Word: sci
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Show me a human fear, and i'll show you a monster. Our ancestors populated dark forests with dragons and uncharted seas with krakens. Sci-fi transmuted commies and nukes into body snatchers and Godzilla. In the 1990s, The X-Files turned post-Vietnam paranoia into an elaborate government-alien conspiracy...
With Fringe (from Lost's creator, J.J. Abrams), sci-fi has come full circle back to Frankenstein: we have gained too much power over life and made the body into a mere machine. Plots turn on how bodies can be used as recording devices: corpses are psychically "interrogated"; people's memories are stolen by a villain jamming wires up their noses; a murder victim's optic nerve is hooked up to a TV screen to show the last thing she saw before she died. The humans involved have no more volition than a hard drive being reformatted in the shop...
This is what keeps Fringe from being more than grim spatter sci-fi: it gets that the very things that make science terrifying also make it cool. (See also CSI.) This is especially true when it comes to the bioscience conundrums that make Fringe's sci-fi so literally intimate. On this new X-Files, the truth is not just out there. It's in here--encrypted in our bodies, under our skin, in our very DNA. If only we could figure out what we are trying to tell ourselves...
...Sci-fi lizard series V to be remade. Only 17 '80s series...
...days, or is it the writers themselves who are doing something more expansive? I think it's the latter. From [fantasy writers] John Crowley and Jonathan Carroll outwards, there have been these waves of people who wrote as through it were perfectly natural to use horror, or fantasy, or sci-fi approaches and themes in mainstream stories, or vice versa. It seems to me that you get the best of both worlds in that way. And in fact, the ultimate argument I would make is that there is essentially just one world if you're talking about good fiction...