From its earliest days, the genre of science fiction has explored the limits of humanity and how these may be transcended. This course will focus on the recognisable Americanness of a significant subset of the genre, as American writers from the middle of the twentieth century onwards have created alternate geographies, societies, histories, and humanities, to explore contemporary anxieties, politics, and cultural concerns of American society. Central themes explored will be national ideologies and Cold War politics, the city, the suburb, gender, and language as we consider the American Body and how it is perceived, represented, or critiqued in this literature.