Word: sci-fi
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Show me a human fear, and i'll show you a monster. Our ancestors populated dark forests with dragons and uncharted seas with krakens. Sci-fi transmuted commies and nukes into body snatchers and Godzilla. In the 1990s, The X-Files turned post-Vietnam paranoia into an elaborate government-alien conspiracy...
With Fringe (from Lost's creator, J.J. Abrams), sci-fi has come full circle back to Frankenstein: we have gained too much power over life and made the body into a mere machine. Plots turn on how bodies can be used as recording devices: corpses are psychically "interrogated"; people's memories are stolen by a villain jamming wires up their noses; a murder victim's optic nerve is hooked up to a TV screen to show the last thing she saw before she died. The humans involved have no more volition than a hard drive being reformatted in the shop...
...days, or is it the writers themselves who are doing something more expansive? I think it's the latter. From [fantasy writers] John Crowley and Jonathan Carroll outwards, there have been these waves of people who wrote as through it were perfectly natural to use horror, or fantasy, or sci-fi approaches and themes in mainstream stories, or vice versa. It seems to me that you get the best of both worlds in that way. And in fact, the ultimate argument I would make is that there is essentially just one world if you're talking about good fiction...
From Sept. 7 to 27, the Los Angeles Opera will present the U.S. premiere of The Fly, a stage mutation of Cronenberg's sci-fi horror tale of a renegade scientist whose teleportation experiment goes horribly awry when a fly enters his telepod - composed by Oscar-winner Howard Shore, conducted by celebrated tenor Plácido Domingo, and directed by Cronenberg. The director sat down with TIME's Jeffrey T. Iverson on the eve of The Fly's world premiere in Paris this summer to talk about the hidden complexities of the horror genre, the challenges facing modern opera...
David Cronenberg: When I was making the movie and talking about the music with Howard, I said, "You know, this could be a play" - it's basically three people in one room, a triangle love story. And underneath all the technology and the sci-fi stuff there's a very powerful, scary story of loss, disintegration and decay. Later it became a kind of iconic AIDS story to a lot of people, but when we were thinking of it, it was just about something that happens to everybody, which is aging and ultimately death. So it has this universal potency...