The mind readily grasps the allure of laying claim to the mantle of the august Uncle Dutch (i.e., being the only legitimate basis of rule, the “One Meme to Rule Them All”).  Therefore it is hardly surprising that its power should attract the devious lust of unsavory creatures from beneath even the dankest rocks in the even the darkest corners of America’s mushroom garden.  That is merely natural and expected, actually a necessary function of narrative causality, being all the better to highlight by means of contrast the enlightened munificence and nobility of the True Heir of the king who single-handedly defeated the corrosive and perverse troglodytes of The Evil Empire. What is unbearable is to see how far you have fallen from thine birthright, oh Padawan.  Woefully are we disappointed in thee, Newt Skywalker!

Where is my rock-powered jet pack, Mr. Gingrich?!!!

I and millions of others just like me came of age in the waning days of the Soviet Union and were raised on the promise of unlimited horizons in the new frontier that was supposed to supplant the forces of monolithic evil.  Loyal soldiers of the Cold War we were, instilled daily with the knowledge that our daily confrontations with wily machinations of pencil-pushing bureaucrats must necessarily be crowned with eventual success, our manly revolutionary virtues being altogether unstoppable by the feeble, crippled imaginations of pallid, apparatchik eunuchs hiding behind the skirt of an effeminate and decadent Socialism.  It was a heady, romantic time of dreams and ambition, all fuelled by the unique vision that only you and Ronald Reagan could conjure in the American imagination.  Don’t pretend that it wasn’t you who inspired Moonraker, Mr. Gingrich, my generation’s Beowulf.  It’s no use in pretending otherwise.

This screed continued at Dystopia Diaries.

Former House Speaker Newt Gingrich, the surging candidate for the Republican presidential nomination, has been simultaneously lauded for his devotion to technological innovation, and ridiculed for his warnings about futuristic weapons.

Gingrich, who has dabbled in science fiction and cited both futurist Alvin Toffler and the concept of “psychohistory” in Isaac Asimov’s Foundation novels as intellectual inspirations, has long been dubbed “Newt Skywalker” thanks to his vision of future warfare that blends fact and fantasy. This streak of futurism is, by his own admission, rooted in a political and philosophical belief about technology and power. ”I would rather rely on engineers than diplomats for security,” Gingrich told Aviation Week & Space Technology magazine in 1994, in reference to his support for missile defense.

Not all his futurism is a bad thing. Many of Gingrich’s early ideas, such as encouraging the Pentagon to fund bureaucratically stripped-down “Skunk Works“–type innovation are laudable.

Read More: Sharon Weinberger in Foreign Policy

In the 1970s the Princeton physicist Gerard O’Neill, with the help of NASA Ames Research Center and Stanford University, held a series of space colony summer studies which explored the possibilities of humans living in giant orbiting spaceships. Colonies housing about 10,000 people were designed and a number of artistic renderings of the concepts were made.

Plants don’t get enough respect as sci-fi monsters. Sure, Triffids will always rule, but sci-fi baddies tend to be mutants, zombies, vampires and other altered mammals. This is in ignorance of plants’ amazingly creepy special abilities. To prove it, we’ve dug up six plant skills that freak us out more than Godzilla.

Eating Rats: Okay, here’s the horrifying plot: You’re a missionary near the Philippine Archipelago. While doing your daily missioning or whatever, you wander up to the top of a mountain. Thirsty, you stumble upon what looks like an ornate birdbath filled with nectar. Leaning over to take a sip, you see a dead rat inside … and it’s slowly being digested by the plant.

This is Nepenthes attenboroughii, one of the most badass scary plants on Earth. See, while most pitcher plants stick to eating bugs, Nepenthes attenboroughii prefers to lure in birds and rats by looking as tasty as possible. Once inside, the animal can’t get out and is digested for the entire nearby ecosystem to see and to know … don’t screw with this plant …

More on Blastr

Late last night, Samsung filed its opposition brief to Apple’s motion for a preliminary injunction in the United States.

One element of Samsung’s defense strategy is interesting enough that I wanted to report on it beforehand. Ever since Apple started to assert the design of the iPad against other manufacturers, many people have been wondering whether there’s actually prior art for the general design of the iPad in some futuristic devices shown in sci-fi movies and TV series. And indeed, Samsung’s lawyers make this claim now in their defense against Apple’s motion for a preliminary injunction.

This is how the related declaration explains why this movie picture is valid prior art for a certain iPad-related design patent:

Attached hereto as Exhibit D is a true and correct copy of a still image taken from Stanley Kubrick’s 1968 film “2001: A Space Odyssey.” In a clip from that film lasting about one minute, two astronauts are eating and at the same time using personal tablet computers…As with the design claimed by the D’889 Patent, the tablet disclosed in the clip has an overall rectangular shape with a dominant display screen, narrow borders, a predominately flat front surface, a flat back surface (which is evident because the tablets are lying flat on the table’s surface), and a thin form factor.

It would be amazing if the court agreed with Samsung that this constitutes prior art for that particular iPad-related design patent. Whether or not Samsung will succeed, the mere fact that they proffer this kind of evidence is remarkable and will be exciting for many fans of movies in general — and of that movie in particular — to find out about.

Most of us (er, them) are motivated by deep excitement. And of course, many corporations are also excited by it as a new way of perceiving the “life cycle of their brands,” and “customer engagement,” and other terms that sound really creepy in the “bad touch” kind of way. But we see all of the possibilities for new ways of engaging with content. Some of us see exciting creative possibilities and some see dollar signs. (I prefer to see both, when possible.)

Engagement. Right there, some people get lost. ”You mean there is more than one way to engage with content?” Yes, there is. When you read a book, you’re engaging with that story in a very different way then when it is shown to you in a comic, and when you watch a movie. Your brain is being engaged in different ways to create the narrative.

With a comic book, you are imagining the continuity of time, you are building mental movies out of the storyboard of the comic. The artist provides static visual cues. With a book, you are given the conceptual cues, but all of the sense experience has to be engaged. As such, it is both a deeply rewarding form of taking in media, because so much of the creative process is left up to you, and a very difficult one in terms of generating engagement, because it isn’t a passive process. (”Why People Don’t Read.”)

With a novel, there is a high entrance price, a potentially high payoff. Movies are a passive process where visual, temporal, auditory cues are provided. Boredom is a potential enemy in all cases, but since there’s a larger investment in reading a book, it seems to follow that if you get more than halfway through a book, you’ve already invested so much in creating that experience that you will insist on seeing it through to the end. It’s very easy to switch channels on the TV, or surf away through YouTube or Netflix. Commitment seems to be so low on a platform like YouTube that it can be hard to keep attention for as “much” as two minutes.

Regardless of format, all of these are blueprints for an experience. Of course, there’s a dark potential in transmedia that the conspiracy theorists have also latched onto, producing a sort of paranoid PR-wing to the transmedia movement. I can’t say if this paranoia is well placed or not, because it is based around things that haven’t happened yet.  (Maybe.) Can’t see the ominous implication of transmedia? The fears engaged here are what drive the plot of the movie, “The Game.”

Namely, if transmedia is a way of telling related narratives across multiple mediums, it becomes increasingly immersive for an audience that invests the energy to read a book, watch a movie, and even interact with the characters in the story, and one another within the context or narrative created by the story.

As a creative obsessive, I see this as a good thing. And I see projects experimenting with the possibilities. For example:

CFG is a participatory drama that will play out this summer, with a cast of more than 400 spread over five countries. The plot centres around a secret society whose aim is to change the world; the society has decided to go public andCFG is the recruitment campaign. The narrative will be played out over web videos, interactive puzzles (including clues hidden inside real MP3s such as tracks on the White Album by The Beatles), mobile apps and real-life events. The project is sponsored by Nokia, and a website went live on May 17. This features a video from Tim Kring, who asks visitors to participate in a movement to drive real-world change through interactive storytelling.

The creative team at The company P, Sandberg’s transmedia production business, staged several tests last winter and spring. The Stockholm event ironed out kinks in the mobile technology used. More importantly, it honed the team’s storytelling. “We learned how to spread people out so as to have the sense of being at the mercy of a big adventure.”

This approach would lend us toward long-running projects, projects that can span entire careers, where each item is unique and essentially stand alone, but mythically related to the others.

If you look at the long-running history of Christianity, Hinduism, Buddhism, or any other religion, you see a multi-generational transmedia story in effect. Many of those stories have real flesh and blood body counts. That’s the side of transmedia that is troubling to most, where we become so immersed in our stories that we kill one another for them. Fact or fiction? You decide.

I hope this short piece has helped you think about media in a new way. Whatever term we use — “transmedia” is a fine one, don’t get me wrong — it is most important from here to look forward and ask “how can these tools be used to produce something beneficial to ourselves and the world?”

More on Modern Mythology

Hong Kong physicists say they have proved that a single photon obeys Einstein’s theory that nothing can travel faster than the speed of light — demonstrating that outside science fiction, time travel is impossible.

The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology research team led by Du Shengwang said they had proved that a single photon, or unit of light, “obeys the traffic law of the universe.”

The possibility of time travel was raised 10 years ago when scientists discovered superluminal — or faster-than-light — propagation of optical pulses in some specific medium, the team said. It was later found to be a visual effect, but researchers thought it might still be possible for a single photon to exceed light speed.

Du, however, believed Einstein was right and determined to end the debate by measuring the ultimate speed of a single photon, which had not been done before. “By showing that single photons cannot travel faster than the speed of light, our results bring a closure to the debate on the true speed of information carried by a single photon,” said Du, assistant professor of physics.

Action is needed now, according to a group of eminent experts. Their report calls for a new rules to supervise sensitive research that involves humanizing animals.

“The fear is that if you start putting very large numbers of human brain cells into the brains of primates suddenly you might transform the primate into something that has some of the capacities that we regard as distinctively human..speech, or other ways of being able to manipulate or relate to us.”

Currently research involving great apes, such as chimpanzees, is outlawed in the UK. But it continues in many other countries including the US, and British scientists are permitted to experiment on monkeys.

Prof Baldwin, professor of philosophy at the University of York, recommended applying the “Great Ape Test”. If modified monkeys began to acquire abilities similar to those of chimpanzees, it was time to “hold off”.

In the US, scientists have already implanted human embryonic stem cells – which can develop into any part of the human body – into mouse embryos. The mouse cells rapidly outgrew the human stem cells, so that only a tiny proportion of the embryos ended up “human”.

A Trip to the Moon (French: Le Voyage dans la lune) is a 1902 French black-and-white silent science fiction film. The film was written and directed by Georges Méliès, assisted by his brother Gaston. It is based loosely on two popular novels of the time: From the Earth to the Moon by Jules Verne and The First Men in the Moon by H. G. Wells.

It is the first science fiction film and uses innovative animation and special effects, including the well-known image of the spaceship landing in the moon’s eye.

The researchers report that they were able to create bright laser pulses that lasted a few nanoseconds with a single cell. Amazingly the cells were not damaged during the production of the laser light but were able to withstand hundreds of pulses.

The project took place at the Wellman Center for Photomedicine in Massachusetts. The key to this breakthrough involved the use of the widely studied protein known as green fluorescent protein. This protein, which was first discovered in jellyfish, has (as the name implies) the property of generating light.

Although there are no immediate plans to use this technology, the erosion of the barrier between optical technologies and biology could open many doors in therapy and research.

A political writer for a second rate, online news magazine, Michael Cobb is assigned by his editor to cover a sci-fi and fantasy convention in a bid to humiliate him.

Since Cobb can’t afford to turn down the job, he heads to Georgia and dives head first into the world of Griffin*Con, renowned the world over as the Mardis Gras of geek conventions. In Atlanta he finds a place that takes geeky debauchery to new heights: science fiction and fantasy, cosplay, booze, sex, comic books, drugs, slash fiction, and more.

This scene takes place on Cobb’s first day at the con:

My heart sank, killing the warmth of the drugs.  The urge for locomotion finally returned to my legs and I continued my sojourn to the elevator.

That feeling of flying high without a safety net returned as the elevator doors I’d finally reached opened with a sharp DING.

And there before me was a Darth Vader.

He was all in black, save the lights twinkling on his chest plate.  He had his laser sword swinging at his side and a boom box straight out of 1985 slung on his shoulder.

Jesus Christ almighty, I was in hell.

Run DMC was blaring, but Vader, with a thick, gloved hand, pressed pause on the tape player ceasing the music.  All was silent but for his asthmatic voice, “Party Vader ‘Vater.”

I had no idea what he said, but what else could I do? I stepped into the elevator with this evil, evil man and his entourage, dressed in costumes from half a different film fantasies.  Squeezing into the back, I thought I might just zone them out, staring out at the floors below.

As soon as the elevator doors closed, Vader once more resumed his assault on decency, filling the airwaves once more with the mingent sounds of early eighties hip-hop.  Then the rest of them joined in on the merriment.  It was as though I’d stepped into a cage for a dozen go-go dancers.

We made it up five floors before the doors opened and I wanted to scream out to those getting on, “Run!  Flee for your insignificant lives!”

But before I could say a word Vader beat me to the punch.  “Party Vader ‘Vater,” he would say, just after stopping the music.  I rolled those words back and forth in my head trying to make sense of them to no avail.

The doors closed, he restarted the music and the dance party began all over again.

By the time we finally reached the ninth floor, it was apparent to me that my heart might explode.  When the door opened I was clamoring to get out, but there was an entire boarding party of people standing in my way, expecting to get on.

They were all dressed in khaki jumpsuits, each of them had hexagonal white patches with rows of solid black lines embroidered along the inside.

It  was a shock to everyone, me most of all, when I shoved the Vader down to his knees, all while I was screaming like a madman. “Get out!  Run for your lives!  Get out while you still can!”

I made it out and hit the front most khaki clad bastard as with my shoulder as and it was as though I’d struck their ten-pin.  They all toppled over, sprawling across the floor.

That’s when my blood ran cold, as though ice was flowing through my veins, stopping me in my tracks.

He was there.

Looking at me, staring at the commotion I’d caused.

Who else but a jet-packed Abraham Lincoln?

He was coming out of a room some thirty feet away and with all of my hollering he had to notice me.  His copper-plated goggles whirred into focus, almost certainly narrowing in on me.  I wondered if his eyewear contained some sort of heads up display that had targeted me, painting a giant bulls eye on my forehead.

I didn’t have much time to actually count the different ways he could crush me with his augmented hands because I was already on my way back in to the elevator.  Clawing my way inside, I prayed that his stovepipe hat wasn’t brimmed with a steel blade, perfect for throwing like a discus and beheading me like some half-assed Bond villain from the sixties.

The Vader turned to me and, in his belabored voice, asked me, “What the fuck?”

Ignoring him, I made my way to the back of the elevator, hurrying my way past the dancers.  I went as far as I could and hit a glass wall, looking out over the lobby and turned to see if the steam powered Lincoln was still on my trail.

Lincoln seemed to have forgotten about me. He was using his meaty bionic arms to help up the guys dressed like janitors that I’d knocked over like brick houses in a hurricane.

Our eyes locked, Lincoln’s and mine.  This was a battle of titans and I was determined to stay as far away from the battlefield as possible.  Our eyes remained fixed until the doors slid shut and the dance party continued upwards.

The rap hits of the eighties began again and the walls shook from the shifting weight of the merrymakers.

The elevator shot upwards.

As I watched the dots on the floor below get smaller and smaller I was left in my own thoughts, considering the ever-expanding nature of the universe.  My brain hurt contemplating the idea that telescopes in space could see the edge of the big bang and that seeing light at immense distances was tantamount to time travel.  Perceiving the vastness of the universe while rising higher and higher into the upper bowels of the hotel made my head swim.

The intoxicating effects of the MDMA in my system were only exacerbating the ethereal pain throbbing in my head.  The people in the lobby below were shrinking, getting smaller and smaller, their lives more and more insignificant.  They were just like me.  Even though I was moving higher and higher, I was matching their insectoid size, contracting into my own original fetal state.  The galaxy was drifting further and further into the far reaches of space and our space telescopes were looking deeper and deeper into the depths of time and I could feel that swirl of emotional discomfort, like that first walk into a strange girl’s bedroom.

And there he was.

There in the void was the head of Lincoln, floating in the ectoplasm of the universe.  His mouth opened and consumed my small, floating, infantile form until I was what Vonnegut would call a wisp of undifferentiated nothingness.

And there was blackness.

And then after the blackness, there was nothing.

Bryan Young is a man of many talents and has worked across many different mediums. As a film producer, his last two films (This Divided State and Killer at Large) were released by The Disinformation Company and were called “filmmaking gold” by The New York Times. He’s also published comic books with Slave Labor Graphics and Image Comics. He’s a contributor for the Huffington Post and the founder and editor in chief of the geek news and review site Big Shiny Robot!

CORUSCANT— Obi-Wan Kenobi, the mastermind of some of the most devastating attacks on the Galactic Empire and the most hunted man in the galaxy, was killed in a firefight with Imperial forces near Alderaan, Darth Vader announced on Sunday.

In a late-night appearance in the East Room of the Imperial Palace, Lord Vader declared that “justice has been done” as he disclosed that agents of the Imperial Army and stormtroopers of the 501st Legion had finally cornered Kenobi, one of the leaders of the Jedi rebellion, who had eluded the Empire for nearly two decades. Imperial officials said Kenobi resisted and was cut down by Lord Vader’s own lightsaber. He was later dumped out of an airlock.

The news touched off an extraordinary outpouring of emotion as crowds gathered in the Senate District and outside the Imperial Palace, waving imperial flags, cheering, shouting, laughing and chanting, “Hail to the Emperor! Hail Lord Vader!” In the alien protection zone, crowds sang “The Ten Thousand Year Empire.” Throughout the Sah’c district, airspeeder drivers honked horns deep into the night.

More on the Galatic Empire News

Hemoglobin-based oxygen carrier HBOC-201 is, in a word (or two), artificial blood — it delivers oxygen to your squishy organs. And, unlike real blood, it can be stored for years and doesn’t require matching blood types.

After years of working pretty well in clinical trials, it’s now saved a life for the first the time — it just brought back a woman whose car wreck was so brutal it left just a liter of blood in her body, and whose religion prevented her from receiving a real blood transfusion.

The future is here, and it’s synthetic blood and organs and tiny people grown in laboratories. Oh and maybe sexy, sexy vampires.

Read More: Gizmodo

Read more: news.com.au

Spotted via io9.com, thanks to Cyriaque Lamar for the post.

Warner Bros-based financing and production company Alcon Entertainment (“The Blind Side,” “The Book of Eli”) co-founders and co-Chief Executive Officers Broderick Johnson and Andrew Kosove, in the most significant property acquisition negotiations in the Company’s 13-year history, are in final discussions to secure film, television and ancillary franchise rights to produce prequels and sequels to the iconic 1982 science-fiction thriller “Blade Runner.”…

Alcon is negotiating to secure the rights from producer-director Bud Yorkin, who will serve as producer on “Blade Runner” along with Kosove and Johnson. Cynthia Sikes Yorkin will co-produce. Frank Giustra and Tim Gamble, CEO’s of Thunderbird Films, will serve as executive producers.

Alcon’s franchise rights would be all-inclusive, but exclude rights to remake the original. The Company, however, may produce projects based on situations introduced in the original film. The project would be distributed domestically by Warner Bros. International rights are yet to be determined.

Johnson and Kosove stated: “We are honored and excited to be in business with Bud Yorkin. This is a major acquisition for our company, and a personal favorite film for both of us. We recognize the responsibility we have to do justice to the memory of the original with any prequel or sequel we produce. We have long-term goals for the franchise, and are exploring multi-platform concepts, not just limiting ourselves to one medium only.”…

Well, what do you think, should they do it?

After more than five decades of tireless work, brave exploration, and technological innovation aimed at a single objective, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration announced Wednesday that it had finally completed its mission to find and kill God.

“I am ecstatic to tell you all today that we have beheld the awesome visage of the supreme architect of the cosmos, and we have murdered Him,” jubilant administrator Charles Bolden said after being drenched with champagne by other celebrating NASA employees. “There have been innumerable setbacks, missteps, and hardships over the past 50 years, but we always stayed true to our ultimate goal and we never gave up.”

“We finally got the son of a bitch!” Bolden continued. “He’s dead! God is dead!”

Read More in the Onion.

Robert Blankenheim and Derek Johnson Productions have created a trailer for ET-X: Extinction, an unnecessarily gritty and violent sequel to Steven Spielberg’s family-friendly blockbuster.

In this preview, grown-up footage of Henry Thomas and Drew Barrymore is spliced with generic disaster flick scenes (starring an authoritative Morgan Freeman, natch) and new animation of the red-eyed, cobra-necked extraterrestrials:

It’s the ultimate experience for Star Wars fans — staring forlornly off into the distance as twin suns sink into the horizon.

Yet it’s not just a figment of George Lucas’s imagination — twin suns are real. And here’s the big news – they could be coming to Earth.

Yes, any day now we see a second sun light up the sky, if only for a matter of weeks.

The infamous red super-giant star in Orion’s nebula — Betelgeuse — is predicted to go gangbusters and the impending super-nova may reach Earth before 2012, and when it does, all of our wildest Star Wars dreams will come true.

The second biggest star in the Orion constellation is losing mass, a typical indication that a gravitation collapse is occurring. When that happens, we’ll get our second sun, according to Dr Brad Carter, Senior Lecturer of Physics at the University of Southern Queensland.

Read More on News.com.au

The year is 2010. America has been at war for the first decade of the 21st century and is recovering from the largest recession since the Great Depression. Air travel security uses full-body X-rays to detect weapons and bombs. The president, who is African-American, uses a wireless phone, which he keeps in his pocket, to communicate with his aides and cabinet members from anywhere in the world. This smart phone, called a “Blackberry,” allows him to access the world wide web at high speed, take pictures, and send emails.

It’s just after Christmas. The average family’s wish-list includes smart phones like the president’s “Blackberry” as well as other items like touch-screen tablet computers, robotic vacuums, and 3-D televisions. Video games can be controlled with nothing but gestures, voice commands and body movement. In the news, a rogue Australian cyberterrorist is wanted by world’s largest governments and corporations for leaking secret information over the world wide web; spaceflight has been privatized by two major companies, Virgin Galactic and SpaceX; and Time Magazine’s person of the year (and subject of an Oscar-worthy feature film) created a network, “Facebook,” which allows everyone (500 million people) to share their lives online.

Antimatter Cloud (NASA)

It sounds like the stuff of science fiction, but scientists are reporting that they have seen antimatter beams emitted from thunderstorms. Jonathan Palmer has the story at BBC News:

A space telescope has accidentally spotted thunderstorms on Earth producing beams of antimatter.

Such storms have long been known to give rise to fleeting sparks of light called terrestrial gamma-ray flashes. But results from the Fermi telescope show they also give out streams of electrons and their antimatter counterparts, positrons.

The surprise result was presented by researchers at the American Astronomical Society meeting in the US.

It deepens a mystery about terrestrial gamma-ray flashes, or TGFs — sparks of light that are estimated to occur 500 times a day in thunderstorms on Earth. They are a complex interplay of light and matter whose origin is poorly understood.

Thunderstorms are known to create tremendously high electric fields — evidenced by lightning strikes. Electrons in storm regions are accelerated by the fields, reaching speeds near that of light and emitting high-energy light rays — gamma rays — as they are deflected by atoms and molecules they encounter.

These flashes are intense — for a thousandth of a second, they can produce as many charged particles from one flash as are passing through the entire Earth’s atmosphere from all other processes…

[continues at BBC News]

The alien planet Gliese 581g set off a firestorm of controversy earlier this year when astronomers loudly declared it to be the first truly habitable planet found outside our solar system.

One of several planets known to orbit the red dwarf star Gliese 581, the headline-grabbing world was described by one researcher as being “just the right size and just at the right distance [from its star] to have liquid water on the surface.”

Not so fast, other astronomers cried. Are you sure this planet actually exists?

Even at a mere 20 light-years from Earth, Gliese 581g is too far away for us to see it directly. We have to infer its existence based on the planet’s gravitational tugs on its host star.

Read More in NatGeo News

Roland Emmerich’s disaster movie proved to be a smash hit, taking more than £490 million [~$760 million] at the box office — but it was less popular at the US space agency. A panel of NASA experts concluded 2012 was the most scientifically flawed blockbuster ever made.

The film, which stars John Cusack, Danny Glover, Thandie Newton and Chiwetel Ejiofor, includes scenes in which a physicist claims to have discovered that neutrino particles carried to earth on solar flares had caused a series of catastrophic natural disasters.

Many film fans were so worried about what they saw that NASA was inundated with questions about whether the world could end in the way suggested in the movie, prompting the organisation to put up a special website explaining that the scientific theories in 2012 were myths. Donald Yeomans, head of NASA’s Near-Earth Asteroid Rendezvous mission, said 2012 was an ‘exceptional and extraordinary case’ of bad science on the big screen.

‘The film makers took advantage of public worries about the so-called end of the world as apparently predicted by the Mayans of Central America, whose calendar ends on December 21st, 2012,’ he added. A committee of NASA experts also criticised Armageddon, The 6th Day, Volcano and Chain Reaction for their inaccurate scientific content.

However, they concluded it was possible for science fiction blockbusters to be both entertaining and rooted in fact, citing Blade Runner and Gattaca as good examples.

Read More in Metro UK

Star Wars sequel The Empire Strikes Back

Each year, 25 “culturally” significant films are added to the registry, which was founded in 1989. Lucas’s Star Wars and American Graffiti are among the 550 titles already selected for preservation.

This year’s raft of entries includes Robert Altman’s 1971 western McCabe and Mrs. Miller starring Warren Beatty, Blake Edwards’ The Pink Panther and Elia Kazan’s first feature film, A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, made in 1945.

Cyberpunk is a 60-minute documentary from 1990 that serves as a charming bookend to the William Gibson documentary No Maps for These Territories. While Gibson is featured prominently in this doc, it also expands out to illuminate an entire slice of the late ’80s/early ’90s culture that used to be featured in the late, great Mondo 2000 magazine.

Cyberpunk Review offers these insights:

Cyberpunk is a documentary that looks back at the 80s cyberpunk movement, and more specifically, how this has led to a trend in the “real” world where people were starting to refer to themselves as “cyberpunk.” The documentary sees “cyberpunks” as being synonymous with hackers. A number of writers, artists, musicians and scientists are interviewed to provide context to this movement. The guiding meme, as told by Gibson, is that information “wants” to be free. 60s counter-culture drug philosopher, Timothy Leary, provides a prediction that cyberpunks will “decentralize knowledge,” which will serve to remove power from those “in power” and bring it back to the masses. Many different potential technologies are discussed, including “smart drugs,” sentient machines, advanced prosthetics — all of which serve to give context to the idea of post-humanity and its imminent arrival on the world stage.

As an added bonus, visit the Insomnia page for a contemporary interview with Mr. Gibson in which he discusses the current state of Cyberspace!