It takes a Jacobin Mag to argue that a biopic about Neil Armstrong is science fiction. Or go on a tear about the meaninglessness of "autur-driven works set in space" and skip the fuck over Arrival. Look- science fiction has never been about alien species, not even vaguely. It's been about aboriginals. Star Trek puts headgear on humans and gives them entirely human emotions; the Hugo- and Nebula-winning shit out there puts headgear on human civilization and takes it all back to colonialism every.single.time. What's stupid is this is a think-piece about brooding, lonely sci fi that doesn't so much as name-check Solaris, one of the few books that actually deals with an alien so alien that we can't find common ground. And let's be honest. If you open with a title card saying "It is the near future, 'a time of hope and conflict,'" your critique isn't philosophy, your critique is sci fi.Ad Astra may be among the first films to explicitly place Clarke’s lonely cosmos possibility at its heart, but a raft of hard sci-fi films in the last few years, auteur-driven works set in space such as Duncan Jones’s Moon, Alfonso Cuarón’s Gravity, Christopher Nolan’s Interstellar, Ridley Scott’s The Martian, and Damien Chazelle’s First Man,
Arrival grossed less than half of the other in the list. So the argument still hold: Sci fi now, mostly are without aliens Since I'm on F. Herbert. The "Whipping star" book is about weird alien : stars (sound like Solaris, but it's not). You might also enjoy reading his short stories with aliens Since I'm on Arrival, it's bit for bit taken from a short story from F.Herbert (beside the twist end). Remember the worst part of the movie? The army guy trying to blow the alien.... Yeah me neither. It's a weak plot. It's also weak in F.Herbert story. But it's proof, they ripped the original material without elevating it much
For the record: It's not that sci fi is without aliens. It's that most of sci fi these days is so absurd that you don't recognize it's sci fi. I remember the halcyon days when Star Wars was finally ending and maybe we'd get back to serious sci fi again. And granted: that space gave us Arrival, Passengers, Interstellar, etc. But it also gave us an endless sea of fuckin' superheroes. Sci fi now, mostly are without aliens
