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Theme Parks in SF

Entry updated 4 November 2024. Tagged: Theme.

Real-world Theme Parks (which see for discussion) such as The Walt Disney Company's pioneering Disneyland have inspired many sf homages and extrapolations of such future Leisure experiences. The Western-themed "Westernworld" or Westworld in Westworld (1973), directed and written by Michael Crichton, unsurprisingly (considering the predilections of its creator) goes catastrophically wrong: the Robot Gunslinger is virally liberated from the Laws of Robotics and famously runs amok. Companion attractions in the theme park complex are "MedievalWorld" and "RomanWorld". Westworld spinoffs include the less successful Futureworld (1976) directed by Richard T Heffron, and the considerably more interesting Television reworking Westworld (2016-2022). The fame of the original Westworld was eclipsed by Jurassic Park (1993) directed by Steven Spielberg, based on Crichton's novel Jurassic Park (1990), in which Dinosaurs recreated by Genetic Engineering get very much more spectacularly out of control; further Jurassic Park films followed.

John Varley's Eight Worlds sequence, in which humanity has been forcibly exiled from Earth, features offworld Earth-themed "disneylands" – Underground on the Moon, for example, in "The Phantom of Kansas" (February 1976 Galaxy) – which are all the experience of the home world now accessible to exiles. The eponymous park of Larry Niven's and Steven Barnes's Dream Park sequence opening with Dream Park (1981) is not so much a specifically themed venue as one that can be configured to offer a variety of LARP (live action Role Playing Game) settings, with reality enhanced by Disneyland-style Technology and holographic projections, but not replaced altogether as in Virtual Reality scenarios. The Red Dwarf series IV episode "Meltdown" (21 March 1991) visits "Waxworld", a planetary theme park complex populated by "wax-droids" of famous fictional and real-life historical characters (plus dinosaurs). Jack Womack's Satirical thriller Let's Put the Future Behind Us (1996) includes the conceit of a Gulag Archipelago Experience theme park as a Near Future Russian tourist attraction. The titular park of Julian Barnes's satire England, England (1998) is a nostalgically condensed England that omits all the tiresome realities like industrial wastelands and urban decay which sentimentalists prefer to forget.

Further sf theme parks are central to The Authentic Touch (1971) by Jack Wodhams; Andy Remic's Books of the Anarchy sequence opening with Theme Planet (2011); Heroic Park (2012) by Lance Woods; Augland (2022) by Erin Carrougher; and the animated Television series Dead End: Paranormal Park (2022). [DRL]

see also: The Dead Zone; Ergo Proxy; Adam Lively; Graham Lord; James McConkey; My Dad the Bounty Hunter; Nope.

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