Archive for the ‘Uncategorized’ Category

one potential SF reading list

Posted: 11th April 2011 by Adam in Uncategorized

A lot of you have been asking (in class, on the forum, etc.) for book/film/TV show recommendations, things that we don’t have time to get to in class or in our extra screenings.  Before the semester’s done, I plan to post a list of my own personal recommendations, and of course there’s also the SF […]

portals, portals everywhere

Posted: 11th April 2011 by Adam in Uncategorized

Portal lovers may appreciate this homemade portal gun, sold in last year’s Child’s Play charity auction (awesomely detailed post about its construction here):   And here’s an imagining of what an ’80s retro commercial for Portal might have looked like: Lastly, if you’re really digging the murderous robot/AI thread of the course, someone posted “Blinkyâ„¢” […]

on SF and “realism”

Posted: 11th April 2011 by Adam in Uncategorized

We’ve been talking a lot recently about how to understand science fiction as in some ways a “realistic” discourse, even though it seems by definition to be something else; in what ways is SF more real than what we normally think of as realism?  What kinds of real-world phenomena (race, immigration, interminable wars, the East, […]

links and miscellany

Posted: 11th April 2011 by Adam in Uncategorized

The essay I mentioned and read from in class a week or two ago, Samuel Delany’s “Racism and Science Fiction,” is available online.  It’s very much worth a read, as an attempt to think through the science fiction community’s troubled relationship to race, the odd blinders SF seems to have about some kinds of otherness […]

Because it’s too good not to post, here‘s Simon Pegg and Nick Frost’s Star Wars.  It’s worth the two and a half minutes, I promise.  CollegeHumor’s TROOPERS is also worth a shot.  “Did the forcefield just stop for a breath?” It’s all okay, though, because Han Solo was in Firefly (kind of).

seeing the other side

Posted: 29th March 2011 by Adam in Uncategorized

And Neil Blomkamp’s short film that later became District 9, Alive in Joburg:

visualizing the history of the future

Posted: 24th March 2011 by Adam in Uncategorized

“why do great nations fail?”

Posted: 17th March 2011 by Adam in Uncategorized

If China Mountain Zhang seems insufficiently science-fictional to you, remember the extent to which a lot of American discourse on China is already science-fictional, dystopian, and future-oriented (at least among a certain fear-mongering set, for whom a thriving China means a broken USA, and in whose minds the Roman empire fell apart because of deficit […]

tell ’em I ain’t comin’ back

Posted: 15th March 2011 by Adam in Uncategorized

The Ballad of Serenity: The final frontier: Classic space western:

man, machine, and a clueless Gumbel

Posted: 17th February 2011 by Adam in Uncategorized

If Wintermute wins, he/it will . . . do very well on Jeopardy?   But before there was Watson, there was The Today Show, asking the hard-hitting questions and wondering what the hell that internet thing was: