Last week, I was blissfully unaware that a giant sinkhole could open up underneath my house and kill me while I was watching tv. But does that mean that I was blissfully ignorant of danger? Not at all. Last week, I was thinking about the possibility that something from the sky could crash into my…
Well, here we are rushing towards the end of another year. For me, it was another good year for books and reading, though alas, I think I am going to fall a couple of books short of my Goodreads challenge of reading 45. Close though — and I still have this weekend! (Not gonna happen).…
I think it’s pretty safe to suggest that most readers love and are enthralled by the power of language to take us places we’ve never been and to understand old concepts in new ways. That transformative power of language is at the heart of China Mieville’s 2011 wonderfully creative science fiction novel, Embassytown. The title…
When my friends and I watch or discuss Star Trek, someone will almost always say in their best Shatner impersonation, “Spock – you, me, McCoy, Rabinowitz. We’re heading down to the planet.” Can you guess who’s not coming back? Of course, it’s Rabinowitz that’s going to meet an untimely-but-plot-point-providing death down on the planet. Almost…
The granddaddy of all science fiction films is, I think, Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey. In its classic opening sequence, we see an alien object trigger an evolution in early hominids (the use of tools-as-weapons) and later another evolution that propels man (in this case Bowman, the astronaut) to another level of consciousness/existence. It’s…
Sometimes when people get depressed and they give into a little drama and hyperbole, they will often say that their world is ending. As it turns out, Lars Von Trier’s spectacularly beautiful 2011 film Melancholia is a remarkable meditation on depression AND the end of the world. Melancholia follows the story of the manic depressive…
At the end of 2011, I was surprised to see Stephen King’s latest book 11/22/63 on a number of “Best of the Year” lists. And not just best “Horror” or best “genre” type of lists – but honest-to-goodness “Best of the Year” for literary fiction lists. That sort of praise has been hard to come…
One hallmark of science fiction writers is that they often try to predict the future. Jules Verne predicted landing on the moon. HG Wells predicted the atomic bomb. At the start of this decade, everyone’s pre-smartphone cell phones looked an awful lot like Jim Kirk’s communicator. And Picard’s handheld tablet seems a lot like an…
I’m not ashamed to admit it. Here at The Aerie, we like ourselves some TV. And no, it’s not all PBS and Discovery Channel (though I do like a good Masterpiece Mystery). And with our DVR hard drive looking sort of empty, the fall offered a chance to see what new shows might make the…
This past weekend, the Beloved and I went to see the new natural disaster film Contagion. Natural disaster film, you say? Absolutely. Much more so than any of the crap that Roland Emmerich’s been churning out (2012, The Day After Tomorrow), Steven Soderbergh’s thriller has a decidedly realistic feeling – so much sometimes so that…
Stevil 