Starship Fonzie

Audiobooks are a true phenomenon of today's book consumption. The ability to multitask everyday chores or a workout routine with experiencing a great book has allowed each individual the ability to be exposed to thousands of more books in their lifetime, which translates to trillions more books being consumed. For science fiction, this means more customers, more books, and more authors. Entire careers have been built on audiobook publications alone! It has also radicalized the way in which books are written. No longer are today's books esoteric or philosophical meanderings meant to be read carefully and savored, like the books of Samuel R. Delany, James Joyce or Marcel Proust. Today's books are often geared toward narration and easy listening. Authors who used to try to grab readers' attention by withholding details and revealing those details later, end up befuddling and confusing an audio listening audience instead of enthralling them. The entire literary world, incl...

A glowing review by Paul DiFilippo and a Hugo nomination prompted me to read The Vanished Birds by Simon Jiminez, which got hailed as one of the best books of the year, and one of the best first books by any author. Now that I've read it, I wonder why. The story begins with a boy named Kaeda, who works in the fields of Umbai-V as a simple farmhand living a simple life. As a boy, he meets the dark and lovely Nia Imani, who returns to the planet every 15 years with one of the many spaceships which come to collect the harvest. The boy is entranced with her, but can scarcely say why. She gives him a flute as a gift, then disappears. 15 years later, Kaeda meets Nia again. Due to the effects of "pocket" space travel, Nia has only aged 8 months, while Kaeda is now a strapping young man. Yet Kaeda has been unable to form any romantic attachments to the young women of his village due to the feelings he developed for Nia all those years ago. They make love, start a one-every-15-ye...

The rise of podcasting in the early to mid-2000's had an impact on all genres of entertainment, but particularly in science fiction. Many of today's writers built their careers on podcasting, as audible versions of books and short stories became increasingly common. Adam Curry and Dave Weiner are generally credited as being responsible for the invention of podcasting. What they did exactly is technical, and there are disputes about how exactly it was done, but it involved the creation and coding of RSS feeds. From there, it became a matter of users creating content, and consumers downloading it. By February of 2004, technologist Ben Hammersley had coined the term "podcast" for the burgeoning media form, since iPods were being used as a primary means of downloading them. New hosting services were soon founded, like Liberated Syndication, which began in October of 2004. Early sci fi podcasters centered around DragonCon in Atlanta, GA, and Balticon in Baltimore, MD. Both...

  Once Bruce Bethke’s 1983 short story coined the term “cyberpunk,” people everywhere began to find further derivations of the term “punk” to define a particular sub-genre, or even sub-sub genre. Since cyberpunk can be thought of as “high-tech, low-life,” any other punk can be thought of as “high emphasis-on-some-unique-thing, low-life to accompany it.    Steampunk was the first to do this, and so it definitely belongs to the middle-to-late portion of the Cyberpunk Era (roughly 80's and 90's). Grabbing hold of the general theme, along with the amazing appeal that it had in costuming, people ran with it the concept. Steampunk developed certain variants, such as clockpunk, dieselpunk , and Teslapunk , but on the whole, the general notion is “old tech, new twist,” and the tech is usually from the 1900’s. Some great examples might be The Difference Engine (1990) by William Gibson and Bruce Sterling. Or The Rocketeer (1991), Howl’s Moving Castle (2004), The Adventures ...

Much has been said recently about Lindsey Ellis and the strange attempts made to cancel her as of late. But she is a candidate for the Astounding Award for Best New Writer, and her novel, Axiom's End, is the reason why. It's a pretty damned good first novel, dealing with extraterrestrial first contact in a way which is fresh and new. Primarily, the book is less about first contact with an E.T., and more about the secrecy and cover-ups that result from it. Niles Ortega, an analog character to Julian Assange, and the father of Our Heroine, works to expose the cover-up and blow the story wide open. Cora Sabino, a.k.a. Our Heroine, decides to come home after an explosion from a meteor strike throws the entire office into chaos, and for that one, oh-so-heinous crime, finds she's in a shitload of trouble from her boss-mother, who got her the job. She is in no position to be targeted as the spokesperson for a runaway alien - which she somehow is. The alien breaks into their house ...

Warning: Spoilers ahead! At first, the movie seems to have it all: Chris Pratt, flawless special effects, a reluctant hero... It's the perfect rendition of a science fiction blockbuster - with one exception: It relies on the overused, worn-out, tattered cliché of a time-loop to defeat the Big Bad. Oh, no, not this shit again . Were it not for that one thing (and the movie leads off with it), I'd say this movie was a whopping big success. But not only does it rely on it, it does so in the most spectacularly disappointing way, by interrupting the key moment in a pretty good soccer match, thus cheating the team of a winning goal and a grand finish. So, not only does this do a "We interrupt this broadcast for an important news bulletin" type of trope, it does so with the messengers from the future saying, "We are you." And were I not such a die-hard sci fi fan, I would have turned the television off right then and there. And that's not even quite true. They ...

   The real champion who bridged the gap between H.G. Wells and the pulp fiction era was a man named Edgar Rice Burroughs. Known today primarily as the author of Tarzan of the Apes (1914) as well as the other Tarzan adventures, Burroughs also wrote a series of novels set on the planet Mars, to which his main character, John Carter, gentleman and adventurer from Virginia, would sometimes travel. Among every collection of science fiction should be the novels, A Princess of Mars ( 1912), The Gods of Mars (1914), and The Warlord of Mars (1918). These adventure novels excited generations of future scientists and sci-fi authors, and continues to do so even today, thanks in large part to the ultra-sexy cover artistry of Roy Krenkel, Frank Frazetta, and Michael Whelan.   An excellent modernization of Burroughs’ first Mars novel was done by an independent studio called The Asylum in 2009. Princess of Mars stars Antonio Sabato, Jr. as John Carter, and Dejah Thoris is fitting...