Word: fi
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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While extraterrestrials remain rumors, some sci-fi is less and less fi. Robots used to be staples of futuristic novels, but now they are virtually essential to production lines, scientific research, nuclear safety and antiterrorist swat teams. Below, with their costs, are a few recent models of modern commercial robots...
...film's well-executed special effects and adventure sequences show that there is nothing wrong with borrowing from other movies so long as it's done well. Viewers will have flashbacks to a wide array of adventure, sci-fi, and apocalyptic classics: "Star Wars," "Top Gun," "Alien," "The Day the Earth Stood Still," and TV movie landmarks like "V," and "The Day After." Even the acronym-based ad campaign reminds one of "Terminator 2: Judgement...
...longtime readers like Brown, the real sci-fi is "hard" sci-fi. It's the literary equivalent of a whiskey shot: bracing, no-nonsense extrapolation of today's science. And it's coming back after years of neglect. The colonization of Mars, for example--a quintessential hard sci-fi subject--inspired Kim Stanley Robinson's Blue Mars (Bantam). The third volume in his acclaimed Mars trilogy, it's a painstakingly plotted epic that follows a group of pioneers across centuries as they transform the Red Planet into an ecologically friendly refuge. "We're acting as the conscience and subconscious...
Then there's cyberpunk, the Net-based genre whose grim, dehumanized vision of the future dominated sci-fi during the late '80s. Its seminal work was the 1984 classic Neuromancer, by William Gibson, who never was happy being pigeonholed as a cyberpunk writer. "It wasn't our term," he says. "It's one of those labels." And although he did invent the word cyberspace, says Gibson, "I had to spend years and years figuring out what it meant." In the past few years, cyberpunk has lost some of its glitter, perhaps because cruising the Net has become so commonplace...
...will those descendants even read sci-fi? "When I started working here 20 years ago, we were getting the 12- and 13-year-olds," says Michael Franklin, manager of New York City's Science Fiction Shop. "We're still getting the same people--but now they're 32 and 33." Where have all the teenage gearheads gone? The Web. Nintendo. The Cineplex Odeon. "It's awful, a terrible habit!" says one of Holy Fire's 21st century Gen Xers. "Reading is so bad for you, it destroys your eyes and hurts your posture and makes you fat." How ironic...