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“The Melville of science fiction” had a hand in bringing 1968’s most technologically advanced potato chip to the world.Plenty of writers have made certain foods or drinks iconic: Marcel Proust had his Madeleines, Hemingway his namesake Daiquiri. C.S. Lewis made kids who’d never tried it crave Turkish Delight. But there may be only one writer who helped create an iconic snack available in grocery stores everywhere: Gene Wolfe. This largely unheralded genius allowed generations worldwide to enjoy the Pringles Potato Crisp. How Gene Wolfe helped create Pringles Before he became a critically acclaimed writer of the Book of the...

Recently, I learned of two phenomena: that people today actually publish books almost entirely written by artificial intelligence and that AI programs, rather than admitting ignorance, may sometimes “hallucinate” a plausible sounding answer. I’ve now experienced both. My journey into Münchhausen’s AI Syndrome began with my own very flawed human memory. Many years ago I read a short science fiction story in an old anthology that is now long lost. It made a deep impression on me, but I’m unable to recall the title or author. Suddenly the thought struck me, perhaps Elon Musk’s synthetic AI brainchild Grok could collate...

Ants are among the most familiar insects on Earth today, but their origins remain cloaked in deep evolutionary history. Until now, the oldest known ant specimens came from amber deposits in France and Myanmar, dating to the Cretaceous period around 100 million years ago. But a new discovery—published recently in the journal Current Biology—pushes that timeline back even further. “Our team has discovered a new fossil ant species representing the earliest undisputable geological record of ants,” said lead author Anderson Lepeco in a recent statement. “What makes this discovery particularly interesting is that it belongs to the extinct ‘hell ant,’...

Neill Blomkamp is going back to Planet P—back to Bug City—to hunt for something no one’s ever seen before: a faithful adaptation of Robert A. Heinlein’s Starship Troopers. Don’t get me wrong, I love Paul Verhoeven’s 1997 cut, not least because Verhoeven tried and failed to satirize the subject matter. He denounced Heinlein’s novel as a “very right-wing book,” and claims to only have read two chapters “because it was so boring.” The result was something perhaps even more Heinleinian than a sober adaptation and a spectacular piece of propaganda for the author, with one of the most memorable movie...

Here's the starting point for this article. For almost 100 years the Education Establishment has maneuvered, plotted, and schemed to eliminate phonics, and to make American children memorize sight-words. The pitch has always been sweeping: phonics can’t possibly work for a complex language like English, and sight-words are the only way to go. Teachers, students, and parents have been bullied relentlessly to embrace what phonics experts (such as Rudolf Flesch) assume is a fraud and a nonstarter. How does the ordinary citizen deal with this? Well, it's been rough because the professors at Harvard, etc. do not play games. They're...

CIENTISTS FIRST SHOWED TELEPORTATION WAS POSSIBLE back in 1993, when a team from IBM published a paper about teleporting a quantum state—rather than just an object—in the journal Physical Review Letters.

In the words of one great work of science fiction, "The glory of creation is in its infinite diversity, and the ways our differences combine to create meaning and beauty." Sci-fi itself is a genre that contains multitudes — space opera, time travel, dystopia, cyberpunk, apocalypse and post-apocalypse, just to name a few. Sci-fi has been the domain of Hollywood blockbusters and independent art films, presented as comedy and drama, used to paint bright futures or portents of doom. On this list, you'll find permutations of every sort, spread across a variety of decades, countries, and languages. While entries on...

For your Halloween Reading edification. One of the scariest stories of all time. Who Goes There by John W. Campbell Jr. This story was the basis for several movies called 'The Thing'. https://soma.sbcc.edu/users/davega/xnon_active_classes/filmst_118/FILMS/ThingFromAnotherPlanet/Who%20Goes%20There_Book.pdf

So, with the third Dune film, Dune Messiah, still very much in development limbo, what can we expect from Villeneuve’s other big science fiction project, the much-discussed adaptation of Arthur C. Clarke’s Rendezvous with Rama? The short answer is: don’t expect it to be anything like Dune. And, if Villeneuve is very smart, he and his collaborators will make Rama very different from its source material. At the risk of sounding reductive, Rendezvous with Rama is a bit easier to define: It’s an epic work of speculative science fiction that firmly favors its concepts over its characters. Anecdotally, even huge...

After five seasons and 155 episodes of macabre twists and turns, the original run of the CBS anthology The Twilight Zone concluded with an uncharacteristically happy ending. First screened 60 years ago, “The Bewitchin’ Pool” centers on Sport (Mary Badham) and Jeb (Jeffrey Byron) Sharewood, two affluent young siblings seemingly unperturbed when a straw-hatted boy suddenly emerges from their swimming pool, the latter poetically described by creator and narrator Rod Serling as “a structure built of tile and cement and money, a backyard toy for the affluent, wet entertainment for the well-to-do.” The pair subsequently accept his invitation to follow...

Iconic Battlestar Galactica and McCloud actor Terry Carter has died aged 95. The star passed away 'peacefully' at his home in New York on Tuesday, a statement on his website read. 'Terry Carter best known for his roles as “Sgt. Joe Broadhurst” on the TV series McCloud and as “Colonel Tigh” on the original Battlestar Galactica died peacefully at home on April 23rd, 2024,' his website reads.

A comet wipes out most of life on Earth, leaving two Valley Girls fighting against cannibal zombies and a sinister group of scientists.

Premiers on the BBC iPlayer in the UK 11th May and Disney+ 10th May where available.

A long time ago, there was a Free Republic Book Club ... mostly because I opened my mouth and a bunch of people told me to organize one. I haven't pinged it in a long time. (Actually, another book club started, so I stopped.) Any way, has anyone read any good books lately. Fiction, non-fiction, genre, mainstream. Anything you want to share? Has anyone WRITTEN any good books that the rest of us should check out?

On the back of COVID-related production delays and massive Hollywood strikes, the next 12 months will be a strange mix of long-awaited content and out-of-the-blue oddities. More than half of last year’s list has yet to appear, so there is likely to be a lot of interesting film and TV to come. I’m ignoring most of the big franchise stuff as it has recently proved to be utterly disappointing. Instead, we have lots of strange, creative and original work to look forward to including an apocalypse musical, an android exploring human emotions, and a story about a clone who lives...

Star Wars director Sharmeen Obaid-Chinoy has declared 'it's about time' a woman shaped a film for the franchise. The Pakistani-Canadian filmmaker, 45, is set to become the first woman and the first person of colour to direct a feature film for the franchise. Sharmeen made her name as an Oscar-winning documentarian before going on to direct two episodes of the Ms Marvel series.

Dreams of a world powered by antigravity got quashed by a particle physics today. ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ It turns out that Einstein was right yet again. A recent experiment just proved that antigravity doesn’t exist and we probably won’t ever get to use antimatter to levitate or build a perpetual motion machine or power warp drives (sorry, Star Trek). Antimatter itself is very real. Made of particles that mostly behave like regular matter, but their electrical charges are reversed, an anti-proton looks just like a proton but has a negative charge, while an anti-electron (or positron) looks and moves just like an...

It's 2274, and on the surface, it all seems to be an idyllic society. Living in a city within an enclosed dome, there is little or no work for humans to perform, and inhabitants are free to pursue all of the pleasures of life. There is one catch however: your life is limited and when you reach thirty, it is terminated in a quasi-religious ceremony known as "carrousel". Some, known as "runners", try to escape their fate when the time comes, and it's the job of Sandmen to track them down and kill them. Logan (Michael York) is such a...

During a long space war, the lives of two wounded enemies become dependent on their ability to forgive and to trust.

The TV studio Desilu was founded in 1950 by Lucille Ball and Desi Arnaz, which you can probably tell by the name. The famous performing couple initially pitched a TV adaptation of the marriage-based radio sitcom "My Favorite Husband" to the execs at CBS, but that show eventually mutated into "I Love Lucy," more explicitly sold as a vehicle for Ball. To this day, "I Love Lucy" remains one of the most popular sitcoms of all time, and every modern comedy show contains traces of its DNA. The series ran for 180 episodes over six seasons, ending its run in...