I’ve enjoyed Douglas Preston & Lincoln Child as authors in the past. The movie adaptation of Relic was probably their most notable mainstream success, but this author pairing has managed to punch out hit after hit of science-fiction meets ancient relics. They premise Indiana Jones-like stories with an FBI agent. Think Mulder meets Indy. The [...]
Continue Reading...There’s good science fiction and bad science fiction. But there’s also popcorn munching shoot ‘em ups that were born more from a video game concept than an actual storyline. Guess which column AVP: Requiem (Aliens Versus Predator 2) falls under. Yep – movie derived from the stuff that makes video games so fun to play. [...]
Continue Reading...Looks like another remake of a popular Japanese thriller (a la The Ring and The Grudge). One Missed Call looks like it could be pretty interesting. It’s supposed to come out this January. Personally, I like these types of thrillers – they’re usually pretty edge-of-the-seat (lets face it, if you’ve seen The Ring I know [...]
Continue Reading...Well, I’m always interested in finding out more about the people behind the movies that make science fiction come to life, and recently I realized that Christopher Nolan might be a screenwriter & director worth keeping a close eye on. His work so far is limited, but extraordinarily psychological. His first mainstream success was found [...]
Continue Reading...Two of the staples for the last twenty years of cinematic science fiction have been the Aliens’ and the Predators. Then came AVP (Aliens versus Predator, for those not in the “know”), and audiences everywhere walked out of the theater asking themselves, “Did that just happen?” Well, looks like we’re in for some more dueling [...]
Continue Reading...There’s science fiction and then there’s fiction about science. Artifact, by Gregory Benford, is the former. What Mr. Benford (himself a physicist) has tried to do is basically create a story around the concept of a new element and/or set of scientific standards. The story opens with a young architect, Claire, working feverishly on an [...]
Continue Reading...Well, wandering the web a little bit this morning, I stumbled across a preview for a new Will Smith movie, titled I Am Legend. Considering I’ve been a fan of a lot of Will Smith movies (and he does have a flair for science fiction: think Independence Day, Men In Black, I Robot), I decided [...]
Continue Reading...Whenever I travel, I try to take at least 1 or 2 good novels that I’ve been meaning to read or re-read, but I just took a trip where I wasn’t able to figure out what I wanted to take with me. I’ve cracked open an ancient Arthur C. Clarke book that’s sitting on my [...]
Continue Reading...Truth be told, I’m a sucker for page-turning science fiction thrillers, and almost nobody does it better than Michael Crichton. Prey was written in 2004, and features a chilling tale of nanotechnology gone awry. The story begins with Jack, a stay-at-home-dad not necessarily by choice, but by requirement. His wife, Julia, works for a startup [...]
Continue Reading...One of the authors that lies somewhere between horror / thriller and science fiction that I enjoy is Dean Koontz. I have no idea how he manages to churn out so many stories year after year, but his tales are uniformly well written, if possibly formulaic. There’s usually a hero with extraordinary powers, and almost [...]
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