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The Earth is a pretty bleak place for humans in the new science fiction movie, "After Earth." Set 1,000 years in the future, "After Earth" depicts a future in which humanity is forced to abandon Earth in search of a new home. The remnants of the human race travel to and resettle on Nova Prime — a fictional planet located light-years away from Earth.

Director J.J. Abrams' 2009 prequel to the dusty Star Trek property got the space saga out of mothballs and back on the pop culture radar. Star Trek Into Darkness resumes the franchise's penchant for futuristic allegories to modern times. Well, if you consider the Bush years the state of today's foreign policy debates.The '60s series never bludgeoned viewers with its mission statements, and the Star Trek sequel similarly embraces razzle dazzle over speechifying. Abrams is too keenly focused on ambitious action sequences, those maddening lens flares and the bond between the ship's crew that made those prior voyages such a...

Star Trek: Secrets of the Universe Tonight, May 15, 10/9c, History Channel

I hope this helps: Previous threads STAR TREK INTO DARKNESS Opens Strong Internationally 'Star Trek Into Darkness' is lost in space 'Star Trek Into Darkness' review: Energized Star Trek Into Darkness – review ‘Star Trek Into Darkness' movie review Review: Star Trek Into Darkness 'Star Trek Into Darkness' review: Fast and fun IMDb user reviews IMDb external reviews Rotten Tomatoes Metacritic

I've been thinking about Philip K. Dick quite a lot in recent months. Philip K. Dick, for those who pay no attention to such things, is the writer who, without ever expressly intending it, transformed the often shabby and degraded genre of science fiction into something resembling art.

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Are you a fan of Orson Scott Card's best-selling young adult science fiction novel "Ender's Game"? Are you eager for the first glimpse of the film adaption that's due in theaters in November? Well, the good news is it's up on line, and don't worry – it won’t take long at all for you to check it out. "Ender's Game" is vying to become the next major movie franchise based on a hot young adult literary property, and while fans will have to wait until May 7 to see the first full trailer, what could be described as a trailer...

A few hours ago at the Arclight theater in Hollywood, director Neill Blomkamp showed off a rock-em-sock-em trailer for his new sci-fi epic Elysium, followed by an even more revealing ten-minute clip reel … but if he'd had his druthers, he'd have shown nothing at all. "I try to show as little as I can," he told reporters afterward. "The thing is, if you're a responsible, functioning filmmaker in the 21st century, you can't spend a hundred million dollars and then try to behave as though you're going to keep [the movie] wrapped under a blanket … I realize that...

Brian Craig of "The Brian Craig Show Podcast" inteviews Conservative actor Gary Graham. Gary played Vulcan Ambassador Soval in the TV show Star Trek Enterprise. Gary talks about Obama's Plan to confiscate all our guns. Also, he talks about his good friend Andrew Brietbart.

This week the Enquiring Hitchhiker is proud to bring you the New York Times bestselling author of the Monster Hunter series Larry Correia… Question 1. You broke into writing by self publishing your first book. How did you market the novel and what experiences positive and negative did you have with that first book? ------- After getting rejected everywhere I decided to self publish. Since I was already well known in the internet gun community, I concentrated my efforts there. Specifically on a couple of gun forums, including one that I’d been a moderator on for a really long time....

William Shatner is a man who has never been shy about expressing his opinion of Star Trek Into Darkness (and future Star Wars: Episode VII) director J.J. Abrams. During a recent press junket to promote Escape From Planet Earth, the original Captain Kirk had a few words for Abrams. During the interview, Shatner discussed Abrams along with his thoughts regarding the possible homogenization of the science-fiction film genre.

So much of science fiction's core topics intersect with war, one way or the other. Rapid social change and technological innovation both get supercharged during wartime, and some of our greatest explorers are also warriors. So it's not surprising that many of science fiction's most well-known authors served in the military at some point — especially during the era when we had a compulsory draft. But how did serving in the military shape these writers' books? Here's a look at 15 of the authors who served in the armed forces, and how their work reflects that experience.

William Shatner’s on the phone, and here’s one of the first things he says: “I just put down the phone with Ben Folds.” I’m a “Star Trek” fan but it’s not, you know, a lifestyle. I like the franchise just fine, and my favorites are the third series and the sixth film.

George Noory hosts. Tonight's topics: "Apocalipticism" and "End of the Mayan Calendar".

Anyone who has read Orson Scott Card’s beloved 1985 sci-fi novel, Ender’s Game, can understand why, for the past 20 years, Hollywood has been unable to adapt the book. After all, it’s challenging enough to shoot a movie about pint-sized military recruits fighting each other in a futuristic, space-set Battle School, but it’s an even taller order to capture the novel’s complex themes about war and morality...

Frederick Jackson Turner changed the face of American history when he introduced his thesis on the importance of the American Frontier experience in 1893. While not initially embraced his work is seminal in understanding how historians and even the public viewed the frontier for almost a hundred years. In Rereading Frederick Jackson Turner we find a succinct series of essays on the American frontier and how it shaped the United States. This powerful collection of essays encompasses Turner’s frontier thesis. No single American Historian has had such an effect on our culture. His ideas are so poignant that they stretch...

The UK's first official Star Trek convention for more than a decade has brought together all five captains from across the TV show's 50-year history. BBC News was there to witness the occasion.

Forget Wimpy Plans and NIMBYs, Let's Solve the Energy Crisis by Blowing Up Mercury Posted by Derek_Mead on Wednesday, Apr 04, 2012 Save this post NextPrev Add This With all the squabbling about oil killing us all, climate change screwing with polar bears, nuclear plants falling apart, solar panels sucking on a cloudy day, and wind turbines scything through migratory birds with a gory violence best explained by an Omega Crom song, there’s a big point that all the complainers in the energy debate are ignoring: These days, we are being huge wimps. Millennia ago us humans were building...

This week the Enquiring Hitchhiker has several new interviews. The first of these is with  Dr. Gregory Benford. Dr. Benford is one of the leading authors of hard science fiction working today. His novel In the Ocean of Night was one of my first introductions to the idea of artificial intelligence.

There's a hierarchy of "Star Trek" inventions we would like to see become reality. We already have voice-controlled computers and communicators in the form of smartphones. A working Holodeck is under development. Now, how about we get some impulse engines for our starships? The University of Alabama in Huntsville's Aerophysics Research Center, NASA, Boeing, and Oak Ridge National Laboratory are collaborating on a project to produce nuclear fusion impulse rocket engines. It's no warp drive, but it would get us around the galaxy a lot quicker than current technologies. According to Txchnologist, the scientists are hoping to make impulse drive...

Link only, per agreement with Gannett.

This article is going to make many people angry. I don’t care because it needs to be said. Doctor Who has become fan wank. I am not slamming the performance of Matt Smith who I think is brilliant as the Doctor. I am slamming this current season’s writing staff and their inability to craft a believable Doctor Who story.

By any honest measurement Barack Hussein Obama has been a dismal failure as a President. Few if any Presidents have been given as much power in their first term as Obama and done so little. In fact for two years he had an unassailable super majority in congress and still his administration has been unable to do something as simple as craft a budget much less control runaway unemployment, a crippling deficit, and the terrorist overthrow of the middle east. While contemplating how anyone could do much worse than Obama, it came to me: Obama is such a failure that...

...The one thing modern education does not do very well is teach critical thinking and this needs to change. In my own life, it was the hall way bull sessions of high school and college that probably did more along this line than any class. In Space Cadet, this took the form of the hall way bull session, but in Starship Troopers it was an actual class called History and Moral Philosophy...

The Hugo Awards! Nothing does the heart of a sci-fi, horror, fantasy fan more good than to see his favorite author or movie win a Hugo or look on past glories of Hugos gone by. Personally, as I looked through the winners old and new, I began to reflect on how much many of the winners and nominees affected my life and influenced my thought. I felt I had to get this down of digital paper for my own benefit. There may be other authors and movies you as a reader hold dear, but these are the ones that...

We had the pleasure to interview J. Neil Schulman last week. He is the author of the Novel Alongside Night and has twice won the Prometheus award for his work. Currently Mr. Schulman is working on a movie based on Alongside Night.

This week we interview author John Ringo. He has had several books on the New York Times best seller list and he has over two million books in print. Ringo’s specializes in military science fiction. The Hitchhiker asks… Question 1- After reading There Will Be Dragons I had a sense that Heinlein had influenced your writing. Are you a fan of his work? Very much so. Heinlein is the absolute sine qua non of science fiction authors. While I haven’t read all of his works, I’ve read most and he’s definitely my favorite SF author influencing both my writing and...

Larry Niven is one of the old guard of hard science fiction writers. His ringworld Novels are some of the most widely read science fiction novels of all time. It was our pleasure to interview him for the site.

Presented at: Chicon 7, Chicago, Illinois, August 30-September 3, 2012 Toastmaster: John Scalzi Base design: Deb Kosiba Awards Administration: Diane Lacey, Jeff Orth, David Gallaher, John Platt, Helen Montgomery

The 2012 Hugo Awards ceremony will be streamed live tomorrow, Sunday, September 2, 2012 from the 70th World Science Fiction Convention (Worldcon). The ceremony is scheduled to begin at 8:00pm CDT. This year's Worldcon is being held in Chicago. It began August 30 and will end September 3, 2012. You can watch the ceremony online here. You can also follow live text coverage here. This is the list of the nominees. For more information, please see the Chicon 7 site and the Hugo Awards site.

One of the great tragedies in the history of science fiction was the premature death of the writer Stanley Weinbaum. His death in 1935 at the age of just thirty-three cut short his writing career which had barely lasted for a year and a half. Even sadder still is that he is nearly forgotten today when in a just world he would continue to be remembered as one of its great authors. Although his first story, “A Martian Odyssey”, remains an oft-anthologized classic, the rest of his oeuvre remains largely inaccessible to contemporary readers. This is almost criminal, for while...

Actually, I would appreciate if people didn’t remake anything. Some originality would be nice.  While, I would appreciate no remakes, this goes double for ones with Arnold Schwarzenegger.It as actually quite interesting how many of Arnold’s films were science fiction or fantasy based.  It is also interesting how every remake of one of them is a complete flop.  The latest edition of Total Recall going to the remake scrap-heap is prime example.  Great CGI, No originality and No Arnold equals epic fail.  It seems the original which was recently called ‘cheesy’ by some critic did far better at the box office than the new one which...

As part of the L, Ron Hubbard Writers of the Future award in 1987, a group of science fiction luminaries put together a text “time capsule” of their predictions about life in the far off year of 2012. Including such names as Orson Scott Card, Robert Silverberg, Jack Williamson, Algis Budrys and Frederik Pohl, it gives us an interesting glimpse into how those living in the age before smartphones, tablets, Wi-Fi and on-demand streaming episodes of Community thought the future might turn out.

We have a special treat for our readers this morning. One of my all time favorite authors Dr, Jerry Pournelle. Having co-authored my third favorite book Lucifer’s Hammer (1 and 2 are both Heinlein works). I was a little nervous to contact him and more nervous to actually ask for an interview. Luckily I got over that and I am very proud to present this interview for our audience here at the Freehold.

Sorry to all you Star Trek fans out there. I may be the only science fiction fan in the universe that really hates his guts. He stands in the annals of history with Karl Marx as one of the most vile perpetrators of socialism and communism this planet has ever known. I call him the used philosophy salesman…. and he was good at that job, one of the best. Today is the anniversary of his birth and I have been constantly reminded of this all morning. Tributes everywhere I look to the man who turned the brains of a generation...

If Harry Harrison had only created "Slippery" Jim DiGriz, the roguish hero of the Stainless Steel Rat books, he would deserve a high place in science fiction history. But he also wrote dozens of other novels, including the hilarious Bill the Galactic Hero saga, the proto-Steampunk classic A Transatlantic Tunnel, Hurrah!, and the novel that became the movie Soylent Green, Make Room! Make Room!.

<p>LOS ANGELES -- Ray Bradbury, the science fiction-fantasy master who transformed his childhood dreams and Cold War fears into telepathic Martians, lovesick sea monsters, and, in uncanny detail, the high-tech, book-burning future of "Fahrenheit 451," has died. He was 91.</p>

Ray Bradbury, the writer whose expansive flights of fantasy and vividly rendered space-scapes have provided the world with one of the most enduring speculative blueprints for the future, has died. He was 91. Bradbury's daughter confirmed his death to the Associated Press on Wednesday morning. She said her father died Tuesday night in Southern California. Author of more than 27 novels and story collections — most famously “The Martian Chronicles,” “Fahrenheit 451,” “Dandelion Wine” and “Something Wicked This Way Comes” — and more than 600 short stories, Bradbury has frequently been credited with elevating the often maligned reputation of science...

After three days of what is becoming a new trend in Hollywood advertising – trailers for a trailer – Apple.com unveiled the first official teaser for time travel movie “Looper.” The action flick stars Joseph Gordon-Levitt and is directed and written by Rian Johnson, who introduced the film in three vignettes that counted down to Thursday’s preview release.

Rare Star Trek Photos Show Green Orion Slavegirls Like You’ve Never Seen Them The original Star Trek pilot, "The Cage," included a lot more of the scenes where Vina is turned into a green Orion slavegirl who dances for Captain Pike — but they were cut because they were too saucy for prime time television. Now, some rare Trek behind-the-scenes pictures include a brand new look at the unshown parts of Vina's dance sequence. Including a part where the poor slavegirl gets whipped. Turns out being an Orion slavegirl isn't all dancing and quoting poetry. Tom Redlaw, aka Bird of...

British author Samuel Youd, who wrote SF as John Christopher, died [February 3] in Bath, England, at the age of 89.

Anne McCaffrey wasn't just the inventor of Pern, the world where a whole society is based on dragon-riding. She was also an incredibly influential author who helped transform the way science fiction and fantasy authors wrote about women, and the way all of us thought about bodies and selfhood. She was the first woman to win a Hugo Award and a Nebula Award, as well as a Grand Master of science fiction.

Too often, conservatives and Christians win the political fight but lose the culture. It doesn't matter how many elections we win if the Left rots the culture right around us. Conservatives need to be writing books, movies, and music. So this is my foray into the culture war. I'm looking for reviewers for my new science fiction book, Knox's Irregulars. It's a fast-paced action novel written from a traditionalist, conservative perspective. If anyone is interested, I'm happy to send them a free copy in Kindle, Epub or PDF format. Drop me an email at jwesleybush@gmail.com. The paperback version will be...

A girl with hair dyed cherry red wears goggles, a tight corset, a lacy Victorian dress and black military boots. Her friend, a gent, dons a top hat, an early 1900s gas mask, fingerless leather gloves and crimson canvas trousers. He holds a pistol that looks like a fusion between the Wild West and a 1950s sci-fi flick. All of this is not some new fashion trend. It's Steampunk, and it's been around for a while.

Stephen Spielberg has remade "Jurrasic Park" for TV. It starts in September. It is described as a tree-hugger version of a time-travel story (Earth's atmosphere becomes so polluted that people have to flee back in time 85 million years.) An updated Robinson family (per "Lost in Space") is described as the main characters. The trailers look like outtakes from "Jurrasic Park." My question: does this thing have a chance at "something over $4M" per episode?

Renovation, the 2011 World Science Fiction Convention, has announced the 2011 Hugo Award winners.

The soundtrack to the 1979 Disney space epic has been remastered, expanded, and now available from Disney and Intrada records. The music was composed by the late English movie music master John Barry, who is widely known for his work on the James Bond films between 1963 and 1987. Here is a suite of the OST on youtube

Four years ago, the BBC decided to capitalize on the immense popularity of the long-running Doctor Who series by creating a spin-off called Torchwood. Whereas Doctor Who is, apart from the intensity of its stories, safe for the whole family, producers said that Torchwood would be “dark, clever, wild, [and] sexy.” Doctor Who for adults” is what they called it. As a colleague wrote at the time, a better word to describe the show is “nihilistic” — it’s a judgment that’s reinforced by the show’s newest character. [...] For the fourth season, entitled “Miracle Day,” the writers ratcheted up the...

The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) is offering money to researchers looking at identifying and controlling timing mechanisms in cells, including those of the human body. The blue sky gazing loon-collective notes that no single "master switch" has been found to control genes' activities. But it hopes that the "Biochronicity" programme will find a way to understand and predict "temporal features of biological systems". The four-year programme will start by identifying "episequences and validation in experimental biological systems". After two years, DARPA hopes to move to Phase II, which aims to conduct Live Fire Tests. Should the research prove...

Joel Rosenberg, a Minneapolis gun rights advocate and author of several fantasy novels, has died. His wife, Felicia, posted a message on the “Free Joel Rosenberg” website, saying he died Thursday evening at Hennepin County Medical Center. “On Wednesday afternoon, June 1, 2011, Joel had a respiratory depression that caused a heart attack, anoxic brain damage and major organ failure. Despite the very best efforts of the paramedics and the team at Hennepin County Medical Center, Joel was pronounced brain dead at around 5:37 p.m. Thursday June 2nd, In accordance with his wishes, he shared the gift of life through...