[Commlist] New book - Technothriller: Film and the American Imagination

New book

Technothriller: Film and the American Imagination
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Soraya Murray (The MIT Press, Feb 2026)

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

“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

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.

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.

Film/Visual Culture

3 February 2026
6 x 9, 296 pp.
81 b&w illus.
US $35.00 /$48.00 CAN paperback
9780262051019

Available for pre-order through the booksellers:
The MIT Press  https://mitpressbookstore.mit.edu/book/9780262051019

Penguin Random House
https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/814408/technothriller-by-soraya-murray/9780262051019/

Amazon
https://www.amazon.com/dp/026205101X/

Barnes and Noble Bookshop
https://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/technothriller-soraya-murray/1147439784?ean=9780262051019


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