There was a time, not a long time ago or in a galaxy far, far away, when the summer movie landscape wasn’t overcrowded with disposable fantasy and sci-fi tentpoles. When studios and distributors hadn’t yet been trained to put all of their eggs in a shrinking collection of threadbare baskets. “Four-plus decades ago,” as Chris Nashawaty writes in his new book “The Future Was Now,” “we were entertained, enthralled, and delighted. Today, we’re merely cudgeled into numb submission over and over again and treated like children being spoon-fed the same sound-and-fury pap.”

Nashawaty’s book zooms in on a specific period — the summer of 1982 — that he posits as both a peak flowering and a last hurrah of the sci-fi genre as serious, ambitious and original popular art. Taking an envious look at the unexpected, unparalleled and lucrative frenzy over “Star Wars” (1977), movie executives asked themselves the question that movie executives are so good at asking, if not necessarily answering: How can we make something just like that (or, at least, something that rakes in similarly obscene gobs of cash)?

Much as the previous decade’s execs drooled over the returns on “Easy Rider,” “Bonnie and Clyde” and “The Graduate,” this bunch sought to put their energies and resources into movies the kids would like, even if this generation was more enthralled with escape than revolution.

As Nashawaty writes, “The only problem was that all the studios seemed to learn the exact same lesson at the exact same time.” “The Future Was Now” sprints through the making and reception of eight movies that Nashawaty files under the sci-fi rubric, all of which somehow invaded theaters within the same two-month span. “Blade Runner,” “Conan the Barbarian,” “E.T. the Extraterrestrial,” “Mad Max 2: The Road Warrior,” “Poltergeist,” “Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan,” “The Thing” and “Tron”: They vied for moviegoers’ attention and disposable income. This was a glut that couldn’t be sustained. What would studios learn from this?

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That said, major books that deal with movies thematically are now few and far between, and “The Future Was Now” is a welcome addition to the catalog. Beneath the blow-by-blow is a story about the turbocharging and selling of fan culture, both its charms and its discontents (which, come to think of it, could make a great book in itself).

For Nashawaty, the summer of ’82 was a hinge moment, after the “Star Wars” big bang and before the studios turned blockbusters into widgets. He writes: “By the dawn of the ’90s … what should have been a new golden age of sci-fi and fantasy cinema became a pop-culture beast that would devour itself to death and infantilize its audience in the process.” And the results are still coming to a theater near you.