Category: Media Reviews

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In 2016, an article I co-wrote (see McCutcheon and Barnetson) argued that contemporary SF markedly underrepresents organized labour (in contrast to business), with exceptions by writers like China Miéville, C.J. Cherryh, and Cory Doctorow. While the article was in press, this review’s co-author, SFF writer Heather Clitheroe, suggested The Expanse, and from the first episodes I realized that our article needs a major update—or a rethink. The Expanse bases its finely machined world and story in working-class culture, organized labor, and the political-economic context of postcoloniality—just a few reasons The Expanse repays critical attention with interest.

James S.A. Corey is the nom de plume of co-authors Ty Franck and Daniel Abraham. Leviathan Wakes, the first novel in Corey’s nine-volume roman-fleuve, was published in 2011; subsequent novels have followed almost annually. The ninth and final Expanse novel, Leviathan Falls, will appear in November 2021, with a final novella planned afterwards (Urrutia). The Expanse takes place some three hundred years from now, positing a postcolonial solar system that stretches from a climate-changed Earth and its moon, centrally governed by the United Nations, to an independent Mars, engaged in a Cold War with Earth, to the asteroid belt and gas giant moons, where “Belters,” les damnés du vide, labor on the colonial periphery in resource extraction for “the Inners” who exploit and oppress them. Belt governance beyond corporate charters is loosely organized around the Outer Planetary Alliance, or OPA, an ambiguous collective that “had begun its life more like a labor union than a nation” (Abaddon’s Gate 183) and parlays its organizing power into political power as the story unfolds. The Expanse’s interplanetary, postcolonial setting is premised on the novum of an “Epstein drive” that enables fast (but not light-speed) rocketry. To launch the plot, a second novum emerges: the “protomolecule,” an artifact of a vanished alien civilization, discovered on a moon of Saturn and appropriated for research and development by private interests seeking to weaponize it. How the solar system’s powers respond to the destabilizing effects of the protomolecule technology, competing to control or destroy it, drives the series’ storyline over nine novels, which also work as three linked trilogies. The first sets the scene, then estranges it with the “protomolecule” novum; the second—with Nemesis Games as middle volume and fulcrum of the whole—recounts the political and economic fallout wrought by the protomolecule mostly within the solar system; and the third, set later, follows that fallout well beyond the solar system.

The TV series based on the novels originated with producers Mark Fergus and Hawk Ostby and Naren Shankar as show-runner. Franck and Abraham signed on to write and produce. The first three seasons aired from 2015 to 2018 on the SyFy channel, which cancelled the show in mid-May 2018. Fans campaigned to “#SaveTheExpanse” and, before that month ended, Amazon picked up the series for its Prime Video service, where it now streams. There is postmodern irony in the acquisition of such a labor-friendly show by one of the world’s most notoriously exploitative corporations. Amazon aired Season 4 in 2019, and the fifth in late 2020—accompanied by Amazon’s announcement that the next, sixth season will be its last.

Each season of the TV series adapts mainly one novel; however, to strengthen the adaptation, the writers take bold and shrewd creative liberties with the novels (and accompanying novellas and stories), like rearranging plot points and turning minor book characters into major screen roles. Season 5 follows the main plot of Nemesis Games, integrating elements of the sixth book, Babylon’s Ashes. In purported “retribution for generations of atrocities committed by the Inners against Belters” (“Gaugamela”), a radicalized Belter faction attacks Earth with accelerated meteors (literalizing, to cataclysmic effect, the resort to rocks as the only weapons the desperate and downtrodden can wield against empire). The ensuing catastrophe embroils the series’ protagonists—especially Naomi Nagata (played by Dominique Tipper) and Amos Burton (played by Wes Chatham)—in a thriller plot of terrorism, espionage, sabotage, abductions, underground trade, double-crossing, disaster survival, and daring escapes.

The Expanse’s style, in print and on screen, emphasizes accessibility (Franck and Chatham, “Episode 8”): in linear plotting; realistic rendering of diverse, likeable protagonists; plain-speaking dialogue; and skilled interweaving of two familiar SF tropes with proven crossover success—first contact and Frankensteinian hubris. The Expanse’s accessible narrative style helps the series’ representations of working-class culture reach the popular audience that relates to them. Yet The Expanse also harbours arch allusions, ironies, and references. The writing reworks elements from a myriad of genres such as space opera, hard SF, climate fiction, noir crime, Gothic horror, pulp Westerns, and political thrillers (the fifth instalment’s title echoing Tom Clancy’s Patriot Games). Ironies abound in the series’ postcolonially informed détournement of Western tropes (frontier, first contact, shootouts) and Gothic tropes (hauntings, monsters, imprisonments). Sometimes both classes of tropes are brought together, as in the remark by protagonist Jim Holden (played by Steven Strait) that humankind’s interstellar expansion will be “another blood-soaked gold rush” (“Abaddon’s Gate”). The series also teems with literary references—often to poetry: Clarissa Mao (played by Nadine Nicole) talks about writing poetry in prison (“Tribes”); Chrisjen Avasarala (played by Shohreh Agdashloo) contemplates a line by her poet spouse (“Winnipesaukee”).

The Expanse features pervasive, refreshingly sympathetic representations of organized labor as part of everyday life, in details like union representatives, dialogue about work and working conditions, enactments of democratic and community-building practices, and leftist and labor allusions (in character names like Althusser [Nemesis 229] and Bertold, a sixth-book character introduced in Season 5, played by Stephen Tracey). Workers facing arrest can request union representatives for defence. Basic income is standard policy on Earth. Season 5 dramatizes good-faith bargaining (in Burton’s negotiation of housing for a friend, and in Mao’s advocacy for servants abandoned by their employers) and expressions of solidarity both blunt—Avasarala’s call for unity among Earth, Mars, and the Belt (“Nemesis Games”)—and subtle, like Belter idioms that suggest the internalization of union-inculcated collectivism. “The more you share, the more your bowl will be plentiful,” says a Belter family sitting to supper (“Churn”). Formally, too, a collective tells the story, in rotating focalizations of multiple characters’ viewpoints—antagonists’ included. “Everybody gets a point of view that makes sense,” says Franck of their writers’ room ethos (Franck and Chatham, “Episode 5”).

Burton and Nagata exemplify the series’ valorization of labor organizing, the entrenched capitalist class striation it challenges—and the importance of higher education to mobility. The lack of socioeconomic mobility and tertiary education experienced by characters like Burton in his early life, and the exceptionality of Nagata’s advanced engineering degrees (for a Belter) unnervingly reflect the real-world crisis of late capitalism’s “university in ruins” (see Readings), as neoliberal governments cut education budgets, tuition fees and student debt escalate, and private capital colonizes public universities.

The Belter character Camina Drummer (played by Ojibwe actor Cara Gee) exemplifies the series’ working-class grounding and how the show adapts the book to magnify that focus. In the books, Drummer is a minor character first appearing in Nemesis Games (172); in the series, Gee’s Drummer has been a lead role since Season 2. Season 5 also rewrites Drummer into the “polyam Belter fam” brought forward from Babylon’s Ashes: “It was really important to all of us,” Gee reflects, “that this queer…fluid and polyamorous [family was] represented with respect” (qtd. in Franck and Chatham, “Episode 6”). Gee’s Drummer exemplifies the TV series’ consistently creative adaptation of the books and its brilliant casting of Indigenous and international talent in the series’ many leading women protagonists, among them Nicole’s Mao, the ex-Marine Draper (played by New Zealand-Samoan actor Frankie Adams), Iranian actor Aghdashloo’s magisterial Avasarala, and the Dominican-British Tipper as Nagata. The Expanse far surpasses the Bechdel test’s threshold.

Nagata focalizes a Season 5 subplot in which she gets abducted and imprisoned by her abusive ex; then, for several episodes, this Black woman struggles to communicate her emergency, to escape, even just to breathe: first aboard a ship whose oxygen depletes because of the way she hacks its communication tech (“Winnipesaukee”), then in a spacesuit whose oxygen runs out (“Nemesis Games”). While this subplot’s context of surviving abuse and oppression is more about misogyny than racism, the season’s sustained close-up on Nagata’s struggle to breathe—set against a backdrop of terrorist conspiracy implicating a corrupt police force in arming Nagata’s captors—argues a dialectical, intersectional synecdoche, the political in the personal. Tipper’s performance of Nagata’s struggle thus makes for uncanny, harrowing viewing in the wake of 2020’s #BlackLivesMatter protests and ongoing violence perpetuated against BIPOC communities.

Corey’s series has become a genre-culture, transmedia touchstone, orbited by a satellite belt including short fiction, graphic novels, social media, and a role-playing game. The Expanse rewards science fiction studies and studies in the other aforementioned modes it reworks, as well as Cultural Studies, postcolonial and postmodern theory, socialist and labor studies, adaptation studies, and poetry. Between the latest season and whatever big finish the final novel and TV season will bring, now is the perfect time to explore The Expanse. Its world is not one of warp speeds or anti-gravity fields, and its attention to scientific realism, if not its vision of solidarity, may ruin other space opera for you. Don’t worry. It’s worth it.

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WORKS CITED

“Abaddon’s Gate.” The Expanse, season 3, episode 13, 27 Jun. 2018, Amazon Prime Video, https://www.primevideo.com/detail/0KRG9W70THAC0B6ZIQREP784SU/ref=atv_dp_btf_el_prime_hd_tv_wfb_t1ACAAAAAA0wg0?autoplay=1&t=0.

“Churn.” The Expanse, season 5, episode 2, 2 Feb. 2021, Amazon Prime Video, https://www.primevideo.com/detail/0LCTJOQ37QDWSJBMSTAJ07JZEE/ref=atv_dp_btf_el_prime_hd_tv_wfb_t1ACAAAAAA0wg0?autoplay=1&t=0.

Corey, James S.A. Abaddon’s Gate. Orbit, 2013.

—-. Nemesis Games (2015). Orbit, 2016.

Franck, Ty and Wes Chatham. “Episode 5.” The Expanse Aftershow, Youtube, 30 Dec. 2020, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D8YkNDsWQl0.

—-. “Episode 6.” The Expanse Aftershow, Youtube, 6 Jan. 2021,  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ynyCMXijTig.

—-. “Episode 8.” The Expanse Aftershow, Youtube, 20 Jan. 2021, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8wHFysH434Q.

“Gaugamela.” The Expanse, season 5, episode 2, 2 Feb. 2021, Amazon Prime Video, https://www.primevideo.com/detail/0QG40FAV0H1QYVE0Y3PZE9LWQQ/ref=atv_dp_btf_el_prime_hd_tv_resume_t1ACAAAAAA0wg0?autoplay=1&t=2398.

“Hard Vacuum.” The Expanse, season 5, episode 8, 19 Jan. 2021, Amazon Prime Video, https://www.primevideo.com/detail/0N4RC4OWKVY0NOVEMG0770W08T/ref=atv_dp_btf_el_prime_hd_tv_wfb_t1ACAAAAAA0wg0?autoplay=1&t=0.

McCutcheon, Mark A. and Bob Barnetson. “Resistance is Futile: On the Under-Representation of Unions in Science Fiction.” TOPIA, no. 36, 2016, pp. 151-71, rpt. in AUSpace, https://auspace.athabascau.ca/handle/2149/3590.

“Nemesis Games.” The Expanse, season 5, episode 10, 2 Feb. 2021, Amazon Prime Video, https://www.primevideo.com/detail/0M6NPRDJEDWEAZIYLA22CK6X6U/ref=atv_dp_btf_el_prime_hd_tv_wfb_t1ACAAAAAA0wg0?autoplay=1&t=0.

Readings, Bill. The University in Ruins. Harvard UP, 1996.

“Tribes.” The Expanse, season 5, episode 6, 6 Jan. 2021, Amazon Prime Video, https://www.primevideo.com/detail/0IE98A41K0662GT29RR3OH7OYU/ref=atv_dp_btf_el_prime_hd_tv_wfb_t1ACAAAAAA0wg0?autoplay=1&t=0.

Urrutia, Doris Elin. “‘Leviathan Falls’: The 9th and final book of the epic ‘The Expanse’ sci-fi series revealed.” Space, 23 Sept. 2020, https://www.space.com/leviathan-falls-the-expanse-book-9-cover-revealed.

“Winnipesaukee.” The Expanse, season 5, episode 9, 26 Jan. 2021, Amazon Prime Video, https://www.primevideo.com/detail/0L4AN3E85JGHNYPVH5GCQQGQ6T/ref=atv_dp_btf_el_prime_hd_tv_wfb_t1ACAAAAAA0wg0?autoplay=1&t=0.

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Heather Clitheroe is an author whose stories have been published in numerous SFF anthologies and magazines, including Beneath Ceaseless Skies and Lightspeed, and she has participated in writing residency programs at the Banff Centre for the Arts, including the Leighton Artists’ Colony, and the Arrowmont School for Arts and Crafts. She has edited science fiction collections in collaboration with the NASA Exoplanet Science Institute at Caltech’s Exoplanet Demographics conference, and leads youth science fiction and fantasy writing workshops in collaboration with the Calgary Public Library. Heather has been a member of the award-winning Uncanny magazine staff since 2014 as a submissions editor, and is a full member of SFWA.

Mark A. McCutcheon is Professor of Literary Studies at Athabasca University. Mark’s open access works include the books Shape Your Eyes by Shutting Them: Poems (2019) and The Medium Is the Monster (2018), winner of the Media Ecology Association’s McLuhan Award; poems in the Exoplanet Demographics conference zine (2020), the 2019 Rhysling Anthology, and Riddled with Arrows (2018); and SF studies in scholarly periodicals like TOPIA (2016), Continuum (2011), and SFFTV (2009). His poems also appear in Beyond Earth’s Edge: The Poetry of Spaceflight (2020), and journals like On Spec, Star*Line, and Kaleidotrope. Mark’s on Twitter and Mixcloud as @sonicfiction.

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Founded in Manchester in 2003, Comma Press is one of the UK’s leading publishers of short fiction. Influenced on the one hand by such techno-inspired collections as Sarah Champion’s Disco Biscuits (1997) and, on the other hand, by Charles May’s now-classic critical anthology, The New Short Story Theories (1994), Comma Press has sought consistently to promote the short story as the vanguard of literary experimentation and artistic responses to modernity. This has meant a strong commitment to science fiction, as well as other related modes such as horror and the Weird, and to the dialogue between science and SF, for example, in Geoff Ryman’s landmark anthology, When It Changed: Science into Fiction (2009). More recently, Comma Press has responded keenly to the refugee crisis, for instance in David Herd and Anna Pincus’ collection, Refugee Tales (2016), and in the publication of émigré authors such as Hassan Blasim. This podcast series, recorded on the eve of the first Covid-19 lockdown in Britain in 2020, brings together the press’ various concerns for SF, the Arab-speaking world, ‘Fortress Europe’, literary innovation, and the politics of locale.

The main presenter is Comma Press’ founder, Ra Page, with Sophie Hughes, co-editor of Europa28 (2020), presenting episode four. Each episode, with the exception of the series opener, takes a recent Comma Press publication as its focus – Blasim’s Iraq + 100 (2016), Basma Ghalayini’s Palestine + 100 (2019), Europa28, and M. John Harrison’s selected stories, Settling the World (2020). Although ‘futures’ is the common theme, each discussion is wide-ranging – covering such topics as the resurgence of Arabic science fiction, the translation and distribution of non-Anglophone literatures, political and cultural oppression, hauntology, and the ambivalences of social media. The longer listening format of the podcast enabled free-flowing conversations, with each episode ranging in length from 60 to 90 minutes. The one exception to the series format, the opening edition, takes a more general look at the role of science fiction, its relationships to science and society, and the predictive and ethical bases for futurology.

For this introductory episode, Page’s guests are the academics Amy Chambers and Amanda Rees, and the SF writer and literary critic, Adam Roberts (a frequent contributor to Comma Press anthologies). Although Roberts begins the discussion by recounting his thesis that science fiction has its origins in the Protestant Reformation of the 16th and 17th centuries, he acknowledges that (as Paul Alkon influentially argued) the idea of futuristic fiction only began in the late 18th century as part of that period’s revolutionary ferment. Roberts’s linkage, however, between SF and scientific and political revolution enables Rees, an historian of science, to argue for SF’s pivotal role as a thought experiment rather than a pedagogical tool. It is in this role that SF most effectively communicates science to a wider public by thinking through the ethical and social dilemmas that underpin scientific discovery. Chambers, a former member of Lisa Garforth’s ‘Unsettling Science Stories’ project at Newcastle University, concurs with Rees’s position whilst drawing upon her research specialisms in SF film and TV. Page’s description of the frustration felt by scientists, participating in the Comma anthologies, towards the more sceptical responses of SF writers initiates a rewarding discussion not only of the differing responsibilities between science and SF but also of the roles of utopia and dystopia. Roberts expresses his distaste for the ultraviolence of Game of Thrones, as well as the simplistic solutions of superhero movies, whilst also lamenting the revisioning of (ostensibly) utopian franchises such as Star Trek. All three acknowledge, though, that dystopia can have a critical function which, ironically, also has a utopian purpose—by pointing out the worst possible scenarios, SF can help to safety-proof future technological outcomes.

Episodes two and three most strongly complement one another, and so form the central focus for the series. In episode two, Page is joined by the Arabic scholars, Sinéad Murphy and Annie Webster, as well as the writer Anoud, one of the contributors to Iraq + 100; in episode three, he is joined by Ghalayini, editor of Palestine + 100, the academics Barbara Dick and Lindsey Moore, and the Palestinian writer Rawan Yaghi. The first of the anthologies imagines life in Iraq a century after the US invasion of 2003 while the second imagines Palestine 100 years after the Nakba: the enforced exodus in 1948 of 700,000 Palestinians following the creation of the state of Israel. Although Murphy and Webster tend to concentrate on the current vogue for SF in the Arab-speaking world, Dick emphasises that its roots lie in the 1960s, and so is more of a revival than a new phenomenon. Anoud’s stress upon the influence of the 1001 Nights as a repository of marvellous tales and feisty heroines suggests, however, that the supposed belatedness of Arabic science fiction is a false construction. Both sets of panellists avoid comparisons with Western SF, concentrating instead upon the local conditions for the production of Arabic SF.

Page notes that, although interest in Arabic futurisms has grown in the wake of Afrofuturism, it may still be Orientalised as an exotic counterpart to Western SF. By contrast, in episode three, mention is made of Larissa Sansour’s film, A Space Exodus (2009), in which the first Palestinian in space can still not escape the historical legacy of the Nakba. Page pertinently observes that, despite the enthusiasm of Western scholars and readers, the production of Iraqi and Palestinian SF from within those countries remains precarious. Anoud, for instance, describes the hostility of US officials and the regional threat of Isis. But, whereas these oppressions drove Anoud to create her SF, the decades-long colonisation of Palestine has all but stifled local literary networks. Page notes that, while there is active émigré writing from Iraq, contact between Palestine and the West remains difficult with Palestinian writers denied the right to travel overseas. Although Anoud, Murphy and Webster emphasise the mix of absurdity and terror that constitutes life in Iraq, a generative factor (as Webster argues) for the ‘creative destruction’ of art, Palestinian life appears more rigid and controlled with fewer opportunities for creative outlets. To that end, Dick and Moore warmly celebrate the appearance of Palestine + 100, and co-opt the role of interviewer from Page to ask Ghalayini how the collection was assembled, how the translations were prepared, and how the authors have distributed their work. Their hope is that the cause of Palestinian SF may be advanced with the aid of TV and film adaptations of Arabic texts—for example, a mooted screen version of Ahmed Khaled Towfik’s Utopia (2008).

Episode four, recorded after lockdown had been introduced, changes tack by focusing upon women’s futuristic fiction from Europe. It acts, though, as a mirror-image to the previous conversations by exploring the refugee crisis from the EU’s point of view and its implications for the European project. As Hughes’s guests and contributors to Europa28, Janne Teller and Kapka Kassabova, contend, the failure to help refugees from Syria and other warzones undermines the utopian principles of the EU, born from the (literal) ashes of two World Wars and the Nazi Holocaust. In their conversation, Teller and Kassabova argue for the need for embodiment, intimacy, touch and the face-to-face encounter in contrast with the alienation of the Internet and screen culture. As Hughes and her panellists note, this demand is all the more ironic since—due to the pandemic—their conversation is reliant upon Zoom. Nonetheless, while making communication across borders technically possible, the technology also highlights the estrangement between individuals and the need for sustainable ecologies to ensure the physical survival of the public space. In the writings of Thomas Piketty, Teller and Kassabova see an economic model in which a fusion of capitalism and socialism is viable. Underlying both this conversation and the collection of stories and essays, written by twenty-eight European women, is a vision of Europe that predates the EU—an Enlightenment model consisting of the ‘republic of letters’.

The final episode is only tangentially related to the overall theme of futures through discussion of hauntology, Mark Fisher’s concept of ‘lost futures,’ and Robert Macfarlane’s reflections on the ‘eeriness’ of the English landscape. Page’s guests include M. John Harrison, the critics Andy Hedgecock and Jennifer Hodgson, and the filmmaker Adam Scovell, best-known for his popularisation of ‘folk horror’. Taking Harrison’s retrospective anthology, Settling the World, as its focus, the conversation offers a thoughtful and insightful examination of what it means to move through a landscape, to be both possessed and radically displaced by it. In comparing Harrison with other neo-avant-garde writers of the 1960s and ‘70s, such as Ann Quin, Hodgson emphasises the phenomenological basis to his fiction—the collapsing of any dialectic between inner and outer experience—, so that Harrison’s protagonists tend to treat the external world as a hieroglyph to be deciphered: only to be entrapped within its manifold complexities. Harrison concurs with Hodgson, acknowledging the impossibility of mimetic representation to describe the object in itself, but emphasising that this tendency also comes as a refusal of such literary conventions as linear narrative, closure and plot. For Harrison, his aim is for fiction to be viable—to live on its own terms—and not at the behest of such external apparatus as the science-fictional obsession with ideas. Although the exchange between Harrison and Hodgson allows Hedgecock and Scovell to discuss the now-familiar terrain of the hauntological, with mention of such writers as H.G. Wells (‘The Door in the Wall’), M.R. James and Robert Aickman, more interesting is how Harrison’s writing is positioned in relation to the avant-garde and the legacy of European modernism. This, too, would seem to dwell upon the nature of political and artistic borders as discussed in the preceding episode. Despite the excellent contributions of the other panellists, Harrison—as is so often the case—is not only the most thought-provoking writer but also the most perceptive analyst of his own work, and its sustenance of a late modernist aesthetic.

Taken as a whole, the series offers a number of engaging and stimulating conversations on the relationship between science and science fiction, the politics of writing, the role of translation, art and civic society, and the nature of landscape. The general theme of futures is somewhat stretched, not least in the final episode, but this is compensated by the quality of the conversations and the various contributors. Since the series was affected by the transition into lockdown, praise should also be given to Becca Parkinson for the editing and sound quality of the series despite at least two of the conversations being conducted remotely. Ultimately, however, the podcast acts as a shop-window for Comma Press and, on this basis, the series demonstrates how the press is not only tapping into some of the most urgent issues of the day but also contributing to the cosmopolitan ideal of the republic of letters. From the point of view of the short story, Comma Press’s anthologies emphasise the importance of short fiction in assembling voices from around the world—a veritable United Nations of writers, artists, and other unacknowledged legislators. 

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Paul March-Russell is editor of Foundation: The International Review of Science Fiction, commissioning editor for SF Storyworlds (Gylphi Press), and co-founder of the feminist fiction imprint Gold SF. He is also a member of the European Network for Short Fiction Research, and author of The Short Story: An Introduction (2009).

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Produced by Spectrevision, Color Out of Space (2019) is the latest rendition of H. P. Lovecraft’s most adapted short story to date. Richard Stanley’s cosmic horror film centers on a family who moves to a remote farmstead in rural New England to escape the hustle of the 21st century. They are adapting to their new life when a glowing meteorite crashes into their front yard and melts into the earth, poisoning both the land and the fabric of space-time with a strange, otherworldly color. To their horror, the family realizes that an alien force is gradually mutating every life form it touches. The film stars Nicolas Cage as a neurotic, righteous family man who faces the odd phenomenon while his wife and children fall victims of a grotesque transformation, which takes him to the brink of madness.

The film opens with a voice-over narration of the first lines from “The Colour out of Space”: “West of Arkham the hills rise wild, and there are valleys with deep woods that no axe has ever cut…”. The plot follows that of the source material, but also dialogues with the more magical-supernatural side of the Mythos by adding a wide range of references to the storyline. In the first scenes, for example, the family’s daughter Lavinia Gardner (Madeleine Arthur) performs a Wiccan ceremony to cure her mother’s cancer. Later, a copy of the Necronomicon and a notebook with arcane symbols can be seen in the girl’s bedroom. Witch cults, occult arcana, and ancient folklore are recurring motifs in Lovecraft’s fiction, although they are absent in that specific source. In addition, the glimpse of a psychedelic dimension inhabited by alien entities whose tentacles curl up through the moving image references the Cyclopean architecture and the dream worlds of “The Call of Cthulhu” (1926) and other stories.

Stanley also brings a new color palette, which was a significant move from earlier adaptations of “The Colour out of Space”. Historically, cinema has built a correlation between the “blasted heath” and the effects of radioactivity on the environment—that was already hinted by the source itself. It’s not by chance, for example, that the “color” fluoresces green from enriched uranium in Daniel Haller’s Die, Monster, Die! (1965), the first adaptation of the story for the screen. That “green” had long become associated with radioactivity, how it reflected post-Cold War era fears, and how it taps into science fiction tropes of radioactivity and outer space. In this sense, Stanley’s color purple is innovative since it departs from the shining green, with any allusion to radiation being much subtler and almost disappearing.

It is interesting that in changing the color palette of the film, Stanley seems to be aesthetically invoking that more magical-supernatural side of the Mythos, instead of the extraterrestrial-cosmic side of it. At the beginning, the strange meteorite is implicitly summoned as a result of Lavinia’s magic ceremony. Nevertheless, the Color’s effects are just as devastating, since it infects mind and body, destroys soil and crops, and causes horrific mutations. At the climax, the color purple is dominant and leaves a trail of destruction. The newcomer hydrologist Ward Phillips (Elliot Knight) witnesses the Gardner property becoming the visual depiction of Lovecraft’s “acres of grey desolation,” with everything (even the color palette) “turning grey and brittle”, “fast crumbling to a greyish powder.”

The film also interacts with the history of horror cinema, since it plunges into body horror—a subgenre of horror and science fiction films since the 1980s. After being affected by the Color, Theresa (Joely Richardson) absentmindedly cuts off two of her fingers with a kitchen knife, spreading blood in the sink. Later, the Color fuses the mother and her son Jack (Julian Hilliard) together into a deranged, grotesque mass in the gruesome style of Sam Raimi, Stuart Gordon or David Cronenberg. In the stables, the alpacas undergo a horrible mutation and become a many-headed monster that resonates the practical effects in John Carpenter’s The Thing (1982). In a way, Color Out of Space could be said to be a film of that decade, and is definitely related to the 1980s revival being currently experienced in film and television.

Color Out of Space opens valuable avenues of interdisciplinary research. If previous generations interpreted the Color’s green as radiation—a “scientific” fear that was a product of the Cold War—, the film reveals how cosmic horror appears to have taken a departure from science fiction in recent times (excepting in media like Stranger Things and Chernobyl, perhaps). Adaptation studies may shed a light on this departure and why it has become a trend in cosmic horror films nowadays. In the field of reception, the changing in the color palette may clarify today’s audience’s fears and the metaphors Stanley is exploiting. Another point of interest, which also represents a departure from Lovecraft’s writings more generally, especially given Lovecraft’s blatant racism, concerns the main roles being played by a female actress and a black actor—Lavinia and Ward, respectively. Reminiscent of the novel Lovecraft Country (2016) and its adaptation, this choice points to the currently changing landscape concerning adaptations of period literature, and should be considered to explore key areas in gender and race studies. On a more paratextual level, the film is tackling the horror that was Lovecraft and racism in general, by casting a diverse cast. Also in the field of gender studies, Lavinia’s mystical bonds with the Color may raise questions about how the female character is represented and why it is more connected to the magical-supernatural side of Mythos.

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WORKS CITED

Joshi, S.T. I Am Providence: The Life and Times of H.P. Lovecraft. Hippocampus Press, 2013.

Lovecraft, H. P. “The Colour Out of Space.” The Complete Cthulhu Mythos Tales, 2015, pp. 62–85.

Mariconda, Steven J. “Atmosphere and the Qualitative Analysis of ‘The Colour out of Space.’” Lovecraft Annual, no. 14, 2020, pp. 14-25. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/26939805. Accessed 31 Mar. 2021.

Poole, W. Scott. “Lovecraft, Witch Cults, and Philosophers.” The Age of Lovecraft, edited by Carl H. Sederholm, and Jeffrey Andrew Weinstock, University of Minnesota Press, 2016, pp. 215–230.

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Lúcio Reis Filho is a Ph.D. in Media Studies (University Anhembi Morumbi, 2019), film critic and historian specializing in the relationships between cinema, history, and literature, with a focus on the horror genre. Addressing the echoes of H.P. Lovecraft in Clive Barker’s works, he wrote the chapter “Demons to Some, Angels to Others: Eldritch Horrors and Hellbound Religion in the Hellraiser Films,” in Divine Horror: Essays on the Cinematic Battle Between the Sacred and the Diabolical (McFarland, 2017). His award-winning research funded by CAPES (Coordination for the Improvement of Higher Education Personnel, Brazil) “Lovecraft out of Space: Echoes of American Weird Fiction on Brazilian Literature and Cinema” was published in Lovecraftian Proceedings No. 3. He also wrote essays on zombies in contemporary Latin American films, published in journals such as the SFRA Review and horror-themed anthologies. Currently, he investigates Lovecraft’s works and its cinematic adaptations in the late twentieth century

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Riding the success of the He-Man and the Masters of the Universe show and toy line (1982–1988), the children’s toy company Mattel sought to capitalize on its sword and sorcery moment by introducing a female-focused toy line, Princess of Power, centered around He-Man’s sister—Adora in her human form, She-Ra in her empowered form. From 1985 to 1987, She-Ra fought the Evil Horde, its leader Hordak, and her nemesis Catra through twenty-two action figures, thirteen comics, several children’s books, and a two-season animated cartoon series created by J. Michael Straczynski and Larry DiTillio. Throughout the ensuing thirty years, Adora/She-Ra would appear numerous times in toy lines and cameos, but she would never be as popular—nor, one could say, as marketed—as her brother, Adam/He-Man.

In 2017, Netflix and DreamWorks Animation announced their plans to reboot the franchise as She-Ra and the Princesses of Power, with Noelle Stevenson, an award-winning author, helming the project as executive producer and showrunner. This move came as part of a series of repackaging of old intellectual property for new audiences (e.g., DreamWorks/Netflix’s Voltron: Legendary Defender). As showrunner, Stevenson chose to pay homage to the past show while inventing a new future for it and for animated fantasy children’s shows. Stevenson’s direction chose to focus on diversity and representation, reimagining all the characters to portray more LGBTQ+ characters and characters of color onscreen. Indeed, the reimagining even goes so far as to portray various body types and emotional and mental capabilities. This diversity breathed new life and vitality into the sword and sorcery franchise and created a show that crossed genre boundaries and pushed back against a television culture that consistently shies away from representation, especially queer representation, in shows created for a young audience.

She-Ra and the Princesses of Power has the same premise as She-Ra: Princess of Power: raised in the Horde, Adora abandons it to fight for the Rebellion after finding the sword that gives her the power of She-Ra. Although sharing the same premise, She-Ra diverges from its source material by changing age, gender, and complexity. Adora is joined by her new friends Glimmer, the princess of Bright Moon and a young woman with mother problems, and Bow, a young Black man and Glimmer’s best friend who believes that love and friendship can conquer any insurmountable obstacle. The team of friends sets out to reestablish the Princess Alliance so the Rebellion can defeat the evil Horde (Season One). However, defeating the Horde is not as simple as gathering a few superpowered friends. As the Horde and Rebellion battle back and forth, the show, through its five seasons, weaves together a story of magic and adventure with more sinister and galaxy-wide intrigue. Seasons Two and Three introduce a long history of She-Ra connected to the ancient First Ones, beings who connected the She-Ra power to the magic of Eternia, the planet. As Adora learns more about her power and the true, ancient, intergalactic war that is being brought to Eternia’s doorstep, she grapples with her identity and destiny, striving to be her own person as she is driven to a certain end goal by other forces. Indeed, Season Four introduces weapons of mass destruction and interdimensional travel, culminating in Adora shattering her destiny, and her connection to She-Ra, in order to save her planet and the rest of the galaxy. This event, though, brings Eternia back into a dimension of space controlled by an evil despot—a despot who wants Eternia’s weapons to arrest full tyranny over the galaxy.

In Season Five, Adora must take to the stars to rescue Glimmer and Catra from the clutches of the true Horde, led by Horde Prime. Season Five is the culmination of four seasons that have woven seamlessly into each other, building up to the point where Adora must overcome her self-sacrificing nature or let the universe fall into the iron grip of Horde Prime and his army of clones. At the same time, Glimmer must come to grips with her mantle of leadership, having almost caused the destruction of the universe, and Catra must realize her love and adoration of Adora. Season Five presents a strong message of companionship, empowerment, and self-realization.

As a finale, Season Five touches on the themes that have been developed throughout the show. Delving into ideas of cowardice, bravery, honor, friendship, and agency, the fifth season is a heart-wrenching experience as the characters realize the culminations of their journeys of self-discovery. For example, one of the princesses, Entrapta, has been an enigma throughout the entire show. Beginning as a princess who joins the Princess Alliance, she is captured by the Horde, thought dead by her friends who leave her behind. Entrapta, lover of technology, thrives within the Horde, joining their side and building them weapons of destruction. In one of her culminating scenes, as she tries to obtain the tech that will save Glimmer and Catra, who are lost in space, Entrapta says, “I’m not good at people, but I am good at tech. I thought maybe if I could use tech to help you, you’d like me” (Season 5, Episode 2),. Entrapta’s growth is just one example of the growth of all the characters on the show—growth that compliments the gender and sexual diversity of the show. The fifth season delivers on the many plot threads, character arcs, and disparate secrets to which the show has been building.

She-Ra is able to take cultural touchpoints—like LGBTQ+ conversations, for example—and present them in ways that are both inclusive and metaphoric. For example, at the end of Season 2, Episode 7, the show introduces the viewer to Bow’s parents, two male historians. The fact that his dads are the gay parents of thirteen children is accepted by everyone in the show. Instead of being a story about struggling with coming out or queer acceptance, the story shifts the focus to the dads. Bow’s parents, who want Bow to become a historian like them, must overcome their former hopes and dreams for their child in order to love him as he is, a warrior in the Rebellion who loves adventure. Like much of the show, the expected tropes—like the unaccepting parents who must come to love their queer child for who they are—is refracted through a different lens. This refraction, present in much of the show, allows viewers and scholars alike to reapproach different ideas in fields like queer theory, film studies, and children’s literature, and conceptualize these in new and intriguing ways.

Along with innovative metaphors for LGBTQ+ representation, the show itself helps to bring more diversity and representation to the animated screen. From the beginning, the show makes it clear that Spinnerella and Netossa, two princesses, are married. Additionally, many of the characters are characters of color, from Bow and Netossa to Frosta and Mermista. As already mentioned, Bow and his twelve siblings were raised by two fathers. Introduced in Season Four, Double Trouble, a shapeshifting mercenary, is nonbinary, uses they/them pronouns, and is voiced by the LGBTQ+ rights activist and actor Jacob Tobia. Additionally, throughout the entire series, and culminating in Season Five, the show develops a strong relationship—from friendship to enemies to lovers—between Adora and Catra as they come to understand the complexities of love. For a DreamWorks show on Netflix, this representation is very welcome, especially after the fleeting representation in previous shows. She-Ra can be firmly placed into the history of LGBTQ+ representation in media, improving upon the dismal efforts of Legend of Korra and Voltron and leading to the lauded work in Kipo and the Age of Wonderbeasts.

As a show is progressive and innovative, however, it also echoes a continual problem that has been revealed over the last years: nostalgia and the recreation and repackaging of intellectual property. This move within science fiction can be a boon and a curse. Reapproaching old property with fresh eyes allows creators to invigorate a universe, helping to bring it into conversation with current questions and interrogations; however, at the same time, repackaged universes must grapple with histories and futures that are tainted with ghosts of the past.

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