Due to my own cartoonish ham-handed-ness in accidentally erasing the site’s content directory and database, I’ve had to restore the site from a backup taken yesterday. Any comments posted since then are probably lost forever, and will be replaced by comments on this post about how silly David is for doing such a thing.
Category Archives: B42 Site News
Halloween Podcast – “Alien (1979)”
This is the first of five weekly podcasts discussing horror movies for the Halloween season. All will contain spoilers. This week it’s Alien (1979), followed next week by Aliens (1986), then Frankenstein (1931), Lifeforce (1985) and finally The Thing (1982) on October 31. All five films were contenders in our recent Greatest Science Fiction Films Tournament.
Mwahaha! But we’ll also have our annual print reviews of scaaaaaaaaaaary, suspenseful, and Fall-friendly films, including:
Book Review: Homeland
The sequel to Little Brother, Cory Doctorow’s YA-novel-as-technonerd/hactavist-primer, boasts many of its predecessor’s merits– and far too many of its flaws.
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But will they think he shaved to beat Meth tests?
The net is abuzz with claims that Breaking Bad‘s Bryan Cranston will play Lex Luthor in an uncertain number of DC-inspired films.
Keep Watching the Skies!
NASA will reactivate a mothballed telescope and use it to search for earth-threatening asteroids.
Amazing pictures of space, and more Toronto Fan Expo, below:
Movie Discussion– Mortal Instruments: City of Bones
Any thoughts on this adaptation of the adult-friendly YA novels?
You chose our TV tournament’s format
The format of the Greatest Science Fiction Film Tournament has been chosen by you guys, the readers. The results can be seen in detail here. We will not break the tournament down by season or episode, looking only at whole series. As before, Bureau 42 authors will come up with a starter list of shows, and wildcards can be submitted by the voters. The tournament will still be 42 weeks. The only real difference between this and the movie tournaments are in scale (half as many titles to start with, so that “round one” will have 8 movies per week instead of 16) and the use of mandatory unique identifiers to provide more statistical analysis. (Those identifiers can be anything provided it won’t be duplicated, and they won’t be seen publicly. They’ll be used solely to correlate votes from a single voter across multiple weeks. With sufficient statistics, we may turn it into a recommendations engine, so that we’ll have a sidebar that lets you say “I like A, B and C, what else should I check out?” and get useful answers.) Once we assemble the starting list of titles, we’ll post a start date for the tournament and get the ball rolling.
Novel Review: The Shambling Guide to New York City
Mur Lafferty has established herself as geek and podcaster and scribe and many people anticipated her first novel. In several places, she cites Douglas Adams as her influence, and some consider Shambling Guide a Hitchhiker’s Guide take on urban fantasy….
Movie Discussion: Kick-Ass 2
If you have thoughts and reviews of Kick-Ass 2, here’s the place for’em.
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So, can people turn invisible and fly through space now?
A lab accident produces impossible material.
Poor timing on the name
A space firm, Elysium will send you into space! Burial in space has never been this affordable.
But will they look like the colonies in old episodes of Star Trek?
More about near-future asteroid mining.
This will look like episodes of Cowboy Bebop:
FUNimation has licensed several anime series, including Cowboy Bebop, for release. Coming soon in Hi-Def.
Avoid Rush Hour traffic!
Travel by Hyperloop!
Last weekend’s Las Vegas Star Trekkers, below:
Classic Novel Review: Stand on Zanzibar
John Brunner’s proto-cyberpunk dystopia won the Hugo back in ’69, and it holds up reasonably well. Sure, we have neither a base on the moon nor a dome over Manhattan, but his world of 2010– , wherein the west encounters terrorism and random violence, a computer system puts you in touch with information, Detroit has declared bankruptcy, China is the ascendant superpower, documents are printed by laser, gay/bisexual relationships are mainstream (if not tolerated by everyone), social drug use has general acceptance, and racism has simmered but remains present, should be a little bit familiar.
The plot concerns overpopulation and eugenics. Two roommates find themselves drawn into international intrigue—and one must confront his role as a sleeper agent.