Why Most Space Art Looks Fake (And How I’m Trying to Fix It)
So there I was, probably three years ago now, scrolling through some concept art for yet another Mars colonization project when it hit me –...
Sci-Fi Culture
-
-
Why Space Opera Still Gets My Old Engineer Heart Racing After All These Years
You know what happened last Tuesday? I was up on the stepladder trying to fix that wobbly shelf in my study — the one where...
-
When Dystopian Movies Stop Feeling Like Fiction and Start Feeling Like Previews
So there I was last Tuesday night, couldn’t sleep again, ended up putting on *Children of Men* for probably the tenth time this year. Something...
-
How Box Office Bombs Become Genre Legends: A Film Editor’s Take on Cult Sci-Fi
You know, there’s something almost perverse about how the sci-fi films we treasure most today were absolute disasters when they first hit theaters. I’m talking...
-
The Science Fiction Fan Theories That Made Me Question Everything I Thought I Knew
You know what happens when you’ve spent forty years building actual spacecraft? You develop this annoying habit of picking apart everything in science fiction. But...
-
When Sci-Fi Stopped Being Fiction and Started Being My Job Training
You know what’s weird about working in game testing? Half the stuff I’m debugging now feels like it came straight out of sci-fi I was...
-
The Problem with Tidy Endings in Our Broken Worlds
I’ve been wrestling with post-apocalyptic stories for decades now, and there’s something that keeps bugging me about how Hollywood handles them. You know what I...
-
When Sci-Fi Breaks Our Hearts: Characters Who Got Screwed Over by Their Own Stories
You know what really gets under my skin? Spending years of your life invested in a character’s journey, only to watch writers completely botch their...
-
Why Time Travel Stories Stopped Being Fun (And Started Making Me Think Too Hard)
You know, I’ve been thinking about this a lot lately – probably more than a retired guy should be thinking about fictional time machines, but...
-
How Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner Taught This Engineer to Appreciate Science Fiction as Art
I first encountered Blade Runner in 1983, about a year after it hit theaters. My wife had rented it on VHS – this was back...
