Andy Pinaria/Pexels
Jordan Prosser’s Big Time revels in the human drive to make art and forge connection, even in the most oppressive situations – and it whisks us along for the ride.
Science and Invention / World Radio History
From the teledactyl and the medical mantis to Zoom doctoring and beyond, scifi and real-world medical technology have developed hand in hand.
ChatGPT-4o and the films ‘Her’ and ‘Blade Runner 2049’ all pull from one another as they develop the concept of a virtual assistant.
Warner Bros.
Science fiction and technological innovation feed off each other in an ongoing back-and-forth that can play out over decades.
Maxwell Jenkins, Nicolas Cage, and Jaeden Martell in Arcadian.
Courtesy of RLJE Films and Shudder
Arcadian manages to be both highly derivative and also quite unusual. It is part thriller, part creature feature and part horror.
HAL, the mercurial supercomputer AI from Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968).
TCD/Prod.DB / Alamy
The prevailing human reaction to the idea of artificial intelligence has always been fear, revealed in the way film has portrayed our increasingly important relationship with AI over the years.
The Conversation, AAP, Pexels
Sci-fi master Ursula Le Guin always asked the question: what sort of world do you want to live in? In her masterpiece, The Dispossessed, she considers injustice and war through an alternative universe.
20th Century Studios
The future is teased in the tenth film of the Apes franchise.
OpenAI executive Mira Murati launching GPT-4o.
OpenAI
The ‘multimodal’ GTP-4o works with text, sound, images and video, all wrapped in a chatty interactive ‘personality’.
Alones/Shutterstock
The intriguing stories in Ceridwen Dovey’s Only the Astronauts bring obscure historical footnotes to life.
The three-body problem is a familiar puzzle in astrophysics.
(Shutterstock)
The Netflix series ‘3 Body Problem’ is based on Liu Cixin’s scifi novel that follows what happens to the alien residents of a planet that orbits two stars.
Shutterstock
Australian literature is a rich and largely untapped source of information about how Australians think about AI.
In 3 Body Problem, the character Ye Wenjie wrestles with the Fermi Paradox.
Ed Miller/Netflix
We have joined a game which has been going on before our arrival, and the strategy that everyone has learned is to hide.
Getty Images and Courtesy Warner Bros.
A century before the Dune films became new classics of the genre, Fritz Lang was making epic fantasies that redefined cinema.
Benedict Wong as Da Shi in 3 Body Problem.
Courtesy of Netflix
3 Body Problem tells a story of survival, betrayal, and a relentless quest for human and alien coexistence.
Courtesy Warner Bros
White saviourism is the paternalistic notion that white people are needed to “save” people of colour from their circumstances.
Oregon’s Umpqua Dunes inspired the desert planet Arrakis in Frank Herbert’s ‘Dune.’
VWPics/Universal Images Group via Getty Images
When Frank Herbert sat down in 1963 to start writing ‘Dune,’ he wasn’t thinking about how to leave Earth behind. He was thinking about how to save it.
Courtesy of Netflix
With an adaptation of Chinese bestseller The Three-Body Problem soon to air on Netflix, Josh Stenberg parses the novel and its many themes.
Courtesy of Warner Bros. Pictures
Zimmer creates a sound world full of texture, personality and new timbral possibilities.
Wassily Kandinsky – Composition 8 (1923).
Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons
Yevgeny Zamyatin was a born loner and instinctive satirist, whose usual response to collective enthusiasm was to dissent.
The entrance to For All Mankind’s Happy Valley.
Apple
In sci-fi depictions, extraterrestrial habitats have evolved tandem with scientific understanding of conditions on planets