A bang and a whimper  A weird future awaits in End of Animal and
other Kafka-inspired films  A pregnant woman struggles through
the apparent beginning of the end of the world in Jo Sung-Hee's
End of Animal   SAN FRANCISCO INTERNATIONAL FILM FESTIVAL
Science fiction's open secret is that it has never really been
about the future. As William Gibson explained to an interviewer
in 2007, echoing earlier genre criticism by writers such as
Samuel R. Delany and Joanna Russ, science fiction is, at its
heart, "speculative fiction, but you don't really have the
future to work with, so you are always working with history and
with the present."  Gibson's ecumenical gloss on genre fiction
provides a helpful rubric under which to view some of SFIFF's
odder ducks. Although each of the following films slot
differently genre-wise — apocalyptic road movie, surrealist
fantasy, cybernetic thriller — the "what ifs?" posed by their
imaginings of alternate presents (and in one case, an alternate
past) certainly qualify them as specu