Word: sci-fi
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...Shanghai, where his father worked for a British textile company. After the family's wartime internment, Ballard studied medicine at Cambridge, trained as a pilot in the Royal Air Force and worked at a scientific journal. He started writing for science-fiction magazines and became a leading figure in sci-fi's New Wave, which eschewed outer space for the more immediate world. "I haven't written any science fiction since the 1960s," Ballard says from his home in the London exurb of Shepperton, where he has lived for 45 years. "I just write what I see happening...
...Vortexx Chandelier Want to jazz up your dinner parties? With a Möbius-strip-like structure and recessed LED, the Vortexx chandelier by Zaha Hadid Architects for Sawaya & Moroni casts "an endless ribbon of light," according to its designers. Sci-fi fans might think it resembles something out of the movie Tron. And you can check out more of the Iraqi-born, London-based Hadid's work at her Guggenheim retrospective, in New York City until Oct. 25. www.sawayamoroni.it...
...find the few strong extracurricular communities that exist (such as the Oxford Debating Union).Perversely, Harvard’s Community deficiency has created a campus culture of vibrant extracurricular activities that double as social organizations. And it is here that real communities are to be found, amongst the sci-fi boffins, dance classes and even The Salient’s cozy Burke Reading Group. Much like the workplace after college, they are a mix of social and “professional” dynamics. And unlike housing groups, these far more valuable communities are easily accessible, well-established and wide-ranging.Yet...
That helps explain the strange fate of Idiocracy, a sci-fi comedy starring Luke Wilson and directed and co-written by Mike Judge, the guy whose spotless track record includes Beavis and Butt-head, King of the Hill and Office Space. Idiocracy may not be a bad movie, but every ad and trailer the studio put together for it tested atrociously. After sitting around finished for almost a year, the movie opened two weeks ago--sort of. Fox released it in a few theaters in seven cities (not including New York City), with no trailers, no ads, no official poster...
...future so purposely, gaudily, corporately ugly--that even showing a second of it made people refuse to see it. Judge's unslick look might work for hand-drawn cartoons of hicks or a movie that takes place in poorly lit cubicles, but it's not so great for a sci-fi action comedy. It just doesn't look or feel like Talladega Nights or Dodgeball. Even though Fox probably made a million dollars' worth of trailers and ads, they empirically knew from testing that every dollar they spent on ad time for Idiocracy would be wasted...