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Science fiction Alien (film)
Science fiction is a genre of speculative fiction dealing with imaginative concepts such as futuristic science and technology, space travel, time travel, faster than light travel, parallel universes and extraterrestrial life. Science fiction often explores the potential consequences of scientific and other innovations, and has been called a "literature of ideas." It usually eschews the supernatural, and unlike the related genre of fantasy, historically science fiction stories were intended to have at least a faint grounding in science-based fact or theory at the time the story was created, but this connection has become tenuous or non-existent in much of science fiction. 

Definitions

Science fiction is difficult to define, as it includes a wide range of subgenres and themes. Author and editor Damon Knight summed up the difficulty, saying "science fiction is what we point to when we say it", a definition echoed by author Mark C. Glassy, who argues that the definition of science fiction is like the definition of pornography: you do not know what it is, but you know it when you see it.

Hugo Gernsback, who was one of the first in using the term "science fiction", described his vision of the genre: "By 'scientifiction' I mean the Jules Verne, H. G. Wells and Edgar Allan Poe type of story—a charming romance intermingled with scientific fact and prophetic vision." 

In 1970 William Atheling Jr. wrote about the English term "science fiction": "Wells used the term originally to cover what we would today call ‘hard’ science fiction, in which a conscientious attempt to be faithful to already known facts (as of the date of writing) was the substrate on which the story was to be built, and if the story was also to contain a miracle, it ought at least not to contain a whole arsenal of them." 

According to science fiction writer Robert A. Heinlein, "a handy short definition of almost all science fiction might read: realistic speculation about possible future events, based solidly on adequate knowledge of the real world, past and present, and on a thorough understanding of the nature and significance of the scientific method." Rod Serling's definition is "fantasy is the impossible made probable. Science fiction is the improbable made possible." Lester del Rey wrote, "Even the devoted aficionado—or fan—has a hard time trying to explain what science fiction is", and that the reason for there not being a "full satisfactory definition" is that "there are no easily delineated limits to science fiction."

Characteristics

Science fiction is largely based on writing rationally about alternative possible worlds or futures. It is related to, but different from fantasy in that, within the context of the story, its imaginary elements are largely possible within scientifically established or scientifically postulated physical laws (though some elements in a story might still be pure imaginative speculation).

The settings of science fiction are often contrary to those of consensus reality, but most science fiction relies on a considerable degree of suspension of disbelief, which is facilitated in the reader's mind by potential scientific explanations or solutions to various fictional elements. Science fiction elements include:
* A time setting in the future, in alternative timelines, or in a historical past that contradicts known facts of history or the archaeological record.
* A spatial setting or scenes in outer space (e.g. spaceflight), on other worlds, or on subterranean earth.
* Characters that include aliens, mutants, androids, or humanoid robots and other types of characters arising from a future human evolution.
* Futuristic or plausible technology such as ray guns, teleportation machines, and humanoid computers.
* Scientific principles that are new or that contradict accepted physical laws, for example time travel, wormholes, or faster-than-light travel or communication.
* New and different political or social systems, e.g. utopian, dystopian, post-scarcity, or post-apocalyptic.
* Paranormal abilities such as mind control, telepathy, telekinesis (e.g. "The Force" in Star Wars ). 
* Other universes or dimensions and travel between them.

History

As a means of understanding the world through speculation and storytelling, science fiction has antecedents which go back to an era when the dividing line separating the mythological from the historical tends to become somewhat blurred, though precursors to science fiction as literature can be seen in Lucian's True History in the 2nd century,  some of the Arabian Nights tales, The Tale of the Bamboo Cutter in the 10th century and Ibn al-Nafis's Theologus Autodidactus in the 13th century.

A product of the budding Age of Reason and the development of modern science itself, Margaret Cavendish's "The Blazing World" (1666) and Jonathan Swift's Gulliver's Travels (1726) are some of the first true science fantasy works,  which both feature the adventures of the protagonist in fictional and fantastical places, together with Voltaire's Micromégas (1752) and Johannes Kepler's Somnium (1620–1630). Isaac Asimov and Carl Sagan considered the latter work the first science fiction story.  It depicts a journey to the Moon and how the Earth's motion is seen from there. The Blazing World (1666), by English noblewoman Margaret Cavendish, has also been described as an early forerunner of science fiction.  Another example is Ludvig Holberg's novel Nicolai Klimii Iter Subterraneum (1741).

Following the 18th-century development of the novel as a literary form, in the early 19th century, Mary Shelley's books Frankenstein (1818) and The Last Man helped define the form of the science fiction novel, and  Brian Aldiss has argued that Frankenstein was the first work of science fiction.  Later, Edgar Allan Poe wrote a story about a flight to the moon. More examples appeared throughout the 19th century.

Then with the dawn of new technologies such as electricity, the telegraph, and new forms of powered transportation, writers including H. G. Wells and Jules Verne created a body of work that became popular across broad cross-sections of society. Wells' The War of the Worlds (1898) describes an invasion of late Victorian England by Martians using tripod fighting machines equipped with advanced weaponry. It is a seminal depiction of an alien invasion of Earth.

In the late 19th century, the term "scientific romance" was used in Britain to describe much of this fiction. This produced additional offshoots, such as the 1884 novella Flatland: A Romance of Many Dimensions by Edwin Abbott Abbott. The term would continue to be used into the early 20th century for writers such as Olaf Stapledon.

In the early 20th century, pulp magazines helped develop a new generation of mainly American SF writers, influenced by Hugo Gernsback, the founder of Amazing Stories magazine.  In 1912 Edgar Rice Burroughs published A Princess of Mars, the first of his three-decade-long series of Barsoom novels, situated on Mars and featuring John Carter as the hero.  The 1928 publication of Philip Francis Nowlan's original Buck Rogers story, Armageddon 2419, in Amazing Stories was a landmark event.  This story led to comic strips featuring Buck Rogers (1929), Brick Bradford (1933), and Flash Gordon (1934).  The comic strips and derivative movie serials greatly popularized science fiction.

In the late 1930s, John W. Campbell became editor of Astounding Science Fiction, and a critical mass of new writers emerged in New York City in a group called the Futurians, including Isaac Asimov, Damon Knight, Donald A. Wollheim, Frederik Pohl, James Blish, Judith Merril, and others. Other important writers during this period include E.E. (Doc) Smith, Robert A. Heinlein, Arthur C. Clarke, Olaf Stapledon, and A. E. van Vogt.  Working outside the Campbell influence were Ray Bradbury and Stanisław Lem.  Campbell's tenure at Astounding is considered to be the beginning of the Golden Age of science fiction, characterized by hard SF stories celebrating scientific achievement and progress. This lasted until post-war technological advances, new magazines such as Galaxy, edited by H. L. Gold, and a new generation of writers began writing stories with less emphasis on the hard sciences and more on the social sciences.

In the 1950s, the Beat generation included speculative writers such as William S. Burroughs. In the 1960s and early 1970s, writers like Frank Herbert, Samuel R. Delany, Roger Zelazny, and Harlan Ellison explored new trends, ideas, and writing styles, while a group of writers, mainly in Britain, became known as the New Wave for their embrace of a high degree of experimentation, both in form and in content, and a highbrow and self-consciously "literary" or artistic sensibility. In the 1970s, writers like Larry Niven brought new life to hard science fiction. Ursula K. Le Guin and others pioneered soft science fiction.

In the 1980s, cyberpunk authors like William Gibson turned away from the optimism and support for progress of traditional science fiction. This dystopian vision of the near future is described in the work of Philip K. Dick, such as Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? and We Can Remember It for You Wholesale, which resulted in the films Blade Runner and Total Recall. The Star Wars franchise helped spark a new interest in space opera. C. J. Cherryh's detailed explorations of alien life and complex scientific challenges influenced a generation of writers.

Emerging themes in the 1990s included environmental issues, the implications of the global Internet and the expanding information universe, questions about biotechnology and nanotechnology, as well as a post-Cold War interest in post-scarcity societies; Neal Stephenson's The Diamond Age comprehensively explores these themes. Lois McMaster Bujold's Vorkosigan novels brought the character-driven story back into prominence. The television series Star Trek: The Next Generation (1987) began a torrent of new SF shows, including three further Star Trek spin-off shows (Deep Space 9, Voyager, and Enterprise) and Babylon 5.   Stargate, a movie about an ancient portal to other gates across the galaxy, was released in 1994. Stargate SG-1, a TV series, premiered on July 27, 1997 and lasted 10 seasons with 214 episodes. Spin-offs include the animated television series Stargate Infinity, the TV series Stargate Atlantis and Stargate Universe, and the direct-to-DVD films Stargate: The Ark of Truth and Stargate: Continuum. Stargate SG-1 surpassed The X-Files as the longest-running North American science fiction television series, a record later broken by Smallville. 

Concern about the rapid pace of technological change crystallized around the concept of the technological singularity, popularized by Vernor Vinge's novel Marooned in Realtime and then taken up by other authors. 

The term "sci-fi"

Forrest J Ackerman is credited with first using the term sci-fi (analogous to the then-trendy "hi-fi") in 1954.   As science fiction entered popular culture, writers and fans active in the field came to associate the term with low-budget, low-tech "B-movies" and with low-quality pulp science fiction.  By the 1970s, critics within the field such as Terry Carr and Damon Knight were using sci-fi to distinguish hack-work from serious science fiction.

Around 1978 critic Susan Wood and others introduced the use of the odd pronunciation "skiffy" which is intended to be self-deprecating humor but is inconsistent with the documented genesis of the term "sci-fi" (i.e., one would not pronounce "hi-fi" as "hiffy") and Ackerman's own words engraved on his crypt plaque which read "Sci-Fi was My High". 

Peter Nicholls writes that "SF" (or "sf") is "the preferred abbreviation within the community of sf writers and readers." David Langford's monthly fanzine Ansible includes a regular section "As Others See Us" which offers numerous examples of "sci-fi" being used in a pejorative sense by people outside the genre.

Innovation

Science fiction has criticized developing and future technologies, but also initiates innovation and new technology. This topic has been more often discussed in literary and sociological than in scientific forums. Cinema and media theorist Vivian Sobchack examines the dialogue between science fiction films and the technological imagination. Technology impacts artists and how they portray their fictionalized subjects, but the fictional world gives back to science by broadening imagination. How William Shatner Changed the World is a documentary that gave a number of real-world examples of actualized technological imaginations. While more prevalent in the early years of science fiction with writers like Arthur C. Clarke, new authors still find ways to make currently impossible technologies seem closer to being realized.

Categories

Hard science fiction

Hard science fiction, or "hard SF", is characterized by rigorous attention to accurate detail in the natural sciences, especially physics, astrophysics, and chemistry, or on accurately depicting worlds that more advanced technology may make possible. Some accurate predictions of the future come from the hard science fiction subgenre, but numerous inaccurate predictions have emerged as well. Some hard SF authors have distinguished themselves as working scientists, including Gregory Benford, Geoffrey A. Landis, David Brin,  and Robert L. Forward, while mathematician authors include Rudy Rucker and Vernor Vinge. Other noteworthy hard SF authors include Isaac Asimov, Arthur C. Clarke, Hal Clement, Greg Bear, Larry Niven, Robert J. Sawyer, Stephen Baxter, Alastair Reynolds, Charles Sheffield, Ben Bova, Kim Stanley Robinson, Anne McCaffrey, Andy Weir and Greg Egan.

Soft science fiction

The description "soft" science fiction may describe works based on social sciences such as psychology, economics, political science, sociology, and anthropology. The term is sometimes used to describe improbable plots, absurd "science", and cardboard characters. Noteworthy writers in this category include Ursula K. Le Guin and Philip K. Dick.  The term can describe stories focused primarily on character and emotion; SFWA Grand Master Ray Bradbury was an acknowledged master of this art. The Eastern Bloc produced a large quantity of social science fiction, including works by Polish authors Stanislaw Lem and Janusz Zajdel, as well as Soviet authors such as the Strugatsky brothers, Kir Bulychov, Yevgeny Zamyatin and Ivan Yefremov.  Some writers blur the boundary between hard and soft science fiction.

Related to social SF and soft SF are utopian and dystopian stories; George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four, Aldous Huxley's Brave New World, and Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale and Oryx and Crake are examples.

Subgenres

Cyberpunk

The cyberpunk genre emerged in the early 1980s; combining cybernetics and punk,
the term was coined by author Bruce Bethke for his 1980 short story Cyberpunk.
The time frame is usually near-future and the settings are often dystopian in nature and characterized by misery. Common themes in cyberpunk include advances in information technology and especially the Internet, visually abstracted as cyberspace, artificial intelligence, and cybernetics and post-democratic societal control where corporations have more influence than governments. Nihilism, post-modernism, and film noir techniques are common elements, and the protagonists may be disaffected or reluctant anti-heroes. Noteworthy authors in this genre are William Gibson, Bruce Sterling, Neal Stephenson, and Pat Cadigan. James O'Ehley has called the 1982 film Blade Runner a definitive example of the cyberpunk visual style.

Time travel

Time-travel stories have antecedents in the 18th and 19th centuries. The first major time-travel novel was Mark Twain's A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court. The most famous is H. G. Wells' 1895 novel The Time Machine, which uses a vehicle that allows an operator to travel purposefully and selectively, while Twain's time traveler is struck in the head. The term time machine, coined by Wells, is now universally used to refer to such a vehicle. Back to the Future is one of the most popular movie franchises in this category; Doctor Who is a similarly popular long-running television franchise. Stories of this type are complicated by logical problems such as the grandfather paradox, as exemplified in the classic Robert Heinlein story "—All You Zombies—" and the Futurama episode "Roswell That Ends Well." Time travel continues to be a popular subject in modern science fiction, in print, movies, and television.

Alternate history

Alternative history stories are based on the premise that historical events might have turned out differently. These stories may use time travel to change the past, or may simply set a story in a universe with a different history from our own. Classics in the genre include Bring the Jubilee by Ward Moore, in which the South wins the American Civil War, and The Man in the High Castle by Philip K. Dick, in which Germany and Japan win World War II. The Sidewise Award acknowledges the best works in this subgenre; the name is taken from Murray Leinster's 1934 story Sidewise in Time. Harry Turtledove is one of the most prominent authors in the subgenre and is sometimes called the "master of alternate history".
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Military science fiction

Military science fiction is set in the context of conflict between national, interplanetary, or interstellar armed forces; the primary viewpoint characters are usually soldiers. Stories include detail about military technology, procedure, ritual, and history; military stories may use parallels with historical conflicts. Heinlein's Starship Troopers is an early example, along with the Dorsai novels of Gordon Dickson. Joe Haldeman's The Forever War is a critique of the genre, a Vietnam-era response to the World War II–style stories of earlier authors. Prominent military SF authors include John Scalzi, John Ringo, David Drake, David Weber, Tom Kratman, Michael Z. Williamson, S. M. Stirling, and John Carr.  The publishing company Baen Books is known for cultivating several of these military science fiction authors.

Superhuman

Superhuman stories deal with the emergence of humans who have abilities beyond the norm. This can stem either from natural causes such as in Olaf Stapledon's novel Odd John, Theodore Sturgeon's More Than Human, and Philip Wylie's Gladiator, or be the result of scientific advances, such as the intentional augmentation in A. E. van Vogt's novel Slan. These stories usually focus on the alienation that these beings feel as well as society's reaction to them. These stories have played a role in the real life discussion of human enhancement. Frederik Pohl's Man Plus also belongs to this category.

Apocalyptic and post-apocalyptic

Apocalyptic fiction is concerned with the end of civilization through war (On the Beach), pandemic (The Last Man), astronomic impact (When Worlds Collide), ecological disaster (The Wind from Nowhere), or some other general disaster or with a world or civilization after such a disaster. Typical of the genre are George R. Stewart's novel Earth Abides and Pat Frank's novel Alas, Babylon. Apocalyptic fiction generally concerns the disaster itself and the direct aftermath, while post-apocalyptic fiction can deal with anything from the near aftermath (as in Cormac McCarthy's The Road) to 375 years in the future (as in By The Waters of Babylon) to hundreds or thousands of years in the future, as in Russell Hoban's novel Riddley Walker and Walter M. Miller, Jr.'s A Canticle for Leibowitz. Apocalyptic science-fiction is a popular genre in video games. The critically acclaimed role-playing action adventure video game series Fallout is set on a post-apocalyptic Earth, where civilization is recovering from a nuclear war as survivors struggle to survive and seek to rebuild society.

Space opera

Space opera is adventure science fiction set mainly or entirely in outer space or on multiple (sometimes distant) planets. The conflict is heroic, and typically on a large scale. It is also used nostalgically, and modern space opera may be an attempt to recapture the sense of wonder of the golden age of science fiction. The pioneer of this subgenre is generally recognized to be Edward E. (Doc) Smith, with his Skylark and Lensman series. George Lucas's Star Wars series is among the most popular and famous franchises in cinematic space opera. It covers epic battles between good and evil throughout an entire galaxy.  Alastair Reynolds's Revelation Space series, Peter F. Hamilton's Void, Night's Dawn, Pandora's Star series,  Stephen Hunt's Sliding Void series, Vernor Vinge's A Fire Upon the Deep, A Deepness in the Sky are newer examples of this genre.

Space Western

The space Western transposes themes of American Western books and films to a backdrop of futuristic space frontiers. These stories typically involve  colony worlds that have only recently been terraformed and/or settled serving as stand-ins for the backdrop of lawlessness and economic expansion that were predominant in the American west. Examples include the Sean Connery film Outland, Heinlein's Farmer in the Sky, Sparks Nevada: Marshall on Mars from the Thrilling Adventure Hour, the Firefly television series, and the film sequel Serenity by Joss Whedon, as well as the manga and anime series Cowboy Bebop, Outlaw Star, and Trigun.

Social science fiction

Social science fiction focuses on themes of society and human nature in a science fiction setting. Since it usually focuses more on speculation about humanity and less on scientific accuracy, it's usually placed within soft science fiction.

Climate fiction

Climate fiction is a genre based around themes of reaction to major climate change. It is sometimes called "cli-fi", much as "science fiction" is often shortened to "sci-fi". Cli-fi novels and films are often set in either the present or the near or distant future, but they can also be set in the past. Many cli-fi works raise awareness about the major threats that global warming and climate change present to life on Earth.

Maritime science fiction

Maritime science fiction is a subgenre of science fiction that takes place in the ocean or the sea and commonly has sea monsters and/or maritime technology.

There are various science fiction works, such as Star Trek, which do not take place at sea but in a comparable setting, such as space; where the threat and theme of the dangers of the unknown (e.g.: Sea/space Monsters) is still present.

Although not primarily a maritime science fiction itself, the Star Wars universe includes elements of maritime science fiction such as the underwater city of Jar Jar Binks in Star Wars: Episode I – The Phantom Menace.

Mundane science fiction

Mundane science fiction is a subgenre that is set on Earth and does not include outer space adventures or alien life. Because it focuses on modern day aspects, it is typically associated with hard science fiction.

Biopunk

Biopunk focuses on biotechnology and subversives. The main underlying theme within these stories is the attempt to change the human body and engineer humans for specific purposes through enhancements in genetic and molecular makeups. Many examples of this subgenre include subjects such as human experimentation, the misuse of biotechnology and synthetic biotechnology. This subgenre also includes works involving human cloning and how clones might exists within human society in the future.

Other subgenres

* Anthropological science fiction is a subgenre that absorbs and discusses anthropology and the study of human kind. Examples include Hominids by Robert J. Sawyer, and Neanderthal by John Darnton.
* Kaiju is a Japanese word that literally translates to "strange beast." The word has been translated and defined in English as "monster" and is used to refer to a genre of tokusatsu entertainment. Kaiju films feature large creatures of any form, usually attacking a major city or engaging another (or multiple) monster(s) in battle. The subgenre began in 1954 with Godzilla.
* Libertarian science fiction is a subgenre focuses on the politics and social order implied by libertarian philosophies with an emphasis on individualism.
* Comic science fiction is a subgenre that exploits the genre's conventions for comic effect.
* Feminist science fiction poses questions about social issues such as how society constructs gender roles, the role reproduction plays in defining gender and the unequal political and personal power of men over women. Some of the most notable feminist science fiction works have illustrated these themes using utopias to explore a society in which gender differences or gender power imbalances do not exist, or dystopias to explore worlds in which gender inequalities are intensified, thus asserting a need for feminist work to continue. Joanna Russ's work, and some of Ursula K. Le Guin's work can be thus categorized. Magical feminism is a subgenre of feminist science fiction.
* Steampunk is based on the idea of futuristic technology existing in the past, usually the 19th century, and often set in Victorian era England—but with prominent elements of either science fiction or fantasy, such as fictional technological inventions like those found in the works of H. G. Wells and Jules Verne, or real technological developments like the computer occurring at an earlier date. Popular examples include The Difference Engine by William Gibson and Bruce Sterling, Leviathan series by Scott Westerfeld, Bas-Lag series by China Miéville, as well as Girl Genius web comic by Phil and Kaja Foglio, although seeds of the subgenre may be seen in certain works of Michael Moorcock, Philip José Farmer and Steve Stiles, and in such games as Space: 1889 and Marcus Rowland's Forgotten Futures.  Machines are most often powered by steam in this genre (hence the name). Terry Gilliam's 1985 film Brazil is seen as  inspiration for writers and artists of the steampunk sub-culture. 
* Science fiction opera is an opera in a science fiction setting without an outer space or multi-planetary setting, thereby distinguishing it from Space opera.
* Sci-fi action - Sharing many of the conventions of a science fiction film, sci-fi action films emphasizes gun-play, space battles, invented weaponry, and other sci-fi elements weaved into action film premises. Examples include G.I. Samurai, Terminator 2: Judgment Day, The Matrix, Total Recall, Minority Report, The Island, Star Wars, Aliens, I Robot, Transformers, The Hunger Games, The Maze Runner, Equilibrium,  District 9,  Serenity,  Akira,  Paycheck, Predator,  Robocop, Avatar, Mad Max 2, Divergent, They Live, Escape From New York and The Fifth Element. 
* Science fiction horror – Often revolves around subjects that include but are not limited to killer aliens, mad scientists, and/or experiments gone wrong.
* Dieselpunk takes over where Steampunk leaves off.  These are stories that take over as we usher in the machine-heavy eras of WWI and WWII.  The use of diesel-powered machines plays heavily.  In this (like its steam counterpart), the focus is on the technology.
* Science-fiction poetry is poetry that has the characteristics or subject matter of science fiction. Science fiction poetry's main sources are the sciences and the literary movement of science fiction prose. An extended discussion of the field is given in Suzette Haden Elgin's The Science Fiction Poetry Handbook, where she compares and contrasts it to both mainstream poetry and to prose science fiction.  The former, she maintains, uses figures of speech unencumbered by noncompliant details, whereas these details can be key elements in science-fiction poetry.  Prose in science fiction has the time to develop a setting and a story, whereas a poem in the field is normally constrained by its short length to rely on some device to get a point across quickly. Elgin says that the effectiveness of this kind of poetry pivots around the correct use of presupposition.  The Science Fiction Association is an international organization of speculative poets,  which gives the annual Rhysling Awards for speculative poetry. An early example of science fiction in poetry is in Alfred, Lord Tennyson's Locksley Hall, where he introduces a picture of the future with "When I dipt into the future far as human eye could see...."  This poem was written in 1835, near the end of the first Industrial Revolution.  Poetry was only sparingly published in traditional science-fiction outlets such as pulp magazines until the New Wave.   By the 1980s there were magazines specifically devoted to science-fiction poetry.

Related genres

Other speculative fiction, fantasy, and horror

The broader category of speculative fiction includes science fiction, fantasy, alternate histories (which may have no particular scientific or futuristic component), and even literary stories that contain fantastic elements, such as the work of Jorge Luis Borges or John Barth. For some editors, magic realism is considered to be within the broad definition of speculative fiction.

Fantasy

Fantasy is commonly associated with science fiction, and a number of writers have worked in both genres, while writers such as Anne McCaffrey, Ursula K. Le Guin, and Marion Zimmer Bradley have written works that appear to blur the boundary between the two related genres. The authors' professional organization is called the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America (SFWA). SF conventions routinely have programming on fantasy topics,  and fantasy authors such as J. K. Rowling have won the highest honor within the science fiction field, the Hugo Award.

In general, science fiction differs from fantasy in that the former concerns things that might someday be possible or that at least embody the pretense of realism.  Supernaturalism, usually absent in science fiction, is the distinctive characteristic of fantasy literature.  A dictionary definition referring to fantasy literature is "fiction characterized by highly fanciful or supernatural elements."  Examples of fantasy supernaturalism include magic (spells, harm to opponents), magical places (Narnia, Oz, Middle Earth, Hogwarts), supernatural creatures (witches, vampires, orcs, trolls), supernatural transportation (flying broomsticks, ruby slippers, windows between worlds), and shapeshifting (beast into man, man into wolf or bear, lion into sheep). Such things are basic themes in fantasy.

Literary critic Fredric Jameson has characterized the difference between the two genres by describing science fiction as turning "on a formal framework determined by concepts of the mode of production rather than those of religion" – that is, science fiction texts are bound by an inner logic based more on historical materialism than on magic or the forces of good and evil. Some narratives are described as being essentially science fiction but "with fantasy elements." The term "science fantasy" is sometimes used to describe such material.

Science fantasy

Science fantasy is a genre where elements of science fiction and fantasy co-exist or combine. Stories and franchises that display fictional science as well as supernatural elements, sorcery or/and "magical technology" are considered science fantasy.

Horror fiction

Horror fiction is the literature of the unnatural and supernatural, with the aim of unsettling or frightening the reader, sometimes with graphic violence. Historically it has also been known as weird fiction. Although horror is not per se a branch of science fiction, some works of horror literature incorporates science fictional elements. One of the defining classical works of horror, Mary Shelley's novel Frankenstein, is the first fully realized work of science fiction, where the manufacture of the monster is given a rigorous science-fictional grounding. The works of Edgar Allan Poe also helped define both the science fiction and the horror genres. Today horror is one of the most popular categories of films. Horror is often mistakenly categorized as science fiction at the point of distribution by libraries, video rental outlets, etc.

Supernatural fiction

Supernatural fiction is a genre that features supernatural and other paranormal phenomenon in stories and settings.

Spy-Fi

A mixed genre that combines elements of science fiction with spy fiction.

Mystery fiction

Works in which science and technology are a dominant theme, but based on current reality, may be considered mainstream fiction. Much of the thriller genre would be included, such as the novels of Tom Clancy or Michael Crichton, or the James Bond films. Modernist works from writers like Kurt Vonnegut, Philip K. Dick, and Stanisław Lem have focused on speculative or existential perspectives on contemporary reality and are on the borderline between SF and the mainstream. According to Robert J. Sawyer, "Science fiction and mystery have a great deal in common. Both prize the intellectual process of puzzle solving, and both require stories to be plausible and hinge on the way things really do work." Isaac Asimov, Walter Mosley, and other writers incorporate mystery elements in their science fiction, and vice versa.

Distinct from the above, a full-fledged Science Fiction Mystery is one which is set in a completely different world from ours, in which the circumstances and motives of the crime committed and the identity of the detective(s) seeking to solve it are of an essentially science fictional character. A prime example is  Isaac Asimov's "The Caves of Steel" and its sequels, set in a world thousands of years in the future and presenting the Robot detective R. Daneel Olivaw. An allied genre is the Fantasy Mystery, a detective mystery set in a world of fantasy - such as the Lord Darcy mysteries taking place in a world where magic works, or "The Idylls of the Queen" set in the mythical King Arthur's court.

Superhero fiction

Superhero fiction is a genre characterized by beings with much higher than usual capability and prowess, generally with a desire or need to help the citizens of their chosen country or world by using their powers to defeat natural or superpowered threats. A number of superhero fiction characters involve themselves (either intentionally or accidentally) with science fiction and fact, including advanced technologies, alien worlds, time travel, and interdimensional travel; but the standards of scientific plausibility are lower than with actual science fiction. Authors of this genre include Stan Lee (co-creator of Spider-Man, the Fantastic Four, the Iron Man, the X-Men, and the Hulk); Marv Wolfman, the creator of Blade for Marvel Comics, and The New Teen Titans for DC Comics; Dean Wesley Smith (Smallville, Spider-Man, and X-Men novels) and Superman writers Roger Stern and Elliot S! Maggin.

Fandom and community

Science fiction fandom is the "community of the literature of ideas... the culture in which new ideas emerge and grow before being released into society at large." Members of this community, "fans", are in contact with each other at conventions or clubs, through print or online fanzines, or on the Internet using web sites, mailing lists, and other resources.

SF fandom emerged from the letters column in Amazing Stories magazine. Soon fans began writing letters to each other, and then grouping their comments together in informal publications that became known as fanzines. Once they were in regular contact, fans wanted to meet each other, and they organized local clubs. In the 1930s, the first science fiction conventions gathered fans from a wider area. Conventions, clubs, and fanzines were the dominant form of fan activity, or "fanac", for decades, until the Internet facilitated communication among a much larger population of interested people.

Authors

Science fiction is being written worldwide by a diverse population of authors. According to 2013 statistics by the science fiction publisher Tor Books, men outnumber women by 78% to 22% among submissions to the publisher.  A controversy about voting slates in the 2015 Hugo Awards highlighted tensions in the science fiction community between a trend of increasingly diverse works and authors being honored by awards, and a backlash by groups of authors and fans who preferred what they considered more traditional science fiction. 

Awards

Among the most respected awards for science fiction are the Hugo Award, presented by the World Science Fiction Society at Worldcon; the Nebula Award, presented by SFWA and voted on by the community of authors; and the John W. Campbell Memorial Award for Best Science Fiction Novel and Theodore Sturgeon Memorial Award for short fiction. One notable award for science fiction films is the Saturn Award. It is presented annually by The Academy of Science Fiction, Fantasy, and Horror Films.

There are national awards, like Canada's Prix Aurora Awards, regional awards, like the Endeavour Award presented at Orycon for works from the Pacific Northwest, special interest or subgenre awards like the Chesley Award for art or the World Fantasy Award for fantasy. Magazines may organize reader polls, notably the Locus Award.

Conventions, clubs, and organizations

Conventions (in fandom, shortened as "cons"), are held in cities around the world, catering to a local, regional, national, or international membership. General-interest conventions cover all aspects of science fiction, while others focus on a particular interest like media fandom, filking, etc. Most are organized by volunteers in non-profit groups, though most media-oriented events are organized by commercial promoters. The convention's activities are called the "program", which may include panel discussions, readings, autograph sessions, costume masquerades, and other events. Activities that occur throughout the convention are not part of the program; these commonly include a dealer's room, art show, and hospitality lounge (or "con suites").

Conventions may host award ceremonies; Worldcons present the Hugo Awards each year. SF societies, referred to as "clubs" except in formal contexts, form a year-round base of activities for science fiction fans. They may be associated with an ongoing science fiction convention, or have regular club meetings, or both. Most groups meet in libraries, schools and universities, community centers, pubs or restaurants, or the homes of individual members. Long-established groups like the New England Science Fiction Association and the Los Angeles Science Fantasy Society have clubhouses for meetings and storage of convention supplies and research materials. The Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America (SFWA) was founded by Damon Knight in 1965 as a non-profit organization to serve the community of professional science fiction authors, 24 years after his essay "Unite or Fie!" had led to the organization of the National Fantasy Fan Federation. Fandom has helped incubate related groups, including media fandom, the Society for Creative Anachronism, gaming, filking, and furry fandom.

Fanzines and online fandom

The first science fiction fanzine, The Comet, was published in 1930. Fanzine printing methods have changed over the decades, from the hectograph, the mimeograph, and the ditto machine, to modern photocopying. Distribution volumes rarely justify the cost of commercial printing. Modern fanzines are printed on computer printers or at local copy shops, or they may only be sent as email. The best known fanzine (or "'zine") today is Ansible, edited by David Langford, winner of numerous Hugo awards. Other fanzines to win awards in recent years include File 770, Mimosa, and Plokta. Artists working for fanzines have risen to prominence in the field, including Brad W. Foster, Teddy Harvia, and Joe Mayhew; the Hugos include a category for Best Fan Artists. The earliest organized fandom online was the [http://www.noreascon.org/users/sflovers/u1/web/ SF Lovers] community, originally a mailing list in the late 1970s with a text archive file that was updated regularly. In the 1980s, Usenet groups greatly expanded the circle of fans online. In the 1990s, the development of the World-Wide Web exploded the community of online fandom by orders of magnitude, with thousands and then literally millions of web sites devoted to science fiction and related genres for all media. Most such sites are small, ephemeral, and/or very narrowly focused, though sites like SF Site and SFcrowsnest offer a broad range of references and reviews about science fiction.

Fan fiction

Fan fiction, known to aficionados as "fanfic", is non-commercial fiction created by fans in the setting of an established book, film, video game, or television series. This modern meaning of the term should not be confused with the traditional (pre-1970s) meaning of "fan fiction" within the community of fandom, where the term meant original or parody fiction written by fans and published in fanzines, often with members of fandom as characters therein. Examples of this would include the Goon Defective Agency stories, written starting in 1956 by Irish fan John Berry and published in his and Arthur Thomson's fanzine Retribution. In the last few years, sites have appeared such as Orion's Arm and Galaxiki, which encourage collaborative development of science fiction universes. In some cases, the copyright owners of the books, films, or television series have instructed their lawyers to issue "cease and desist" letters to fans.

Science fiction studies

The study of science fiction, or science fiction studies, is the critical assessment, interpretation, and discussion of science fiction literature, film, new media, fandom, and fan fiction. Science fiction scholars take science fiction as an object of study in order to better understand it and its relationship to science, technology, politics, and culture-at-large. Science fiction studies has a long history dating back to the turn of the 20th century, but it was not until later that science fiction studies solidified as a discipline with the publication of the academic journals Extrapolation (1959), Foundation: The International Review of Science Fiction (1972), and Science Fiction Studies (1973), and the establishment of the oldest organizations devoted to the study of science fiction, the Science Fiction Research Association and the Science Fiction Foundation, in 1970. The field has grown considerably since the 1970s with the establishment of more journals, organizations, and conferences with ties to the science fiction scholarship community, and science fiction degree-granting programs such as those offered by the University of Liverpool and Kansas University.

The National Science Foundation has conducted surveys of "Public Attitudes and Public Understanding" of "Science Fiction and Pseudoscience." They write that "Interest in science fiction may affect the way people think about or relate to science....one study found a strong relationship between preference for science fiction novels and support for the space program...The same study also found that students who read science fiction are much more likely than other students to believe that contacting extraterrestrial civilizations is both possible and desirable (Bainbridge 1982).

As serious literature

Mary Shelley wrote a number of science fiction novels including Frankenstein, and is treated as a major Romantic writer. A number of science fiction works have received critical acclaim including Childhood's End and Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? (the inspiration for the movie Blade Runner). A number of respected writers of mainstream literature have written science fiction, including Aldous Huxley's Brave New World, George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four, Anthony Burgess' A Clockwork Orange and Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale. Nobel Laureate Doris Lessing wrote a series of SF novels, Canopus in Argos, and nearly all of Kurt Vonnegut's works contain science fiction premises or themes.

The scholar Tom Shippey asks a perennial question of science fiction: "What is its relationship to fantasy fiction, is its readership still dominated by male adolescents, is it a taste which will appeal to the mature but non-eccentric literary mind?" In her much reprinted essay "Science Fiction and Mrs Brown," the science fiction writer Ursula K. Le Guin has approached an answer by first citing the essay written by the English author Virginia Woolf entitled Mr Bennett and Mrs Brown in which she states:

Le Guin argues that these criteria may be successfully applied to works of science fiction and so answers in the affirmative her rhetorical question posed at the beginning of her essay: "Can a science fiction writer write a novel?"

Tom Shippey in his essay does not dispute this answer but identifies and discusses the essential differences that exists between a science fiction novel and one written outside the field. To this end, he compares George Orwell's Coming Up for Air with Frederik Pohl and C. M. Kornbluth's The Space Merchants and concludes that the basic building block and distinguishing feature of a science fiction novel is the presence of the novum, a term Darko Suvin adapts from Ernst Bloch and defines as "a discrete piece of information recognizable as not-true, but also as not-unlike-true, not-flatly- (and in the current state of knowledge) impossible."

In science fiction the style of writing is often relatively clear and straightforward compared to classical literature. Orson Scott Card, an author of both science fiction and non-SF fiction, has postulated that in science fiction the message and intellectual significance of the work is contained within the story itself and, therefore, there need not be stylistic gimmicks or literary games; but that some writers and critics confuse clarity of language with lack of artistic merit. In Card's words:

Science fiction author and physicist Gregory Benford has declared that: "SF is perhaps the defining genre of the twentieth century, although its conquering armies are still camped outside the Rome of the literary citadels." This sense of exclusion was articulated by Jonathan Lethem in an essay published in the Village Voice entitled "Close Encounters: The Squandered Promise of Science Fiction." Lethem suggests that the point in 1973 when Thomas Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow was nominated for the Nebula Award, and was passed over in favor of Arthur C. Clarke's Rendezvous with Rama, stands as "a hidden tombstone marking the death of the hope that SF was about to merge with the mainstream." Among the responses to Lethem was one from the editor of the Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction who asked: "When is it [the SF genre] ever going to realize it can't win the game of trying to impress the mainstream?" On this point the journalist and author David Barnett has remarked:

Barnett, in an earlier essay had pointed to a new development in this "endless war":

World-wide examples

Although perhaps most developed as a genre and community in the United States, Canada, and the United Kingdom, science fiction is a worldwide phenomenon. Organisations devoted to promotion and even translation in particular countries are commonplace, as are country- or language-specific genre awards.

Africa

Mohammed Dib, an Algerian writer, wrote a science fiction allegory about his nation's politics, Qui se souvient de la mer (Who Remembers the Sea?) in 1962.
Masimba Musodza, a Zimbabwean author, published MunaHacha Maive Nei? the first science-fiction novel in the Shona language,  which also holds the distinction of being the first novel in the Shona language to appear as an ebook first before it came out in print. In South Africa, a movie titled District 9 came out in 2009, an apartheid allegory featuring extraterrestrial life forms, produced by Peter Jackson.

Science fiction examines society through shifting power structures  (such as the shift of power from humanity to alien overlords). African science fiction often uses this genre norm to situate slavery and the slave trade as an alien abduction. Commonalities in experiences with unknown languages, customs, and culture lend themselves well to this comparison. The subgenre also commonly employs the mechanism of time travel to examine the effects of slavery and forced emigration on the individual and the family.

Asia

India

Indian science fiction, defined loosely as science fiction by writers of Indian descent, began with the English-language publication of Kylas Chundar Dutt's A Journal of Forty-Eight Hours of the Year 1945 in the Calcutta Literary Gazette (June 6, 1835). Since this story was intended as a political polemic, credit for the first science fiction story is often given to later Bengali authors such as Jagadananda Roy, Hemlal Dutta and the polymath Jagadish Chandra Bose. Eminent film maker and writer Satyajit Ray also enriched Bengali science fiction by writing many short stories as well as science fiction series, Professor Shonku (see Bengali science fiction). Similar traditions exist in Hindi, Marathi, Tamil and English. In English, the modern era of Indian speculative fiction began with the works of authors such as Samit Basu, Payal Dhar, Vandana Singh and Anil Menon. Works such as Amitav Ghosh's The Calcutta Chromosome, Salman Rushdie's Grimus, and Boman Desai's The Memory of Elephants are generally classified as magic realist works but make essential use of SF tropes and techniques. In recent years authors in some other Indian languages have begun telling stories in this genre; for example in Punjabi IP Singh and Roop Dhillon have written stories that can clearly be defined as Punjabi science fiction. The latter has coined the term Vachitarvaad to describe such literature.

Bangladesh

Bangladesh has a strong Science fiction literature in South Asia. After Qazi Abdul Halim's Mohasunner Kanna (Tears of the Cosmos) (1970), Humayun Ahmed wrote the first modern Bengali SF novel, Tomader Jonno Valobasa (Love For You All). It was published in 1973. This book is treated as the first full-fledged Bangladeshi science fiction novel. Then he wrote Tara Tinjon (They were Three), Irina, Anonto Nakshatra Bithi (Endless Galaxy), Fiha Somikoron (Fiha Equation) etc.

But Bengali science fiction leaves its cocoon phase holding the hands of Muhammed Zafar Iqbal. Mr. Iqbal wrote a story named Copotronic Sukh Dukho (Copotronic Emotions) when he was a student of Dhaka University. This story was later included in a compilation of Iqbal's work in a book by the same name. Muktodhara, a famous publishing house of Dhaka was the publisher of this book. This collection of science fiction stories gained huge popularity and the new trend of science fiction emerged among Bengali writers and readers. After his first collection, Mr. Iqbal transformed his own science fiction cartoon strip Mohakashe Mohatrash (Terror in the Cosmos) into a novel. All told, Muhammed Zafar Iqbal has written the greatest number of science fiction works in Bengali science fiction.

Following the footsteps of the ancestors, more and more writers, especially young writers started writing science fiction and a new era started in Bengali literature.

China

Modern science fiction in China mainly depends on the magazine Science Fiction World. A number of works were originally published in it in installments, including the highly successful novel The Three-Body Problem, written by Liu Cixin.

Korea

Until recently, there has been little domestic science fiction literature in Korea.  Within the small field, the author and critic writing under the nom de plume Djuna has been credited with being the major force.  Kim Boyoung, Bae Myunghoon and Kwak Jaesik are also often mentioned as the new generation of Korean science fiction writers of 2010s.  The upswing that began in 2009 has been attributed by Shin Junebong to a combination of factors.  Shin quotes Djuna as saying, "'It looks like the various literary awards established by one newspaper after another, with hefty sums of prize money, had a big impact.'"   Another factor cited was the active use of Web bulletin boards among the then-young writers brought up on translations of Western SF.  In spite of the increase, there were still no more than sixty or so authors writing in the field at that time.

Middle east

Chalomot Be'aspamia is an Israeli magazine of short science fiction and fantasy stories. The Prophecies Of Karma, published in 2011, is advertised as the first work of science fiction by an Arabic author, the Lebanese writer Nael Gharzeddine.

Europe 

France and Belgium 

Jules Verne, a 19th-century French novelist known for his pioneering science fiction works (Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea, Journey to the Center of the Earth, From the Earth to the Moon) is the prime representative of the French legacy of science fiction. French science fiction of the 19th century was also represented with such artists as Albert Robida and Isidore Grandville. In the 20th century, traditions of French science fiction were carried on by writers like Pierre Boulle (best known for his Planet of the Apes), Serge Brussolo, Bernard Werber, René Barjavel and Robert Merle, among others.

In Franco-Belgian comics, bande dessinée ("BD") science-fiction is a well established genre. Notable French science fiction comics include Valerian et Laureline by Pierre Christin and Jean-Claude Mézières, a space opera franchise that has lasted since 1967. Metal Hurlant magazine (known in US as Heavy Metal) was one of the largest contributors to francophone science-fiction comics. Its major authors include Jean "Moebius" Giraud, creator of Arzach; Chilean Alejandro Jodorowsky, who created a series of comics, including L'Incal and Les Metabarons, set in Jodoverse; and Enki Bilal with The Nikopol Trilogy. Giraud also contributed to French SF animation, collaborating with René Laloux on several animated features. A number of artists from neighboring countries, such as Spain and Italy, create science fiction and fantasy comics in French aimed at a Franco-Belgian market.

In French cinema, science fiction began with silent film director and visual effects pioneer George Méliès, whose most famous film was Voyage to the Moon, loosely based on books by Verne and Wells. In the 20th and 21st centuries, French science fiction films were represented by René Laloux's animated features, as well as Enki Bilal's adaptation of the Nikopol Trilogy, Immortal. Luc Besson filmed The Fifth Element as a joint Franco-American production.

In the French-speaking world, the colloquial use of the term sci-fi is an accepted Anglicism for the term science fiction.  This probably stems from the fact that science fiction writing never expanded there to the extent it did in the English-speaking world, particularly with the dominance of the United States. Nevertheless, France has made a tremendous contribution to science fiction in its seminal stages of development. Although the term "science fiction" is understood in France, their penchant for the "weird and wacky" has a long tradition and is sometimes called "le culte du merveilleux." This uniquely French tradition certainly encompasses what the anglophone world would call French science fiction but also ranges across fairies, Dadaism, and surrealism.

Italy 

Italy has a vivid history in science fiction, though almost unknown outside her borders. 
The history of Italian science fiction recognizes a varied roadmap of this genre which spread to a popular level after World War Two, and in particular in the second half of the 1950s, on the wave of American and British literature. 

The earliest pioneers may be found in the literature of the fantastic voyage and of the Renaissance Utopia, even in previous masterpieces such as "The Million" of Marco Polo.  
In the second half of the 19th century stories and short novels of "scientific fantasies" (also known as "incredible stories" or "fantastic" or "adventuristic", "novels of the future times" or "utopic", "of the tomorrow") appeared in Sunday newspaper supplements, in literary magazines, and as booklets published in installments. Added to these, at the beginning of the 20th century, were the most futuristic masterpieces of the great Emilio Salgari, considered by most the father of Italian science fiction, and Yambo and Luigi Motta, the most renowned authors of popular novels of the time, with extraordinary adventures in remote and exotic places, and even works of authors representing known figures of the "top" literature, among them Massimo Bontempelli, Luigi Capuana, Guido Gozzano, Ercole Luigi Morselli. 

The true birth of Italian science fiction is placed in 1952, with the publishing of the first specialized magazines, Scienza Fantastica (Fantastic Science) and Urania, and with the appearance of the term "fantascienza" which has become the usual translation of the English term "science fiction." The "Golden Years" span the period 1957-1960.

From the end of the 1950s science fiction became in Italy one of the most popular genres, although its popular success was not followed by critical success. In spite of an active and organized fandom there hasn't been an authentic sustained interest on the part of the Italian cultural élite towards science fiction. 

Popular Italian science fiction writers include Gianluigi Zuddas, Giampietro Stocco, Lino Aldani,  as well as comic artists, such as Milo Manara. Valerio Evangelisti is the best known modern author of Italian science fiction and fantasy. 
Also, popular Italian children's writer Gianni Rodari often turned to science fiction aimed at children, most notably, in Gip in the Television.

Germany 

The main German science fiction writer in the 19th century was Kurd Laßwitz.   According to Austrian SF critic Franz Rottensteiner, though significant  German novels of a science-fiction nature were published in the first half of the 20th century,  SF did not exist as a genre in the country until after World War II and the heavy importing and translation of American works. In the 20th century, during the years of divided Germany, both East and West spawned a number of successful writers. Top East German writers included Angela and Karlheinz Steinmüller, as well as Günther Krupkat. West German authors included Carl Amery, Gudrun Pausewang, Wolfgang Jeschke and Frank Schätzing, among others. A well known science fiction book series in the German language is Perry Rhodan, which started in 1961. Having sold over one billion copies (in pulp format), it claims to be the most successful science fiction book series ever written, worldwide. Current well-known SF authors from Germany are five-time Kurd-Laßwitz-Award winner Andreas Eschbach, whose books The Carpet Makers and Eine Billion Dollar are big successes, and Frank Schätzing, who in his book The Swarm mixes elements of the science thriller with SF elements to an apocalyptic scenario. The most prominent German-speaking author, according to Die Zeit, is Austrian Herbert W. Franke.

In the 1920s Germany produced a number of critically acclaimed high-budget science fiction and horror films. Metropolis by director Fritz Lang is credited as one of the most influential science fiction films ever made.  Other films of the era included Woman in the Moon, Alraune, Algol, Gold, Master of the World, among others. In the second half of the 20th century, East Germany also became a major science fiction film producer, often in a collaboration with fellow Eastern Bloc countries. Films of this era include Eolomea, First Spaceship on Venus and Hard to Be a God.

Russia and ex-Soviet countries 

Russians made their first steps to science fiction in the mid-19th century, with utopias by Faddei Bulgarin and Vladimir Odoevsky. 
However, it was the Soviet era that became the genre's golden age. Soviet writers were prolific, 
despite limitations set up by state censorship. Early Soviet writers, such as Alexander Belayev, Alexey N. Tolstoy and Vladimir Obruchev, employed Vernian/Wellsian hard science fiction based on scientific predictions.

The most notable books of the era include Belayev's Amphibian Man, The Air Seller and Professor Dowell's Head;  Tolstoy's Aelita and Engineer Garin's Death Ray. Early Soviet science fiction was influenced by communist ideology and often featured a leftist agenda or anti-capitalist satire.
 
Those few early Soviet books that challenged the communist worldview and satirized the Soviets, such as Yevgeny Zamyatin's dystopia We or Mikhail Bulgakov's Heart of a Dog and Fatal Eggs, were banned from publishing until the 1980s, although they still circulated in fan-made copies.

In the second half of the 20th century, a new generation of writers developed a more complex approach. Social science fiction, concerned with philosophy, ethics, utopian and dystopian ideas, became the prevalent subgenre. 
The breakthrough was started by Ivan Yefremov's utopian novel Andromeda Nebula (1957). He was soon followed by brothers Arkady and Boris Strugatsky, who explored darker themes and social satire in their Noon Universe novels, such as Hard to be a God (1964) and Prisoners of Power (1969), as well as in their science fantasy trilogy Monday Begins on Saturday (1964). A good share of Soviet science fiction was aimed at children. Probably the best known  was Kir Bulychov, who created Alisa Selezneva (1965-2003), a children's space adventure series about a teenage girl from the future.

The Soviet film industry also contributed to the genre, starting from the 1924 film Aelita. Some of early Soviet films, namely Planet of the Storms (1962) and Battle Beyond the Sun (1959), were pirated, re-edited and released in the West under new titles. 
Late Soviet science fiction films include Mystery of the Third Planet (1981), Ivan Vasilyevich (1973) and Kin-dza-dza! (1986), as well as Andrey Tarkovsky's Solaris and Stalker, among others.

After the fall of the Soviet Union, science fiction in the former Soviet republics is still written mostly in  Russian, which allows an appeal to a broader audience. Aside from Russians themselves, especially notable are Ukrainian writers, who have greatly contributed to science fiction and fantasy in Russian language.

Among the most notable post-Soviet authors are H. L. Oldie, Sergey Lukyanenko, Alexander Zorich and Vadim Panov. Russia's film industry, however, has been less successful recently, producing only a few science fiction films, most of them are adaptations of books by the Strugatskys (The Inhabited Island, The Ugly Swans) or Bulychov (Alice's Birthday). Science fiction media in Russia is represented with such magazines as Mir Fantastiki and Esli.

Other European countries 

Poland is a traditional producer of science fiction and fantasy. The country's most influential science fiction writer of all time is Stanisław Lem, who is probably best known for his science fiction books, such as Solaris and the stories involving Ijon Tichy, but who also wrote very successful hard sci-fi such as The Invincible and the stories involving Pilot Pirx. A number of Lem's books were adapted for screen, both in Poland and abroad. Other notable Polish writers of the genre include Jerzy Żuławski, Janusz A. Zajdel, Konrad Fiałkowski, Jacek Dukaj and Rafał A. Ziemkiewicz.

Czech writer and playwright Karel Čapek in his play R.U.R. (1920) introduced the word robot into science fiction. Čapek is also known for his satirical science fiction novels and plays, such as War with the Newts and The Absolute at Large. Traditions of Czech science fiction were carried on despite the general political climate by writers like Ludvík Souček, Josef Nesvadba, Ondřej Neff and Jaroslav Velinský. In the years 1980 - 2000 a new vawe of young writers appeared (J. W. Procházka, F. Novotný, E. Hauserová, V. Kadlečková, J. Rečková, E. Dufková).

Oceania

Australia: American David G. Hartwell noted there is "nothing essentially Australian about Australian science-fiction." A number of Australian science-fiction (and fantasy and horror) writers are in fact international English language writers, and their work is published worldwide. This is further explainable by the fact that the Australian inner market is small (with Australian population being around 21 million), and sales abroad are crucial to most Australian writers. 

North America

In Canadian Francophone province Québec, Élisabeth Vonarburg and other authors developed a tradition of French-Canadian SF, related to the European French literature. The Prix Boreal was established in 1979 to honor Canadian science fiction works in French. The Prix Aurora Awards (briefly preceded by the Casper Award) were founded in 1980 to recognize and promote the best works of Canadian science fiction in both French and English. Also, due to Canada's bilingualism and the US publishing almost exclusively in English, translation of science fiction prose into French thrives and runs nearly parallel upon a book's publishing in the original English. A sizeable market also exists within Québec for European-written Francophone science fiction literature.

Latin America

Although there is still some controversy as to when science fiction began in Latin America, the earliest works date from the late 19th century. All published in 1875, O Doutor Benignus by the Brazilian Augusto Emílio Zaluar, El Maravilloso Viaje del Sr. Nic-Nac by the Argentinian Eduardo Holmberg, and Historia de un Muerto by the Cuban Francisco Calcagno are three of the earliest novels which appeared in the continent.

Up to the 1960s, science fiction was the work of isolated writers who did not identify themselves with the genre, but rather used its elements to criticize society, promote their own agendas or tap into the public's interest in pseudo-sciences. It received a boost of respectability after authors such as Horacio Quiroga and Jorge Luis Borges used its elements in their writings. This, in turn, led to the permanent emergence of science fiction in the 1960s and mid-1970s, notably in Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Mexico, and Cuba. Magic realism enjoyed parallel growth in Latin America, with a strong regional emphasis on using the form to comment on social issues, similar to social science fiction and speculative fiction in the English world.

Economic turmoil and the suspicious eye of the dictatorial regimes in place reduced the genre's dynamism for the following decade. In the mid-1980s, it became increasingly popular once more. Although led by Argentina, Brazil and Mexico, Latin America now hosts dedicated communities and writers with an increasing use of regional elements to set them apart from English-language science-fiction. Alien is a 1979 British-American science-fiction horror film directed by Ridley Scott, and starring Tom Skerritt, Sigourney Weaver, Veronica Cartwright, Harry Dean Stanton, John Hurt, Ian Holm and Yaphet Kotto. The film's title refers to a highly aggressive extraterrestrial creature that stalks and kills the crew of a spaceship. Dan O'Bannon wrote the screenplay from a story he wrote with Ronald Shusett, drawing influence from previous works of science fiction and horror. The film was produced by Gordon Carroll, David Giler and Walter Hill through their Brandywine Productions and distributed by 20th Century Fox. Giler and Hill made revisions and additions to the script. Shusett was executive producer. The eponymous Alien and its accompanying elements were designed by Swiss surrealist artist H. R. Giger, while concept artists Ron Cobb and Chris Foss designed the human aspects of the film. Alien launched the Alien franchise and is chronologically the first of the main series, with the prequel series set in an earlier timeframe.

Alien received both critical acclaim and box office success, receiving an Academy Award for Best Visual Effects,   Saturn Awards for Best Science Fiction Film, Best Direction for Scott, and Best Supporting Actress for Cartwright,  and a Hugo Award for Best Dramatic Presentation, along with numerous other award nominations.  It has remained highly praised in subsequent decades, being considered one of the greatest films of all time. In 2002 the film was deemed "culturally, historically or aesthetically significant" by the Library of Congress and was selected for preservation in the United States National Film Registry. In 2008, it was ranked as the seventh-best film in the science fiction genre by the American Film Institute, and as the 33rd greatest film of all time by Empire magazine. 

The success of Alien spawned a media franchise of novels, comic books, video games, and toys. It also launched Weaver's acting career by providing her with her first lead role, and the story of her character Ripley's encounters with the Alien creatures became the thematic thread that ran through the sequels Aliens (1986), Alien 3 (1992) and Alien: Resurrection (1997).  A prequel series, which includes Prometheus (2012) and Alien: Covenant (2017), continues in development. 

Plot

The commercial spacecraft Nostromo is on a return trip to Earth with a seven-member crew in stasis: Captain Dallas, Executive Officer Kane, Navigator Lambert, Science Officer Ash, Warrant Officer Ripley, and Engineers Parker and Brett. Detecting a mysterious transmission, possibly a distress signal, from a nearby planetoid, the ship's computer, MOTHER, awakens the crew. Following standard company policy for such situations, the Nostromo lands on the planetoid and Dallas, Kane, and Lambert head out to investigate, damaging their ship upon landing in dust. They discover the signal is coming from a derelict alien spacecraft. Inside, they find the remains of a large alien creature whose ribcage appears to have exploded from the inside.

On the Nostromo, Ripley determines that the transmission is not a distress signal but a warning. In the alien ship, Kane discovers a chamber containing hundreds of eggs. As he inspects one, a creature springs out, spits acid through his space helmet and attaches itself to his face. Dallas and Lambert carry the unconscious Kane back to the Nostromo. As acting senior officer, Ripley refuses to let them aboard, citing quarantine regulations, but Ash violates protocol by overriding Ripley's lock and letting them in. The crew are unable to remove the creature from Kane's face, as its grip is strong and its blood is an extremely corrosive acid. It eventually lets go, crawls away, and dies.

The crew repair the ship and lift off. Kane awakens and seems healthy, but during the crew's final meal before re-entering stasis, he chokes and convulses in pain before a small alien creature bursts from his chest, killing him, and escapes into the depths of the ship. Since attacking the creature with conventional weapons could result in its corrosive blood breaching the ship's hull, the crew attempts to locate and capture it with motion trackers, nets, electric prods, and flamethrowers.

Brett is sent to look for the crew's cat, Jones, and the now fully grown alien attacks him and disappears with his body into the air shafts. After a heated discussion, the group devises a plan to jettison the creature out of the ship. Dallas enters the Nostromo labyrinthine ventilation shafts, intending to force the alien into an airlock, but it ambushes him. Lambert, realizing the alien is killing the crew one by one, implores the others to escape in the ship's shuttle. Now in command, Ripley explains that the shuttle will not support four people, and recommends that they continue with Dallas' plan of flushing the alien out.

Accessing MOTHER, Ripley discovers that Ash has secretly been ordered to return the alien to the crew's employers, who consider the crew expendable. When Ripley confronts Ash, he tries to choke her to death. Parker intervenes and knocks off Ash's head, revealing him to be an android. Parker reanimates Ash's head, and Ripley interrogates him. They learn he was assigned to the Nostromo to convince the crew to capture the creature and return it for analysis, even at the expense of the human personnel. Ash taunts them about their chances of survival against the "perfect organism."  Parker turns a flamethrower on Ash.

Ripley, Lambert and Parker agree to set the Nostromo to self-destruct and escape in the shuttle. However, Parker and Lambert are ambushed and killed by the alien while gathering life-support supplies. Ripley initiates the self-destruct sequence and heads for the shuttle with Jones, but the alien blocks her path. She retreats and unsuccessfully attempts to abort the self-destruct sequence, then returns to retrieve Jones, finding the alien gone. She narrowly escapes in the shuttle as the Nostromo explodes.

As she prepares to enter stasis, Ripley discovers the Alien is aboard the shuttle. She dons a spacesuit and opens the shuttle's airlock, causing explosive decompression which forces the Alien into the shuttle's open doorway. She propels it into space by shooting it with a grappling hook, but the gun catches in the closing door, tethering the alien to the shuttle. Ripley activates the engines, blasting the alien into space. After recording the ship's final log entry, she places herself and Jones into stasis for the voyage home.

Cast

* Tom Skerritt as Dallas, the captain of the Nostromo
Skerritt had been approached early in the film's development but declined as it did not yet have a director and had a very low budget. Later, when Scott was attached as director and the budget had been doubled, Skerritt accepted the role of Dallas.
* Sigourney Weaver as Ripley, the warrant officer aboard the Nostromo
Weaver, who had Broadway experience but was relatively unknown in film, impressed Scott, Giler, and Hill with her audition. She was the last actor to be cast for the film, and performed most of her screen tests in-studio as the sets were being built. The role of Ripley was Weaver's first leading role in a motion picture, and earned her nominations for a Saturn Award for Best Actress and a BAFTA award for Most Promising Newcomer to Leading Film Role.
* Veronica Cartwright as Lambert, the Nostromos navigator
Cartwright had previous experience in horror and science fiction films, having acted as a child in The Birds (1963) and Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1978).  She originally read for the role of Ripley, and was not informed that she had instead been cast as Lambert until she arrived in London for wardrobe.  She disliked the character's emotional weakness,  but nevertheless accepted the role: "They convinced me that I was the audience's fears; I was a reflection of what the audience is feeling." Cartwright won a Saturn Award for Best Supporting Actress for her performance.
* Harry Dean Stanton as Brett, the engineering technician
Stanton's first words to Scott during his audition were "I don't like sci fi or monster movies." Scott was amused and convinced Stanton to take the role after reassuring him that Alien would actually be a thriller more akin to Ten Little Indians.
* John Hurt as Kane, the executive officer who becomes the host for the Alien
Hurt was Scott's first choice for the role but was contracted on a film in South Africa during Aliens filming dates, so Jon Finch was cast as Kane instead. However, Finch became ill during the first day of shooting and was diagnosed with severe diabetes, which had also exacerbated a case of bronchitis. Hurt was in London by this time, his South African project having fallen through, and he quickly replaced Finch. His performance earned him a nomination for a BAFTA Award for Best Actor in a Supporting Role. He was the only actor aware of the extremely bloody scene of Alien's "birth" in advance.
* Ian Holm as Ash, the ship's science officer who is revealed to be an android
Holm, a character actor who by 1979 had already been in twenty films, was the most experienced actor cast for Alien (he was 46 at the time of filming).
* Yaphet Kotto as Parker, the chief engineer
Kotto, an African American, was chosen partly to add diversity to the cast and give the Nostromo crew an international flavor. Kotto was sent a script off the back of his recent success with Live and Let Die, although it took some time and deliberation between Kotto and his agent before he was offered the part. 
* Bolaji Badejo as The Alien
Nigerian Badejo, while a 26-year-old design student, was discovered in a bar by a member of the casting team, who put him in touch with Ridley Scott. Scott believed that Badejo, at 6 ft (7ft. inside the costume) and with a slender frame,  could portray the Alien and look as if his arms and legs were too long to be real, creating the illusion that there could not possibly be a human being inside the costume. Stuntmen Eddie Powell and Roy Scammell also portrayed the Alien in some scenes. 
* Helen Horton as the voice of Mother, the Nostromo's computer. Mother gives the countdown to the destruction of the ship.

Production

Development

While studying cinema at the University of Southern California, Dan O'Bannon had made a science fiction comedy film with director John Carpenter and concept artist Ron Cobb entitled Dark Star.  The film included an alien which had been created using a spray-painted beach ball, and the experience left O'Bannon "really wanting to do an alien that looked real." A "couple of years" later he began working on a similar story that would focus more on horror: "I knew I wanted to do a scary movie on a spaceship with a small number of astronauts", he later recalled, "Dark Star as a horror movie instead of a comedy." Ronald Shusett, meanwhile, was working on an early version of what would eventually become Total Recall. Impressed by Dark Star, he contacted O'Bannon and the two agreed to collaborate on their projects, choosing to work on O'Bannon's film first as they believed it would be less costly to produce. O'Bannon had written twenty-nine pages of a script titled Memory comprising what would become the film's opening scenes: a crew of astronauts awaken to find that their voyage has been interrupted because they are receiving a signal from a mysterious planetoid. They investigate and their ship breaks down on the surface. He did not yet, however, have a clear idea as to what the alien antagonist of the story would be.

O'Bannon soon accepted an offer to work on Alejandro Jodorowsky's film adaptation of Dune, a project which took him to Paris for six months.  Though the project ultimately fell through, it introduced him to several artists whose works gave him ideas for his science-fiction story including Chris Foss, H. R. Giger, and Jean "Moebius" Giraud. O'Bannon was impressed by Foss's covers for science fiction books, while he found Giger's work "disturbing": "His paintings had a profound effect on me. I had never seen anything that was quite as horrible and at the same time as beautiful as his work. And so I ended up writing a script about a Giger monster." After the Dune project collapsed O'Bannon returned to Los Angeles to live with Shusett and the two revived his Memory script. Shusett suggested that O'Bannon use one of his other film ideas, about gremlins infiltrating a B-17 bomber during World War II, and set it on the spaceship as the second half of the story. The working title of the project was now Star Beast, but O'Bannon disliked this and changed it to Alien after noting the number of times that the word appeared in the script. He and Shusett liked the new title's simplicity and its double meaning as both a noun and adjective.  Shusett came up with the idea that one of the crew members could be implanted with an alien embryo that would later burst out of him, feeling that this was an interesting plot device by which the alien creature could get aboard the ship.

In writing the script, O'Bannon drew inspiration from many previous works of science fiction and horror. He later stated that "I didn't steal Alien from anybody. I stole it from everybody!"  The Thing from Another World (1951) inspired the idea of professional men being pursued by a deadly alien creature through a claustrophobic environment. Forbidden Planet (1956) gave O'Bannon the idea of a ship being warned not to land, and then the crew being killed one by one by a mysterious creature when they defy the warning. Planet of the Vampires (1965) contains a scene in which the heroes discover a giant alien skeleton; this influenced the Nostromo crew's discovery of the alien creature in the derelict spacecraft. O'Bannon has also noted the influence of "Junkyard" (1953), a short story by Clifford D. Simak in which a crew lands on an asteroid and discovers a chamber full of eggs.  He has also cited as influences Strange Relations by Philip José Farmer (1960), which covers alien reproduction, and various EC Comics horror titles carrying stories in which monsters eat their way out of people.

With roughly eighty-five percent of the plot completed, Shusett and O'Bannon presented their initial script to several studios, pitching it as "Jaws in space."  They were on the verge of signing a deal with Roger Corman's studio when a friend offered to find them a better deal and passed the script on to Gordon Carroll, David Giler, and Walter Hill, who had formed a production company called Brandywine with ties to 20th Century Fox. O'Bannon and Shusett signed a deal with Brandywine, but Hill and Giler were not satisfied with the script and made numerous rewrites and revisions to it.  This caused tension with O'Bannon and Shusett, since Hill and Giler had very little experience with science fiction and according to Shusett: "They weren't good at making it better, or in fact at not making it even worse." O'Bannon believed that they were attempting to justify taking his name off of the script and claiming it as their own. Hill and Giler did add some substantial elements to the story, however, including the android character Ash which O'Bannon felt was an unnecessary subplot,  but which Shusett later described as "one of the best things in the movie...That whole idea and scenario was theirs." In total Hill and Giler went through eight different drafts of the script, mostly concentrating on the Ash subplot but also making the dialogue more natural and trimming some sequences set on the alien planetoid.

Despite the multiple rewrites, 20th Century Fox did not express confidence in financing a science-fiction film. However, after the success of Star Wars in 1977 the studio's interest in the genre rose substantially. According to Carroll: "When Star Wars came out and was the extraordinary hit that it was, suddenly science fiction became the hot genre." O'Bannon recalled that "They wanted to follow through on Star Wars, and they wanted to follow through fast, and the only spaceship script they had sitting on their desk was Alien". Alien was greenlit by 20th Century Fox at an initial budget of $4.2 million. Alien was funded by American dollars, but made by Twentieth Century-Fox's British production subsidiary. 

Direction

O'Bannon had originally assumed that he would direct Alien, but 20th Century Fox instead asked Hill to direct.   Hill declined due to other film commitments as well as not being comfortable with the level of visual effects that would be required.  Peter Yates, Jack Clayton, and Robert Aldrich were considered for the task, but O'Bannon, Shusett, and the Brandywine team felt that these directors would not take the film seriously and would instead treat it as a B monster movie.  Giler, Hill, and Carroll had been impressed by Ridley Scott's debut feature film The Duellists (1977) and made an offer to him to direct Alien, which Scott quickly accepted. Scott created detailed storyboards for the film in London, which impressed 20th Century Fox enough to double the film's budget from $4.2 million to $8.4 million. His storyboards included designs for the spaceship and space suits, drawing influences from films such as 2001: A Space Odyssey and Star Wars. However, he was keen on emphasizing horror in Alien rather than fantasy, describing the film as "The Texas Chain Saw Massacre of science fiction".

O'Bannon introduced Scott to the artwork of H. R. Giger; both of them felt that his painting Necronom IV was the type of representation they wanted for the film's antagonist and began asking the studio to hire him as a designer. 20th Century Fox initially believed Giger's work was too ghastly for audiences, but the Brandywine team were persistent and eventually won out. According to Gordon Carroll: "The first second that Ridley saw Giger's work, he knew that the biggest single design problem, maybe the biggest problem in the film, had been solved." Scott flew to Zürich to meet Giger and recruited him to work on all aspects of the Alien and its environment including the surface of the planetoid, the derelict spacecraft, and all four forms of the Alien from the egg to the adult.

Casting

Casting calls and auditions for Alien were held in both New York and London. With only seven human characters in the story, Scott sought to hire strong actors so he could focus most of his energy on the film's visual style. He employed casting director Mary Selway, who had worked with him on The Duellists, to head the casting in the United Kingdom, while Mary Goldberg handled casting in the United States.   In developing the story O'Bannon had focused on writing the Alien first, putting off developing the characters for a later draft. He and Shusett had therefore written all of the roles as generic male ones with a note in the script explicitly stating "The crew is unisex and all parts are interchangeable for men or women."  This left Scott, Selway, and Goldberg free to interpret the characters as they liked and to cast accordingly. They wanted the Nostromos crew to resemble working astronauts in a realistic environment, a concept summed up as "truckers in space". According to Scott, this concept was inspired partly by Star Wars, which deviated from the pristine future often depicted in science fiction films of the time.

To assist the actors in preparing for their roles, Ridley Scott wrote several pages of backstory for each character explaining their histories.  He filmed many of their rehearsals in order to capture spontaneity and improvisation, and tensions between some of the cast members, particularly towards the less-experienced Weaver, translated convincingly on film as tension between their respective characters.

Film critic Roger Ebert notes that the actors in Alien were older than was typical in thriller films at the time, which helped make the characters more convincing:

None of them were particularly young. Tom Skerritt, the captain, was 46, Hurt was 39 but looked older, Holm was 48, Harry Dean Stanton was 53, Yaphet Kotto was 42, and only Veronica Cartwright at 30 and Weaver at 29 were in the age range of the usual thriller cast. Many recent action pictures have improbably young actors cast as key roles or sidekicks, but by skewing older, Alien achieves a certain texture without even making a point of it: These are not adventurers but workers, hired by a company to return 20 million tons of ore to Earth.

David McIntee, author of Beautiful Monsters: The Unofficial and Unauthorised Guide to the Alien and Predator Films, asserts that part of the film's effectiveness in frightening viewers "comes from the fact that the audience can all identify with the characters...Everyone aboard the Nostromo is a normal, everyday, working Joe just like the rest of us. They just happen to live and work in the future." 

Filming

Alien was filmed over fourteen weeks from July 5 to October 21, 1978. Principal photography took place at Shepperton Studios near London, while model and miniature filming was done at Bray Studios in Water Oakley, Berkshire. Production time was short due to the film's low budget and pressure from 20th Century Fox to finish on schedule. A crew of over 200 workmen and technicians constructed the three principal sets: The surface of the alien planetoid and the interiors of the Nostromo and derelict spacecraft.  Art Director Les Dilley created 1/24th scale miniatures of the planetoid's surface and derelict spacecraft based on Giger's designs, then made moulds and casts and scaled them up as diagrams for the wood and fiberglass forms of the sets.  Tons of sand, plaster, fiberglass, rock, and gravel were shipped into the studio to sculpt a desert landscape for the planetoid's surface, which the actors would walk across wearing space suit costumes. The suits themselves were thick, bulky, and lined with nylon, had no cooling systems and, initially, no venting for their exhaled carbon dioxide to escape. Combined with a heat wave, these conditions nearly caused the actors to pass out and nurses had to be kept on-hand with oxygen tanks.  For scenes showing the exterior of the Nostromo, a 58 ft landing leg was constructed to give a sense of the ship's size. Ridley Scott still did not think that it looked large enough, so he had his two sons and the son of one of the cameramen stand in for the regular actors, wearing smaller space suits to make the set pieces seem larger.  The same technique was used for the scene in which the crew members encounter the dead alien creature in the derelict spacecraft. The children nearly collapsed due to the heat of the suits, and eventually oxygen systems were added to assist the actors in breathing. Four identical cats were used to portray Jones, the Nostromo crew's pet. During filming Sigourney Weaver discovered that she was allergic to the combination of cat hair and the glycerin placed on the actors' skin to make them appear sweaty. By removing the glycerin she was able to continue working with the cats.

Alien originally was to conclude with the destruction of the Nostromo while Ripley escapes in the shuttle Narcissus. However, Ridley Scott conceived of a "fourth act" to the film in which the Alien appears on the shuttle and Ripley is forced to confront it. He pitched the idea to 20th Century Fox and negotiated an increase in the budget to film the scene over several extra days. Scott had wanted the Alien to bite off Ripley's head and then make the final log entry in her voice, but the producers vetoed this idea as they believed that the Alien had to die at the end of the film.

Post-production

Editing and post-production work on Alien took roughly twenty weeks to complete. Terry Rawlings served as Editor, having previously worked with Scott on editing sound for The Duellists. Scott and Rawlings edited much of the film to have a slow pace to build suspense for the more tense and frightening moments. According to Rawlings: "I think the way we did get it right was by keeping it slow, funny enough, which is completely different from what they do today. And I think the slowness of it made the moments that you wanted people to be sort of scared...then we could go as fast as we liked because you've sucked people into a corner and then attacked them, so to speak. And I think that's how it worked." The first cut of the film was over three hours long; further editing trimmed the final version to just under two hours.

One scene that was cut from the film occurred during Ripley's final escape from the Nostromo: she encounters Dallas and Brett who have been partially cocooned by the Alien. O'Bannon had intended the scene to indicate that Brett was becoming an Alien egg while Dallas was held nearby to be implanted by the resulting facehugger.  Production Designer Michael Seymour later suggested that Dallas had "become sort of food for the alien creature", while Ivor Powell suggested that "Dallas is found in the ship as an egg, still alive." Scott remarked that "they're morphing, metamorphosing, they are changing into...being consumed, I guess, by whatever the Alien's organism is...into an egg." The scene was cut partly because it did not look realistic enough and partly because it slowed the pace of the escape sequence. Tom Skerritt remarked that "The picture had to have that pace. Her trying to get the hell out of there, we're all rooting for her to get out of there, and for her to slow up and have a conversation with Dallas was not appropriate." The footage was included amongst other deleted scenes as a special feature on the Laserdisc release of Alien, and a shortened version of it was re-inserted into the 2003 "Director's Cut" which was re-released in theaters and on DVD. 

Music

The musical score for Alien was composed by Jerry Goldsmith, conducted by Lionel Newman, and performed by the National Philharmonic Orchestra. Ridley Scott had originally wanted the film to be scored by Isao Tomita, but 20th Century Fox wanted a more familiar composer and Goldsmith was recommended by then-President of Fox Alan Ladd, Jr. Goldsmith wanted to create a sense of romanticism and lyrical mystery in the film's opening scenes, which would build throughout the film to suspense and fear.  Scott did not like Goldsmith's original main title piece, however, so Goldsmith rewrote it as "the obvious thing: weird and strange, and which everybody loved." Another source of tension was editor Terry Rawlings' choice to use pieces of Goldsmith's music from previous films, including a piece from Freud: The Secret Passion, and to use an excerpt from Howard Hanson's Symphony No. 2 ("Romantic") for the end credits.  

Scott and Rawlings had also become attached to several of the musical cues they had used for the temporary score while editing the film, and re-edited some of Goldsmith's cues and re-scored several sequences to match these cues and even left the temporary score in place in some parts of the finished film. Goldsmith later remarked that "you can see that I was sort of like going at opposite ends of the pole with the filmmakers of the picture." Nevertheless, Scott praised Goldsmith's score as "full of dark beauty" and "seriously threatening, but beautiful." It was nominated for a Golden Globe Award for Best Original Score, a Grammy Award for Best Soundtrack Album, and a BAFTA Award for Best Film Music. The score has been released as a soundtrack album in several versions with different tracks and sequences.

Design

O'Bannon brought in artists Ron Cobb and Chris Foss (with whom he had worked on Dark Star and Dune, respectively) to work on designs for the human aspects of the film such as the spaceship and space suits.  Cobb created hundreds of preliminary sketches of the interiors and exteriors of the ship, which went through many design concepts and possible names such as Leviathan and Snark as the script continued to develop. The final name of the ship was derived from the title of Joseph Conrad's 1904 novel Nostromo, while the escape shuttle, called Narcissus in the script, was named after Conrad's 1897 novella The Nigger of the 'Narcissus'. The production team particularly praised Cobb's ability to depict the interior settings of the ship in a realistic and believable manner. Under Ridley Scott's direction the design of the Nostromo shifted towards an 800 ft tug towing a refining platform 2 mi long and  wide. Cobb also created some conceptual drawings of the Alien, but these were not used. Moebius was attached to the project for a few days as well, and his costume renderings served as the basis for the final space suits created by costume designer John Mollo.

Sets

The sets of the Nostromos three decks were each created almost entirely in one piece, with each deck occupying a separate stage and the various rooms connected via corridors. To move around the sets the actors had to navigate through the hallways of the ship, adding to the film's sense of claustrophobia and realism. The sets used large transistors and low-resolution computer screens to give the ship a "used", industrial look and make it appear as though it was constructed of "retrofitted old technology". Ron Cobb created industrial-style symbols and color-coded signs for various areas and aspects of the ship. The company that owns the Nostromo is not named in the film, and is referred to by the characters as "the company". However, the name and logo of "Weylan-Yutani" appears on several set pieces and props such as computer monitors and beer cans.  Cobb created the name to imply a business alliance between Britain and Japan, deriving "Weylan" from the British Leyland Motor Corporation and "Yutani" from the name of his Japanese neighbor.  The 1986 sequel Aliens named the company as "Weyland-Yutani",  and it has remained a central aspect of the film franchise.

Art Director Roger Christian used scrap metal and parts to create set pieces and props to save money, a technique he employed while working on Star Wars.  Some of the Nostromo corridors were created from portions of scrapped bomber aircraft, and a mirror was used to create the illusion of longer corridors in the below-deck area. Special effects supervisors Brian Johnson and Nick Allder made many of the set pieces and props function, including moving chairs, computer monitors, motion trackers, and flamethrowers. 

H. R. Giger designed and worked on all of the alien aspects of the film, which he designed to appear organic and biomechanical in contrast to the industrial look of the Nostromo and its human elements. For the interior of the derelict spacecraft and egg chamber he used dried bones together with plaster to sculpt much of the scenery and elements. Veronica Cartwright described Giger's sets as "so erotic...it's big vaginas and penises...the whole thing is like you're going inside of some sort of womb or whatever...it's sort of visceral". The set with the deceased alien creature, which the production team nicknamed the "space jockey", proved problematic as 20th Century Fox did not want to spend the money for such an expensive set that would only be used for one scene. Ridley Scott described the set as the cockpit or driving deck of the mysterious ship, and the production team was able to convince the studio that the scene was important to impress the audience and make them aware that this was not a B movie. To save money only one wall of the set was created, and the "space jockey" sat atop a disc that could be rotated to facilitate shots from different angles in relation to the actors. Giger airbrushed the entire set and the "space jockey" by hand.

The origin of the jockey creature was not explored in the film, but Scott later theorized that it might have been the ship's pilot, and that the ship might have been a weapons carrier capable of dropping Alien eggs onto a planet so that the Aliens could use the local lifeforms as hosts. In early versions of the script the eggs were to be located in a separate pyramid structure which would be found later by the Nostromo crew and would contain statues and hieroglyphs depicting the Alien reproductive cycle, offering a contrast of the human, Alien, and space jockey cultures. Cobb, Foss, and Giger each created concept artwork for these sequences, but they were eventually discarded due to budgetary concerns and the need to trim the length of the film. Instead the egg chamber was set inside the derelict ship and was filmed on the same set as the space jockey scene; the entire disc piece supporting the jockey and its chair were removed and the set was redressed to create the egg chamber. Light effects in the egg chamber were created by lasers borrowed from English rock band The Who. The band was testing the lasers for use in their stage show in the sound stage next door. 

Spaceships and planets

The spaceships and planets for the film were shot using models and miniatures. These included models of the Nostromo, its attached mineral refinery, the escape shuttle Narcissus, the alien planetoid, and the exterior and interior of the derelict spacecraft. Visual Effects Supervisor Brian Johnson, supervising modelmaker Martin Bower, and their team worked at Bray Studios, roughly 25 mi from Shepperton Studios where principal filming was taking place.   The designs of the Nostromo and its attachments were based on combinations of Ridley Scott's storyboards and Ron Cobb's conceptual drawings. The basic outlines of the models were made of wood and plastic, and most of the fine details were added from model kits of warships, tanks, and World War II bombers. Three models of the Nostromo were made: a 12 in version for medium and long shots, a 4 ft version for rear shots, and a 12 ft, 7 ST rig for the undocking and planetoid surface sequences. Scott insisted on numerous changes to the models even as filming was taking place, leading to conflicts with the modeling and filming teams. The Nostromo was originally yellow, and the team filmed shots of the models for six weeks before Johnson left to work on The Empire Strikes Back. Scott then ordered it changed to gray, and the team had to begin shooting again from scratch. He ordered more and more pieces added to the model until the final large version with the refinery required a metal framework so that it could be lifted by a forklift. He also used a hammer and chisel on sections of the refinery, knocking off many of its spires which Bower had spent weeks creating. Scott also had disagreements with miniature effects cinematographer Dennis Ayling over how to light the models.

A separate model, approximately 40 ft long, was created for the Nostromo underside from which the Narcissus would detach and from which Kane's body would be launched during the funeral scene. Bower carved Kane's burial shroud out of wood and it was launched through the hatch using a small catapult and filmed at high speed, then slowed down in editing.  Only one shot was filmed using blue screen compositing: that of the shuttle racing past the Nostromo. The other shots were simply filmed against black backdrops, with stars added via double exposure. Though motion control photography technology was available at the time, the film's budget would not allow for it. The team therefore used a camera with wide-angle lenses mounted on a drive mechanism to make slow passes over and around the models filming at 2½ frames per second, giving them the appearance of motion. Scott added smoke and wind effects to enhance the illusion. For the scene in which the Nostromo detaches from the refinery, a 30 ft docking arm was created using pieces from model railway kits. The Nostromo was pushed away from the refinery by the forklift, which was covered in black velvet, causing the arm to extend out from the refinery. This created the illusion that the arm was pushing the ship forward. Shots from outside the ship in which the characters are seen through windows moving around inside were filmed using larger models which contained projection screens showing pre-recorded footage.

A separate model was created for the exterior of the derelict alien spacecraft. Matte paintings were used to fill in areas of the ship's interior as well as exterior shots of the planetoid's surface. The surface as seen from space during the landing sequence was created by painting a globe white, then mixing chemicals and dyes onto transparencies and projecting them onto it. The planetoid was not named in the film, but some drafts of the script gave it the name Acheron after the river which in Greek mythology is described as the "stream of woe", a branch of the river Styx, and which forms the border of Hell in Dante's Inferno. The 1986 sequel Aliens named the planetoid as "LV-426", and both names have been used for it in subsequent expanded universe media such as comic books and video games.

Creature effects

The scene of Kane inspecting the egg was shot during post-production. A fiberglass egg was used so that actor John Hurt could shine his light on it and see movement inside, which was provided by Ridley Scott fluttering his hands inside the egg while wearing rubber gloves. The top of the egg opened via hydraulics, and the innards were made of a cow's stomach and tripe.  Initial test shots of the eggs were filmed using hen's eggs, and this footage was used in early teaser trailers. For this reason a hen's egg was used as the primary image for the film's advertising poster, and became a lasting image for the series as a whole rather than the Alien egg that actually appears in the film. 

The "facehugger" and its proboscis, which was made of a sheep's intestine, were shot out of the egg using high-pressure air hoses. The shot was acted out and filmed in reverse, then reversed and slowed down in editing to prolong the effect and show more detail. The facehugger itself was the first creature that Giger designed for the film, going through several versions in different sizes before deciding on a small creature with humanlike fingers and a long tail. Dan O'Bannon drew his own version based on Giger's design, with help from Ron Cobb, which became the final version. Cobb came up with the idea that the creature could have a powerful acid for blood, a characteristic that would carry over to the adult Alien and would make it impossible for the crew to kill it by conventional means such as guns or explosives, since the acid would burn through the ship's hull. For the scene in which the dead facehugger is examined, Scott used pieces of fish and shellfish to create its viscera.

The design of the "chestburster" was inspired by Francis Bacon's 1944 painting Three Studies for Figures at the Base of a Crucifixion. Giger's original design resembled a plucked chicken, which was redesigned and refined into the final version seen onscreen. Screenwriter Dan O'Bannon credits his experiences with Crohn's disease for inspiring the chest-busting scene. 

For the filming of the chestburster scene the cast members knew that the creature would be bursting out of Hurt, and had seen the chestburster puppet, but they had not been told that fake blood would also be bursting out in every direction from high-pressure pumps and squibs.  The scene was shot in one take using an artificial torso filled with blood and viscera, with Hurt's head and arms coming up from underneath the table. The chestburster was shoved up through the torso by a puppeteer who held it on a stick. When the creature burst through the chest a stream of blood shot directly at Veronica Cartwright, shocking her enough that she fell over and went into hysterics. According to Tom Skerritt: "What you saw on camera was the real response. She had no idea what the hell happened. All of a sudden this thing just came up." The creature then runs off-camera, an effect accomplished by cutting a slit in the table for the puppeteer's stick to go through and passing an air hose through the puppet's tail to make it whip about.

The real-life surprise of the actors gave the scene an intense sense of realism and made it one of the film's most memorable moments. During preview screenings the crew noticed that some viewers would move towards the back of the theater so as not to be too close to the screen during the sequence. In subsequent years the chestburster scene has often been voted as one of the most memorable moments in film.  In 2007, the British film magazine Empire named it as the greatest 18-rated moment in film as part of its "18th birthday" issue, ranking it above the decapitation scene in The Omen (1976) and the transformation sequence in An American Werewolf in London (1981). 

For the scene in which Ash is revealed to be an android and has his head knocked off, a puppet was created of the character's torso and upper body which was operated from underneath by a small puppeteer. During a preview screening of the film this scene caused an usher to faint.  In the following scene Ash's head is placed on a table and re-activated; for portions of this scene an animatronic head was made using a face cast of actor Ian Holm. However, the latex of the head shrank while curing and the result was not entirely convincing. For the bulk of the scene Holm knelt under the table with his head coming up through a hole and milk, caviar, pasta, fiber optics, and glass marbles were used to show the android's inner workings and fluids.

The Alien

Giger made several conceptual paintings of the adult Alien before crafting the final version. He sculpted the creature's body using plasticine, incorporating pieces such as vertebrae from snakes and cooling tubes from a Rolls-Royce. The creature's head was manufactured separately by Carlo Rambaldi, who had worked on the aliens in Close Encounters of the Third Kind. Rambaldi followed Giger's designs closely, making some modifications in order to incorporate the moving parts which would animate the jaw and inner mouth. A system of hinges and cables was used to operate the creature's rigid tongue, which protruded from the main mouth and had a second mouth at the tip of it with its own set of movable teeth. The final head had about nine hundred moving parts and points of articulation. Part of a human skull was used as the "face", and was hidden under the smooth, translucent cover of the head. Rambaldi's original Alien jaw is now on display in the Smithsonian Institution,  while in April 2007 the original Alien suit was sold at auction.  Copious amounts of K-Y Jelly were used to simulate saliva and to give the Alien an overall slimy appearance.  The creature's vocalizations were provided by Percy Edwards, a voice artist famous for providing bird sounds for British television throughout the 1960s and 1970s as well as the whale sounds for Orca: Killer Whale (1977).  

For most of the film's scenes the Alien was portrayed by Bolaji Badejo. A latex costume was specifically made to fit Badejo's 6 ft slender frame, made by taking a full-body plaster cast of him. Scott later commented that "It's a man in a suit, but then it would be, wouldn't it? It takes on elements of the host – in this case, a man." Badejo attended t'ai chi and mime classes in order to create convincing movements for the Alien. For some scenes, such as when the Alien lowers itself from the ceiling to kill Brett, the creature was portrayed by stuntmen Eddie Powell and Roy Scammell; in that scene a costumed Powell was suspended on wires and then lowered in an unfurling motion.

Scott chose not to show the Alien in full through most of the film, showing only pieces of it while keeping most of its body in shadow in order to heighten the sense of terror and suspense. The audience could thus project their own fears into imagining what the rest of the creature might look like: "Every movement is going to be very slow, very graceful, and the Alien will alter shape so you never really know exactly what he looks like." The Alien has been referred to as "one of the most iconic movie monsters in film history" in the decades since the film's release, being noted for its biomechanical appearance and sexual overtones.  Roger Ebert has remarked that "Alien uses a tricky device to keep the alien fresh throughout the movie: It evolves the nature and appearance of the creature, so we never know quite what it looks like or what it can do...The first time we get a good look at the alien, as it bursts from the chest of poor Kane (John Hurt). It is unmistakably phallic in shape, and the critic Tim Dirks mentions its 'open, dripping vaginal mouth.

Marketing

Around and shortly after Alien release in theaters, a number of merchandise items and media were released and sold to coincide with the film. These included a novelization by Alan Dean Foster, in both adult and "junior" versions, which was adapted from the film's shooting script. Heavy Metal magazine published a comic strip adaptation of the film entitled Alien: The Illustrated Story, as well as a 1980 Alien calendar. Two behind-the-scenes books were released in 1979 to accompany the film: The Book of Alien contained many production photographs and details on the making of the film, while Giger's Alien contained much of H. R. Giger's concept artwork for the movie. A soundtrack album was released as an LP featuring selections of Goldsmith's score, and a single of the main theme was released in 1980.  A twelve-inch tall model kit of the Alien was released by the Model Products Corporation in the United States and by Airfix in the United Kingdom.  Kenner also produced a larger-scale Alien action figure, as well as a board game in which players raced to be first to reach the shuttle pod while Aliens roamed the Nostromo corridors and air shafts. Official Halloween costumes of the Alien were released for October 1979. Several computer games based on the film were released, but not until several years after its theatrical run.

Release

An initial screening of Alien for 20th Century Fox representatives in St. Louis suffered from poor sound in the theater. A subsequent screening in a newer theater in Dallas went significantly better, eliciting genuine fright from the audience. Two theatrical trailers were shown to the public. The first consisted of rapidly changing still images set to some of Jerry Goldsmith's electronic music from Logan's Run. The second used test footage of a hen's egg set to part of Goldsmith's Alien score. The film was previewed in various American cities in the spring of 1979 and was promoted by the tagline "In space no one can hear you scream." 

Alien was rated "R" in the United States, "X" in the United Kingdom, and "M" in Australia. In the UK, the British Board of Film Classification almost passed the film as an "AA" (for ages 14 and over), although there were concerns over the prevalent sexual imagery. 20th Century Fox eventually relented in pushing for an AA certificate after deciding that an X rating would be a better choice commercially for selling a horror film. 

Alien opened in American theaters on May 25, 1979. The film had no formal premiere, yet moviegoers lined up for blocks to see it at Grauman's Egyptian Theatre in Hollywood where a number of models, sets, and props were displayed outside to promote it during its first run. Religious zealots set fire to the model of the space jockey, believing it to be the work of the devil. In the United Kingdom, Alien premiered at a gala performance at the Edinburgh Film Festival on September 1, 1979,   before starting an exclusive run at the Odeon Leicester Square in London on September 6, 1979, but it did not open widely in Britain until January 13, 1980.

Critical reception

Critical reaction to the film was initially mixed. Some critics who were not usually favorable towards science fiction, such as Barry Norman of the BBC's Film series, were positive about the film's merits. Others, however, were not: Reviews by Variety, Sight and Sound, Vincent Canby and Leonard Maltin were mixed or negative.  (Maltin, however, reassessed the film upon the release of the Director's Cut and gave Alien a positive review. ) A review by Time Out said the film was an "empty bag of tricks whose production values and expensive trickery cannot disguise imaginative poverty".  In a 1980 episode of Sneak Previews discussing science fiction films of the 1950s and 1970s, critics Gene Siskel and Roger Ebert were critical of Alien. Ebert called it "basically just an intergalactic haunted house thriller set inside a spaceship" and one of several science fiction pictures that were "real disappointments" compared to Star Wars, Close Encounters of the Third Kind, and 2001: A Space Odyssey, though he did compliment the early scene of the Nostromo crew exploring the alien planet as showing "real imagination".  However, the film later made it onto Ebert's Great Movies list, giving it four stars and stating, "Ridley Scott's 1979 movie is a great original." 

Box office

The film was a commercial success, making $78,900,000 in the United States and £7,886,000 in the United Kingdom during its first run. It ultimately grossed $80,931,801 in the United States, though international box office figures have varied from $24,000,000 to $122,700,000. Its total worldwide gross has been listed within the range of $104,931,801 to $203,630,630.

According to 20th Century Fox accounts, however, by April 1980 when the film had earned a reported $100 million at the box office, after advertising, distribution fees, penalties and other costs were deducted, it was still recorded as having made a loss to the studio of $2.4 million. This was seen as an example of Hollywood creative accounting and was much criticised.  By August 1980 Fox was saying the film was $4 million in profit. 

Accolades

Alien won the 1979 Academy Award for Visual Effects and was also nominated for Best Art Direction (for Michael Seymour, Leslie Dilley, Roger Christian, and Ian Whittaker). It won Saturn Awards for Best Science Fiction Film, Best Direction for Ridley Scott, and Best Supporting Actress for Veronica Cartwright, and was also nominated in the categories of Best Actress for Sigourney Weaver, Best Make-up for Pat Hay, Best Special Effects for Brian Johnson and Nick Allder, and Best Writing for Dan O'Bannon. It was also nominated for British Academy of Film and Television Arts (BAFTA) awards for Best Costume Design for John Mollo, Best Editing for Terry Rawlings, Best Supporting Actor for John Hurt, and Most Promising Newcomer to Leading Film Role for Sigourney Weaver. It also won a Hugo Award for Best Dramatic Presentation and was nominated for a British Society of Cinematographers award for Best Cinematography for Derek Vanlint, as well as a Silver Seashell award for Best Cinematography and Special Effects at the San Sebastián International Film Festival. Jerry Goldsmith's score received nominations for the Golden Globe Award for Best Original Score, the Grammy Award for Best Soundtrack Album, and a BAFTA Award for Best Film Music.

Home video

Alien has been released in many home video formats and packages over the years. The first of these was a seventeen-minute Super-8 version for home projectionists. It was also released on both VHS and Betamax for rental, which grossed it an additional $40,300,000 in the United States alone. Several VHS releases were subsequently sold both singly and as boxed sets. LaserDisc and Videodisc versions followed, including deleted scenes and director commentary as bonus features.  A VHS box set containing Alien and its sequels Aliens and Alien 3 was released in facehugger-shaped boxes, and included some of the deleted scenes from the Laserdisc editions. When Alien: Resurrection premiered in theaters, another set of the first three films was released including a Making of Alien: Resurrection tape. A few months later the set was re-released with the full version of Alien: Resurrection taking the place of the making-of video. Alien was released on DVD in 1999, both singly and, as The Alien Legacy, packaged with Aliens, Alien 3 and Alien: Resurrection.  This set, which was also released in a VHS version, included a commentary track by Ridley Scott. The first three films of the series have also been packaged as the Alien Triple Pack.

In 2003 20th Century Fox was preparing the Alien Quadrilogy DVD box set, which would include Alien and its three sequels. In addition, the set would also include alternate versions of all four films in the form of "special editions" and "director's cuts". Fox approached Ridley Scott to digitally restore and remaster Alien, and to restore several scenes which had been cut during the editing process for inclusion in an expanded version of the film.  Upon viewing the expanded version, Scott felt that it was too long and chose to recut it into a more streamlined alternate version:

Upon viewing the proposed expanded version of the film, I felt that the cut was simply too long and the pacing completely thrown off. After all, I cut those scenes out for a reason back in 1979. However, in the interest of giving the fans a new experience with Alien, I figured there had to be an appropriate middle ground. I chose to go in and recut that proposed long version into a more streamlined and polished alternate version of the film. For marketing purposes, this version is being called "The Director's Cut."

The "Director's Cut" restored roughly four minutes of deleted footage while cutting about five minutes of other material, leaving it about a minute shorter than the theatrical cut.  Many of the changes were minor, such as altered sound effects, while the restored footage included the scene in which Ripley discovers the cocooned Dallas and Brett during her escape of the Nostromo. Fox decided to release the Director's Cut in theaters, and it premiered on October 31, 2003. The Alien Quadrilogy box set was released December 2, 2003, with both versions of the film included along with a new commentary track featuring many of the film's actors, writers, and production staff, as well as other special features and a documentary entitled The Beast Within: The Making of Alien. Each film was also released separately as a DVD with both versions of the film included. Scott noted that he was very pleased with the original theatrical cut of Alien, saying that "For all intents and purposes, I felt that the original cut of Alien was perfect. I still feel that way", and that the original 1979 theatrical version "remains my version of choice". He has since stated that he considers both versions "director's cuts", as he feels that the 1979 version was the best he could possibly have made it at the time.

The Alien Quadrilogy set earned Alien a number of new awards and nominations. It won DVDX Exclusive Awards for Best Audio Commentary and Best Overall DVD, Classic Movie, and was also nominated for Best Behind-the-Scenes Program and Best Menu Design. It also won a Sierra Award for Best DVD, and was nominated for a Saturn Award for Best DVD Collection and Golden Satellite Awards for Best DVD Extras and Best Overall DVD. In 2010 both the theatrical version and Director's Cut of Alien were released on Blu-ray Disc, as a stand-alone release and as part of the Alien Anthology set. 

In 2014, to mark the film's 35th anniversary, a special re-release box set named Alien: 35th Anniversary Edition, containing the film on Blu-ray, a digital copy, a reprint of Alien: The Illustrated Story, and a series of collectible art cards containing artwork by H.R. Giger related to the film, was released.  The disk itself is the same as the respective disk on the 2010 Anthology Blu-ray release, and contains MU-TH-UR mode, despite the lack of the required bonus disk. A reprint of the novel by Alan Dean Foster was also released.

Legacy

Sequels

The success of Alien led 20th Century Fox to finance three direct sequels over the next eighteen years, each by different writers and directors. Sigourney Weaver remained the only recurring actor through all four films, and the story of her character Ripley's encounters with the Aliens became the thematic thread running through the series. James Cameron's Aliens (1986) focused more on action and involved Ripley returning to the planetoid accompanied by marines to confront hordes of Aliens. David Fincher's Alien 3 (1992) had nihilistic tones and found her on a prison planet battling another Alien, ultimately sacrificing herself to prevent her employers from acquiring the creatures.  Jean-Pierre Jeunet's Alien: Resurrection (1997) saw Ripley resurrected through cloning to battle more Aliens even further in the future. 

The success of the film series resulted in the creation of a media franchise with numerous novels, comic books, video games, toys, and other media and merchandise appearing over the years. A number of these began appearing under the Alien vs. Predator crossover imprint, which brought the Alien creatures together with the titular Predators of the Predator franchise. The film series eventually followed suit, with Paul W. S. Anderson's Alien vs. Predator (2004) and Colin and Greg Strause's Aliens vs. Predator: Requiem (2007). These stories are set in the 2000s.   

Sigourney Weaver has expressed interest in reuniting with Ridley Scott to revive her character for another Alien film. In the 2003 commentary track for the Alien DVD included in the Alien Quadrilogy set, she and Scott both speculated on the possibility, with Weaver stating: "There is an appetite for a fifth one, which is something I never expected...it's really hard to come up with a fifth story that's new and fresh...but I have wanted to go back into space...I think outer space adventure is a good thing for us right now, 'cause Earth is so grim...so we've been talking about it, but very generally." Scott remarked that, if the series were to continue, the most logical course would be to explore the origins of the space jockey and the Aliens.  Weaver supported this idea, stating that "I think it would be great to go back, because I'm asked that question so many times: 'Where did the Alien come from?' People really want to know in a very visceral way." David Giler stated that he, Walter Hill, and Gordon Carroll, the producers of the first four films in the series, would not be willing to produce another unless it was about the Aliens' homeworld and Weaver was on board (although they were among the producers of Aliens vs. Predator and its sequel). Weaver, in turn, indicated that she would only return to the franchise if either Scott or James Cameron were directing.  Cameron had been working on a story for a fifth Alien film which would explore the origins of the creatures, but ceased work on it when he learned that Fox was pursuing Alien vs. Predator, which he felt would "kill the validity of the franchise".   Weaver has continued to express interest in another installment, stating in 2008 that "I would definitely do another if I had a director like Ridley Scott and we had a good idea. Ridley is enthusiastic about it." 

In July 2009, 20th Century Fox announced that Jon Spaihts had been hired to write a prequel to Alien, with Scott attached to direct.  The script was subsequently re-worked by Scott and Damon Lindelof. Titled Prometheus, it went into production in May 2011, and was subsequently released in 2012. Scott released a statement: "While Alien was indeed the jumping-off point for this project, out of the creative process evolved a new, grand mythology and universe in which this original story takes place. The keen fan will recognize strands of Alien DNA, so to speak, but the ideas tackled in this film are unique, large and provocative." 

Variety reported on February 18, 2015 that a new Alien film will be directed by Neill Blomkamp.  On February 25, it was confirmed that Sigourney Weaver would have a role in the film. 

Imitations

Alien had both an immediate and long-term impact on the science fiction and horror genres. Shortly after its debut, Dan O'Bannon was sued by another writer named Jack Hammer for allegedly plagiarising a script entitled Black Space. However, O'Bannon was able to prove that he had written his Alien script first.  In the wake of Alien success a number of other filmmakers imitated or adapted some of its elements, sometimes by copying its title. One of the first was The Alien Dead (1979), which was titled at the last minute to cash in on Alien popularity.  Contamination (1980) was initially going to be titled Alien 2 until 20th Century Fox's lawyers contacted writer/director Luigi Cozzi and made him change it, and it built on press coverage of Alien chestburster scene by having many similar creatures, which originated from large, slimy eggs, bursting from characters' chests. An unauthorized sequel to Alien, titled Alien Terror (later Alien 2: On Earth), was released in 1980 and included alien creatures which incubate inside human hosts. Other science fiction films of the time that borrowed elements from Alien include Galaxy of Terror (1981), Inseminoid (1981), Forbidden World (1982), Xtro (1982), and Dead Space (1991).

The film studio The Asylum has produced two mockbuster based on the Alien franchise: AVH: Alien vs. Hunter (based on the crossover Alien vs. Predator: Requiem) and Alien Origin (based on Prometheus).

Analysis

Critics have analyzed Alien sexual overtones. Following Barbara Creed's analysis of the Alien creature as a representation of the "monstrous-feminine as archaic mother,"  Ximena Gallardo C. and C. Jason Smith compared the facehugger's attack on Kane to a male rape and the chestburster scene to a form of violent birth, noting that the Alien's phallic head and method of killing the crew members add to the sexual imagery.   Dan O'Bannon has argued that the scene is a metaphor for the male fear of penetration, and that the "oral invasion" of Kane by the facehugger functions as "payback" for the many horror films in which sexually vulnerable women are attacked by male monsters.  McIntee claims that "Alien is a rape movie as much as Straw Dogs (1971) or I Spit on Your Grave (1978), or The Accused (1988). On one level it's about an intriguing alien threat. On one level it's about parasitism and disease. And on the level that was most important to the writers and director, it's about sex, and reproduction by non-consensual means. And it's about this happening to a man."  He notes how the film plays on men's fear and misunderstanding of pregnancy and childbirth, while also giving women a glimpse into these fears.  Film analyst Lina Badley has written that the Alien's design, with strong Freudian sexual undertones, multiple phallic symbols, and overall feminine figure, provides an androgynous image conforming to archetypal mappings and imageries in horror films that often redraw gender lines.  O'Bannon himself later described the sexual imagery in Alien as overt and intentional: "One thing that people are all disturbed about is sex... I said 'That's how I'm going to attack the audience; I'm going to attack them sexually. And I'm not going to go after the women in the audience, I'm going to attack the men. I am going to put in every image I can think of to make the men in the audience cross their legs. Homosexual oral rape, birth. The thing lays its eggs down your throat, the whole number. 

In the decades since its original release critics have analyzed and acknowledged Alien roots in earlier works of fiction. It has been noted as sharing thematic similarities with earlier science fiction films such as The Thing from Another World (1951)  and It! The Terror from Beyond Space (1958) as well as a kinship with other 1970s horror films such as Jaws (1975) and Halloween (1978). Literary connections have also been suggested, including thematic comparisons to And Then There Were None (1939). Many critics have also suggested that the film derives in part from A. E. van Vogt's The Voyage of the Space Beagle (1950), particularly the stories "The Black Destroyer", in which a cat-like alien infiltrates the ship and hunts the crew, and "Discord in Scarlet", in which an alien implants parasitic eggs inside crew members which then hatch and eat their way out.  O'Bannon, however, denies that this was a source of his inspiration for Alien story. Van Vogt initiated a lawsuit against 20th Century Fox over the similarities, but Fox settled out of court.  Rick Sanchez of IGN noted the "striking resemblance"  to Mario Bava's cult classic Planet of the Vampires (1965), especially in a celebrated sequence in which the crew discovers a ruin containing the skeletal remains of long dead giant beings, and in the design and shots of the ship itself, similar to the derelict spacecraft in Alien.  Despite the visual similarities, both O'Bannon and director Ridley Scott claimed in a 1979 interview that they had not seen Planet of the Vampires. 

Writer David McIntee has also noted similarities to the Doctor Who episode "The Ark in Space" (1975), in which an insectoid queen alien lays larvae inside humans which later eat their way out, a life cycle inspired by that of the ichneumon wasp. He has also noted similarities between the first half of the film, particularly in early versions of the script, to H.P. Lovecraft's At the Mountains of Madness, "not in storyline, but in dread-building mystery",  and calls the finished film "the best Lovecraftian movie ever made, without being a Lovecraft adaptation", due to its similarities in tone and atmosphere to Lovecraft's works. In 2009, Dan O'Bannon said the film was "strongly influenced, tone-wise, by Lovecraft, and one of the things it proved is that you can't adapt Lovecraft effectively without an extremely strong visual style ... What you need is a cinematic equivalent of Lovecraft's prose."  Regarding O'Bannon's initial Alien storyline, H. R. Giger stated, "I liked it particularly because I found it was in the vein of Lovecraft, one of my greatest sources of inspiration." 

Lasting critical praise

Alien has continued to receive critical acclaim over the years, particularly for its realism and unique environment. It has a 97% approval rating at the online review aggregator Rotten Tomatoes based on 89 reviews,  while Metacritic gives an 83% approval rating based on 22 reviews.  Critical interest in the film was re-ignited in part by the theatrical release of the "Director's Cut" in 2003. Despite having criticized Alien in 1980, Roger Ebert included it in his "Great Movies" column in 2003, ranking it among "the most influential of modern action pictures" and praising its pacing, atmosphere, and settings:

One of the great strengths of Alien is its pacing. It takes its time. It waits. It allows silences (the majestic opening shots are underscored by Jerry Goldsmith with scarcely audible, far-off metallic chatterings). It suggests the enormity of the crew's discovery by building up to it with small steps: The interception of a signal (is it a warning or an SOS?). The descent to the extraterrestrial surface. The bitching by Brett and Parker, who are concerned only about collecting their shares. The masterstroke of the surface murk through which the crew members move, their helmet lights hardly penetrating the soup. The shadowy outline of the alien ship. The sight of the alien pilot, frozen in his command chair. The enormity of the discovery inside the ship ("It's full of ... leathery eggs ...").

McIntee praises Alien as "possibly the definitive combination of horror thriller with science fiction trappings." He notes, however, that it is a horror film first and a science fiction film second, since science fiction normally explores issues of how humanity will develop under other circumstances. Alien, on the other hand, focuses on the plight of people being attacked by a monster: "It's set on a spaceship in the future, but it's about people trying not to get eaten by a drooling monstrous animal. Worse, it's about them trying not to get raped by said drooling monstrous animal." Along with Halloween and Friday the 13th (1980), he describes it as a prototype for the slasher film genre: "The reason it's such a good movie, and wowed both the critics, who normally frown on the genre, and the casual cinema-goer, is that it is a distillation of everything that scares us in the movies." He also describes how the film appeals to a variety of audiences: "Fans of Hitchcockian thrillers like it because it's moody and dark. Gorehounds like it for the chest-burster. Science fiction fans love the hard science fiction trappings and hardware. Men love the battle-for-survival element, and women love not being cast as the helpless victim." 

David Edelstein wrote, "Alien remains the key text in the 'body horror' subgenre that flowered (or, depending on your viewpoint, festered) in the seventies, and Giger’s designs covered all possible avenues of anxiety. Men traveled through vulva-like openings, got forcibly impregnated, and died giving birth to rampaging gooey vaginas dentate — how’s that for future shock? This was truly what David Cronenberg would call 'the new flesh,' a dissolution of the boundaries between man and machine, machine and alien, and man and alien, with a psychosexual invasiveness that has never, thank God, been equaled." 

In 2002, Alien was deemed "culturally, historically or aesthetically significant" by the National Film Preservation Board of the United States,  and was inducted into the National Film Registry of the Library of Congress for historical preservation alongside other films of 1979 including All That Jazz, Apocalypse Now, The Black Stallion, and Manhattan.  In 2008 the American Film Institute ranked Alien as the seventh-best film in the science fiction genre as part of AFI's 10 Top 10, a CBS television special ranking the ten greatest movies in ten classic American film genres. The ranks were based on a poll of over 1,500 film artists, critics, and historians, with Alien ranking just above Terminator 2: Judgment Day (1991) and just below Ridley Scott's other science fiction film Blade Runner (1982).  The same year, Empire magazine ranked it thirty-third on its list of the five hundred greatest movies of all time, based on a poll of 10,200 readers, critics, and members of the film industry.
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