Watch Six New Short Alien Films: Created to Celebrate the 40th Anniversary of Ridley Scott’s Film

in Film, Sci Fi | May 1st, 2019

Alien came out 40 years ago this month, not that its age shows in the least. The terror of the ever-diminishing crew of the Nostromo trapped on their ship with the merciless extraterrestrial monster of the title remains as visceral as it was in 1979, and the dank, pre-digital confines of its setting have taken on a retro patina that successive generations of filmmakers struggle to recreate for themselves.

Now, in a series of brand new short films set in the Alien universe, you can see how six young filmmakers pay tribute to Ridley Scott’s original film and its cinematic legacy, each in their own way. These shorts come as the fruits of an initiative launched by 20th Century Fox to mark 40 years of Alien.

“Developed by emerging filmmakers selected from 550 submissions on the Tongal platform,” writes Collider’s Dave Trumbore, “the anniversary initiative focused on finding the biggest fans of the Alien franchise to create new, thrilling stories for the Alien fandom.”

These stories include many of the elements that fandom has come to expect — isolated and endangered spacefarers, bleak colonies on distant planets, tough women, fearsome creatures lurking in the darkness, escape pods, chest-bursting — as well a few it hasn’t. Indiewire’s Michael Nordine highlights Noah Miller’s Alone, “which follows a woman named Hope who’s hurtling through space on her lonesome. She eventually gains access to a restricted part of her ship after a system malfunction, and you can probably guess what’s on the other side of that sealed-off door.” But you certainly won’t be able to guess what happens next.

Nordine also has praise for the protagonist of the Spears Sisters’ Ore: “A miner about to welcome her latest grandchild, she puts herself in harm’s way rather than risk letting the latest alien specimen make it out of the mine and threaten the colony (and, more to the point, her family) above. That’s a simple, familiar tack, but it’s well told — something true of most Alien stories.” Collectively, he writes, these shorts “emphasize what makes Alien such an enduring franchise: its industrial, working-class environs full of clunky green-screen computers and disgruntled laborers; its bleak view of the corporate bureaucrats who enable the xenomorphs’ carnage by trying to control them and writing off their underlings as collateral damage; and, of course, its heroines.”

Taking pitches from fans through a crowdsourcing platform and distributing the resulting films on Youtube may seem like an almost parodically 21st-century way of extending a franchise that began in the 1970s, but testing out different filmmakers’ visions has long been a part of the greater Alien project: the sequels directed in the 1980s and 90s by James Cameron, David Fincher, and Jean-Pierre Jeunet hinted at the great variety of possibilities laid down by Scott’s original, the cinematic standard-bearer for the contest of wills between man and alien — or rather, woman and alien.

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Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles and the video series The City in Cinema. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Faceboo k.

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9 Science-Fiction Authors Predict the Future: How Jules Verne, Isaac Asimov, William Gibson, Philip K. Dick & More Imagined the World Ahead

in History, Sci Fi | April 18th, 2019

Pressed to give a four-word definition of science fiction, one could do worse than “stories about the future.” That stark simplification does the complex and varied genre a disservice, as the defenders of science fiction against its critics won’t hesitate to claim. And those critics are many, including most recently the writer Ian McEwan, despite the fact that his new novel Machines Like Me is about the introduction of intelligent androids into human society. Sci-fi fans have taken him to task for distancing his latest book from a genre he sees as insufficiently concerned with the “human dilemmas” imagined technologies might cause, but he has a point: set in an alternate 1982, Machines Like Me isn’t about the future but the past.

Then again, perhaps McEwan’s novel is about the future, and the androids simply haven’t yet arrived on our own timeline — or perhaps, like most enduring works of science fiction, it’s ultimately about the present moment. The writers in the sci-fi pantheon all combine a heightened awareness of the concerns of their own eras with a certain genuine prescience about things to come.

Writing in the early 1860s, Jules Verne imagined a suburbanized 20th century with gas-powered cars, electronic surveillance, fax machines and a population at once both highly educated and crudely entertained. Verne also included a simple communication system that can’t help but remind us of the internet we use today — a system whose promise and peril Neuromancer author William Gibson described on television more than 130 years later.

In the list below we’ve rounded up Verne and Gibson’s predictions about the future of technology and humanity along with those of seven other science-fiction luminaries. Despite coming from different generations and possessing different sensibilities, these writers share not just a concern with the future but the ability to express that concern in a way that still interests us, the denizens of that future. Or rather, something like that future: when we hear Aldous Huxley predict in 1950 that “during the next fifty years mankind will face three great problems: the problem of avoiding war; the problem of feeding and clothing a population of two and a quarter billions which, by 2000 A.D., will have grown to upward of three billions, and the problem of supplying these billions without ruining the planet’s irreplaceable resources,” we can agree with the general picture even if he lowballed global population growth by half.

In 1964, Arthur C. Clarke predicted not just the internet but 3D printers and trained monkey servants. In 1977, the more dystopian-minded J.G. Ballard came up with something that sounds an awful lot like modern social media. Philip K. Dick’s timeline of the years 1983 through 2012 includes Soviet satellite weapons, the displacement of oil as an energy source by hydrogen, and colonies both lunar and Martian. Envisioning the world of 2063, Robert Heinlein included interplanetary travel, the complete curing of cancer, tooth decay, and the common cold, and a permanent end to housing shortages. Even Mark Twain, despite not normally being regarded as a sci-fi writer, imagined a “ ‘limitless-distance’ telephone” system introduced and “the daily doings of the globe made visible to everybody, and audibly discussable too, by witnesses separated by any number of leagues.”

As much as the hits impress, they tend to be outnumbered in even science fiction’s greatest minds by the misses. But as you’ll find while reading through the predictions of these nine writers, what separates science fiction’s greatest minds from the rest is the ability to come up with not just interesting hits but interesting misses as well. Considering why they got right what they got right and why they got wrong what they got wrong tells us something about the workings of their imaginations, but also about the eras they did their imagining in — and how their times led to our own, the future to which so many of them dedicated so much thought.

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Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles and the video series The City in Cinema. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Faceboo k.

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Isaac Asimov Predicts the Future of Civilization–and Recommends Ways to Ensure That It Survives (1978)

in Sci Fi | March 19th, 2019

When we talk about what could put an end to civilization today, we usually talk about climate change. The frightening scientific research behind that phenomenon has, apart from providing a seemingly infinite source of fuel for the blaze of countless political debates, also inspired a variety of dystopian visions, credible and otherwise, of no small number of science-fiction writers. One wonders what a science-fictional mind of, say, Isaac Asimov’s caliber would make of it. Asimov died in 1992, a few years before climate change attained the presence in the zeitgeist it has today, but we can still get a sense of his approach to thinking about these kinds of literally existential questions from his 1978 talk above.

When people talked about what could put an end to civilization in 1978, they talked about overpopulation. A decade earlier, Stanford biologist Paul Ehrlich published The Population Bomb, whose early editions opened with these words: “The battle to feed all of humanity is over. In the 1970s hundreds of millions of people will starve to death in spite of any crash programs embarked upon now. At this late date nothing can prevent a substantial increase in the world death rate.” With these and other grim pronouncements lodged in their minds, the bestselling book’s many readers saw humanity faced with a stark choice: let that death rate increase, or proactively lower the birth rate.

A decade later, Asimov frames the situation in the same basic terms, though he shows more optimism — or at least inventiveness — in addressing it, supported by the workings of his powerful imagination. This isn’t to say that the images he throws out are exactly utopian: he sees humanity, growing at then-current rates, ultimately housed in “one world-girdling skyscraper, partially apartment houses, partially factories, partially all kinds of things — schools, colleges — and the entire ocean taken out of its bed and placed on the roof, and growing algae or something like that. Because all those people will have to be fed, and the only way they can be fed is to allow no waste whatever.”

This necessity will be the mother of such inventions as “thick conduits leading down into the ocean water from which you take out the algae and all the other plankton, or whatever the heck it is, and you pound it and you separate it and you flavor it and you cook it, and finally you have your pseudo-steak and your mock veal and your healthful sub-vegetables and so on.” Where to get the nutrients to fertilize the growth of more algae? “Only from chopped-up corpses and human wastes.” It would probably interest Asimov, and certainly amuse him, to see how much research into algae-based food goes on here in the 21st century (let alone the popularity of an algae-utilizing meal replacement beverage called Soylent). But however delicious all those become, humanity will need more to live: energy, space, and yes, a comfortable ambient temperature.

Asimov’s suite of proposed solutions, the explanation of which he spins into high and often prescient entertainment, includes birth control, solar power, lunar mining, and the repurposing of some of the immense budget spent on “war machines.” The volume of applause in the room shows how heartily some agreed with him then, and perspectives like Asimov’s have drawn more adherents in the more than 40 years since, about a decade after Asimov confidently predicted that the world would run out of oil, a time when an increasing number of developed countries have begun to worry about their falling birthrates. But then, Asimov also imagined that Mount Everest was unconquerable because Martians lived on top of it in a story published a seven months after Edmund Hillary and Tenzing Norgay made it up there — a fact he made a rule of cheerfully admitting whenever he started with the predictions.

Isaac Asimov Laments the “Cult of Ignorance” in the United States: A Short, Scathing Essay from 1980

Isaac Asimov Predicts in 1983 What the World Will Look Like in 2019: Computerization, Global Co-operation, Leisure Time & Moon Mining

Isaac Asimov’s Favorite Story “The Last Question” Read by Isaac Asimov— and by Leonard Nimoy

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Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles and the video series The City in Cinema. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Faceboo k.

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Pioneering Sci-Fi Author William Gibson Predicts in 1997 How the Internet Will Change Our World

in Books, Literature, Sci Fi, Technology | February 5th, 2019

“What’s the one thing that all great works of science fiction have in common?” asks a 1997 episode of The Net, the BBC’s television series about the possibilities of this much-talked-about new thing called the internet. “They all tried to see into the future, and they all got it wrong. Orwell’s 1984, Huxley’s Brave New World, Arthur C. Clarke’s 2001: all, to some extent or other, wrong. And there’s another name to add to this list: William Gibson.” But then on strolls Gibson himself, fresh off the writing of Idoru, a novel involving a human who wants to marry a digitally generated Japanese pop star, to grant the interview above.

In it Gibson admits that computers hadn’t gone quite the way he’d imagined thirteen years earlier in his debut novel Neuromancer — but in which he also offers prescient advice about how we should regard new technology even today. “The thing that Neuromancer predicts as being actually like the internet isn’t actually like the internet at all!” Gibson says in a more recent interview with Wired. “I didn’t get it right but I said there was going to be something.” Back in the mid-1980s, as he tells the BBC, “there was effectively no internet to extrapolate from. The cyberspace I made up isn’t being used in Neuromancer the way we’re using the internet today.”

Gibson had envisioned a corporate-dominated network infested with “cybernetic car thieves skulking through it attempting to steal tidbits of information.” By the mid-1990s, though, the internet had become a place where “a really talented and determined fifteen-year-old” could create something more compelling than “a multinational entertainment conglomerate might come up with.” He tells the BBC that “what the internet has become is as much a surprise to me as the collapse of the Soviet Union was,” but at that point he had begun to perceive the shape of things to come. “I can’t see why it won’t become completely ubiquitous,” he says, envisioning its evolution “into something like television to the extent that it penetrates every level of society.”

At the same time, “it doesn’t matter how fast your modem is if you’re being shelled by ethnic separatists” — still very much a concern in certain parts of the world — and even the most promising technologies don’t merit our uncritical embrace. “I think we should respect the power of technology and try to fear it in a rational way,” he says. “The only appropriate response” is to give in to neither technophobia nor technophilia, but “to teach ourselves to be absolutely ambivalent about them and imagine their most inadvertent side effects,” the side effects “that tend to get us” — not to mention the ones that make the best plot elements. Seeing as how we now live in a world where marriage to synthetic Japanese idols has become a possibility, among other developments seemingly pulled from the pages of Gibson’s novels, we would do well to heed even these decades-old words of advice about his main subject.

via Big Think

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Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles and the video series The City in Cinema. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Faceboo k.

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Ursula K. Le Guin’s Daily Routine: The Discipline That Fueled Her Imagination

in Sci Fi, Writing | January 29th, 2019

Image by Gorthian, via Wikimedia Commons

“Some of us are Norman Mailer,” said Ursula K. LeGuin in a 1976 interview with science-fiction fanzine Luna Monthly, “but others of us are middle-aged Portland housewives.” And though Le Guin may have thought of herself as one of the latter, “middle-aged Portland housewife” is hardly the way the rest of us would describe her. Over a nearly 60-year-long career, Le Guin produced an enormous body of literary work, including but not limited to the six books in which she created the world of Earthsea and other acclaimed sci-fi novels like The Left Hand of Darkness, The Dispossessed, and The Lathe of Heaven. And somehow she managed to write all of it between 7:15 a.m. and 1:00 p.m. each day.

Or that’s what her ideal writing schedule dictates, anyway. Recently tweeted out by writer Michael J. Seidlinger as “the ideal writing routine,” it first appeared in an interview she gave in 1988 (and more recently reappeared in Ursula Le Guin: The Last Interview and Other Conversations).

Beginning at the early hour of 5:30 in the morning, the time to “wake up and lie there and think,” it continues on to breakfast — and “lots” of it — at 6:15, and the commencement of the day’s “writing, writing, writing” an hour later, which lasts until lunch at noon. After that, Le Guin considered what we consider her main work to be done, moving on to such pursuits as reading, music, correspondence, “maybe house cleaning,” and dinner. Past 8:15, she said, “I tend to be very stupid,” a state in which nobody could write the sort of books we remember her for.

But however originally she wrote, Le Guin was hardly exceptional in living this way while doing it. “Be regular and orderly in your life, so that you may be violent and original in your work,” said Gustave Flaubert, a maxim true for enough writers that we also worked it in when we featured an infographic on the daily routines of famous creative people. In both Flaubert and Le Guin’s case (or in the case of a writer like Haruki Murakami, who rises famously early and runs famously hard when working on a book), their domestic lives, well-ordered to the point that an outside observer would find them boring, facilitated the creation of literature like none that had ever come before. This despite the fact that, on the surface, few novels could seem more dissimilar than Flaubert and Le Guin’s, but each writer would have seen what the other had in common: specifically, that they knew what it took to get the imagination well and truly fired up.

via Michael J. Seidlinger

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Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles and the video series The City in Cinema. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Faceboo k.

by Colin Marshall | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 3 ) |

Oodles of Classic Doctor Who Episodes Streaming Free Online This Month

in Sci Fi, Television | January 18th, 2019

A quick fyi: This month, Twitch is presenting a marathon streaming of classic Doctor Who episodes. Continuing through January 25th, they plan to broadcast “11 to 12 hours of new episodes per day (~27 episodes), repeating once so you can catch Doctor Who nearly 24 hours a day, every day…” Stream the episodes right above, or here on Twitch.

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via BoingBoing

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by OC | Permalink | Make a Comment ( None ) |

Isaac Asimov Predicts in 1983 What the World Will Look Like in 2019: Computerization, Global Co-operation, Leisure Time & Moon Mining

in Literature, Sci Fi, Science | December 31st, 2018

Painting of Asimov on his throne by Rowena Morill, via Wikimedia Commons

“It’s difficult to make predictions,” they say, “especially about the future.” The witticism has been variously attributed. If Yogi Berra said it, it’s adorable nonsense, if Mark Twain, dry plainspoken irony. If Niels Bohr, however, we have a statement that makes us wonder what exactly “the future” could mean in a radically uncertain universe.

If scientists can’t predict the future, who can? Science fiction writers, of course. They may be spectacularly wrong at times, but few professionals seem better equipped to imaginatively extrapolate from current conditions—cultural, technological, social, and political—and show us things to come. J.G. Ballard, Octavia Butler, Arthur C. Clarke, Kurt Vonnegut… all have foreseen many of the marvels and dystopian nightmares that have arrived since their time.

In 1964, Asimov used the occasion of the New York World’s Fair to offer his vision of fifty years hence. “What will the World’s Fair of 2014 be like?” he asked in The New York Times, the question itself containing an erroneous assumption about the durability of that event. As a scientist himself, his ideas are both technologically farseeing and conservative, containing advances we can imagine not far off in our future, and some that may seem quaint now, though reasonable by the standards of the time (“fission-power plants… supplying well over half the power needs of humanity”).

Nineteen years later, Asimov ventured again to predict the future—this time of 2019 for The Star. Assuming the world has not been destroyed by nuclear war, he sees every facet of human society transformed by computerization. This will, as in the Industrial Revolution, lead to massive job losses in “clerical and assembly-line jobs” as such fields are automated. “This means that a vast change in the nature of education must take place, and entire populations must be made ‘computer-literate’ and must be taught to deal with a ‘high-tech’ world,” he writes.

The transition to a computerized world will be difficult, he grants, but we should have things pretty much wrapped up by now.

By the year 2019, however, we should find that the transition is about over. Those who can be retrained and re-educated will have been: those who can’t be will have been put to work at something useful, or where ruling groups are less wise, will have been supported by some sort of grudging welfare arrangement.

In any case, the generation of the transition will be dying out, and there will be a new generation growing up who will have been educated into the new world. It is quite likely that society, then, will have entered a phase that may be more or less permanently improved over the situation as it now exists for a variety of reasons.

Asimov foresees the climate crisis, though he doesn’t phrase it that way. “The consequences of human irresponsibility in terms of waste and pollution will become more apparent and unbearable with time and again, attempts to deal with this will become more strenuous.” A “world effort” must be applied, necessitating “increasing co-operation among nations and among groups within nations” out of a “cold-blooded realization that anything less than that will mean destruction for all.”

He is confident, however, in such “negative advances” as the “defeat of overpopulation, pollution and militarism.” These will be accompanied by “positive advances” like improvements in education, such that “education will become fun because it will bubble up from within and not be forced in from without.” Likewise, technology will enable increased quality of life for many.

… more and more human beings will find themselves living a life rich in leisure.

This does not mean leisure to do nothing, but leisure to do something one wants to do; to be free to engage in scientific research. in literature and the arts, to pursue out-of-the-way interests and fascinating hobbies of all kinds.

If this seems “impossibly optimistic,” he writes, just wait until you hear his thoughts on space colonization and moon mining.

The Asimov of 1983 sounds as confident in his predictions as the Asimov of 1964, though he imagines a very different world each time. His future scenarios tell us as much or more about the time in which he wrote as they do about the time in which we live. Read his full essay at The Star and be the judge of how accurate his predictions are, and how likely any of his optimistic solutions for our seemingly intractable problems might be in the coming year.

Philip K. Dick Makes Off-the-Wall Predictions for the Future: Mars Colonies, Alien Viruses & More (1981)

Arthur C. Clarke Predicts the Future in 1964 … And Kind of Nails It

Octavia Butler’s 1998 Dystopian Novel Features a Fascistic Presidential Candidate Who Promises to “Make America Great Again”

Sci-Fi Author J.G. Ballard Predicts the Rise of Social Media (1977)

Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness

by Josh Jones | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 1 ) |

NASA Creates Movie Parody Posters for Its Expedition Flights: Download Parodies of Metropolis, The Matrix, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy and More

in Design, Sci Fi, Science | December 27th, 2018

For just over eighteen years now, NASA has been conducting expeditions to the International Space Station. Each of these missions has not just a name, or at least a number (last week saw the launch of Expedition 58), but an official poster with a group photo of the crew. “These posters were used to advertise expeditions and were also hung in NASA facilities and other government organizations,” says Bored Panda. “However, when astronauts got bored of the standard group photos they decided to spice things up a bit.”

And “what’s a better way to do that other than throwing in some pop culture references?” As anyone who has ever worked with scientists knows, a fair few of them have somehow made themselves into living compendia of knowledge of not just their field but their favorite books, movies, and television shows — not always, but very often, books, movies, and television shows science-fictional in nature.

The prime example, it hardly bears mentioning, would be Star Trek, but the well of fandom at NASA runs much deeper than that.

You’ll get a sense of how far that well goes if you have a look through the Expedition poster archive at NASA’s web site. There you’ll find not just pop culture references but elaborately designed tributes — downloadable in high resolution — to the likes of not just Star Trek but Star Wars, The Matrix, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy (the sole possible theme, Douglas Adams fans will agree, for Expedition 42), and even Fritz Lang’s Metropolis, which first gave dystopian sci-fi its visual form in 1927 (and which you can watch here). Albums are also fair game, as evidenced by the Abbey Road poster for Expedition 26.

Bored Panda calls these posters “hilariously awkward,” but opinions do vary: “I love them,” writes Boing Boing’s Rusty Blazenhoff. “I think they’re fun and creative.” And whatever you think of the concepts, can you fail to be impressed by the sheer attention to detail that has clearly gone into replicating the source images? It’s all more or less in line with the formidable graphic design skill at NASA, previously featured here on Open Culture, that has gone into its posters celebrating space travel and the 40th anniversary of the Voyager missions.

Going through the Expedition poster archive, I notice that none seems yet to have paid tribute to Andrei Tarkovsky’s Solaris, surely one of the most powerful pieces of outer space-related cinema ever made. Granted, that film has much less to do with teamwork and camaraderie than the intense psychological isolation of the individual, which would make it tricky indeed to recreate any of its memorable images as proud group photos. But if NASA’s poster designers can’t take on that mission, nobody can.

via Boing Boing

NASA Lets You Download Free Posters Celebrating the 40th Anniversary of the Voyager Missions

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Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles and the video series The City in Cinema. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Faceboo k.

by Colin Marshall | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 2 ) |

Watch Six New Short Alien Films: Created to Celebrate the 40th Anniversary of Ridley Scott’s Film

9 Science-Fiction Authors Predict the Future: How Jules Verne, Isaac Asimov, William Gibson, Philip K. Dick & More Imagined the World Ahead

Isaac Asimov Predicts the Future of Civilization–and Recommends Ways to Ensure That It Survives (1978)

Pioneering Sci-Fi Author William Gibson Predicts in 1997 How the Internet Will Change Our World

Ursula K. Le Guin’s Daily Routine: The Discipline That Fueled Her Imagination

Oodles of Classic Doctor Who Episodes Streaming Free Online This Month

Isaac Asimov Predicts in 1983 What the World Will Look Like in 2019: Computerization, Global Co-operation, Leisure Time & Moon Mining

NASA Creates Movie Parody Posters for Its Expedition Flights: Download Parodies of Metropolis, The Matrix, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy and More

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