Re-constellating the Great Mother: images of the gynoid in Contemporary SF TV Drama

This chapter explores a set of television images of the artificial female, here dubbed the ‘gynoid’, a term originally coined by sf writer Isaac Asimov in the 1970s. Miller examines these characters as a possible fresh ‘manifest visibility’ of the Great Mother archetype, forming part of the archetype’s contemporary symbol canon, but where the Great Mother has taken a particularly technological turn in the last ten years or so. The chapter critiques the history and scholarship around the Great Mother archetype and its relationship to the concept of the Great Goddess in the wider Academy, before examining how these images might offer a version of the Great Mother who blends nature and technology, and who stands poised between grand destruction and new possibilities.