Tag Archives: Science Fiction

As auteurs, the Wachowskis have some grand ideas. Trouble is, a grand idea needs excellent execution to hold it together. Too much philosophy with high scientific principles and you’ll lose the audience, not enough and the story will never make ...

This collection of critical writing on SF taps into the SF community and the debates happening around what we all love best: speculative fiction. This doesn’t just mean SF writing (though this is where the bulk of the essays are ...

I recently saw the fourth installment of George Miller’s Mad Max franchise and my review rubbed some people the wrong way. While I did thoroughly enjoy the film, I came out of the cinema feeling a little bit short-changed when ...

The trailer for Tomorrowland made it look action-packed and interesting. Sadly, the most thrilling aspects of the film are featured in the trailer almost shot for shot. The action is very limited, with the first act being slow, bumbling, and ...

Iain Banks is a very well respected and commercially successful writer. While he tends to be more widely known for his literary fiction writing under the name ‘Iain Banks’, he also wrote a number of successful science fiction novels under ...

Science fiction in general is an awesome genre to mash-up with pretty much any other genre. Actually, I defy you to come up with a scifi genre mash-up that doesn’t work (I realise this is a dangerous game to play. After challenging ...

Before I became a regular reader of the Tor.com blog, I had never heard of D Vinge’s novel The Snow Queen. More and more often I found it cropping up in articles I was reading on the site, often praised ...

Since Neill Blomkamp’s stellar debut, District 9 (2009), he has continued to be an active voice in science fiction cinema. While Elyisum (2013), with it’s heavy handed moralistic metaphors, was a disappointment (knowing Blomkamp was capable of producing so much ...

Ex Machina is the latest film by writer-director Alex Garland. It is essentially a three-piece between reclusive social media mogul Nathan (Oscar Isaacs), the A.I. Ava (Alicia Vikander) who he has built, and Caleb, an employee brought in to test ...

After seeing Ancillary Justice recommended by practically every one of my favourite authors I had to find out what all the fuss was about. Not only that, the novel has been awarded a number of prestigious awards, including the Hugo ...