The fictitious world of Judge Dredd highlights authoritarianism, including laws against outsiders, walls around cities and rules that deny people basic rights. Are the Dredd comics a cautionary tale?
Science fiction writing often serves as a thought experiment that explores shared and hidden beliefs whose material and political reverberations lie further in the future.
A document in Tengwar, the script of the Elvish languages invented by JRR Tolkien, Dozza, Italy.
Luca Lorenzelli via Shutterstock
The first peer-reviewed survey of Doctor Who fans’ attitudes to science reveals it was literally life-changing TV for some. But the verdicts were surprisingly nuanced and sometimes contradictory.
If sci-fi films mirror the world’s contemporary dystopian anxieties, then over the years Star Wars has gone from nuclear war to environmental collapse.
Blade Runner 2049: dystopian vision, now even more terrifying.
Warner Bros
From mobile phones to artificial wombs: what a breathtakingly visionary set of predictions from a century ago can teach us about our attempts to forecast the future today.
Season 5 of Black Mirror begins on June 5, 2019.
Allocine
We have robots that can walk and run but still a long way to go before the technology matches the cybernetic skills in the new science fiction film Alita: Battle Angel.
A time-lapse image showing the plane flying across a gymnasium.
Steven Barrett, MIT
Steven Barrett, Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT)
Ionic winds – charged particles flowing through the air – can move airplanes using only electricity; no propellers or jet engines needed. The scholar who led the project explains how it works.
If you don’t want to be facing down an angry dinosaur, pay attention to what happens on screen.
Universal Pictures
As fictional inventors make terrible choices on the big screen, real-world tech innovators can learn from their example how not to make the same kinds of ethical mistakes.
Biologists are gathering evidence of green algae (pictured here in Kuwait) becoming carbohydrate-rich but less nutritious, due to increased carbon dioxide levels. As science fiction becomes science fact, new forms of storytelling are emerging.
Raed Qutena
Jodie Whittaker finally takes over as the first woman to play the Doctor in the long-running TV series. But that’s not all that’s new as the show make a welcome return to our screens.