THE ROUGH GUIDE TO SCI-FI MOVIES

The Rough Guide to Sci-Fi Movies is a comprehensive companion to the ''final frontier'' of film. It explores cinema''s fascination with space exploration, time travel and fantastical worlds, and tells the stories behind the movies that have been expanding our universe since film began. Features include: The origins: How everything from the philosophy of Plato to classic Victorian tales and cult comic books has helped to create sci-fi as we know it. The canon: 50 essential science fiction movies, including Metropolis, Star Wars, Blade Runner, 2001, Alien and The Planet of the Apes -- with dozens more films reviewed in each chapter. The locations: The places we know -- decimated by invading alien hordes -- and those we don''t, from the moons of Jupiter to the barren wastes of Tatooine. The icons: Filmmakers such as George Lucas and Stanley Kubrick; characters like Ming the Merciless and Ellen Ripley; and not forgetting the spaceships, robots and creatures that defined a genre. Global sci-fi: The classic and the weird from Mexico, Russia, India and beyond, with special attention paid to the anime and kaiju eiga traditions of Japan. And everything else you need to know: The technology, the fans, conventions, magazines and websites.