Stargate Atlantis: Islandness in the Pegasus Galaxy

Abstract

This paper explores how 'islandness' is constructed within the science fiction television program, Stargate Atlantis. While fictional, considering the Atlantis of Stargate offers the opportunity to examine what islandness may be like outside the physical, technical and social parameters of Earth; and to this end this paper offers three insights. Firstly, this paper proposes that even in a distant galaxy, and on an island that is arguably not really an island, several familiar features of 'islandness' can be found in places entirely surrounded by water. Secondly, the sea surrounding Atlantis plays an important role in the survival of the city yet remains mostly unexplored by the Earth expedition team, echoing Earthly island scholarship that calls for greater understanding of the maritime aspects of islands. Thirdly, Atlantis is a mobile city-ship and its islandness shifts and transforms to the point of refutability but this paper argues that it resembles an aquapelagic assemblage despite its extraterrestrial capabilities.

A future of island studies

“…Hayward's warning is an important one, and Shima has indeed helped advance new conceptualisations of the appropriate subject matters and borders of island studies, particularly through development of the 'aquapelago' as a theoretical framework focusing on human-land-sea interaction (launched in Hayward, 2012a; with subsequent contributions from, for example, Hayward, 2012b;Fleury, 2013;Alexander, 2015;Dick, 2015;MacKinnon, 2016;Bremner, 2017). In recent years, I have ventured outside my own scholarly comfort zone of remote, cold-water islands to help establish a distinctive form of urban island studies, which has not only brought new disciplinary perspectives (architecture, urban studies, urban planning) to bear on traditional island studies questions but has also highlighted hitherto under-appreciated connections between islands and cities as well as called into question certain assumptions about the nature of islandness in general (e.g., Grydehøj, 2015;Steyn, 2015;Hayward, 2015;Casagrande, 2016;Grydehøj & Kelman, 2016;Gang, 2017).…”