Tag: scifi

Hollywood Eats Scifi Brains

Hollywood is afraid to produce true scifi. Instead we get little boys on broomsticks

Why has Hollywood stopped making serious scifi? It is all about risk and money. “Scifi is hard to fund — it’s never a slam-dunk. You have to put a certain level of budget into these films.”

If scifi has always been hit-or-miss with studios, investors these days seem less willing to gamble. Who knows if The Terminator could have gotten the green light in this environment? It was made in 1984 for $6M — the kind of midrange budget that rarely exists any more — and starred a little-known weight lifter with an unpronounceable name.

Star Wars, a monumental struggle for George Lucas to produce, would likely be a non-starter these days. Blade Runner? Perhaps too dark to get financing. And 2001: A Space Odyssey? With its cast of unknowns, enigmatic ending and (in inflation-adjusted figures) more than $50M budget, it just wouldn’t compute with today’s backers.

Paul McAuley books

Making History After the Quiet War is over, a historian discovers that victory is far from simple. A novella published back-to-back with Stephen Baxter’s Reality Dust as part of the Gollancz Binaries series.

Whole Wide World Sex, surveillance, and Wreckless Eric ..A murder mystery set in near future London, where information is the universal currency, and some people will do anything to be able to control it. There are no spaceships or ray guns in Whole Wide World, just as there were none in McAuley’s earlier SF novel Fairyland, but the rigorous examination of the ramifications of a major issue on the future of our society make this novel every bit as much science fiction. And, in different ways, it is every bit as good. Whole Wide World is a major novel, and McAuley is one of our best.’

The Secret of Life There is life on Mars. Will it end life on Earth? A gripping near-future thriller for the Age of the Genome, blending the wonder of classic science fiction with the terrifying implications of biotechnology.

Holy Fire

life extension haves and havenots

The 21st century is coming to a close, and the medical industrial complex dominates the world economy. It is a world of synthetic memory drugs, benevolent government surveillance, underground anarchists, and talking canine companions. Power is in the hands of conservative senior citizens who have watched their health and capital investments with equal care, gaining access to the latest advancements in life-extension technology. Meanwhile, the young live on the fringes of society, eking out a meager survival on free, government-issued rations and a black market in stolen technological gadgetry from an earlier, less sophisticated age.

Jury Service

Earth has a population of 1b hominids. For the most part, they are happy with their lot, living in a preserve at the bottom of a gravity well. Those who are unhappy have emigrated, joining one or another of the swarming densethinker clades that fog the inner solar system with a dust of molecular machinery so thick that it obscures the sun. Except for the solitary lighthouse beam that perpetually tracks the Earth in its orbit, the system from outside resembles a spherical fogbank radiating in the infrared spectrum; a matrioshka brain, nested Dyson orbitals built from the dismantled bones of moons and planets.

Bad scifi lessons

dave liloia alerted me to the sci fi movie nights at the harvard center for astrophysics.

The Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics will screen a classic science fiction film on the first Thursday of each month. The series will explore the idea that “everything we learned about science, we learned from the movies.” Except for Camp-o-Rama, doors open at 18:45 and programs begin at 19:10 with a Flash Gordon serial. Movie begins at 19:30.

the next installment on 12/6 features robot monster along with the well-known plan 9 from outer space:

Ro-Man, the most evil creature in the Universe, comes to Earth to kill everyone with his powerful death ray. Perhaps even outdoing Plan 9 From Outer Space as the Biggest Turkey Ever Made, Robot Monster is beyond belief…and that’s why it is so much fun to watch…but no more than once! Labeled a “Poverty Row Quickie” by film critics, this low budget 1950’s B film stars actors and directors who never should have come within a km of a movie camera. Featuring imbecilic dialog and moronic costumes, this classic sub-schlock masterpiece rivals anything put out by Ed Wood! Starring: Who cares?

Second renaissance

This is a history of the world before the Matrix was created. The Second Renaissance is the most powerful 20 minute animated story I have ever seen. The powerful imagery shocked, horrified, and forever changed me after my initial viewing. Images like the robotic horse rider storming across the nuclear battlefield or the televised execution of robot protesters show us a future that is terrible to behold. Second Renaissance brings about a new emotion towards the machines, sympathy. In the first Matrix movie, our only view of the machine’s personality is through Agent Smith. His short efficient speeches don’t invoke much sympathy for the robotic plight. Second Renaissance shows us that we were the ones who screwed up and we paid for it with our souls.

Planck Dives


The polis of Cartan has been in orbit around the black hole Chandrasekhar for almost 3 centuries. Now, a group of polis citizens are preparing to encode clones of themselves into a form that will be able to travel inside the hole and explore the nature of space time at the Planck scale, 10-35 meters.

i have to read some of the works of greg egan after i finish flatland a romance of many dimensions.

2022-02-08: Speaking of Flatland, Planiverse sounds interesting as well:

I recently praised Planiverse as peak hard science fiction. But as I hadn’t read it in decades, I thought maybe I should reread it to see if it really lived up to my high praise.

The basic idea is that a computer prof and his students in our universe create a simulated 2D universe, which then somehow becomes a way to view and talk to 1 particular person in a real 2D universe. This person is contacted just as they begin a mystical quest across their planet’s one continent, which lets the reader see many aspects of life there. Note there isn’t a page-turning plot nor interesting character development; the story is mainly an excuse to describe its world.

The book seems crazy wrong on how its mystical quest ends, and on its assumed connection to a computer simulation in our universe. But I presume that the author would admit to those errors as the cost of telling his story. However, the book does very well on physics, chemistry, astronomy, geology, and low level engineering. That is, on noticing how such things change as one moves from our 3D world to this 2D world, including via many fascinating diagrams. In fact this book does far better than most “hard” science fiction. Which isn’t so surprising as it is the result of a long collaboration between 10s of scientists. But alas no social scientists seem to have been included, as the book seem laughably wrong there. Let me explain.