Working for the past few months immersed in a science fiction show has been a lot of fun. Lots of work too, of course, but when a big part of the research has been revisiting shows that ran and ran such as Mission: Impossible, Columbo and The Man from U.N.C.L.E. it’s not the kind of work day that you drag your feet towards.

The great part of writing a show like Slingers is that a lot of the reference material is so readily available – for the most part I don’t have to worry too much about the future as in many ways (for better or worse) we’re already living in it. For example, the above image is taken from the trailer for upcoming apocalyptic thriller The Road. It’s a stunning image of a familiar world gone wrong, but what’s more stunning is what I read in this Esquire preview:

“When they pass through a city, there’s a shot of two ships sitting on a freeway that looks like a visual effect. That is an actual IMAX 70mm shot taken days after Katrina. We had to doctor the image, grunge it up, make it more toxic, set it into our world, but these places were not hard to find. There’s a fair amount of devastation already in the American landscape.”

Kinda horrifying.

A much more beautiful example was this shot of the Space Shuttle Atlantis caught as just a speck against the backdrop of the sun (uncropped image here). When you take into account that Atlantis is almost 25 years old and quite an old fashioned idea herself (often described as a brick with a stick by those piloting her back into our atmosphere) there’s something almost retro about our Shuttle missions.

One real piece of real life science fiction that touched me recently was the Phoenix Mars Mission from NASA and the genius stroke to anthropomorphise the little craft by giving it a voice via Twitter:

It was a thing of wonder to have the reports come back and see the little guy interact with its followers, but then as the mission came towards its end it suddenly became heartbreaking:

I used to think living in the future was all jetpacks and rocket ships, but it turns out it was all about projecting a little of our humanity out into the darkness…