CategoryScience Fiction
Spaceman: World Is Ending. Worse, an Astronaut’s Wife Wants Out
It’s not clear just what role the threatening Chopra Cloud plays and that complexity dogs the storyNetflix recently released a film called Spaceman, starring Adam Sandler. It’s… interesting. The first time I watched it, I hated it. The second time I watched it, I hated it less. I can appreciate what the movie was trying to do, and Adam Sandler puts on a fine performance… most of the time. But there were just too many plot holes and too much meaningless rhetoric for me to really enjoy the story. The movie is based on a 2017 novel, Spaceman of Bohemia by Czech author Jaroslav Kalfař. It begins with a Czech astronaut flying toward a mysterious, purple anomaly called the Chopra Cloud. The Cloud had appeared in the sky a few years previously, with no known reason. Read More ›
Dune, Part Two: A Good Movie But a Bad Set-Up for Part Three
When Paul avenges his father and settles an old feud, the threads of the story start to connectLast Saturday, we talked about how the writers did an excellent job setting up Feyd-Rautha as a worthy adversary for Paul. However, their decision to make Chani a skeptical antagonist—opposing the man she supposedly loves—has already created numerous problems for the story, and those problems continue to stack up. By the time we reach the conclusion of the film, I don’t know how the writers expect to create a Part Three that will be in any way, shape, or form consistent with the source material. In Part Two, Paul and the Fremen finally launch their final assault on the emperor. As in previous retellings of the story, Paul uses his father’s stash of atomic weapons to blow a hole in Read More ›
Dune, Part Two: At Last, Feyd-Rautha Becomes Relevant
The treatment of Feyd in this version is more satisfactory than in any previous one. We are prepared for Paul’s confrontation with him
Invisibility Isn’t Science Fiction; It’s Interesting Engineering
Things are visible only when light strikes them but light can sometimes be manipulated so as not to strike them, with remarkable results.Invisibility is one of those interesting concepts that started out as imagination: What if I were invisible? Or— in the hands of a storyteller — what if my character were invisible? Tolkien famously made it a power granted by the Ring in The Lord of the Rings. The concept is used in science fiction too, for example, in the form of the cloaking device: However, as science fiction writer Douglas Adams (1952–2001) noted satirically in Life, the Universe, and Everything, in everyday life, “The Somebody Else’s Problem field is much simpler and more effective, and what’s more can be run for over a hundred years on a single torch battery. This is because it relies on people’s natural disposition not Read More ›
Dune, Part Two: Paul Becomes a Hero — Very Reluctantly
Some departures from the book work better than others. The “reluctant hero” trope simplifies a complex political situation but at a cost
Dune Part Two Succeeds Brilliantly — But Dooms Plans for Part III
The difficulty is that the changes made for the film have warped the core story so much that it’s going to be nearly impossible to follow the source material from here on out.
Dune 1984 Offers A Strong Finish to a Unique Adaptation
I’d go as far as to say that, while not all of David Lynch’s adaptations worked, the film is, overall, better than the book
Dune (1984) vs the Classic Sci-Fi Novel: What Worked, What Didn’t
For some scenes, the film was an improvement on the book; for others, writer David Lynch might better have stuck with the originalLast time we talked about the opening of Dune 1984. The Hollywood Strike has delayed the sequel to the current remake till March but the classic is worth revisiting in the meantime, both for its successes and failures. The 1984 writer, David Lynch, made various changes to the story that gave the viewer a clearer understanding of what was going on than Frank Herbert’s classic 1965 novel did. After the first two scenes, which help establish the situation in the world of Dune, the Reverend Mother flies to Caladan to test Paul Atreides with the painful Gom Jabbar. I’ve agreed with his choices so far. His opening showed the viewer why the Reverend Mother chose to visit Paul when she Read More ›
Where Did Dune 1984 Succeed? Where Did It Fail?
The Hollywood Strike postponed the release of the sequel to the new film version of Dune until March so, for now, let’s have another look at the 1984 version
Alien Resurrection Part 4: The Good, the Bad, and the… Bizarre
In a single moment, Purvis becomes one of the most heroic characters in the entire franchise
Alien Resurrection (1997) Part 3: Call Up the Reluctant Robot
Amid the harrowing crew escapes, Call survives being shot because she’s a robot. She somehow has sentience and hates being a robot
What AI Will Probably Really Do to White Collar Businesses
The tech media are full of scare stories but we can look at what happened when advanced technology hit blue collar industries as a guide
Will the Driving Force for Space Exploration Be a Religious Cult?
The Multiverse: Better in Fiction Than in Real Life?
The multiverse may be “unscientific nonsense” or a “religious” belief, as some physicists assert but the rules of storytelling are not the laws of nature
Westworld Episode 10 Review (Part Two)
Welcome to the dark end of the journeyLast time, Teddy had just finished saving Dolores from the Man in Black, who turned out to be William all along. He takes her to the coast because that was where he promised to take her when they were performing their pre-programmed loop. However, the coast is apparently not very far because as Dolores dies in his arms, Teddy starts reciting a campy monologue, and then shuts down while the board applauds the speech. Even when they’re trying to escape their loop, the robots still, somehow, find themselves trapped in yet another one of Dr. Ford’s narratives. Dr. Ford appears, addresses the crowd, then orders for Teddy to be cleaned up, and for Dolores to be taken to a nearby Read More ›
Westworld Episode 10 Review (Part One)
The maze isn't the only thing that's hard to navigate in this episode.I’ll start out with the most irrelevant plot first because almost no screen time is devoted to it, and it amounts to nothing in the end anyway. Hale successfully convinces the Board to fire Ford, not that he really cares. But Hale has been convinced this entire time that Ford is going to delete the park’s data out of spite. So, after Theresa is killed, she enlists Sizemore, a jaded writer who works for the park, to smuggle the data out through one of the decommissioned robots. This plan doesn’t work; however, because all the robots wake up by the end of the episode, and the data is lost in the vengeful horde. So, it’s a plot point that goes Read More ›
The Big Bang: Last Summer, Doubt Suddenly Exploded. Why?
Why did a story that cast doubt on the Big Bang quickly go viral about a year ago? An experimental physicist offers some thoughts
Westworld: Episode 5 Review
Mediocre writing made bearable by talented actorsEpisode Five opens with Ford talking to one of the parks older droid’s, something he has grown fond of doing over the years. He tells a story of an old Grey Hound he and his brother once had, and explains that one time, they let the dog off the leash. The dog was used to chasing a fake rabbit around the track, so when it saw a cat, it immediately went after it. But after the dog had caught the cat and killed it, he didn’t know what to do. This story obviously implies that Dr. Ford knows the droids are becoming conscious, and it seems as if he is the dog chasing the car and has finally caught it. Read More ›
J.R.R. Tolkien on Science Fiction
The master storyteller was more open to sci-fi and tech than the stereotype lets onIn early 2021, literary scholar Holly Ordway published a deep dive into J.R.R. Tolkien’s reading habits. The celebrated author of The Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit was a linguist and medievalist at Oxford for decades until his death in 1973. Based on his immersion in ancient literature, people often assume that Tolkien despised all things modern – including modern books. Even C.S. Lewis is quoted as saying, “No one ever influenced Tolkien–you might as well try to influence a Bandersnatch.” Today’s conception of Tolkien stereotypically portrays him as a curmudgeon who refused to engage with modernity. Ordway, however, pushes back against such an image and lays out a comprehensive case for Tolkien’s interest in contemporary literature, including the Read More ›