Books

Another week, another televisual corpse to dissect. This time, I’ll stick the scalpel in the fascinating, frustrating world of Earth2, a show that—with a little more luck and a few different choices—could have been big time. I mean that s...

When I first took up this Rewatch-in-One series I knew that there would be a variety of reasons for cancellation of shows. Some were just bad to begin with. Some suffered from poor programming or marketing decisions. Some had writing or acting issues. ...

Simon MacCorkindale. What a truly splendid name. Say it when you feel sad. Simon MacCorkindale. There’s a smile built right in! This jaunty name reminds one of Eddie Izzard’s alternatives to Jerry Dorsey. I believe it remained unchallenged in the r...

Full disclosure: This is only kinda-sorta a rewatch. I had never heard of The Middleman (or the graphic novel that spawned it) before my intro to the rewatch-in-one series. The name came up so many times in the comments that I just had to check it out....

A supermodel dabbling in dark magic curses her competition, plucking them off one at a time, only to be foiled and locked away. An episode of Buffy the Vampire Slayer? No, that was cheerleaders, not models. A mysterious creature devoures zoo animals’...

Imagine this meeting. Screenwriters Carlton Cuse and Jeffrey Boam pitch a series idea to producers. “An airplane crashes onto a bizarre island,” Cuse says. “There’s science fiction and romance and fantasy and big stunts and ghostly appearances ...

Whenever a story pits an individual against an amorphous authority, it’s bound to be described as Orwellian or Kafkaesque. Seldom, however, does the intelligence of the work in question really merit these designations. The Prisoner is one of the few ...

I wonder if a few years ago, when Tor.com first launched, the folks who put the site together knew that rereads and rewatches would be such a big part of the experience. These rereads/views vary in length and depth of analysis, but what they have in co...

“The full moon brings out the monster in you. / A strange tune seems to be playing for you. / Could you be someone’s invention, so unreal as you feel tonight? / Did you sell your soul to the devil at that monster party last night?”Imagine an...

I hold a special fondness for poems and stories that bridge oral tradition and literature. I think it was in that switch, from oral to written, that fantasy as a literary form was born. Such works — the Panchatantra, Epic of Gilga...

When I was a young kid, 5 or 6 years old, I would sometimes get insomnia and watch movies very late at night. These are, naturally, not the movies little kids should be watching. For the most part I don’t think it did me any harm to see the occasiona...

In Voltaire’s Micromegas, a gargantuan visitor to Earth says that in his home world there are 39 primary colors and 1,000 senses. Ever since Voltaire (though not due to him) extra senses have cropped up throughout science fiction, fantasy and comics....