“Deftly shows how a seemingly frivolous film genre can guide us in shaping tomorrow’s world.” —Seth Shostak, senior astronomer, SETI Institute Artificial intelligence, gene manipulation, cloning, and interplanetary travel are all ideas that seemed like fairy tales but a few years ago. And now their possibilities are very much here. But are we ready to handle these advances? This book, by a physicist and expert on responsible technology development, reveals how science fiction movies can help us think about and prepare for the social consequences of technologies we don’t yet have, but that are coming faster than we imagine. Films from the Future looks at twelve movies that take us on a journey through the worlds of biological and genetic manipulation, human enhancement, cyber technologies, and nanotechnology. Readers will gain a broader understanding of the complex relationship between science and society. The movies mix old and new, and the familiar and unfamiliar, to provide a unique, entertaining, and ultimately transformative take on the power of emerging technologies, and the responsibilities they come with.

Future Film Fiction is a collection of short stories that will interest both the novel-loving reader, and the movie-going public. Its unique layout offers four times the pleasure.

A designer’s deep dive into seven science fiction films, filled with “gloriously esoteric nerdery [and] observations as witty as they are keen” (Wired). In Typeset in the Future, blogger and designer Dave Addey invites sci-fi movie fans on a journey through seven genre-defining classics, discovering how they create compelling visions of the future through typography and design. The book delves deep into 2001: A Space Odyssey, Star Trek: The Motion Picture, Alien, Blade Runner, Total Recall, WALL·E, and Moon, studying the design tricks and inspirations that make each film transcend mere celluloid and become a believable reality. These studies are illustrated by film stills, concept art, type specimens, and ephemera, plus original interviews with Mike Okuda (Star Trek), Paul Verhoeven (Total Recall), and Ralph Eggleston and Craig Foster (Pixar). Typeset in the Future is an obsessively geeky study of how classic sci-fi movies draw us in to their imagined worlds.

This book will appeal to everyone who reads science fiction or thinks about science and its impact on our lives. It raises profound economic, ethical, political, sociological, and psychological questions. It explores our fears and fantasies as it examines a range of fictions, films, and TV programs that speculate about the possibilities of humans in the future. The contributions here ask central questions that have provoked the creators and readers of science fiction since Mary Shelley inaugurated the genre with her novel Frankenstein. What are the aims and limits of science and technology? What are our responsibilities toward the products of our advancing science and technology? What kinds of creatures will we produce or encounter in the future? What rights will we grant to these creatures or – more worryingly – will they grant to us? Do science and technology make us more civilized or more barbaric? How should we treat each other? Ultimately, what does it mean to be human?

Covering titles ranging from Rocketship X-M (1950) to Wall-E (2008), these insightful essays measure the relationship between music and science fiction film from a variety of academic perspectives. Thematic sections survey specific compositions utilized in science fiction movies; Broadway's relationship with the genre; science fiction elements in popular songs; the conveyance of subjectivity and identity through music; and such individual composers as Richard Strauss (2001: A Space Odyssey) and Bernard Herrmann (The Day the Earth Stood Still).

ONE OF BARACK OBAMA’S FAVORITE BOOKS OF THE YEAR “The best science-fiction nonfiction novel I’ve ever read.” —Jonathan Lethem "If I could get policymakers, and citizens, everywhere to read just one book this year, it would be Kim Stanley Robinson’s The Ministry for the Future." —Ezra Klein (Vox) The Ministry for the Future is a masterpiece of the imagination, using fictional eyewitness accounts to tell the story of how climate change will affect us all. Its setting is not a desolate, postapocalyptic world, but a future that is almost upon us. Chosen by Barack Obama as one of his favorite books of the year, this extraordinary novel from visionary science fiction writer Kim Stanley Robinson will change the way you think about the climate crisis. "One hopes that this book is read widely—that Robinson’s audience, already large, grows by an order of magnitude. Because the point of his books is to fire the imagination."―New York Review of Books "If there’s any book that hit me hard this year, it was Kim Stanley Robinson’s The Ministry for the Future, a sweeping epic about climate change and humanity’s efforts to try and turn the tide before it’s too late." ―Polygon (Best of the Year) "Masterly." —New Yorker "[The Ministry for the Future] struck like a mallet hitting a gong, reverberating through the year ... it’s terrifying, unrelenting, but ultimately hopeful. Robinson is the SF writer of my lifetime, and this stands as some of his best work. It’s my book of the year." —Locus "Science-fiction visionary Kim Stanley Robinson makes the case for quantitative easing our way out of planetary doom." ―Bloomberg Green

Each month brings new scientific findings that demonstrate the ways in which human activities, from resource extraction to carbon emissions, are doing unprecedented, perhaps irreparable damage to our world. As we hear these climate change reports and their predictions for the future of Earth, many of us feel a sickening sense of déjà vu, as though we have already seen the sad outcome to this story. Drawing from recent scholarship that analyzes climate change as a form of “slow violence” that humans are inflicting on the environment, Climate Trauma theorizes that such violence is accompanied by its own psychological condition, what its author terms “Pretraumatic Stress Disorder.” Examining a variety of films that imagine a dystopian future, renowned media scholar E. Ann Kaplan considers how the increasing ubiquity of these works has exacerbated our sense of impending dread. But she also explores ways these films might help us productively engage with our anxieties, giving us a seemingly prophetic glimpse of the terrifying future selves we might still work to avoid becoming. Examining dystopian classics like Soylent Green alongside more recent examples like The Book of Eli, Climate Trauma also stretches the limits of the genre to include features such as Blindness, The Happening, Take Shelter, and a number of documentaries on climate change. These eclectic texts allow Kaplan to outline the typical blind-spots of the genre, which rarely depicts climate catastrophe from the vantage point of women or minorities. Lucidly synthesizing cutting-edge research in media studies, psychoanalytic theory, and environmental science, Climate Trauma provides us with the tools we need to extract something useful from our nightmares of a catastrophic future.