Doing a comic book adaptation of a novel must be a huge undertaking. There’s an awful lot of content crammed into a novel’s pages, much of which is subtle and doesn’t necessarily fit well with graphic representation and limited dialogue/text ...
Read More »Assassin’s Creed: We work in the dark to serve the light
Well, it wasn’t as bad as I thought it was going to be. That’s something. Video game films have a bad reputation. They are often light on plot and character development. If they are one of the better entries, they ...
Read More »The art of writing a book series
Having been racing my way through many SFF book series, I started to note the differences amongst how they approach certain issues of construction – how they deal with the continuing story, individual novels as part of a larger whole, and ...
Read More »Waking Hell by Al Robertson
One of the perils of being a book reviewer is accepting an author review copy of a book in a series when the book is not the first in the series. If you have no prior knowledge of the series ...
Read More »Do andriods dream of Tom Cruise in glitter?
Within three years, Ridley Scott created one of the best science fiction films of all time and one of the worst fantasy films. How did this happen? What was he thinking? And why was Legend (1985) so awful? When the ...
Read More »How Westworld broke out from Game of Thrones’ shadow
I’ve seen a number of recent articles discussing Westworld, asking whether or not it can ‘do for science fiction what Game of Thrones did for fantasy’. The idea being that Game of Thrones brought the fantasy genre into the mainstream ...
Read More »Arrival: What is your purpose?
The best science fiction is philosophical and thought provoking. I don’t mean to suggest that good science fiction has to be as mind-numbingly slow and boring as 2001: A Space Odyssey, but really good scifi is rarely just explosions and ...
Read More »Sexually charged feminine villainy in SFF
From witches to succubi to super-powered femme fatales, female villains in SFF have long been defined by their sexuality. With skimpy outfits and powers derived from their sexuality or used to enhance their sexual attractiveness, these villainous women seem incapable ...
Read More »Nostalgic Impulse: The Man Who Fell to Earth
This hasn’t been a good year for me. Two of my idols have died (Prince and Bowie). If there can be a silver lining to the death of an admired genius, it’s that Bowie’s films are being remastered, The Man ...
Read More »Revenger by Alastair Reynolds
No matter how many books I read, I never manage to stop judging books by their covers. After all, that’s the purpose of a cover, setting the expectations of the reader. I saw the cover of Revenger and I thought ‘Yes, ...
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