Let's Get Off This Rock Already!
An Author's Adventures in Space Travel, Science Fiction, and Worlds Beyond
I've teased my upcoming book a couple of times---and today, I will drop a few more breadcrumbs for you. It's not far away, now. This will be my final update before I go live with a cover, title, blurb, and release date. The key points: The first draft is done. Only took me three years!... Continue Reading →
Not all the worlds in our solar system are created equal. Some are enormous, some are vanishingly small; some are scorching hot, others freezing cold; some (one) are clement to human life, while some (all the rest) are inhospitable deathtraps. And if I may be frank---some are just better than others. For today's post, we... Continue Reading →
At long last, we return to the Star Trek franchise. For today's post we're going to follow up from my review of The Undiscovered Country with the next installment in the series. This is a deeply uneven film that attempted, with some success, to pass the baton from the Original Series crew to the cast... Continue Reading →
This movie is deranged. But that's a good thing. Today's subject: Mad God, crafted over 30 years by animator Phil Tippett, a work of staggering ambition that is not for the faint of heart (or queasy of stomach). Let us venture into the realms of madness, now, and take a look. Theatrical release poster. First... Continue Reading →
A few Roman legionaries shirk their duties during the Siege of Jerusalem, 70 AD. Antics ensue. (Historical Fiction) (Complete)
One of the many utopian dreams of the last century was that space travel would become possible not just for carefully selected astronauts, but for the common man. 2001: A Space Odyssey famously depicted a passenger flight to the Moon; the 2004 book Eyewitness: Future promised that by 2020, people would book hotel stays in... Continue Reading →
Harry Turtledove is a big fish in a small pond. He may not be widely known outside of alternate history circles, but within them everybody knows his name, and has probably read some of his work. Dust jackets have proclaimed him the "Master of Alternate History" for about three decades now. He was my personal... Continue Reading →
Some of you may remember my previous posts about secret Apollo missions: Apollo 18, the ill-fated landing which fell victim to rock spiders, and Apollo 20, a joint US-Soviet effort which recovered a living alien from the far side of the Moon. Both are fictional, of course. One is a horror movie, the other a... Continue Reading →
We all have our bad days at work. Sometimes you have to deal with an abrasive, domineering boss. Sometimes you're tasked with meeting impossibly high quotas, despite unclear instructions and faulty equipment. And sometimes, all those things are going on at once, and you happen to be working in the control room of Chernobyl Reactor... Continue Reading →
The 1990s were not a good time in the former Soviet Union. When the central government fell, it wasn't just a political collapse, but a collapse of just about everything---the military, the economy, society itself. Ethnic tensions erupted into raging civil wars; rushed free-market reforms threw countless millions into poverty; amid political turmoil, President Boris... Continue Reading →
