All posts tagged: sci-fi

Do Lightsaber Blades Have Mass?

Do Lightsaber Blades Have Mass?

Published by skeptic

When you think of Star Wars, you think of lightsabers. Right? What could be better, from a movie-making standpoint, than a futuristic sword that lets you create awesome fencing duels like in old-time Errol Flynn swashbucklers. (So much better than watching Stormtroopers fire their blasters into walls and ceilings and anything else except their targets.) Lightsabers come in a cosmic rainbow of hues (color-coded blue or green for good guys, red for bad) and a variety of shapes. There’s even a double-bladed version in Phantom Menace. (I don’t want to start a nerd fight—yet—but the best lightsaber battle in the canon has to be the “Duel of the Fates” in that movie, thanks to the skills and scariness of Darth Maul actor Ray Park.) So … exactly what are lightsabers? Of course, they aren’t real, so nobody really knows how they work. Even the characters in the movies seem a little confused about it. In Phantom Menace, Anakin calls it a “laser sword.” Yeah, he was a kid, but both Din Djarin (the Mandalorian) and …

The Online Fiction Boom Reimagining China’s History

The Online Fiction Boom Reimagining China’s History

Published by skeptic

If you could travel back in time, what year would you choose? What would you change about history? For a surprising number of Chinese people, their answer turns out to be the same: Use what they know today to save China from its unglorious past. In a new book titled Make China Great Again: Online Alt-History Fiction and Popular Authoritarianism, Rongbin Han, a Chinese politics professor at the University of Georgia, examines a popular science fiction genre where people travel back in time to rewrite Chinese history. Han looked at the 2,100 most popular titles on a top web novel review platform and found 238 such stories where the main characters bring technological knowledge, advanced political theories, and economic reform ideas back to ancient China or more recent historical eras. Who says 10th-century China is unequipped for a parliamentary political system? Someone’s gotta try to see how it would have worked. Han says he has personally read over 70 of these alt-history fiction books, plus dozens of other web novels with other themes for comparison. …

The Star Trek Communicator Is Now a High-End Wristwatch

The Star Trek Communicator Is Now a High-End Wristwatch

Published by skeptic

After the damp squib that was Rolex’s anniversary celebration at this year’s Watches and Wonders in Geneva (maybe Rolex will bring back the Milgauss in 2027?), we started to worry that truly WIRED timepieces would be few and far between this year. Then we found the Retrovision ’64 by Hautlence. Clearly channeling none other than Captain Kirk, the high-end Swiss brand has turned Star Trek’s iconic Communicator into a full-on luxury wristwatch—and we’re very much here for it. Fans of the ’60s sci-fi series will be delighted to recognize the characteristic cover and perforated grille, which, oh yes, flips up to reveal the watch workings underneath. However, despite the light-hearted design cues, those workings very much lean into serious horology. The Retrovision ’64 is a high-end wristwatch masquerading as a Star Trek communicator. Photograph: Courtesy of Hautlence The Star Trek universe is no stranger to watch collaborations, but this is a whole new level. Inside the retro-futuristic case beats an in-house caliber equipped with a linear jumping hour mechanism developed in collaboration with Geneva-based artisan …

‘Fallout’ Producer Jonathan Nolan on AI: ‘We’re in Such a Frothy Moment’

‘Fallout’ Producer Jonathan Nolan on AI: ‘We’re in Such a Frothy Moment’

Published by skeptic

Jonathan Nolan saw this coming. As a screenwriter, he’s worked on several of his brother Christopher Nolan’s films, from Interstellar to the Dark Knight movies. Partnered with his wife Lisa Joy, he created HBO’s Westworld and executive produced Amazon Prime’s Fallout. But before that, he cut his TV teeth creating Person of Interest, a CBS procedural about a solitary tech billionaire who creates a piece of surveillance software aimed at stopping crime before it happens. It was fiction, but it’s hard not to feel its prescience. With Fallout, now in its second season, Nolan also has his sights on the future. Based on the video game series of the same name, it’s about a postapocalyptic America where everyone must survive in any way they can. It’s also wickedly funny and full of 1950s-era retrofuturism. So, what does Nolan see happening in the coming decades? A lot. For one, he doesn’t think AI is going to replace human filmmakers. In fact, he thinks it could help aspiring directors get a foot in the door. (Though, he …

You’ve Never Heard of China’s Greatest Sci-Fi Novel

You’ve Never Heard of China’s Greatest Sci-Fi Novel

Published by skeptic

Ma’s moment arrived in 2011. On July 23, two high-speed trains collided near Wenzhou, killing 40 people. The accident traumatized the nation for what it seemed to reveal about the costs of China’s breakneck pace of development. A prominent essay captured the mood, its title becoming a rallying cry: “China, Slow Down, Wait for Your People.” The prose read almost like prayer: “China, please stop your flying pace, wait for your people, wait for your soul, wait for your morality, wait for your conscience!” Ma and other Industrial Party voices responded with a counteroffensive. The solution wasn’t to slow down but to double down, they said—to learn from mistakes, to push through the difficult phase when new technologies were still being mastered. And key to their campaign was Lingao itself. The writing of it became a phenomenon across Chinese internet forums in the 2010s: Its open source ethos and collaborative methods deeply appealed to China’s burgeoning tech community. Beyond regular meetups among core contributors, Lingao’s creation fostered the formation of China’s “keyboard politics”—online communities where …