Scifi other than Starwars where Earth doesn't exist?

It does not reference the earth or the earth does not exist.

I cant for the life of me think of anything other than starwars where it takes place in a setting where the earth or humans from earth are not mentioned. I'm sure there are novels out there but I'm mostly thinking about movies/tv.

Can anyone think of anything that fits this guideline? Maybe I'm forgetting something totally obvious.

Also does earth exist in the starwars universe or is that just covered with "A long time ago, in a galaxy far far away"? And are we supposed to believe that humans or something that looks exactly like humans evolved separately in a totally different galaxy? But that's a totally different discussion. Also I know its a movie with human actors so we don't have alot of options.

Dune never references Earth and is in sci-fi. Amazing book series, not ever adapted to movie format very well.

To a lesser degree The Book of the New Sun.

YES DUNE. I forgot about that one! Also what? that movie was awesome.

Star Wars is fantasy. In that fantasy humans originated on another world.

Tomato tomato. don't give me that shit. I'm not asking to define genres. I'm looking for FICTION which takes place on distant worlds. fantasy is also fiction.

Borderlands?

Well its a game. I know there are at least a few games which qualify. but I wouldn't count borderlands. cause I assume its humans originate from earth.

That's the truth. Even George Lucas called it a fairytale. It's like the planet Mobius in Sonic. A different reality.

The Star Wars movies try to dodge it with "a galaxy far away", but they refer to characters like Han, Leia or Luke Skywalker as members of the same specie (that is, humans)... so, whether they successfully dodge it or not may depend of your mileage.

This relates to other space operas like Flash Gordon, where the characters were mostly humans (obviously, because of budget constraints), but they were not referred as earthlings.

Other than movies?

• In novels, Dune and The Foundation original trilogy has no references to earth or the sol system. The protagonists are essentially human, but they are so far into the future and so accustomed to technologies like interstellar travel that they forgot the location of the birth of the civilization.
• In TV series, Farscape is the closest I got. Crichton is an earthling, but nearly 99% of the show happens outside of Earth (which is out of reach for most of the series), and they make perfectly clear that there is nothing specials in humans.

so you agree?

What's with the attitude? You asked if Earth exists in Star Wars.

no attitude here. just being clear. I just want to know if there are other films/tv which qualify for this guideline.

I guess I thought at first that you were saying that starwars is not scifi but instead fantasy, in terms of genre. Which you could argue that it is but that is NOT what this is about.

Spaceships and lasers = scifi

swords and magic = fantasy

at least as far as this discussion is concerned.

Farscape and guardians of the galaxy fall into the same category of theres 1 guy from earth and then a bunch of far away space stuff. which is close. but still references earth.

I'll say that movie was interesting if we completely distance it from the source material. I'm not some huge prude where ITS NOT LIKE THE BOOK! But they took some reaaaal creative liberties with that source material.. I enjoyed the visuals if nothing else.

There is a fascinating documentary called Alejandro Jodorowsky's Dune about this eccentric director that had this truly amazing vision for Dune but sadly it was never made. They had Pink Floyd doing music, Mick Jagger and Dali playing roles - it was nuts.

I have only seen the film. Like the really long version wasn't it like 3hrs or something crazy.

@devil240z: I don't remember, but the books are very different from the film.

I ought to read that some day.

@humanity:

Actually Earth gets mentioned a few times in the series.. From Dune Messiah:

“Stilgar,” Paul said, “you urgently need a sense of balance which can come only from an understanding of long-term effects. What little information we have about the old times, the pittance of data which the Butlerians left us, Korba has brought it for you. Start with the Genghis Khan.”

“Ghengis … Khan? Was he of the Sardaukar, m’Lord?”

“Oh, long before that. He killed … perhaps four million.”

“He must’ve had formidable weaponry to kill that many, Sire. Las beams, perhaps, or …”

“He didn’t kill them himself, Stil. He killed the way I kill, by sending out his legions. There’s another emperor I want you to note in passing—a Hitler. He killed more than six million. Pretty good for those days.”

“Killed … by his legions?” Stilgar asked.

“Yes.”

“Not very impressive statistics, m’Lord.”

well that sort of kills dune for this.

@duluoz: Well Earth exists in that series but it's so far removed from what they are that I thought it qualified.

In that case, Legend of the Galactic Heroes and Outlaw Star fit. Earth is barely mentioned in either. Trigun too, although Earth is a little more significant there.

It's actually pretty hard to find sci-fi that just takes place in some alternate reality that still has humans, just they evolved the exact same way but on a non-Earth planet. A surprisingly high amount of sci-fi, even the really out there stuff, implies that Earth existed thousands of years in the past and is just a distant memory. If you don't do that and go the Star Wars route, you're suddenly implying that humanity could evolve exactly the same way on a planet that doesn't have the unique evolutionary pressures of Earth, which is a lot more fantastical and devil-may-care than some sci-fi authors prefer.

Anathem by Neal Stephenson is...kind of sci-fi. There isn't a huge focus on super advanced technology and honestly most of the book could take place in present day because it focuses on a bunch of...academic monks that purposely don't use technology, but there's just enough stuff in it that it's still sci-fi.

Strictly speaking, the book establishes early on that the planet the humans live on is not Earth, but also because of that, the humans don't look exactly like humans for evolutionary reasons. And when the author says "they made a vegetable soup", it has stuff in it that is close enough to carrots and potatoes, and so on, but it's not actually carrots and potatoes. Like, there is literally a preface in the book where Stephenson establishes that all of the flora and fauna on the planet is probably a little different from Earth, but for the sake of expediency, he uses Earth names to describe common flora and fauna and human features, unless there is some unique alien creature that needs specific mention (I'm not sure this ever happens in the book, for all intents and purposes it's a different planet with humans but a totally different world history and geography).

Anyway, you should read it, Anathem is a pretty good book.

I guess I'm most surprised that more writers aren't thinking of worlds or settings outside of what we know to be possible or exist.

I constantly think about what life is like for beings of other distant worlds. What their lives might be like. If they have fallen into the same social/political traps that we have.

I think about how wrong humanity have gotten it. How badly we have fucked up our planet/society and how well another planet might be doing compared to us. or how similar they could be as well.

@bisonhero: I am going to counter that. I really like Neal Stephenson and Cryptonomicon as well as the System of the World series are some of my favorite books of his. That said, Anathem often felt like a book written for math majors. While Stephenson is known to go off on technical/historical tangents in his novels, Anathem is just permeated with theory that I found hard to parse past in order to get to the story.

I also know I'm COMPLETELY ignoring stuff like divergent and hunger games. But the story there just makes no sense to me.

Lightsabers and the Force....

Star Wars definitely straddles a line between sci fi and fantasy.

This is a weird, debatable, one but...

Final Fantasy?

Some of them are sci fi, no doubt about that. And there is certainly no Earth as far as I know. Ironically, the Final Fantasy movie, is, I think, about Earth? Or was it still Gaia? Can't remember.

Honestly I feel your best bet to find this kind of Sci Fi is to look at comic books. I will try to think of some tonight, but I'm certain there are some.

I think the big issue is that there are so many sci fis where it could be Earth, but no one goes out of there way to say so, one way or the other.

so are we talking "the spirits within" here?

yeah but that line isn't what we're here for.

Unless starwars doesn't count and there has never been a scifi film which doesn't involve earth or humans from earth.

@humanity said:

To be fair, I almost majored in computer science, and instead I'm going to school for engineering. So maybe he's preaching to the choir on that one.

Still, I think the fictional world is an interesting one. The appendices that are literally math proofs are maybe a little much, but they are appendices for a reason, and not critical to the story. I guess I do recommend that anyone who reads the book just look on the Wikipedia page to figure out what the ideologies are behind the two major schools of thought in the book (it's basically people who think mathematics is a universal truth, versus people who think mathematics is some kind of construction that is only internally consistent and could end up looking totally differently if aliens came up with their own math).

What about the Riddick trilogy and it's games? Is Earth ever mentioned? I know the games and movies do not take place on Earth, but I'm not sure if Earth is ever mentioned/is the originator of anything.
Though as the most grounded of the Riddick stuff, Pitch Black makes plenty of allusions to religions that would only make sense if Earth was part of the canon.

I have missed out on riddick. I need to check out the films.

And I call myself a fan of Vin diesel.

Does Firefly involve earthlings? I can't remember. Like I know they're humans, but I can't remember if Earth is a thing in that series.

firefly directly comes from earth. Thats why people swear in mandarin.

@devil240z: Edited your thread title a bit.

Vague thread titles: The reader should be able to tell what your topic is about without clicking on it. Topics with intentionally vague or misleading titles are subject to editing or deletion.

Sorry about that. I don't intend to lead or mislead. only discuss.

@devil240z: It was mainly the first part. Since there was room to state the entire purpose of your topic in the thread title, I just edited it in, instead of forcing the reader to click on the topic to find out what it is you were asking.

I guess I'm used to running out of space so I try to make my topic titles as short as possible.

its not like we're on kotaku. I didn't intend to TRICK people into clicking.

I also DID NOT want to imply that earth does not exist in starwars...

@devil240z: sorry only just realized your OP says "movies/tv". Talking FF there is only 1 movie (Spirits Within) and it is in fact about Earth, unlike those ~15 games of the same name.

Unfortunately the Chronicles of Riddick does reference Earth. Pitch Black specifically but it's a throw away line as I recall. Great movies though.

FireFly also calls out Earth at some point, 100%.

This is completely my opinion and it is also unsolicited but here it is:

Being that TV & Movies feature real, live humans, and that those productions are, at the mainstream level, obsessed with getting the biggest audience possible - they are far, far more likely to set any fiction (sci fi or fantasy) on Earth versus a Comic Book, Novel or Video Game. The imagination space in those mediums is simply less restricted. For example you can find dozens of William Gibson short stories (and hundreds of Ray Bradbury short stories) that never, ever specify where they take place, if the characters are humans, or what. Because they just don't need to. The novel/short story answer to your question is super gigantic. Tons of abstract space games as well.

Anyways - I forgot to ask...

What's the purpose of your question? Just curious or something else?

I just wonder about other worlds not connected to ours and if any fictions wonder this as well. and narrowing it down to film to see how self centered we are as a race. Not that we have ANY REASON WHAT SO EVER not to be self centered since we have no knowledge of things outside or tiny solar system. by things I mean life and the ways of those lives which we don't know of.

Man if I had a fancy education I could probably make money talking about this kind of shit.

Huh two similar threads. I'll have to read through both, but a sci fi only about aliens might be interesting (though you'd have to suspend belief when explaining why they all think/talk in english). It might be completely unrelateable though, or suffer too much from human chauvinisms.

District 9 movie/novel entirely from the prawn's POV!

I get that we cant imagine what we don't know cant know. But I would think that the desire to know would lead to more fiction than what we have.

My first knee-jerk reaction was Warhammer 40k but then I remembered the Horus Heresy. I'm pretty sure the comic book series Saga doesn't have an Earth but I wouldn't straight up call it science fiction. I imagine that Earth-less science fiction just becomes fantasy at a point. I mean, without some type of human shaped thing to ground us in the known reality, sci-fi really loses its relevance.

so scifi cant exist without an earth centric viewpoint?

Asimov's Foundation series. It gets a little muddied with the eventual tie-in to I Robot, but The original trilogy never references earth.

Outside of a reference to Adolf Hitler in Children of Dune, earth isn't mentioned in any of the Dune books as far as I know.

Hard to think of good Sci-fi that doesn't have any ties to Earth.

It depends if we consider only the original Dune series then it isn't really mentioned other than 2 tiny references to ghengis khan and hitler but if we count the prequel books which were not neccesarily written by Frank Herbert then the universe certainly references Earth. One whole Dune trilogy is basically about Earth as a central premise dealing with the ban on thinking machines (which is referenced in the original trilogy in things like why their ships can't rely on computers to make warp journeys and such).

But not counting either of the two prequel trilogies Dune basically doesn't ever care about Earth's existance.

In this same idea though I would have to assume that somewhere in the Star Wars Expanded Universe there will be Earth but this probably doesn't matter anymore since Disney basically said that any EU books from before like 2014 are no longer canon anymore.

@zolroyce: Considering Riddick involves a planet called New Mecca and a religion called Chrislam I am going to say Earth at one point existed

@rejizzle: In Asimov's Foundation series humanity did come from Earth, but it's been so long that people don't remember. "Sol" is mentioned in Foundation as one of a few possible birthplaces of humanity. Then of course there's the fifth book in the series, Foundation and Earth.

@devil240z: I think the distinction between Fantasy and Science Fiction is highly relevant to this discussion, because Fantasy commonly takes place in imaginary worlds. Star Wars, despite being considered Science Fiction, contains no more science than does Game of Thrones. The difference is that Star Wars takes place in a futuristic, space-faring setting, while Game of Thrones is set at a medieval technology level. It wouldn't be much of a stretch to imagine Game of Thrones taking place "a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away."

I'm just popping in here to remind people that genres are just descriptors... not a big deal... besides... Star Wars is an absolute blend of fantasy and sci-fi.. i mean... you've got magic and beasts (sure, aliens, but beasts not the less), but you also have future tech and lasers... it's the PERFECT blend of the two genres and that's probably another aspect that makes it so enjoyable.