I’ve heard a theory-I forget who originally floated it-that the length of the average mass-market genre fiction work has gone way up due to two things: the demands of the market and the invention of the word processor.
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One of SF’s more distinguished names (and son) collaborated on this scattershot but enjoyable set of essays on science fiction in the movies. It’s best for the tone and tenor of the writing, with some nifty snippets of interviews with various creators. Some are well-known to current generations of SF fans - Harlan Ellison, John Dykstra, Ray ( Read more... )

Hollywood’s messy love affair with science fiction is documented beautifully in this overview of SF movies which either made it to the screen only after great developmental strife (Dune, Spider-Man, The Fantastic Four) or never made it at all (The Tourist, The Stars My Destination, The Six Million Dollar Man). Hughes did his homework for every ( Read more... )

The heck with the labels. That’s what I say when faced with writing about Tow Ubukata’s Mardock Scramble: forget about the categories you could slot this book into; forget about what part of the shelf to stick it in. Just...
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A spiritual and intellectual sequel to Stephen King’s Firestarter; it picks up where that book left off in more ways than one. Junko Aoki, born with the power of pyrokinesis, lives a compulsively anonymous life while using her powers to render the kind of justice the authorities seem incapable of. Her power soon draws the attention of not only the ( Read more... )

The author of The Woman in the Dunes and The Box Man was not nominally thought of as a “science-fiction author”, but this 1970 novel is science fiction by every other name. A professor has invented a supercomputer with remarkable predictive capacity, which at first is used for prosaic things like weather and economic analysis. Then they use it to ( Read more... )

Paul Greengrass (of United 93, but not of Watchmen) has, in my opinion quite wisely, turned down a chance to direct the remake of Fantastic Voyage.

Fred Pohl talked about the movie in his Science Fiction: Studies in Film, way back when, and I was surprised to find it had been changed drastically from its original concept. Jerome Bixby (of Star ( Read more... )

Reading Twin Spica made me realize that outer space, like the Wild West before it, persists so fiercely in our cultural imagination because we have found so many ways to mythologize it. We named one of the first space shuttles...
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“Prawns,” we call them. They’re a horde of aliens, a couple of million strong, half-starved and left for dead in a giant mothership that floated to a stop just over Johannesburg. That was twenty years ago, and since then they’ve been dumped into a shantytown and segregated at gunpoint from the rest of humanity. Not that the rest of humanity wants ( Read more... )

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