Books

Fighting with literal monsters is the cornerstone of not only fantastic literature, but some of the oldest stories ever. If Hercules isn’t beheading some creature, then he’s at least thinking about it. His bros Beowulf and Perseus were into that so...

Anytime a novel starts talking about “the Empire,” I don’t default to thinking of the Galactic Empire of Star Wars, but rather of the Empire in Isaac Asimov’s shared universe, found in the Foundation and Robot novels. At this point, the only th...

There’s no use ignoring the current power of nostalgia acts in popular cinema. Nearly every summer blockbuster is derivative of some existing story/franchise/universe/comic book or board game. But when it comes to a big screen version of Dark Shadows...

Contemporary television is often lauded for complicated storylines and numerous characters. We call good television with several chapters, which make up various arcs “dramas” but in many ways, popular television from Downton Abbey, to Mad Men, to B...

Easily one of the most quotable films of all time, Ghostbusters haunts the zeitgeist with its wit, originality, and almost complete perfection. For massive Ghostbusters fans like myself, the animated series, and the second film count too, but nothing w...

The long-awaited return of the popular 21st century Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson hit America tonight with the season 2 premiere of Sherlock titled “A Scandal in Belgravia.” In addition to giving us this splendid image of Benedict Cumberbatch un-i...

Last week, the new Prometheus trailer hit, and it’s fantastic. It’s gripping, original, and most of all it makes you want to see the movie if only to find out what the hell is going on. At one point someone in the trailer says “they’re changing...

Historical dramas have a lot in common with science fiction when you consider how alien/exotic the settings might seem to a contemporary audience. As a kind of squeakquel to the Arthur C. Clarke maxim; “any sufficiently advanced technology is indisti...

In addition to the official trailers, the marketing for Ridley Scott’s Prometheus has given us two “viral” videos in the form of faux-statements from Weyland Industries. Any fan of the original Alien series knows that Weyland-Yutani Industries wa...

Considering how nerdy the Tor.com offices is (we have a shrine to Dalen Quaice, for Cthulhu’s sake) we come to agreement on a bizarrely large number of things. But that’s by no means a guarantee, so when we find ourselves on opposite sides of a par...

The 2012 Pulitzer winners have been announced, and in the category of Fiction, no award was given. However, three fiction finalists were named; Train Dreams by Denis Johnson, The Pale King by David Foster Wallace, and Swamplandia! by Karen Russell. We

Though not the largest extinction in the history of our little planet, the collective death of the dinosaurs still stings. Never mind that we probably wouldn’t have evolved if they were still around nor would Jurassic Park have ever been made, the po...