Tag Archives: science fiction
Adieu Ellison
Harlan Ellison was a firebrand author of New Wave speculative fiction who wrote everything from sci-fi to fantasy, short stories, novels, television shows, film criticism and much more. Ellison’s “The City on the Edge of Forever” is widely-recognized as the best episode in the original Star Trek series and his Outer Limits episode, “Soldier,” was [...]
Sharp New Blade
I saw a media screening of Blade Runner 2049 on Monday night. Just so you know, it’s a very good addition to the Blade Runner universe that connects to the first film as well as one might ever expect. It differs from the Ridley Scott film in that it’s less of a pulp noir (especially [...]
Into The Veldt
Yesterday I was thinking about all the ideas and visions and ambitions that are reshaping Nashville and other cities all over the country as suburbanites push to urban cores and gentrification becomes the only game in town. So often what we want isn’t what we need or even what we thought we wanted once we [...]
Making a Monolith
In the late 1960′s, Stanley Kubrick and Arthur C. Clarke teamed-up to create what is generally acknowledged as the greatest science fiction film ever made, 2001: A Space Odyssey. Now, Taschen has released their massive tome about the making of the film, and its pages capture all the spirit, effects, sets, costumes, concepts and the [...]
Gentleman Cybernaut
Today I have 1013 followers on Twitter, but last night I had 997. The milestone seemed like an opportunity to interact with some folks and get some help scrambling over the hump. A while back, a literary journal I review books for was in a similar position: The folks in charge of their funding were [...]
Arthur C. Clarke and the Unexplained
Today we celebrate the birthday of Arthur C. Clarke. We lost Clarke in March of 2008. Before that, Clarke discovered an ancient temple while scuba diving in Sri Lanka, invented the geosynchronous communications satellite, penned the screenplay for 2001: A Space Odyssey with Stanley Kubrick, and — along with Robert Heinlein and Isaac Asimov — [...]
Unfinished Kubrick
On November 28, Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey was re-released in remastered, digital form in the UK. I haven’t been able to confirm when it will be screening in the U.S. but I’m hoping that some form of BFI’s sci-fi celebration will be making its way to the states soon. While the spacefaring film [...]
Harlan Ellison Troll Hunter
Harlan Ellison is one of the greatest authors of science fiction and fantasy ever. He’s written more than 1,700 short stories, novellas, screenplays, comic book scripts, teleplays, essays as well as criticism covering literature, film, television, and print media. He edited and anthologized two groundbreaking science fiction collections, Dangerous Visions (1967) and Again, Dangerous Visions [...]
Celebrating Ed Wood
Continuing our string of spooky October posts, today we celebrate the birthday of filmmaker Ed Wood who was born on October 10, 1924. Wood died of a heart attack at the age of 54, but first he made a series of science fiction and monster films that weren’t so much scary as they were scary-bad. [...]
