To take things in a different direction, there’s Futurama, which does not use FTL travel, because they raised the speed of light in 2208.
On a less humorous note, what about present-day-ish science fiction stuff like Space Camp and Space Cowboys?
I haven’t seen the movie in a long time, but in the book the most advanced technology is the wall screen, and we’ve pretty much got that now.
Except for the magic intelligence enhancer which drives everything. The rest is a mundane story
Lord of the Flies, definitely. On the Beach too. But I’m not sure about the movies where the survivors are in an intact New York City. “After We’re Gone” describes how cities fall apart without constant care. “I Am Legend,” (the Will Smith version) is definitely not hard sf, but it at least tries to show things falling apart.
It’s worse than them walking on the moon without spacesuits. The near side of the moon has no atmosphere - the far side does. How does that work?
And while the staging is accurate, they seem to have reaction mass to spare since they can handle last minute stowaways, no problem. I’m sure Oberth objected, but what got on the screen isn’t all that hard.
Worth watching, though.
I hope that was a joke. The Martian Chronicles was about as far from hard science fiction as you can get. Bradbury would not disagree.
Exception: “There will come soft rains.”
-
I made especial note of TV. The economics are completely different from film.
-
Pilots tend to be the most expensive episodes, especially in sf series, as they are used to sell the rest of the series. There are exceptions (GoT), however these exceptions tend to be for shows consistently popular. For a more modest show like Firefly? The cost-cutting begins in episode 2.
-
Again, wire work is extremely difficult. No actor worth their salt would sign an open-ended, possibly years-long contract requiring them to do all their scenes hooked up to pulleys. No producer would sign off on such a thing, given the expense. Few directors would care to work in such an environment. Choreography would be excessively detailed… people in 0-g bump into each other, right? How do you realistically portray that?
My point is simple: the use of earth-normal gravity on space-based TV shows is a function of economics and production issues, not science illiteracy, and its inclusion in a list of items which preclude a TV show from being “hard” science fiction does not take full account of how TV shows are produced and financed.
I would argue the killer robot dogs are higher-tech, and more expensive, than a wall-sized television.
You named Gravity as possibly the sole exception (it is not). That didn’t make it seem like you were focusing on TV.
But why do you keep harping on wire work when spinning and acceleration can be used instead, and astronauts kept seated during most zero-g scenes?
IIRC the RDA had a way to send FTL messages between Pandora & Earth, but it was extraordinarily expensive and had extremely low bandwidth.
Zeroth Law actually. The Machines would’ve needed to harm many, many individual humans to get most of humanity into that tanks, but now humanity isn’t going to be able to drive itself to extinction. Also it explains why their first instinct was to make the Matrix into a paradise.
A Clockwork Orange and Century City (the TV show from 2004 that looked like a mash-up of Star Trek and LA Law). Heh, you may never see these two productions mentioned together in the same paragraph again, but both are feasible, near-future stories purged of magic and obvious pseudoscience.
On the other hand, both are more rooted in “soft” social sciences than in physics or astronomy, so they may not be exactly “hard” SF.
Interesting question. Personally, I would welcome social science fiction into the hard science fiction tent, as long as the social science was plausible. So I agree about Clockwork Orange. But I’m not so sure about other “dystopian future” fiction, like Hunger Games or Handmaid’s Tale. In particular, when a story declares itself to be a future version of our own society as those do, I have to be able to imagine us evolving from our present state to what is shown there. And I just feel like there are some misunderstandings of human nature that become corners cut to get to a cool and terrifying version of dystopia. Even 1984 has some dubious elements in this regard, but I wouldn’t fight anyone else who wanted to include it.
I responded to all those arguments in #74.
Those are not at all the pertinent facts of the case. Kip Thorne doesn’t just “enthusiastically support” Interstellar, he helped create it. Moreover, he established the guiding principles that it must be (1) based on real science, and (2) if speculation was necessary, that the speculation be realistically derived from real science. The purpose of the book was to show how those principles were followed, and in the process, to give a sort of primer on Newtonian, relativistic, and quantum physics in the context of the movie, and show where it engaged in speculation or educated guesses. It’s nothing remotely like Star Trek, and if respected physicists watch Star Trek, it would be in the same sense in which they might read comic books, too, or pulp science fiction. Kip Thorne would be offended by the comparison.
If one accepts Clockwork Orange as science fiction, one also has to accept movies like Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. Which, BTW, is a superb film, but not one that I’d normally consider science fiction. My only objection to calling them science fiction is that it pretty much opens the floodgates to anything that has even a single science-y plot device but, meh, it’s all just semantics.
And, without adding much to the story, unless (a) you have a showrunner who’s trying for true “hard” sci-fi, or (b) the plot is specifically built around either zero-g, or the mechanics by which the ship is simulating artificial gravity.
So he has a vested interest in its success, and that makes his positive opinion more credible? :dubious:
BTW, Eternal Sunshine and Clockwork Orange are definitely both science fiction.
Nope. What makes his opinion credible is being one of the world’s leading theoretical physicists and arguably the world’s leading expert on precisely the scientific subjects of the film, specifically the astrophysical implications of general relativity. Plus the Nobel Prize in physics he was awarded last year.
He wrote a book specifically detailing why the movie was based on good science. If you want to argue with a Nobel laureate about his own specialty, go ahead, but it seems a precarious position to take.
Agent Smith indeed tells Neo that the first Matrix was designed as a perfect human world, and that human minds did not accept it. But we mustn’t forget that the reason the world is trashed, the sun obscured, with everybody living underground is as a consequence of the apocalyptic war between man and machine. It is not known which side started it, but I never got the impression the machines had humanity’s best interests at heart.
When interpreting The Matrix, we must also not ignore the allegorical aspects of the story where Neo = Jesus, etc. Humanity in soulless shackles, even in a false paradise, was a situation he had to redeem.
None of this directly contradicts the supposition that the machines-- somehow-- meant well (and Morpheus admits that it is unknown but possible that the machines were only defending themselves), but, if so, then they were themselves ultimately misguided.
Dallas specifically mentions that it will take about 18 months in suspended animation for them to get home. That’s calculated following the realization that they’re nowhere near Earth. So…
- They’re near another sun. There are no worlds/asteroids like the one they land on in the solar system.
- It’s going to take them less than 2 years to get to Earth from wherever they are.
- They have to be at least 4.3 light years away
Ergo, using on canonical sources - from the first movie - they have some form of FTL.
Elysium may fit in - if you accept that by 2154 we will have med pods that can generate body parts and reverse the aging process
How about the Planet of the Apes remakes (not the original Heston or Marky Mark ones). Science fiction in gene modification making apes super-smart!
We did discuss this a year or two ago.
Except for the giant Space Cannon that fires the travelers to the moon, From the Earth to the Moon is a pretty mundane story, too.
reductio ad absurdum, indeed.