SF film and television

Sandy Collora’s Hunter Prey

I have a soft spot for commercial director and filmmaker Sandy Collora‘s short and very professional fan film, Batman: Dead End. And you know I am always excited about indicators that SF filmmaking is becoming more affordable, thus leading to more of every kind of SF film. So I was excited to see this piece on io9.com interviewing Sandy about his new feature-length original film, Hunter Prey. Apparently the film — about “a crew of special forces commandos who must recapture an alien prisoner that has escaped after the military transport ship carrying it crashes on a desolate and hostile planet” — has even attracted the attention of Guillermo Del Toro. So hopefully this will lead to more and bigger things from a director who says that science fiction has the power to make you think about “things like war, politics and current events, by presenting them in situations cinematically from a uniquely different perspective. That’s one of the great things about Science Fiction; You can tell the audience something in a very unique way by using the guise of a futuristic world or society that can reflect our own.”

Sandy Collora’s Hunter Prey Read More »

Shatner on the "Machine Where You Suck in the Air with the Molecules"

Via SFSignal. On the one hand, I’m disturbed (though not surprised) that Shatner doesn’t seem to know what the teleporter is called. On the other hand, he makes a good point. The fact is, Star Trek has to ignore half the implications of its teleporter/replicator technology for the sake of drama, because the truth is that it would eliminate death entirely in just the way he understands.

Shatner on the "Machine Where You Suck in the Air with the Molecules" Read More »

Stargate: Atlantis "Whispers" & Pyr

For those who watched Stargate: Atlantis‘ episode “Whispers,” about mid-way through the episode, you may have noticed the character of Dusty reading The Martian General’s Daughter.The cover wasn’t 100 % visible in the frame, but you’ll be seeing a full, clear cover shot in a forthcoming episode. Theodore Judson’s book is reportedly part of the Atlantis book club!


A big thanks to John-Mark for the freeze frame image above.

Stargate: Atlantis "Whispers" & Pyr Read More »

Does Nostalgia Do SF a Disservice?

Over on Futurismic, Paul Raven points to a post by Ian Sales saying, “Readers new to the genre are not served well by recommendations to read Isaac Asimov, EE ‘Doc’ Smith, Robert Heinlein, or the like. Such fiction is no longer relevant, is often written with sensibilities offensive to modern readers, usually has painfully bad prose, and is mostly hard to find because it’s out of print. A better recommendation would be a current author – such as Richard Morgan, Alastair Reynolds, Iain M Banks, Ken MacLeod, Stephen Baxter, and so on.”

To which I say, “Amen.”

I was in Barnes & Noble some months back and bumped into a friend of mine with his daughter. He told me she had been assigned Fahrenheit 451 at school, to which I replied, “You poor girl. You are going to hate it. It’s about an old man whining that his wife watches too many soap operas, and nothing happens it it until the cities arbitrarily blow up at the end on cue. Please don’t think that’s the sort of thing I do for a living. Come with me.” Then I walked her over to a display of Scott Westerfeld’s Uglies books and said, “Here, this is much more representative of contemporary SF. Try this.”

I bumped into them a month later and asked how it went. I found out that, as predicted, she hated the Bradbury, but they were there so she could pick up the third book in the Uglies series. She is now an avid Westerfeld fan.

This isn’t to say that I didn’t enjoy Bradbury, or that it is not of historical importance, or that *working professionals* in the SF field and wanna-be-writers don’t have a responsibility to know their history so they don’t struggle to reinvent the wheel, but half-a-century old fiction is NOT the starting point for newbies who have never encountered the genre before. People coming in cold, particularly people coming in from positive encounters with media SF&F, ought to start with contemporary writers. When I set about to recommend books to new SF&F readers, I typically ask them what kind of films they like and then pair them on that basis. The Matrix? Try Charles Stross, Karl Schroeder, Ian McDonald, Cory Doctorow, etc… Buffy the Vampire Slayer? How about Jim Butcher, Patricia Briggs, Justina Robson. Star Wars? How about Gardner Dozois and Jonathan Strahan’s The New Space Opera, or the works of Karen Traviss? Firefly/Serenity? – Mike Resnick’s Santiago books, and his current Starship series. Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind/Being John Malkovich? Something by Jonathan Lethem, maybe As She Crawled Across the Table.

I have met so many people, who when they learn what I do, tell me “Oh, I tried science fiction once. I didn’t like it.” When I asked them what they read, they invariably say they went into the SF&F section, started at the A’s, and grabbed the first thing they recognized – Isaac Asimov. Tried it, and found it cold and dated.

Again, this is NOT to say that the enthusiast, the purest, the aficionado, the die-hard, the wanna be, the professional, the completist shouldn’t read the A,B,C’s of the Golden Age, or that those texts no longer have anything to say to us, only that if someone came to me having just seen The Bourne Ultimatum and wanted to know what contemporary spy novels he or she should read for more of the same, I wouldn’t start him or her off with Joseph Conrad’s The Secret Agent. (If they *end* up there, fine, but I wouldn’t *start* them there).

I think matching them with the analogous movie works best (produces better results than asking people what sort of “mainstream” they read), though 9 times out of 10, you’d do just as well to just hand them John Scalzi’s Old Man’s War.

Does Nostalgia Do SF a Disservice? Read More »

Thoughts on Science Fiction Film & Television

There’s a really interesting article up at Popular Mechanics right now, “Hollywood Sci-Fi’s Bronze Age: Are Comics to Blame?” by Erik Sofge. Erik runs a comparison of the SF films that were released in 1982 – Blade Runner, E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial, Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan, The Thing and Tron, and compares it to 2007’s Aliens vs. Predator: Requiem, 28 Weeks Later, I Am Legend, Fantastic Four: Rise of the Silver Surfer, The Invasion, Resident Evil: Extinction, Spider-Man 3 and Transformers. He then asks if the wealth of comic book projects isn’t gobbling up the same resources that once went to smart SF.

Now, personally, I love a well-made comic book adaptation, and I think that there’s always been loads of crap peppered with a few gems coming out of Hollywood and always will be. It wouldn’t be hard to make a list of 100 smart SF films and another list of 100 dumb ones; and the smart ones aren’t necessarily the good ones and the dumb ones not necessarily the bad ones (I love The Fifth Element!) Furthermore, the boom in effects technology, coupled with the lowered cost of same, means that the coming years are going to see more SF films than every before, smart and dumb, because the coming years are going to see more of everything than ever before. So I’m sure we’ve got some gems in the works right now, and some clunkers. And I’m not too worried about it.

Of course, Erik is right to be worried that “interest in science is at a low point in this country. Gadget and robot-related news might score high marks online, but there’s a difference between reading a blog and getting a doctorate.” Here he links to “Educator Panel: U.S. Science Needs a Sputnik-ian Wakeup Call” by Matt Sullivan, who says “ With American high school seniors performing below the international average for 21 countries in math and science…there needs to be an ambitious plan to increase awareness of scientific education.” Amen.

And you know I think more SF is good for that. In fact, the top comment on Erik’s article is:

james cameron made me a robotics engineer. i watched terminator 2 when i was 10,and it was the first time i went to a cinema.cameron rocks!!!!

Lately I’ve been considering how even the dumb stuff (and I’m not counting Terminator 2 in that category) has a role to play in inspiring people. I think that anything expansive and imaginative has benefits, even, you know, that dreadful Lucas stuff… Anything that inspires sense of wonder can inspire, right?

Of course, I have to applaud Erik when he concludes, “What’s missing from Hollywood sci-fi, and what the comic adaptations continue to smother, is a celebration of smarts. The smaller movies have them—films like Sunshine and Primer. In fiction, writers like Charles Stross are pushing the limits of the genre. Maybe next year’s Star Trek reboot will make quantum physics look cool again. And if anyone can return some credibility to science-fiction movies, it’s James Cameron, whose long-gestating Avatar (about a human remote-operating a robot on a distant, alien planet) also shows up next year.”

Again, they’ll be a lot more films like Primer coming down the pike, as it just gets cheaper and cheaper for a basic level of SF effects to be produced by the almost-average Joe. And they won’t all be from Hollywood either. I imagine there’s at least one or two mind blowing SF films being cooked up on someone’s home computer right now, if not their cellphone.

And I would point to this article from Fast Company, “Rebel Alliance,” by David Kushner. It’s about the cabal of sf fans that are revolutionizing television with their visions (quite a few of whom – like Battlestar Galactica’s Ron Moore – are very knowledgeable when it comes to literary SF.) The article is really about “transmedia” – how TV producers have to think about extending their storylines into other media such as games, comics, and online sites, but it also illustrates without calling out the fact that as movies seem to be getting sillier, television is getting better and better, richer, more “novelistic.”

And David’s article echoes my own optimism when it concludes, “The Geek Elite are well aware that they’re creating a future that may ultimately pass them by. ‘There’s someone out there who will figure out how to relate the Internet and narrative beyond my old-fashioned notions,’ [Joss] Whedon says. ‘But I think whoever cracks that is not going to be someone who’s made it huge in television. It’s going to be some guy we just don’t know about yet.'”

I, for one, can’t wait to meet ’em.


Thoughts on Science Fiction Film & Television Read More »

Scroll to Top