science fiction

Chris Knight's avatar

Last month this year’s series of Doctor Who arrived at one hum-dinger of a mid-season cliffhanger.

So you wanna see some of where the rest of the season is going? Check this out, courtesy of the BBC…

Doctor Who returns on August 27th. And I can’t wait!! Well, I guess I’ll have to but, you know… 😛

Speaking of the Whoniverse, I haven’t watched the rest of them yet but I did catch the first episode of Torchwood: Miracle Day. Am waiting for my girlfriend to come over some weekend so we can watch the rest together (no, not gonna take a peek at them without her to share it with :-). But I have watched that first episode a number of times now and, it’s some of the best Who-ish material that Russell T. Davies has done since he was the revived series’ first showrunner in 2005. Looking ...

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It was all the way back in 2005, when Star Wars Episode III: Revenge of the Sith was hitting theaters, that James Luceno first mentioned he was interested in writing a novel about Darth Plagueis. Plagueis, as we know, was the Sith Master of Darth Sidious: AKA Palpatine. And that’s darn nearly all that we’ve ever come to know about the mentor of one of fiction’s most infamous villains.

Well the novel has been on-again and off-again, but Star Wars: Darth Plagueis is hitting shelves this coming December 27th. And today we finally get to see what the cover looks like!

Behold the Dark Side in its glory…

That cover is… stunning. Just as much as I have been dying to read this book I have wondered how the cover art would be handled and it wildly exceeded anything that I was expecting. Just look at that: ...

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Here’s a reminder in case you missed it…

Y’know, 2010 – Peter Hyams’ follow-up to Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey – is by now a horribly dated film: the Soviet Union was long gone by the time this movie’s eponymous date rolled around, and we’ve yet to return to the Moon, much less have manned missions to Jupiter…

…but so help me, I positivalutely love this movie all the same. And that scene, where the planet Jupiter is forced by the monoliths to ignite into a new star, is on my very short list of all-time favorite science fiction moments in film. Everything about that scene is orchestrated perfectly together.

Anyhoo, fellow blogger Scott Bradford has compiled a neat list of “past” science-fiction “history”. As in, events that sci-fi foretold but somehow never quite seemed to pass (or did they?). Like, back in 1996 when Khan Noonien Singh ...

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I mean that in a good way…

The one bit of British television that I had my DVR set to record this week (and I mean that in a good way too), tonight brought the second episode of the sixth season (or the thirty-second season, if we’re counting to the show’s very beginning in 1963) of Doctor Who. Picking up from “The Impossible Astronaut”, “Day of the Moon” continues the first Doctor Who story to be filmed in the United States. I watched “The Impossible Astronaut” twice more over the past week and had my expectations set high for Part 2.

I don’t know what precisely to say but, alternatively, “WOW!” and “HUH?!?”

The episode picks up three months after last week’s episode, still in 1969 and on the eve of the Apollo 11 launch, with Amy Pond fleeing across the Utah desert. Her pursuer? None other than Canton ...

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Okay, that was off the chain, folks!

The first ever episode of Doctor Who to be filmed in the United States (the show began in November 1963) had Matt Smith’s Eleventh Doctor ummm… killed by a spacesuit-clad assailant before the horrified eyes of Amy, Rory and River Song, in the middle of American desert. Then a stranger (played by William Morgan Sheppard, who’s done a lot of great work over the years) shows up with a can of gasoline for the Doctor’s body to be given a makeshift Viking funeral.

Then the scene shifts to a roadside diner and the Doctor coming out of the men’s room looking fine and dandy.

Then the Doctor and crew flew the TARDIS to the Oval Office of President Richard Milhous Nixon in 1969.

And for reasons which are not immediately clear, President Nixon has been getting a mysterious phone call from a ...

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I guess if Philadelphia can have a Rocky Balboa statue, and if New York City has one of Ralph Kramden and if Milwaukee has the Fonz as a landmark, then Detroit should get a lasting monument to its own… hero?

(Oh yeah, I almost forgot : nearby Mount Airy – the model for Mayberry on The Andy Griffith Show – has that life-sized bronze statue of Andy and Opie going fishing! So I guess the precedent has already been set for fictional lawmen. Law-cyborgs. Whatever…)

Earlier this week a flood of support coalesced across Facebook and Twitter to erect in Detroit a statue of… RoboCop. The titular “part man, part machine, all cop” hero of the 1987 sci-fi action smash-hit movie. Somebody forwarded the idea to Detroit mayor Dave Bing, who responded with “There are not any plans to erect a statue to Robocop. Thank you for the suggestion.”...

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IESB.net is reporting that Twentieth Century Fox is about to commit to two sequels to Independence Day: its 1996 mega-blockbuster about aliens arriving on Earth to wipe out humanity on the Fourth of July. Will Smith is already set to return as Steven Hiller, the hotshot pilot he played in the original.

Do we really need this? For its tenth anniversary in 2006 I posted an extensive write-up about Independence Day. As much as I still love the movie, too much time has gone by since the original. It remains a product of its era and to make sequels to it would make a mockery of that. Well, I think so anyway.

I do think that Independence Day could be rebooted (since that’s the route every other movie franchise seems to be going these days). I mean, think about it: who in America wouldn’t want to see the ...

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This morning good friend and fellow Eagle Scout Steven Glaspie (who needs to update his blog sometime: something about being too busy with his sweet lass of a girlfriend lately…) and I went to StellarCon 34 in High Point. ‘Twas Steven’s very first sci-fi convention. Well, he didn’t know as much going in but I’d already heard that three of his favorite Star Wars writers were going to be there. I’ve met with Timothy Zahn, Michael Stackpole and Aaron Allston quite a few times over the years (including an interview I got to with Zahn for TheForce.net years ago) and had some photos with each of them already. But for Steven, it was an entirely new experience! So I got a pic of all of them together…

(left to right: Michael Stackpole, Steven Glaspie, Timothy Zahn, Aaron Allston)

Allston, Stackpole and Zahn did a panel discussion for an hour and ...

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“I don’t want to go!”

Good (Time) Lord… it’s been ages since I’ve done a write-up about Doctor Who! The last time one appeared on this blog was when “The Next Doctor” Christmas special aired twelve months ago.

But no way was I gonna miss posting thoughts about the final adventure of David Tennant as the Tenth Doctor…

Thankfully, BBC America aired “The End of Time” Part 1 last Saturday night: a day after its Christmas Day premiere for our Brittish brethren across the pond… meaning that for the first time ever I didn’t have to download it off the Intertubes via BitTorrent. But I didn’t want to share my thoughts on it until Part 2 aired stateside this evening. It just finished so here we go!

I’ve mixed feelings about “The End of Time” but in general, I found it to be a rollickin’ and satisfying finale not ...

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