Arrival is classic “hard” science fiction in the tradition of Arthur C. Clarke and Isaac Asimov novels from the 1950s and ‘60s. What makes it science fiction is not that it depicts the arrival on Earth of alien spaceships but that it attempts to imagine this scenario in the context of real-life science. Like all the best sci-fi stories, Arrival takes a theoretical scientific hypothesis and extrapolates the implications of that real idea into a fictional future.

This Postmodern Realities episode is a conversation with Journal author John McAteer about his online-exclusive movie review “Reading a Sci-fi, Pro-life Theodicy in Arrival“.

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