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A former child actor who starred in one of the “Star Wars” movie prequels faces charges after leading South Carolina deputies on a high-speed chase. Colleton County Sheriff’s Sgt. Kyle Strickland said Sunday deputies on Wednesday arrested a 26-year-old man they confirmed through a former talent agent was Jake Lloyd. He played young Anakin Skywalker in the 1999 movie “Star Wars: Episode I – The Phantom Menace.”

One day in the 1970s, George Lucas screened a rough cut of his new movie, Star Wars, for his influential Hollywood friends. And almost none of them liked it. The plot seemed incomprehensible, the made-up fantasy names absurd. Director Brian De Palma, who had just had a big hit with Carrie, made fun of everything about the film, including Princess Leia’s hairstyle: “Hey, George, what were those Danish rolls doing in the princess’s ears?” Almost 40 years later, De Palma is mostly making low-budget movies, and the most-anticipated film of the year is Star Wars: The Force Awakens, the first...

I’m not sure if I’ll see Jurassic World but if I do, it will likely be for the reasons summed up by New York Post film critic Kyle Smith:

Star Trek legend Nichelle Nichols suffered a mild stroke last night at her home in Los Angeles, according to a statement on her official Facebook page. "She is currently undergoing testing to determine how severe the stroke was," the statement read. "Please keep her in your thoughts." Nichols, who is 82 years old, earned her place in both Star Trek and entertainment history with her portrayal of Uhura in Star Trek: The Original Series and the six TOS feature films. She's also been a constant, joyous presence at Star Trek and sci-fi conventions all over the world. Additionally, Nichols achieved...

Over the past month we here in the Sad Puppies Revolutionary Vanguard Party Ministry of Truth have received a number of questions about which classic works of SF do and don't exemplify the goals of the Party. While our cohort John Z. Upjohn has done a fantastic job identifying SJW-infused works, we do not wish to present ourselves as wholly negative, so today we're going to talk about one of the all time great works of SF, a classic of yesteryear which could never win a Hugo today. Yes, Isaac Asimov's Foundation. This is of course a story about a...

Harlan Ellison is still an angry young man, except he'll be 81 on May 27. He has used this anger, fueled by childhood anti-Semitism, throughout his extraordinary career as a writer of speculative fiction. This year saw the publication of his 116th and 117th (so far) books: The Top of the Volcano, a collection of his awardwinning short stories, and a graphic novelization of his original script for "The City on the Edge of Forever," widely considered the best Star Trek episode ever written. Although Ellison's hundreds of published stories contain a wealth of Jewish characters, his most complex creation...

Interstellar:Can You Do It?Circumnavigate the Many dimensions of Time, Space,Having Left Twenty Years Ago, Be Home For Dinner Tonight?http://endurance.interstellarmovie.net

Brazilian artist Henrique Alvim Corrêa’s career was cut short when he died at only 34 years old. But the illustrator left behind a small science-fiction legacy thanks to his 1906 artworks detailing the Martian invasion of London in H. G. Wells’ novel The War of the Worlds. Wells’ tale preyed upon turn-of-the-century fears about the apocalypse and other Victorian superstitions (and social prejudices) about the unknown. Corrêa’s fantastical, murky style is fitting of Wells’ dark themes. The Martian fighting machines resemble frightening legions of massive spiders. There were only 500 copies of the Belgian edition of Wells’ story with Corrêa’s...

It appears that ‘Star Trek Beyond‘ may be the title of the upcoming Star Trek film, lucky number 13 in the franchise. As far as the storyline is concerned, the title suggests that the new film will venture farther out into the galaxy than we have seen in the previous two Abrams films, as co-writer Simon Pegg has been hinting at for some time now.

Last Monday afternoon, Entertainment Weekly posted a story in its Books section with the ominous headline: "Hugo Award nominations fall victim to misogynistic, racist voting campaign." Within a few hours, the headline changed to: "Correction: Hugo Awards voting campaign sparks controversy." Both versions of the EW story were about the annual Hugo Awards given out to science fiction and fantasy writers. In the original version, EW's Isabella Biedenharn claimed that "misogynist groups lobbied to nominate only white males for the science fiction book awards," urging their followers to "cast votes against female writers and writers of color." Turns out that...

This is the era in which we are all being drafted in the Culture War. It doesn’t matter if you’re secular or religious, political or apolitical, frat boys or geeks, hipsters or bros. Nobody gets to be neutral or sit on the sidelines, because we’ll all be expected to make our obeisance to the latest politically correct opinion handed down to us by a Twitter mob. By now, we know the basic ingredients of a typical skirmish in Culture War 4.0. It goes something like this: a) a leftist claque starts loudly pushing the “correct” Culture War position onto b)...

Paul Krugman, a few years ago, wrote at length to extol the magnum opus of science fiction grandmaster, Isaac Asimov, theFoundation Trilogy. Prof. Krugman’s reflections thereon are of keen interest. I met Asimov once, 40+ years ago, at a world science fiction convention. I even got him to autograph my Science Fiction Book Club copy of “The Foundation Trilogy.” This compilation of three novels is an SF classic. I, then and since, found it too dull to read in full. (Asimov’s I, Robot then was much more engaging to this long-ago SF geek. But nothing Asimov wrote really rivaled Heinlein’s...

The Tunisian desert region used as a location for the original "Star Wars" and as a tourist destination for fans of the film franchise is now reportedly crawling with a threat more insidious than marauding Sand People — ISIS terrorists. Particularly hard hit has been Tataouine, the Tunisian town that inspired George Lucas to name Luke Skywalker's home planet, Tatooine, and now a pit stop for wannabe jihadists headed to join ISIS in nearby Libya, CNN reported. Three men were arrested nearby the town that's just 60 miles from the Libyan border and arms caches were confiscated nearby, one of...

A new patent granted to aircraft, defense and security company Boeing is taking its cues from science fiction. Just like the glowing energy shields seen protecting troops, machines and even spacecraft in Star Wars and Star Trek, the design -- named "Method and system for shockwave attenuation via electromagnetic arc" -- uses energy to deflect potential damage.

In 1949, George Orwell received a curious letter from his former high school French teacher. Orwell had just published his groundbreaking book Nineteen Eighty-Four, which received glowing reviews from just about every corner of the English-speaking world. His French teacher, as it happens, was none other than Aldous Huxley who taught at Eton for a spell before writing Brave New World (1931), the other great 20th century dystopian novel.

Just because a character has been around forever doesn’t mean there aren’t new ways to reimagine it. Damon Hellandbrand, a talented artist based in the U.S., has created a series of images that portray the symbols of the zodiac as twisted, surreal creatures straight out of a nightmarish realm. Hellandbrand does much of his art with various digital illustration programs, but some are born as pencil drawings or watercolors – or “basically whatever medium I’m in the mood for.” He writes that he is inspired by artists like Ralph McQuarrie, Boris Vallejo and Frank Frazetta, and it’s easy to imagine...

EXCLUSIVE: Paramount Pictures is talks to acquire feature-film rights for the classic sci-fi novel The Stars My Destination for producer Mary Parent. Written by Alfred Bester, the book (better known as Tiger! Tiger! in the U.K. for its opening-page reprint of a William Blake poem) follows a man who is shipwrecked in space for years when one day a rescue crew passes him by. Angered, he channels his energies into seeking revenge and begins scheming. The key art of the book is enough to get anyone intrigued.

An instant candidate for the so-bad-it’s-sort-of-great hall of fame, “Jupiter Ascending’’ is totally bonkers, a sort of black-velvet-Elvis mash-up of “Star Wars’’ and every other sci-fi/fantasy movie of the past half-century right up to “The Hunger Games.” Look, there’s Mila Kunis as another chosen one, spending 10 percent of the movie cleaning toilets! A shirtless Channing Tatum in Mr. Spock ears, trying to pretend he doesn’t love Kunis! And poor Eddie Redmayne — up for Best Actor for “The Theory of Everything” — flamboyantly camping it up (oops, Oscar voting begins Friday) as an intergalactic real-estate mogul-cum-mass-murderer bent on marrying...

Ray Bradbury lived in his 1937 Cheviot Hills home for more than 50 years. After the author of "Fahrenheit 451" died in 2012, the house was readied for sale ... The home, which was purchased in June for $1.765 million, is being demolished. A permit for demolition was issued Dec. 30, Curbed LA reports, and a fan who visited the house over the weekend found it in the process of being torn down ...

What if the Allies had lost World War II, the Nazis had been first to develop the atomic bomb, and the Germans and Japanese had carved up control of United States? That's the premise of the new streaming series from Amazon, The Man in the High Castle — an adaptation of the 1962 book by the same name. And the show is fantastic.N