Science Fiction

BBC’s Excellent “Life on Mars”

January 8, 2008
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BBC’s Excellent “Life on Mars”

My favorite BBC programming has always been its mystery series, and the best of those are not the ones that mimic American programs but those that have the most British feel to them.   Unfortunately, the BBC has almost fully assimilated former Prime Minister Tony Blair’s "Cool Britannia" notion, turning the government media service into a bastion of vulgar flash and nonsense designed to appeal to sex-addled teenagers of all ages. Hence it’s a happy day any time the BBC accidentally puts out one of its increasingly rare programs of intelligent and sensible entertainment. Life on Mars is just such a one and is not to be missed.

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Golden Compass Sliding Outside U.S.

December 24, 2007
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Golden Compass Sliding Outside U.S.

Planned sequels to failed pro-atheism children’s film are increasingly unlikely.  The controversial children’s film The Golden Compass, which has accomplished only very weak box office appeal in the United States, has fallen off in foreign appeal as well, landing in second this past weekend, behind I Am Legend. The Golden Compass has earned $130 million in non-U.S. markets and is fading. None of this foreign money will go to the studio that made the film, New Line, because the company sold off the foreign rights a couple of years ago in order to raise enough money to produce and market the film. It has earned only $48 million in the United States since opening three weekends ago. As a result of the poor U.S. showing, it is unlikely that any sequels will be made.

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“Golden Compass” Movie Opens Today

December 7, 2007
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“Golden Compass” Movie Opens Today

The controversial fantasy film The Golden Compass opens today in theaters across the United States. With a production budget reported to be in the $150 million range, the film will have to sell a boatload of tickets in the United States and abroad if the investors are to get any return on their money—and the controversy over the film’s origins in the first novel of an openly atheistic trilogy of books does not help things from their perspective.

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Master Storyteller

September 28, 2007
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Master Storyteller

Critic John J. Miller has published a very informative interview with Robert E. Howard scholar Rusty Burke on National Review Online, which merits attention. The excerpts below provide a good sense of why the underappreciated writer of the Conan the Barbarian stories deserves more consideration. Howard wrote for the pulps in a variety of genres, and modern-day readers are rediscovering his non-Conan writings and realizing that he was above all a master storyteller. Particularly praiseworthy is Burke’s emphasis on the importance of story in narrative fiction, which reflects criticisms made in the prior century by G. K. Chesterton, C. S. Lewis, J. R. R. Tolkien, and other such luminaries:

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ABC to Present “Masters of Science Fiction”

August 2, 2007
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ABC to Present “Masters of Science Fiction”

I’m not a big fan of science fiction, but this sounds interesting (from AP): a limited series of adaptations of short stories, offered in August by ABC. In some ways, this is pretty amazing stuff: material from top-flight authors like Robert Heinlein and Harlan Ellison, directed by well-known directors like Mark Rydell ("On Golden Pond") and Michael Tolkin ("The Player"), with actors like Sam Waterston, Judy Davis, Brian Dennehy, Anne Heche and Malcolm McDowell. . . .

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The Admirable Conciseness of Fantastic Four: Rise of the Silver Surfer

June 23, 2007
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The Admirable Conciseness of Fantastic Four: Rise of the Silver Surfer

  Fantastic Four: Rise of the Silver Surfer topped the U.S. box office during the past week, performing very well at the box office while garnering generally negative reviews. The audiences are right on this one (as usual).

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More on Lord Darcy

March 7, 2007
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Matthew Bowman of Christendom College posted a very interesting comment on my article on Randall Garrett’s Lord Darcy tales, which I think adds some value to the discussion. Matthew’s comment indicates some reasons why the stories are so interesting, and suggests that a renaissance of interest in them is possible. Here is Matthew’s comment: Well, I have to say you’ve got good taste in fiction. I only read Lord Darcy for the first time at the tail end of last summer, as I was getting ready for the new semester at college. I’d first heard about it from my father, thouh only iin very vague terms — basically just "alternate universe where magic is used to solve crimes." Years later, following some "you’d probably like this links" on Amazon, I came across a book that sounded good. Noticing it was a Baen book, I immediately switched over to Baen.com to read the sample chapters. The first story blew me away. It not only sounded like the story my father had alluded to years before but couldn’t remember the title of, it was also a fantasy story with a strong base in Roman Catholicsm. (I later found out that Randall Garrett

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Can We Judge Literature?

November 29, 2006
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I stirred up some concerns among PKD fans with my Philip K. Dick article, which was cross-posted at The Reform Club site. Francis Poretto commented thoughtfully there, suggesting that there is no way to discern true greatness in a writer. After stating, "For my money, a great writer is one who inspires me to great emotion," Francis asks, "How shall I judge Dick, or any writer, great, even if permitted to use my criterion?" It’s a fair question, and one that I implicitly answered in my original comment on PKD. Francis correctly observes that a numerical analysis of how a particular author measures up to an individual’s chosen standards is impossible. Hence, he suggests, it’s silly to engage in such discussions. "I think you can see where this is going," he concludes. I can indeed see where that is going, and I am rather surprised to see someone who is most decidedly not a philosophical relativist taking the position Francis is staking out in regard to literature. Certainly it’s true that we cannot hope to judge the quality of literary works and the overall achievements of their authors by some sort of quantitative analysis, but that is absolutely not the

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Philip K. Dick Canonized

November 28, 2006
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It’s official: Philip K. Dick is a great writer, according to the Library of America. As the Galley Cat at Media Bistro reports: Buried at the tail end of Mark Sarvas’s interview with Jonathan Lethem comes news of one project on the novelist’s plate: "I’m helping preside over the utter and irreversible canonization of one of my (formerly outsider) heroes, Philip K. Dick: I’m writing endnotes for The Library of America, which is doing a volume of four of his novels from the sixties, which I also helped select." I suppose that if Dashiell Hammett, Raymond Chandler, and H. P. Lovecraft are great writers, then Dick is too. But in my view, this event is most important as further evidence of how poor the mainstream American novel was during the previous century. Solid but unspectactular and fairly uninsightful genre authors (though this last limitation does not apply to Dick) are touted as among the best the nation had to offer, and this is true because the mainstream novelists were so often confused, self-important, and wrongheaded. A good many of Philip K. Dick’s books and stories are well worth reading, but he really worked largely on frankly pulp material. His great

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Deja Vu and Time Travel Fiction

November 22, 2006
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Deja Vu and Time Travel Fiction

  Two time travel movies are premiering today, and a none of those astounding mysteries of the universe that Hollywood creates every couple of months. Tony Scott’s Deja Vu (directed with his usual great skill and creativity) is the bigger-budgeted and promoted film, and will probably do well at the box office. Darren Arnofsky’s The Fountain promises to be a bit quirkier and probably won’t make as much money but might obtain more critical accolades. Time travel fictions are certainly interesting and have been around for a long time. Peter Suderman suggests, in National Review Online, that their appeal is based on a natural human obsession with mortality, which time travel naturally brings to the fore. I can’t say I agree that human mortality is a special interest in time travel fictions, given that pretty much any narrative has a good deal to do with human mortality. I think that the real appeal of time travel is in the possibility of changing things—time travel is the ultimate power trip. We’ve all done things we wish we hadn’t, and failed to do things we wish we had. (Cf. the Lutheran rite of confession and absolution.) And we’ve all experienced things that

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Lord Darcy Online

October 25, 2006
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Lord Darcy Online

I have some good news for you regarding Randall Garrett’s Lord Darcy mysteries, which I highly recommend for a bit of fun and somewhat meaningful reading—see article here and excerpts from that article below. The good news is that two complete Lord Darcy stories (novellas, really) are available online, at the site for Baen Books, the publisher of the Lord Darcy omnibus collection. The Darcy mysteries were written in the 1960s and ’70s and are set in an alternative twentieth century in which the Reformation never happened, the rules of magic were discovered during the Middle Ages, and technology has not advanced beyond the mid-nineteenth century. The stories (and one novel) combine dashing adventure, real fair-play puzzle mysteries, a world where magic is real but bound by definite rules, and some lightly presented insights into the human condition. To read the stories on the Baen website, click here. Once you read them, you will want to read them all.  For more info on Lord Darcy and why you might want to read Randall Garrett’s delightful series, click here for my National Review Online essay on the subject. To buy a copy of the trade paperback edition, click here. Here’s some more info on Lord Darcy, from my National Review Online essay on

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The Devil Went Down to the Multiplex

August 19, 2006
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The first installment of Philip Pullman’s anti-Christian, pro-"Lucifer" children’s saga His Dark Materials is coming to the silver screen. New Line will produce The Golden Compass, based on the first of the trilogy of young-adult novels, with shooting scheduled to commence on September 4 in the UK. New James Bond Daniel Craig will star as Lord Asriel, in a cast that also includes Nicole Kidman. New Line is the company that produced the Lord of the Rings film trilogy.  

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Newswire

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In U.S., Nearly Half Identify as Economically Conservative

Bald Eagles Fall to Green Energy

Phillips: Movin' Out

‘American Idol’ Posts Lowest-Rated Finale Ever

Phillip Phillips is the new 'American Idol'

Cooling Global Warm-Mongers

Boy Jesus, Big Screen: Anne Rice's 'Christ the Lord' to be Made into a Movie

Ross Douthat: What Has Jerusalem To Do With Athens?

Is TV Destroying U.S.?

Confessions of an Atheist Darwin-Doubter

Secularization and Christian Institutions

Biggest Religious Lawsuit in U.S. History Launched, Liberal Evening News Shows Ignore It

Government is Force!: Why individual rights demand limited government and constitutional democracy

A New Dark Age

Media Works To Suppress Obama 'Born in Kenya' Bio

"Freedom's Forge" tells the story of how U.S. business leaders were mobilized to build ships, tanks and weapons faster and better than the enemy, to win World War II

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