There are people within our time that just can see way ahead in the future and do some genius predictions, even though normally they end up wrong on the time frame. Take Phillip K. Dick and his androids from “Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?” that later became Blade Runner. The technology is right, if there weren’t any moral restraints on our cientists, but the timing is wrong. Arthur C. Clarke was a futurist. He loved to try and predict what would mankind be doing […]
The only rival to the cold detachment of science is the cold detachment of Arthur C. Clarke
Years ago, while still in college, my girlfriend and I went on a year-long Star Trek binge by renting all of The Next Generation, Deep Space 9, and Voyager from Netflix. One night, after watching a few episodes, I went outside to put the disc (this was before Netflix was predominantly a streaming service) in the mailbox, and noticed the night sky emblazoned by a full moon. I stood beneath the pristine glow of that autumnal moon and pondered our place in the universe. I […]
In pain of a heart forbade to fly. But you learn to say goodbye.
I knew very little about this book going into it other than it was considered to be a Science Fiction classic and that SyFy recently produced a miniseries adaptation of it. When it popped up on sale for $1.99 on Kindle shortly after that, I figured it would be a good time to fill in some of the gaps in my SciFi reading (long story short. My parents were SciFi nerds. I rebelled by being a horror/true crime fanatic). I’m glad I waited until I […]
Do Androids Dream of … Revenge?
With this 2013 novel, Ann Leckie has won the Nebula, Arthur C. Clarke and, as of last week, Hugo awards, and has been nominated for the Philip K. Dick award. Ancillary Justice has a complex, fascinating plot and in its protagonist a kickass corpse soldier. I picked up the book because the author is a woman (serves my quest to read 50 books by 50 women this year) and it has won so many prestigious awards. I’m often wary of Sci Fi — it’s not […]