Science Fiction Audiences: Watching Star Trek and Doctor Who

The science fiction series Doctor Who and Star Trek have survived cancellation and continue to attract a huge fan following, with Doctor Who having appeared in nine different guises and Star Trek now approaching its fourth television incarnation. Science Fiction Audiences explores the immense popularity of the two series as multiple sources of meaning and pleasure asking what it is that elicits such strong and active audience responses. Is it their particular intervention into the sci-fi genre? Their expressions of peculiarly American and British national cultures? Their ideologies and visions of the future, or their conceptions of science and technology? Is it simply their complexity, consistency and continuity as entertainment? Science Fiction Audiences encapsulates ten years of research in the United States, Britain and Australia taking in such topics as teenage audiences and club fanzines; queers and Star Trek , Star Trek at MIT, and ideology and pleasure in Doctor Who . Fans will be able to continue their debates in its pages while students are offered a historical overview of audience theory in a synthesis of text, context and audience.