science fiction

Chris Knight's avatar

2009 marks thirty years since Ridley Scott’s film Alien was released. Alien remains one of the most classic and influential science fiction movies ever produced… and it has not only held up against the test of time, it’s one of the few films of the genre that actually seems to get better with each passing year.

GeekTyrant has posted a fine retrospective of Alien, including some thoughts and observations that had never occurred to me before, as well as lots of trivia that will now doubt come as new information to many people (like how H.R. Giger’s designs for the Facehugger were held up by alarmed U.S. Customs agents at the airport, prompting writer Dan O’Bannon to drive on over and explain that they were meant for a horror movie)....

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I’m still enjoying this re-imagined V (slam here for my review of the pilot episode). ABC is doing a fine job of updating the concepts of the original. However, I’m more than a little compelled to say that this show needs to ratchet up the intensity. Tonight’s episode “There is No Normal Anymore” picked up right after the end of last week’s premiere, and then hit a plodding stride.

Maybe this is still just “setup” for a bigger payoff later. I hope so, because V has tons of potential. But unless there’s some master arc plan in the works that we aren’t aware of the show is taking its own sweet time more than Babylon 5 did, or Ronald Moore’s Battlestar Galactica. It worked very well on those series and it can work just as well now, but V‘s showrunners need to pick up the pace ...

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Giant alien spacecraft arrive over dozens of major cities around the world and their leader – a sexy brunette in a revealing skirt and high heels – broadcasts a greeting in perfect English and all these other languages in 100,800,000 progressive high-def television, says her name is “Anna” and that humanity is the first sentient life they have ever encountered… and nobody on Earth is bothering to ask HOW the hell any of this is possible?!

Well, other than that…

(I’ll interject that all of those previous plotholes were quickly forgotten just before the final commercial break, when Elizabeth Mitchell’s character peeled back the skin and I screamed out “OH HELL YES!!”)

I watched the premiere episode of V tonight on ABC and thought it was wildly and surprisingly good. I loved the original V miniseries from 1983, thought the following year’s V: The Final Battle stank on ...

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Isaac Asimov – perhaps the most prolific writer of the Twentieth Century and especially regarded for his contributions to science fiction – passed away in 1992. It’s now being announced that Asimov’s estate has given the official go-ahead for a trilogy of sequel novels to his acclaimed I, Robot series. The books will be written by Mickey Zucker Reichert, an author whose works have primarily been of the fantasy genre.

(With all due respect to Mrs. Reichert, I’ve no doubt that she is a fine writer but I also can’t help but find this situation very ironic since apart from Tolkien and a few other writers that he respected, Asimov was famously known to have despised fantasy literature and on at least one occasion referred to it as “crap”.)

Hmmm… I’m more “meh” about this news than I care to really dwell upon. If there’s going to be ...

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…resembles NOTHING of the Riverworld from the books of Philip Jose Farmer! Other than having, well, a river.

(The inclusion of Samuel Clemens and his fabulous riverboat, however, does give me some hope that this will be a better effort than what Sci-Fi Channel attempted in 2003.)

So if you’ve never read the novels, what do you think?

The after-death journey to the source of the River begins in 2010....

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Chris Knight's avatar

District 9 was the big winner at the theaters this weekend. A lot of folks are raving about how this movie is much better than a summer box office blockbuster deserves to be. I’m looking forward to catching it again later this week.

In the meantime, here is Neil Blomkamp’s short film that inspired his District 9 feature film. You won’t be spoiled by watching Alive in Joburg but if you’ve seen District 9 you’ll certainly catch the similarities…

...

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Production has now begun on next year’s season of Doctor Who (following the hiatus it took during 2009) and the BBC has published the first photo of Matt Smith in full costume. Smith will be the next actor to take on the iconic role of the Doctor (taking over from David Tennant).

So what does the Eleventh Doctor look like? Here he is (along with new companion Amy Pond, played by Karen Gillan)…

Heck, that’s darn near how I dress on a regular basis! I mean, nice shirt along with rugged pants and sturdy boots… except I don’t usually wear a bow tie 😛

Next season’s Doctor Who will be the first with new showrunner Steven Moffat at the helm. If that name doesn’t ring a bell, I probably only have to mention that he wrote the previous episodes “The Girl in the Fireplace” and the “Silence in the ...

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Chris Knight's avatar

It was twenty-five years ago this week, on July 1st 1984, that William Gibson’s now-classic science-fiction novel Neuromancer was first published. The book presented a world overwhelmed by too much technology, a people with a gluttony for body enhancement and personal media, and transnational corporations with the power of major governments. In other words: a time not very unlike our own. Neuromancer is often hailed as foreseeing the rise of the World Wide Web, and it even added a new word to the English language: “cyberspace”. In many ways Neuromancer was considerably prophetic, while in others it has missed the mark (so far).

On the anniversary of its release, pcworld.com’s Mark Sullivan examines Neuromancer after the rise of the near-future fog and details how it got many things right and failed on a few concepts. It’s a pretty good article, and especially recommended for any students of cyberpunk fiction....

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