“Save Hitler? That’s not what you do with a time machine!” — SyFy’s 12 Monkeys
Late last year I discovered that Hulu was finally streaming the fourth and final season of SyFy’s 12 Monkeys TV series. In the lag between Christmas and the second half …
Category: Science Fiction
What’s wrong with ‘Star Wars’ (and How to Fix It)
Once again, I found myself writing a lengthy response to a post on Facebook, and just before I hit send, I thought “gee, this would be better as a post over at the Junk Shop.” So here we are. This time it’s the Star Wars Saga. The first response posted to that thread was the suggestion that “maybe, just maybe, Star Wars was a really cool idea that got taken way too far.” My reaction to that, and the reason we’ve assembled here today, was that some parts were taken too far, while others were simultaneously not taken far enough.
John D. MacDonald – SF writer?
Before he gained fame writing thrillers and his well-regarded Travis McGee books, John D. MacDonald was also quite a prolific writer of science fiction. He wrote three novels, and published dozens of stories in the pulp magazines.
That time Philip K. Dick wrote a children’s book
A little known, or at least often overlooked fact, is that back in the mid-1960s, Philip K. Dick wrote a children’s novel that was only published posthumously in the 1980s. I read it recently, and decided to share my thoughts on it.
Terminator: Trying to Sort Out The Timelines
Terminator: Dark Fate (2019) didn’t set fire to the box office, but if it’s the final film in the franchise (I wouldn’t bet on it) it’s still better than 2015’s …
The Tomorrowland Promise
Somehow, we were all convinced to abandon the idea of Utopia, to give up on the notion that the future would be better than today. The reason Disneyland’s Tomorrowland was allowed to become quaint and kitsch and eventually retro-cool is that it couldn’t be updated, because we’ve had no vision for the future since the mid-1970s. Or at least not for a future that’s nicer than our present.
Romancing the planet(s)
A few years ago, my interest in the planetary romance genre was reignited, and I decided to read several classic series in this genre for the first time – and tell everybody what I thought about them.