(Or, Why Your Beloved Franchise Is About to Become More Powerful than You Could Possibly Imagine.) Since the news that J. J. Abrams will be directing the seventh installment of Star Wars hit a couple […]
There are some people who think that a movie based on a video game should automatically be considered mindless trash. Good science fiction movies, they say, should be based on loftier sources, such as the […]
I always hate getting in to a show and then it suddenly gets cancelled before it gets to even begin its story (Firefly is a key example). You might say that I should just not […]
A few weeks ago, a friend and I were discussing which films should be considered science fiction and which shouldn’t. He claimed comic book/superhero movies should not be called SF. I claimed that Inception isn’t […]
We live in a cinematic age of remakes, reboots and re-imaginings. Even new movies like The Hobbit feel like pictures that have gone before. This is hardly a new experience. Long before he became President […]
With zombie rom-com Warm Bodies opening to strong reviews and good box-office last week zombies have moved out of the horror ghetto into the PG13 friendly mainstream. This is a remarkable development, but what is […]
Now, I’m never one to say a film or TV adaptation of a book is ever as good as the read itself. I’m not much of a reader as I’m more of a visual person, […]
I have mentioned elsewhere that my participating as a contributor to the new Amazing Stories feels like one of those Six Degrees of Separation experiences. Once upon a time I worked for a technical publishing start up, The Cobb […]
Being Human is a fascinating TV show, originating in a time before Twilight became all the rage and posing an interesting question: what if your neighbours weren’t human? We all wonder what our neighbours get […]
Title: Possession (The Night The Screaming Stopped) Release Date: 1981 Director: Andrzej Zulawski Starring: Isabel Adjani, Sam Neill Language: English Many horror fans are filled with despair when flipping channels, or picking over the bones […]
2013 sees the twentieth anniversary of Jurassic Park. To celebrate, a 3D version will be released in the USA in April: https://www.jurassicpark.com/index_splash.html. Dinosaurs are hotter than ever before and that’s good news. Their snapping jaws […]
One of the things that has always been perfect for short films is that you can take a known property and play with it for a while. The perfect example of that is the classic […]
It is the time of year when the studios start looking at new pilots to hit screens this year. Some we will never see, some will never last more than a few episodes and others […]
Folks who read my author bio will have realized I lead an interesting life or that I have a passion for Starbucks. No wait, that wasn’t it. Yes, you will have noticed that I’m something of a […]
A couple of months ago came an announcement that caught many of off-guard. The announcement I refer to is that of the Star Wars franchise being sold to Disney and the plan of a new […]
The only time the public pays attention to Science Fiction is when that great machine of mass marketing and “entertainment” called Hollywood inundates the collective consciousness with that most dreaded of phenomena: the Summer Blockbuster. But […]
Science deals with a lot of high speed phenomena, like the speed of sound and the speed of light, which can make the topic seem fast and exciting. We also see science news on tv […]
They’ve really done it now. It’s over. First George Lucas sold Luke, Obi Wan, Princess Leia, Han and all the others into eternal indentured servitude on the Disney Plantation. Lucas, once a man with ideas […]
Are there too many people on the planet? Science fiction bears much of the responsibility for spreading this meme, which can be unpleasantly tinged with racism. But now and again a great science fiction author develops a more inspiring and pro-human approach to the population question.
You’d think that fronting a new TV show with a well known cast would equal a hit. Especially in the sci-fi sector. There are a few actors who are rolled out for several shows, the […]
Fringe finished it’s five year run the ot her night and I am grieving it’s loss. At the same time though, as I watched the two hour finale, I was left with a deep sense of […]
Fantasy, Horror and Science Fiction can exist in the real world, or create hermetic worlds of their own. Which is to say genre fiction can follow the rules of the real world, or make its […]
Oh yes, 2013 marks the 50th anniversary of the one and only Doctor. Doctor Who is the longest running science fiction TV show in the world, and being that successful, clearly there is a lot […]
American Horror Story is an odd show. I missed it’s first run but got hooking on the anthology-format and various timelines. Being British, I often find it quite hard to conceive of America as having had […]
There are things that titles tell you. A title like “A Conversation with My Time Traveling Future Self” says “Expect science fiction comedy played against a hilarious relationship situation.” That’s what I had in my […]
It recently struck me how most of the films that, IMHO, were truly scary were the ones that had little or no digital special effects. The reason is simple: what makes something scary is mostly […]
The science fiction movie Outland has been described as a reimaging of the western classic High Noon set in space: [youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ez2XfvN8XSc&version=3&hl=en_US] The setting is Io, which is the closest large moon of Jupiter, despite […]
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 […]
There is a curious phenomenon not exclusive to science fiction fandom, it is prevalent in pop music worship and other places, by which those afflicted feel a need to establish rivalries. The Star Wars fan […]
It must be an incredibly hard decision for a studio to decide what superheros are worthy of a big screen adaptation, which should be aired on the small screen…and those that should never make it beyond […]
Recent Comments