Exotic SF

It's sometime in the future in a state controlled society, where conformity and homogeneity are the rule. What is also the rule is that the populace follows the wants of the faceless state without question. How this is achieved is through a mandatory drug regimen, which also suppresses human desire, with sexual intercourse and human relationships banned. The law of the state is policed by a force of robocops. The physical environment is totally within a manufactured enclosure, what being outside of this unknown. THX 1138 is a loyal subject, he who goes about his business as a skilled factory working building robocops. And even when he begins to have strange feelings, he does what is obliged by going to the state run confessional, which further brainwashes through its reinforced mantra of happiness, loyalty and understanding. THX 1138 is given a glimpse into the other side through his computer matched and thus appointed female roommate, LUH 3417, and her surveillance colleague SEN 5241, LUH 3417's vision which may be something that THX 1138 may want to continue despite its illegality. If THX 1138 is able to keep his activities from the authorities and the robocops, he will have to figure out what options are available to him.

In 2270, Earth is completely depleted and no one lives there anymore. Those that have money move to Rhea; but most of the population lives in orbit in space stations. Dr. Laura Portmann decides to work in the cargo ship Kassandra in an eight year travel to Station 42 that is in orbit of RH278 to raise money to meet her sister Arianne in Rhea. They keep in touch with each other, but their messages take three years to reach the other. Laura joins Captain Pierre Lacroix and his crew composed by the First Officer Anna Lindbergh; Communication Officer Miyuki Yoshida and Igor Prokoff and Claudio Vespucci. The Sky Marshall Samuel Decker joins the team since the terrorist group Luddites, led by Klaus Bruckner, is bombing the stations. Lacroix organizes shifts of eight and half months for each crew-member while the others rest in cryogenic sleep. Three years and eight months later, Laura finds that there is apparently a stowaway in the cargo compartments and Decker and Lacroix are awakened to investigate the incident with her; however, Lacroix has an accident and dies and the crew is woken up. Further, she finds that Arianne's transmission to her took only twenty minutes. What might be the secret of the cargo transported by Kassandra and where the spaceship is going?

Computer scientist Hannon Fuller has discovered something extremely important. He's about to tell the discovery to his colleague, Douglas Hall, but knowing someone is after him, the old man leaves a letter in the computer generated parallel world his company has created (which looks like the 30's with seemingly real people with real emotions). Fuller is murdered in our real world the same night, and his colleague is suspected. Douglas discovers a bloody shirt in his bathroom and he cannot recall what he was doing the night Fuller was murdered. He logs into the system in order to find the letter, but has to confront the unexpected. The truth is harsher than he could ever imagine...

Berkeley record store clerk Nick Brady (Jonathan Scarfe) begins to experience strange visions from an entity he calls VALIS that cause him to uproot his family and move to Los Angeles where he becomes a successful music company executive. With the help of best friend, science fiction writer Philip K. Dick himself (Shea Whigam) and a mysterious woman named Silvia (Alanis Morissette), Nick finds himself drawn into a dangerous political-mystical conspiracy of cosmic proportions. The story is set in an alternate reality America circa 1985 under the authoritarian control of President Fremont, a Nixon-like clone (Scott Wilson).

A man and woman are drawn together, entangled in the life cycle of an ageless organism. Identity becomes an illusion as they struggle to assemble the loose fragments of wrecked lives.

In a future Earth barren of all flora and fauna, the planet's ecosystems exist only in large pods attached to spacecraft. When word comes in that the pods are to be jettisoned into space and destroyed, most of the crew of the Valley Forge rejoice at the prospect of going home. Not so for botanist Freeman Lowell, who loves the forest and its creatures. He kills his colleagues taking the ship deep into space. Alone on the craft with his only companions being three small robots, Lowell revels in joys of nature. When colleagues appear to "rescue" him, he realizes he has only one option available to him.

Astronomer Dr. Ellie Arroway has long been interested in contact to faraway lands, a love fostered in her childhood by her father, Ted Arroway (David Morse), who died when she was nine-years-old, leaving her orphaned. Her current work in monitoring for extraterrestrial life is based on that love and is in part an homage to her father. Ever since funding from the National Science Foundation (N.S.F.) was pulled on her work, which is referred to some, including her N.S.F. superior David Drumlin (Tom Skerritt), as more science fiction than science, Ellie, with a few of her rogue scientist colleagues, have looked for funding from where ever they could get it to continue their work. When Ellie and her colleagues hear chatter originating from the vicinity of the star Vega, Ellie feels vindicated. But that vindication is short lived when others, including politicians, the military, religious leaders, and other scientists, such as Drumlin, try to take over her work. When the messages received from space are decoded, the project takes on a whole new dimension, which strengthens for Ellie the quest for the truth. Thrown into the mix are the unknown person who has up until now funded most of Ellie's work and what his motivations are, and Palmer Joss (Matthew McConaughey), a renowned author and theologian, who despite their fundamental differences in outlook, is mutually attracted to Ellie, that attraction based in part on intellect and their common goal of wanting to know the truth.

Forbin is the designer of an incredibly sophisticated computer that will run all of America's nuclear defenses. Shortly after being turned on, it detects the existence of Guardian, the Soviet counterpart, previously unknown to US Planners. Both computers insist that they be linked, and after taking safeguards to preserve confidential material, each side agrees to allow it. As soon as the link is established the two become a new Super computer and threaten the world with the immediate launch of nuclear weapons if they are detached. Colossus begins to give its plans for the management of the world under its guidance. Forbin and the other scientists form a technological resistance to Colossus which must operate underground.

Sam Bell has a three year contract to work for Lunar Industries. For the contract's entire duration, he is the sole employee based at their lunar station. His primary job responsibility is to harvest and periodically rocket back to Earth supplies of helium-3, the current clean and abundant fuel used on Earth. There is no direct communication link available between the lunar station and Earth, so his only direct real-time interaction is with GERTY, the intelligent computer whose function is to attend to his day to day needs. With such little human contact and all of it indirect, he feels that three years is far too long to be so isolated; he knows he is beginning to hallucinate as the end of his three years approaches. All he wants is to return to Earth to be with his wife Tess and their infant daughter Eve, who was born just prior to his leaving for this job. With two weeks to go, he gets into an accident at one of the mechanical harvesters and is rendered unconscious. Injured, he awakens back at the station in the infirmary, he assumes assisted by GERTY. GERTY tells him that a rescue team named Eliza will come to the station to clean up the aftermath of the accident. After his recuperation, he takes an unauthorized trip back to the broken harvester, where he makes an unexpected discovery. Because of his find, he begins to doubt his sanity, then his true identity, then the company and GERTY's willingness to do what is best for him. Because of his resulting beliefs, his sole mission becomes how to get back to Earth on his own.

Caleb, a 26 year old programmer at the world's largest internet company, wins a competition to spend a week at a private mountain retreat belonging to Nathan, the reclusive CEO of the company. But when Caleb arrives at the remote location he finds that he will have to participate in a strange and fascinating experiment in which he must interact with the world's first true artificial intelligence, housed in the body of a beautiful robot girl.

Hoping for a more exciting life than the suburban drawl he currently inhabits, nerdy salary man Morgan Sullivan takes a job as an industrial spy at Digicorp, a global computer corporation. Digicorp assigns him the duty of flying to various conventions around America, recording the speeches that are made. But when Sullivan meets a mysterious woman he begins to realize that his job may not be what it seems, as he descends into a dark underworld of brainwashing and struggles to maintain his own identity.

50 years into the future, the Sun begins to die, and Earth is dying as a result. A team of astronauts is sent to revive the Sun - but the mission fails. Seven years later, a new team is sent to finish the mission as mankind's last hope.

On a road trip, Nic and two friends are drawn to an isolated area by a computer genius. When everything suddenly goes dark, Nic regains consciousness - only to find himself in a waking nightmare.

On the night of an astronomical anomaly, eight friends at a dinner party experience a troubling chain of reality bending events.

Two artificial intelligence engineers come together as they work to create the first ever self-aware artificial intelligence. A veteran AI engineer secretly hopes to develop technology to help his diseased daughter, even if it means funding comes from the powerful Ministry of Defence (MoD). His new partner, a young woman gifted in the field of AI, is brought on after her breakthroughs are recognized by the MoD. Things go wrong when the MoD takes over and advances the researchers' work to the next level, teaching the AI to kill and follow MoD instructions with its new and nearly indestructible body.

In the not-too-distant future, a less-than-perfect man wants to travel to the stars. Society has categorized Vincent Freeman as less than suitable given his genetic make-up and he has become one of the underclass of humans that are only useful for menial jobs. To move ahead, he assumes the identity of Jerome Morrow, a perfect genetic specimen who is a paraplegic as a result of a car accident. With professional advice, Vincent learns to deceive DNA and urine sample testing. Just when he is finally scheduled for a space mission, his program director is killed and the police begin an investigation, jeopardizing his secret.

2044. The climate change and a series of solar storms have turned in a desert the surface of the planet and annihilated to the 99.7 % of Earth's population, leaving alive 21 million people across the world in a single city covered by mechanical clouds (zeppelins anchored to the city) to make rain. Trying to rebuild the world again, a robot company named ROC Corporation create Automata Pilgrim 7000 with two security protocols: 1st, a robot cannot harm human beings, and 2nd, a robot cannot alter himself or another robot. But this situation changes when police officer Sean Wallace shoots and destroys a robot claiming that it was altering himself. With the company worried by the possible implications if the case were known by the people, insurance agent Jacq Vaucan is chosen to investigate the happened, while Vaucan tries to convince his boss, friend and brother-in-law Robert Bold to transfer him and his pregnant wife Rachel to the coast, with Bold accepting the request if Vaucan solves the case. Going with Wallace to a brothel, they meets a robot in blue wig named Cleo, who is shot by Wallace in the belief that Cleo will go with the mysterious repairman that Vaucan calls The Clocksmith. However, Cleo travels a mechanical workshop property of Dr. Susan Dupré, who informs Vaucan about a terrible possibility: that the robots can alter their second protocol themselves to acquire self awareness, implying a non-human intelligence that easily it should overpass the human brain after a test where she mixed a biocore from the Wallace's shot robot with Cleo's own biocore. Vaucan reports secretly Bold about it, but ROC's chairman intercepts the message. When Dr. Dupré is killed in front of Vaucan by a ROC's squad group, he and Cleo run from the assassins, ending outside the city, lost in the white desert that surrounds the city. Forced to meet ROC's chairman, this reports Bold about the secret of the two protocols: that the Pilgrim 7000's prototype was created without them, and due to its unlimited intelligence and learning, he overcame to its human owners just eight days later. After to escape, all the next Pilgrims were created with the protocols to limit their capacity in order to have them under control. Fearing the extinction of human race if all the Pilgrims evolve beyond the protocols, ROC's chairman blames Vaucan of Dupré's assassination and the alteration of the robots to cover up to the public, and Wallace is hired to find Cleo and Vucan and kill them. According Vaucan, Cleo and three robots more travel across the desert to the forbidden and radioactive zone to meet The Clocksmith, Vaucan will find himself as witness of something that it would change the world as nobody could imagine.

John Murdoch awakens alone in a strange hotel to find that he has lost his memory and is wanted for a series of brutal and bizarre murders. While trying to piece together his past, he stumbles upon a fiendish underworld controlled by a group of beings known as The Strangers who possess the ability to put people to sleep and alter the city and its inhabitants. Now Murdoch must find a way to stop them before they take control of his mind and destroy him.