I suppose the movie industry has figured out the various formulae for hitting particular market segments within most genres, and the fact they they keep pumping out severe suspension-of-belief sci fi flicks suggests that things that bother me can be perfectly acceptable entertainment for others. I watched 65 last night (all the way through!). Really championship trope grinding every moment of the feature, from beginning to end.
I was transfixed in awe by the thought of how the production team thought about their jobs. They’re certainly not doing it for critical acclaim.
This is somewhat amusing because at the time of release Star Wars was lauded for the technology having a used, lived in appearance. This was in sharp contrast to the typical science fiction movie depicting technology as bright, shiny, and new.
In Genesis II, it was Pax, the organization attempting to rebuild the world. They were implied to be cleaning up old (damaged?) tunnels and stations.
Of course, fixing a train in the station is easier than fixing a leak 2000 miles down a tunnel that’s buried hundreds of feet beneath the bottom of the Pacific. It would take days at service vehicle speeds just to get there.
Still, i would have liked to see the series get made.
The novelization of the Motion Picture explained that the T was for Tiberius which was his mothers first sex instructor. I thought that was a bit racy and surely Gene would have something to say about that. Then I realised that Gene had written it.
People can drive past a horrific accident on the freeway yet think nothing of getting into a car just a short while later and might mock someone afraid to drive or get into a car. It’s very human, regarding risks run daily, to go into denial and think “it won’t happen to me”.
A friend of mine had a theory that Star Fleet medical personnel were the most likely to have “transporter phobia” because they’re the folks who have to deal with the transporter accident results and thus have a different view of the risks involved.
Oddly enough, you did get that in Guardians of the Galaxy III
On the other hand, while you more or less can only use a bullet once (there is reloading, but that’s sort of re manufacturing the bullet) a battery can fire over and over then be recharged. Different circumstances might favor one over the other. For example, desert nomads might prefer laser rifles that don’t require heavy, bulky ammo and can be easily recharged with abundant solar power. Some people living far enough north to go some time without daylight in the winter who have a fixed base might favor bullets.
I prefer it when whomever is writing the SF actually thinks about why things are the way they are rather than just adding random window dressing.
You actually see that with real-world Amish - apparently they’re quite open to using solar power even as they continue to have off-grid homes lit with kerosene and candles and use plowhorses. A clear case of socio-religious factors influencing a lot of tech choices.
Or one enterprising villager buys a solar panel which they charge other people to use to charge their phones. Or, sure, the village pools their money for the solar panel.
The TV series of Logan’s Run had as a main character a pre-apocalypse AI that kept the lights on in a city, then went off for adventures with Logan and Jessica and presumably kept their vehicle running. (In the novels people weren’t restricted to just one city, there was still a viable world-wide civilization going)
Post-apocalypse for awhile I’d expect some tech to keep staggering along, but after a century or two I’d expect it to be gone. Absent some mega-work like the Roman roads or aqueducts which still exist in bits and pieces to the present day.
I never heard that term before. But it perfectly describes L. Ron Hubbard’s Beyond the Black Nebula, an awful little story that still found its way into the Donald Wollheim anthology Tales of Outer Space
The objection to the electric grid, if I understand it correctly, is that it requires continual dependency on non-believers. Apparently buying something from non-believers, but which is then owned and maintained by the Amish, is a different matter.
Horses instead of cars, AIUI, is based on a different issue: the use of cars changes society in ways in which the Amish, and some Mennonites, don’t want to change. The wider society just went ahead and changed, without considering possible long term effects and whether any of them were considered to be negative. The Amish and Mennonites are very much a think-about-it-first, then-pick-and-choose society; decisions vary between individual congregations, and a number of different factors are considered. I often don’t agree with the particular choices made; but I admire the overall attitude.
The early stories I read about virtual reality were all effectively horror stories. Somebody would heroically escape into the real world, or somebody living in the Real World would come across a building full of dreadful breathing bodies hooked into a computer –
Well, not the very first. Daniel F. Galouye’s Simulacron-3, acknowledged as the first non-mechanical “artificial reality” presents it as a revelation, but not necessarily a horror. It was adapted as a German TV movie in 1973 and as a movie, The Thirteenth Floor, in 1999 that was pretty good. But, liker David Cronenberg’s similar eXistenZ that came out about the same time, both were pretty much lost by comparison with The Matrix.
The entire first season of Black Mirror was an interlocking chain of horror stories about how virtual reality and other technologies will make it possible to torture people in Hell forever.
I don’t think we watched the same show named Black Mirror.
First season was pretty darn grim, yes, but there wasn’t any VR in any of its episodes.
The first example of VR I can think of in the series is the Christmas episode, between seasons 2 & 3; the second was San Junipero in season 3 which was about as far from hellish torture as imaginable.