All posts tagged: scifi

Netflix’s best sci-fi show is ending, and nobody seems ready for it

Netflix’s best sci-fi show is ending, and nobody seems ready for it

Published by skeptic

The biggest shows on Netflix are so big that you can probably name at least a few of them even if you’ve never watched them: stuff like Stranger Things, Squid Game, and Bridgerton. But there are other series that fly more under the radar. That includes 3 Body Problem, which just happens to be the smartest sci-fi show on Netflix right now. Netflix ran the first, intriguing season of 3 Body Problem back in 2024, which means fans have been waiting a while to see more. Now the show is barreling towards an ending and it feels like no one is paying attention, even though they should. 3 Body Problem is a heady sci-fi trip The science is crazy, imaginative, and just plausible enough to be convincing 3 Body Problem is based on the Remembrance of Earth’s Past books by author Liu Cixin, a trilogy that earned high praise when it was published over a period of three years in the late 2000s. The books tell the story of humanity’s first contact with extraterrestrial life, …

Sci-fi horror film Backrooms is a triumph for its 20-year-old director

Sci-fi horror film Backrooms is a triumph for its 20-year-old director

Published by skeptic

Clark (Chiwetel Ejiofor) discovers an unsettling series of rooms in a furniture store A24 BackroomsKane Parsons, in cinemas now There is something uniquely disturbing about a room that seems to have no reason to exist. A corridor without destination. A chair half planted into the floor. A couch positioned just wrongly enough to become a threat. In Backrooms, the feature debut of 20-year-old Kane Parsons, ordinary objects are stripped of their everyday usefulness and made alien. A shadow, a carpeted hallway, a buzzing fluorescent light: all become evidence that reality has lost its bearings. Parsons, better known online as Kane Pixels, first developed Backrooms as a YouTube phenomenon inspired by a photo of a yellow-wallpapered, fluorescently lit room posted online by an anonymous 4chan user in 2019. The poster asked for other “disquieting images that just feel ‘off’”; another user responded with the concept of “the Backrooms, where it’s nothing but the stink of old moist carpet, the madness of mono-yellow… and approximately six hundred million square miles of randomly segmented empty rooms to be …

Disclosure Day review: Spielberg awe elevates clunky sci-fi thriller

Disclosure Day review: Spielberg awe elevates clunky sci-fi thriller

Published by Daniella Wilson

A star rating of 3 out of 5. Anyone who knows the slightest thing about cinema knows that the subject of extra-terrestrial life is something that has preoccupied Steven Spielberg for just about the entirety of his storied career. With Close Encounters of the Third Kind in 1977 and ET: The Extra-Terrestrial five years later, the legendary filmmaker crafted arguably the two most seminal works about alien beings visiting Earth – a pair of stories rich with his trademark sense of wide-eyed wonder that redefined pop culture iconography forever (and which remain every bit as compelling and emotionally rewarding to this day.) He dipped his toes back into similar (albeit also rather different) waters in 2005 with his take on HG Wells’s classic sci-fi tale The War of the Worlds, and now – another two decades on – he’s gone back to the well one more time. Disclosure Day marks a welcome return to summer blockbuster fare for the master of that particular art, and finds him once again asking cinemagoers how we might react …

11 sci-fi and fantasy movies still coming in 2026 that should be on your radar

11 sci-fi and fantasy movies still coming in 2026 that should be on your radar

Published by skeptic

Between blockbusters like Project Hail Mary and Michael, as well as unexpected indie smashes like Backrooms and Obsession, there’s a sense that 2026 is the year that movie theaters finally shake off the post-COVID lull they’ve been in for years and make a comeback. And things are just getting warmed up. There’s a huge swath of exciting sci-fi and fantasy movies on their way in the rest of 2026, so clear your calendars, buckle down, and be part of the revival! Disclosure Day In theaters June 12 A lot of the movies on this list are going to be sequels and spin-offs, and there’s nothing inherently wrong with that, but there’s something nice about the prospect of a completely original, big-budget sci-fi movie that dares to do something different. That’s what we’re getting with Disclosure Day, about the day the world finally finds out about the existence of extraterrestrial life. We don’t know a ton about the story beyond that, which is part of the appeal. But we know it’s directed by Steven Spielberg, the …

Apple TV’s 16 Best Sci-Fi Shows You Should Stream Right Now

Apple TV’s 16 Best Sci-Fi Shows You Should Stream Right Now

Published by skeptic

Apple TV — which dropped the “Plus” in its name last year — is home to a plethora of sci-fi shows you should be watching. Yes, you can find the genre hit Severance on the streaming platform, but there are loads of other options you may not know about. This is common with Apple’s streaming service, which rarely advertises its original shows and instead expects you to discover them on your own.  I write a lot about science fiction shows and movies available on streaming services. You can find a whole assortment of cool genre shows on Netflix and Prime Video, but this isn’t about them. Today, I’m spotlighting Apple TV. If you don’t really know what you’re looking for, scrolling through every show on the platform can be taxing. To cut down on confusion, I sorted through Apple’s deep content library and put together the guide below to help you get started on your Apple TV sci-fi journey. These are the best sci-fi shows to watch on Apple TV. Take note: This list will be updated regularly, so be sure …

13 Awesome New Sci-Fi and Fantasy Books Out in June 2026

13 Awesome New Sci-Fi and Fantasy Books Out in June 2026

Published by Jenni Sidey

The hits just keep on coming as we roll through 2026 at warp speed. There’s a little something here for everyone, whether you’re a hardcore genre reader or just getting started with science fiction and fantasy. (Seriously, these books are so, so fun!) There’s (possibly) unicorns in 16th-century France; a barbarian who gets a lesson in societal manners; a young boy who must compete to save Earth; a queer retelling of Sleeping Beauty; a dark academia fantasy about a mother and daughter’s memories; a new sci-fi novel from the most recent fiction Pulitzer Prize winner; a jewel heist set in the world of Dungeons & Dragons; a giant glowing jellyfish off the coast of Maine; and much more. The Best New Science Fiction and Fantasy Books Out in June 2026 The Unicorn Hunters by Katherine Arden (Del Rey, June 2) This is a gorgeous historical fantasy about Anne of Brittany in France. In order to keep from being the last duchess of Brittany, she schemes a secret marriage to France’s rival. To pull off this stunt, …

How I built my own DIY cyberdeck straight out of 80s sci-fi – and all the cool things it can do

How I built my own DIY cyberdeck straight out of 80s sci-fi – and all the cool things it can do

Published by skeptic

My Raspberry Pi cyberdeck. Adrian Kingsley-Hughes/ZDNET Follow ZDNET: Add us as a preferred source on Google. ZDNET’s key takeaways The cyberdeck name comes from the 1984 novel Neuromancer. They’re DIY computers that can be based on a cyberpunk vibe. If you don’t fancy building a cyberdeck, why not try buying your own? Everyone seems to be talking about cyberdecks. At the risk of mixing up sci-fi genres, that’s a name that I’ve not heard in a long time. No, cyberdecks aren’t a Star Wars thing. Instead, the term was coined by William Gibson in the 1984 near-future dystopian cyberpunk novel, Neuromancer. In the novel, hackers, called “console cowboys,” would use cyberdecks to hook up to cyberspace (another term that Gibson came up with, two years earlier in a short story called Burning Chrome). In the book, they’re described as custom-built, rectangular, deck-like computers with red and green LEDs that are used to jack into the matrix (yes, Gibson used that term too). Also: The Flipper One is the Linux cyberdeck I wish my Raspberry Pi …

My Tesla Y Does What Felt Like Sci-Fi 10 Years Ago

My Tesla Y Does What Felt Like Sci-Fi 10 Years Ago

Published by Jenni Sidey

Tesla supervised self-driving electric vehicles have just surpassed the 10 billion mile mark. The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration knighted the ​2026 Tesla Model Y as the first vehicle model to ‌pass the agency’s new advanced driver-assistance system tests.   Model Y/Tesla I understand the theory behind AI-driven vehicles, but experiencing one of them firsthand is something else entirely. My son Jeremiah test-drove a Tesla Y, urged me to do the same, and I ended up buying one for less than he paid for his new truck. In my view, it is the most impressively engineered consumer product since the smartphone. I say this as a practicing electrical and computer engineering professor with decades of experience in algorithms and artificial intelligence. Among others, I’ve showed off my Tesla to a control theory professor, a retired Marine fighter pilot, and a retired police officer. All were agog. Here is a list of features that, together, I find jaw-droppingly impressive: Voice ControlI can tell my Tesla where I want to go by voice or by typing.  The …

The late Ian Watson’s sci-fi The Embedding is intriguing – but dated

The late Ian Watson’s sci-fi The Embedding is intriguing – but dated

Published by skeptic

The Embedding is a first-contact novel that centres on linguistics Ignatiev/Getty Images The EmbeddingIan Watson, Gollancz The acclaimed British science-fiction writer Ian Watson, author of more than two dozen novels, died this April. His fame may have faded over the decades, but his debut novel The Embedding was greeted with acclaim when it was published in 1973. The Spectator declared it “the most spectacular thing in science fiction since the outstanding Solaris by Stanisław Lem”. Watson’s later work, both sci-fi and fantasy, included novels relating to Warhammer 40,000 games and a stint developing the script of A.I. Artificial Intelligence with Stanley Kubrick. To my embarrassment as a reviewer of sci-fi, I had never heard of Watson until his death and I decided to put that right, starting with his debut, which remains the best-known of his novels. The Embedding is a first-contact story that centres on linguistics. Chris is running an experiment on children in a British research institute. The idea is to see what happens to children if they are brought up speaking an …

Rebecca Hall in Quirky Sci-Fi Dramedy

Rebecca Hall in Quirky Sci-Fi Dramedy

Published by Daniella Wilson

The always eminently watchable Rebecca Hall (The Man I Love, TV’s The Beauty) both anchors and buoys the tonally irregular but consistently thoughtful and compelling sci-fi comedy-drama The End of It, a feature debut for Catalan writer-director Maria Martinez Bayona. Offering a near future that’s creepily plausible, resonant with recent headlines and nicely underplayed in terms of design, this posits Hall as Claire, a 250-year-old artist who’s kept looking like an elegant 30something thanks to sophisticated blood dialysis techniques and other kinds of high-tech, vaguely defined wizardry, available to a very select few. The End of It The Bottom Line Augurs a potentially interesting career. Venue: Cannes Film Festival (Cannes Premiere)Cast: Rebecca Hall, Gael Garcia Bernal, Noomi Rapace, Beanie FeldsteinDirector/screenwriter: Maria Martinez Bayona 2 hours 22 minutes However, when Claire grows bored with an effectively immortal life and chooses to die, her husband Diego (Gael García Bernal), 180-year-old daughter Martha (Noomi Rapace), and android personal assistant Sarah (Beanie Feldstein) react in various ways, ranging from supportive to angry. Running an attenuated 142-minutes, this feels slightly …