The conservative lie is that public spending is bad, and taxation is bad. The reality is that spending tax revenue is an investment in the improvement of society. Something with moral benefits, but also lasting economic ones.

Cast adrift from their ship somehow, three crewmates seek succour. Perhaps a nearby island will bring shelter, and new discoveries.

We’re living in a global pandemic. And pandemics, plagues, and apocalypses have always been part of our fiction. Entertainment might need to change the way it portrays those events, to adjust to our new sense of vulnerability.

In the 1920s and 1930s the US reacted to break up the monopoly and oligopoly of the “robber barons”. The government had the will, and the public backing, to make changes necessary to protect from corporate dominance. That will doesn’t exist any more.

For some reason, these two genres are always placed together. There’s not a great deal that actually connects them, though. One envisions possible futures, things that might be. The other deliberately looks beyonds the bounds of even potential reality.