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Tag Archives: sf-ish
Why Was Heinlein So Wrong?
The eclectic blog Lists of Note recently published a list of predictions that the SF writer Robert Heinlein made in 1952 for what the year 2000 would be like. Here they are, with my comments in red for wrong and … Continue reading
Unsuspended Disbelief in “Hunger Games”
In the Oath of the Slan that every trufan must secretly swear, there’s a clause that says you must go and see any movie that’s even vaguely science fiction. You don’t have to do the sequels – one Transformers is … Continue reading
The Moon Is Dull
Last summer there were two movies partially set on the Moon: “Transformers: the Dark of the Moon” and “Apollo 18”. In the first, the Apollo program has a secret agenda to explore alien robots that are discovered there. In the … Continue reading
Auto Automobiles
The consistently interesting Brian Hayes has a column in the latest issue of American Scientist speculating on the consequences of true self-driving automobiles. He makes a number of valuable points: For liability reasons, they’ll only be present in large numbers … Continue reading
SF Writers At War
In 1942 three of the country’s leading SF writers – Robert Heinlein, Isaac Asimov, and L. Sprague De Camp – all started working together at the Philadelphia Navy Yard. The US had just entered WW II, and everyone wanted to … Continue reading
Myth -> Novel -> Theme Park -> Caper -> Movie!
Now here’s a story that by my count involves four different levels of pretense: Hollywood Reporter says that Ben Affleck is in negotiations to direct a movie based on the Canadian Caper, a ripping yarn of the CIA and the … Continue reading
Lovecraft news
So Guillermo Del Toro is going to do a film version of H. P. Lovecraft’s “At the Mountains of Madness”. There’s been a steady stream of awful Lovecraft adaptations, but this will be the biggest version yet. I’ve long been … Continue reading
The Population of Other Hostile Places
In the last post I calculated that the current population of outer space was about five, if you added up all the person-years spent up there. What about other difficult places to live? Under the Ocean This was another of … Continue reading
The Population of Space
The SF writer Charlie Stross recently wrote on his blog about the absurdity of self-sufficient space colonies (“Insufficient Data”). He noted that it takes an extraordinary number of people to maintain a technological civilization, because even the most common artifacts … Continue reading
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Tagged big-tech, people-and-numbers, sf-ish, space-ish, tech-history
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Out of Body Experiences
In one of those Hollywood coincidences, two recent movies, “Avatar” and “Surrogates” made use of the idea of remote-controlled bodies. In “Surrogates”, people had robot bodies that were so much better than real ones that no one went out in … Continue reading
A Niche in the Library of Babel 