From reel to real: to make their vision of the future a reality, Hollywood entertainment providers have long used science fiction to shape the public mindset. (Cover Story: At a Glance).

Choose your collective: On both television and the big screen, Star Trek depicts a collectivist future, with the "benign" United Federation of Planets facing off against "evil" collectives, such as the cybernetic 

Alien apocalypse: World-changing encounters with advanced, godlike aliens are common in science fiction -- whether the visitors are benevolent explorers like those in Close Encounters of the Third Kind interplanetary "peacekeepers" like Klaatu from The Day the Earth Stood Still or predatory invaders such as the Martians in The War of the Worlds and the unnamed extraterrestrials in Independence Day. In any case, such stories usually depict alien contact as the catalyst for creating a united world.

Descent into barbarism: H.G. Wells' The Time Machine created the familiar futurist premise of a world plunged into primitivism because of mankind's refusal to embrace the gospel of global collectivism. Popular film series such as Planet of the Apes, Mad Max, and Terminator predict a barbaric future resulting from nuclear war or environmental catastrophe.

Utopia vs. dystopia: Things to Come, the 1935 adaptation of an H.G. Wells novel was used in English schools to indoctrinate students about the supposed need for an all-powerful World State to keep the peace. George Orwell's novel 1984, which was brought to the screen in 1956 and again in the title year, presented a grimly plausible picture of what life in such a regime would be like. Robert Heinlein's novel Starship Troopers celebrated soldiers' heroism while warning of totalitarian political trends -- yet the 1997 film of the same name (below) inverted that message by glamorizing totalitarianism.

Disaster from space: The films Deep Impact (above) and Armageddon (below), released within weeks of each other, presented disaster scenarios involving a collision between Earth and a large celestial object -- a comet and an asteroid, respectively. In Deep Impact, the U.S. president (Morgan Freeman), following collectivist conventions, enacts a lifeboat exercise by sparing the world's elite and leaving common people to perish. In Armageddon, however, the government turned to a private sector group for a solution that would save everybody -- a clear-headed approach likely to be found only in science fiction, alas.