In a nifty article about the importance of the science-fiction genre, there is a fun quote from author Brian W. Aldiss about his work developing the treatment for A.I.:
Aldiss is the great champion of logical SF – with good reason. He worked on the film script of his short story “Supertoys Last All Summer Long” with Stanley Kubrick for 10 years, much of the time simply trying to persuade the director not to bring in a Pinocchio theme of a robot boy seeking love from the Blue Angel. “But you might as well try to persuade this table to be a chair as persuade Stanley of anything. I should have known better.” Kubrick died without making the film. Steven Spielberg took over the project and made AI, a film that toppled over into whimsy and fantasy. “It’s crap,” Aldiss says. “Science fiction has to be logical, and it’s full of lapses in logic.”
The article, entitled “Why don’t we love science fiction?” examines the prejudice against the genre, focusing more on literature than cinema, while making a case that science-fiction is, in many cases, a precursor to the efforts of real scientists, citing the example of the search for extra-terrestrial life – a program that spends billions of dollars on something that, so far as we know, exists only in fiction.