Category: Science Fiction
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The Unstoppable War Machine
Did the producers at Netflix celebrate when the current U.S. President declared war (not war police action. Not police action, regime change. whatever) on Iran? You have to think one of them did, right? This is probably here nor there. The basic plotline: A soldier, still grieving the loss of his brother, takes part in…
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The Path Not Taken
Recently Disney released a trailer for The Mandalorean and Grogu. It looks fun, like good-humored family fare—a return to the 1940s serial aesthetic of The New Hope. It feels like they’ve crammed as much fan service as they could into a two-minute ad. From the opening shots that could have been lifted whole-cloth from previous…
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Snippet Thursday
From The Dent in the Universe: Walrus hadn’t been home since Friday morning. His eyes were tinged with red, and his hand never strayed far from his double-caff RageCola. He and Workshop 3 smelled earthy. Even the ever-present perfume of fabric softener couldn’t mask the essence of overworked Walrus. But he was happy, drunk with…
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So long Star Trek, It’s been Nice.
I first watched Star Trek (now called The Original Series – TOS) with my father. He let me stay up to watch it. I was eight in 1966. We didn’t have a color TV then, so the crew’s yellow, red, and blue costumes and all the colorful blinking lights were lost on us. All those…
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Interstellar: Beautiful lunacy
Lunacy – from Late Latin lunaticus “moon-struck,” from Latin luna “moon” The yearning to reach the stars runs deep in Baby Boomers like myself. We grew up with the deep, ingrained, cultural mythos that we were headed for a moon base by the end of the 1970s and, after that the planets. Beyond that, the stars. But then the…
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Whiskey and Warfare
“Old Woman’s War” is how I characterized Whiskey and Warfare by E.M. Hamill when someone asked me what I was reading for SPSFC4. While I found John Scalzi’s Old Man’s War sort of meh, this book feels like a more mature, more heartfelt exploration of similar ground. Given the opportunity would someone of middle age…
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EAT
“Night of the living furries” is how a character describes their situation a little more than midway through Jesse Brown’s EAT. I laughed when I read that line and I also nodded. That’s a good description of the basic premise, though replace cute or weirdly sexualized furries with the sleek, muscle-bound, eat-your-face-off variety. Caede wakes…
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The Realists of a Larger Reality
Is there a science fiction author more akin to literature than Ursula K. Le Guin? I can’t think of any. There are others that may rise to her level. Octavia E. Butler, certainly. One day, I think N.K. Jemisin will have that luster. I struggle to think of a male writer with the same claim…
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Cordwainer Smith – The Sci-Fi Master You’ve Probably Never Heard of
When I was a teenager, my brother introduced me to a set of books by a writer with a goofy name, Cordwainer Smith. The first was a short story collection called The Instrumentality of Mankind, and the other was a novel called Norstrilia. My mind was blown. These stories, published in the 50s and 60s,…