Kaoru Mori last turned heads on this side of the ocean with her lovely and thoroughly-researched story of Victorian-era England, Emma, adapted into an equally lovely animated series. With A Bride’s Story, she’s taken the same fascination for period detail...
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The New York Times has a profile of Steve Jobs that features the following quote: "His is not a product-design philosophy steered by committee or determined by market research. The Jobs formula, say colleagues, relies heavily on tenacity, patience, belief and instinct."

This stands in marked contrast with the current state of the entertainment ( Read more... )

There have traditionally been three great or at the very least formative dystopian novels of the 20th century: Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World, George Orwell’s 1984 and Evgeny Zamyatin’s We. The first two are almost stereotypically familiar ...
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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... )

An animated adaptation of a Serbian graphic novel, very much in the mold of Moebius and Enki Bilal, with plenty of acerbic humor and wit that for a lack of a better word is strongly Eastern European in flavor. Set some decades hence, young Edit resorts to biotechnology to cheat on one of her exams and finds herself becoming a host for an artificial ( Read more... )

I'm still reeling from the sheer amount of technological catastrophe that decided to visit Chez Genji this past couple of weeks, which apart from work is a big reason why I haven't posted anything.

This wasn't some simple fender-bender or a paint-scrape, mind you. This was a ten-car pileup on a hillside with the victims rolling down and drifting ( 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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Brain, n. That with which we think we think. I first heard that joke when I was, I believe, ten years old. I first read Douglas Hofstader’s Gödel, Escher Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid when I was about ten years...
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A book like this leaves me divided. Popular Hits of the Showa Era is black comedy of the kind that would have made Terry Southern proud, and is written in a wild, paintball-splatter style where most every sentence has something...
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