Posts tagged Star Trek

In ‘Game of Thrones,’ a Language to Make the World Feel Real - NYTimes.com

People have made a career out of this?

“There’s been a sea change in Hollywood. They realize there’s a fan base out there that wants constructed languages,” said Matt Pearson, a linguistics professor at Reed College in Portland, Ore. He created Thhtmaa (pronounced tukhh-t’-mah), the language of termite-like aliens in the short-lived NBC series “Dark Skies.”

“Game of Thrones,” based on the best-selling series of novels “A Song of Ice and Fire” by George R. R. Martin, may be the biggest television showcase for an invented language. The books, which primarily follow feuding kingdoms in the fictional land of Westeros, had a scattering of Dothraki words, but the show’s executive producers wanted a fully formed language.

I remember from my school days, there was a kid who was learning to speak Klingon. Predictably, he came in for a lot of mockery. He’s probably consulting on one of these TV shows by now.

fuckyeahsciencefiction: http://io9.com/5559829/star-trek-space-seed-poster-sells-out-in-just-one-hour

fuckyeahsciencefiction:

http://io9.com/5559829/star-trek-space-seed-poster-sells-out-in-just-one-hour

fuckyeahsciencefiction

Why Minority Report was spot on | Technology | The Guardian

In predicting the future, Spielberg’s Minority Report helped to shape it:

What Spielberg didn’t count on, though, is what might be called “the Star Trek effect”. If you show off imaginary cool technology in a film or TV series, then kids, teenagers and enthusiastic technologists of all ages will try their damnedest to make it come true. When James T Kirk beamed down to an alien planet and flipped open his communicator, when Spock waved his tricorder over strange life forms and murmured “intriguing …”, when the crew of the Enterprise teleported, carried phasers, communicated with their computer by voice and carried data around on little plastic sticks, a generation looked at it and thought: that’s a future I want to live in.

What the article doesn’t mention is that when Spielberg was making this film, he consulted with a team of eminent “futurologists” to develop a compelling vision of the future. More on that here.

Guardian