Decipher SciFi

We’re from there! We love the fashion. And the music!

Hackers, crackers, script kiddies, etc.

Huge in the new at the time. Media coverage. The model for Dade’s legal situation.

Hacking, social engineering, dumpster diving.

Ruining Agent Gill. Reddit.

The importance of his work. Valis experience. Drugs! PKD’s place in the pantheon of science fiction writers, among Asimov, Bradbury and others. Humanity. Dignity. Technology vs humanity.

As we come closer to the machine, the machine comes closer to us. -Daniel Abella

Daniel Abella

Indie sci-fi film festival. Featuring a bunch of interesting films, shorts, and documentaries. Even one video game! Here are some trailers:

We’ve just launched our Patreon to help us improve the show! Check out the Support the Show page to see our spiel.

Sun science. Stages and timeline of sun death.

Solar radiation. Reflector shields. Ion drive. Magical gravity. Oxygen garden. Sun room.

LOVE pragmatic Chris Evans. Our favorite person. Cillian is always great. Earth room holo tech. The different captains and their madness. Jumping through space! PS: we’ve covered this before, in episode 1.

Thoughts on the third act juxtaposed with the first two.

Why return trip? Rendezvous a good idea? Thinning the herd. Pragmatic Chris Evans again.

We looooooooooove the score around this whole thing.

We realize that there are some very obvious omissions from our lists. In the episode we address these, so check out the episode to see how we treat your favorite thing!

We welcome you to contact us to tell us how wrong we are. Please! Especially if we left out your very obvious #1. We’d like to hear from you.

Spanish, French, Transatlantic Accent. Class identifier. Norman invasion. Linguistic bigotry.

Facial branding. Fancy Pip Boys. Differences in rich and poor tech.

How does it work? Neurological limitations. Altering personality.

Brain storage implants. Encryption. Kill switches.

REALLY cool installation montage. Order of installation operations. Current tech. Warhammer Space Marines.

Voices from L5! Space planes. Torus settlements. Artificial gravity. Division of rich and poor. Space exploration

Chewed to bits by giant turtles! The Pulpiest Pulp.

The pulp school L. Ron Hubbard came from. The book should not stand out much against this background. Except it came out in the 80s!

DUTCH TILTS. The book Hubbard most wanted made into a movie. Travolta stood behind it as a love letter to Scientology. Reportedly, interference from Scientology higher-ups destroyed the whole thing, and then they threw John Travolta under the bus.

Nature would take over. Paper would waste away. People would… start to act like chimps? Chernobyl. The Koream DMZ.

Read about the paradox on Wikipedia. The Psychlos as the great filter. They’re Made Out of Meat on The Truth Podcast.

Psychlos underestimating humans. Tool use and language.

In the book, they were feline! Douchey Klingons. Breathable atmosphere. High and low gravity. Cats are jerks.

Why gold? Why slaves? Corporate space exploitation.

We watched a lot of it in highschool. How this film transcends the norm. Timeline of anime and the cyberpunk aesthetic.

The influences that went into this movie. The huge influence this movie had on everything after.

For once we have to lay out the plot of the movie in detail, because it’s kind of complicated!

Awesome. Exploding heads. Japanese pornography laws. Encryption as armament.

The spectrum on jacked-in-ness in the movie. Taxonomy of androids, cyborgs, and robots.

Mind-body dualism. The treatment of consciousness in the film.

Emergent AI. What is life? Evolution of digital life forms.

Underdogs, sticking it to the man, engaging with our sense of justice and living the American Dream! Or something.

The world of Gattaca banks on this big-time, but in real it’s much more complicated. Nature AND nurture. People are more than the genes they start with.

Current practices with in vitro and in vivo baby testing. Down syndrome.

Racism. “Positive” and “negative.” American eugenics programs. Medical choices are eugenic.

Loooooong list of inconveniences Ethan Hawke has to keep up with to not get caught. Financial arrangements. Colloquial speech in Andrew Niccol’s films.

How they produced the “zoom” sequences in the film. Color grading.

Drugs as tools. 20% brain myth. Christopher’s past caffeine issues. Drugs have side effects, like blacking out, maybe murdering folks.

How do we define intelligence? Social? Knowledge? Pattern recognition? Analysis? Synthesis? Crazy neuro physical adaptation.

Would you want the drug? How could this affect society? Going into politics?

Really cool Youtube channel. Neil deGrasse Tyson. Spoiler policies.

Serially published on Andy Weir’s blog. Accidental best-seller.

Research. Space travel is dangerous. Radiation shielding.

Mars One. Space X. ELON MUSK. Settlement.

Liquid salinated water. Frozen water under surface. NASA sterilization.

Robots? Human inspiration.

Growing or shipping food.

Pretty much have to be MacGyver. Overcoming functional fixedness.