by Tenebris

Created on: April 16, 2008

By the 1970s, science fiction/fantasy (SF/F) had become firmly established as very nearly mainstream television, and the superhero subgenre was poking its nose into living rooms everywhere. After the extreme optimism typical of much of the 1960s, the 1970s emerged from the giddy heights of the lunar landing, the terrifying depths of the Cuban Missile Crisis, the shock of having been forced to withdraw from what had been seen as a moral war against the forces of evil, and the perceived individual powerlessness in an environment of economic turbulence, as a decade less willing to believe that technology would be the solution to all of society's ills and more than half convinced that technology could yet prove society's undoing.

In particular, two themes running on parallel tracks through many of the SF/F series of the 1970s are the twin ideas that what we want or, more frighteningly, what society needs may not always be what is best for us individually or even as a species. This approach opens the door to dystopia and the great myth cycles, with a particular focus on hubris. While the gateway shows for these themes are the 1960s series 'The Outer Limits' (in the United States) and 'The Prisoner' (in Great Britain), it is in the 1970s that the concept really takes off.

In 'Logan's Run' (1977-8), a disillusioned society long fixated on eternal youth ("Trust no one over thirty!") has at last reached the critical mass necessary to achieve its goal: an individual's usefulness to society expires at 29 ... and even that short span of life can be tampered with to remove undesirable elements. The television series adds an even darker twist symbolic of the Watergate era: its idealised city is actually controlled by a secret cabal of the elderly. In the film, the computer controlling the city is in the end destroyed by a truth it cannot comprehend and cannot accept, an idea directly echoed in the same year by Terry Brooks' Sword of Truth in 'The Sword of Shanarra'. Logan's Run is also often considered among the earliest post-apocalyptic films.

While not of true apocalyptic proportions, it is nuclear catastrophe which hurls the moon, and with it the inhabitants of Moonbase Alpha, out of Earth's orbit and into interstellar space. Although the idea of encountering strange new worlds had already been established with the previous decade's 'Lost In Space' and 'Star Trek', the Alphans would have far less control over their fate. Perhaps not surprisingly, the death count is high

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