Category: Media
Read This: Ian Fleming’s Goldfinger
Goldfinger’s literary James Bond has an internal ambivilence that many of the big screen Bond’s ignore. While both books and films have reveled in plot twists and gagetry, Ian Fleming fleshed out his character in a way that only the last three films (and I am certain Spectre, too) have begun to seriously tap in to.
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Read This: Something Wicked This Way Comes
Ray Bradbury’s iconic October novel, Something Wicked This Way Comes, taps into the sadness and longing that lurks behind what frightens us.
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Watch This: Tales From the Darkside
George A. Romero’s Tales From the Darkside, in first-run syndication from 1983-1988, was part of a great eighties revival of horror/weird anthology TV. The format lent itself to clever, twisted half-hour stories made on the cheap with low-tech special effects and great enthusiasm.
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NYCC 2015: A Nerd In the Crowd
As a fan without a specific focus, I did my best to show up with few preconceived expectations and a willingness to learn what the NYCC is all about. I got there nice and early, and was pleased to find the line to enter moving quickly. And by noon, the venue was packed.
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Read This: Pontypool Changes Everything
Tony Burgess’s Pontypool Changes Everything is an unusual entry in the zombie novel field. In it, the danger of zombiehood comes though the corruption and failure of language, and Burgess creates a great deal of mayhem without splattering everything in sight.
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The Visit: Worth Stopping By
The Visit is quite an effective little horror film about two children meeting their grandparents for the first time. It relies on nothing but finely-tuned acting and sharp camera work to make it scary. And it was—I jumped, I flinched, I gasped in shocked surprise. Is it derivative? Absolutely. Is it predictable? Frequently. Is it scary? Yes, indeed.
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Read This: Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?
It is assumed that the androids of Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?’s dwindling Earth have their own desires and motivations, and are all but impossible to tell from natural humans without highly specialized empathy tests. In this world, it is not the androids’ ability to be self-aware that defines the difference, but their inability to feel for anyone but themselves. Or so the humans believe.
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Musings on “In the Walls of Eryx”
The popular focus on H.P. Lovecraft has long been on his Cthulhu Mythos. “In the Walls of Eryx” stands apart from that particularly haunted universe. Instead, its universe is a bit closer to home.
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Read This: Emergence
I first read Emergence, by David R. Palmer, in the magazine Analog back in 1981. I was thrilled with it then. The protagonist, Candy Smith-Foster, all of eleven years old, was a self-described plucky female adventurer taking on a depopulated post-apocalypse world with the help of her hyacinthine macaw companion. How could I not be thrilled?
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Read This: Dune
It is hard to believe it has been fifty years since Frank Herbert’s Hugo and Nebula award-winning Dune was published in August, 1965. The novel, and its titular planet, are still as vast and imposing as when they were new. Dune is space opera at its finest, a grand sweep of empire and conquest.
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