James Whale’s Frankenstein (1931) and Bride of Frankenstein (1935) explored both the hubris of the male scientist described in Mary Shelley’s novel Frankenstein, or the Modern Prometheus (1818) as well as the repressive sexuality of Western culture. Robert Wise’s The Day the Earth Stood Still (1951) advocated for a liberal belief in the collective submission to a technocratic elite.

Desk Set (1957) is a delightful Tracy-Hepburn comedy about automation and information technology. 

In the far future, the [human group] fights a pitched battle against the mighty [alien name] Empire, but deep in the mysterious [region of space], among the ruins of the past, a darker threat looms."

Korzybski

arrier bag rather than weapon of domination,

“Well, they believe that when they have listed all His names — and they reckon that there are about nine billion of them — God’s purpose will be achieved. The human race will have finished what it was created to do, and there won’t be any point in carrying on. Indeed, the very idea is something like blasphemy.”

, Octavia Butler

Set on a space station in the 23rd century, the show revolves around galactic politics, epic alien battles, and secret agendas from a variety of factions

Once upon a time a magazine editor asked Twitter what to do with a 5-year-old who was despondent over a Mars rover that could never come home. John Rogers responded: “Hang on a minute.” A couple of hours later, he sent this.

Ready Player One Official Trailer #1

Chiang’s story is driven by the obsolescence of the virtual world that is the host platform for the digients, who can continue to exist as social beings only if their software engine is ported to its successor. Unfortunately, their parent corporation has gone bankrupt and so porting the software is not commercially viable. The digients, who are themselves clamoring for individual liberties—you can think of them as woke Tamagotchi—have become what the industry would term abandonware. It is thus left to their small circle of caretakers and enthusiasts to create an incentive for the port—for example, by licensing the digients to a company specializing in artificial sex partners. In all cases, however, the real value of the digients turns out to be their accumulated experiential history as sentient lifeforms.

This is something the digients of Chiang’s story would understand very well, for their existence is continually imperiled by the limited capacity of the virtual worlds they inhabit to render their digital selfhood across changing platforms.

Empire Strikes Back is the rare sequel that manages to outshine its predecessor.

As film genres go, science fiction is often the one that’s hardest for folks to get into. Literal-minded moviegoers often have a hard time with worlds where anything—and everything—is possible and, well, some people just don’t like space.

n 1978, the indisputably most popular science fiction movie of all time — Star Wars — was nominated for Best Picture at the 50th Academy Awards, but it lost to Annie Hall.

As part of EFF’s 25th Anniversary celebrations, we are releasing “Pwning Tomorrow: Stories from the Electronic Frontier,” an anthology of speculative fiction from more than 20 authors, including Bruce Sterling, Lauren Beukes, Cory Doctorow, and Charlie Jane Anders. To get the ebook, you can make an optional contribution to support EFF’s work, or you can download it at no cost. We're releasing the ebook under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-No Derivatives 4.0 International license, which permits sharing among users. 

…AND I SHOW YOU HOW DEEP THE RABBIT HOLE GOES