It came out when I was a kid and I didn’t see it but instead had to hear about it from all those kids who got into the R movies. But now I finally saw Cronenberg’s Videodrome. Coming on the heels of reading a lot of PKD, and then Skillingstead’s very fine Life on the Preservation, I conclude that the secondary mood of science fiction (the primary mood being wonder) is epistemic paranoia.
Only science fiction takes as a theme that we may be systematically, catastrophically in error. Descartes proposed radical doubt as a tool. Much science fiction proposes radical doubt as a terrifying state of being.