Recent posts tagged Science Fiction Repair Shop
2023
12 Monkeys
Terry Gilliam's paranoid time-travel labyrinth is less an SF film than a story of the fear of madness, but no less powerful for it
The Unasked And Unseen Questions
Science fiction and fantasy are like any other fictional mode: they're only as good as the presumptions brought to them.
2022
Labels, Labels, Labels
I don't particularly care if my SF is hard, soft, or mushy; I care whether or not I give a darn about who's in it and what happens.
Fantfacy [sic]
On the presence of inarticulate, inexpressive prose -- "Engfish" -- in SF&F.
The Fine Art Of The Center-Eligible Play And Other Cheats
On cheating in a work of fantasy or SF.
Wave A Wand And We Got The Bomb
Most fantasy stories never confront the idea that magic would have the social impact of the atomic bomb.
Looking Onto Other Pages
"When everyone in the community reads the same books, you can an inward-looking, intellectually impoverished community that can only contemplate its own navel."
Here, Now, Nowhere
On using Zen Buddhist notions of time in writing SF&F.
Knots Within Knots
The job of a storyteller should not be to make things complex, but to find common threads in complex things. Doubly so in SF&F.
Arrival
An actual SF movie, not just a tarted-up shoot-'em-up, both because of the breadth of its ideas and how they are lovingly personalized.
2021
Moving Parts Grind The Gears
On the balance between a story with too many rules and not enough.
The Future Is A Hodgepodge
If there is a "throughline" for our moment in time, it's not something that condenses itself down to the kind of overarching planning found in fiction.
Dune (1984) [2021 review]
The mere fact that David Lynch's Dune was made at all, and in the Hollywood of the early 1980s to boot, is something of a miracle. Would that it was a better adaptation of the source material, or just a better movie, period.
Fringe Benefits
In a field that's trend-driven, all the most interesting and truly groundbreaking work can only come from the fringes.
Pi
Darren Aronofsky's ingenious micro-budget debut, twenty-plus years later, holds up better than some of his bigger-budgeted efforts
Untold Influences (2021 Edition)
The books that made me -- specifically, the SF and fantasy books.
The Longest Possible Now
Near-future SF has always struck me as the most precarious kind of SF, because of its sell-by date.
I Love Maria
A kooky example of science fiction from Hong Kong, a cinematic world that has relatively little SF to begin with.
The Matrix
Twenty years later, the Wachowskis' digital fable still stands tall, outliving the slickness of the moment and attempts to misappropriate it
Larger Than Life And Twice As Unreal
How not all fiction has to be "realistic" to be affective, and how new aesthetic standards can follow from that.
Something Old, Something New, Something Borrowed, Something Else
Why not propose something truly new, instead of just taking the old and rejugging it?
Why The Force Isn't With Me Anymore
I didn't leave Star Wars. Star Wars left me. And not in the way you might think.
Getting It From Somewhere Else
On how new influences keep every kind of art healthy, including and especially popular arts.
Tenet
At the end of the day, it's just a fancy excuse to shoot a bunch of scenes in reverse.
An Amiable Chaos
How science fiction and fantasy stories live and die by their technical details, for both better and worse.
