I’ve been busy these past weeks finishing the edition of a new e-book with 96 book reviews written by my undergrad students in the subject Contemporary English Literature, whose publication I’m very proud to announce: Reviewing Contemporary Anglophone Fiction and Nonfiction, vol. II. You can check here the post I wrote last year about producing this kind of publication. This has been my fifteenth e-book with texts written by students and, yes, this second semester I’ll be taking a break as I consider whether to go on. Each e-book is 80-100000 words long, a whole 250-300 page volume and, as you may imagine, they are hard to fit in with my own research.

          Actually, the subject of today’s post is another edited volume, Masculinities in Contemporary Science-Fiction Television (Bloomsbury Academic), published on 11 December 2025, and which I have co-edited with Michael Pitts. I haven’t found the time until today to write about it here, but it’s about time I do so. I’m currently proofreading another co-edited volume (with Jessica Aliaga-Lavrijsen) for Palgrave, Exploring Reproduction and Gender in Contemporary Feminist Speculative Fiction: Mothers Out of this World. And I signed yesterday the contract with Edinburgh UP for yet another volume, Production Design as Adaptation in Anglophone Speculative Fiction: Creative (Re)Settings, which I’ll be editing alone. This will be my eighth edited volume (apart from the fifteen with my students) and I would like to vindicate collective books as true research projects. I’m very much annoyed that the Spanish Ministry of Universities and ANECA do not consider edited volumes on an equal footing to research projects, or as merits for assessment exercises, when they do at no cost (I’ve never paid for publication) what funded projects are supposed to do: gather together a group of scholars and publish research done under a common theoretical framework.

          Masculinities in Contemporary Science-Fiction Television has a backstory which I wish to narrate even though it makes me appear in a very bad light. Michael Pitts, a young US researcher whom I had not met, published in 2021 Alternative Masculinities in Feminist Speculative Fiction: A New Man, which I asked to review for the journal Extrapolation. I wrote a rather negative review because I found that Dr. Pitts was too ready to praise male characters I found deplorable just because they had been written by feminist women writers. So, I wrote my obnoxious review and sent it, only to find out next that Michael was editing a symposium called ‘Conflicting Masculinities in SF’ for the SFRA Review. I very much wanted to participate in that symposium, so, I emailed Michael and candidly explained the situation with the review. That’s how we met. After reading it, and expressing his regrets that my reading did not match his intentions, Michael just accepted that it would be published as it was. Still, he very kindly accepted my proposed article for the symposium, published as “Being the Other, the Other Being: Masculine Insecurities in Matthew Haig’s The Humans and Blake Crouch’s Dark Matter” (Fall 2022). In gratitude, I asked Extrapolation to allow me to resubmit the review in a better informed, fairer version. This doesn’t mean that I lied about the merits of Michael’s book in this second review, but that I corrected the glaring misjudgments of the first version. Lesson learned: make friends, not foes.

          To my surprise, Michael, one of the most generous scholars I’ve ever met, proposed that we worked in whatever project might suit me and we eventually agreed that a collective volume on men and masculinities in SF series sounded like a very good idea. I had already started work on my book Masculinity in Contemporary Science Fiction by Men: No Plans for the Future and this is a method I recommend: working in parallel on a monograph and a collective volume. It’s been, truly, an extremely enriching experience. Anyway, Michael and I made a list of scholars who had already published on men and SF in audiovisual productions (series and films) and sent invitations. I included in the list scholars I had already worked with, but we cold-called others we didn’t know. Collaborating with all of them was a real pleasure. The result is our fantastic table of contents:

  • CHAPTER 1. Michael Pitts, The Captain as Auteur: Reconsidering Masculinity in Firefly/Serenity
  • CHAPTER 2. Marianne Kac-Vergne, Remodelling Cyborg Masculinities in Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles
  • CHAPTER 3. Hasan Gürkan, Technological Reflections of Masculine Vulnerability: Analysing Emotional Detachment and Dependency in Black Mirror
  • CHAPTER 4. Jonathan Hay, “Am I A Good Man?” Regenerating Masculinity in Doctor Who
  • CHAPTER 5. Juan Carlos Hidalgo-Ciudad, “If All the World Is a Stage, Identity Is Nothing but a Custom”: Liquid Masculinities in Sense8
  • CHAPTER 6. Miguel Sebastián-Martín, A Different History but the Same Old Story?: Rethinking Hegemonic Masculinities from the Fascist World of The Man in the High Castle.
  • CHAPTER 7. Sara Martín, ‘What Am I Now If I’m not a Father?’: Fox Mulder’s Ageing Masculinity in The X-Files
  • CHAPTER 8. Amaya Fernández Menicucci, The Black Man and the Man in Black: Black Masculinity in Jonathan Nolan’s and Lisa Joy’s Westworld
  • CHAPTER 9. Kimberly Yost, Commanding the Masculine Space: Leadership, Power, and Gender Performance in The Handmaid’s Tale
  • CHAPTER 10. Paul Mitchell, Envisioning Masculinity and Caring in Philip K. Dick’s Electric Dreams
  • CHAPTER 11. Rocío Carrasco-Carrasco, Takeshi Kovacs: The Commodification of the Male Body in Altered Carbon
  • CHAPTER 12. M. Isabel Santaulària i Capdevila, ‘You Know What They Call a Superhero Who Works Alone and Doesn’t Listen to Anybody? A Villain’: Interrogating Patriarchy, Hegemonic Masculinity and Heroism in The Umbrella Academy
  • CHAPTER 13. Bridget Kies, A Stranger to Himself: Perfection, Paterfamilias, and Picard

Of course, the field of SF television series is vast, and a 100000 word volume can only accommodate so many chapters, which means that we could only cover a selection. Yes, Battlestar Galactica is missing and so are the series in the Star Wars franchise, but, as we argued in the proposal to our publisher, Bloomsbury Academic, our volume is intended to open up a field of research, not to have the last word.

          When we set out to explore the science-fiction TV series that constitute the corpus of our volume, we did so hoping to find signs of a clear regeneration regarding the representation of gender in comparison to similar series of the 20th century. Our main research question was whether the 21st century has brought significant changes in the way the future of men and of humankind is imagined, whether this future is near, far, or alternative. The answer to our question is that whereas the progress may be obvious if two versions of the same TV series can be compared, it is far less perceptible if we advance series-by-series, as we did, from Firefly (2002) to Picard (2023). Generally speaking, the macho men of Golden Age SF disappeared long ago to be replaced with more vulnerable and caring models of postmodern masculinity although, as superhero cinema shows (this is also a branch of science fiction), there is much reluctance to let go of the ultra-muscular male body and little effort to transcend individualism in the search for communal justice, despite the different alliances among male and female superheroes.

          The TV series analyzed present a far more flexible masculinity (or masculinities, rather), but are still far from offering the variety of male characters that the audience is demanding, which ranges from revised traditional models to the non-binary individuals that reject all attempts at limiting gender to essentialist positions, portrayals that frequently also take into account sexuality, race, ethnicity, age, ability and other identity markers. This is bound to change since TV series, now mostly in the hands of streaming platforms, are, for basic commercial reasons, quite sensitive to the demands of the mostly young demographic at which they aim their products, an age group more in touch with the need to reform gender norms than older segments of the audience.

          These conclusions are very much in tune with my own findings in Masculinity in Contemporary Science Fiction by Men: No Plans for the Future, which deals with 50 SF novels by 17 male authors, but also with the findings of the volume I co-edited with M. Isabel Santaulària, Detoxing Masculinity in Anglophone Literature and Culture: In Search of Good Men (Palgrave, 2023; see my blog post on it). Detoxing, which covers male characters in texts from Jane Austen to Mr. Robot, paints a panorama in which while patriarchy and its toxicity are rejected by all authors, few truly good men can be found. Michael Pitts and I assumed that SF, being oriented to the future, would offer a more diverse roster of new masculinities, but the fact is that SF extrapolates from the present and there are clear limits to the alternatives to patriarchy that can be imagined. As I’ve been arguing, whereas women’s writing is mostly guided by the utopian wish to reach full equality, men who reject patriarchy have no common agenda. No plans for the future, as I subtitled my book.

          Please, enjoy Masculinities in Contemporary Science-Fiction Television (which, by the way, lost its subtitle Exploring New Spaces in the process of publication) and be demanding as part of the large TV audience. We need progressive masculinities that can break away from the grim panorama of the manosphere and the rise of extreme right-wing patriarchal political forces. Imagining new models in fiction is indispensable, and in that sense SF offers a vast field to act out thought experiments that may alter how we apprehend the oppressive mundane reality dominating mimetic fiction, and our lives.