It's not science fiction - just the opposite. It's a weird mash-up of Wiemar Republic era KDP-style Marxism and German "progressive" evangelical Christianity - in opposition to technology, corporatism, and technocratic fascism. Great movie, actually, but don't tell me it's an -SF- classic....
I suppose Mr. Cameron might be motivated to make "one Avatar movie a year" in order to keep up with the numerous and sometimes well-founded law suits filed around the original.... I realize that's a snarky comment, but come on, Jim - give Roger Dean a deserved break.
I was indeed thinking of Harry Purvis when I wrote the commentary above. Nicely caught!
Two points on Bear's novel: First, motives & strats for extermination were discussed/speculated on by two physicists in FoG - especially in the "deathbed" scene when one of them is hospitalized with cancer. Motives & strats were confirmed in FoG2/Anvil. Second, I didn't take it as "convenient" that the "Moms" found…
The trailers are accurate - this is how these things generally look and feel. In 1989, when STS 28 was retasked by DoD to chase down a damaged Soyuz flight after impact with a UEH ("undetermined errant hardware"), this is pretty much what the surviving cosmonaut described to us when we reeled her in from the s-panel…
Before anyone makes the point, btw, I am not lauding Tipler - who has become, imo, a psuedo-sci crackpot. His early work, however, contains some interesting anthropic and SETI-related perspectives.
The grimmer possibility has been referred to as "a naive bird chirping in a tree" - civilizations emerge all the time, but one of two things occur: Either they loudly announce their presence, in which case they are taken down by the same probes that find them (dual-function); or wisely they stay "dark" and…
Basically this is a question that has been attempted myriad times in utopian/dystopian studies, both fictional and academic. The Federation is still a big deal in political utopian studies, although the area reached an apogee in the 1990s. So there's a lot of material out there, and perhaps the intro to the topic…
I'm not about to parse over 400 replies - but I've read commentary from other sources on the "slave/race" controversy surrounding DT/GOT. What is often not recognized - and should be - is that there is institutional slavery based on racial ideologies, and then there are many other forms of slavery based on other…
Public familiarity with Schroedinger's cat - accurate or not - hinges significantly on idea of a cat in danger; substitute a raccoon and fewer people would "notice", probably eliminating the experiment as "iconic" culturally. The only more notorious (and therefore more iconic) choice - in the early 20th century, at…
I point you back to an older book recently discussed on io9 - from the late sixties: John Brunner's Stand on Zanzibar, which was, in its day and now, every bit as eerily prophetic as Snow Crash. An intelligent, aware author, extrapolating from past-to-current events, can create near-spot-on future-fiction. The trick,…
Just as a I thought: Middle Earth, First Age.
It's manifestly obvious what the most vile, insidious, and cloying dystopia imagined in human literature is. There can be no doubt.
"Just like the...."
For a guy who (a) doesn't understand SF, (b) dislikes better popular SF because he doesn't get it, (c) admits to not knowing classic SF works and tries to make a virtue of it, and (d) makes shallow, mediocre films, JJ Abrams is getting a lot of career mileage out of SF.
Forgive me for being a grump, but some of the designs above are laughable. I would very much like to see spaceship designs that are based on (a) functional engineering, (b) biological necessities, and (c) the aesthetics and culture of those who design and live in them. Too many of these things are built merely on a…
Martha Mitchell was a bit "crazy" - but she was also uncomfortably correct. I'm going to do a terrible thing here and mention Foucault and "On Madness" - We mix politics, values and ethics, and the social sciences freely today, much in the same way politics, values and ethics, and religion were mixed in the pre-modern…
I was. I've been waiting for the franchise to bring forward a Klingon-based show for a long time - the success of the Worf character and the Klingon-intensive STNG episodes indicated to me that it might be successful - depending, of course, on how well it's done.
It all depends on how it's done and what the hook is, of course. Yes, the idea - done poorly - will narrow the clientele. No, no inevitably, however - the "next big thing" always has detractors who say "no one will buy it."
I like the idea of an ST TV show, by the way - but many of the environmental contexts have been covered in previous series. Why not do one from the Klingon perspective, wherein the all the major characters are Klingons, the emphasis is on Klingon culture, politics, ethics, militancy and exploration - and the…
The difference between JJA's ST movies and franchise-related blockbusters is this: JJA has stripped away the sociological and ethical "frosting" on a basic space-opera and offered two makes-no-sense roller-coaster rides, instead - thus alienating a core audience that would boost ticket sales by going to see the movie…
