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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...

I'm a big fan of written SF. I can enjoy reading authors whose political views differ from my own so long as their politics don't clumsily interfere with the story. I recalled an essay by Arthur C. Clarke that illustrates just how whacked out his views were. and was able to find it online. I present to you an excerpt from "Scenario for a Civilized Planet", in which he outlines what weaponry would be permitted. Mind you, he thinks this will apply to the entire planet: http://www.lightmillennium.org/2006_18th/arthur_c_clarke_civilized.html (yeah, it's looney webite...what a shock) High-tech weapon systems are the crutches of...

We have confirmation that Joanna Russ, 74, died this morning peacefully around 7:15 a.m. in hospice care in Tucson AZ. She has been ill since suffering a stroke in February 2011. Russ was a critic and SF writer, best known for The Female Man (1975).

Syfy acquired the rights to all 31 episodes of Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles but is pulling the plug on the 4-5 hour blocks of them after only three weeks (including tonight’s episodes) and will replace them with blocks of Star Trek: The Next Generation reruns beginning next Thursday.Perhaps Syfy is trying to not be out sci-fied by BBC America which also airs Star Trek: TNG reruns and also just acquired the rights to air Syfy “hit” (from the SciFi days) Battlestar Galactica.  Not to mention BBC America just announced a co-production deal on the UK version of Being Human,...

Renovation is proud to present the 2011 Hugo Award Nominees... The winners will be announced Saturday, August 20th, 2011, during the Hugo Awards Ceremony at Renovation in Reno, Nevada...

This weekend, American soldiers have once again stepped into harm’s way, as Operation Odyssey Dawn begins in Libya. Coincidentally, we’re also passing through a pop-culture moment of some significance, as a sizable portion of our cultural elite find themselves strongly at odds with audiences over an unexpectedly popular movie, Battle: Los Angeles. Pop-culture criticism can be a tricky affair. Critics often praise a film that audiences ignore, or vice versa. What’s interesting in this case is how profound the disconnect has become. Battle: LA passed the $60 million mark at the box office this weekend, but many critics don’t just...

Another former Fox sci-fi fan favorite is heading to cable: Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles has been picked up by Syfy. EW can exclusively report that Syfy has gained the rights to all 31 episodes of the series, which ran for two seasons on Fox from 2007-09. This will mark the first time the show has aired off broadcast. The news comes on the heels of Science Channel making waves by picking up Fox’s cult fave Firefly. Sarah Conner Chronicles will launch on Syfy on Thursday, April 7 at 9 p.m., with an airing of Terminator 3 for a lead-in....

Once upon a time, TV Science Fiction was literate, thoughtful, and could be, on occasion, profound. From the long lost but quite well done One Step Beyond, to Rod Serling's The Twilight Zone, television that focused on the strange and alien unknown sought to fire our imaginations and move our thoughts beyond the common, mundane, and trivial. These genres (science fiction and the supernatural) were used to explore the human condition by situating human dramatic conflict within strange, fantastic, alien contexts and environments. Within this context, the great dramas of human existence, such as the overarching struggle between good and...

Do you know of any science fiction stories about future Ice Ages? I've read one, the novel, Fallen Angels by Larry Niven, Jerry Pournelle, and Michael Flynn Wikipedia articleRead it online ... Do you know of any other SF stories on this topic?

...In any case, the twenty-first century is undeniably the century science fiction built—if not in utter hands-on reality (though even that proposition is debatable, given the inspiration the genre has provided for influential scientists and geeks), then in the public imagination...