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“He Has Walled Me In”: New Short Story

Tired of waiting for the sequel to In the Shadow of Ares? Wondering when or if we’ll ever be done with it? (We will, still working on it.) Well, here’s a little something to tide you over: “He Has Walled Me In”

Leon Toa sets out on what for any other Martian settler would be […]

Re-Reading Some SF Classics

I just finished re-reading Dune for perhaps the fourth time, and am about two-thirds of the way through Footfall for I think only the second time. Both are good, of course, but they seem to have held up in different ways over the years.

I think the last time I read Dune was around 2003, […]

“Oblivion”: More Clever Than I Expected

Like many Tom Cruise vehicles of late, Oblivion seems to have come and gone with little fanfare. Indeed, I was surprised to see the DVD on a stand at the grocery store last week – I didn’t know it had already come out and been (ironically) consigned to its titular state.

Which is unfortunate, because […]

Movie Review: “Elysium”, “Europa Report”

Sharlto Copley is a South African actor who first came to prominence in 2009, in director Neil Blomkamp’s excellent District 9, a tour-de-force of relatively low-budget, indie science fiction film-making. This weekend, Copley came to American theaters in two new films: Blomkamp’s big-budget follow up, Elysium, which stars Matt Damon, and in the indie film […]

Advanced Robotics

So, who thinks Carl and I were too sporty with the diggers and other robots in In the Shadow of Ares?

The humanoid robots are a little creepy in an uncanny valley way, but quite impressive for what they can do if even part of it is autonomous (it looks to me like the […]

Mars on Iceland, v2.0

Thanks to a cheap promotional airfare and some friends willing to go on a weekend trip to the Arctic north, in the winter, on a lark, I now know what Iceland looks like in the dark.

Something like this…

…which reminded me of the agricultural bubbles at the Green in In the Shadow of […]

Post-Election Prognostications

Bruce Webster is making some: The coming liberal meltdown.

Interesting. Plausible. Maybe or maybe not likely — who knows?

What I liked about his post was the element of prognostication from current trends and social/political circumstances, and how it resembles what Carl and I have been doing for the backstory for In the Shadow of […]

“The World Is Sick, and We Are the Doctors”

I managed to get in on the Colorado Springs showing of “Iron Sky” last night.

I won’t say it’s the best movie I’ve ever seen, but it certainly had a lot going for it.

First off, the bad:

The dialogue was a little klunky through most of the movie, but once you allow for […]

Prometheus (No, Not *That* Prometheus)

I haven’t seen it on the lfs.org website yet, but word is that In the Shadow of Ares did not win this year’s Prometheus Award.

But that’s okay. I didn’t really expect to win given who we were up against, and I’m thrilled that we were among the finalists – I never expected to get […]

Killer Weeds, Pt. 2

I finished The Day of the Triffids on the flight to Krakow on Sunday, and I have to say that Wyndham managed to keep up the quality right until the end. The twist involving Josella should have been pretty obvious, in hindsight, but surprised me anyway given Bill’s fixation with finding the group from the […]