I love period pieces. Doctor Strangelove is now, irrevocably and forever, a period piece. There are many other movies from the same year that have translated into the future, but Dr. Strangelove is not one of them. It is trapped in the time that it was made. If you don't believe me, try watching it with millennials.

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It didn't. Robots and the internet were in a weird place then, and Pohl made it really clear that he didn't believe computer memory would get as cheap as they did. In the sequel there's a shipboard AI on a computer that's flying away from earth at sublight speeds, and it gets notably dumber as it goes because it…

Life is not cheaper than webcams. Every human being requires a mind-boggling investment of life support, food, and water — this is made very clear in the books. Robinette didn't win a lottery to get to Gateway, he won a lottery, and chose to spend that money to pay for the ticket to Gateway and his life support…

Have you read the books? Because that doesn't make much sense in terms of the books. For one thing, if something went wrong with the ships, the humans couldn't fix them. For another, the humans couldn't really do anything on the other side that a camera couldn't. For a third, fuel was not at all an issue — they…

That's absolutely true, and if I'd actually ever gotten around to reading E. E. Smith I might have something to say about that.

As it happens, though, I'm a huge fan of Pohl and the Heechee series, and have read Gateway several times. I had been toying with the idea myself of trying to adapt it and found it extremely…

I love these books so much, but modern technology will play havok with the plot. Consider; webcams. Why go through all the time and effort to put humans and life support on these ships? You can send them out packed to the gills with webcams and a little timer that squeezes the go-bulb and brings them back.

No stupider than what they did with the first one.

Tron: Legacy is a weird and beautiful film, a truly eloquent movie about people who cannot find the words to say. It's about confronting the past, about being trapped by a legacy yet knowing the legacy is flawed.

I've seen it several times, I went to film school, and I'll cheerfully stand by my estimation that it's competently made and edited.

Showgirls.

Seriously. The first time I saw it I walked out of the theater because it was so boring and dumb. The second time I watched it I still don't know what I saw.

It really doesn't matter if you like Alien3 or not, and it certainly is a joyless and utterly nihilistic film. It's competently made, it's definitely canon, and it's defiantly uninterested in being your friend. The whole point of Alien3 is that the events of Aliens are idiotic and madly irresponsible, and they made…

So to review, she ignores good advice to go into an infected installation to save a little girl. This decision led directly to the little girl's death, her death, Hicks' death, the destruction of the Bishop android, and the demise of 35 completely unrelated individuals who were living peacefully on a completely…

So to review, she ignores good advice to go into an infected installation to save a little girl. This decision led directly to the little girl's death, her death, Hicks' death, the destruction of the Bishop android, and the demise of 35 completely unrelated individuals who were living peacefully on a completely…