I'm surprised that nobody has brought up the fact that, since early in the Cold War, Belize City is "The Village," it's where the CIA and British Intelligence retirees end up.

I'm surprised that nobody has brought up the fact that, since early in the Cold War, Belize City is "The Village," it's where the CIA and British Intelligence retirees end up.

The arch is 630 feet tall. Sixty three stories. (People who've never walked all the way up to the base of it never "get" how tall the thing is, not viscerally. As far as I know, it's still the single tallest sculpture in the world.) The video says that St. Louis has been buried under hundreds of feet of rubble. Picked…

Can somebody recommend a good translation for Solaris? I read it back in the '70s, or tried to at least. I couldn't even tell you, after all these years, if I finished it. All I remember was that I found it deadly dull. And, since then, I've heard that there are multiple translations, and the earliest one, which is…

Compare it to James Alan Gardner's take on the same subject, /Expendable/, please? Because that's what's holding me back from picking it, the vague suspicion that I read this exact same book just a couple of years ago.

Towards the end of his life, Heinlein predicted that in the early 21st century, it would be possible to live and work in space, but that you'd have to learn Russian. Or maybe Chinese.

The difference between an artist and a historian is that in less time and man-hours than he and his students spent speculating about it, a historian would have gone down to the county records office, looked up the architect's name, and asked the architect. If the modification wasn't on the architect's drawings, one…

Again, you're counting Elementary, but you're not counting Last Resort? I don't see how Elementary, which if you strip the character names off of it is just a detective show, is SF or fantasy, and I don't see how a political techno-thriller set about a decade into the future, which is what The Last Resort is, isn't.

(LOUD EXPLETIVE DELETED) That trailer scared the (expletive deleted) out of me!

Watched the first 20 minutes on their web page, and I think I'm going to be ordering this. The human spammer character reminded me, in a good way, of Scott Westerfeld's under-rated book "So Yesterday."

De gustibus non disputandem est, but I like Larry Niven's old rule of thumb about this: there's nothing wrong with a science fiction story asking you to accept one impossible premise (time travel, faster than light, ghosts, whatever) and then spinning out the consequences of that. He argued, and I agree that, it's…

Presumably environmentalist dictators of some kind, ala Scott Westerfeld's "Uglies" trilogy. And presumably what he was downloading into the pendant was the encryption software necessary to suppress the dampening field in any given area.

I remember this show when it was called Batman Beyond.

First of all, thanks for this: I feel about Anno Dracula the way I feel about World War Z: almost every vampire book sucks (pun unintended) except for Anno Dracula, almost every zombie book sucks except for World War Z. What saves both of them is that they both take their monsters seriously, and the humans in them act…

That's a LOT less campy than the trailers looked. And oddly faithful to the original, as best as I can recall it after all these years. I'm slightly more willing to grudgingly see this than I was before.

Now that's just crazy talk. The next thing you'll tell me is that you want to see a story about a future civilization that's actually solved a few problems and is working pretty well.

Eminent domain, if we wanted to. And before you complain, how much of the research was federally subsidized? If you count the R&D tax credit, the answer is "very nearly all of it."

Giving all new meaning to the Occupy slogan, "I'll believe that corporations are people when Texas executes one."

You know what I don't get about all of the concept art I've seen for this idea? If the trains are going to run in vacuum tunnels, why are all the concept-art trains streamlined?

After oil, the economics may change radically, especially if it becomes impossible to sustain enough agriculture to meet the demand for aviation-grade biofuel. Electric trains have this advantage over aviation: they don't have to carry their own fuel. And vacuum maglev is the best way to provide aviation-like speeds…