Posts Tagged: scifi

life — Comments Off
20
May 11

Celebrating the Ray Gun

Den of Geek has a great article that gives a brief history of the use of the “ray gun” in movies and television. Essentially they outline a movement away from the quite realistic description of an “energy weapon” in H. G. Well’s The War of the Worlds to the guns that “shoot” rays of light that begin with the Buck Rogers serials and climax with Star Wars. The article does a nice job of pointing out that the similarities between the guns were quite intentional: check out the comparison between Buck Roger’s XZ-38 Disintegrator and Hans Solo’s DL-44 Blaster. (Lucas is clearly at his best when he is having fun — and at his worse when he is being serious?)

Future Guns of the Past
work — Comments Off
10
May 11

The Four Chapters of John Scalzi’s New Novel Are On-line

John Scalzi continues to impress me not only with his prosaic verve, which, I confess, did slacken a bit in The God Engines, but also with his entrepreneurial and/or exploratory spirit. His latest project is a reboot of H. Beam Piper’s Little Fuzzy and he is sharing the results, at least the first four chapters, on-line. The first two chapters are available through Tor, whose site continues to get better and better, and the next two chapters are available through io9, a site that I would like to explore more when I get the time. (Perhaps when I start work on my own scifi novel.)

work — Comments Off
22
Apr 11

More on Tor

Tor’s site is just getting better and better. Great original stories — sometimes re”print”ed from paper editions now hard to find. Great blog posts. Great re-reads. Great community. This particular post during their dystopia week caught my eye: Dealing with Real Dystopias is Part of My Job. Now I know why I want to be a scifi novelist: you get to be a futurist consultant. Or, as the program is called: Strategic Foresight and Innovation.

Truth really is stranger than fiction.

life — Comments Off
9
Sep 09

In Praise of SciFi Corridors

There’s a lovely post up at Den of Geek about the role of corridors in science fiction films. I wish there was more discussion, or at least I didn’t feel like there was much of an argument or analysis really offered. It’s more of a breezy tour. Still, it’s a great idea and I hope others take Anderson up on his suggestion and we see more pieces like this looking at texts from seemingly oddball perspectives. (If any of my intro to film students are reading this: here’s your chance.)