Tag Archives: Sci-Fi

Learning to Fly

13 June 2026 By in Novel Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , Leave a comment

Robert Heinlein (1907–1988) belonged to the groundbreaking mid-20th-century trio of hard science-fiction writers often grouped together as the field’s “Big Three”: Heinlein, Isaac Asimov, and Arthur C. Clarke. Asimov built his epics, mainly the Foundation series, on the cycles of human civilization and logical progression, while Heinlein favored brisk narratives grounded in plausible engineering. Clarke filled his fiction, including the Rama series, with cosmic wonder and exploratory grandeur; Heinlein, by contrast, kept his technological futures close to the practical limits of the present. All three could lapse into pedantry, but Heinlein and Asimov learned to compress their exposition into engaging, digestible, sometimes enjoyable bursts. Asimov remained the analytic scientist, Clarke the futurist dreamer, and Heinlein the engineer-storyteller with a taste for adventure.

Heinlein began his writing career in the late 1930s with the short story, sometimes described as future histories but more accurately they were brief, idea driven social experiments. Philosophical and political provocations disguised as tales of the future. In his early years Heinlein was what Azimov described as a “flaming liberal” heavily influenced by his far-left wife, Leslyn. His stories from this period centered on Rooseveltian New Deal themes and very liberal politics. After the war he divorced Leslyn and married Virginia, a rock-ribbed conservative at which point the author discovered individual liberty and the rights of man.

In 1947, Heinlein published his first novel, Rocket Ship Galileo, the first of thirteen books now known as his juvenile novels. Technically, it was his second written novel. His first, written in 1939, was not published until 2003. And both these novels document a writer fighting, struggling to find a voice and an audience.

Rocket Ship Galileo, the earliest of Heinlein’s juveniles, is clumsy in structure, thin in characterization, and constantly interrupted by pedantic lectures that freeze the story in place and launch the reader into a hazy galactic void. At times, it reads like a Boy Scout manual welded to a pulp adventure, a work of yellowing paper stock, serving as a visible watermark of a first effort. Yet even in this awkward beginning, the impulses that would define Heinlein’s later work are already visible: a celebration of competence, a belief that teenagers can shoulder adult responsibility, and an instinct for treating engineering as adventure rather than a paycheck. Fortunately, by his second juvenile novel, he was beginning to find his groove in his literary space.

His second juvenile: Space Cadet, Heinlein loses some, but not all, of the stiffness of its predecessor, the storytelling is more controlled, the protagonist has a clearer arc, and the world feels more lived‑in. Heinlein is no longer lecturing at the reader; he’s beginning to build a world the reader can inhabit. It’s the first sign that he understands how to shape and guide a juvenile novel rather than simply assemble one from random thoughts guided by his slide-rule.

And the third time was the charm. Red Planet marks the real breakthrough. Here Heinlein finally integrates his didactic impulses into the story instead of stopping the narrative to deliver them. The pacing works, the characters feel like actual young people rather than mouthpieces, and the stakes emerge naturally from the world rather than being imposed from above. It’s the first juvenile that reads like the work of a confident storyteller rather than a talented engineer trying to write science fiction.

By Farmer in the Sky, Heinlein has become the writer people know and remember. The novel reflects the ideological shift Asimov famously noted; the move from the “flaming liberal” of the early 1940s to the postwar champion of individualism, self‑reliance, and the government be damned. The frontier ethos is fully formed, the suspicion of bureaucracy is unmistakable, and the competence ethic is elevated to a moral principle. It’s also the first juvenile that stands comfortably as an adult novel, not just a boys’ adventure.

My only real lament with Farmer in the Sky is the abrupt introduction of a crystalline ancient civilization in the final chapters. The idea is more imaginative than Heinlein usually allowed himself, and its tone is far closer to Clarke’s cosmic motifs than to Heinlein’s engineering realism. It could have served as a superb launching point for a more expansive, Clarkeian exploration of deep time and alien intelligence, but sadly, he never pursued it.

Across all four books, one confining trait remains constant: Heinlein never imagines a future very far removed from the technology he personally understood. His worlds are full of microfilm, rock crushers, slide rules, and mechanical systems. Even when he writes about space travel or Martian colonies, the machinery is always something he could diagram, calculate, or build. The applied science of his time rules his future. His futures are grounded in engineering reality, not speculative fantasy, and that constraint shapes the tone of the juveniles as much as their plots.

Taken together, these early novels show a writer evolving rapidly; from a shaky, almost amateurish beginning (I’m being kind) to a confident command of narrative, theme, and character. Their flaws are real, but so is the trajectory. By the time Heinlein reached Farmer in the Sky, he had become the storyteller who would dominate mid‑century science fiction and put him on the same plane as Asimov and Clarke.

To thoroughly understand Heinlein, it helps to start with his juveniles.

Literary Plots

31 March 2026 By in Books Fiction, Novel Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , Leave a comment

(Note: This is an updated version of the original post from March of 2026. It now includes a Chowder reference that I recently stumbled across in Heinlein’s juvenile novels.)

“What was the worst thing you’ve ever done?”  “What is the worst thing that has ever happened to you?”

So begins the story of the Chowder Society nightmare. Five men bound since their youth, destined purposefully together by life and consequence, later joined by the main protagonist Don Wanderley, drawn into an A.M. horror with no single name and a thousand shifting labels. Their lives become a tangle of stories within stories, the past bleeding into the present, each tale circling a separate Dantean ring of terror.

Peter Straub (1943–2022) builds “Ghost Story” out of the shadows of man’s dreams of dread and death. Drawing on a century of horror in literature, visual arts, and psychology to create a world of insinuation, illusion, and fear; where nothing is ever said just once, nothing is ever said plainly, and nothing settles. Straub’s references to books, photos, and films, often through Wanderley, but not exclusively, are not decorative touches or character shading. They are physical clues. Each reference is a lens through which the plot becomes clearer.

Don Wanderley’s name is the novel in miniature: this is a tale about a man who wanders through illusions and a town that wanders through its own lies. As the heir to the Chowder Society’s buried horror, Wanderley carries the past into the present, through his criticism of art and letters, through his misreadings of life, and through belief in the oldest self‑deception of all, the belief that the women who charm you are the ones who love you.

As a lecturer at Berkeley, Wanderley teaches Hawthorne’s “The House of the Seven Gables” and encounters R.P. Blackmur’s essay on the novel, which argues: “When every possibility is taken away, then we have sinned.” Wanderley finds that this idea radiates throughout Hawthorne’s work, and he “could connect the novels and stories by this black Christianity,” an impulse or more directly, a desire for nightmares. Hawthorne himself writes that he sometimes achieved a “singular and not unpleasing effect” by imagining incidents in which “the spiritual mechanism of the faery legend” is fused with “the characters and manners of everyday life.”

In modern terms: the ghost and the haunted are part of the same mechanism. Straub uses this to signal that Don and the Chowder Society are haunted not by an external force, but by themselves.

Wanderley extends this line of thought through D.H. Lawrence’s critique of Hawthorne, which ties Blackmur’s concept of sin to lust, and to the New England lineage of Hawthorne, Poe, James, Lovecraft, and King:

And the first thing she does is seduce him.
And the first thing he does is to be seduced.
And the second thing they do is to hug their sin in secret, and gloat over it, and try to understand.
Which is the myth of New England.

Although Straub never states it outright, Stephen King does so in his introduction to “Ghost Story:” this lineage leads directly to Henry James’s “The Turn of the Screw,” which asks whether the supernatural is real or a projection of the psyche. James refuses to resolve the question. Straub resolves it by refusing to choose. His haunting functions like a double‑slit experiment: both interpretations are true simultaneously. The horror is real and psychological. It exists because the Chowder Society created the conditions for it.

Hawthorne fused the supernatural with everyday life. James separated them and let the reader decide. Straub makes them inseparable, a melding of spirit and mind, a duality of horror.

Continuing this duality, Wanderley describes a sudden vision of Alma: “Then suddenly and shockingly, she [Alma] lifting a spoonful of mint-green avocado to her mouth, I had another vision of her. I saw her as a whore, a 1910 Storyville prostitute, her hair exotically twisted, her dancer’s legs drawn up, her naked body was very clear for a moment. Another image of professional detachment, I supposed, but that did not explain the force of the vision.”  A vision of Alma or from Alma?

Alma as a “1910 Storyville prostitute” is not a literary allusion but a visual one. Straub is invoking the E.J. Bellocq photographs of New Orleans prostitutes in Storyville around 1910: stark, intimate portraits rediscovered in the 1970s and now held in major museums such as MoMA. These images show women posed in small, bare rooms, sometimes clothed, sometimes nude, their expressions shifting between defiance and vulnerability. They carry an aura of theatrical melancholy: present yet absent, exposed yet unknowable.

It is a perfect portrait of Alma. And Wanderley misses the meaning entirely. The vision is not “professional detachment.” It is the novel’s gears revealing itself: Alma appears as a figure who is both real and unreal, historical and spectral, seductive and annihilating; the very embodiment of Straub’s fused supernatural psychology of mind and ghost.

Enhancing the contradictions Straub has Don Wanderley bring Alama to a showing of Renoir’s “La Grande Illusion.” The film is about the collapse of the structures that once defined Europe: class, nation, aristocratic codes, the belief that enemies and friends can be cleanly separated. Straub’s novel is about the collapse of the structures that once defined the Chowder Society: honor, memory, guilt, the belief that the past can be buried. It’s not a casual reference; it’s Straub subtly telling the reader how to understand the plot of “Ghost Story.”

In La Grande Illusion, friends are enemies and enemies are friends. A French aristocrat and a German aristocrat share more with each other than with the men they command. Working‑class soldiers form bonds that ignore borders. The “grand illusion” isn’t war; it’s the belief that the old hierarchies still matter in the face of modernity. Renoir uses the prison‑camp setting not for escape‑movie suspense (though there is an escape), but to dissect a social order already dying.

Straub mirrors this logic. “Ghost Story” is a deadly illusion of its own: heroes and villains circle one another, and to know one is to find the other. Evil is a ghost from the past, a supernatural entity and a moral consequence brought to the present. The men who see themselves as honorable are the ones who committed the original sin. The woman they loved is the monster they created and honored. The past they buried is the thing hunting them.

Like Renoir’s war film without battles, Straub builds a ghost story without medieval props of vampires and werewolves, although there is that. The real haunting is psychological. The real prison is memory. The real war is the struggle between the stories the men tell about themselves, the truth they refuse to face, and the nightmares that consume them.

Both works, the film and the novel, strip away the expected genre scaffolding, war without battles, society without walls; ghosts without haunted houses, horror without the supernatural. What remains is the same core revelation: the structures we trust to define us are illusions, and when they collapse, the truth steps forward. “When every possibility is taken away, then we have sinned.”

Alma tells Waverley everything and he misses it entirely. “I (Alma) know some people who are interested in the occult.”…It can’t be…Ordo Templi Orientis.” …They were known to be cruel, even savage.” …”I saw a ghost” …[or] did Alma actually say, “I am a ghost?”

Then the mists begin to dissipate. Don begins to see. “…my second lecture was a disaster. I brought out secondhand ideas unsuccessfully, tried to relate them and got lost in my notes: I contradicted myself. …I said that “The Red Badge of Courage” was a great ghost story in which the ghost never appears. He begins to see ghosts. But Waverley misreads the book just as Henry Fleming in Badge of Courage misreads himself. Fleming was a coward and courageous, he lied and acted with honor, and he was neither hero nor villain. Straub tells the reader that Wanderley is tactically brilliant in seeing ghosts but strategically misreading Alma, and his fears, and his courage, and his guilt. He misses the moral and ocular truth in front of him.

Then Straub moves the deception from Wanderley to the weakest link in the original Chowder Society: Dr. Jaffery. Straub begins Jaffery’s end with a normal scene morphing into the long hidden truth: “The fading wallpaper…the table bearing neat piles of coins, a library book (The Making of a Surgeon) and a lamp…In this room, at once familiar and unreal, he could not stay…Jesus she moved.” This is the moment the author moves beyond Wanderley’s thematic deception onto Jaffrey and the entire Chowder Society’s moral deception.

And “The Making of a Surgeon” is all about moral clarity, facing consequences, and accepting responsibility. It’s a memoir of professional responsibility and moral courage. And the Chowder Society is finally reaching across the abyss of denial and confronting the horror or their past.

Now working backwards, Edward Wanderley, Don Wanderley’s uncle, an original Chowder, enters the story mostly as a memory, but he is the caretaker of all those haunting memories. He is unwitting biographer of their past, recording moments of truth that reveal nothing, saving no one. Edward preserved the past in perfect detail, and like his nephew, it all remained unexamined, redeeming no one.

Finally, if Straub’s novel teaches anything, it is that every circle eventually closes. The Chowder Society’s memories loop back on themselves, and so does the novel’s architecture. Even the name of the Society carries its own literary origin, one that reaches not into the gothic of Hawthorne or James but into the sci-fi literature of Straub’s youth. In Robert Heinlein’s first juvenile novella Rocket Ship Galileo (1947), a trio of boys form a self‑styled “Marching‑and‑Chowder Society.” The phrase is unusual enough that its reappearance is unlikely to be accidental, even if the influence operated subconsciously. In Heinlein the Chowder Society is an exclusive action‑club of boys whose bond is forged through shared adventure and forward‑moving purpose. Straub begins his Chowder Society by inverting this structure: his Chowder Society is a literary circle of elderly men whose bond originates in a youthful action and persists as a lifelong burden. Where Heinlein presents the bright formation of a pact, Straub presents its long shadow, the adult reckoning that follows the kind of formative event boys’ adventure fiction treats as uncomplicated. This possible allusion subtly reinforces Ghost Story’s central concern with how male bonds, once formed, harden into narrative, secrecy, and fate.

Readers often describe Ghost Story as wandering, uneven, or prone to detours, a criticism echoed in contemporary reviews that note Straub’s tendency to drift away from the main plot or indulge in seemingly irrelevant texture. But what looks like narrative drift on the surface is, on a deeper reading, the novel’s strongest logic. Straub isn’t losing the thread; he’s showing us what a haunting feels like. He shows that the lies we tell ourselves are the horrors that destroy us.

Straub’s haunting is not linear. It circles and returns. Like Asimov’s hidden Earth — the point “as far away as possible” that turns out to be the origin — Straub’s details repeat endlessly, drift, and seem meaningless until the moment the circle closes back to the beginning and the truth stands revealed. Straub builds his novel out of these arcs, fragments of a circumference that seem disconnected until the circle closes. He hides this map inside the tangents, and once you see the pattern: Heinlein’s bonding, Hawthorne’s nightmare impulse, Lawrence’s seduction‑and‑sin pattern, Crane’s “ghost story without a ghost,” James’s ambiguity, Renoir’s collapsing social order. Don Wanderley’s literary misreadings are not digressions but the novel’s diagnostic tools. Each failed interpretation reveals the flaw that defines him: he wanders through texts the way he wanders through life, intelligent but unanchored, perceptive but myopic.

Straub refuses to lead the reader by the hand. He insists that you find your own way through the misty, musty traces of arts and letters. He trusts us to assemble meaning the way the Chowder Society must: by piecing together fragments, memories, misreadings, and half‑buried truths. What appears astray is actually ghostly context; the white space in which the novel’s real shape emerges. The wandering is the haunting. The arcs of irrelevances are the clues. The men believe they buried the past, but Straub shows that nothing buried stays buried; it simply waits at the farthest point of the circle to be met again.

The worst thing is the horror circling your mind.

Graphic: 1910 Storyville Photographs by Bellocq. Source: Ghost Story by Peter Straub. Copyright 1979.

Practical Solutions

15 June 2025 By in Novel, Science Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , Leave a comment

Thomas Malthus in the late 18th century stated that population growth proceeds at an exponential pace while growth in the food supply is arithmetic (linear) leading to inevitable periods of disease and starvation. Malthus argued, or more accurately, preached, that there were only two ways to prevent inevitable famine: actively curtail population growth or let nature take its course. He advocated tariffs to spur local agricultural production and moral restraint. Modern day adherents of Malthusian theories coupled with climate, environmental, and social catastrophes include Paul Ehrlich author of The Population Bomb, and Garrett Hardin author Tragedy of the Commons, both who were concerned that resources could not keep pace with population growth. John Maynard Keynes, not necessarily a Malthusian, initially feared overpopulation would result in poverty. Later, he grew concerned that insufficient population growth would lead to labor shortages and economic stagnation. All Malthusian predictions fail because they underestimated human ingenuity: agricultural innovations, industrial advances, and the energy revolution continually expanded resources. While Malthusian thinkers predicted collapse, human ingenuity reshaped the future, standing on the shoulders of giants, we brought the sky closer instead of watching it fall.

Early in his career, Robert A. Heinlein acknowledged Malthusian concerns about overpopulation, but rather than advocating population control, he envisioned technological solutions to expand humanity’s reach. This idea provided the foundation for his 1956 juvenile novel, Time for the Stars, which explores interstellar colonization as a means of alleviating Earth’s burden. Faced with mounting population pressures, Earth launches an interstellar program to search for habitable worlds. The explorations will take place aboard spaceships that can accelerate up to but not beyond the speed of light. As the ships venture deeper into space at relativistic speeds, conventional communication with Earth suffers increasing delays, making real-time coordination nearly impossible. If the ships are lost or destroyed their discoveries will be delayed or lost completely. To solve this problem, Heinlein introduces the literary fictional concept of telepathic twins and triplets, individuals capable of instantaneous communication, unaffected by distance or time dilation.

Twins are recruited to maintain real-time communication with the ships, with one twin remaining on Earth while the other travels aboard the spacecraft. The twin on Earth ages much faster than the spacefaring twin traveling at near-light speeds. As the time gap widens, their telepathic link weakens, forcing the ship-bound twin to communicate with younger generations of their family on Earth.

This adventure becomes the sci-fi narrative for the concept of the twin paradox first proposed by Paul Langevin. In 1911 Langevin showed that a traveler moving close to the speed of light for two years would return to an Earth that had aged 200 years since his departure. At first, the paradox seemed to suggest that each twin should perceive the other as older, an apparent contradiction. Einstein resolved this by showing that time dilation is a fundamental consequence of special relativity, not an actual paradox. In special relativity, time dilation arises due to velocity, whereas in general relativity, it extends to curved spacetime via the equivalence principle. The traveler ages slower than his Earth-bound twin.

In Time for the Stars, Heinlein does more than illustrate relativistic physics, he champions the optimism that human ingenuity will always outweigh natural pessimism. It serves not only as a rebuttal to Malthusian gloom but also as a direct rejection of William Golding’s dystopian vision in Lord of the Flies, which Heinlein previously wrote in his 1955 utopian novel ‘Tunnel in the Sky’. Lord of the Flies in semitic languages translates directly to Beelzebub. In Indo-European languages Beelzebub, according to some, translates to ‘lord of the jungle’ a phrase with much less negativity than the semitic translation. Heinlein further expands on the lord of the jungle by introducing the German 20th century concept of Lebensraum in chapter 3 of Time for the Stars titled Project Lebensraum. Lebensraum in his novel parallels the German concept in that it means territorial expansion as a pragmatic solution to overpopulation. Given the post-WWII connotations of Lebensraum, Heinlein’s use of the term is provocative, perhaps deliberately so, prompting reflection on whether space colonization is an ethical necessity or simply another form of expansionist imperialism. Heinlein believed in the problems of overpopulation, but he wanted a positive solution to that rather than a disturbing reach into limiting fertility. Project Lebensraum to Heinlein was likely a repurpose of Lebensraum as a brilliant solution to overpopulation and continued survival of the species.

Ultimately, Heinlein’s Tunnel in the Sky counters the pessimistic view of human nature, demonstrating that young people can build a functional society rather than descend into chaos, contrasting Lord of the Flies and reinforcing the themes of Project Lebensraum in Time for the Stars. As an extension of that logic, humanity must expand beyond Earth to secure its future.

Time for the Stars is more than a literary exploration of Einstein’s time dilation, it is a direct refutation of fear-driven pessimism, a celebration of humanity, and a testament to our quest for an enduring future among the stars.

Source: Time for the Stars by Robert A. Heinlein, 1956. Graphic: Robert A. Heinlein.

The Many Colors of Slavery

27 May 2025 By in Art, Novel, Philosophy, Philosophy Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , Leave a comment

“Those who deny freedom to others deserve it not for themselves.”—Abraham Lincoln

“Whoever does not have two-thirds of his day for himself, is a slave, whatever he may be: a statesman, a businessman, an official, or a scholar.” — Friedrich Nietzsche

As the great continental glaciers receded at the end of the Pleistocene, fertile land emerged, allowing for the transition from hunting and gathering to agriculture. Farming was labor-intensive, and with the rise of permanent settlements came the demand for constrained and controlled labor. Slavery, likely with first roots in Mesopotamia, though independent manifestation by the Pharaohs in ancient Egypt and other early civilizations, made it ubiquitous, and it has never disappeared.

From the bonded laborers of the Pharaohs to the structured servitude in Greece and Rome, from the transatlantic trade that brutalized African populations to the modern exploitation of migrant workers in sweatshops and the sex trades, slavery has evolved rather than vanished. Each era refines its own form of servitude; forced labor, insurmountable debt, bureaucratic entrapment, or corporate exploitation. It is a practice as ancient as prostitution and taxation, deeply embedded in human society, yet constantly shifting into less visible but equally insidious forms. As long as slavery remains profitable its existence will continue to indelibly stain humanities’ collective soul.

Slavery, and its ultimate contrast, freedom, was a persistent theme in the works of sci-fi author Robert A. Heinlein. With a piercing social awareness, Heinlein, who, in his early years, was described by Isaac Asimov as a ‘flaming liberal’—picked up the theme and horrors of slavery with his 1957 juvenile novel “Citizen of the Galaxy”; bringing the many forms of servitude into the personal history of a precocious kidnapped boy named Thorby. Citizen of the Galaxy is a planet-hopping, spacefaring critique of oppression, class structure, and the nebulous concept of freedom. Heinlein crafts a future where contrasting societies across the galaxy reflect varying degrees of servitude and autonomy, if not necessarily total freedom. Man rarely allows himself complete independence.

Heinlein through the lens of Thorby explores the various shades of slavery, beginning with the brutal, controlling enslavement and continuing to more subtle forms that the individual may not even recognize as confinement. (Partial plot giveaways beyond this point.) Escaping his initial enslavement by the graces of a kindly, strict, but loveable old cripple named Baslim, Thorby moves into a hierarchical, structured existence of spacefaring traders then onto a self-imposed, due to a thirst for justice, straitjacket of a corporate bureaucracy on his birth planet of Terra. A life story of how control can be imposed by others or by ourselves.

As Heinlein’s social perspectives evolved, his libertarian leanings took greater prominence in Citizen of the Galaxy. Through Thorby’s life journey, Heinlein emphasizes personal autonomy, resistance to tyranny, and the moral duty to fight injustice. Baslim, Thorby’s first mentor, symbolizes the idea that one person can stand against oppression and make a difference, even if it takes many miles and years to materialize.

This theme runs through much of Heinlein’s work, but here, it’s especially poignant because Thorby is powerless for much of the novel, making his eventual triumph all the more meaningful. Heinlein’s novels, Farnham’s Freehold, Friday, and Time Enough for Love, explore slavery and control, reinforcing humanity’s inherent need for freedom, or at the very least, breathing space.

Source: Citizen of the Galaxy by Robert A. Heinlein, 1957. Graphic: Joseph Sold into Slavery by Friedrich Overbeck, 1816. Vanderbilt University. Public Domain.

Stasis and Change

23 October 2024 By in Movies, Uncategorized Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , Leave a comment

Alien Romulus: A group of young adults indentured for life on the cloud-shrouded mining planet of Yvaga discovers a derelict spacecraft orbiting above. They plan to rendezvous with the craft and steal the ship’s cryostasis suits to travel to another planet. Once inside the spacecraft they soon detect they are not alone.

Romulus enters the Alien franchise as the seventh film, situated between Alien and Aliens, attempting to walk the path between Ridley Scott and James Cameron-two giants that Alvarez fails to surpass with this entry.

The story plays homage to its predecessors in the first acts, delivering plenty of frights and gore, enhanced by great graphics, visuals, and adequate acting. However, it then drifts off course into territory best left unexplored. But I guess that’s called setting up the sequel or more likely a spin-off.

Genre:  Horror—Sci-Fi–Suspense–Thriller

Directed by: Fede Alvarez

Screenplay by: Fede Alvarez Rodo Sayagues

Music by: Benjamin Wallfisch

Cast: Cailee Spaeny, David Jonsson, Archie Renaux

Film Locations: Budapest, Hungry and Various Studios

ElsBob: 6.5/10

IMDb: 7.2/10

Rotten Tomatoes Critics: 80%

Rotten Tomatoes Popcornmeter: 85%

Metacritic Metascore: 64%

Metacritic User Score: 7.1%

Theaters: 16 August 2024

Runtime: 119 minutes

Source: Rotten Tomatoes, IMDb, Metacritic. Graphic: Alien Romulus Poster and Trailer, 20 Century Studios

Future Apes

25 September 2024 By in Movies Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , Leave a comment

Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes: In the future some apes remember Ceasar, some lord over their slaves, some covet man stuff, and some are for the birds–Animal Farm meets Captain Fantastic.

Kingdom is the 10th movie in the series that began in 1968 with Planet of the Apes starring Charlton Heston; still the best of the banana bunch, originality wise that is.  

This movie is the first in a planned new trilogy that attempts to build on the previous trilogy. Unfortunately, it doesn’t surpass them in either acting or plot except for the supporting work of Kevin Durand for his portrayal of the movie’s antagonist, Proximus. He is superb and worth the price of admission.

Trivia or Goof: The flooding the man cave defies gravity. Try not to think about it.

Genre:  Action—Adventure—Drama–Fantasy—SciFi–Thriller

Directed by: Wes Ball

Screenplay by: Josh Friedman

Music by:  John Paesano

Cast: Owen Teague, Freya Allan, Kevin Durand, Peter Macon

Film Locations:  New South Wales, Australia

ElsBob: 7.0/10

IMDb:  6.9/10

Rotten Tomatoes Critics:  80

Rotten Tomatoes Audience:  78

Metacritic Metascore: 66

Metacritic User Score:  7.0/10

Theaters: 11 May 2024

Runtime: 145 minutes

Budget:  $160 million

Worldwide Box Office:  $397.4 million

Source: IMDb. Rotten Tomatoes. Metacritic. Graphic: Movie trailer and poster, copyright 20th Century Studios.

Wolverine: The First X-Men Movie

21 August 2024 By in Movies Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , Leave a comment

In the beginning there was the 2000 cinematic introduction of all things mutant, some good and some excessively proactive. The good were the Xavier’s X-Men and the excessively proactive belonged to Magneto’s unsympathetic Brotherhood of Mutants.

Wolverine, not necessarily part of the good or proactive, is living in the Canadian wilderness as an outsider just trying to make a buck by winning a cage match here and there. With a body full of adamantium with rather remarkable healing powers he is a formidable opponent in the ring.

Wolverine quickly becomes entangled in Magneto’s plans for annihilation of humans, forcing him to team up with Xavier’s X-Men. He ultimately plays a crucial role in the epic battle against Magneto and the Brotherhood.

Genre:  Action—Adventure–Fantasy—Sci-Fi

Directed by: Bryan Singer

Screenplay by: Tom DeSanto, Bryan Singer, David Hayter

Music by:  Michael Kamen

Cast: Hugh Jackman, Patrick Stewart, Ian McKellen

Film Locations:  Ontario, Canada

Els: 8.5/10

IMDb:  7.3/10

Rotten Tomatoes Critics:  82

Rotten Tomatoes Audience:  83

Metacritic Metascore: 64

Metacritic User Score:  7.5/10

Theaters: 12 July 2000

Runtime: 104 minutes

Budget:  $75 million

Worldwide Box Office:  $296.3 million

Source: IMDb. Rotten Tomatoes. Metacritic. Graphic: Movie Poster, 20th Century Fox.

X-Men Origins: Wolverine

7 August 2024 By in Movies Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , Leave a comment

I’m currently working my way through the 10 X-Men Wolverine flicks.

In the 2009 X-Men Origins: Wolverine, exhibiting twisted bureaucratic logic, the U.S. Army takes a seemingly immortal and invincible mutant and makes him into the more immortal and more invincible Wolverine. Not a logical plot line but it does make for an enjoyable movie.

This is the 4th X-Men film and the 1st solo Wolverine project of a planned trilogy.  

Genre:  Action—Fantasy—Sci-Fi

Directed by: Gavin Hood

Screenplay by: David Benioff, Skip Woods

Music by:  Harry Gregson-Williams

Cast: Hugh Jackman, Liev Schreiber, Ryan Reynolds

Film Locations:  Australia, Canada, New Zealand, U.S.

Els:  7.5/10

IMDb:  6.5/10

Rotten Tomatoes Critics:  38/100

Rotten Tomatoes Audience:  58/100

Metacritic Metascore:  75/100

Metacritic User Score:  8.0/10

Theaters: 1 May 2009

Runtime: 107 minutes

Budget:  $150 Million

Worldwide Box Office:  $373.1 Million

Source: IMDB, Rotten Tomatoes, Metacritic, Wikipedia. Graphic: Movie Poster by 20th Century Fox

Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga

24 July 2024 By in Movies, Uncategorized Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , Leave a comment

Furiosa, prequel to Mad Max: Fury Road, documents the psychological development of Furiosa (Taylor-Joy) as she channels her hate and vengeance towards Dementus (Hemsworth), destroyer of her mother in a post-apocalyptic, dystopian tale of fiefdoms and control.

Furiosa finds peak vengeance against her antagonist around the 2 hour and 15-minute mark of the movie when Dementus, somewhat incidentally, asks her if she was able to ‘make it epic’. The question really is posed to you the viewer and the short answer would be no. The long answer is the movie is needlessly long but not as long as it seemed.

Genre:  Action – Adventure – Drama — Sci-Fi

Directed by: George Miller

Screenplay by: George Miller, Nico Lathouris

Music by:  Tom Holkenborg

Cast: Anya Taylor-Joy, Chris Hemsworth, Tom Burke

Film Locations:  Australia, USA

ElsBob:  5.5-6.0/10

IMDb:  7.7/10

Rotten Tomatoes Critics:  90/100

Rotten Tomatoes Audience:  89/100

Metacritic Metascore:  79/100

Metacritic User Score:  7.3/10

Theaters: 23-24 May 2024

Streaming: 16 September 2022

Runtime: 148 minutes

Budget: $168 million

Box Office: $172.8 million

Source: IMDb. MetaCritic. Rotten Tomatoes. Graphic Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga movie poster, 2024, Copyright Warner Brothers.

Space Elevators

2 April 2024 By in Books Fiction, Novel Tags: , , , , , Leave a comment

Arthur C. Clarke in his 1979 sci-fi novel, The Fountains of Paradise, builds a space elevator on Earth as a solution to the monetary and technical expense of Earth-based rockets.

A space elevator is a conceptual solution for a low-cost, low energy planet-to-space transportation system. The challenge to building the elevator is finding a material strong enough to withstand the immense compressional and tensional forces that with a counterweight balance, would be 44,490 miles long (71,600 km). Carbon nanotubes offer a possible solution but currently they are only strong enough to work on Mars or the moon.

This is not Clarke’s best novel, but he thoroughly explains the concept of a space elevator and a lot of the engineering problems that would need to be solved to build one. The solutions to all the problems are solved by the book’s protagonist, Dr. Vannevar Morgan, a thinly veiled character that likely refers to himself as Arthur C. Clarke when he is among friends.

As an aside, both within the book and as a reader, he spends 5-6 pages harping on his belief there is no God. Why he does so is a mystery since it adds nothing to his story and in the end, it is a pointless, garrulous, one-sided debate.