Will Wonder Woman Finally Make Her TV Comeback?
Wonder Woman is one of the shows I can’t wait to see on TV. The original TV show was pre-me (I’m a child of the 80s) but I do recall it being on TV. I […]
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Mouldy Old History
For a number of years I wrote The Crotchety Old Fan blog. One of my favorite posts to write was finding new and interesting ways to bring the older works to the attention of new […]
Walking unto Death
I’ve never read The Walking Dead but I love the TV show and watch it religiously every Monday morning. Series one enthralled me because of the likeable characters who unfailingly seemed to die just as […]
SF Weapons 101: An Introduction
Science Fiction from its earliest incarnations has always featured some sort of futuristic weaponry. From H.G. Wells’ martian heat-ray to the most modern charged particle beam of Alastair Reynolds, SF weapons astound, confound and amaze […]
All Your Rebel Base Are Belong to Us: In Defense of J. J. Abrams
(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 […]
Resident Evil
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 […]
Some shows get cancelled before their time
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 […]
Christopher Nolan’s Inception as Shamanic Psychodrama
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 […]
Invasion of the Movie Snatchers
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 […]
The Rise of the Zombies
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 […]
The Battle of the Paranormal Romance
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, […]
Crackpots, Conspiracies, UFOs and Air War
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
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 […]
Unearthed: Possesion (1981)
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 […]
Raptor Rapture
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 […]
Yeah Rite by Michael Penney
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 […]
More Sci-fi Shows to Hit Screens in 2013
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 […]
Blind Geek For Beginners
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 New Generation of Star Wars
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 […]
“I Like Science Fiction, It’s Got Like Giant Robots and Stuff, Right?” Science Fiction’s Self-Esteem Problem Part III: Robots, Reboots and Remakes. How Hollywood Kills Serious Science Fiction
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 […]
The Speed of Science
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 […]
Ready When You Are, JJ
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 […]
What is the Optimal Human Population? Lessons From the Novels of Stephen Baxter
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.
A Big Money Cast Doesn’t Always Make For A Hit
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 […]
Life on the Fringe
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 […]
Doctor Who and the Strange Victorians
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 […]
Knock, knock…Who’s There? Doctor. Doctor Who?
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 […]
The Horror of the Asylum
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 […]
A Conversation about Cheating with My Time Traveling Future Self by Pornsak Pichetshote
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 […]
How SFX Can Ruin a Horror Film
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 […]
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