Revisiting “The Martian Chronicles” TV miniseries…

Mars: Warm Fiction vs. Cold Reality.  I have been a Mars fanatic since the age of 9, when the twin Viking spacecraft first touched down on the Red Planet in the summer of 1976.  Mars has long been a theater for humanity’s collective imagination, a strange realm largely the domain of science fiction.  Viking made…

My long relationship with science-fiction television…

The way it was. When I was a kid there was an emergent wave of science fiction and fantasy films in the multiplexes.  “Star Wars,” “Close Encounters of the Third Kind” and “Superman: The Movie,” as well as countless lesser-quality imitators of each, such as “Starcrash” (an exceptionally awful movie), “Hangar 18” (a dumbed-down “X-Files”…