Medical research can be complex and difficult to understand, but cinematic representations of mad scientists who speak gobbledygook add to the confusion. An annual event separates fact from fiction.
Whatever name you give it, writing of this sort is increasingly becoming the prime location for imaginative representations of our culture’s deepest hopes and fears.
Roaming among the dinosaurs in Jurassic World.
ILM/Universal Pictures and Amblin Entertainment
By featuring girls who buck the conventions of their world – and ours – films like Insurgent inspire fans to enact real change.
Star Trek fans were especially drawn to Leonard Nimoy’s Mr. Spock – who showed many that it “was okay to be a nerd, that even in the future not everyone fit in, or needed to.”
Sam Howzit/Flickr
Lynn Zubernis, West Chester University of Pennsylvania
Star Trek fans were especially drawn to Leonard Nimoy’s Mr. Spock – who showed many that it “was okay to be a nerd, that even in the future not everyone fit in, or needed to.”
Declan Fahy, American University School of Communication
Interstellar’s protagonists spend a significant portion of the movie’s 169-minute running time giving mini-lectures – sometimes with props and a little whiteboard – on theoretical physics. The characters…
The clincher of the latest season of Doctor Who? The Doctor’s nemesis is a woman.
ABC Publicity
The latest series of Doctor Who wrapped up on the weekend with the completion of a startling two-episode finale: Dark Waters and Death in Heaven. This season we’ve seen what is perhaps the darkest, edgiest…
Note: this article has spoilers. In Interstellar’s near-ish future, our climate has failed catastrophically, crops die in vast blights and America is a barely-habitable dustbowl. Little education beyond…
This is carnal science fiction cinema.
Sancho McCann/Flickr
I will often say to my film students that if you want to know what aches a culture at a particular historical juncture then you need to visit and spend time with the catastrophic imagination of science…
Killer robots, a problem as old as voodoo.
x-ray delta one
Robots represent the cutting edge in science. For decades we have been promised a bright future in which these human-like machines will become so advanced that we won’t be able to tell the difference between…
Our obsession with worlds worse than our own says more about our future than we might realise.
x ray delta one
The future in science fiction is often presented in a dystopian setting. Certainly films such as Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner, Andrew Niccol’s Gattaca and Alfonso Cuarón’s Children of Men follow this pattern…
More than 99.5% of the genome is identical between two humans, but that still leaves 15m positions to search through.
fdecomite
Imagine a future where doctors take a strand of your hair or a drop of your blood and tell you your DNA predicts a 78% risk of developing heart disease. On the plus side, it also predicts exactly which…
Hyper-drives might be the stuff of science fiction, but they could be science fact too.
20th Century Fox
Fans of science fiction must be disheartened when introduced to Einstein’s Special Theory of Relativity. Dreams of galactic empires, criss-crossed by roguish princesses and beautiful smugglers, go out…