Blogs / Science Not Fiction

Stargate Solutions interviewed Joe Mallozzi, showrunner for the recently cancelled Stargate Atlantis, where he talks about the reaction of the cast to the news and his thoughts on the plans to continue the Stargate franchise.

Last night on Eureka, Sherriff Carter was faced with a bumbling superhero who had constructed his gear from discarded pieces of technology thrown out by the town’s scientists. In this, our wannabe superhero was participating in the ultimate expression of the fine old art of dumpster diving.

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The new season of Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles kicked off into high gear last night, promising some great TV to come. The episode picked up seconds after the last season left off, when Cameron–a terminator reprogrammed and sent back from the future to protect John Connor, leader-of-the-human-race-in-waiting–became the victim of a car bomb.

A damaged Cameron finds herself in need of some significant hardware and software repairs: unfortunately, it’ll be years before any terminator technical support facilities are built. Cameron must fix herself. In the real world, it’s exactly this problem that researchers are actively struggling with–how to create computers that can realize they’re malfunctioning and restore themselves to working order.

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The release of the Torchwood Series 2 DVD gave us the opportunity to watch (in some cases watch for the first time) every episode of the second season.

And the verdict?  In the immortal words of Ed Grimley, “totally decent, I must say.”  John Barrowman still rocks.

With that out of the way, I’ll add that the show is also showing troubling signs of flaming out after the upcoming mini-series. Series Two had at least one genuinely terrible episode (”From Out of the Rain”) and a few marginal ones (”Something Borrowed,” “To The Last Man”).

Unlike Doctor Who, Torchwood doesn’t have a multi-decade reserve of goodwill and nostalgia to fall back on.  Unlike Buffy, Captain Jack isn’t a teenager whose adolescent angst can be mined for a season’s worth of new story arcs.

Here are five things we’d like to see more (and less) of in the Series 3 mini-series that would improve the prospects for the show to live on.

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It’s been a long time in the making, but Spore has finally been released today for Windows and Macs. The brainchild of Will Wright, (best known as the creator of The Sims) this video game allows the player to go from controlling a protoplasmic blob in a tide pool to commanding a galactic empire. DISCOVER interviewed Will Wright about the Big Thoughts behind Spore in 2006, but what’s it like as a game?

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It’s not often you see a video trailer for a book, but here one is, a promo for the eagerly anticipated Anathem by Neal Stephenson. I’m not quite sure what to make of the hockey jerseys, but I’m sure it’ll all make sense once I’ve read the book.

Hot on the heels of last week’s posts about using 100 per cent proof real science in science fiction (Special Relativity in particular), Night Shade Books sent me a copy of Greg Egan’s recently released novel Incandescence. Greg Egan writes what can be called hard space opera. The space opera part comes from the fact that his books are set on a galaxy-sized canvas, and most of his protagonists are members of fantastically advanced civilizations. The “hard” part refers to hard science fiction — the physical laws followed and natural objects found within this type of story are written to be as close to scientifically accurate as possible.

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There’s a scene in the movie Babylon A.D., which opened Friday, where Mélanie Thierry’s character, Aurora, escapes from her guardians through a crowded post-apocalyptic marketplace and is suddenly confronted by two cloth-covered cages. She stares at the cages and as the camera zooms in, the audience realizes that something big is prowling about inside. The cage-porters whip the cloth off (Don’t ask why. This movie does not answer well to “Why?”) , and we see a pair of Siberian tigers pacing angrily and growling at the crowd. Aurora was raised in a convent, and the sight of the tigers awes her, not least because she knows (somehow) that tigers had been extinct for decades.

The plot of the film is set in some indeterminate future, and it centers on Aurora’s journey from Russia to America in the company of Sister Rebeka (Michelle Yeoh as a badass nun) and Toorop, the hard hard-bitten, badass mercenary (Vin Diesel, who plays no other kind of mercenary, right Riddick fans?).

Anyway, there’s the market place, there’s the tigers, there’s Aurora as Toorop and Sister Rebeka come up behind her. Toorop is not so impressed, later dismissing the beasts as “copies. Clones of clones. Fakes.”

But why so dismissive, Toorop? (more…)