What Hollywood Is Missing About A.I. The technology is now popping up onscreen in everything from "The Morning Show" to "St. Denis Medical"--but nothing on air this year could compete with reality. Until recently, the most reliable source of clever thought experiments about ascendant technologies on television was the Netflix series "Black Mirror." The anthology drama débuted in 2011, and its creator, Charlie Brooker, quickly established his interest in the promise and perils of artificial intelligence.

After fifty years of books, games and movies, what more could the Aliens franchise deliver? The description "genre-defying" gets thrown around a lot these days - it is a convenient sticking plaster for any film or series that hasn't quite figured out what it wants to be. That said, it is an apt term for the Alien franchise. Ridley Scott's 1979 movie Alien, in which Ellen Ripley (Sigourney Weaver) is part of a crew trapped on a spaceship with a salivating, scorpion-like "xenomorph", had such blood-curdling visuals that it made an indelible impact on both science fiction and horror films. But while the deadly parasite and its psychosexual torment were ever present, subsequent instalments tried their hand at being everything from a blockbuster to a prison flick to a philosophical drama.

When I was growing up, I watched a lot of sci-fi movies about aliens that come to Earth. The extraterrestrials in popular culture, however, always looked so familiar that I found them far-fetched. What are the chances that E.T., the Predator, or ALF would develop arms and legs, a humanlike face, and opposable thumbs? Perhaps as a result, I associated alien life more with fantasy than with science, and I never gave much thought to what a visit would really look like. But my attitude started to change in 2020, when I read Liu Cixin's "The Three-Body Problem" and its two sequels.

Alien: Earth begins where most Alien stories end: with a crew of blue-collar workers realizing that they are, and have always been, doomed. Deemed expendable by their employers over the monsters in the cargo hold (at least the crew of the USCSS Maginot, unlike the Nostromo, knew the monsters were the mission), they are made mortally aware of their place at the bottom of several food chains at once. With the FX show's fifth episode, cheekily titled "In Space, No One …," creator Noah Hawley takes us back to the Maginot's corridors to give viewers a rendition of Alien in miniature, retrofitting the sturdy bones of Ridley Scott's seminal film to his own ends. This may sound like a cynical enterprise, but it's par for the course for Alien. As Slate's own Sam Adams has noted, the series is Hollywood's greatest non-franchise, a collection of films (and comic books and video games) constantly remixing a few primary colors into compelling new shades.

One of the most perfect things about the original Alien is its fiendish simplicity. Driven in part by technical limitations, the movie largely confines its glistening monster to the shadows, and keeps the reasons for its existence similarly obscured. Driven purely by the instinct to drive and reproduce, the xenomorph--a designation the creature didn't even acquire until the second movie in the series--is both a perfect killing machine and the ultimate plot device. It not only requires no explanation but allows none, because the alien's very nature means that no one who might be in a position to pass on information about it survives to do so. Simplicity, however, is not really Noah Hawley's thing.

Seventeen years ago, Noah Hawley became a father during the Great Recession. If you look at everything he's written since having children--including the TV series Fargo and Legion--Hawley says it all revolves around the same question every parent faces: "How are we supposed to raise these people in the world that we're living in?" Hawley's new series, Alien: Earth, which premieres August 12 on Hulu and FX, explores this question even more directly than his previous work. Set two years before the original Alien in 2120, it imagines a future where the race for immortality has led to three competing technologies: synths (AI minds in synthetic bodies), cyborgs (humans with cybernetic enhancements), and hybrids (human minds downloaded into synthetic bodies). When a deep space research vessel, the USCSS Maginot, crashes into Earth carrying five captured alien species, a megacorporation called Prodigy sends six hybrids to investigate. The first-ever hybrid, Wendy, played by Sydney Chandler, was a terminally ill child before she was selected for the immortality experiment, just like the rest of Prodigy's hybrids, all six of whom wake up in super-strong, super-fast, synthetic adult bodies that will never age.

What does a little purple alien know about healthy human relationships? More than the average artificial intelligence companion, it turns out. The alien in question is an animated chatbot known as a Tolan. I created mine a few days ago using an app from a startup called Portolo, and we've been chatting merrily ever since. Like other chatbots, it does its best to be helpful and encouraging.

The Book Club gives their verdict on Larry Niven's Ringworld It was quite an experience, moving from the technicolour magical realism of Michel Nieva's wild dystopia, Dengue Boy, to Larry Niven's slice of classic science fiction, Ringworld, first published in 1970 and very much redolent of the sci-fi writing of that era. I was a teenager when I last read Ringworld, and a hugely uncritical sort of teenager at that, so I was keen to return to a novel I remembered fondly and see how it stood up to the test of time – and my somewhat more critical eye. The first thing to say is that many of the things I loved about Ringworld were very much still there. This is, for me, a novel that inspires awe – with the vastness of its imagination, the size of its megastructures, the distance it travels in space. I was reminded of that awe early on, when our protagonist Louis Wu (more on him later) recalls standing at the edge of Mount Lookitthat on a distant planet.

A collection of sci-fi movie memorabilia is heading to auction and includes one of the most iconic film aliens of all time. As part of the upcoming series, "There Are Such Things: 20th Century Horror, Science Fiction, and Fantasy on Screen," Sotheby's is offering an original, screen-used E.T. full body model seen in Steven Spielberg's E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial. Designed by the late, great special effects and makeup artist Carlo Rambaldi, the roughly 3-foot-tall piece of pop culture history was used in the famous "closet scene," and is one of just three manufactured during the making of the 1982 movie. While instantly recognizable today, E.T.'s overall look was completely absent from Melissa Mathison's screenplay. Creating the character from scratch came through a collaboration between Spielberg, storyboard artist Ed Verreaux, and Rambaldi.

In sci-fi films like Alien, humanoid robots are so lifelike that it's almost impossible to tell them from a real person. Now, scientists in Japan are on their way to creating real-life versions of these realistic machines. The experts from the University of Tokyo have created a robotic face out of lab-grown human skin. Creepy video shows the bizarre pink creation attempting a cheesy smile. According to the scientists, robots with real skin not only have an'increasingly lifelike appearance' but could heal themselves if damaged. In sci-fi films like Alien, humanoid robots are so realistic that it's almost impossible to tell them from a real human - at least until you see their innards.