Science Fiction

What will it take to build a spaceship capable of traveling to the stars? And what if you wanted it to be ready to launch in just 100 years? It may sound like the premise of a science fiction show or reality TV series. But these are serious questions being asked by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, the research-and-development arm of the U.S. military. This fall, DARPA intends to award up to $500,000 in seed money to a group that proves it would do the best job of developing the necessary technologies — whatever they may be — for interstellar travel.

Months before the release of director Ridley Scott's "Prometheus," the studio behind his big-budget science-fiction film has been building buzz online with an unorthodox campaign. Aside from traditional movie trailers, 20th Century Fox has been carefully introducing the film's major characters (and a bit of back story) through a series of online videos - including one released Tuesday that features actor Michael Fassbender ("Shame") in an eerily deadpan performance as an android named David.

In "Looper," Joseph Gordon-Levitt plays a hitman in the near future whose targets have been sent back in time; one day, the man who turns up turns out to be an older version of the assassin. To bring the premise to life, Gordon-Levitt had to look (and act) like Bruce Willis, who plays the older incarnation of his character, and that meant spending three hours a day in the makeup chair. "That was really scary because you commit to that and there's no real way out of it," said "Looper" writer-director Rian Johnson of using practical prosthetics to make one actor look more like the other.

Han Song predicted the destruction of the Twin Towers a year before 9/11. In his novel "2066: Red Star Over America," Han, China's premier science-fiction writer, depicts a disturbing future. It is the year 2066. China rules the world while the U.S. festers in financial decline and civil war. A team has been sent to America to disseminate civilization through the traditional Chinese board game Go. But during the critical Go match held at the World Trade Center, terrorists strike.

Plot outline for a Philip K. Dick story: Hollywood buys film rights to obscure short story by famous author. Makes movie. Movie makes money. Producers then claim they never needed to buy rights in the first place. Demand their money back. Emblematic Philip K. Dick story elements: Attempt to turn back time and murkiness of reality. Extra mind-bending plot twist: Author of original story is named Philip K. Dick. As Laura Dick Coelho, one of the late author's daughters, told me: "Everything in the Philip K. Dick world is complicated.

THE COLLECTED STORIES OF ROBERT SILVERBERG Volume 1: Secret Sharers by Robert Silverberg (Bantam Books: $25 cloth, $12.50 paper; 546 pp. ) Bob Silverberg has been a very busy man for a long time now, his prolificacy often obscuring the fact that he has all along, while cranking out porno novels, children's books and a variety of potboilers, also produced some of the most engaging, original science fiction being written.

Rosie the Robot could finally be coming to your home. Willow Garage, a start-up in Menlo Park, Calif., has designed a robot called the PR2 that bears some resemblance to "The Jetsons'" beloved Rosie. It's still under development, but already the PR2 can fold clothes, fetch a drink from the fridge, set the table and even bake cookies. The robot's backers aren't ready to say just how soon the PR2 will hit the mainstream market. Right now it costs too much, does too little and is too slow to be of interest to most consumers.

Philip Jose Farmer was working for a steel and wire company in Peoria, Ill., and writing part time in 1952 when he stirred up the science-fiction world with his first published sci-fi tale, a controversial novella that appeared in the magazine Startling Stories. "The Lovers," a story in which a male earthling has a sexual relationship with an alien female, broke the taboo against depicting sex in the genre.

J.G. Ballard, one of the most inventive of the new wave of British science fiction writers to emerge in the 1960s who was best known for the autobiographical novel "Empire of the Sun," died Sunday, his agent said. He was 78. He had been ill "for several years" and died in London at the home of his long-term partner, his agent, Margaret Hanbury, said. She did not give the cause of death. Ballard was diagnosed with prostate cancer in 2006.

When Walt Disney Co.'s "John Carter" opens in theaters this weekend, the science-fiction adventure may encounter obstacles as formidable as its hero faces on Mars. The film brings to the big screen a century-old fantasy tale, from Tarzan creator Edgar Rice Burroughs, that has inspired generations of filmmakers and science fiction writers including James Cameron, George Lucas, Arthur C. Clarke and Ray Bradbury. Its sweeping scope and $250-million budget suggest director Andrew Stanton's ambition to create a cinematic adventure on a par with movies such as "Avatar" and "Star Wars" — works that were informed by Burroughs' original pulp fiction.

In "Looper," Joseph Gordon-Levitt plays a hitman in the near future whose targets have been sent back in time; one day, the man who turns up turns out to be an older version of the assassin. To bring the premise to life, Gordon-Levitt had to look (and act) like Bruce Willis, who plays the older incarnation of his character, and that meant spending three hours a day in the makeup chair. "That was really scary because you commit to that and there's no real way out of it," said "Looper" writer-director Rian Johnson of using practical prosthetics to make one actor look more like the other.

The Affair A Reacher Novel Lee Child Delacorte Press, $28 Knuckle-busting crime-solver Jack Reacher returns with a story from his early years involving a murder near a military base and how he became a maverick hero. After the Apocalypse Stories Maureen F. McHugh Small Beer Press, $16, paper McHugh pins down the wildest of disasters - the devastation of plague, zombies, the end of the world - by using a subdued, matter-of-fact narrative voice that makes these scenarios seem eerily real.

Plot outline for a Philip K. Dick story: Hollywood buys film rights to obscure short story by famous author. Makes movie. Movie makes money. Producers then claim they never needed to buy rights in the first place. Demand their money back. Emblematic Philip K. Dick story elements: Attempt to turn back time and murkiness of reality. Extra mind-bending plot twist: Author of original story is named Philip K. Dick. As Laura Dick Coelho, one of the late author's daughters, told me: "Everything in the Philip K. Dick world is complicated.

In Other Worlds SF and the Human Imagination Margaret Atwood Nan A. Talese/Doubleday: 259 pp., $24.95 Great fiction writers are usually better at showing than at telling. Sometimes, though, the job of explaining their creative choices is thrust on them by critics and others contributing to the daily cultural chatter. Canadian novelist Margaret Atwood rises to the challenge in her new book, "In Other Worlds: SF and the Human Imagination," in which she describes her lifelong relationship with the writerly worlds of fantasy and science fiction.

Russell Garcia, an arranger, composer and conductor who was an influential figure in the West Coast music scene during the 1950s and '60s and whose work in Hollywood included writing the score for the 1960 science-fiction classic "The Time Machine," has died. He was 95. Garcia, who walked away from his career in Hollywood in the mid-'60s, died of cancer Sunday at his home in Kerikeri, New Zealand, said his wife, Gina. During his eight-decade career in music, Garcia recorded more than 60 albums under his own name, including the otherworldly sounding "Fantastica: Music From Outer Space" and the avant-garde jazz album "Wigville" in the 1950s.

And So It Goes Kurt Vonnegut: A Life Charles J. Shields Henry Holt: 544 pp., $30 It's dangerous to begin a biography with what amounts to an advertisement for oneself. "Someone else could cobble together a so-so version of your life just by mining what's stored in library boxes and electronic files. And it will happen soon, I think," Charles J. Shields writes in the introduction to "And So It Goes: Kurt Vonnegut: A Life," quoting a note he sent his then-potential-subject in summer 2006.

Richard Gordon, a B-moviemaker whose credits as a producer and executive producer of science fiction and horror films included "Fiend Without a Face" and "The Haunted Strangler," has died. He was 85. The British-born Gordon died Tuesday at New York-Presbyterian Hospital in New York City. He had been hospitalized in recent months for heart problems, said Tom Weaver, a friend. Beginning his more than two-decade career as a producer in the mid-1950s, Gordon executive-produced movies such as "Corridors of Blood" with Boris Karloff and Christopher Lee, "The Haunted Strangler" with Karloff, "Island of Terror" with Peter Cushing and "Fiend Without a Face" and "First Man Into Space," both with Marshall Thompson.