Negative Space: science fiction
- Alien
- A classic space horror film directed by Ridley Scott and featuring a lot of design by H. R. Giger. The original tagline was “In Space, No One Can Hear You Scream”. Giger’s alien did a pretty good job of making sure that in the movie theater, everyone could.
- Appendix N Survey
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Jeffro at Jeffro’s Space Gaming Blog read everything on Appendix N, partly to see what influences it might have had on D&D.
- The Best of Henry Kuttner
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The Ballantine Classic Library of Science Fiction is uniformly great; but, as you might guess from the title of this blog, the Henry Kuttner volume is especially worth searching out.
- The Best of Omni Science Fiction No. 2
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I always enjoyed Omni, but, unlike its sister publication, I enjoyed it for its photos more than for the stories. It’s best, however, was not too bad, at least from 1978-1980.
- The Brother From Another Planet
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An extremely lesser-known movie, but very well directed (John Sayles) and acted (Joe Morton). It’s a movie about different worlds in a very literal as well as metaphorical sense!
- Futuristic gaming texts
- Games set in the near or far future, and information for campaigns set in the future.
- Hero World
- A very specific (and short) game where the superheroes are humans, elves, and mercurians. And galaga creatures.
- The Man Who Fell to Earth
- Woman marries illegal alien—from outer space—without realizing it. Tragedy ensues.
- The Matrix
- Wow! People are already talking about this movie as the new Star Wars, and they may not be wrong; the future will decide. It has all the right elements: action, story, mythical heroes, perhaps an overemphasis on the messiah bit, but otherwise a kick-ass movie.
- The New Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy
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The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy is upon us. And it’s coming from Apple.
- Optimistic pessimism, or utopian dystopias
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Each new year brings in a new science fiction milestone. This year, it’s George Jetson.
- The Planet Strappers
- The Archer Five came in a big packing box, bound with steel ribbons and marked, This end up—handle with care. It was delivered at a subsidized government surplus price of fifty dollars to Hendricks’ Sports and Hobbies Center, a store in Jarviston, Minnesota, that used to deal mostly in skin diving equipment, model plane kits, parts for souping up old cars, and the like. The Archer Five was a bit obsolete for the elegant U.S. Space Force boys—hence the fantastic drop in price from two thousand dollars since only last June.
- A Princess of Mars
- I am a very old man; how old I do not know. Possibly I am a hundred, possibly more; but I cannot tell because I have never aged as other men, nor do I remember any childhood. So far as I can recollect I have always been a man, a man of about thirty. I appear today as I did forty years and more ago, and yet I feel that I cannot go on living forever; that some day I shall die the real death from which there is no resurrection. I do not know why I should fear death, I who have died twice and am still alive; but yet I have the same horror of it as you who have never died, and it is because of this terror of death, I believe, that I am so convinced of my mortality.
- Ringwielder
- A shareware fantasy/science fiction game. “The Orion was built using the principles of Psycho-Manipulative Energy. During its launch a terrible accident occurred. All animal and plant life was mutated, and the inhabitants were turned into characters from literature and imagination. They awaken with their old memories erased and new ones in their place, facing a starship defense system that is definitely not friendly.”
- Robot Wars
- A freeware diceless Mecha miniatures game. “The year, 2024, There are no more armies. Disputes are settled by large scale robotic wars. These are unmanned robots built by a neutral company in Switzerland.”
- Science fiction’s anti-socialist socialists
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Why do socialist authors so often disparage socialism? From The Time Machine to Animal Farm, the best socialist dystopias are written by committed socialists.
- Skill Oriented Universal Playing System (84.3 KB)
- A freeware fantasy/science fiction game “based totally on skills”.
- To Challenge Tomorrow
- A shareware space game. Zipped.
- Women are writing science fiction!
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The never-ending and very forgetful feminist revolution cycle in science fiction.
More Information
- A Canticle for Leibowitz•
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“Canticle” is unquestionably the best story of mankind’s demise since revelation itself. Miller traverses a thousand years beyond the apocalypse, the “Flame Deluge”, as seen through the eyes of a small order of monks in the southwest desert of the United States.
- Children of Dune•
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The prescient conclusion of the Dune trilogy.
- That Hideous Strength• (paperback)
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The conclusion of C.S. Lewis’s Space Trilogy outdoes them all. (C.S. Lewis)
- The Science Fiction Hall of Fame• (paperback)
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Subtitled “The Greatest Science Fiction Stories of All Time”, it comes close if it doesn’t make it. This is the best science fiction collection I own. (Robert Silverberg)
