science fiction

Chris Knight's avatar

Behold the 8 Weirdest Real-Life Science Fiction Political Ads as assembled by popular geeky/techy website io9.

And yes, that school board commercial of mine from 2006 is on the list.

But check out this ad – also inspired by Star Wars – that West Virginia Governor Joe Manchin aired when he successfully ran for re-election two years ago…

Hey, Manchin shot a TIE Fighter out of the sky with a rifle! That’s a hella lot better shootin’ than the Imperial Stormtroopers ever did.

But John Waite of Spokane, Washington blows away everybody with what he did when he ran for city council. The comic book store owner campaigned while wearing a full set of space marine armor from the StarCraft computer game series! Nevermind Spokane City Council: we should send Waite to Washington D.C.: that whole town is overrun with worse than the Zerg ever were.

Blast on over to ...

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“Spoilers”? I doubt it. By the night it aired everyone and their tin dog knew all too well that “The Angels Take Manhattan” would be the episode that saw wife-and-husband companions Amy and Rory (Karen Gillan and Arthur Darvill) taking their bows from Doctor Who.

So what did this blogger think of the second Doctor Who story that the BBC has filmed in the United States?

I think that writer and showrunner Steven Moffat gave Amy and Rory a fine and fitting close to their part in the Doctor’s epic mythology, with as much happiness as two people in love with each other could possibly have. At the same time, with more and more time passing since watching it I can’t help but think that this story felt too fast-paced and blurring, especially toward an event which by every measure should be forever burned into the gestalt consciousness of ...

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Chris Knight's avatar

Before getting into the review, I wanna say from the getgo that I thought this week’s episode further demonstrates a theory I’ve had for the past few years: that the Doctor is an unconscious agent of God. Last year’s “The Doctor’s Wife” might have supported that notion, but I mean, c’mon: how is it that the TARDIS is always landing in a time and place that the Doctor is needed? How else… unless there is a Higher Power guiding the Doctor, whether he is aware of it or not?

Anyway…

In spite of the beautiful special effects work (along with the reunion of Harry Potter alums Mark Williams and David Bradley, each of whom turned in fine work) I found last week’s “Dinosaurs on a Spaceship” to be somewhat lacking. Maybe that’s because it came on the heels of this season’s Doctor Who premiere “Asylum of the Daleks”, which was ...

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“Welcome to Urf”… again.

(Hah-hah-hah, did you see what I did there? Did you?!)

Word breaking this afternoon is that TWO sequels to the 1996 sci-fi blockbuster Independence Day are in the works. Dean Devlin and Roland Emmerich are trying to get everyone from the original back on board. Right now the follow-ups are titled ID Forever Part One and ID Forever Part Two. How clever…

I have extremely mixed feelings about this. Yeah, even considering how much of a fan I was – and always will be – of the original. 1996’s Independence Day was a unique product of its era. It should remain as much. At the same time it was such a great concept now tied down to being so dated a film that it’s one of the few movies that I could see a reboot/remake being in order. Just as long as those ...

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Is it just me, or has Doctor Who suddenly become a bigger presence in American pop culture than ever before? Every Barnes & Noble I’ve been into lately has an entire table devoted to Doctor Who books and other merchandise. Matt Smith as the Eleventh Doctor was on the cover of Entertainment Weekly earlier this summer. A friend in Roanoke spotted a comic book store this past week: the marquee outside said “TALKING ABOUT REGENERATION” to advertise Doctor Who stuff inside.

I’ve been watching Doctor Who since the winter of 1981. But in more than thirty years I’ve never seen the Doctor and his mythology as wildly popular on this side of the pond as it is now.

It’s been almost a year since last season’s finale “The Wedding of River Song” and more than eight months since “The Doctor, the Widow and the Wardrobe”. However you figure it, this ...

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Or is that Season 33? I mean, look at this new promo art that the BBC has released for the new season of Doctor Who…

That’s darn nearly every model of Dalek since the show first began in 1963! If you look toward the left there’s even the Special Weapons Dalek, first (and until now last) shown in the 1988 story Remembrance of the Daleks back when Sylvester McCoy was the Doctor.

You can click on that image for a much larger version, bringing every detail of the Eleventh Doctor’s grim, bloody visage into stark clarity. To say nothing of Amy Pond unconscious in his arms.

And as awesome as that pic is, well… here’s the trailer which hit the Intertubes yesterday:

The first episode of the new season, said to be “Asylum of the Daleks”, doesn’t have a transmission date yet but widespread word is that it’ll premier ...

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Chris Knight's avatar

Lookee what popped up on the Intertubes while I was unconscious yesterday! The first trailer for Season 7 (or Season 33, if we’re counting all the seasons since 1963) of Doctor Who…

Not much, but still nice. Wondering if they filmed this Western-ish episode back in the U.S., like last year’s mind-blowing “The Impossible Astronaut”/”Day of the Moon” two-parter.

And doesn’t that town look more than a smidgeon like Hill Valley circa 1885 from Back To The Future Part III? Maybe we’re gonna finally get that Doctor/Marty McFly fight that we’ve always fantasized about…...

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I began reading Suzanne Collins’ novel The Hunger Games, as it turned out, a few day before Mom passed away. It took me awhile to get back to it but I picked it up again a coupl’a nights ago.

I thought it was a most excellent and enjoyable read. Maybe not as rich in allegory as it could have been but, I’m willing to defer final judgment on this series until I finish the third book.

In case you haven’t had the pleasure of discovering it yet, The Hunger Games takes place in a distant future where what was once North America collapsed into ruin and from the ashes arose a cruel dictatorship called Panem. It’s a place ruled by The Capitol: a megalopolis populated by a decadent people who do nothing but eating, drinking, getting plastic surgery and probably getting laid. They live at the expense of the ...

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Did you know that next year will be thirty years since Blade Runner: the last time that Ridley Scott gave us a science-fiction movie?

Based on this much-awaited first trailer for Prometheus, I’m praying that it won’t be another thirty years before Scott delves into the genre again!

So if you don’t know already, Prometheus is sort-of a prequel to Ridley’s 1979 Alien (and by extension also a prequel to James Cameron’s Aliens from 1986). It just won’t have those chest-bursting xenomorphs, allegedly. Ummmm confused by that? Yeah me too, a bit. Still gonna see this on opening day though 🙂...

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Forty-three years after it first aired on American television in 1968 as part of Star Trek‘s second season, “Patterns of Force”, the episode that had Kirk, Spock and the crew of the Enterprise looking for a Starfleet historian and finding an alien civilization modeled after Nazi Germany instead, will be broadcast for the first time tonight on public television in Germany.

Why hasn’t “Patterns of Force” been widely aired (it was made available as a pay-per-view episode previously) until now? The official reason is that later in the episode, the Nazi era is described as “the most efficient society” in Earth’s history. But widespread consensus is that the extreme hesitancy regarding “Patterns of Force” mostly has to do with what remains the shocking and startling image of James T. Kirk in an S.S. officer’s uniform (along with Spock’s similar attire, before being captured and tortured in the ...

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