Posted on by Alexander Case

Film Review: Star Crash

There are some genres of cinema that have been lost to technological developments and rise of global interconnectivity. One of these genres is the “Italian knockoff of an successful American film.” One of the more impressive parts of this cinematic sub-genre is the science fiction film Starcrash, directed by Luigi Cozzi under an American pseudonym to conceal the film’s true nature. Read more

Posted on by Alexander Case

Comic Review: Marvel Star Wars – Part 1

Continuing with my run-down of the Star Wars Legends continuity, I’m taking a look at the first chunk of Marvel’s initial run on Star Wars, falling between their adaptation of A New Hope to the start of Empire Strikes Back. Yeah, I said I wasn’t going to cover Marvel Star Wars, but I changed my mind. Read more

Posted on by Alexander Case

Film Review: Solaris (1972)

When it comes to the “science and technology” part of Science Fiction, there tend to be three axis of thought, that end up forming into a sort of spectrum-ish thing – like those charts used in some video games where your character’s stats are portrayed in context of a geometric shape, with portions sticking out in different directions based on how you’ve chosen to weight things. There’s a technical term for this, but I don’t know what its. Read more

Tor.Com has started running a series of articles on African SFF (Science Fiction/Fantasy) writers. This is really awesome. SF/F Fandom tends to focus on writers and artists from the “Anglophone Zone” – The US, Canada, the UK, Australia, and the EU (yes, not all EU countries have English as their primary language, but English is a fairly major language in the EU). East Asian countries – primarily Japan, China, and to a lesser degree Korea have also been getting some attention as well, but Africa and Latin America have not gotten near the same degree of attention that other countries have had.

So, this article is great, and I’m looking forward to reading the rest of the series.

Posted on by Alexander Case

Film Review: Interstellar

Sometimes, science and scientific concepts make for great story hooks. Time Dilation – the idea that as you approach the speed of light, time slows down for you while moving normally for everyone else – is one of those concepts. One of the few high points of Flight of the Navigator was how it used time dilation to create pathos with the main character’s family having out-aged him. Makoto Shinkai’s Voices of a Distant Star did it with a couple being separated by not only distance, but time (a theme that would carry over to much of Shinkai’s other work). Interstellar does this with a parent and child. Read more