Technothriller

Name: Technothriller
Price: 75 AUD
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ISBN: 9780262051019

Film and the American Imagination

Soraya Murray

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English

MIT Press
03 March 2026

The Arts: General & Reference

What technothrillers-popular films that center advanced technology-can tell us about ourselves, and how they ignite our imagination in technologically supercharged times.

In Technothriller, Soraya Murray reveals how popular American films after the 1960s, in which technology assumes a central role-mainly biotech, military, and computational-channel our cultural anxieties, dreams, and convictions about the power and meaning of advanced technology.

Along with iconic adaptations from technothriller novels by Tom Clancy and Michael Crichton, such as The Hunt for Red October and The Andromeda Strain, Murray considers Westworld, Rollerball, Demon Seed, WarGames, Ex Machina, Tenet, M3GAN, and The Creator, as well as the Terminator and Mission- Impossible franchises. Through these films and others, she traces deeply embedded popular beliefs about technology and innovation-and then asks what this tells us about the mechanics of power within our technological lives. Exploring how popular culture negotiates political and cultural attitudes toward innovation and difference, her work finds in technothrillers a new way of thinking about the troubled, sometimes catastrophic, relationships between humans and their inventions.

By: Soraya Murray
Imprint: MIT Press
Country of Publication: United States
Dimensions: Height: 229mm, Width: 152mm,
Weight: 369g
ISBN: 9780262051019
ISBN 10: 026205101X
Pages: 296
Publication Date: 03 March 2026
Audience: General/trade , ELT Advanced
Format: Paperback
Publisher's Status: Active

Preface Introduction: Technothrillers, Imagination, and the Political 1 The Technothriller Has Two Fathers 2 Protocols and Hazmat Suits: The Biological Technothriller 3 The Military Technothriller 4 Bad Robots and the Innovators Who Made Them 5 Hypercapitalism as Destructive Innovation 6 Power Fantasies of the Supercomputer 7 Tech’s Gender Problems 8 Counter-Visions: The Creator 9 The Black Tech Archetype Acknowledgements Notes Index

Soraya Murray teaches in the Film and Digital Media Department at the University of California, Santa Cruz. She is the author of On Video Games- The Visual Politics of Race, Gender and Space.

Reviews for Technothriller: Film and the American Imagination

ENDORSEMENTS ""A beautifully crafted and timely book on the technothriller that shows the power of film in shaping how we see and engage with all manner of contemporary technologies from biotech to artificial intelligence. A book I wish I’d written."" —John Wills, author of Gamer Nation: Video Games and American Culture “Charting the cinematic visions and cultural histories of the defining technologies of our age, this timely text illustrates the critical role of Hollywood in navigating and negotiating profound technological change.” —Andrew Utterson, author of Persistent Images: Encountering Film History in Contemporary Cinema REVIEWS “[A] scholarly, in-depth survey with insightful critiques of a fairly recent film genre.” – Kirkus Reviews