That's one of my favourite time-travel movies, because Wells is intelligent and forward-thinking enough to keep his head down in modern society without getting arrested, mugged, or thrown into an asylum like almost every other fish-out-of-water tale.

Yup, I've been saying the same thing as Marissa Lee ever since Kingsley was confirmed as the Mandarin: the Han majority in China are going to be perfectly cool with a Central Asian-looking villain.

Yeah, the name for the language came from the bureaucrats (def #2) who used that dialect. And it was possible under foreign dynasties for mandarins to be other than Han Chinese, especially under the Manchu/Qing dynasy.

I agree, I find a lot of main characters in genre franchises to be the least interesting character in their franchises, Batman and Buffy among them. Maybe it's this notion the main character has to be an empty vessel the reader/viewer/player can pour themselves into, or maybe because heroes in general tend to be very…

You know, I did find those two scenes more compelling than all the action sequences that went on three times longer than they needed to.

The books are similar in only the most superficial ways, i.e. they tell a story about a group of characters then skip forward a couple decades or centuries and tell another one, rinse, lather, repeat. And there's the reincarnation angle. For Robinson, it's a narrative device: essentially the same personalities…

Like most depictions of cyberpunk societies in film, they're probably using Blade Runner as the main reference for Nea So Copros and all of its "stolen" architecture. In BR, the implication was that civilization had run out of new ideas, and could only pillage its past. I think Sonmi-451 makes a similar argument in…

Yeah, what the hell? It's like that scene just walked in from a much smarter movie, only to walk right out again.

I've only read the first two Hyperion books by Simmons, but the Priest's Tale from the first book was pretty effective sci-fi horror, I must say.

I tend to agree with your assessment. I remember a couple of the stories being very grisly—probably the first and last ones you mention—but not exactly scary.

If you want to get a sense of what the Parthenon looked like when it was intact, there's a full-scale model in Nashville, Tennessee.

But it wasn't a single event, it was several over the course of centuries.

Yeah, but that was the older Parthenon destroyed by the Persians in 480 BC.

Once I finish Cloud Atlas, I don't think I'll ever look at it again, except in celluloid form. Not because Mitchell's a bad writer, or because the language is difficult, or because the nested stories structure was a failure, but simply because I'm over halfway through and still struggling to give a damn. But I'm still…

There are a couple of action films where the villain is initially taken alive, usually "cowboy cop" movies so they can show just because Detective Loose Cannon plays by his own rules, he's still a cop, dammit. But the film just has the villain try to kill the hero again, whereupon the hero can just put him down in…

That's why "Cabin in the Woods" is the opening song for Evil Dead: The Musical.

I love Swype but since my S3's last update, its predictive text has gone out the window. My S3-owning friends report a similar decline. I might have to try Swiftkey again.

Like almost every other creative industry, publishing used to be in the hands of people who were passionate about it. Publishers tended to be book-lovers, record company execs were music lovers, film studio heads were film-afficionados, etc. They wanted to make money, for sure, but on some level they respected the art…

I think portal fantasies aimed at younger readers tend to take that route. They're like a metaphor for imagination: "You can temporarily visit other worlds of wonder and fantasy, but eventually you have to come home and live in this one."

He is an extremely polarizing writer in recent fantasy fiction, though.