First of all, I’m referring to video games. If there was a Ringworld text adventure or something like that in the ‘80s, then mea culpa.

Yep, that was my impression from the dozen or so hours I spent with the game, that as a work of speculative fiction it was aggressively mid and derivative. You’re in the future, you travel to other solar systems, but when you get to other planets they’re just office parks and malls. And also wild west-style frontier…

Watchmen is a property that makes money, much to Alan Moore’s disgust, so we will see that property exploited with other works beyond what Moore wrote. Moore himself is -to say the least- a prickly guy and I’m not really in his corner for much of what he’s said and done following leaving DC (I feel he is a rather huge…

I think its good that we are seeing comic book people doing stuff that’s theirs and often providing a complete beginning-middle-end story.

The problem is that you’re treating creativity as this rarified essence that exists in a bubble, when the fact is that lots of books (like movies and LPs) exist mainly because their creators wanted or needed to make a lot of money. It’s almost always a mistake to assume that a writer has a long-term plan for a story.…

You have to judge adaptations on their own merits. I love Blade Runner but it has very little in common with Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? beyond the basic idea of a cop hunting androids. I also love the LotR movies, though they take enormous liberties with Tolkien. But it feels, on a key level, true to the…

Thing is about Manga books, unlike the US superhero market, is that most of the series are finite and started, and ended, with a certain/same creative cast start to end.

Cheesy production values aside, Star Crash s a lot of fun, and easily the best of the many Italian Star Wars wannabes of the late ‘70s. The director, Luigi Cozzi, is a big SF fan, and there are a lot of direct references to Golden Age stories from the ‘30s and ‘40s, as well as callbacks to genre movies like Invaders…

Also: Leia as the George Smiley of the New Republic. 

VHS was always pretty lousy, but it was better than nothing, and being able to record libraries of material off TV was its biggest plus. I think younger people are fascinated by the sheer physicality of old technology. And there are probably some older people who are nostalgic for it because it brings back fond…

I also have to assume that Indy had a lot of friends in government who also knew that “Schmidt” was an unrepentant Nazi and figured that if Indy was going after him, it wasn’t without good reason.

That’s kind of been the deal with the new shows, too — there needs to be more bad guys besides the Empire and the Sith and their imitators.

True, although Heinlein wasn’t always that way -- he was a liberal and even a socialist before that, until he met his second wife, who was a staunch anti-communist and conservative. 

Battle Beyond the Stars is a longtime personal fave, though my B-movie space opera heart belongs to Star Crash. I saw it at a Texas drive-in in a double feature with Laserblast when I was six or seven and for many years I would insist to my friends that it was better than Star Wars. I still feel that way today.

I kinda assumed Bright killed the sequel to Bright. I don’t remember a whole lot of hype surrounding the project before or after its released. But “dumped unceremoniously in the middle of the holiday season” describes a lot of these big projects. They’re like spam emails. You get the feeling that relatively few…

You have to put yourself in Kennedy and Iger’s position in 2012 and honestly evaluate the state of Star Wars at that moment. I can’t fault them for the overall direction they decided to take. They HAD to do a soft reset. They had to shutter the old Expanded Universe.

I just don’t get Indy going from an associate dean of a college where he was clearly tenured at for a long time to having a demotion at another location so quickly.

From what I can tell Warhammer is mostly Moorcock mixed with bits of Herbert and Lovecraft. And apart from Lovecraft, neither of those other writers are remotely Fascist. Herbert was at most Fascist-curious, but hated tyranny in any form, while Moorcock had his Eternal Champion fighting literal Nazis in the Von Bek…

It also felt the most video gamey of the movie, and seems to serve more as a showcase for ILM’s deaging technology than anything else.

I was quite surprised at how much I liked this movie, and thought the last scene was genuinely moving.