Ready Player One was a near perfect book for me. Ready Player Two, not so much. Ready Player One was filled with all the nerdy nonsense that I loved when I was growing up. It was set in a world much like our own, but a few years down the road. The tech that made the books’ virtual reality work, was not that far off from the tech of today. Virtual Reality has been popular in science fiction for some time. The real world stuff, the MetaVerse type stuff, has never lived up to the worlds imagined in stories like…
Tag: sci fi
After Earth
I like Will Smith not because he’s Will Smith, but because he starred in a lot of great movies. I’m a bit less impressed with Will Smith’s blatant nepotism to promote his son as a movie star and not impressed with Jaden Smith at all. And this is a Jaden Smith film, he got top billing over his father and the title. After Earth was an OK movie, it’s greatest weaknesses being director M. Night Shyamalan and it’s star Jaden Smith. Sony has done an amazing job of hiding any connection M. Night Shyamalan has to After Earth, but there…
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…
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…
The Diamond Age: Or, A Young Lady’s Illustrated Primer
I found a list of the Top 100 Sci Fi Stories not too long ago and there were a few titles I haven’t read. Neal Stephenson’s The Diamond Age came in at 58. The Diamond Age was written in 1995, which makes it one of the younger books on the list and one that I missed when it came out. In our own world, where any random question can be answered with a quick Google and it hasn’t even created a world of better Jeopardy players, The Diamond Age seems a bit quaint. It’s the story of poor ignorant…
Prometheus-In Space, No One Can Hear You Snore
Alien was an amazing movie set in a gritty world where space travel was mundane and the people working for the The Company were more interested in their bonuses than the monster that was loose in the bowels of the ship. H.R.Giger’s creature and spaceship were perfect, his wonderful mix of machines and organics was made for a sci fi movie project. Alien was meant to be a one off horror movie that didn’t need to answer any of the countless questions it asked, such as: Why did the ship stop? How did the robot know about the alien? Why…
The Hunger Game Trilogy
Do something shocking every thousand words. —A.E. van Vogt A few spoilers. The Hunger Games Trilogy is a compelling roller coaster of shocking moments and it also meets the most important standard that any fictive writing can-it elicits emotion in the reader. By the time I got to the last page of Mockingjay I was ready to swallow a handful of poisoned berries myself. Easily the best of the books is The Hunger Games, where our moody hero Katniss chooses to sacrifice herself so that her little sister will not have to die in the…
Distrust That Particular Flavor
William Gibson has written some great novels and one of my all time favorite short stories-Burning Chrome. Most of his stuff has not held up well over time, he talks a little too much about Virtual Reality-even after it’s pretty much turned out to be a bit of a bust. Or maybe it just hasn’t been long enough, and once we are all living in The Matrix we will see what a true visionary Wiliam Gibson really was. His last couple of novels are sort of sci fi, in that they have a lot of science and a lot of…
Alcatraz
Alcatraz is the story of time traveling murders and the people who want to catch them before they kill again. It’s a good show on many levels, the actors are great, the production values are high, and who doesn’t long for a glimpse of the good old days of prison life in the early 1960s? The problem with all new Sci Fi shows is that the Sci Fi fan base has a very long memory and it’s all but impossible to come up with something completely new. Alcatraz has the look and feel of Fringe, The X-Files, Prison Break, LOST, The…
Attack The Block
The story of a council block inhabited by an odd mixture of London poor, that happens to become the center of an alien invasion. From the producers of Shane of The Dead, Attack The Block is a pretty straight forward take on a monster movie. Unlike CGI fests such as Super 8 and Cloverfield, Attack The Block gives us a story on a human level-and leaves the over the top special effects in the box. Our heroes don’t start off very heroic, they are busy mugging a woman when something falls from the sky and flattens a car. They find…