Gravity was the most frustrating film I've ever seen - bar none. Why? Precisely because of the metaphors Cuarón alludes to in the above interview. The first 40 minutes of the film were near-perfect: the best filmic representation of humans in space I've ever seen. Yes, for a few moments I really did feel like I was…

"I can't help but wonder if Dunlap was put under for this procedure. I bet he was. Still, I'm really curious to know what this feels like."

Having had a stent put into my otherwise entirely healthy, 56 year old heart last June (the LAD "widowmaker" artery was 70% blocked, and in the meantime I was biking 20 miles a day…

You know.... With the general success of Gravity demonstrating that hardcore (if only a slightly unreal) SF can pull in a broad market and entertain the (semi-SF-literate) masses, I'm more than a little tired of "complicated plots" like this one - alien baby / ro-baby mash-up with gorgeous astronaut mom changing…

Watching the burial party trudge carefully across the plain of silt, heavy casket hoisted onto their shoulders, the fleet boat commander hung his head and reflected on the great mystery. All around him the ocean floor was littered with the graves of the dead; Christian crosses rose like a small forest of concrete…

The German VIIC - the primary fleet boat in the war - was not qualitatively superior to the American Gato/Balao/Tench boats. The VIIC's were a bit more agile, a bit faster, could dive a little deeper, etc., but the American Gato boats were larger and more comfortable for the crew in extended combat patrols, and could…

You need to bone up on "satire" and "sardonic commentary". And you need to watch both movies again. Ciao!

I'll be off-the-wall and say that Aliens was a better remake of Platoon, even though both movies were released in the same year, and a remake was entirely unintentional. After all, both movies are about American soldiers in a hostile environment, stalked by unseen predators while unit cohesion slowly fell apart....

Doubt it, although it made good promo for Churchill's literary career after the war to say so - which is why he did. If you look at the internal documentation from the Roosevelt administration after the fall of France in summer 1940, it is very clear that the American government had every intention to do whatever it…

Tell me that someone at io9 didn't miss the analogy between this incident and the famous Sokal hoax in 1996, which took front or feature pages of media all over the world, and is still a subject of of bloody battle between the scientific and lit-crit communities (with philosophers and historians as bemused spectators…

Contrary to popular perception, Canada has long dominated the United States - politically, culturally, economically, and in terms of values, attitudes, and ideas - but with great subtlety and sophistication, so that undereducated, brainwashed Americans cannot recognize the fact. (Canadians who claim otherwise are all…

You know, if Elysium had been about these 'bots - I, Robot 'bots, not the silly movie, but Asimov's Three-Rule-'bot-conundrums - it would have been a much better film about class.

"The First Law says I can't, even through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm.... So what the fuck am I doing up here, repairing…

I think the point is to juxtapose overripe philosophical truisms from Dune onto the reflective simplicity of Calvin & Hobbes. Strikes me as Dune satire, not a celebration.

You'll get no argument from me on the value of paycheck to an artist! And I certainly won't argue with your point that the source of much SF muddling is at the producer's level, and not the artist's. I sincerely wish you luck with the producers.

My comment was in response to an earlier claim that the short was "an original". In effect, I made the same point you did - before you did. Which means you're right - little is truly original. Now... do you really want answers to your questions?

It's a very good, very emotionally-charged short film. But it's not original - the son as knight riding to save a loved family member against the father has been "done" before, literally and/or metaphorically, notably in a couple of Francois Truffaut films and one by Ingmar Bergman.

On whether Gravity is SF: Science Fiction. Fiction about Science.... More precisely in this case, the engineering physics involved in the Kessler Syndrome, and how it might affect a space mission. Clearly SF.

Out of breath, I looked at the damned Octopus Train and sighed as I searched for a place to sit down. Being in your nineties is not fun. The pain is not physical - it's not so much that your body betrays you in a thousand ways every day - it's mental. Spiritual. You struggle to keep your grasp on the world, but you…

I don't agree. Such a spaceship might look strange to certain cohorts in your audience, but I suspect that those who are more knowledgeable, aware, and educated - the very high-spenders you'd want to attract to make the film have "legs" at the box-office - would find necessity/function-based starships laudable.

Besides…

Umberto Eco's Foucault's Pendulum. It's... well, every genre known to humanity. I'm not exaggerating.

Shiny pictures, sure. But show me how these forms follow the functions and necessities of a starship, and I'll be much more appreciative. I venture to say that not one of these representations will resemble actual human-built and crewed starships - generational or otherwise - in the remote future. The best starship…