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🔗 United States 🔗 Biography 🔗 Military history 🔗 Military history/North American military history 🔗 Military history/United States military history 🔗 Science Fiction 🔗 Biography/science and academia 🔗 Military history/Military biography 🔗 Biography/military biography 🔗 Biography/arts and entertainment 🔗 Chicago 🔗 United States/Massachusetts - Cape Cod and the Islands 🔗 United States/Indiana - Indianapolis

Kurt Vonnegut Jr. (; November 11, 1922 – April 11, 2007) was an American writer. In a career spanning over 50 years, Vonnegut published fourteen novels, three short story collections, five plays, and five works of non-fiction, with further collections being published after his death. He is most famous for his darkly satirical, best-selling novel Slaughterhouse-Five (1969).

Born and raised in Indianapolis, Indiana, Vonnegut attended Cornell University but dropped out in January 1943 and enlisted in the United States Army. As part of his training, he studied mechanical engineering at Carnegie Institute of Technology (now Carnegie Mellon University) and the University of Tennessee. He was then deployed to Europe to fight in World War II and was captured by the Germans during the Battle of the Bulge. He was interned in Dresden and survived the Allied bombing of the city by taking refuge in a meat locker of the slaughterhouse where he was imprisoned. After the war, Vonnegut married Jane Marie Cox, with whom he had three children. He later adopted his sister's three sons, after she died of cancer and her husband was killed in a train accident.

Vonnegut published his first novel, Player Piano, in 1952. The novel was reviewed positively but was not commercially successful. In the nearly 20 years that followed, Vonnegut published several novels that were only marginally successful, such as Cat's Cradle (1963) and God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater (1964). Vonnegut's breakthrough was his commercially and critically successful sixth novel, Slaughterhouse-Five. The book's anti-war sentiment resonated with its readers amidst the ongoing Vietnam War and its reviews were generally positive. After its release, Slaughterhouse-Five went to the top of The New York Times Best Seller list, thrusting Vonnegut into fame. He was invited to give speeches, lectures and commencement addresses around the country and received many awards and honors.

Later in his career, Vonnegut published several autobiographical essays and short-story collections, including Fates Worse Than Death (1991), and A Man Without a Country (2005). After his death, he was hailed as a morbidly comical commentator on the society in which he lived and as one of the most important contemporary writers. Vonnegut's son Mark published a compilation of his father's unpublished compositions, titled Armageddon in Retrospect. In 2017, Seven Stories Press published Complete Stories, a collection of Vonnegut's short fiction including five previously unpublished stories. Complete Stories was collected and introduced by Vonnegut friends and scholars Jerome Klinkowitz and Dan Wakefield. Numerous scholarly works have examined Vonnegut's writing and humor.

🔗 Film 🔗 Film/American cinema 🔗 Science Fiction 🔗 Romania 🔗 Film/British cinema 🔗 Film/War films

Children of Men is a 2006 dystopian action thriller film co-written and directed by Alfonso Cuarón. The screenplay, based on P. D. James' 1992 novel The Children of Men, was credited to five writers, with Clive Owen making uncredited contributions. The film takes place in 2027, when two decades of human infertility have left society on the brink of collapse. Asylum seekers seek sanctuary in the United Kingdom, where they are subjected to detention and refoulement by the government. Owen plays civil servant Theo Faron, who must help refugee Kee (Clare-Hope Ashitey) escape the chaos. Children of Men also stars Julianne Moore, Chiwetel Ejiofor, Pam Ferris, Charlie Hunnam, and Michael Caine.

The film was released by Universal Pictures on 22 September 2006 in the UK and on 25 December in the US. Critics noted the relationship between the US' Christmas opening and the film's themes of hope, redemption, and faith. Despite the limited release and lack of any clear marketing strategy during awards season by the film's distributor, Children of Men received critical acclaim and was recognised for its achievements in screenwriting, cinematography, art direction, and innovative single-shot action sequences. It was nominated for three Academy Awards: Best Adapted Screenplay, Best Cinematography, and Best Film Editing. It was also nominated for three BAFTA Awards, winning Best Cinematography and Best Production Design, and for three Saturn Awards, winning Best Science Fiction Film. In 2016 it was voted 13th among 100 films considered the best of the 21st century by 117 film critics from around the world.

🔗 Computing 🔗 Computer science 🔗 Lists 🔗 Science Fiction

Computers have often been used as fictional objects in literature, movies and in other forms of media. Fictional computers tend to be considerably more sophisticated than anything yet devised in the real world.

This is a list of computers that have appeared in notable works of fiction. The work may be about the computer, or the computer may be an important element of the story. Only static computers are included. Robots and other fictional computers that are described as existing in a mobile or humanlike form are discussed in a separate list of fictional robots and androids.

🔗 Computer science 🔗 Science Fiction 🔗 Systems

Swarm intelligence (SI) is the collective behavior of decentralized, self-organized systems, natural or artificial. The concept is employed in work on artificial intelligence. The expression was introduced by Gerardo Beni and Jing Wang in 1989, in the context of cellular robotic systems.

SI systems consist typically of a population of simple agents or boids interacting locally with one another and with their environment. The inspiration often comes from nature, especially biological systems. The agents follow very simple rules, and although there is no centralized control structure dictating how individual agents should behave, local, and to a certain degree random, interactions between such agents lead to the emergence of "intelligent" global behavior, unknown to the individual agents. Examples of swarm intelligence in natural systems include ant colonies, bird flocking, hawks hunting, animal herding, bacterial growth, fish schooling and microbial intelligence.

The application of swarm principles to robots is called swarm robotics, while 'swarm intelligence' refers to the more general set of algorithms. 'Swarm prediction' has been used in the context of forecasting problems. Similar approaches to those proposed for swarm robotics are considered for genetically modified organisms in synthetic collective intelligence.

🔗 Novels 🔗 Novels/Science fiction 🔗 Science Fiction 🔗 Media franchises

Dune is a science fiction media franchise that originated with the 1965 novel Dune by Frank Herbert and has continued to add new publications up to 2017. Dune is frequently cited as the best-selling science fiction novel in history. It won the 1966 Hugo Award and the inaugural Nebula Award for Best Novel, and was later adapted into a 1984 film and a 2000 television miniseries. Herbert wrote five sequels, and the first two were presented as a miniseries in 2003. The Dune universe has also inspired some traditional games and a series of video games. Since 2009, the names of planets from the Dune novels have been adopted for the real-world nomenclature of plains and other features on Saturn's moon Titan.

Frank Herbert died in 1986. Beginning in 1999, his son Brian Herbert and science fiction author Kevin J. Anderson published a number of prequel novels, as well as two which complete the original Dune series (Hunters of Dune in 2006 and Sandworms of Dune in 2007), partially based on Frank Herbert's notes discovered a decade after his death.

The political, scientific, and social fictional setting of Herbert's novels and derivative works is known as the Dune universe, or Duniverse. Set tens of thousands of years in the future, the saga chronicles a civilization which has banned all forms of computers, or "thinking machines", but has also developed advanced technology and mental and physical abilities. Vital to this empire is the harsh desert planet Arrakis, only known source of the spice melange, the most valuable substance in the universe.

Due to the similarities between some of Herbert's terms and ideas and actual words and concepts in the Arabic language, as well as the series' "Islamic undertones" and themes, a Middle Eastern influence on Herbert's works has been noted repeatedly.

🔗 Computing 🔗 Computer science 🔗 Science Fiction 🔗 Cognitive science 🔗 Robotics 🔗 Transhumanism 🔗 Software 🔗 Software/Computing 🔗 Futures studies

Artificial general intelligence (AGI) is the hypothetical intelligence of a machine that has the capacity to understand or learn any intellectual task that a human being can. It is a primary goal of some artificial intelligence research and a common topic in science fiction and futures studies. AGI can also be referred to as strong AI, full AI, or general intelligent action. (Some academic sources reserve the term "strong AI" for machines that can experience consciousness.)

Some authorities emphasize a distinction between strong AI and applied AI (also called narrow AI or weak AI): the use of software to study or accomplish specific problem solving or reasoning tasks. Weak AI, in contrast to strong AI, does not attempt to perform the full range of human cognitive abilities.

As of 2017, over forty organizations were doing research on AGI.

🔗 Science Fiction 🔗 Business 🔗 Psychology 🔗 Anthropology 🔗 Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy

"Somebody else's problem" (also "someone else's problem") is a phrase used to describe an issue which is dismissed by a person on the grounds that they consider somebody else to be responsible for it. The term is also used to refer to a factor that is "out of scope" in a particular context.

🔗 Film 🔗 Film/American cinema 🔗 Science Fiction 🔗 Comedy

Dark Star is a 1974 American independent science fiction comedy film produced, scored and directed by John Carpenter and co-written with Dan O'Bannon. It follows the crew of the deteriorating starship Dark Star, twenty years into their mission to destroy unstable planets that might threaten future colonization of other planets.

Beginning as a University of Southern California (USC) student film produced from 1970 to 1972, it was gradually expanded with reshoots in 1973, eventually appearing in its current feature-length form at Filmex in March 1974, and subsequently received a limited theatrical release in 1975. Its final budget is estimated at $60,000. While initially unsuccessful with audiences, it was relatively well received by critics, and continued to be shown in theaters as late as 1980. The home video revolution of the early 1980s helped the movie achieve "cult classic" status. O'Bannon collaborated with home video distributor VCI in the production of releases on VHS, LaserDisc, DVD, and eventually Blu-ray.

Dark Star was Carpenter's feature directorial debut; he also scored the film. It was also the feature debut for O'Bannon, who also served as editor, production designer, and visual effects supervisor, and appeared as Sergeant Pinback.

🔗 Television 🔗 Science Fiction 🔗 Television/British television 🔗 Television/ITC productions

The Prisoner is a 1967 British television series about an unnamed British intelligence agent who is abducted and imprisoned in a mysterious coastal village, where his captors designate him as Number Six and try to find out why he abruptly resigned from his job. Patrick McGoohan played the lead role as Number Six. The series was created by McGoohan with possible contributions from George Markstein. Episode plots have elements of science fiction, allegory, and psychological drama, as well as spy fiction. It was produced by Everyman Films for distribution by Lew Grade's ITC Entertainment.

A single series of 17 episodes was filmed between September 1966 and January 1968, with exterior location filming in Portmeirion, Wales. Interior scenes were filmed at MGM-British Studios in Borehamwood, north of London. The series was first broadcast in Canada beginning on 5 September 1967, in the UK on 29 September 1967, and in the US on 1 June 1968. Although the show was sold as a thriller in the mould of the previous series starring McGoohan, Danger Man, its combination of 1960s countercultural themes and surrealistic setting had a far-reaching influence on science fiction and fantasy TV programming, and on narrative popular culture in general. Since its initial screening, the series has developed a cult following.

A six-part TV miniseries remake aired on the US cable channel AMC in November 2009. In 2016, Big Finish Productions reinterpreted the series as an audio drama.

🔗 Television 🔗 Science Fiction

V (or V: The Original Miniseries) is a two-part American science-fiction television miniseries, written and directed by Kenneth Johnson. First shown in 1983, it initiated the science-fiction franchise concerning aliens known as the "Visitors" trying to gain control of Earth and of the ways the populace reacts.