Starship Fonzie

There's nothing quite like a great new sci fi series, and Three Body Problem, based on the Hugo-Award-winning novel by Liu Cixin, is one of the best to be found out there. The show was created, in part, by David Benioff and D.B. Weiss, who are best known for creating HBO's Game of Thrones. As such, they brought some key actors from Game of Thrones along with them to this project: Liam Cunningham, who played Davos Seaworth (the Onion Knight), and John Bradley (sometimes John Bradley West), who played Jon Snow's timid friend, Samwell Tarley. The plot originates with the Cultural Revolution in China under Mao Tsedong in the mid 1970's. A young woman named Ye Wenjie, a brilliant physicist, witnesses her parents being presented before an angry mob for the "crime" of espousing scientific ideas which run afoul of the official Chinese Party line. For example, her father taught students about the Big Bang theory at university, which (they say) strongly implies the exis

Poor things is now available for streaming on Hulu, and as such, I finally got around to seeing it this past week. It's a rollicking rewrite of the Frankenstein mythos, set in a steampunk, alternate late-1800's Britain. It stars Emma Stone, Willem Dafoe, and Mark Ruffalo, thus giving it two local acting heroes, as Dafoe, an Appleton native, played in Milwaukee's avant garde theater districts before moving to New York, and Ruffalo originally hails from Kenosha, WI. The film is based on a novel of the same name, originally written by Alasdair Grey. The story begins with a suicide. A pregnant woman whose name we don't know (at least, not at first), throws herself from a bridge into icy, cold water. Her body washes up on an embankment, remarkably well preserved. It is chanced upon by an eccentric scientist named Dr. Godwin Baxter (Dafoe), who loves nothing more than dissecting cadavers, and is looking forward to testing a new re-animation technique. He realizes that the mo

Greetings, all my fellow Milwookies, homo-sapiens, and all other sentient lifeforms of the Planet Earth. This is Starship Fonzie, the official podcast of the Milwaukee Science Fiction and Fantasy League. I’m your host, Eric J. Hildeman, and we’re going to let you know what’s going on in the world of sci fi in Milwaukee, and in the SFF world generally. This podcast is being pre-recorded live from the Imperial Palace on Arrakis, where Paul Atreides is about to face off with Feyd Rautha in a duel. Actually, it's coming to you from Milwaukee, Wisconsin, or as the rest of the world knows it, the site of the Republican National Convention this summer. That’s going to be a big event. Disastrous, but a big event. I think overall, this will be good for Milwaukee’s economy, and bad for its overall mental health. There’s going to be protests, there are going to be counter-protests, its gonna be a lot. But have you seen Dune Part 2? If not, go see it. It’s time VERY well spent. Welcome to the

At first, the premise sounds a little silly. It's long been speculated that intelligent life would have arisen among dinosaurs had a meteor impact not wiped them out. So what if intelligent life did , in fact, arise among dino-like reptiles? That's the basic idea behind Robert J. Sawyer's book, Far-Seer . It follows the adventures of Afsan - a dino-like version of Galileo - who uses a "far-seer" (a kind of early telescope) to work out that their world was not at the center of their solar system. But this is not the Planet Earth! This world is a moon orbiting a Jovian gas-giant in an entirely different solar system. What's more, it is tidally locked, so that the one, lone continent is always on the far side. (That would mean there would have to be a large concentration of iron, off-center from the core, or else the continents would always face the planet, but Sawyer doesn't go into that.) In order for these technology-weilding dinos (known as Quintaglios

It's time to list out nomination recommendations for each category for the Hugos. I'm a little late in doing so this year because I'm way behind in my short story reading, and that's not likely to change very soon. As always, I reserve the right to change my mind. So, with that asterisk clearly marked, here are my recommendations for this year: Astounding Award for Best New Writer The one name on this list that truly leaps out at me is Ai Jiang. Her book, "I Am Ai," was a prototypical cyberpunk novelette that really impressed me. She's already won the Ignyte Award for her poetry, and been nominated for a Nebula Award and a Locus Award. Naseem Jamnia is also a name which stands out, and who I've mentioned before. Her book The Bruising of Quilwa was a huge hit with critics. Other writers that stand out for me include Victor Forna , who has an impressive list of writing credits, Thea Guanzon whose novel The Hurricane Wars is a New York Times Bestsell