Science Fiction

This has a lot in common with science fiction, a genre full of thought experiments that ask Heinlein's famous three questions:

What if?
If only, and

If this goes on…

These contrafactuals are incredibly useful and important. As critical tools, science fiction's parables about the future are the best chance we have for resisting the inevitabilism that insists that technology must be used in a certain way, or must exist at all. Science fiction doesn't just interrogate what the gadget does, but who it does it for and who it does it to:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/03/20/love-the-machine/#hate-the-factory

One of science fiction's key methods comes from sf grandmaster Theodore Sturgeon: "ask the next question." Ask a question, then ask "what happens next?" Do it again, and again, and again:

It's a slightly click-baity title, but as we're still generating more content for our magazines, this one included, why not?

Unpopular opinions from last time include:

• My Sci-fi unpopular opinion is that 2001: A Space Odyssey is nothing but pretentious, LSD fueled nonsense.

• I could not get into the expanse at all.

• My unpopular opinion is that I don't like space operas.

What's yours?

Come for Edgar Allan Poe's gothic classic, stay for 21st-century gay revenge horror by Wendy Pini of "Elfquest" fame.

'Stellar Blade' delivers a narrative that will make you question what it really means to be human, while also requiring split-second timing in battle if you want to live to tell the tale.

How did a terrifying alleged incident involving "real" extraterrestrials inspire Steven Spielberg to create the cuddly E.T. and Poltergeist?

Anya Taylor-Joy's Alia will presumably have a much bigger role in Dune: Part Three, but adapting this Frank Herbert character won't be easy.

Sci-fi fiends have a long history of saving their darlings. Francis Ford Coppola’s epic “Megalopolis,” 40 years in the making, could be their biggest save yet.

The Tomorrow Prize and The Green Feather Award: Celebrity Readings & Honors will take place May 11. The Omega Sci-Fi Project’s culminating event recognizes outstanding new works of science fict…

'The Matrix' defined cyberpunk for a generation, but it's Cronenberg's grotesque vision of the future, released just weeks later, that will haunt you long after the credits roll.

There’s a case to be made that the Xenomorph is the greatest movie monster ever conceived. It’s certainly among the most iconic. H.R. Giger, the Swiss artist who designed the title creature of Alien, took inspiration from Francis Bacon and Rolls-Royce, and emerged with a biomechanical killing machine that’s instantly identifiable in silhouette. Cross a tapeworm with a shark, a cockroach, a dinosaur, and a motorcycle, and you’re close to describing the nightmare Giger and director Ridley Scott inflicted on unsuspecting moviegoers in 1979.

A monster so unforgettable sells itself. One look is all it would take to know that you had to see the cursed thing in action. And yet, there’s barely a glimpse of the alien in any of the original advertising for Alien. The beast is completely absent from the posters, and the trailer contains only a borderline-subliminal flash of its earliest larval stage, the face hugger. Unless you subscribed to a select few science fiction fan magazines — the ones boasting some enticing behind-the-scenes images, all part of a final “hard push” to get asses in seats — you were going into Alien blind, completely unprepared for the exact nature of the threat faced by its cast of unlucky galaxy-traversing characters.
Restraint isn’t unheard o

BAFTA Award-nominee Callum Turner (Masters of the Air, The Boys in the Boat) is joining Neuromancer, a new 10-episode drama based on the sci-fi novel of the same name by William Gibson.

Created for television by Graham Roland (Tom Clancy's Jack Ryan) and JD Dillard (The Outsider), Neuromancer follows a damaged, top-rung super-hacker named Case (Turner) who is thrust into a web of digital espionage and high stakes crime with his partner Molly, a razor-girl assassin with mirrored eyes, aiming to pull a heist on a corporate dynasty with untold secrets.

Neuromancer was Gibson’s debut novel that earned a Nebula Award, the Philip K. Dick Award, and the Hugo Award. It served as the first book in the Sprawl trilogy and was followed by Count Zero and Mona Lisa Overdrive.
The series will be a co-production between Skydance Television, Anonymous Content and Apple Studios. It will also be produced by Drake's DreamCrew Entertainment, with Roland serving as showrunner and Dillard set to direct the pilot episode.

Neuromancer will be executive produced by Roland and Dillard, alongside David Ellison, Dana Goldberg, and Matt Thunell for Skydance Television; Anonymous Content; Drake, Adel ‘Future' Nur and Jason Shrier for DreamCrew Entertainment; Zack Hayden and Gibson.

Apple TV+'s adaptation of the Blake Crouch novel stars Joel Edgerton and Jennifer Connelly, and premieres May 8.

Before there was Blue Beetle, there was The Guyver.

Friendly aliens, adorable moppets, and breathtaking special effects—what's not to love about Spielberg's first big-budget science fiction film?

Bill Skarsgård plays a martial artist out for a revenge in a flashy but insubstantial pop culture potpourri directed by Moritz Mohr

Elliot Page is bringing this fan-favorite sci-fi novel to the big screen. Will the actor deliver the next big sci-fi franchise in Hollywood?

I talked about this before - name your favorite scifi toys. I'll go first:

• My MASK cars and action figures
• My space Legos
• My Star Wars guys

This list will ENRAGE you when you discover Bulma is the greatest scifi engineer, not Scotty or Kaylee from Firefly

'The Mandalorian and Grogu' is hitting theaters in 2026. When it does, it has a perfect opportunity to set up an ancient prequel.

Film sci-fi is often original, with stories that were made specifically for the screen, but there have also been many, many sci-fi adaptations. Many classic novels have been made into sci-fi movies, even previously thought unfilmable ones like Dune, but there are still many great sci-fi novels out there that have never made the leap to the silver screen. These books would make for excellent movies, or in some cases, series of movies.

Elliot Ackerman and James Stavridis have followed their cyber page-turner 2034 with an equally propulsive biotech thriller.

America and Britain recently accused hackers linked to China of an array of cyber attacks. In response the US launched sanctions against figures linked to APT31 — or Advanced Persistent Threat Group 31 — a shadowy cyber outfit it claimed acted as a front for Beijing’s espionage services.

As alarming as this sounds, cyber attacks by murky foreign actors are a common and fairly well-understood threat, for all that they could have catastrophic consequences. But they raise a broader question: how should governments identify threats posed by cutting-edge new technologies?

Here fiction can play an intriguing role. During the war on terror, the US Department of Homeland Security asked an array of science fiction authors to take part in an exercise in which they brainstormed possible future threats. (France ran a similar exercise.) Sometimes novels or pacy thrillers can sound the alarm via imaginative foretelling of looming disasters.

One such example was 2034 by Elliot Ackerman and James Stavridis. A page-turner from 2021, this began with a new Chinese cyber weapon capable of disabling electrical equipment around the world, and concluded in a brutal war over Taiwan in 2034 (hence the title). The result was bleak: a nuclear conflict between the US and China that saw cities wiped out and millions dead.

Costumes seem like an obvious barometer, but the measurements may not be what you’re expecting. Rather than looking for costumes with quality, attention to detail, or uniquely inspired designs, all you have to do is look for how dirty the costumes are.

Costume weathering, the process of adding details of wear and tear like grime, cuts, and scrapes, is a lost art on most productions. The easiest place to see the gold standard is in Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings trilogy. Those costumes aren’t just wonderfully designed, they’re wonderfully destroyed, too. The hobbits’ cloaks start out fresh and beautiful in The Fellowship of the Ring, but by the time Sam and Frodo make it to Mordor they’re torn and faded, with brilliant greens reduced to faded grays by mottled stains set in deep from weeks of sleeping on the ground and trekking through the muck. And the same is true for the clothes of every other character; Aragorn’s leather is worn and tired from years of nomadic adventuring, a strong contrast to the brightness of Legolas’ elven-made gear or Boromir’s quasi-royal Gondorian garb.

Star City will take For All Mankind fans back to the Soviet Union's space race victory in a new paranoid thriller

Now streaming on Peacock for the very first time, the psychedelic satire helmed by Antoine Bardou-Jacquet tackles the famous conspiracy theory that director Stanley Kubrick helped the U.S. government fake the Apollo 11 Moon landing by using the cinematic trickery he employed on 2001: A Space Odyssey a year earlier.

Such wild conjecture deserved an equally wild screen adaptation (an edge-of-your-seat political thriller in the vein of Argo just wouldn't work here), and that's exactly what screenwriter Dean Craig set out to achieve once he sat down to write the drug-fueled odyssey of Moonwalkers, which doesn't even know the meaning of the phrase "play it safe."

Craig, whose screenwriting CV includes Death at a Funeral — both the 2007 original and its 2010 American remake — cleverly uses the Kubrick conspiracy as more of a jumping off point for a Strangelove-ian farce involving a Vietnam-scarred CIA agent (Ron Perlman), a failed rock band manager (Rupert Grint), and a narcotic-addled layabout (Robert Sheehan) trying to pull a faux Moon landing out their butts against the kaleidoscopic backdrop of London, circa 1969. SYFY WIRE recently hopped on Zoom call with the writer for a groovy look-back at the oft-overlooked comedy.

TEHRAN- Throughout history, humans have harbored a fascination with envisioning the world of tomorrow and its potential appearance, a concept that has been imaginatively translated into literature through the genre of science fiction.