Ad Astra may be among the first films to explicitly place Clarke’s lonely cosmos possibility at its heart, but a raft of hard sci-fi films in the last few years, auteur-driven works set in space such as Duncan Jones’s Moon, Alfonso Cuarón’s Gravity, Christopher Nolan’s Interstellar, Ridley Scott’s The Martian, and Damien Chazelle’s First Man,

It takes a Jacobin Mag to argue that a biopic about Neil Armstrong is science fiction. Or go on a tear about the meaninglessness of "autur-driven works set in space" and skip the fuck over Arrival.

Look- science fiction has never been about alien species, not even vaguely. It's been about aboriginals. Star Trek puts headgear on humans and gives them entirely human emotions; the Hugo- and Nebula-winning shit out there puts headgear on human civilization and takes it all back to colonialism every.single.time. What's stupid is this is a think-piece about brooding, lonely sci fi that doesn't so much as name-check Solaris, one of the few books that actually deals with an alien so alien that we can't find common ground.

And let's be honest. If you open with a title card saying "It is the near future, 'a time of hope and conflict,'" your critique isn't philosophy, your critique is sci fi.