Ultimate Timewaster?
If you play Civilization IV for three months, your next novel will probably be late — it happened to Iain M. Banks.
He Can Say This Because He’s a Browncoat
Henry Jenkins says Snakes on a Plane might do better than Serenity, two films with comparable prerelease internet buzz, and thinks Whedon should have broken out of the broadcast media mold: “…if he had gone that route, we would have been able to enjoy many more hours of […]
SciFi and Nonexistent
A surprisingly lucid and yet still impossibly nerdy look at The Top Ten Sci-FI Films That Never Existed: “There was a movie that perfectly captured the Douglas Adams experience, the combination of bitter sarcasm and sharp imagination, the droll British wit and whale-exploding slapstick that infused his novels. […]
Making the Familiar, Alien
Christina Socorro Yovovich over at Strange Horizons on what drew her to sf: “What kept me reading science fiction was the way it made my immediate surroundings alien, too. Everywhere I looked, something familiar turned new and strange.”
Rethinking Brain Eating
If he feels vindicated, he doesn’t show it. As Marc Laidlaw waits for his co-workers to finish a talk, we sit down at a table in San Francisco’s cavernous Moscone Center and talk about Half-Life 2 (Valve, 2004). Its 1998 predecessor is legendary for pushing the form both […]
The Scientist-Hero Returns
I was a little nervous as I waited for Half-Life 2 (Vivendi, 2004) to start. The original Half-Life (Sierra, 1998) is one of the reasons this column exists — the game brought atmosphere and intelligence to the first-person shooter without skimping on the visceral kickassocity, and brought me […]
The Cultural Gutter 