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ScienceFiction

★ Sci-Fi Culture

Star Citizen: The Genesis of a Universe and of Cloud Imperium Games

In October 2012, Chris Roberts asked for 2 million dollars to bring the space sim back to life on PC. Fourteen years later, Star Citizen has passed one billion dollars in funding, its studio employs more than a thousand people, and the game is still in alpha. This is the story of how an outsized project came to be, and of the company built to make it: Cloud Imperium Games. No video game has ever raised this much money from its own players. None has taken this long not to come out, either. To understand how a crowdfunding campaign turned into a global studio, you have to go back well before 2012, to a teenager in Manchester writing code on a BBC Micro.

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Sci-Fi Culture

Why science fiction helps us think about the future

Long before the engineers, writers were dreaming up rockets, robots and satellites. A look back at a genre that does not predict the future, but teaches us how to argue about it. Science fiction has never claimed to predict the future. It does something better: it asks 'what if…?' and follows the answer all the way through. What if we could leave Earth? What if a machine began making decisions for us? What if the climate tipped over? Each story is a thought experiment carried to its conclusion, with characters there to feel the effects. The American author Frederik Pohl is credited with a line that sums up the exercise: a good science fiction story does not just predict the car, it predicts the traffic jam. In other words, the invention matters less than what it changes in our lives. That is what makes the genre such a remarkable laboratory of ideas.

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Space opera, cyberpunk, hard SF : le petit lexique de la SF

Sci-Fi Culture

Space opera, cyberpunk, hard SF: a short sci-fi glossary

Do you mix up space opera and hard SF? Not sure whether Blade Runner belongs under cyberpunk or dystopia? This short guide sorts out the main families of science fiction: for each one, a definition, a little history and a few works to start with. Science fiction is less a genre than a continent. Galactic sagas, neon-lit noir, engineers' novels and green utopias all live under the same label. Subgenres work as a compass. They say less about what a story tells than about the promise it makes to its audience: escape, scientific wonder, a warning or a reason to hope. Here are the four families worth knowing, and a few of their cousins.

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