Gothic Post-Human Crime in The Expanse: The Interstellar Gumshoe as Epigraph
Gothic Post-Human Crime in The Expanse: The Interstellar Gumshoe as Epigraph
Two hundred years in the future, in a fully colonized Solar System, police detective Josephus Miller (Thomas Jane), a ‘belter’ born on Ceres in the asteroid belt, is assigned to find a missing young woman, Juliette "Julie" Andromeda Mao (Florence Faivre). Julie’s father is an ‘Earther’ and as such a man of incredible wealth and power. He is paying for information leading to his daughter’s whereabouts.
The ‘Interstellar Noir’ narrative of the missing woman and the hard-boiled detective is, in a twist from the norm, in service to a larger politically-charged plot. In The Expanse crime fiction is a mere pre-cursor to a challenging and developing set of stories involving anarchists, war-mongers, and greedy politicians.
Drawing on Le Guin (The Dispossessed, 1974; The Heron, 1978) in its theoretical divisions and threatening to surpass Battelstar Galactica in its critical strength, The Expanse, is the “the Best Sci-FI TV Show You're Not Watching” (Rolling Stone, 2015). It’s crime fiction merely sets the scene for a series of interrogations on environmental scarcity, interstellar class warfare and capitalism’s catastrophic residue at the end of the Anthropocene.
This paper considers the genre of crime fiction as it is incorporated into a complex science fiction narrative that sits well outside the mainstream of crime dramas. The Expanse, I will argue, relies on the traditional ideas and themes of Detective Miller’s storyline to put its viewer at ease and lure them into a larger, more complex, main plot that challenges and shifts the crime story genre in form and function
Gothic Studies, Detectives, Posthumanism, Science Fiction, Television Series
Millette, Holly-Gale
909906ff-426b-47ab-a71a-5788ea36c213
Millette, Holly-Gale
909906ff-426b-47ab-a71a-5788ea36c213
Millette, Holly-Gale
(2018)
Gothic Post-Human Crime in The Expanse: The Interstellar Gumshoe as Epigraph.
Captivating Criminalities Conference: Crime Fiction, Insiders & Outsiders, Corsham Court, Bath Spa University, Bath, United Kingdom.
28 - 30 Jun 2018.
(Submitted)
Record type:
Conference or Workshop Item
(Paper)
Abstract
Two hundred years in the future, in a fully colonized Solar System, police detective Josephus Miller (Thomas Jane), a ‘belter’ born on Ceres in the asteroid belt, is assigned to find a missing young woman, Juliette "Julie" Andromeda Mao (Florence Faivre). Julie’s father is an ‘Earther’ and as such a man of incredible wealth and power. He is paying for information leading to his daughter’s whereabouts.
The ‘Interstellar Noir’ narrative of the missing woman and the hard-boiled detective is, in a twist from the norm, in service to a larger politically-charged plot. In The Expanse crime fiction is a mere pre-cursor to a challenging and developing set of stories involving anarchists, war-mongers, and greedy politicians.
Drawing on Le Guin (The Dispossessed, 1974; The Heron, 1978) in its theoretical divisions and threatening to surpass Battelstar Galactica in its critical strength, The Expanse, is the “the Best Sci-FI TV Show You're Not Watching” (Rolling Stone, 2015). It’s crime fiction merely sets the scene for a series of interrogations on environmental scarcity, interstellar class warfare and capitalism’s catastrophic residue at the end of the Anthropocene.
This paper considers the genre of crime fiction as it is incorporated into a complex science fiction narrative that sits well outside the mainstream of crime dramas. The Expanse, I will argue, relies on the traditional ideas and themes of Detective Miller’s storyline to put its viewer at ease and lure them into a larger, more complex, main plot that challenges and shifts the crime story genre in form and function
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Submitted date: 2018
Venue - Dates:
Captivating Criminalities Conference: Crime Fiction, Insiders & Outsiders, Corsham Court, Bath Spa University, Bath, United Kingdom, 2018-06-28 - 2018-06-30
Keywords:
Gothic Studies, Detectives, Posthumanism, Science Fiction, Television Series
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Local EPrints ID: 467800
URI: http://eprints.soton.ac.uk/id/eprint/467800
PURE UUID: 3b5ed696-2296-42a8-b6c0-f77203a6e946
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Date deposited: 22 Jul 2022 16:30
Last modified: 24 Jul 2022 01:45
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