James Cameron is mak­ing a doc­u­men­tary series about the his­to­ry of sci-fi

Fol­low­ing the news that the Coen broth­ers are mak­ing a TV west­ern, James Cameron, the man behind The Ter­mi­na­tor series, Aliens and Avatar, has added his name to the grow­ing list of direc­tors who are turn­ing their atten­tions to tele­vi­sion. US cable chan­nel AMC have con­firmed that the vision­ary film­mak­er is work­ing on a new six-part doc­u­men­tary series under the work­ing title ​‘James Cameron’s Sto­ry of Sci­ence Fiction’.

The show, which is sched­uled for release some­time next year, will trace the jour­ney of the genre from its lit­er­ary begin­nings in the futur­is­tic, typ­i­cal­ly dystopi­an fic­tion of Jules Verne, HG Wells and Aldous Hux­ley, right through to the present day block­buster. Cameron is report­ed­ly, ​“inter­est­ed in explor­ing the strug­gles and the tri­umphs that brought these incred­i­ble sto­ries to life and see­ing how art imi­tates life, as well as how sci­ence fic­tion imi­tates and some­times informs science.”

Each hour-long episode will tack­le what Cameron refers to as ​“the Big Ques­tions”. Debates on the nature of human­i­ty, mor­tal­i­ty and the dan­gers of tech­nol­o­gy are like­ly to fea­ture heav­i­ly, as the show unpicks the dif­fer­ent ways our favourite sci­ence fic­tion sto­ries and films have attempt­ed to engage with and inter­pret fun­da­men­tal and uni­ver­sal dilemmas.

While Cameron will no doubt sur­vey how sci­ence fic­tion cin­e­ma has evolved over the years, it seems that his pri­ma­ry focus will be on the con­cep­tu­al ideas that con­tin­ue to dri­ve the genre, rather than on the advance­ment of spe­cial effects and the tech­ni­cal­i­ties of film­mak­ing. Speak­ing about Stan­ley Kubrick’s 2001:A Space Odyssey, the film that inspired him become a direc­tor, Cameron explained at a recent con­fer­ence, ​“I liked the spe­cial effects, but I real­ly loved the ideas and the ques­tions behind them: ​‘How will the world end?’ ​‘Will tech­nol­o­gy destroy us?’ ​‘What does it mean to be human?’”

From this descrip­tion, per­haps the main appeal of the show will be that it won’t sim­ply offer up a pot­ted his­to­ry of sci­ence fic­tion, but, as the work­ing title sug­gests, an expert and very much per­son­al exam­i­na­tion of the genre that has con­sumed this proud ​“sci-fi nerd” since his ear­ly childhood.