Adaptive Forms: Videographic Criticism and Contemporary Science Fiction Film employs videographic essays to explore the themes, ideas, and visual language through which media culture constantly evolves and adapts. Focusing on contemporary science fiction film, this analysis considers affinities between the genre’s expansive concerns with technological and social adaption, and cinema’s own evolutionary responses to technological and aesthetic change. 

Looking at a range of contemporary science fiction films, including Arrival, Black Panther, District 9, her,Splice, Snowpiercer, Under the Skin, and more, this book argues that science fiction film has proven remarkably adaptive, responding to changing media environments through futurist speculations and alternate histories that thematize adaptation in technology, biology, and society. In dialogue with short critical essays, Adaptive Forms adopts a range of videographic styles—including documentary filmmaking, music videos, supercuts, and slash fanvids—to illuminate the formal techniques through which cinema engenders techno-cultural adaptation. This videographic book entangles biological, semiotic, and cultural understandings of adaptation, gesturing to a post-human and post-cinematic future.  

Originating in part from the authors’ own adaptation to the videographic mode of instruction and evaluation in the wake of the Covid-19 pandemic, Adaptive Forms is relevant to media, film, and science fiction studies, adaptation scholars, science fiction fans, and creators of videographic essays.

Gregory Brophy and Shawn Malley are professors in the Department of English at Bishop’s University in Sherbrooke, Quebec, Canada. Their work has appeared in Science Fiction Film and Television, [in]Transition, and Literature/Film Quarterly. Brophy’s research spans film and literature, including recent work in The New Review of Film and Television, Victorian Review, and The Journal of Victorian Culture. Malley is author of Excavating the Future: Archaeology and Geopolitics in Contemporary North American Science Fiction Film and Television (2018).