The Gate is a short film depicting a horrific event where humans are modified via unlicensed pharmaceuticals. Using a governmental review of the event as the structure, flashing back to images of mutants and conflict with authorities, it presents how the events came about and who was effected. A brief glance at what could happen if current pharmaceutical practices continue as the ability to manufacture designer drugs become the norm.

Considered one of cinema's most influential science fiction films, the Blade Runner screenplay was based on Philip K. Dick's novel Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? and directed by Ridley Scott, who also directed sci fi classics Alien and Prometheus. Blade Runner is set in our near future, 2019 is only 5 years away, against a dystopian backdrop of a filthy, crowded, culturally mixed cityscape on a planet where most humans appear to have left for other colonies. As with most classics that visualized technological and ecological hell on the other side of the year 2000, the vision is not accurate. Yet, it navigates issues we are discussing today because they will be here tomorrow.

Gravity is a highly detailed action thriller set in Earth's orbit. Starting with a what should be a routine Hubble Space Telescope repair, the mission ends as events threaten the shuttle and astronauts. The movie spins the lead characters, of which there are two, through a series of attempts to survive in orbit while seeking a way back to Earth.

In 1971, Glen Cook, an author known for his gritty fantasy novels, wrote the short story, "Song from a Forgotten Hill." Recently included in a short story collect, Winter's Dreams, "Song" is not your normal science fiction, though it is a dystopian view of a broken American landscape where the country has been through three "fires." The first is from Russian nuclear strikes on major American cities. The second is "when (black) militants burned remnants of Whiteys' cities." The third occurs when the US military's return from the war (presumably with Russia) leads to a civil contest "between whites and blacks."

In the anarchy following nuclear holocaust, Cook depicts the worst of humanity as sides are formed on American soil. Black militants strike at governmental infrastructure and then white rednecks turn back the hands of time to revisit the atrocity of slavery. In the midst of the aftermath, we find a a black protagonist, a veteran of the Vietnam war, attempting to keep his remaining family, "Four kids, the oldest fifteen, and no wife," safe and free in the wilderness: "The war killed most of the good folks. They lived where the bombs fell. The rednecks and the militants seem to be the only survivors. And now the rednecks, who had waited so long for their chance, are 'putting 'em back in their place.' There are very few of us out here in the hills. We're hunted, and running, but free."