Live data from Hacker News

Science fiction and the death of the sun

typebarmagazine.com

31–40 of 144 posts

Re: Science fiction and the death of the sun

#31
post #3

> "Now-disgraced sci-fi patriarch John W. Campbell..." What did he do?

John W. Campbell did one of those contrarian intellectual who knee jerked too hard. He advocated that slavery had good sides and that it should've been kept as an institution because the civil war was worse than slavery. Also that slavery was a more natural way of society. Also that the relation of smoking to lung cancer was esoteric (he loved a good cig). Oh and that racial segregation should be maintained because of the inferiority of negroes. You know this kind of personality.

Re: Science fiction and the death of the sun

#32

Danny Boyle and Alex Garland's 2007 film Sunshine is another great example of this genre. Rather than abandoning a frozen earth due to the dying sun, they send a mission to deliver a bomb into it to "restart" it. A real all-star cast featuring not only a young Cillian Murphy, but a young Michelle Yeoh, Chris Evans, Hiroyuki Sanada, Benedict Wong, Cliff Curtis, and Rose Byrne! Highly recommended, despite never satisfa…

Event Horizon is a great movie to watch after Sunshine

These two articles in American Cinematographer (1 and 2) give some interesting background on the movie; concerning the ship they write:

> When it first appears onscreen, the Event Horizon craft itself resembles a giant crucifix hovering over the surface of Neptune. "The spaceship was built on a cruciform, like all cathedrals are," Anderson explains. "We began the design process by literally scanning [photos of] the Notre-Dame Cathedral into the computer and then constructing the Event Horizon out of those Gothic elements. For example, the big thruster engines are an adaptation of the Notre Dame towers, repositioned on their sides. A lot of the iron and steel work of the superstructure is based on the cathedral's stained-glass windows. The ship also has a lot of triptych windows and big recessed crosses.

> "When Adrian and I first sat down, we said, 'Let's do something completely different,"' says Anderson. "Since we were going into outer space, I felt we had to have a really strong design concept; otherwise Event Horizon would have ended up looking like [a bunch of] other movies cobbled together. We spent a lot of time coming up with a design concept, which we called 'techno-Medieval.' When the lights are on, everything looks very technological and very spaceship-like. But when the lights go off and the haunting begins, you start looking at the shapes, and the architecture is actually very medieval. We extended that techno-Medieval design idea into as many aspects of the picture's look as possible, without rubbing the audience's nose in it."

1: https://theasc.com/articles/unearthly-terrors-event-horizon

2: https://theasc.com/articles/event-horizon-scare-tactics

Re: Science fiction and the death of the sun

#33
post #27

I never realized I had misread _The Time Machine_ or _The Magician's Nephew_ as being about red giants, rather than heat-death! Goes to show how easy it is to seriously misunderstand aspects of ' science fiction' when the science changes... OP missed a good historical example before Thompson, however: Isaac Newton himself had a cosmology with the Sun being renewed by periodic comet impacts. Unfortunately, we would al…

H.G. Wells and C.S. Lewis intersect in more ways than one; in Out of the Silent Planet, one of the characters references Wells's The First Men in the Moon (1900), and the plot of the two parallel each other when the inhabitants of Mars (in Lewis's work) find out about the violent nature of Earth's inhabitants.

Re: Science fiction and the death of the sun

#34
post #17
post #3

> "Now-disgraced sci-fi patriarch John W. Campbell..." What did he do?

[flagged]

I don't believe Samuel Delany is an open NAMBLA member. He has expressed support for NAMBLA in 2004, and in 2014 admitted to reading a newsletter from them but claims not to have kept up with them for 20 years. These statements are now a decade and two decades old & I don't know what to make of him now these days. If you have more recent info, please let me know.

[Also: alleged pedophile? who alleged him of pedophilia? seriously asking]

Re: Science fiction and the death of the sun

#35
This hammered home for me how incredibly recent are a lot of the scientific discoveries we take utterly for granted. Even before nuclear energy, atoms themselves were only confirmed to exist in the 20th century. Everyone knows about plate tectonics, but that was confirmed in the 60s or something.

Re: Science fiction and the death of the sun

#36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nobody claimed there was no science. Just that there was no scientific method, nor the supremacy of scientific over religious explanations for the natural world.

This is a case of “Whig History” that refuses to die

The scientific method didn’t exist before the Enlightenment. We had tolerant societies before the present. But the notion that science should trump religion is modern.

That doesn’t imply a glorious present. Just a qualitatively different one from any period before the modern era.

Re: Science fiction and the death of the sun

#37

Danny Boyle and Alex Garland's 2007 film Sunshine is another great example of this genre. Rather than abandoning a frozen earth due to the dying sun, they send a mission to deliver a bomb into it to "restart" it. A real all-star cast featuring not only a young Cillian Murphy, but a young Michelle Yeoh, Chris Evans, Hiroyuki Sanada, Benedict Wong, Cliff Curtis, and Rose Byrne! Highly recommended, despite never satisfa…

Event Horizon is a great movie to watch after Sunshine

Yes! And then I'd follow up Event Horizon with Pandorum. Perhaps not quite as good or as well-known as the other two, but still clever and worth watching.

Re: Science fiction and the death of the sun

#39

Danny Boyle and Alex Garland's 2007 film Sunshine is another great example of this genre. Rather than abandoning a frozen earth due to the dying sun, they send a mission to deliver a bomb into it to "restart" it. A real all-star cast featuring not only a young Cillian Murphy, but a young Michelle Yeoh, Chris Evans, Hiroyuki Sanada, Benedict Wong, Cliff Curtis, and Rose Byrne! Highly recommended, despite never satisfa…

Event Horizon is a great movie to watch after Sunshine

Event Horizon is the closest we’ll get to a Warhammer 40k film.

Re: Science fiction and the death of the sun

#40

> For while the dying-earth genre came to an end in the 1940s uhh... Dying Earth is a fantasy series by the American author Jack Vance, comprising four books originally published from 1950 to 1984. The Book of the New Sun (1980–1983, 1987) is a four-volume science fantasy novel[2] written by the American author Gene Wolfe.

The author is using "dying-earth genre" to mean something rather specific that the series Dying Earth, despite the name, doesn't necessarily fit. I haven't read it, but going by Wikipedia it sounds like it has at least as much in common with the "sword and sorcery" stuff she mentions later as it does with the absolutely bleak stories she excerpts by Wells et al. I've read a couple of Wolfe's books (Short Sun, IIRC?) and I would definitely put them in her later category, even if "sword and sorcery" undersells them enormously.

Reading further on Wikipedia though, she might have picked a bad/already taken name for her category. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dying_Earth_(genre)

Post reply on HN