Archief - Fantaseer over je eigen filmproject

The main story arc is set approximately 6 million years in the future. Humanity has spread throughout the Milky Way galaxy, which appears devoid of any other organic sentient life. The galaxy is populated by many civilizations of humans and various posthumans of widely varying levels of development. A civilization of sentient robots known as the Machine People has also developed, and coexists peacefully with humanity. Technologies of the era include inertial dampening, force fields, stellar engineering, and stasis fields. Also of note is the "Absence"—the mysterious disappearance of the Andromeda Galaxy.

Large-scale human civilizations almost invariably seem to collapse and disappear within a few millennia (a phenomenon referred to as "turnover"), the limits of sub-lightspeed travel making it too difficult to hold interstellar empires together. Consequently, the most powerful entities in the galaxy are the "Lines"—familial organisations made of cloned "shatterlings". The Lines do not inhabit planets, but instead travel through space, holding reunions after they've performed a "circuit" of the galaxy; something that takes about 200,000 years.

House of Suns concerns the Gentian Line, also known as the House of Flowers, composed of 999 clones (or "shatterlings"), male and female, of Abigail Gentian, with Abigail being the 1,000th shatterling.

The primary storyline begins as Campion and Purslane, 2 shatterlings of the Gentian line, are roughly fifty years late to the 32nd reunion. On approach they pick up an emergency distress signal from Fescue, another Gentian shatterling who informs them of a vicious attack that took place on the reunion world; an ambush in which the majority of the Gentian Line was wiped out. It's up to them to find out exactly who or what wants them dead.

After a major disaster caused by a meteorite falling in Northeast Italy in 2077, the government of Earth sets up the Spaceguard system as an early warning of arrivals from deep space.

The "Rama" of the title is an alien star ship, initially mistaken for an asteroid categorised as "31/439". It is detected by astronomers in the year 2130 while still outside the orbit of Jupiter. The object's speed (100,000 km/h) and the angle of its trajectory clearly indicate that this is not an object on a long orbit around our sun; it comes from interstellar space. Astronomers' interest is further piqued when they realise that this asteroid not only has an extremely rapid rotation period of 4 minutes, but it is exceptionally large. It is renamed Rama after the Hindu god and an unmanned space probe dubbed Sita is launched from the Mars moon Phobos to intercept and photograph it. The resulting images taken during its rapid flyby reveal that Rama is a perfect cylinder, 20 kilometres (12 mi) in diameter and 54 kilometres (34 mi) long, made of a completely featureless material, making this humankind's first encounter with an alien space ship.

Foundation begins a new chapter in the story of man's future. As the Old Empire crumbles into barbarism throughout the million worlds of the galaxy, Hari Seldon and his band of psychohistorians must create a new entity, the Foundation-dedicated to art, science, and technology-as the beginning of a new empire.

Renegade biotechnologist Vergil Ulam achieves an amazing breakthough in genetic engineering when he manages to create simple biological computers based on his own lymphocytes. Faced with orders from his nervous employer to destroy his work, he injects them into his own body, intending to smuggle them out of the company and work on them elsewhere. Shutting the door of the decontamination bay behind him, he adds a new chapter to the book chronicling the history of life.

In the 25th century, "jaunting" – personal teleporation – has so upset the social and economic balance that the Inner Planets are at war with the Outer Satellites. Gully Foyle of the Presteign-owned merchant spaceship Nomad – an uneducated, unskilled, unambitious man whose life is at a dead end – becomes a victim of the war when the ship is attacked and he alone survives. After six months of waiting for rescue, a passing spaceship, the Vorga, also owned by the powerful Presteign industrial clan, ignores his signal and abandons him. Foyle is enraged and is transformed into a man consumed by revenge, the first of many transformations.

Humans had discovered this artificial spaceport, full of working interstellar ships left behind by the mysterious, vanished Heechee. Their destinations are preprogrammed. They are easy to operate, but impossible to control.

Some came back with discoveries which made their intrepid pilots rich; most with their remains barely identifiable.

It was the ultimate game of Russian roulette, but in this resource-starved future there was no shortage of desperate volunteers.

Earth has become a Utopia, guided by a strange unseen people from outer space whose staggering powers have eradicated war, cruelty, poverty and racial inequality. When the 'Overlords' finally reveal themselves, their horrific form makes little impression.

Then comes the sign that the Overlords have been waiting for. A child begins to dream strangely - and develops remarkable powers. Soon this happens to every child - and the truth of the Overlords' mission is finally revealed to the human race...

The 21st century was on the brink of nuclear confrontation when the 300 kilometer-long stone flashed out of nothingness and into Earth's orbit. NASA, NATO, and the UN sent explorers to the asteroid's surface...and discovered marvels and mysteries to drive researchers mad.

For the Stone was from space--but perhaps not our space; it came from the future--but perhaps not our future; and within the hollowed asteroid was Thistledown. The remains of a vanished civilization. A human--English, Russian, and Chinese-speaking--civilization. Seven vast chambers containing forests, lakes, rivers, hanging cities...

And museums describing the Death; the catastrophic war that was about to occur; the horror and the long winter that would follow. But while scientists and politicians bickered about how to use the information to stop the Death, the Stone yielded a secret that made even Earth's survival pale into insignificance.

It's the twenty-fifth century, and advances in technology have redefined life itself. Human consciousness is digitally freighted between the stars and downloaded into bodies as a matter of course. A new body [or "sleeve"] is dirt cheap, making death nothing more than a minor blip on a screen. Onetime U.N. Envoy Takeshi Kovacs has been killed before, but his last death was particularly painful. Resleeved into a body in Bay City [formerly San Francisco], Kovacs is thrown into the dark heart of a shady, far-reaching conspiracy that is vicious even by the standards of a society that treats existence as something that can be bought and sold. For Kovacs, the shell that blew a hole in his chest was only the beginning.

Winter is an Earth-like planet with two major differences: conditions are semi artic even at the warmest time of the year, and the inhabitants are all of the same sex. Tucked away in a remote corner of the universe, they have no knowledge of space travel or of life beyond their own world. When a strange envoy from space brings news of a vast coalition of planets which they are invited to join, he is met with fear, mistrust and disbelief...

'The Left Hand of Darkness' is a groundbreaking work of feminist science fiction, an imaginative masterpiece which poses challenging questions about sexuality, sexism and the organisation of society.

Imagine living on a planet with six suns that never experiences Darkness. Imagine never having seen the Stars. Then, one by one your suns start to set, gradually leading you into Darkness for the first time ever. Image the terror of such a Nightfall.

The Earth's leaders have drawn a line in the interstellar sand--despite the fact that the fierce alien enemy they would oppose is inscrutable, unconquerable, and very far away. A reluctant conscript drafted into an elite Military unit, Private William Mandella has been propelled through space and time to fight in the distant thousand-year conflict; to perform his duties and do whatever it takes to survive the ordeal and return home. But "home" may be even more terrifying than battle, because, thanks to the time dilation caused by space travel, Mandella is aging months while the Earth he left behind is aging centuries, isolating the combatants ever more from the world for whose future they are fighting.