New Voice. As a lifelong fan of science fiction, I’m not embarrassed to admit that sometimes the genre can fall a bit short in a couple of areas; humor and actual science. Much of the early literary sci-fi I’ve read in my life came from greats like Ray Bradbury (my all-time favorite author), H.G. Wells,…
Tag: AndyWeir
The Planetary Society celebrates a trio of space missions with “Planetfest ’21: To Mars and Back Again”…
The Planetary Society. Founded in 1980, The Planetary Society was the dream of Dr. Bruce Murray, Dr. Carl Sagan, and Dr. Louis Friedman. The three men were seeking to create a privately funded, non-profit organization devoted to the exploration of our solar system, as well as popularizing education in space science. I joined as an…
Netflix’s “Away” (2020) is all about family drama, not the final frontier…
Martian Melodrama. Bit of quick preamble; anyone who’s read this site for awhile probably knows that I am an irredeemable Mars-geek, and a sizable chunk of my book and DVD library relates to Mars, either through real-life probe findings or fictional Mars exploits. For me, the gold standard of fictional Mars missions in this past…
Why “The Martian” is the perfect film (and book) during safe-distancing and quarantine…
The COVID-19 pandemic has brought many parts of the world, including my own (sunny southern California), to a virtual standstill. My wife and I are both home right now in self-quarantine, and many conventions we’d planned to attend, such as WonderCon and others that I’d planned to cover for this site, have been indefinitely postponed or…
Nat Geo’s “Mars” warms a cold hell in its 2nd season…
Welcome to “Mars”… The first season of National Geographic channel’s new science fiction/documentary series “Mars” (based on the book “How We’ll Live On Mars” by Stephen Petranek) aired in late 2016 with six episodes telling the tale of the first group of humans to settle on the red planet. What differentiates this series from…
My personal Martian chronicles…
Discovery. A few days ago, I turned on the news to finally hear something other than scandals, angry tweets, and a world increasingly going to hell in a hand basket. There was a headline story about the planet Mars. The Curiosity rover, which landed on Mars almost 6 years ago, had discovered organic material on…
San Diego Comic Con 2017 final entry/recap…
Well, SDCC has come and gone. It’s been a lot of exhausting, sweaty, crowd-navigating fun. At age 50, it’s becoming increasingly patience-taxing at times to navigate/negotiate the formidable crowds with good humor and grace, but I wouldn’t trade it for anything. It’s Nerd-vana. And when you’re in the middle of it?…
Visions of Futures Past…
We’re a few years shy of two decades into the 21st century, and I’m a graying, spectacled, middle-aged geek who’s now living in the “future”of his childhood. And so far it’s not quite the future I imagined in my youth. Parts of it still amaze me, but the bulk of it is very underwhelming and more…
A Tale of Two Martians
In addition to science fiction, I’m also a lifelong fan of actual space science as well. Certainly “Star Wars” and “Star Trek” whetted my youthful appetite for space opera and space fantasy, but it was seeing a relatively obscure 1964 movie on late-night television when I was a kid that helped in developing a future…