If you don’t know who Rick Berman is, than you will never understand why so many old Trekkies now hate J.J. Abrams. Rick Berman was the producer of Star Trek The Next Generation, Star Trek Deep Space Nine, Star Trek Voyager, Star Trek Enterprise, and the Star Trek The Next Generation Movies. Instead of being a figure of love and admiration like Star Trek Creator Gene Roddenberry, Rick Berman is viewed by most Star Trek fans as the Anti-Christ who did his damned best to destroy everything that made Star Trek great. J.J.Abrams must have him on speed dial. Over…
Category: sci fi
Star Trek Into Darkness
Spoilers Within Star Trek Into Darkness was Ok. The 3D was good in spots, the special effects were a bit over the top, and the acting was as wooden and silted as the last movie. If you liked J.J.Abrams Star Trek, you’ll like his Into Darkness. If you happen to be Trekkie, well, this is in no way a Star Trek movie. These kids are not Kirk, Spock, McCoy, etc. That ship is not The Enterprise. At best, this is an alternate timeline episode, but it’s so far from the Star Trek universe it’s more like Fan Fiction-something you might…
Old Man’s War by John Scalzi
For an old fan of Robert A. Heinlein like myself, Old Man’s War feels like the Grand Master has come back to life. Here’s a story of grand space opera with lots of violence, sex, and just a hint of politics. The characters are both serious and silly, not unlike the snarky people who inhabit Heinlein’s universe. Old Man’s War is set in some distance future where mankind has spread across the galaxy and managed to go to war with just about everyone they meet. This means that they need a lot of soldiers to play cannon fodder on the…
Space’s Orphan Black
How would you feel if you woke up one day and discovered that you are not as unique in the world as you thought? Instead of being a one of a kind, it turns out your a clone, and you have no idea how many other ‘you’s are out there. This is the basic premise of the Canadian science fiction show Orphan Black airing on Space and BBC America. Clones were a big deal in science fiction in the 1970s, lots of movies, lots of books, and even a throwaway line tossed into Star Wars about Obi-Wan fighting with…
Tom Cruise’s Oblivion
Oblivion is yet another movie about a world where the bulk of the earth’s population has been wiped out and a handful of survivors with virtually no chance of beating a vastly superior enemy-uh wait, that’s a lot closer to the end. We start off with Tom Cruise and a cute British woman with over-sized pupils going about the routine business of sucking all the water off the Earth’s surface so it can be shipped off to Titan, a large moon orbiting Jupiter. There are pockets of aliens hiding here and there that sabotage the equipment and Tom has to go out and repair it. Tom is Tech number…
Syfy’s Defiance
The first episode of Syfy’s new makeup and CGI fest Defiance was not as good as I had hoped, but not as bad as I had feared. We start of with a family sitting is green field when they are shocked by an alien invasion. This scene is taken almost frame for frame from the last season of Fringe. We then fast forward 33 years to a world that has been terraformed, but not enough to kill off the original population, just enough to add silly looking CGI plants all over the place. We are told that the invasion reached…
Snow Crash by Neal Stephenson
I read The Diamond Age not too long ago and really liked it, so I thought I would read Snow Crash next. Like Diamond Age, Snow Crash is a hypercomplex story with many characters doing all kinds of odd things, often at the same time. It took me several tries to get all the way through Snow Crash. The general ebb and flow of the story is confusing, the super stylized world baffling, and the general idea that humans can adapt to such a rapidly changing reality, let alone thrive in it, is a tad hard to believe. But then,…
Battlestar Galactica:Blood and Chrome
I was never a huge fan of Sci-Fi’s remake of Battlestar Galctica, but I did watch it and I did come to like most of the characters. The spin-off series, Caprica, about the worlds before Cyclons never made much sense. Why should anyone care that some idiot billionaire make the Cyclons? And how did it make any sense that his daughter’s soul was the cause of all their problems? Battlestar Galactica:Blood and Chrome was a damned good pilot. It had a lot of action, a lot of foreshadowing, and I have no problem with following around a young William Adama…
Robot & Frank
In the not too distant future a retired second story man is losing his mind. His son is tired of having to spend his day off driving out to check on him, so he buys him a robot companion. The robot soon becomes the most important person in his life. There are a few twists and turns in this fairly slow moving story of a man and his robot. Bit by bit we learn about Frank and get a clearer picture of just how bad his memory has become. Robot helps him by providing structure to his life. Part of…
Fringe Wobbles to an End
I’m not a big fan of series finales, but they do seem to be one last chance for the network to snag a few viewers. I hated the last MASH, didn’t much care for the Borg destroying end of Voyager, and the whole last season of LOST was pretty pointless. Fringe started out as a kind of knock off of The X-files, we had a team of people of looked into odd things happening. Then we veered off into this parallel universe and I sort of lost interest as the story became larger and stranger and made less and less…