A Far Out Fantastic Site

Credit: Wikimedia Commons/SpaceX It’s the fourth weekend of the month and, so, according to our unofficial pandemic schedule , it is time for another Book-To-Movie! For those of you who are just tuning into this blog, a Book-To-Movie is when we review a work of prose fiction and its movie adaptation. This month we are reviewing Philip K. Dick’s science fiction short story, “We Can Remember It for You Wholesale” and its 1990 movie adaptation, “Total Recall”. And I will say it straight out right now, I hated the movie. Yet, it was the very few good points of the movie that got me to read and really like the short story.  The Short Story When Dick’s “We Can Remember It For You Wholesale” was originally published in the April 1966 issue of  “The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction”, the Martian craze in sci fi was still going. So, it’s no doubt that that craze, at least in part, influenced this story. But there are no little green men in it (at least as far as Martians go)....

Progress Report I may be behind in my writing projects but I’m making progress. I just completed writing my first novella last night. It’s a virtual reality-video game sci fi/dark fantasy. Sure, it’s going to need a lot of revising but as many long-time authors will say, one of the most important steps in the fiction writing process is to finish the first draft. A year or two ago, I had started writing a novella but never finished it. I allowed myself to drift away from it and never resumed writing it. Maybe I’ll go back to it someday after revising this new one. Besides finishing the first draft of my novella, I’ve been working on the cover to the print edition of “Circa Sixty Years Dead” . The illustration, title and byline lettering are all set up since I’m using the same graphics as I did for the ebook edition. But I need to write the back cover summary which shouldn’t take me long. However, I may need to examine a copy of the print edition before I can release it for s...

1958 paperback edition of a Ray Cummings sci fi novel Photo Credit: Amazon/Ace Books  There's been a heat wave here in the Sacramento valley for the last two days. It reached 104 degrees today is what I understand. I know that's nothing compared to other regions in the nation and throughout the world, but if you're a native of this part (like me) you would think the sun is moving closer to the earth at rapid speed! Kind of like in the 1951 movie When Worlds Collide. Which brings me to my discussion here. For the past week I've been working on a new short story of mine that's supposed to be an atom punk story. A lot of you probably don't know what atom punk is. It's just another -punkism of science fiction that derived from cyberpunk like steam punk did, only instead of cyber futures and alternative steam powered futures, it deals with alternative futures based on the 1950s/'60s anticipation of future society. Examples would be similar to w...

(Photo removed for reasons of copyright.) Photo Credit: Wikimedia Commons  I just got back from seeing The Dark Knight Rises . It was awesome! I'll admit that I liked the first and second of Christopher Nolan's Batman trilogy better, especially when I prefer the Joker much more over Bane since he's Batman's arch enemy and the most grotesquely psychotic of the Batman villains. Even so, out of all three of the movies, I like Batman Begins (the first in the trilogy) best simply because I'm one that believe's no sequel or remake can beat it's original (with very few exceptions). But Dark Knight Rises was good. It went further into Bruce Wayne's character and his interaction with the other characters, including Alfred the butler, Salina Kyle/the Cat Woman, and Commissioner Gordon. And Bane's character was chilling especially with that mouth mask that he wears which looks like a pair of an alien monster's jaws but is really an oxygen mask ...