Slightly OT: Cold War Continuation Sci-Fi

[Raellus]

When I started scrolling down through this list, I began hoping, more and more until reaching the end, that Twilight 2000 would get a shout-out. No such luck, but there's some odd and interesting stuff here.

http://io9.com/1980s-science-fiction-where-the-cold-war-never-ends-1685646798

I'm not personally familiar with any of it. It'd be interesting to hear from someone who is.

Enjoy.

[Rainbow Six]

I'm familiar with a few of them. Amerika I watched at the time, although I really can't recall anything about it now other than it involved the Soviets splitting the US into various puppet states...iirc the action centred on one of those puppet states called 'Heartland' which was ruled by a character played by Sam Neill. Kris Kristofferson played the hero. iirc the end was quite bleak...

I also saw the episode of Doctor Who in question, which is probably most memorable for the use of a pantomime horse as one of the monsters. iirc the idea behind the Cold War setting was that the monsters were going to try and get convince each side that the other was attacking them thus triggering a global nuclear war (yep, that old trope).

Judge Dredd: the Apocalypse War I am very familiar with. I eagerly awaited each instalment as a 13 year old in 1982...it was one of the true 2000AD epics.

If you're not familiar with it, 2000AD is a British sci fi comic that was first published in around 1977. It did publish a better example of a Cold War story, although it's not sci fi - it was called Invasion and has been discussed on this forum at least once before:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Invasion!_%282000_AD%29

(I'm not familiar with the sequel, Savage)

They also published Rogue Trooper in the 1980's, which was a future war story and was also epic

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rogue_Trooper

[StainlessSteelCynic]

Okay... aside from the so totally obvious that I can't believe he missed them, 80s end-of-the-world tropes like Alphavilles' "Forever Young" to Nik Kershaw's "I Won't Let The Sun Go Down On Me", or more recent RPG Modules like "Hot City". by Contested Ground Studios, the author seems totally too young to understand the 80's mindset, the mindset that said "Yes, we expect a nuclear war sometime soon and we don't expect to survive it". I would be willing to bet the author is too young to even have been born in the appropriate time period...

You know, in a way, I see this current world as a world of uncertainty whereas in the 1980s we had some sort of certainty -- that is to say, we were certain a nuclear war would happen sooner or later and we would all have to live with the consequences. The world as we knew it was going to end, we "knew" it... even if it did turn out to be wrong, at the time we had some certainty...
These days, there just doesn't seem to be any sort of certainty to anything.


Edit: That'll teach me to try and write a post while I'm rushing around to get ready to catch up with friends in town... Hot City should have been Cold City. It has a partner - although not connected - game called Hot War that also fits into the "continuation" genre and me being a dumb-arse on the day, confused the two titles

[Olefin]

Amerika had to be one of the stupider mini-series I have ever seen - a US govt that meekly submits to the Soviets after an EMP attack that knocks out all communications when the US has multiple backup systems that arent EMP affected and thus we surrender when our subs and overseas forces are completely unaffected (as are the nukes which wouldnt have been affected by an EMP attack)

And at the end the guy trying to bring the US back together gets shot and never delivers his speech because somehow breaking up the US into little nation states is the better idea

Give me a break