Posts Tagged “
Science Fiction
”Scifi Movie Locations in the Real World
With movies like Speed Racer and Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow creating entire scifi landscapes from CGI, it's easy to forget that some of the most futuristic settings for scifi movies are borrowed from the real world. Today Oobject has a terrific collection of photographs of the architectural marvels (and subtle background buildings) that populate scifi movies. Here you can see the BMW building that appears in Rollerball. Check out a few more below. More »The Four Styles You'll Wear in the Future, According to Science Fiction
One of the most terrifying parts of any science fiction movie or TV show are the inevitable Future Jumpsuits that everyone seems to wear because somehow every aspect of civilization has advanced except clothing technology. Whether you're in Battlestar Galactica's space fatigues, Star Trek's onesie uniforms, or whatever the hell you call that crap Jean-Paul Gaultier forced upon the hapless actors in The Fifth Element, it still boils down to one thing: The many moods of the jumpsuit. Below, we explore four of the most popular jumpsuits in science fiction for your sartorial edification. More »On the International Space Station, You Can Watch Star Wars But Not Star Trek
In a stroke of weird genius, the people at GovernmentAttic.org issued a FOIA (freedom of information act) request to the US government to reveal the contents of the multimedia library on the International Space Station. Probably happy that they weren't being asked about the Patriot Act, the government happily complied, supplying us with a 13-page document containing the titles of every book, movie, and TV show in the ISS library. Not surprisingly there's a lot of science fiction in the mix, plus (of course) The Right Stuff. But there are some shocking choices in terms of what got put in — and what got left out. More »20 Science Books Every Scifi Fan (and Writer) Should Read
You can't have great science fiction writing without great books about science. Ever since the nineteenth century, when Charles Darwin's classics On the Origin of Species and The Descent of Man took the reading public by storm, popular science writing has been inspiring fictional thought experiments, as well as possibly less-inspiring political debates. What are the science books you should be reading now if you want your brain turned inside-out by weird new ideas that might just change the world for real? We've got 20 brilliant, and brilliantly-written, science books that have already influenced science fiction — or are about to. More »How Do You Find People Who Like Science Fiction?
With science fiction becoming more mainstream all the time, it should be easier and easier to find people who share your interest, right? At least, there are more big SF movies than ever, and literary writers are dipping into the SF well more and more. But there are many kinds of science fiction enthusiasts, from the highbrow George Saunders-ites to the girls who dress up as Optimus Prime. How do you find your own kind of SF lovers? More »Future Scenarios that Don't Look Like SciFi Are Wrong
Science fiction is the go-to genre when you're looking for a glimpse of the future. Joel Achenbach makes a persuasive case in the Sunday Washington Post that the best way to stay in front of the dizzying pace of technological progress is to keep up on your Star Trek and take what Arthur C. Clarke wrote to heart. He also quotes Foresight Nanotech Institute President Christine Peterson, who says, "If you look out into the long-term future and what you see looks like science fiction, it might be wrong. But if it doesn't look like science fiction, it's definitely wrong." More »Vernor Vinge's Forgotten Novel About Scifi Publishers on Another Planet
Although it's easy to love scifi author Vernor Vinge for his most lauded work, like Rainbows End or Fire Upon the Deep, some of his lesser-known novels are more memorable than the great ones. Such is the case with Tatja Grimm's World, a collection of two novellas Vinge published in the late 1960s, coupled with a mid-1980s short story about the same character. That character is Tatja Grimm, a woman on late-medieval world who mysteriously begins to manifest super-intelligence, super-strength — and a super-ability to edit science fiction manuscripts. That last bit is what makes the novel sheer, strange genius, as well as a fascinating glimpse at the creative coming-of-age of one of today's greatest SF writers. More »
horrorhead
Welcome back to Horrorhead, where we explore the intersection of horror and science fiction. I talk a lot here about "science horror," which I usually mean as the opposite of supernatural horror. Science horror is basically the dark side of science fiction, whereas supernatural horror can be anything from reality TV bunk like Ghosthunters to really excellent spirit flicks like The Ring or dark fantasies by Stephen King. What makes science horror scary is science itself, and the mad doctors who steer it into the crawly places full of reanimated bodies and reality-warping physics. But some kinds of science are more terrifying than others. That's why I've delineated four branches of science most likely to show up in the next science horror movie in your queue.
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The Most Shocking Science Caught on Film
scifi season listings
It's time for the annual science fiction season to begin. Spring and summer are when giant science fiction flicks hit the screens, and even more giant science fiction conventions open their doors to the hundreds of thousands of light saber-wielding masses. New television series will debut (Clone Wars!), and old ones will restart (Battlestar!) Plus, you'll have a chance to snap up copies of awesome new books from Greg Egan, Karen Joy Fowler, Charles Stross, Ken MacLeod, and Nancy Kress. If you want to know where to go and what to do when you're in a science fictional way from April to August, then look no further than io9's exhaustive, amazing, intensive list of everything scifi this season.
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io9's Complete Guide to Science Fiction Season
Plot of New Neal Stephenson Novel Revealed
We've heard rumors about Neal "Snow Crash" Stephenson's new novel, but nothing more concrete than that it would be called Anathem and it would be a space opera about math and aliens. That would mark a real departure for the novelist, who has dealt only with human histories and futures in his previous works like The Diamond Age, Snow Crash, and Cryptonomicon. Now Lev Grossman, Time magazine's nerd correspondent, has more details about the plot of Anathem. More »New Issue of Rudy Rucker's FLURB Hits the Interwebs
Science fiction writer Rudy "Postsingular" Rucker has just posted issue #5 of his speculative fiction webzine FLURB, which is always full of bizarro delights. In this issue, Terry Bisson writes about a superhero called Captain Ordinary who teleports around the world via hidden portals in Starbucks outlets, triggered if you order the right kind of soy latte. John Shirley gives us a tasty excerpt from his dark new cyberpunk novel Black Glass Samples, and Nathaniel Hellerstein takes on the persona of the entire Web to humbly request that people stop accusing it of trying to end the world. Plus, there's a lot more, including a new story from Rucker and plenty of Rucker's art too. [FLURB]The Greatest Science Fiction Pinball Machines Of All Time
Long before the current obsession with console processing power and how many billions of polygons can be display onscreen at the same time, the only way to get your game on was via pinball machines. There have been tons of scifi pinball machines, with some amazingly garish artwork. Besides all of the Star Trek, Star Wars, and other licensed games, take a look at some of the forgotten scifi pinball machines of yesteryear. We'd give our eyeteeth for one of those The Machine: Bride of Pin-Bot games. More »
Automated Science Fiction Convention Finder
You know you're living in the future when somebody builds a web application to help you find the science fiction conventions nearest to your zip code. Over at BoingBoing, Cory Doctorow points us to the just-born "Convention Finder," a creation of SpaceWesterns editor Nathan Lilly. Now it's up to us to help make Convention Finder a success by adding every convention you know about to the database. Says Lilly: "Spread the word to your various fan groups and/or, if you know of a convention that's coming up in your area that would be of interest to geeks in general, please feel free to submit it yourself to the convention finder (just make sure that you have the venue's zip code)." [Convention Finder via BoingBoing]
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