Let's Get Off This Rock Already!
An Author's Adventures in Space Travel, Science Fiction, and Worlds Beyond
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 →
I've always been one for spooky spaceship stories. And while there are some terrific deep-space horror movies out there, I've had a much harder time finding a book that fits the bill---for whatever reason, it's a subgenre with relatively little presence in print sci-fi. So you can imagine I was intrigued when I found an... Continue Reading →
Welcome back, everyone! This week's entry will be a little lighter on text and heavier on visuals---which, judging by the success of my previous posts on AI-generated art, ought to be a popular decision. But this time I aim to focus on a particular theme. You see, ever since I was a kid, I've been... Continue Reading →
A young lieutenant makes a desperate last stand in the depths of an alien catacomb---only to find himself somewhere very, very familiar. (Science Fiction/Horror) (Complete)
Laurence Fishburne is aboard a creepy spaceship again. This time the destination is Titan, not Neptune, and instead of an all-out horror flick, we get something much more psychological. Today's feature: the 2024 movie Slingshot. Slingshot came out on August 30. I saw it on August 31, and I'm writing this just three hours after... Continue Reading →
How to Mars is like Andy Weir's The Martian, if The Martian had been written by a humanities major instead of an engineer. It is also, not coincidentally, a better book. Now, the subject of today's review was something of a happy accident on my part. I was at my local library---the same library where... Continue Reading →
A story of family, interstellar travel, and dreams that span generations. Is it worth pouring your blood and sweat into something if you never live to see it? (Science Fiction) (Complete)
It's been the better part of a year since I posted my early experiments with Midjourney. Today, in what may be one of my shorter, sillier pieces, I'll fill you in on my antics during the intervening time. It's stunning how far generative AI has advanced just while I've been using it; if I were... Continue Reading →
Ah, to live in the old Solar System, before our nosy little space probes pushed back the veil and revealed the other planets to be absolute shitholes. Venus was, beneath its clouds, a steamy paradise world full of lush vegetation and primordial beasts; Mars, meanwhile, was one vast desert crisscrossed by canals, pockmarked by the... Continue Reading →
Historians will remember 2022 as the year AI took the internet by storm. Algorithmic text and image generators---the likes of ChatGPT, MidJourney, and Jasper---exploded in popularity, spawning new internet trends, provoking fierce opposition from flesh-and-blood artists, and threatening the security of creative jobs (like mine). As 2023 dawns, it seems there is no stopping the... Continue Reading →
