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Author Charles Stross has given the world many a flight of futuristic fancy — post-human worlds where androids carry on our legacy, bank robberies committed inside online games, and god-like meddlers — but what does he think the world will really be like in the next 20 years? More »
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Generally, the future is so chaotic that there's no way of guessing what will come next. But one area is so obvious, so repetitive, so completely and utterly predictable that it's a breeze to guess what's coming next: pop music. More »
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The fact that the future exists is second nature to us, but few animals share our awareness of events yet to happen. So let's meet the tayra, the first animal outside primates and birds to plan for the future. More »
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When adapting the Ghost in the Shell manga into an anime film, director Mamoru Oshii chose to turn the real-life streets of Hong Kong into a hyper-stylized, dreamlike city of the future. What's astonishing is that Oshii captured the real Hong Kong so well in his submerged metropolis. More »
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Philip K. Dick's insanely complicated, mind-bending novel Ubik is being adapted by Michel Gondry. It's a match made in creepy alternate universe heaven. Clotted milk and stale cigarettes for everyone! More »
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In Andrew Niccol's new dystopian movie Now, you can stay young forever — but only if you can afford the extra years. In our exclusive interview with I Am Number Four star Alex Pettyfer, he told us a little bit more about playing the villain in this futuristic epic. More »
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The first ever concept art from the new Battlestar Galactica prequel series Blood And Chrome have been released. From the looks of things, the space opera's next chapter will be full of aliens, blood, cylons, spaceships and WAR! Excellent! More »
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Legendary concept artist Syd Mead takes us into the future and talks about what sort of gadgets await us in the year 2019 in a new featurette. Plus get a closer look at some of his gorgeous futuristic concept art. More »
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The first ever image of Karl Urban as Mega City One's lawman, Judge Dredd, has emerged, and it ticks all the boxes, including the helmet and the big gun. Can it erase the memories of Sylvester Stallone? More »
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We were sent a propaganda pamphlet help us get ready for Korea's eventual U.S. invasion. According to these documents, we were asking for it, after the "dual crises of peak oil and the global economic meltdown of 2012-2025." More »
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Right now President Obama is outlining his goals for the future of the US space program. We've got the live feed below. More »
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I've just returned from Texas, a state that blends old-school American values and high tech industries into a strange hybrid culture of digital cowboys. Is Texas the most futuristic state? More »
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Last week, humanity saw two minutes of our future, in the FlashForward series premiere. But can they alter their fates, or are they set in stone? We look at other premonitions and flashforwards from science fiction for clues. More »
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What will the New Yorks, Londons, and Tokyos of tomorrow look like? Will they be technological Edens, grim dystopias, or entirely obliterated? We look at science fiction's take on the future of today's cities to gauge our urban future. More »
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Just as we were asking ourselves when this dreary dystopian fad was going to wear off, news comes from a sunnier side of the universe. We’ve been plagued with so many movies and books that paint the future as a big, bad place to live that I’ve started to wonder if I should build a bomb shelter or just stock up on antidepressants. To provide an oasis in this dystopian desert, Solaris Books has commissioned Jetse de Vries to collect manuscripts for Shine, an anthology of optimistic near-future science fiction. More »
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If you're a fan of the Bioshock game, where a subaquatic Utopian society goes terribly wrong, you'll be weirdly drawn to the futurist gang behind real-life think tank The Venus Project. They've got a whole plan for optimizing society, using planned communities and cultural engineering. And the best part is that they've got a seriously googie 1950s futurism vibe going in all their designs. So space age! So wonderful! Check out your future Utopia, below. More »
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If you ever watched the Star Wars Kid and Homestar Runner, or gawked at the Tron Guy and web comic Xkcd, you're changing the future of celebrity. You're building a world where Paris Hilton and Tom Cruise will be replaced by captioned pictures of cats and clever comics about algebra. At least, that was the premise of a conference held over the weekend at MIT called ROFLCon, which brought together the web's most famous meme-disseminators to prove that In The Future, Fame Will Be Different. Will it really? More »
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This is a next-generation "emotional robot" named Nexi, who can move its body, hands, and face in a way that suggest human emotion. Created by world-famous roboticist Cynthia Breazeal's group at the MIT Media Lab, Nexi manages to be both weirdly cute and disturbingly emotive. Sure, she "emotes" in a cartoonish way, and yet you won't have any trouble recognizing the feelings she's trying to convey. [Suicide Bots] More »
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This piece from the 1930s shows scientists trying to come up with antigravity — now it's more than 50 years later and we're still waiting on hoverpads and floating grav-lifts. This poster is part of a series of eight that all showcase futures we should have had by now, like fish bowl swimming pools, flapwing flycars, and mining on the moon. In fact, the only two futuristic things depicted here that we actually got are the electronic home library, and robot warehouses where the bots fetch your orders. Sometimes futurism is more hopeful than predictive. More »
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If you're worried about getting packages from grandma and Amazon when you live in a hovering spacepod floating somewhere off the Pacific Rim, fret no more. You'll have friendly mail carriers with anti-Postal Tendencies (tm) automatic injector systems buzzing by to drop things off. They won't complain about the weather, steal your lingerie catalog-capsules, or mace your dog. More »
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Artist James Clyne, who already wowed us with what turned out to be a racer lost in Antarctica, also has a gorgeous vision of what it would be like if we started modifying and hacking the moon into a place to live and do business. But what's up with that giant ball in the middle of downtown? City-to-city low-gravity volleyball? Find out the answer, along with details of http://www.jamesclyne.com/artist's vision, after the jump. More »
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Nicolas Cage will be starring in Knowing, where he apparently has knowledge about the future, and Tourette's syndrome. Alex Proyas, who also directed Dark City (yay!) and I, Robot (meh) will direct this flick about a man who digs up a time capsule and finds information inside that he and his son might be responsible for the destruction of the world. Whoops. Not sure where the Tourette's fits in, but I guess we'll find out. [Variety] More »
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We hope that upcoming MMOThe Day manages to look like its sumptuous concept art, pictured above. That image of the Arc de Triomphe being repaired, upgraded, or duplicated is just simply amazing. The premise of The Day is that two parallel worlds smash together, and we've got a whole gallery of strange history-mashup imagery from The Day for you to gawk at. More »
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You can visit the desolate world of Wall-E, this summer's animated movie about a trash-compacting robot, in an upcoming xBox game. Judging from these early screen shots, it looks like the Wall-E game may do too good a job of capturing the robot's loneliness and the toll of time on his robotic circuits. You'll be able to explore 10 other worlds in the game, but if they all look like this we'd probably have to commit robo-suicide to stave off the inevitable boredom and insanity. Minor movie spoilers after the jump More »
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If ideas from William Gibson and Cory Doctorow got mashed up, and the resulting technology was stolen by the music industry in a desperate attempt to reinvigorate their bottom line, then you'd end up with U23D, the 3D concert movie of the future. io9 took a look at U23D this week, and the experience was flashbaked into our brain matter. Find out why. More »
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Andrew Niccol's film Gattaca seems like it's been swept under the carpet and behind the radiator lately, which is surprising given the current obsession with stem cells, in utero fetal testing, and the human genome. In fact, there's a whole generation out there who haven't even seen this film. Breathe easy, because you'll be able to help them see it when a brand-new edition comes to DVD and Blu-ray on March 11th. Can you believe Danny DeVito produced this thing? The new disc features all new interviews with Ethan Hawke and Jude Law and an expose on DNA testing. More »
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io9 spoke with star Lena Headey and producer James Middleton of Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles today to try and torture secrets out of them, Skynet-style. Luckily, we also sent robot duplicates of ourselves back in time to infiltrate the set while they were filming, and to take out the future leader of the human resistance. Check out what we learned after the jump, and tune in when this show gets started on Sunday night. More »
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When you're strapped into a tin can and rocketing through the galaxy at thousands of miles an hour, your opportunities for bathroom breaks are pretty few and far between. At some point, you're going to have to step away from the controls and relieve yourself. However, in a zero gravity environment where an errant fart can send you spinning in the opposite direction, what are you supposed to do? Here's our list of the best ways science fiction has handled this delicate question. More »
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These are bionengineered tooth crowns grown from pig cells that were implanted in a rat's stomach. Obviously a beta version resulted. But eventually scientists hope to use teeth like these in your mouth. Yum. Image by Douglas McFadd via Getty. More »
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With the writer's strike threatening to spread into the holidays and beyond, NBC is rushing a novelization of Heroes to print the day after Christmas. This Heroes novel is the first book to try and capitalize on the writer's strike. After all, with the number of game and reality shows on television increasing daily, people are going to have to turn to books if they want to get their fill of . . . television. But will it be good television? Maaaybe. Details after the jump. More »
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Disneyland promises visitors through its gates four separate worlds that are supposed to thrill and delight you: Fantasyland, Adventureland, Frontierland, and Tomorrowland. While the other lands deliver on that promise, Tomorrowland seems like it got stuck in Yesterdayland. Once a portal to the future, the amusement park has now been surpassed in coolness by several new museums. What went wrong? More »
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Earlier this year, architect Jan Kaplicky won a contest for this design of the planned Czech National Library. Though observers say he won fair and square, controversy over the purple, ten-story, octopus-shaped building continues to rage. President Vaclav Klaus has rejected the design, and so the Czech Republic may not get its mutant spore library after all. More »
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If only it were an implant. This soft, foldable key interface molds to your hand and represents the future of RSI-proof typing. If I can't have my EEG-controlled keyboard, I want one of these. More »
]]> http://io9.com/index.php?op=postcommentfeed&postId=324518&view=rss&microfeed=true Tyranny, one of the most visually haunting science fiction flicks available on the Web, comes from the imagination of a guy who spends his days photographing real-life science. John Beck Hofmann is director of photography at NASA's Jet Propulsion Lab, and that makes his tale of government conspiracies and machine-induced prophetic visions even more interesting. Is there something Hofmann knows about secret NASA projects that we don't? More »
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Syd Mead has had a hand in designing everything from Ford automobiles, to V'Ger in Star Trek: The Motion Picture, to the Sulaco ship design in Aliens, and even the look and feel of the cities in Blade Runner and Tron. He's definitely a giant in the field of future design, and if you could ask him any question, what would it be? More »
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Must-see TV shows are futuristic classics that shouldn't be missed. Of course, not every must-see is perfect. That's why we've rated them 1-5 on the patented "crunchy goodness" scale. Must see by Sherilyn Connelly. More »
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Futurist Kevin Kelly has done a back-of-the-napkin calculation showing that the Internet uses about 5% of global electricity. This number doesn't include mobile devices that require charging up. This power-sucker has gone from using a tiny percentage of global electricity just 15 years ago, to using 5%. And as the internet grows, along with server megafarm-based businesses like Google, that number is likely to grow larger very quickly. Whenever I see this kind of data, I always worry about the sum total of world knowledge being dependent on electrical power. If we're not careful, the internet and all its goodies will flame out in a knowledge-apocalypse moment millions of times worse than the one that destroyed the library at Alexandria. AP Photo by Jay LaPrete. More »
]]> http://io9.com/index.php?op=postcommentfeed&postId=313228&view=rss&microfeed=true Everybody is jabbering about whether there will be an ounce of goodness in Your Name Here, the upcoming movie about the life of dystopian scifi author Philip K. Dick (whose novels inspired movies Bladerunner, Minority Report, and A Scanner Darkly). It sounds promising — Bill Pullman plays the meth-snorting writer who becomes obsessed with a robot version of Victoria Principal after watching her in Earthquake. What few people realize, however, is that Your Name Here might have been inspired by a little-known industrial film satire of the same name, released in 1960. The original Your Name Here is a spot-on parody of movies that hype the scientific-industrial society as a utopia, and use cheesy marketing to convince Americans to buy more stuff. The best part? "Your Name Here" was actually made by a company that specialized in the very industrial films it makes fun of. Watch the movie above, via the Prelinger Archive. It's pure Dickish fun, a surreal blend of advertising and science propaganda. I love how "progress" and "the future" are represented by endless vistas of disgusting industrial buildings belching smoke. The original Your Name Here is probably a more truthful representation of Dick's sense of humor than the new movie will be. More »
]]> http://io9.com/index.php?op=postcommentfeed&postId=311196&view=rss&microfeed=true 9/Tenths, a movie that's been making the film festival rounds for the past year, is about what happens when two rich Southern Californians flee a global war meltdown to their hidden country home and find that a working-class Mexican is squatting there. At first, they manage to co-exist peacefully, but as civilization continues to deteriorate the men go the to 28 Days Later place and start fighting over which of them "owns" the woman. I'm looking forward to catching this flick, written by relative unknown Michele McGuire, when it goes into wider release because it deals with two of my favorite topics: the bourgeoisie brought low by a radical change in global politics, and the way gender roles are affected by a return to pre-techological society. More »
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In 1908, artist William Leigh was commissioned by Cosmopolitan magazine to create several paintings of a future New York City. Leigh, who was mostly known for his drawings of Western landscapes and Indians, proved surprisingly adept at urban futurism, producing gorgeous drawings of a New York with elevated walkways and roads that issue from arched tunnels halfway up his soaring skyscrapers. Matt at Paleo-Future points out that Leigh's paintings are currently on display at New York's Skyscraper Museum, along with images by other artists fascinated by urban futures. More future New Yorks below the fold. More »
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