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The highly anticipated next installment of the "Star Wars" franchise will be set 30 years after "Episode VI: Return of the Jedi," Walt Disney Co.'s chief executive officer Bob Iger said on Tuesday at the company's annual shareholders meeting. Disney purchased "Star Wars" production company LucasFilm for $4.05 billion in 2012 and announced it would release three new films in the popular sci-fi series. Fans have been avidly awaiting details of the next film, "Star Wars: Episode VII."

In 1898, British writer H. G. Wells wrote "The War of the Worlds," a science-fiction novel in which Martians invade the Earth and nearly decimate humanity. A decade later, in what was then the Russian Empire, writer and Marxist revolutionary Alexander Bogdanov wrote his novel "Red Star," also about Martians landing on Earth. But in Bogdanov's novel, the Martians are not violent or monstrous. Instead, they invite the main character, a young Russian student named Leonid, back to the Red Planet to see the Martians' civilization: a thriving, peaceful — and communist — utopia. The optimism of "Red Star" was...

Starman actor Ken Utsui passed away on March 14, 2014, of chronic respiratory failure. He was 82. Although Utsui was a prolific actor for many decades, he is best known in the United States as Starman (a.k.a. Super Giant), the Shintoho superhero who fought a bevy of outlandish creatures in the late 1950s.

Richard Coogan, who played Captain Video on the early TV sci-fi adventure series Captain Video and His Video Rangers, died Wednesday in Los Angeles. He was 99.

It's a cold day here in the South, snowing, raining and freezing. So it was a good day to curl up with my Basset Hound and watch some old sci-fi movies. They're dated, but still relevant for today's world. Soylent Green. http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0070723/?ref_=fn_al_tt_1 1973 movie set in 2022 with Charlton Heston and Edward G. Robinson (his last appearance). The world is overpopulated, polluted, suffering from global warming, short on food and many people are homeless. Charlton Heston plays a detective trying to solve a murder case of an "Important" person. Important being code word for rich elite quasi government business man....

New Delhi: Jose Padilha is making his Hollywood debut with 'RoboCop', a remake of the 1987 film of the same name, and says his approach to the sci-fi film is similar to the happenings in the world today. A re-telling of the Paul Verhoeven-directed 1987 movie, the film is about a Detroit police officer who is transformed into a sentient law enforcement machine. "I think that the issues our movie talks about - the robots, the use of drones, our law enforcement all of these are real issues and very close to reality today. And they are going to become...

Actress Alexandra Bastedo, best known for her role in the 1960s television sci-fi series The Champions, has died aged 67 following a long illness.

Happy National Science Fiction Day! January 2nd is the day selected for this wonderful holiday because it was Isaac Asimov's birthday. It's a day to celebrate, appreciate, and even read some of the many science fiction offerings at your local library, bookstore, website, or your own bookshelf.

I have been down with a nasty cold for the last few weeks. The good side of that is that I have been catching up with my reading, which included the last couple of issues of "Analog...Science Fiction and Fact". I was reading along and enjoying the stories, until I got to "Not for Sissies" by Jerry Oltion in the March 2014 issue, at which point my jaw dropped. This story is nothing more than gay pornography. The first line is: "Nathan was eating breakfast in the kitchen when his husband, Greg, announced that he was going to die." And...

“We’ve created a micro-bimorph dual coil that functions as a powerful torsional muscle, driven thermally or electro-thermally by the phase transition of vanadium dioxide,” said Junqiao Wu, the project’s lead scientist at the U.S. Department of Energy’s Lawrence Berkeley National Labs (Berkeley Labs). ... Dr. Koh suggests how these micro-muscles will change the game of humanoid robotics. “Our materials mimic those of the human muscle, responding quickly to electrical impulses, instead of slowly for mechanisms driven by hydraulics. Robots move in a jerky manner because of this mechanism. Now, imagine artificial muscles which are pliable, extendable and react in a...

Everybody (well, everybody who reads sf/fantasy) has their favorite novels in each genre...which are usually a bunch of other people's favorite novels as well. This only makes sense, since cream rises to the top. But even so, there are plenty of obscure books that for whatever reason, never really caught on. They might well be great reads, but no one seems to have heard of them...so what's your favorite sf and fantasy novel that still lies in not-so-deserved obscurity? With any luck, we'll all discover a bunch of great books that we've never heard of before! I'll start off with...

There are so many amazing science fiction movies that it's hard to include all the greats in a list of 50. It may not be the same 50 you'd pick, but I hope you enjoy this list of must-sees. How many have you seen? Click items to mark as completed.

William Patterson’s big Heinlein biography isn’t just the life story of one man. It’s a history of United States in the first half of the 20th century. Not a complete history, but in some ways it’s better than complete, because it’s more intimate. Heinlein was like a real-life Forrest Gump, in the middle of many of the trends that shaped America. Heinlein was born in Kansas, in 1907, the heart of Middle America. He was a cadet at Annapolis during the years between the great wars. His classmates believed ruefully that they’d be the first academy class that would never...

When Paul Verhoeven’s Starship Troopers hit theaters 16 years ago today, most American critics slammed it. In the New York Times, Janet Maslin panned the “crazed, lurid spectacle,” as featuring “raunchiness tailor-made for teen-age boys.” Jeff Vice, in the Deseret News, called it “a nonstop splatterfest so devoid of taste and logic that it makes even the most brainless summer blockbuster look intelligent.” Roger Ebert, who had praised the “pointed social satire” of Verhoeven’s Robocop, found the film “one-dimensional,” a trivial nothing “pitched at 11-year-old science-fiction fans.” But those critics had missed the point. Starship Troopers is satire, a ruthlessly...

Did you know a Mad Max sequel was in the works? Dubbed as 'Mad Max: Fury Road' The fourth installment of the post apocalyptic franchise wrapped filming in mid December, and the slow trickle of production shots and concept art has started to trickle out to the public. This latest video features some on set footage from the shooting location of Namibia, showcasing a handful of deadly vehicles strutting their stuff. Starring Tom Hardy (Bane) in the role of Mad Max, the new installment will take place 29 years after the latest installment, 1985's 'Mad Max: Beyond Thunderdome.' A few...

The controversy over Orson Scott Card's opposition to gay marriage appears to have simmered down. Maybe it'll kick up again as the Ender's Game premiere closes in, but it shouldn't—Card's religious objection to gay marriage is shared by a substantial minority of Americans, and holding it against him is a little pat. The actual outrage over what's happening to gay Russians appears to have captured all the anger being directed Card's way. That's good! The gay marriage foofarah was a distraction from Card's much more fascinating political paranoia. His last column on politics is a sort of masterpiece of that...

UPDATED: The Sandra Bullock-George Clooney space epic -- fueled by adults -- does huge business in 3D; Justin Timberlake-Ben Affleck poker thriller "Runner Runner" folds with $7.6 million. Once again proving the power of older moviegoers, Alfonso Cuaron's 3D space epic Gravity debuted to a record-breaking $55.8 million in North America, the top October opening of all-time and the best three-day showing for stars Sandra Bullock and George Clooney. Overseas, Gravity also won the weekend with a solid $27.4 million from 27 markets for a worldwide total of $83 million. Gravity's launch caps a substantial production and marketing effort by...

The Star Trek episode Mirror Mirror illustrates the problem with cultures that solve their problems with violence... perfectly.

Click Here:Same Picture As Below But Twenty Times The Size:All Spaceships Known To Man

1910 circa - Rosendaal bij Arnhem - Kettingbrug - historical zombie A vintage photo (postcard) from 1910 of a purported "zombie" shambling across a bridge in Arnhem, Netherlands.