There are three movies from my youth that shaped how I felt about space: E.T., Cocoon and Independence Day. While the first two presented extraterrestrial life as wrinkly, cute and more or less benign, watching spaceships obliterate the White House didn’t give me the best feeling about what was out there in the universe. It was a fear that persisted through much of the late 90s as I watched Apollo 13, The X-Files and Species.
But for many of my fellow millennials, sci-fi shows and movies were a welcome escape from the mundanity of daily life. Bengaluru-based writer and illustrator Vinayak Varma grew up watching Star Trek. “I loved the show’s vision of a utopian federal society that’s taken to adventuring in space only after having solved Earth’s most pressing problems. Its optimism comes from the relief of having truly transcended all human limitations,” he shares.
