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I watched Forbidden Planet, a seminal 1956 Science Fiction movie, with Helen&Andrew a couple of nights ago. I was appalled.

Now, don’t get me wrong: it’s a decent movie that has stood the test of time remarkably well. But therein lies the problem. It seems that many of Science Fiction’s standard tropes were already in place and fully-formed, way back in 1956. Starships? Check. Hyperspace? Check. Blasters? Check. Force-fields? Check. Personal communicators? Check. Hot chicks in skimpy outfits? Check. Robots? Check. Long-vanished civilizations? Check. Self-repairing alien machines still running after “two thousand centuries”? Check. Scientific hubris? Check. It was all there. In 1956.

The special effects were noticably inferior to today’s movies of course, but even then they weren’t as lame as I was expecting. The only other really jarring thing I noticed was the fact that the crew of the starship was all male. If you took Forbidden Planet, smartened up the special effects and the ham acting, de-greased the hairstyles and addressed the gender imbalance you’d have a modern SF blockbuster.

I like to think of SF as the most progressive and inventive of the genres, and so I found it quite depressing that (in the “space opera” sub-genre anyway), nothing major seems to have happened for 50 years…