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Genre: Sci-fi

In Search of Sacrifice: The Drama of the Family in Godzilla Minus One

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2023’s Japanese film Godzilla Minus One is more than a monster flick—it’s a true family movie. Not to be confused with CGI-heavy American Monsterverse films like Godzilla x Kong (2024), GMO is a piece of old-fashioned movie magic. What it lacks in budget—the film was made for a mere $15 million!—it more than compensates for in story, acting, and an incredible use of budget-conscious effects that somehow look better than Warner Bros.’ $150 million popcorn flicks. And yes, GMO is a popcorn flick, but it’s so much more. The movie…

Armageddon in Slow Motion

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Mankind will end in four hundred fifty years, and its opinions about that fact may be largely irrelevant. That is upshot of Cixin Liu’s Hugo-winning The Three-Body Problem, and its sequels, The Dark Forest, and Death’s End. Together, they make for a complicated, high-concept meditation on humanity, politics, speculative science, and the problem of evil. Whether that meditation yields good fruit is another question. While the events in this trilogy involve multiple protagonists, include numerous plot twists, and span hundreds of years, this review will focus primarily on the first…

Terrible Purpose: Beauty and Contradiction at the Heart of Dune

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In Dune, Part One and Part Two, Denis Villeneuve has adapted the unadaptable. These two impressive films, though they simplify and sometimes alter their source material, manage to distill the heart and soul of Frank Herbert’s original novel (1965). Given the influence of the ideas embodied in the text and now popularized in the films, it seems a good moment to appraise these adaptations, and to reflect on the ideas they promote. Like the films, this essay is divided into two parts, the first being a traditional film review (of…

An Understated Masterpiece You’ve Probably Never Seen

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“They used to say that a child conceived in love has a greater chance of happiness. They don’t say that anymore.” So muses Vincent Freeman (Ethan Hawke), whose status as a “God child” with a one percent chance of living past thirty ought to have prevented him from pursuing greatness. Set in a believable near-future where nearly every new human life has been planned down to the genes, Gattaca chronicles the early career of a man who refused to submit to that world’s predestinarian yolk. Gattaca’s star-studded cast and incredible…

A Lonely Trip Through the Southern Reach

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My very first impression, from the first page of Annihilation, book one of The Southern Reach Trilogy by Jeff Vandermeer, was not far from my last thoughts on the series. What insanity have I just stumbled into? Every reveal seems to bring along numerous other mind-bending doubts or questions about the world Vandermeer has created. The story opens with a group of nameless female explorers beginning their expedition into “Area X”, a mysterious portion of the ordinary world that has somehow, inexplicably become subject to laws all its own. Its…

MacGyver on Mars

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The Martian, by Andy Weir, is an entertaining page-turner with an inherently interesting premise and a well-executed plot. Aside from entertainment, the novel’s chief value lies in its celebration of cheerful resourcefulness, and its appreciation of the worth of a single human life. Good in several important ways, the book also lacked some of the depth that its premise might have supported. In a near-future mission to Mars, an accident forces the astronaut crew of the Hermes to leave behind an apparently dead colleague, Mark Watney. As it happens, Mark…

Escaping the Enderverse

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All in all, this book has an energy and passionate intensity that endears itself to a wide audience, despite the violence, vulgarity and racial slurs.

Close Encounters of the Medieval Kind

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“Eifelheim” is a very fine science fiction novel, and should be on the reading list of everyone interested in the interaction of medieval and modern philosophy, science, and even politics.

Ready Player One

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The pros, in my opinion, far outweigh the cons. The book affirms the value of online social interaction as a step in the right direction if you’re living in a dystopia, but that reality is still best.