{"id":4350,"date":"2026-02-10T11:18:55","date_gmt":"2026-02-10T11:18:55","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/webs.uab.cat\/saramartinalegre\/?p=4350"},"modified":"2026-02-10T11:30:13","modified_gmt":"2026-02-10T11:30:13","slug":"a-new-book-masculinities-in-contemporary-science-fiction-television","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/webs.uab.cat\/saramartinalegre\/2026\/02\/10\/a-new-book-masculinities-in-contemporary-science-fiction-television\/","title":{"rendered":"A NEW BOOK: MASCULINITIES IN CONTEMPORARY SCIENCE-FICTION TELEVISION\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

I\u2019ve 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\u2019m very proud to announce: Reviewing Contemporary Anglophone Fiction and Nonfiction<\/a><\/em>, vol. II. You can check here the post<\/a> 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\u2019ll 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

          Actually, the subject of today\u2019s post is another edited volume, <\/a>Masculinities in Contemporary Science-Fiction Television<\/em><\/a> (Bloomsbury Academic), published on 11 December 2025, and which I have co-edited with Michael Pitts. I haven\u2019t found the time until today to write about it here, but it\u2019s about time I do so. I\u2019m 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<\/em><\/a>. And I signed yesterday the contract with Edinburgh UP for yet another volume, Production Design as Adaptation in Anglophone Speculative Fiction<\/em>: Creative (Re)Settings<\/em><\/a>, which I\u2019ll 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\u2019m 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\u2019ve 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

          Masculinities in Contemporary Science-Fiction Television<\/em> 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<\/em><\/a>, which I asked to review for the journal Extrapolation<\/em>. 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 \u2018Conflicting Masculinities in SF\u2019 for the SFRA Review<\/em>. I very much wanted to participate in that symposium, so, I emailed Michael and candidly explained the situation with the review. That\u2019s 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<\/a> for the symposium, published as \u201cBeing the Other, the Other Being: Masculine Insecurities in Matthew Haig\u2019s The Humans<\/em> and Blake Crouch\u2019s Dark Matter<\/em>\u201d<\/a> (Fall 2022). In gratitude, I asked Extrapolation<\/em> to allow me to resubmit the review in a better informed, fairer version. This doesn\u2019t mean that I lied about the merits of Michael\u2019s book in this second review, but that I corrected the glaring misjudgments of the first version. Lesson learned: make friends, not foes.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

          To my surprise, Michael, one of the most generous scholars I\u2019ve 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 <\/a>Masculinity in Contemporary Science Fiction by Men: No Plans for the Future<\/em><\/a> and this is a method I recommend: working in parallel on a monograph and a collective volume. It\u2019s 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\u2019t know. Collaborating with all of them was a real pleasure. The result is our fantastic table of contents:<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n