Introduction

The main subject of the story of my film is about exploring and confronting things that have never been seen before – the ‘unknown’. I chose to set my film within the Sci-Fi genre because it is fitting for presenting exploration and discovery of the unknown as many pieces of Sci-Fi media already do this. That is why I think the subject for my project and its research should be “discovery in science fiction”.

Real World Events

Like all fiction, Sci-Fi draws inspiration and builds upon reality and real events. In real world history, people have explored and made significant discoveries – the discovery of Antarctica, the space race and the subsequent landing of humans on the moon – All of these are examples of times when people have travelled without full certainty of what they would find when they reached their destination. When the Apollo 11 crew returned from the moon in 1969, they were quarantined for 21 days in case they had contracted infections from the moon’s surface. In 2022, we now know that there are no living things on the moon at all, and so there’s no way that the crew would have been infected with anything that they weren’t already infected with on Earth – but it took people to go to the moon to find that out.

The War of the Worlds and Scientific Conjecture

New discoveries and ventures into unknown things are exciting for the people living through them and the science fiction genre builds upon the sense of wonder and excitement from real world discoveries through the ages. In 1878, an Italian astronomer saw what he thought was a network of channels on the surface of mars (which was translated into English as canals) and from there, another astronomer in 1895 proposed that the ‘canals’ were an irrigation system built by a civilization of Martians to fertilize the arid Martian soil – this became a topic of speculation among some scientists around the turn of the century. H.G Welles wrote the book The War of the Worlds in 1897 about a civilization of advanced Martians who invade earth, and are eventually wiped out by Earth’s diseases. It is a story based on the (contemporary) real world possibility of there being life on Mars – an example of where science fiction has taken inspiration from scientific conjecture and assumptions. The canals on Mars were an optical illusion, but to people at the time they were real: it takes Science Fiction to answer the question “who built the canals? what do they want? what if they came to Earth?”.

Applying This to the Modern Day

In the 20th and 21st century, people have had the technology which they did not have in previous times to prove scientific theories. The 2014 movie Interstellar aims to extrapolate some modern scientific theories into a story for cinema. The film follows an ex-pilot who leads a team of scientists through a mysterious wormhole to find a new planet for humans to settle on. It includes different themes of black holes, extra-dimensions and time. For the movie, the writer, director and producer Christopher Nolan consulted multiple physicists to try and maintain the scientific accuracy of the events of the movie as much as possible, even going so far as to have the main physicist working on the film collaborate with the VFX company DNEG to create new rendering software that would accurately simulate the black holes in the film. Single frames in some of these sequences took one hundred hours to render. After all of the meticulous research and accuracy, I thought the movie was just pretty good.

Conclusion

I am not trying to replicate complete accuracy in my project, nor am I working off of any specific scientific theory or idea but instead the staples of the Science Fiction genre – aliens, spaceships, adventures and fictional technology. Though some of these things may trace back to real theories or real space travel, I think that Science Fiction is ultimately an exercise of imagination and fantasy – the idea that maybe something extraordinary or fictional could be real, under the right circumstances. In conclusion, researching how the genre of science fiction has been fuelled by ideas, theories and assumptions since it emerged that are grounded in reality, or what’s perceived to be reality, has helped me to consider ways that I can create imaginative fiction in my on work.