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It’s not surprising that Shakespeare surfaces so often in science fiction media—it’s hard to find a genre that isn’t influenced by his work. But The Bard’s influence runs far deeper than an amusing guest spot on a show about time travel. RELATED: 8 Books About Messages from Outer Space

The Tempest, thought by many to have been Shakespeare’s last play, made an undeniable impact on sci-fi. Shakespeare scholar A.D. Nuttall in his book Shakespeare the Thinker credited The Tempest as “inventing science fiction.” While Nuttall’s claim might be a stretch, the play inspired numerous sci-fi classics. Perhaps most famously, The Tempest was the basis for the 1956 film Forbidden Planet, in which the crew of Starship C-57D visits planet Altair IV in search of an expedition that crash-landed years ago. There, they encounter the Prospero-like Commander Edward Morbius, and his daughter Altaira, the sole survivors of the doomed initial expedition. RELATED: 5 Technologies from Science Fiction That Could Be Awesome in Real Life Forbidden Planet replaced Prospero’s magic with Morbius’ scientific knowledge, but it’s still recognizable as Shakespeare’s story. For instance, the character Robby the Robot—one of the first movie robots with a distinct personality—is an analog for The Tempest’s Ariel. The Robby the Robot character was later featured in other sci-fi movies and shows, permanently altering what audiences expected from on-screen robots.

Forbidden Planet has its own version of The Tempest’s Caliban, too. Many people connect The Monster of the Id, created when Morbius’ subconscious is made manifest, to the half-man, half-monster from Shakespeare’s play. The Tempest also influenced Aldous Huxley’s iconic dystopian novel Brave New World, which takes its title from Miranda’s exclamation upon first seeing the men marooned on the island by the eponymous tempest: “Oh wonder! How many goodly creatures are there here! How beauteous mankind is! Oh brave new world, that has such people in it. “ (Prospero is less impressed: “’Tis new to thee.”) RELATED: 8 Freaky Predictions from Dystopian Novels That Have Come True

The play was also the basis for a Season 3 episode of Star Trek: The Original Series, “Requiem for Methuselah,” in which the Enterprise crew lands on a remote planet in search of a cure for Rigellian fever. More recently, science fiction writer Dan Simmons turned to The Tempest for his books Ilium and Olympos, which transport the play’s characters to a distant future. Clearly, The Tempest provides sci-fi writers with plenty of inspirational raw material. The play’s exploration of identity, shot through the lens of not-quite-human characters like Ariel and Caliban, prefigured the ways in which androids and aliens are depicted in many science fiction narratives. What’s more, Prospero and Miranda arrive on the island after fleeing threats against their lives in Milan. Upon their arrival, the pair develop a fraught relationship with the native inhabitants of their new home. Science fiction often follows a similar narrative, in which humans flee a threatened or threatening Earth only to face ethical and personal dilemmas while colonizing a new land. RELATED: The Surprising Origins of Wonder Woman The Bard was born 21 years after Copernicus published his landmark text On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres, and there may be references in Shakespeare’s work to the cosmological sea change that occurred during his lifetime. Dan Falk, author of Science of Shakespeare, told The Smithsonian that during the Elizabethan era, science was shaking people’s perception of big-picture things like the heavens, or the concept of infinity. In his book, Falk cites the work of Peter Usher, an astronomer who views Shakespeare’s canon through a scientific lens, and who interprets Hamlet as an allegory for the “cosmological worldviews” of Shakespeare’s time.

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