A Far Out Fantastic Site

Credit: Pixabay.com Cloning has been a theme in a lot of science fiction and horror. However, it became a reality more than ever during the past week with a ferret clone. Also new this week is the announcement of a remake of the ‘80s movie, “The Running Man”. (Yes, another remake. Or is it?) Dead Ferret Cloned Into a Live One This week the ideas of “Frankenstein” and “Jurassic Park” became more science fact than science fiction. Thursday, the US Fish and Wildlife Services (FWS) disclosed to the world that they successfully cloned a black-footed ferret that had been dead for more than 30 years. The ferret’s cells had been frozen through the decades. Then, recently, scientists developed an embryo from them and placed it in a living ferret that, in turn, gave birth to the clone Elizabeth Ann. She is the first clone of an endangered North American species. CNN   says that scientists cloned the dead ferret for reasons of rescuing the black-footed species from going extinct. FWS plans to...

Credit: Pixabay   This has been a very hectic week for me. I’ve had technological problems to deal with in areas outside of my writing and art. They’ve been burning me out like the fires here in California have been burning out the forests. Even so, I continued working on my writing projects, especially the two that are most important at this time: my Patreon page and a new book cover for my short fiction collection, “The Fool’s Illusion”.  Author’s Patreon Page I spent my evenings this week creating the “tiers” and the benefits that they will offer on my Patreon page. A Patreon  page often features several levels, or tiers, of membership to choose from. Mine will offer three. The membership benefits will range from exclusive book discounts to fiction-in-progress and concept art for book covers. The top-most tier will also offer more in-depth articles on science fiction and fantasy of the past, present and future! I have only a little more to do with the page until its la...

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)....

Credit: Pixabay Again, I’ve postponed the Book-To-Movie from its usual third weekend of the month to this fourth weekend and so tonight it’s here! In a Book-To-Movie , we review a work of prose fiction and its movie adaptation. This month we’re reviewing Isaac Asimov’s novella, “The Bicentennial Man” and its 1999 movie adaptation starring Robin “Mork from Ork” Williams. Much of Asimov’s science fiction is hard science fiction. So, his stories take serious consideration of the scientific subject matter involved. In doing so, they seriously ask the speculative question that all good science fiction should ask: “What if?” As in “What if robots developed human consciousness?” There is something unique when it comes to Asimov’s robot stories and that is that, unlike with most robot fiction of the 1950s when he was flourishing as a writer, his robot characters are more benefitting to humans than they are menacing. He had an optimistic view of robots and their impact on future soci...

Credit: Pixabay For almost a year, Netflix has streamed Disney’s 2012 movie, ‘John Carter’. However, the movie, based on Edgar Rice Burroughs’ “A Princess of Mars” of his Barsoom series of novels, will be leaving Netflix and moving to Disney+ on May 2. Because this is a Disney movie it should be expected that the Disney Company would want it on its new streaming television platform that went live in November of last year. After all, Disney’s been buying up so many un-Disney properties, so why would it leave one of its own movies behind? This regardless of “John Carter” being one of its biggest flops?  While the movie did poorly at the box office, it’s one of Disney’s most underrated films. It had a lot of good things that went into it such as its creature designs, cinematography and special effects. Eric Francisco says in his article at Inverse that “the movie is colorful in ways so few modern blockbusters are . . .” So if you’re like me, and have Netflix but not Disne...

Credit: Pixabay.com I hope everybody had a great holiday season and is getting a good start to this new year of 2020! While the 21st century has shown a rise in the acceptance of fantasy and science fiction into mainstream culture, the past decade has particularly shown a rise in TV and movie adaptations of books in these genres. I’m not really big on TV adaptations of books and so can’t say a lot at this time about any that may be coming during this year of 2020. However, since I’m much more into watching big screen movies and reading, I can say that the new year has lined up five sci fi and fantasy book-to-film adaptations which all look really awesome! Okay, I’m speaking a bit hypocritically. I haven’t actually read any of the books these five films are based on. Still, the plots look super and worthy of the big screen. So, that gives me at least three new year’s resolutions to put on my list: 1) read the book to each of these movies; 2) see the movies; 3) do a Book-To-Movie ...

It’s the third weekend of the month and so it’s time for another Book-To-Movie review! [link] In a Book-To-Movie we review a work of prose fiction and its movie adaptation. This month’s Book-To-Movie is a review of Edgar Rice Burroughs’s A Princess of Mars and the Disney movie adaptation. And as I said I would in the previous blog post , I also have a mini movie review for you of Doctor Sleep , the new movie based on Stephen King’s novel of the same name! Book-To-Movie: ‘A Princess of Mars’/’John Carter’ Credit: Wikimedia Commons Warning: Potential spoilers. Even though it didn’t become the pop cultural icon that his Tarzan character did, Edgar Rice Burroughs’s John Carter series of books has influenced several of the best-known science fiction writers of all time, including Ray Bradbury . The first of this 11-book series, A Princess of Mars , was published in 1912 as a serial under the title of “The Moon of Mars” in All-Story Magazine . It was one of the ear...

Credit: Universal Studios/Pixabay.com What got me reading classic horror and sci fi novels such as Frankenstein and Dracula was their Universal movie adaptations. I grew up watching these films on television when I was a kid and because of that became interested in reading the books. That’s why I’m excited to hear that Universal is planning to produce several remakes of its classic horror films one of which has already been given a director. Universal Monster Movie Remakes According to Variety , Leigh Whannell has been hired to direct and write the script to the remake of Universal’s The Invisible Man . The movie, based on H.G. Wells’s novel of the same name, is part of a plan to remake several of Universal’s classic monster films, a plan that has moved away from a previous one that was to interconnect Universal monster characters under one story arc called the “Dark Universe”. Even though it has not been said which movies beyond The Invisible Man wi...

Credit: Pixabay.com Most of us have our childhood memories of sitting in a warm, dark movie theater on a cold weekend afternoon during the holiday season, watching a movie that really impressed us. One of the memories that stand out most for me was when I saw Star Trek the Motion Picture when it released during the Christmas season of 1979. I hated it. But still, it impressed me with it’s cinematography and special effects likened to those of Star Wars, the movie that Motion Picture ’ s producers were competing with during that space opera craze. I would come to actually like this film several years later, especially when I got into my Star Trek fan phase in high school. In fact, and I don’t care if anyone attempts to stone me for it, it’s my favourite of the Star Trek movies for reasons that I’m not going to go into here. But perhaps, one very tiny reason is nostalgia. And for the past three holiday seasons we’ve had Star Wars films releasing which will probably b...

Credit: Pixabay.com Just today I saw Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom . It was a lot better than what many critics said but I think I liked the first Jurassic World movie better and it definitely wasn’t as good as the first Jurassic Park film. Because I’m a lover of originals (books, movies, TV series, etc.) and because this is a Book-To-Movie post where I review movies based on books, I’m going to review the first Jurassic Park film along with the novel that it’s based on. For those of you not familiar with the Jurassic Park films and books that inspired them, Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom is not directly based on any of the Michael Crichton novels like Jurassic Park is. It’s merely a sequel to the movie preceding it ( Jurassic World ) . But before I saw Fallen Kingdom , I wanted to make sure I did two things: read Michael Crichton’s Jurassic Park and then see the Stephen Spielberg movie adaptation which I saw a few days ago right after finishing the book. Before tha...

It has no skin! Or does it? This sculpture of an alien is said to be from the H.R. Giger Museum. Photo Credit: Pixabay.com I finally saw A Quiet Place yesterday evening. It was really good in almost all aspects. T he story to this film was not made to be merely an audience pleaser. This was an intelligently made movie with well-developed characters and a well-written storyline. But the monsters were designed terribly. So as not to create any spoilers I won’t go into too many details, but at many points in the film the monsters looked like they were cut open in parts of their bodies. I know that’s been a major characteristic in the creatures of horror films ever since Alien in the late ‘70s, but it’s been over done too many times. I’m not against the design of the Alien movies’ exoskeleton creatures that’s muscle tissues seem to be exposed. In fact, the first movie has been one of my favourites among sci fi horror. But those monsters were Ridley Scott and H.R. Gige...

Credit: Pixabay.com One of the funniest Easter moments was when I was six and painted an egg to look like the title character of the movie, Phantom of the Paradise (the ‘70s rock version of Phantom of the Opera ). When my family had the Easter egg hunt for us, a cousin of mine, who seemed to always find the most eggs out of all us kids, found the egg I painted. I got mad at her because I wanted to find it first, so I yanked at her basket and shouted, “Give me that! That’s mine! That’s my ‘Phantom’ egg!” My parents stopped me from snagging it, though, thank God! That egg must’ve been my first geeky Easter egg before I even new what a nerd or geek. Unfortunately, no one took a picture of it so I can’t show it to you. But one of the sci fi “Easter Egg” articles in the list I’ve provided below has a photo gallery of some very groovy and geeky eggs! The egg in both Christian and Pagan cultures has traditionally represented new life. But, in a way, it’s beginning to re...