‘As The Earth Turns’ (1937/2019) on Turner Classics Movies is a real curiosity: a silent film shot in 1937 but not released until 2019. Director Richard Lyford, who died in 1985, made several award-winning documentaries but this very early attempt of his languished until clips appeared in a ‘trailer park’ reel and people became interested. […]
Future Science Fiction Digest # 15 is all translated stories. Hooray! In the foreword, editor Alex Shvartsman says that he aims for this in every issue but the quantity of quality stories that have been translated makes it impossible so the pages have to feature original English yarns. Nothing wrong with them but the point […]
Drifting Home, Studio Colorido’s third feature-length animation film is coming to Netfllix. Sixth-graders Childhood pals Kosuke and Natsume grew up in the same apartment block. During their summer vacation, they get caught up in a bizarre occurrence while playing in the apartment building that is about to be destroyed. All they can see is a […]
Kami are the spirits of Japanese folklore and an inukami, in particular, a dog-spirit that features in this manga series is called Yoko, a supposedly untrainable and rebellious spirit, despite her essentially benevolent nature. Keita Kawahira is a young man from a family of spirit trainers but, in time-honoured manga tradition, he’s really an idler, […]
We talk about what comes next and what the escape strategy is after Nathan Fillion’s tenure in Hollywood is through as he considers his success on several TV shows as well as his cult following in Firefly and Serenity. We also discuss his experience swimming with sharks, the way that struggle brings out one’s real […]
The Netflix scifi-horror series with all the retro feels gives us a glimpse of Stranger Things, season 4, volume 2, with their new trailer. Streams 1st July 2022 on Netflix.
Looking at Dennis Saleh’s other books, record album covers and poetry, ‘Science Fiction Gold: Film Classics Of The 1950s’ certainly comes out of the left field. As he was also publisher of Comma Books, he could cover what he wanted. I can’t recall what made me buy it recently but I’m nothing but up-to-date and […]
As usual ‘Retro Fan’ ensures interest by having a mixture of material for nostalgia with obvious emphasis of the American kind. For starters, new to the magazine writer Mark Voger has a look at the Three Stooges. I only ever saw one of their shorts at a Saturday morning cinema back in the late 1960s […]
Although science fiction has shown humans travelling across space at speeds hundreds of times faster than the speed of light, what if the fastest spacecraft we are ever able to build don’t even come close to reaching a tenth of the speed of light? Is it possible for us to still colonise the galaxy, and […]
Humanity seems tremendously evolved when you consider the challenges that basic dead matter must overcome before developing into a sophisticated society and the possibility that there are planets that are livable for billions of years. The great filter was invented in 1996 by Robin Hanson, who provides a solid justification: grabby aliens. They are said […]
While most people look forward to retirement, a pension and the hope that they will be able to do what they want without an employer always demanding more, a few don’t even consider the prospect of retirement. It is not surprising then that there are those who leave behind unfinished work when they die. Most […]
There is always something a little weird finding another AE Van Vogt anthology and finding only a couple titles that I recognised. Of course, ‘The Enchanted Village’ is regarded as a classic and been reprinted all over the place. Van Vogt had an enormous back catalogue of short stories although as some of the nine […]
Looking at the cover of ‘Cinema Of The Fantastic by Chris Steinbrunner and Burt Goldplatt and it does give the impression of one of the cheap SF film books from the 1970s. However, the content shows otherwise with the quality of black and white photos getting better over the decades and many that I haven’t […]
J. Michael Straczynski’s TV scifi creation, Babylon 5, carved out its own niche in popular culture by eschewing the shadow of their preeminent rival Star Trek and using innovative production methods and longform narrative, instead. The closing of the show’s home network PTEN, however, gave the impression that it would end abruptly after its fourth […]
