Wow, a post on io9 about Interstellar that doesn’t just focus on the fact that the characters express human emotion and use that to denigrate the film... now this is the real amazing part!

He illustrated so many of the space books I read as a kid. I got to see him give a talk in person a few years ago in Austin... it was great, especially since going in, I didn’t know he was *that* space artist.

Part of the goal of Westernizing it was to make it a lot shlockier to discredit Soviet sci-fi. The original movie was a highly acclaimed hard-scifi space adventure (which stressed internationalism) in the Eastern Bloc; the Corman version inserted battles with monsters that looked like vaginas.

This reminds me of the old mid-1990s Sierra game Outpost.

Oh man... I remember having this! Might still be somewhere in my parents’ house, even. I have a very vivid memory of reading the part on the Mercury program by candlelight when we lost power due to a thunderstorm.

That image reminds me of the walk-in whale in front of the West Hartford Children’s Museum here in Connecticut.

I’ve always loved Russian books that focus on Mars - Red Star and Aelita being the most iconic. The former was written by one of the founders of the Bolsheviks and was a blueprint for socialist revolution on Earth (turns out the process of building all those canals led to a workers’ revolution on Mars) and the latter…

1953 movie version of The War of the Worlds... my favorite HG Wells adaptation, my favorite 1950s sci-fi movie, one of my favorite alien invasion films, and a movie I’ve shown (alongside Invasion of the Body Snatchers) to classes to demonstrate Cold War thinking. It also was clearly the main influence on Independence…

Bonestell is a legend... his paintings probably did more than anything to help get me interested in space travel and hard science fiction as a kid.

Why would reporters have been at a student-run sci-fi convention at a small liberal arts college?

I hope it includes stuff from the Independence Day UK BBC radio show.

It was Guilford College in North Carolina.

I can never fully like Mike after a stunt he pulled at my college maybe 10-11 years ago now. Basically he was invited to campus and ended up getting into a gay guy’s face and telling him how he was disgusting and was going to hell. I have no proof to show for this but I was there, I saw it, and it’s well documented…

Abrams has talked in interviews about how making episode 7 was like how he played with his Star Wars kids as a toy and how he channeled that in the movie’s filming.

Uh... yeah, that was the point. For all their advanced technology they didn’t understand basic biology or how it could affect them, which is how they got infected, and which is why it is a parallel to European colonialism.

Gabe Newell actually said that The Mist was an influence on Half-Life.

Okay, Miller didn’t get modern historical views right. But 300 is a propaganda story being told by a soldier to other Spartans before a battle. Everything is from that POV. And what the characters in 300 say is pretty accurate to Greek propaganda of the time.

I always thought it was a crime that Vampire’s Kiss doesn’t have a cult following. I’ve seen some of its best moments show up a lot in GIFs but not many seem to have a lot of knowledge about the movie itself.

This kind of reminds me of the first fifteen minutes of The Last of Us.