Hacker News with Generative AI: Science Fiction

Tech-Noir: How One Scene in 'The Terminator' Changed Science Fiction (2018) (wearethemutants.com)
The Tech-Noir club scene in The Terminator is a masterpiece of action film-making, arguably the most important sequence of the movie, and the club itself—its decor and atmosphere, its customers, its soundtrack, its very name—has had an extraordinary influence on the development of sci-fi and subsequent reimaginings of the 1980s aesthetic.

Science Fiction, Movies, Filmmaking, 1980s

4 points by austinallegro 1 day ago | 0 comments

Coincidence between the start spacecraft scene in Prometheus and 60s phreaking (ycombinator.com)
Is there any coincidence between the scene in "Alien Prometheus" where the engineer pilot ignites the spacecraft by a piccolo and 1960s phreaking(2600 Hz whistles)?

Science Fiction, Film, History, Technology

4 points by damiaozi 2 days ago | 3 comments

Lesser-known science fiction movies (exotext.com)
I love science fiction in all forms, and I can't resist watching almost any sci-fi movie. So, I watch a lot of them. It's a bit annoying how "sci-fi and fantasy" became the standard pairing. In my eyes, these genres are exactly opposite. It's like grouping movies about horses with movies about cars.

Science Fiction, Movies, Genre, Recommendations

3 points by freetonik 5 days ago | 0 comments

Star Trek: Section 31 is Paramount Plus' attempt to add spies to Trek (polygon.com)
Either Section 31 is a betrayal of everything the Federation stands for, or the Federation isn’t utopian

Star Trek, Television, Streaming, Science Fiction, Paramount Plus

4 points by Tomte 5 days ago | 0 comments

Colossus: The Forbin Project (wikipedia.org)
Colossus: The Forbin Project (originally released as The Forbin Project) is a 1970 American science-fiction thriller film from Universal Pictures, produced by Stanley Chase, directed by Joseph Sargent, that stars Eric Braeden, Susan Clark, Gordon Pinsent, and William Schallert. It is based upon the 1966 science-fiction novel Colossus by Dennis Feltham Jones.

Science Fiction, Film, 1970s, Thriller

8 points by axiologist 5 days ago | 4 comments

Colossus – The Forbin Project (1970) (archive.org)
Defense Department computers of both the United States and The Soviet Socialist Republic become sentient.

Science Fiction, Cold War, Artificial Intelligence

11 points by wallflower 8 days ago | 4 comments

Ask HN: Recommend a sci-fi movie I can watch on the new year's eve (ycombinator.com)
Hi everyone, I'll be spending my New Year's Eve in a foreign tropical country with beers. Please recommend a movie to me. ：） Thanks!

Science Fiction, Movies

13 points by mollywhite 22 days ago | 26 comments

Rod Serling on Doomsday (mubi.com)
Marking the centenary of the creator of “The Twilight Zone,” who knew that dystopia was always over the nearest ridge.

Science Fiction, Television, Dystopia

68 points by ecliptik 22 days ago | 11 comments

‘Star Trek: Discovery’ Officially Erased From Canon (giantfreakinrobot.com)
Star Trek: Lower Decks had its big finale this week, and in the process of ending the show, they fixed one of the worst problems Star Trek has ever had.

Science Fiction, Television, Star Trek

44 points by taubek 23 days ago | 103 comments

Cory Doctorow's prescient novella about health insurance and murder (theguardian.com)
Five years ago, the science fiction writer Cory Doctorow published a short story whose plot might seem eerily similar to followers of the past few weeks’ news.

Science Fiction, Health Insurance, Murder, Politics

9 points by throw0101c 28 days ago | 1 comments

Cory Doctorow wrote a prescient novella about health insurance and murder (theguardian.com)
Five years ago, the science fiction writer Cory Doctorow published a short story whose plot might seem eerily similar to followers of the past few weeks’ news.

Science Fiction, Healthcare, Social Commentary, Current Events

16 points by ethagnawl 28 days ago | 1 comments

Our muscles will atrophy as we climb the Kardashev Scale (solmaz.io)
This is an addendum to my previous post The Kilowatt Human. I mean it as half-entertainment and half-futuristic speculation. I extrapolate the following insight more into the future:

Science Fiction, Human Evolution, Technology

187 points by hosolmaz 32 days ago | 249 comments

"Star Trek" Helped Make Midcentury-Modern the Signature Sci-Fi Aesthetic – Dwell (dwell.com)
When Star Trek first premiered in the mid-1960s, it was meant to portray a far-off future, with Captain James T. Kirk and Mr. Spock traversing the universe 300 years hence.

Science Fiction, Design, Television, History

11 points by rbanffy 38 days ago | 1 comments

Science Fiction Writer Ted Chiang Wins Pen/Malamud Prize (npr.org)
Science fiction author Ted Chiang wrote the short story that became the movie "Arrival." He talks with host Scott Detrow.

Science Fiction, Awards, Literature

59 points by pseudolus 40 days ago | 14 comments

Freshly Remember'd: Kirk Drift (2017) (strangehorizons.com)
Good parties diverge widely; all bad parties are bad in the same way.

Science Fiction, Short Stories, Literature

10 points by omnibrain 41 days ago | 0 comments

Five of the best science fiction books of 2024 (theguardian.com)
From a post-apocalyptic dystopia to a brilliant time-travel debut, a far-future take on humanity and more

Science Fiction, Books, 2024, Literature, Reviews

34 points by sorokod 41 days ago | 19 comments

A Personally Significant Bluesky Moment (scalzi.com)
Today marks a significant day in my personal history of social media, because today’s the day the Bluesky officially became the site where I have the largest number of followers I’ve ever had on any social media site: 206,700 as of this morning. Not Taylor Swift or John Cena numbers, but a perfectly respectable number for a nerd who writes science fiction.

Social Media, Personal Experiences, Bluesky, Science Fiction

19 points by akuchling 46 days ago | 4 comments

The zoology and biochemistry of xenomorphs from the Alien franchise (jgeekstudies.org)
In science fiction, the xenomorph emerges as a creature that transcends the boundaries of traditional extraterrestrial movie knowledge (Fordham, 2023). From the corridors of the spaceship USCSS Nostromo to the haunting silence of the primordial exoplanet Acheron LV-426 (Flowers, 2020), the creature created by Ridley Scott and H.R. Giger has become the symbol of alien terror in movies and in collective imagination (Domino, 2019).

Science Fiction, Biology, Film, Alien Franchise

118 points by zdw 47 days ago | 75 comments

Issues of '50s Magazine Galaxy Science Fiction (archive.org)

Science Fiction, Magazines, Archives

11 points by coloneltcb 48 days ago | 4 comments

An 83-year-old short story by Borges portends a bleak future for the internet (theconversation.com)
How will the internet evolve in the coming decades?

Internet, Future, Literature, Science Fiction

133 points by tagawa 48 days ago | 102 comments

World on a Wire (wikipedia.org)
World on a Wire (German: Welt am Draht) is a 1973 West German science fiction television serial, starring Klaus Löwitsch and directed by Rainer Werner Fassbinder.

Science Fiction, Television, Germany

14 points by doener 49 days ago | 6 comments

The Problem with Sci-Fi Body Armor (acoup.blog)
This week we’re covering the winning topic from the latest ACOUP Senate poll, which is a look at some of the odd designs and mechanics for futuristic science fiction body armor, particularly rigid ‘hardsuits.’ Naturally, this post isn’t going to cover every variety of armor that appears in science fiction, so I want to be clear that I am generally limiting my scope here to rigid non-powered armor.

Science Fiction, Body Armor, Design, Mechanics

129 points by Tomte 49 days ago | 62 comments

Murderbot, she wrote (wired.com)
Murder is in the air. Everywhere I turn, I see images of a robot killing machine. Then I remind myself where I actually am: in a library lecture room on a college campus in East Texas. The air is a little musty with the smell of old books, and a middle-aged woman with wavy gray-brown hair bows her head as she takes the podium.

Science Fiction, Artificial Intelligence, Robots

243 points by lastdong 52 days ago | 180 comments

Behold All 42 Maps from Jules Verne's Extraordinary Voyages (openculture.com)

Literature, Maps, Jules Verne, Science Fiction, History

42 points by BerislavLopac 53 days ago | 1 comments

Against the Dark Forest (wrecka.ge)
The complex of ideas I’m going to call the Dark Internet Forest emerges from mostly insidery tech thinking, but from multiple directions—initially in Kickstarter co-founder Yancey Strickler’s freeform noticings that apply science fiction writer Liu Cixin's dark forest theory of the universe to social media, then in humanist all-arounder Maggie Appleton’s illustrated tech notes.

Social Media, Internet Culture, Science Fiction, Technology

121 points by tobr 56 days ago | 94 comments

Neal Stephenson on History, Spycraft, and American-Soviet Parallels (conversationswithtyler.com)
Neal Stephenson’s ability to illuminate complex, future-focused ideas in ways that both provoke thought and spark wonder has established him as one of the most innovative thinkers in literature today. Yet his new novel, Polostan, revisits the Soviet era with a twist, shifting his focus from the speculative technologies of tomorrow to the historical currents of the 1930s.

Science Fiction, History, Politics, Literature

14 points by hackandthink 64 days ago | 1 comments

Neal Stephenson's "Polostan" (pluralistic.net)
Science fiction isn't collection of tropes, nor is it a literary style, nor is it a marketing category. It can encompass all of these, but what sf really is, is an outlook.

Science Fiction, Books, Neal Stephenson

19 points by _whiteCaps_ 75 days ago | 7 comments

Star Trek Writer-Producer Jeri Taylor Dies at 86 (deadline.com)
Jeri Taylor, the Emmy-nominated scribe, producer, director and showrunner behind Star Trek: The Next Generation and Star Trek: Voyager (which she co-created), has died. She was 86.

Star Trek, Television, Obituaries, Entertainment, Science Fiction

12 points by acheron 79 days ago | 2 comments

Reasons Warhammer 40k should be considered a great work of science fiction (theconversation.com)
Games Workshop, the British company behind the tabletop war game Warhammer and its futuristic counterpart Warhammer 40,000 (also known as Warhammer 40k), is now worth in the region of £3.75 billion. And it counts among its fans celebrities like Henry Cavill, Brian May and the late Robin Williams.

Science Fiction, Games Workshop, Warhammer 40k

4 points by zeristor 80 days ago | 0 comments

An indie studio created a game based on Stanislaw Lem's novel (invinciblethegame.com)

Indie Games, Science Fiction, Books, Video Games

134 points by mgl 81 days ago | 61 comments