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 […]
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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„¢” […]
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, […]
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).
And Neil Blomkamp’s short film that later became District 9, Alive in Joburg:
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 […]
The Ballad of Serenity: The final frontier: Classic space western:
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: