That seems kind of plausible, but I think it could also be interesting if the Framework world doesn't actually make all that much sense. There was that scene where Radcliffe complained to Aida that the world kept changing in disorienting ways, and she told him that she had to keep rewriting history to cancel out all…

This is the second or third time that the show has managed to put an interesting spin on the old "mind-controlled or impostor character" device, by taking the idea that the person really has their same personality more seriously than usual.

I'm gonna tentatively throw in the remake of Kiss of Death, too. I haven't seen it in a long time so I may be way off, but I remember weirdly digging Cage as a grotesquely musclebound thug who is the stupidest person in organized crime, and who likes to crank up House of Pain on a boombox prior to beating some guy to…

I'll just throw in a plug here for one of the more interesting z-related fictional efforts I've seen, "The Outbreak" by Sean Collins, which you can read in its entirety (in reverse order, since it's a blog) here. It's very much a character piece, written in character as the author (i.e. it starts out just being his…

I just don't think it's that much of a stretch for any character to be massively suspicious of artificial intelligence projects in general, in a world where the very first artificial intelligence immediately turned evil and almost destroyed the world pretty recently. "But I intend it to be used for good things!" isn't…

It's not the name of a character in the story, nor is it an X-Men reference. Really the answer would be Shakespeare anyway no matter what, since everything called Caliban (including that moon) is a Shakespeare reference.

Just to nerd out even more thoroughly: this Wikipedia article is a good example of how muddled this stuff has always been. Arthur C. Clarke is almost always considered a hard SF writer, but Rendezvous with Rama is all about finding a weird alien artifact full of physics-defying stuff and crazy biotech… not to mention 2…

I apologize for the following act of nitpicking about terms that no one can ever agree about anyway, but: if "humans encountering an alien technology that doesn't make sense to us" is a disqualifier for "hard SF", then almost no one has ever written any hard SF. It's a pretty common story element for writers who are…

"Avasarala, out of nowhere, vouching for Holden?"

The first half of 28 Weeks Later is like that, sort of— it's just, you know, 28 weeks instead of 100 years, because the apocalypse didn't last very long (the zombies were stuck in England, ran out of food and rapidly died).

I think it's hard to say whether he had the right idea about A.I.— it would depend on how he tried to do it, and when. If he were doing it now, I think odds are good that he wouldn't have gone with full animation for David, but digital editing of a live actor. The Westworld show made pretty good use of that, either to…

And, being Kubrick, he would have become infamous for making hyper-specific demands about exactly how all the digital stuff should be… resulting in, probably, everything looking insanely better than other current movies that used equal amounts of CGI.

Not to be a pedantic asshole, but just in case anyone finds this stuff interesting: "practical" doesn't mean "anything non-digital"; it means "done physically on set, rather than in post-production." 2001 had plenty of optical effects involving mattes, multiple exposures, etc., none of which are "practical."

Eye of the beholder and all, but I don't think the stuff W.S. Punk is talking about is anything you have to "dig for". You really don't even have to have seen Thor. It's presented pretty straightforwardly in The Avengers - I never had any trouble understanding that Loki is under the thumb of a bigger villain that he's…

It's the kind of thing where a lot of people would notice and mention "uh isn't this kind of fucked up", and then a lot of other people would tell them "oh lighten up, you crazy feminist." Which is also a thing that happens now! The difference is more about who's louder and whether the media treat it more as a legit…

I was around and watching movies and reading movie reviews at that time, and I agree with Griner that you've got some selective memory going on there. (Not that there wasn't plenty of ingrained sexism in the 80s, but that's different from thinking that people literally didn't notice these things at all.)

Yeah, I think what CineCraft saw as "stock Christian asshole", I thought was necessary to the idea that the mom really hasn't gotten her shit together at all yet. For her, the born-again persona is papering over problems that she doesn't want to deal with. So if the Broderick character had been a guy who was deeply…

They didn't make the movements look very realistic, but moving a massive thing in microgravity (and I think nuclear weapons, even small ones, would probably have to be pretty massive) is still a chore. It's like if you're trying to push 500 pounds of furniture on a cart that has totally perfect frictionless wheels—…

No, I think you were just reading the diagram wrong. It showed the Nauvoo staying on course, and Eros makng a really sharp change, like not even a curve, more of a corner.

If Epstein reads the short story about how he invented it ("Drive"), he will probably be OK with taking his time.