The final frontier? Religion and posthumanism in film and TV

This is the author's pre-print of a chapter proposed for publication in Palgrave handbook of posthumanism in film and television, 2015.This chapter aims to indicate how, in keeping with wider cultural trends, contemporary science fiction film and TV may be exhibiting a shift from a secular to a ‘post-secular’ sensibility. If the modernist paradigm within science fiction is beginning to dissolve, and with it a somewhat one-dimensional narrative of scientific triumph over religious superstition, then recent work on the emergence of post-secular paradigms opens up a range of new potential relationships between science, religion and science fiction. It is reasonable to expect that the resurgence of religion both as a geopolitical force and a source of human understanding would be reflected in contemporary examples of the genre, and that religious and spiritual themes would feature in contemporary science fiction narratives, including representations of the posthuman