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Posts Tagged “

world building

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Why Commericals Are the Best Way to Evoke an Alternate World

Searching for a quick, effective way to evoke the warlust-driven future world of Starship Troopers, director Paul Verhoven created a series of fake TV spots that characters watch in the movie. You can see one this clip, a patriotic ad for the Mobile Infantry which captures both the weirdness of a future where humans fight bugs, and the familiarity of a culture where TV commercials are still bizarrely perky and strained. Other scifi creators have also gone the Verhoven route, adding realism to their alternate realities by peppering them with ads. See some of the creepiest and best of the bunch below. More »

3:27 PM on Thu Jun 12 2008
By Annalee Newitz
4,026 views, 29 comments

Latest by Grodoro: @hopskipper: Actually, it's a Heuristically programmed ALgorithmic Computer </geek> more »

world building

Dream-Eaters and Three-Sexed Aliens in the Five Greatest World-Building Novels

What would weather be like if you lived in a planet-sized bag of oxygen? What would reproduction be like if there were a third sex who combined the genetic material of two other sexes by linking them at the neurological level and giving them braingasms? What would scientific progress be like in an anarchist-feminist society? One of the ingredients in many great science fiction novel is world-building, the practice of creating an entire unfamiliar (yet familiar) world whose strange permutations allow us to explore how unfathomable environments can dramatically reshape events that happen all the time in our own lives. Here are five cool world-building novels to suck your attention away from the misery of cooling weather and impending turkey day doom. More »

9:00 AM on Tue Nov 13 2007
By Annalee Newitz
394 views, 1 comment

Latest by puckrod: What about 'The Smoke Ring', also by Niven, which is basically if worlds #4 and #5 had a baby? more »