For some reason, too many science fiction films dwell on disasters and not on the sense of wonder of being in space. The majesty and grandeur of the universe doesn’t hold enough promise and therefore release after release seems to focus on the terrible things that will happen to us out there. The latest such…
In 2018 , director John Krasinski delivered a gripping thriller in the guise of a science fiction/horror film, something that would not have out of place in the 1950s. A Quiet Place, though, was a contemporary film as it focused entirely on a family, trying to survive in a world post-invasion. The aliens, in this…
Stories are inherently molded by their format. A novelization is different from a movie: it typically will include scenes and lots of interior monologues absent in its model. The same happens in any adaption – the original format has certain strength and structures, the new one does things differently. Starport is a TV pilot: it…
So this is how it goes: two years ago I had the urge to re-read Slaughterhouse-Five, possibly Kurt Vonnegut’s best novel [1]. And I did . It was still a great novel; it was still deeply sad about humanity. About a year later, a graphic novel adaptation of Slaughterhouse-Five came out. It was adapted by…
I’m sure the creators will all insist that this is totally not a superhero book, that it’s much cooler and obscure and indy and retro and hand-crafted than that. But it’s a big DC Comics book with Superman in it, whose hero is a guy with a mysterious, technologically-advanced eyeball with unexpected and plot-convenient powers,…
It has been an exceptionally disappointing year for smart, serious science fiction on the screen. In a short period, we had the crash and burn of Ad Astra and Lucy in the Sky, the latter of which has been made available for streaming by Fox Home Entertainment ahead of its inevitable release on disc. Where…
AD ASTRABrad Pitt gives a powerful performance in this “absolutely enthralling” (Peter Travers, Rolling Stone), sci-fi thriller set in space. When a mysterious life-threatening event strikes Earth, astronaut Roy McBride (Pitt) goes on a dangerous mission across an unforgiving solar system to uncover the truth about his missing father (Tommy Lee Jones) and his doomed expedition that…
SYNOPSIS Astronaut John Crichton assumes he’ll be home in time for dinner. But a freak accident during an experimental space mission catapults him across a thousand galaxies to an alien battlefield. Suddenly, he’s trapped among alien creatures wielding deadly technology – a battle that 20th century sci-fi pop culture never prepared him for. Hunted by…
If you know anything about Saga, you know there’s a big change at the end of this book, and that the series is now on a longer hiatus than usual. If you know nothing about Saga, you might just have been living in a hole for the last seven years, and nearly anything I could…
Hey! The time-cops finally get named in this book! They’re called WATCH — we don’t know what that stands for, but baby steps, man, baby steps — and the old guy who runs them is Jahpo Thapa. And our heroines learn more than his name, which I won’t spoil: they learn who he is and…
I was ten when I was taken to see 2001: A Space Odyssey for a friend’s birthday. I was coming to love all things science fiction by this point, but the film both dazzled and baffled me. I got most of it up until the final twenty minutes or so and was left utterly confused….
Now, I know that I tend to focus on the negative, even when the positive is much larger and objectively more interesting. I usually blame that on “editor brain” — when you spend years pulling apart stories for a living, it forms a habit that you just can’t break. So let me say up front…
