Living Large in Smallville

Somebody saaaaaave me. I’ve become thoroughly addicted to Smallville, the TV show about the teenage years and early manhood of Superman. I didn’t watch it when it was actually running, but now it’s over I’ve decided to watch all ten damn seasons. The teen drama and endless angsting kind of gets on my nerves. I [...]

Pirates and Bounty Hunters…In Spaaaaace.

Do you know that game when, after eating your Chinese food, you open up your fortune cookie and read it, then add “in bed” to the end of it? My most recent one? “Hard work will get you wherever you want to go…in bed.” Hmm. I don’t know if I want my funtimes between the [...]

Back to the Future: Past and Present

The time has finally come when my kids are now old enough to watch some classic sci-fi movies that were favorites of mine when I was a kid. We usually do a family movie night on Saturdays and they’ve become so much more enjoyable for me now we don’t have to be quite so strict [...]

Kurt Vonnegut and I

This is a sad story. It’s about a very greedy girl – me. Once upon a time I was unemployed and, having applied for gazillions of jobs, I was waiting for one of them to call me for an interview. While waiting I decided it was time to read the much-lauded Slaughterhouse Five by Kurt [...]

Race in Space: A Question

I’ve recently been involved in a few discussions regarding race in science fiction. The majority of the science fiction I’ve read in my four plus decades almost always featured white, male protagonists. It’s only in more recent years that I’ve been able to find more diversity – women and characters of different races. My own [...]

A Novella Renaissance?

  Since I received a Kindle for Christmas last year I think I may have read more novellas in that short time than in all the years previously. And that’s not to say I was a slouch with reading them before. Orwell and Steinbeck are two of my favorite authors and they both wrote novellas [...]

Servalan: Queen of Villains

A few months ago I blogged about some of my favorite sci-fi shows I saw on British TV when I was kid. One of those mentioned was Blake’s 7. This was my favorite of them all and my memories of this show has continued to inspire me as a writer. I’ve previously shared, in this [...]

Until The End Of The World

‘Until The End Of The World’ is a 1991 film directed by Wim Wenders and starring Sam Neill, William Hurt and the late Solveig Dommartin, with supporting performances from Jeanne Moreau and Max von Sydow. Hell of a cast, huh?   Mostly a critical and commercial failure at the time of its release it has [...]

The Women of Flash Gordon: The Movie

I recently re-watched Flash Gordon: The Movie, that campy, colorful movie from 1980, and was surprised by how much I enjoyed it. I originally saw it on the big screen and remember being annoyed at what I perceived as one of my favorite TV serials being made fun of. The 1936 version, starring bottle-blonde bombshell, [...]

World Building: Camping in the Future

Writers – you can’t take them anywhere, really. At some point – no matter how much fun they might be having – their eyes start to glaze over and when you ask them where they’ve gone, they just mumble something about thinking. This happened to me when camping this weekend. We had a very rainy [...]