"By the closing years of the twentieth century, after the climax of the Cold War,American science fiction reflected a prevalent sense that typical Western subjects were essentially victims of their own society and culture, colonized by vast networks of artificial simulacra, justified in their desire to break through to something more authentic (and recover the priviledge of threatened masculine agency in the process). In the late 1990s, popular science fiction was dominated by awakening-from-simulacrum stories-exemplified by films like The Matrix (1999), Dark City (1998), and The Truman Show (1998)-which all presented narratives (with predecessors reaching back to Phillip K. Dick’s Time Out of Joint [1959] and beyond) in which the main characters found themselves trapped within a false or simulated world striving to gain access to some more real or authentic exterior. Everyday life, in these narratives, was often portrayed as a kind of emasculating ensnarement within post-Fordist systems of command and control. Protagonists like Neo from The Matrix or Tyler Durden from Fight Club struggled against their externally imposed roles within boring and lifeless administrative white-collar jobs focused on keeping the late capitalist system running. There was a general sense in these films and stories that life had somehow become false or artificial, and science fiction literalized the metaphor of being trapped in an alienating system designed to keep one docile, numb, and plugged into an endless cycle of late capitalist production and consumption."