Hollywood loves “remakes.” Sometimes Hardcore Fans Don’t
The funny thing about movies is that liking or disliking them can become as political a process as anything else. In fact, sometimes I get a pretty strong sense of whether a movie will do […]
The Wrong Gadgets
Science Fiction is frequently accused of being a genre that’s too much about gadgets. I tend to think that we focus on the wrong gadgets, and that’s why that generalization is made.
The Escape Pod: Listen to your Science Fiction
Escape Pod is a publication which has embraced the digital age. They pay their authors at a professional level, but their stories are available for free as podcast, and also for reading on their site.
SyFy. Not a Mispelling, Just an Awful Channel.
There are a lot of reasons for a Science Fiction fan to dislike the channel. One would be that several nights of the week, they play professional wrestling in prime time. Even the worst space operas are more realistic.
Review: Leviathan Rising by Jonathan Green
Review: Leviathan Rising Leviathan Rising in many ways reminds me of older styles of Science Fiction. It’s a story set in our near future. Mankind has colonized Mars and set up stations asteroid belts, but […]
The Trouble With God Powers. (No, I’m not talking about realism.)
Among diehard science fiction fans, there is this argument that happens quite frequently. Someone will mention how in a series, the protagonist used a stargate to jump from one point in the universe, and how […]
Number One at the Box Office, and Still a Failure.
The movies have changed a great deal in the last twenty years. One of the most interesting changes is that it’s not that unusual anymore for someone to review the number one most seen movie […]
Atlanta Nights: A good, bad example.
Science Fiction authors have frequently felt that their genre was treated badly by publishers. When PublishAmerica wrote on its own web site that [SF and fantasy writers] have no clue about what it is to […]
William Gibson’s formulae for success: No rayguns.
Not long ago I started rereading the Moon is a Harsh Mistress by Robert Heinlein. It’s an interesting book, but the thing that really struck me when I read it was the startling amount of […]
Special Effects, then and now
When Forbidden Planet came back out way back in 1956, it was on the cutting edge of animation, and lots of people were talking about how it showed things on film which hadn’t been […]
Fast Versus Slow Zombies
Lately there has been an unstoppable wave of zombies movies rampaging through the cinema, and lately even onto television. Zombie movies are so well known that many of the new movies don’t even bother to […]
When Hollywood Attacks!
There was no movie in 2012 that I looked forward to seeing more than Prometheus. It was being produced by Ridley Scott, the same man who produced Alien and Blade Runner. Unfortunately it wasn’t really […]
Time Travel Defined: A device for repairing a poorly thought out plot. Usually.
Time travel is one of those devices that seems to turn up eventually in most long running Science Fiction shows, particularly in the later seasons when they’ve worked out their main story arc already. I’ve […]
Hollywood Loves “Remakes.” Sometimes Hardcore Fans Don’t.
The funny thing about movies is that liking or disliking them can become as political a process as anything else. In fact, sometimes I get a pretty strong sense of whether a movie will do […]
What SF Means To Me
I grew up watching and reading Science Fiction. Some of it was actually old by the time I had already been born, but it had a natural appeal to me when I was young. The […]
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