Scientists pick Blade Runner as their favourite film; Asimov their top author
LONDON (AP) – A newspaper survey of top scientists has chosen Blade Runner as the world’s best science fiction film.
The 1982 movie was the favourite when 60 scientists were questioned by the Guardian, including evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins and Harvard psychologist Steven Pinker, the newspaper reported Wednesday. In the film, a retired cop played by Harrison Ford hunts down renegade human replicates in a dark futuristic vision of Los Angeles.
Stephen Minger, a stem cell biologist at King’s College, London, said Blade Runner was the best movie he had ever seen.
“It was so far ahead of its time and the whole premise of the story -what is it to be human and who are we, where we come from. It’s the age-old questions,” he said.
Stanley Kubrick’s epic, 2001: A Space Odyssey, came in a close second, followed by the first two films of George Lucas’s Star Wars trilogy: Star Wars and The Empire Strikes Back.
The others chosen, in descending order, were Alien, Solaris (1972), Terminator, Terminator 2: Judgment Day, The Day the Earth Stood Still, War of the Worlds, The Matrix, and Close Encounters of the Third Kind.
Asked to pick their favourite authors, the scientists chose: Isaac Asimov (I, Robot); John Wyndham (Day of the Triffids and Chocky); and Fred Hoyle (The Black Cloud).
The other writers chosen, in descending order, were Philip K. Dick, H.G. Wells, Ursula Le Guin, Arthur C. Clarke, Ray Bradbury, Frank Herbert and Stanislaw Lem.
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