23 November

Watching The Martian again the other day, along with the film Gravity there's been a real shift in the way people see science fiction. In the past science fiction was all that corny Star Trek reaching for the stars stuff, to go where no man (sic) has gone before etc. And 2001 was the same, about humankind reaching for the stars and leaving Earth behind. The Martian and these other recent films are flipping things. Suddenly there's a realisation that the one thing standing between all of us and extinction is that thin blue line at the surface of the Earth. Not a greenie message either, the Green movement is often even more conservative than the conservatives it hates, with its fantasies of living at one with Nature etc. As if nature was a thing that even existed. All known life in the universe lives in that thin blue line. Everything we think and do will eventually have to focus on that.