Science Fiction

SIDNEY PERKOWITZ, a serious-minded professor of physics at Emory University, has done some serious counting up: Since 1902, he reckons, the movie industry has produced about 1,400 science-fiction films ("more than one a month"). In "Hollywood Science: Movies, Science, and the End of the World" (Columbia University Press: 256 pp., $24.95), he surveys this prodigious output. Perkowitz grew up in the 1950s, the "golden era" of science fiction.

Today in the United States and most of Western Europe, a majority of people say they believe their children's lives will be worse than theirs. According to the 2007 Pew Global Attitudes Project survey, this stunning lack of optimism ranges from 80% in France to about 70% in Italy and Germany to 60% in the U.S. and Britain.

Leave it to George Lucas to dictate style in space. On the first day of filming "Star Wars" -- as Carrie Fisher writes in her new book, "Wishful Drinking" -- the director told her that she couldn't wear a bra under her white Princess Leia dress because it would strangle her in zero gravity. Hmmm. No doubt, a little jiggle didn't hurt in a galaxy far, far away, either. In fact, it would seem that undergarments have no place in most science fiction movies.

Hollywood has already dipped into its sci-fi vault for 21st century remakes of "The War of the Worlds," "Planet of the Apes" and "The Day the Earth Stood Still," so what's next on the revival list? Plenty.

Director Steven Spielberg and screenwriter Jonah Nolan are collaborating on a potential science-fiction epic titled "Interstellar" for Paramount Pictures. To cinephiles, comic-book junkies and science-fiction fans, the prospect of this team exploring the outer edges of space together is the filmmaking equivalent of a blooming supernova. Nolan, who co-wrote "The Prestige" and the short story upon which "Memento" was based, has just been hired to adapt the mind-bending ideas of physicist Kip S.

FOR the German monk searching for signs of God in "Star Trek," the obscure storeroom on the fourth floor of UC Riverside's main library was worth the trans-Atlantic pilgrimage. Bernhard Janzen pored over television scripts and a video clip from "Star Trek: Deep Space Nine," and noticed how an African American space station captain had found a religious stone tablet and, much like Moses, smashed it on the ground as he shepherded an oppressed people toward freedom.

THE science fiction writer Robert A. Heinlein was born in Missouri, and his fiction was mostly set in the future and on distant planets. But there's no question that Heinlein -- born 100 years ago this week -- was one of Southern California's great prophets. He lived in Los Angeles in the 1930s and '40s, and first turned to writing because of looming mortgage payments after his failed campaign in 1938 to represent Hollywood in the Assembly.

One "purpose" of science fiction, when it cares to take up the challenge, is to tell us something about the world we actually live in -- not a far future or far distant world, but the logical and proximate extension of what we're up to now. It takes our follies, dreams, nightmares and gives them form, provides a way to talk about ourselves without exactly talking about ourselves.

VANCOUVER, Canada -- Back then, it didn't seem like a great career move. "I don't think anyone told me that I was crazy," William Gibson recalled last week, sitting on the leafy patio of a Creole restaurant near his home. "But they didn't read science fiction, they didn't care. I suspect they sort of thought it was sad, to become obsessed with doing this stuff." Gibson, almost three decades later, has had the last laugh.

Philip K. DICK, the science-fiction author who struggled for years with personal demons, never saw "Blade Runner," the first Hollywood adaptation of his writing. He died of a stroke just four months shy of its release in 1982. His grieving daughter Isa, then 15, remembers going to see the film in a San Rafael theater hoping that it might, somehow, keep part of her father alive.