Tag: science fiction

May 10, 2013
I recently acquired Fringe Season 4. It has been out for some time, but I was happy to wait until it was non-expensive.

I’ve actually had it for about a month, now, but hadn’t started watching it, for two reasons. Firstly, I had another DVD series on the go – Leverage; but mainly because I couldn’t decide whether to dive straight into Season 4, or watch some of season 3 again, which I last watched in December 2011.

March 23, 2013
Just caught this 2007 film – ”The Man From Earth”. A low budget movie that – from the description – I didn’t expect to want to sit through, but the script – by the late Jerome Bixby – was actually quite enthralling. No action at all, really, it was all in the dialogue; it would actually work very well on the stage. Some of the acting was a bit hammy, but the actor in the leading role pulled it off nicely, so all else could be forgiven.

As a professor bids goodbye to his colleagues, he admits that he is actually a centuries-old caveman.

November 11, 2012
This film came out last year, but I’d never heard about it before. Made by the BBC, in partnership with others, it was reshown last night, and is on iPlayer until Nov 18. I found it really interesting.

The plot is simple – an unexplained world-wide epidemic that robs everyone of their sense of smell. Just as people are adjusting to this, taste follows.

October 10, 2012
Suffering currently from conjunctivitis, I’ve found that watching TV irritates me, but I have been able to read my Kindle comfortably. Which is why I have managed to speed through Peter Hamilton’s latest mega-novel in faster than usual (for me) time.

Which is probably good, as it helped me keep the multiple narratives (and frequent flashbacks) straight in my mind – a number of the characters have similar names (for good reason, as will become evident if you read it), and even reading it continuously, I had moments of confusion.

September 26, 2012
Earlier I mentioned I’d ordered this book, which the film Countdown was based on. It arrived a couple of days ago, and I’ve just finished it.

The book tells the (fictional) story of a more perilous alternative to the Apollo mission, evolved from the fear that the Russians would beat the US to the moon.

September 19, 2012
There is a film I saw, when I was young (turns out I must have been about 8 or 9 years old), that I remember vividly, but I could never remember the title. The exciting (to a 9-year-old) climax involves a stranded astronaut, with limited oxygen, walking across the surface of the moon, in search of a kind of life-support-hut.

Yes, it sounds like an episode of UFO, but it isn’t.

February 26, 2012
Just watched Real Steel on DVD and was very pleasantly surprised. Unusually for this kind of flick, it had an actual story (albeit a predicatable one about a father bonding with the son he never knew), and the acting was pretty good too. Good special effects – although they used CGI for the robots for most of the action/moving shots, they actually did built giant robot electronic puppets for specific scenes where they interact with actors – 19 of them, in fact. I think this made all the difference, especially with the scenes with the son.

Well worth seeing, not least to spot the boxing references, both real-life and fictional.

December 16, 2011
I have been watching Fringe Series 3 on DVD, and thoroughly enjoying it. I don’t want to post spoilers, because my DVDs are being lent to at least two people when I have finished with them; but last night I watched episode 3.16 – “Os”, and was delighted by the turn of events at the end. Both shocking and hilarious – I am still chuckling over it today, and can’t wait to see how it develops.

Anna Torv is a genius!

July 19, 2011
I’ve been flicking through the Science Fiction in Amazon’s Kindle Summer Sale. With many books reduced to 99p, it had to be worth a look.

Fortunately, even at that price, I had the sense to read samples first, and a lot of stuff got rejected before the end of the first chapter.

April 10, 2011
Have just finished the final episode of Fringe Season 1 and I loved it. For some strange reason, I was under the impression that Series 2 wasn’t available yet on DVD, but that proves not to be the case, although it is 30 quid at all of the usual online outlets I have looked at (Amazon, Play etc.).

Time to hang out on eBay for a while, I think.

February 20, 2011
January 20, 2011
I was saying to someone on Tuesday that although I am reading a lot at the moment, it is mostly crime and thrillers, and almost no science fiction. In fact the only book I have read recently close to that genre was Stephen King’s Under The Dome, which I thoroughly enjoyed.

But while saying that my sf reading was way down, I had no idea why it was. It was definitely not a conscious decision *not* to read sf. I wonder if, in part, it is because there have been several decent SF shows on TV in the last couple of years, so I was getting my fix that way.