploration of how Franco’s early films were marketed, censored, or critically received beyond Spain. While it provides a thorough analysis of the transnational production context, the international reception of these works receives comparatively less attention. This omission mitigates? inhibits? makes it difficult for readers to gain? a comprehensive understanding of the global circulation and legacy of Franco’s pre-1967 output—an area complicated by the post-war political climate and the challenges of incomplete, poorly preserved, or lost film records from the period.

Despite this limitation, the book makes a substantial contribution to cult cinema studies by elevating Franco’s early work from historical obscurity to essential groundwork for his later, more widely discussed productions. By centering on this neglected period, Cesari and Curti invite a reassessment of Franco as a filmmaker whose artistic ambitions extended well beyond his most controversial films.

The Films of Jesús Franco, 1953–1966 offers a much-needed scholarly examination of a crucial yet underexplored phase in Franco’s career. Through meticulous archival research and critical film analysis, the book challenges reductive readings of his early work and situates it within broader cultural and industrial frameworks. While certain aspects, particularly international reception, could be more fully developed, the book ultimately succeeds in addressing a significant gap in research about Jess Franco. It serves as a vital resource for scholars of Spanish cinema, European genre film, and cult cinema more broadly, representing a key step in the ongoing academic reassessment of Jess Franco’s diverse and often misunderstood filmography.

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WORKS CITED

Balbo, Lucas, et al. Obsession: The Films of Jess Franco. Editions 7e Dimension, 1993.

Franco, Jesús. La noche pasa demasiado lenta. Ediciones La Máscara, 1991.

Franco, Jesús. The Jess Franco Files: Cuatro Guiones y Una Sinopsis de Jesús Franco (Laberinto; La Noche Tiene Ojos; El Castillo de Frankenstein; Un Tiro en la Sien; Orloff 2001). Edited by Roberto Curti and Francesco Cesari, 2017.

Petit, Alain. The Strange Case of Jesús Franco. L’Étrange Festival, 1998.

Thrower, Stephen. Murderous Passions: The Delirious Cinema of Jesús Franco. Vol. 1, Strange Attractor Press, 2015.

Tohill, Cathal, and Pete Tombs. Immoral Tales: European Sex & Horror Movies 1956–1984. Titan Books, 1995.

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Elena Natalia Romea Parente holds a PhD in Spanish Cinema and Literature, with a doctoral dissertation focused on the Spanish mystic filmmaker José Val del Omar. She also holds dual degrees in English and Spanish Studies, as well as a Master’s in European Literary Studies. Her academic career includes teaching appointments at several Spanish universities, including the Universidad Autónoma de Madrid (UAM) and the Universidad Nacional de Educación a Distancia (UNED). In addition to her scholarly work, she is the founder of Spanish Fear (spanishfear.com), a platform and podcast dedicated to the study and dissemination of Spanish horror cinema. Her research engages with multidisciplinary contemporary narratives, with particular emphasis on horror, the uncanny, and the aesthetics of strangeness.

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Miguel Sebastián-Martín is a postdoctoral researcher and teacher in the English Department at the Universidad de Salamanca, Spain, where in 2023 he completed the PhD dissertation behind the volume here reviewed, Thinking through High-Tech Hell: A Theory of the New Media Dystopia. Sebastián-Martín, an MPhil in Film and Screen Studies from the University of Cambridge, focuses his research on Anglophone speculative fiction in audio-visual media. In this volume, he studies in particular diverse British and American 2010s series, which he presents as part of the SF sub-genre of new media dystopia.

With this label, Sebastián-Martín refers to the series that criticize digital capitalism while being at the same time successful products of the digital-capitalist streaming platforms. Sebastián-Martín’s volume is informed by the underlying supposition that new media dystopia is part of an epoch-making structure of feeling, as a narratively reflexive sub-genre, as an aesthetically ambivalent form, and as the expression of (post-)postmodern quixotism. The author explores which ways the series selected contribute to, rather than truly criticize, the hopelessness with which we face seemingly indestructible contemporary capitalism, and encourages readers to boldly face the high-tech SF hell that current life is in the age of digital capitalism.

The success of the series that Sebastián-Martín analyzes is paradoxically based on inviting viewers to acknowledge the many points of contact between SF and current reality, and to critically rethink both, but without abandoning the 21^st century dystopian structure of feeling. Sebastián-Martín wonders, therefore, whether the series do offer a truly meaningful discourse beyond the attractive post-cyberpunk aesthetics and the enjoyable reflexivity about their own medium: platform TV. The author argues that, actually, the often-ironic approach to their position as SF audiovisual texts made to entertain a media-savvy audience results in a rather limited critical-dystopian message. Often, the characters express a utopian impulse, but, since this follows the myth of Don Quixote, spectators are left with no feasible referents for actual change. Unless, that is, they approach the fictions of new media dystopia as Quixotes ready to fight digital-capitalist giants even knowing they’re windmills.

Thinking through High-Tech Hell is divided into four substantial chapters, each constituting an area of theoretical exploration dense enough to originate a separate volume (the author himself hints this might be particularly desirable in the case of the last chapter, devoted to examining quixotism, and I agree). Chapter 1, “Our Hopeless SF Times: Contemporary Capitalism as a New Media Dystopia,” addresses the contradictions articulating the bleakness that current dystopia expresses, paying attention to left melancholy, capitalist realism, and, above all, to Raymond William’s notion of the structure of feeling. Inspired by Tom Moylan’s concept of the critical dystopia and its links to hope, Sebastián-Martín investigates how in dystopia “contrasting ideological impulses, the utopian and the anti-utopian, are put into dialog, resulting in a complex interplay of hopefulness and cynicism” (43). He worries, though, that our postmodern stance and the neoliberal hegemony are preventing us from finding an alternative to the bleak vision of the dystopian future. This dark panorama has been thoroughly absorbed by SF, so that “new media are now re-imagined as a science-fictional novum when they are understood as a totality and a totalizing force that seems to be taking history in a dystopian direction” (83, original italics). The series, in short, might seem just the cherry on top of the fictional dystopian cake, but they are actually a basic ingredient in our march towards something that might be even worse than the current capitalism.

Chapter 2, “New Media Reflexivity: Self- Referentiality and Self-Consciousness in the Audio-Visual SF of Digital Platforms,” claims that this speculative sub-genre mirrors the nature of the digital media themselves. Using Pedro Javier Pardo’s transmedia model of reflexivity, Sebastián-Martín reads Amazon’s serialized adaptation of Philip K. Dick’s The Man in the High Castle and Black Mirror’s interactive film Bandersnatch, made for American Netflix after the series abandoned UK’s Channel Four. For the author, new media reflexivity is both “a symptom of digital capitalism’s dominant dynamics, which predispose a degree of commodified self-referentiality” but also “a potential mode of estrangement that can be allied with SF’s own estrangement—and directed against the system from within” (120), though neither production ultimately challenges the thriving streaming platforms system of production and consumption.

Chapter 3, “Between Critique and Mystification: The Aesthetic and Ideological Ambivalences of New Media Dystopias,” explores the essential ambivalence of this sub-genre, which offers its products as a potential critique of the excesses of technology while flaunting that same technology as the source of mere SF audio-visual spectacle, just as SF cinema has always done. The analysis of HBO’s Westworld in comparison to Devs (a DNA/FX production distributed by Hulu) also raises the issue of whether unnecessary plot complexity is the main enemy of new media dystopia and the main hindrance to build clear-cut utopian hope.

Chapter 4, “New Media Quixotism: Satiric and Utopian: Characterizations of Digital Subjectivity,” offers a ground-breaking theorization of current SF’s indebtedness to the myth of Don Quixote. Sebastián-Martín considers Black Mirror’s popular episode “USS Callister” (Netflix), Mr. Robot (US Network) and Maniac (a Netflix remake of a Norwegian series), to explore characters who, following Cervantes’s unique protagonist, mix (science) fiction and reality with different degrees of awareness, and madness. Sebastián-Martín, however, prefers not to deal with the issue of whether this new SF quixotism affects in particular male characters, concluding instead that all spectators are “somewhat quixotic as users of digital technologies” (337) which provide us with dystopian views of the present and the future, as we ponder, each of us alone before the screen, “what we can do about the apparently inevitable” (337).

Thinking through High-Tech Hell: A Theory of the New Media Dystopia does not conceal from readers that its aim is to present a theory of a particular SF sub-genre. This is why the analysis of the series selected leaves readers asking for more (such as information about the platforms distributing the series and the material conditions of production), while the deluge of footnotes leaves us asking for less. Sebastián-Martín assumes a no doubt idealizing quixotic position in trying to impose order onto a very complex phenomenon, as he maps simultaneously the theorization of capitalism (above all of commodified culture), audio-visual SF, the new media, their rather hypocritical dystopian inclinations and their techno-ambivalent gaze (a re-purposing of Laura Mulvey’s ‘male gaze’). He calls, besides, for “theorizing digital platforms as self-referential, all-encompassing paratexts” (341) since “there is still need for a theory of the possibilities—and the limits—that digital cultural consumption poses for reflexive narration” (341). The author’s beautiful quixotism is also manifest in his decision to celebrate his mentor, Pedro Javier Pardo, cited in many points of his book as an indispensable referent, when most of us, Spanish scholars in SF studies and/or English Studies, too often unfairly ignore our own local talent to rely instead on Anglophone big (and small) names.

 “Maybe descending into high-tech hell,” Sebastián-Martín writes as a final conclusion, “was a necessary exercise that gave us a degree of critical-utopian clarity” in the 2010s to “keep on walking away, to see what awaits” (345) beyond the paralyzing hopelessness of the 2020s, to which the popular series of new media dystopia have so significantly contributed. The future calls, indeed, for a new utopian SF but, as Sebastián-Martín warns, this cannot be built unless we abandon our postmodern cynicism and turn technology into a source of welfare rather than despair.

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Sara Martín is Senior Lecturer in English Literature and Cultural Studies at the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona and a SFRA member. Dr Martín specializes in Gender Studies, particularly Masculinities Studies, and in Science Fiction Studies. Her most recent books are American Masculinities in Contemporary Documentary Film (2023), Masculinity in Contemporary SF by Men: No Plans for the Future (2025) and Masculinities in Contemporary Science-Fiction Television (2025, co-edited with Michael Pitts).

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Above all, reading Late Star Trek gives the reader a solid appreciation for the result of scholarly and thoughtful analysis when melded with the enthusiasm, excitement, and feelings of betrayal for a franchise that only a fan can provide. Kotsko’s volume is suffused with his own fannish opinions (for example, his love for the first season of Discovery[1] [DIS] [2017-2024] followed immediately by his crushing disappointment in its remaining seasons, or his scathing summary of the narrative failures of Picard [PIC] (2020-2023), or his clear affection for Lower Decks [LD] [2020-2024]). Trek fans and scholars alike, I believe, will commend Kotsko’s avoidance of stereotypical scholarly bloodlessness; rather, they will, as I do, take delight in the ways in which he is deeply committed to the Trek storyworld in its various permutations and how that longtime love informs his analysis of its successes, failures, and creative potential. I think, in fact, that Kotsko’s work is a model of readable, practical popular cultural analysis, because the best scholars tell us not only factually or analytically what we need to consider about a particular topic but emotionally why that topic is meaningful. There’s uncommon emotional resonance in a media franchise like Star Trek, which has nearly six decades of history behind it, including eleven television series, fourteen films (13 theatrical, 1 streaming) from two different in-universe timelines, more than 850 tie-in novels and story collections, numerous comic book series, and boundless amounts of social and cultural recognition. Such a widespread body of content that has generated so much love and fannish dedication over the years deserves attention, particularly in our late-stage capitalist age when nothing seems free of commodification, even a beloved media franchise that traditionally roots itself in a post-scarcity utopia where inequality is nonexistent.

One of the more valuable portions of Kotsko’s study is his examination of the ways in which “late Star Trek” (the term Kotsko applies to the period of the franchise following the end of Voyager in 2001, the time when “Star Trek stops being a business out of necessity, simply because that’s what it takes to keep new stories, and becomes more purely commodified (2)”) evolves in the face of corporate necessity. Late Star Trek represents a media moment where, as Kotsko puts it, “story decisions are dictated by business strategy, when the quest for new audiences risks undercutting everything the established fans love, and when endless reams of materials are churned out in the expectation that those same fans will shell out for anything with the name Star Trek on it” (Ibid.) (No doubt Star Wars fans are nodding along with this sentiment.) However, Kotsko never simply surrenders to a simplistic model in which late Trek = late-stage capitalism and neoliberalism (and a concomitant assumption that late Trek is automatically and forever worse than the original series or Next Generation [1987-1994]). Instead, throughout the book he brings to bear his inner Trekkie and posits that Trek avoids full commodification in this late period—despite multiple dramatic missteps—because the people who generate and consume it still tend to love it (well, perhaps not Section 31 [2025]) and take to heart the ethics, values, and ethos that mark the Trek universe. And by proceeding step by step through each iteration of post-Voyager (1995-2001) Trek, Kotsko produces what he calls “a case study for late capitalist franchise storytelling…(and) our understanding of a franchise that has always been noted for its relative intellectual sophistication and has therefore held a privileged place in the academic study of popular culture” (16). Furthermore, he looks deeply into the double-edged, fraught influence of franchise “canonicity,” which throughout Trek is a push-and-pull struggle between fan service (where canonicity is enshrined as the highest value), artistic freedom as expressed through discontinuity from the main established storyworld narrative (which can be a perilous endeavor the more it pulls away from that narrative), and maximizing worldbuilding (which synthesizes both these other strategies, but which risks losing character and plot development). His method is an elegant one for exploring canon in all its ramifications for a franchise, ranging from igniting fannish enthusiasm to a cheap replacement for narrative exploration.

These three different narrative strategies and their varying levels of deployment mark the directions of every Trek iteration in late Trek.  Kotsko begins with an exploration of the prequel show Enterprise (2001-2005), Star Trek’s redheaded stepchild, generally disliked by fans and eschewed by scholars. The series, under franchise bêtes noires Rick Berman and Brannon Braga, had the unenviable task of being the first Trek iteration to try and solidify the universe’s timeline into some sort of cohesive whole. But despite bright spots, Kotsko argues that the show was dragged down by the creative decision to make a prequel (that should, by definition, prioritize fan service and reward fannish understanding of franchise lore) that instead tried to center Berman and Braga’s desire for creative freedom which ended by downplaying or ignoring the Trek tradition of progress, diversity, and inclusion. Later attempts in the show to try and exercise fan service (i.e. the Klingon head ridges storyline) were maladroit and unnecessary at best, producing in the end a series that was “a fragment, riven by contradictions and continually making promises its creators could not—and perhaps did not even want to—fulfill” (64). However, Kotsko argues that Enterprise set the tone for future late Trek in trying to maintain a successful tension between fan service and creative freedom while making frequent use of in-text meta gestures to continually cement itself into the franchise’s history and evolution.

The next section of the book examines the area of the Trek universe that has received the least scholarly analysis: the “novelverse,” that is, the body of so-called ‘beta canon’ that supplements what we see on screen. Kotsko quotes Sean Guynes and Gerry Canavan, who define the novels as “an imaginative space for fans to collectively work out the implications of concepts from televisual Star Trek, as well as to identify and attempt to resolve apparent contradictions in the character portraits, fictional history, and philosophical themes of the series” (70). That massive and complex body of work is no less meaningful because the corporate owners of Trek deem it noncanonical and not legitimate. He uses the works of three different authors to ground his analysis here: Christopher L. Bennett (who personifies effective deployment of fan service), Kirsten Beyer (artistic freedom), and David Mack (Federation- or worldbuilding strategies). The novelverse in many ways, Kotsko argues, enjoyed the freedom to drastically expand our reading of thefranchise from Enterprise through Voyager, but that creative flowering was dramatically curtailed once Picard began production and the novels’ canon was deemed irreconcilable with what the Powers That Be declared “official,” requiring an overwriting and destruction of the entire novelverse, in part, it seems, to meet studio executives’ need for control over a profitable product.

Another chapter explores the “Kelvin Timeline,” the three films from J.J. Abrams set in an alternate timeline and rooted in a creative freedom that would free them from the constraints of an established canon. The first film, Star Trek (2009), however, proved empty in being concerned with nothing more than placing new versions of beloved Original Series characters into familiar positions on board the U.S.S. Enterprise. The next film, Into Darkness (2013) was a poorly disguised 9/11 allegory, and the third, Beyond (2016), is convoluted and, like its predecessor—and much else in late Trek—is darkly overlaid with themes and images of terrorism. The Kelvin reboot/prequel/sequel hybrid series proved ultimately unsuccessful in impacting the greater Trek universe by its emotional and actual separation (mandated by corporate pettiness between co-owners CBS and Paramount) from the beloved Original Series. Kotsko then moves to Trek’s return to television after a 12-year absence: Discovery (2017-2024), whose first season resulted in what Kotsko calls one of the finest story arcs in Trek history, through both a re-embrace of traditional Trek diversity and taking seriously franchise worldbuilding via intricate plots and dramatic retcons (i.e. a devastating Federation-Klingon war that had never been mentioned in the franchise before). But later seasons betrayed this original expansion of artistic freedom by writing the series into an irrelevant dead end and much more clumsy, haphazard worldbuilding.

Kotsko reserves his greatest fannish scorn and disappointment for Picard (2020-2023), the first Trek since the 2002 film Star Trek: Nemesis to move the timeline forward past Next Generation. As with Discovery, the first season of Picard combined creative freedom with expansive worldbuilding to create a complex and emotionally rich story, one that “breaks” the utopia of Next Generation by placing TNG’s Picard in a Federation that is callous towards Romulan refugees and allows economic inequalities, and where old friends (William Riker and Deanna Troi) live lives marked by grief and trauma. But Picard suffers from developing plot incoherence and an increasing tendency to reset in the name of fan service—season 3 virtually erases season 2—and culminates in a painfully pandering conclusion that reunites the TNG crew on the bridge of the old Enterprise-D battling the last of the Borg. Kotsko notes that this moment marks perhaps the lowest point of late Trek, “the moment when the franchise threatened to transform into a purely cynical commodity, nothing more than ‘content’ churned out to extract subscription fees for Paramount+” (197).

A final chapter plays cleanup by discussing together the latest three Trek shows: the animated and ultra-meta comedy Lower Decks (2020-2024), the animated children’s adventure series Prodigy (2021-2023), and the prequel Strange New Worlds (2022-present), all of which taken together demonstrate late Trek’s potential for narrative variety. All three series share a general unconcern with the knottiness of worldbuilding, that instead obliges them to concentrate on interesting and likeable characters and a return to the episodic nature of old Trek instead of a focus on universe-shattering story arcs that mark Discovery and Picard. Their approach to canon varies. Prodigy, set just before Picard, sidesteps canonical disconnect by setting itself mostly (especially in season 1) in the distant Delta Quadrant, far from the Federation; Lower Decks embraces canon as an opportunity by constantly referencing it as part of the characters’ lived experiences as self-aware fans of the franchise’s past; and Strange New Worlds manages to wear lightly its identity as an ultimate expression of fan service while still flexibly playing with canon without destroying it (i.e. by readjusting the romantic tension between Spock and Christine Chapel, or by giving the lizardlike Gorn a terrifying and horrific Xenomorph-like maturity cycle).

Kotsko concludes his remarkable study on a cautionary note, referencing failures in studio management, corporate tendencies to interfere with creative production, the periodic invalidation of tie-in productions, problems with the streaming television model and, most of all, an overreliance on the significance of franchise canon. He calls this concept of a binding canon “a marketing technique to compel fans to consume every new installment because it may become relevant for still later installments” (239), and worries that, for all the fun that fan theories and connections to canon may generate (I’m certainly guilty myself of such activities!), an iron-clad commitment to a corporate-mandated continuity may ultimately suffocate drama, and cause consumers, driven by a production environment devoted to maximizing profits, to replace appreciation of plots and characters on their own terms in favor of labored, endless searches for canonical connections that may not exist. But, in the finest tradition of the Star Trek he loves, Kotsko holds out optimism, if future Trek creators can be freed from the current neoliberal moment and given freer rein to explore the post-capitalist utopia in which Star Trek resides.

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[1] For the purposes of this review, I am ignoring the naming convention that the titles for all the series discussed here formally begin with the prefix ‘Star Trek:’.

Jeremy Brett is a Librarian at Cushing Memorial Library & Archives, where he is the Curator of the Science Fiction & Fantasy Research Collection, one of the largest of its kind in the world. He has also worked at the University of Iowa, the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, the National Archives and Records Administration-Pacific Region, and the Wisconsin Historical Society. He received his MLS and his MA in History from the University of Maryland – College Park in 1999. His professional interests include science fiction, fan studies, superheroines, and the intersection of libraries and social justice.

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John L. Steadman offers a blunt exploration of H.P. Lovecraft’s racism. While severely limited in his engagement with race scholarship, Steadman nevertheless presents an intriguing exegetic text on key stories in Lovecraft’s oeuvre. Steadman’s main thesis is twofold: Lovecraft’s racism manifests one way in his early works and another way in his later writings. Specifically, the early works have a focus on miscegenation as brought on by immigration, and the later works have a focus on slavery as seen in a master/slave race dichotomy. The book is divided into three parts and nineteen chapters. Part I (Chapters 1-4) is titled ‘Beginnings,’ and it offers an introduction to Lovecraft’s early life with a focus on biographical details, especially his intellectual preoccupations and formative experiences. Part II (Chapters 5-11) is titled ‘Humankind against Hybrid, Degenerative Monsters’ and it is concerned with racism as miscegenation in the early works of Lovecraft. Part III (Chapters 12-19) focuses on the later works, and Steadman’s second thesis respectively; it is titled ‘Humankind against the Cosmic Slave Masters.’ Overall, Steadman’s argument is persuasive in its distinction between Lovecraft’s twofold racist fixation and its development throughout his work. More than that, the book does well to root its thesis in an analysis of Lovecraft’s formative years. The common Lovecraftian protagonist’s ultimate stupor upon uncovering the hidden eldritch knowledge is argued to mirror Lovecraft’s own passivity in dealing with trauma and hardship.

While Steadman presents a focused monograph with a cumulative logic, certain matters tend to get obscured and displaced. For instance, the book, especially in Parts II and III, takes on the format of a single chapter per specific text by Lovecraft. Most chapters of this kind might prove rather descriptive to the reader familiar with Lovecraft’s work, and there is only occasionally a reference to a scholar or writer other than Lovecraft. At the end of both Part II and III, Steadman offers a ‘Critical Commentaries’ chapter (11 and 18, respectively), in which he moves away from the story-specific chapters and situates his own twofold thesis in relation to other scholars. While the bulk of the book tends to have a reverential, albeit critical, approach to the original text, Steadman seems to be rather quick to dismiss certain perspectives from other scholars. For instance, in a discussion of Lovecraft’s “The Lurking Fear” (1923), Steadman cites Williams’ work on the hysterical female gothic in relation to Lovecraft’s use of underground locations such as caves and grottoes.  Instead of providing an argument against Williams’ claim (or Callaghan’s claim cited shortly before), Steadman rejects it out of hand and provides a dismissive generalisation about ”so-called psychological analyses of Lovecraft” (90). Interestingly, Steadman does not see his own argument in this vein, even though significant attention is devoted to Lovecraft’s own “pattern of loss and failure […as] evident in the lives of Lovecraft’s main characters” (5). This results in a certain tension that cannot be ignored by the careful reader of the book, let alone the reader familiar with Lovecraft. Specifically, this means that the potential significance of a range of patterns in Lovecraft’s fiction remains ignored; so is the case with the multiple cases of chthonic female goddesses, the symbology of the witch (which Steadman acknowledges on pg.197), and the spatial symbolism of caves and grottoes, especially considering Steadman’s own remarks on Lovecraft’s own formative experiences of restrictive spaces (such as the house he moved into with his mother after his grandfather’s passing, or his inability to enter hospitals and only visiting his ailing mother in the hospital grounds—in fact described as “the grotto” in a quotation provided on p. 27).

This is not an uncommon pattern in the book. Steadman will acknowledge a perspective, only to dismiss it without engaging with the claim in question in much depth. Another example is Simmons’ argument that Lovecraft’s characters are both repulsed and attracted by the Other. Steadman is a little more thorough here with his dismissal of the claim, but similarly as noted above, the tension between the dismissal and Lovecraft’s texts remains unresolved. Steadman claims that there is nothing attractive about the Other in Lovecraft’s work. Such a dismissal has to ignore the very fact that Lovecraft’s characters seek out magic from Western Asia, knowledge from Africa, or refer frequently to places beyond Western Europe and North America as abounding with mystery and danger. In the simplest of terms, Lovecraft’s characters are in need of people over which to rule. The common interweaving of revulsion with attraction in orientalism appears to be a proposition unworthy of consideration for Steadman.

This is indicative of Steadman’s understanding of race, which at times appears superficial, at others severely misguided. The bulk of the conceptualisation of racism seems to rely on Robin DiAngelo’s White Fragility (2018). However, despite informing the subtitle of Steadman’s book, DiAngelo seems to be cited only once on the first page of the introduction. Nevertheless, the evocative phrase of ‘white fragility’ is made to carry a lot of weight in support of Steadman’s general lack of engagement with scholars of race. This is made worse in two telling instances. First, in the chapter discussing Lovecraft’s The Shadow Over Innsmouth (1936), there is a misguided, to be quite generous, attempt at riffing on Lovecraft’s racist language that amounts to Steadman himself using the n-word (165). Second, the appendix seeks to go beyond Lovecraft and engage with work that deals head on with Lovecraft’s racism. To do this, Steadman discusses Afrofuturism in general and Matt Ruff’s Lovecraft Country (2016) and Victor LaValle’s The Ballad of Black Tom (2016) in particular. Steadman’s ignorance of race scholarship is quite telling. It is such ignorance that leads him to draw parallels between Afrofuturist music duo Drexciya and Lovecraft’s work. Steadman (223) cites Kodwo Eshun’s description of Drexciya’s “science-fictional retelling of the Middle Passage,”: in which they imagine “water-breathing, aquatically mutated descendants of ‘pregnant America-bound African slaves thrown overboard by the thousands during labour for being sick and disruptive cargo”’ (Drexciya as cited in Eshun, 2003: 300). Steadman, perhaps facetiously, and definitely in bad taste, pontificates so: “The idea of adding the water babies born from drowned female slaves into the mix is intriguing and one, I think, that Lovecraft might not have objected to” (223). To claim that Afrofuturism is “overtly Lovecraftian” (223) is a terrible misreading of the unbridgeable difference in what separates the aesthetics being compared.

Overall, Horror as Racism in H.P. Lovecraft promises an intriguing perspective by trying to pick apart Lovecraft’s racism and its central role throughout his work. Nevertheless, Steadman, while clearly critical of Lovecraft’s racism, fails to provide much insight into the subject. At this point in time, the description and acknowledgement of Lovecraft’s racism is easy and should be the bare minimum in critical scholarship. It is much more important to understand it.

Vladimir Rizov is Assistant Professor in the Department of Sociology and Criminology at the University of Sussex. His current book project is titled A Criminology of Videogames: Playing at Crime and its Control. He is the author of Urban Crime Control in Cinema: Fallen Guardians and the Ideology of Repression. He has published articles and essays on film, videogames, the history of documentary photography, and urban history.