Get your paws off me you damned dirty ape. The Planet of The Apes starts off with a four person crew on a sleeper ship heading into deep space. The Captain is the last one awake and has a few regrets about leaving his world behind. Due to Relativity, everyone he has known is already dead before he enters the sleep chamber. When the ship crashes into a lake, they find the one woman on the expedition has died in cold sleep and only three men are left. They trek across deserts, over mountains, and finally find a wooded area…
Category: sci fi
Primeval-Monsters Out of Time
Primeval is a British ITV show about holes in time that varied and sundry beasties wander through. They all end up near London and our merry band of heroes is always there to save the day. In the tradition of Dr Who Primeval is a sort of Sci Fi show, in that there doesn’t seem to be much real science, but there is a lot of fiction. Also like Dr Who, the special effects are not exactly up there with Jurassic Park. Primeval is coming to BBC America on August 9th and I’m sure fans of Dr Who and Torchwood…
Joss Whedon’s Dollhouse
In what seems a bit of a shocker to me, Joss Whedon’s new show Dollhouse will air on the much hated Fox Network. Much hated because they butchered the airing of Joss Whedon’s Firefly by showing it out of order, only airing a handful of episodes, and generally sabotaging Firefly before it had a chance to build any kind of following. Sci fi shows have a history of not being strong right out of the gate. Star Trek didn’t really take off until it had been canceled for several years. Ok, what about Dollhouse? From what I have seen so…
I Am Ironman
I liked Ironman the movie-this may have something to do with the fact that I have never been a big fan of Ironman the Comic. It’s hard to go into a film of something you grew up loving and not find it wanting. Case in point, one of the trailers before Ironman started was for Ed Norton’s The Incredible Hulk-I’m a huge fan of the Bill Bixby/Lou Ferrigno Tv Series. For me the biggest problem with the last Hulk movie was that the CGI sucked-it looks like they are using the same CGI, or worse, for this one. Ironman, however,…
Battlestar Galactica-The Last Season
For fans of the old show, the new show was always a bit jarring and there were too many changes. But fans of the new show love it-well, except for all that crap left over from the old show. So that the writers/creators of this show manage to piss off both parts of their tiny fan base at the same time. But now we are nearing the end of the run, and as with most sci fi shows, once it is gone everyone will love it and mourn its passing. Battlestar Galactica has been a show that is filled with…
Constellation Program-Dream a Little Dream
The Constellation Program is supposed to pick up the ball that NASA dropped in the early 1970s and send the United States triumphantly back into manned space flight. The Space Shuttle will be retired in 2010 with a mostly successful record of going into Earth orbit and returning safely. There were a couple of Space Shuttles that didn’t quite make it and that was the news that everyone got to see. The routine launches and returns were, well, a bit dull and their missions seemed pretty pointless. We are all members of the Science Fiction Generation, we are living in…
The Draco Tavern by Larry Niven
I listened to The Draco Tavern on a recent trip to Tyler. It’s a series of short stories which are loosely related to each other, but the only real constant is the Bartender Rick Schumann. Rick Schumann is characterized brilliantly by narrator Tom Weiner. He has the perfect touch as a 1940s Film Noir character running a space age watering hole. My father in law was a huge fan of sci fi and grew up reading the pulps and listening to the radio. Now it needs to be said here that radio was the perfect format for science fiction-and by…
Arthur C Clarke Dies at 90
With the death of Arthur C Clarke, the list of great science fiction writers from the Golden Age has dropped to one-Ray Bradbury. Issac Asimov and Robert A Heinlein have been gone for some time and they seemed like relics from another time even then. I have not been a huge reader of modern science fiction, most of it feels as if it has lost it’s way. Harlan Ellison is among the last generation that grew up without television poisoning their creativity. And Harlan is no spring chicken himself. I loved 2001:A Space Odyssey, though to be honest, I never…
Stargate-The Ark of Truth
I’d heard rumors of a Stargate movie being made for some time, with the usual debate being will it be a Stargate Tv Show movie, or a sequel to the Movie. The Ark of Truth was never meant to be a theatrical release, too much back story needed for an uninitiated viewer to figure out what is going on. In fact, most Stargate shows are heavy on the back story and need little preludes to remind the viewer what is going on. The Ark of Truth was a good show with a lot of drama and suspense-even though there were…
The New Knight Rider
A.I. is a bridge between art and science. Pamela McCorduck One of my standard complaints about remakes is that they take the original idea and totally trash it. The New Bionic Woman and Battlestar Galactica both worked on the general premise that the original shows sucked, so they were going to do them right. Which only served to piss off the people, such as myself, that pretty much liked the original shows. If you really hate the whole idea of Battlestar Galactica and the Bionic Woman, why not make up a new show, why go ahead and ruin the original?…