Free Republic

One of my favorite things to do here at JoBlo is to highlight obscure movies that deserve a lot more love. One of the best movies I’ve ever covered is Peter Hyams’ 1981 movie Outland. A kind of quasi sci-fi remake of High Noon set on Jupiter’s Moon, IO, it stars Sean Connery as a Marshal set to enforce law on a mining colony who finds himself marked for death by the company administering the moon when he discovers a conspiracy. They hire gunmen to take him out, and with no one on the moon willing to help him, he...

AI has become inescapable these days, with every app, search engine, and internet browser overloading us with pop-ups of why their new AI enhancement/assistant/plagiarism machine is something we just can't live without. In reality, AI is being shoved down all of our throats because a bunch of billionaire weirdos invested an insane amount of money into it and desperately need to convince us that they didn't bet on a lemon....The force-feeding of AI is an obnoxious intrusion at best, and giving people AI-induced psychosis at worst....Sam Rockwell plays Man From the Future, a man, well, claiming to be from the...

Even more impressive is that Predator: Badlands" has the highest rating for a film in the franchise, as its current Cinemascore is an A-. This is huge news for the future of the franchise, and the latest chapter in the saga that Trachtenberg is building. As stated, "Prey" helped to revive the franchise when the story took audiences on a journey where a Predator faces off against the Comanchee Nation. The idea of an alien hunter taking on historical warriors was further explored in "Predator: Killer of Killers," which

Astronomers at MIT, Columbia University, and elsewhere have used NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope to peer through the dust of nearby galaxies and into the aftermath of a black hole’s stellar feast. Credit: NRAO/AUI/NSF/NASA Unlike active galaxies that endlessly devour nearby matter, these black holes remain in slumber, stirring only momentarily to consume an unlucky passing star. Astronomers from MIT, Columbia University, and other institutions have used NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) to look through thick layers of dust in nearby galaxies and examine the aftermath of black holes consuming stars. According to a new study published on July...

There was a small renaissance in science fiction movies in the early '50s, aside from the space operas and creature features there were politically resonant, to include big budget titles like Robert Wise's The Day the Earth Stood Still. How and why science fiction films took themselves seriously isn't hard to understand if you just look at the headlines from the moment the film began production to after it hit theatres. Screenwriter Edmund North was working on the script for the film in the first two months of 1951, at the beginning of the first full year of the Korean...

I'm proud to mention that I’m a columnist with Renew America. The editors suggested I provide a review of my new novel. The problem with reviews, good, bad, long, short, is that each is one person's opinion. Surely I can be more helpful. Here are the first six reviews: ——————————————————————- “I LOVED IT. It's interesting and fast-paced." —Laurie Endicott Thomas, author of "Not Trivial: How Studying The Traditional Liberal Arts Can Set You Free” —————————————————————— "A riveting sci-fi thriller that delves into artificial intelligence, government surveillance, and the nature of free will. At the heart of the novel is Carlos,...

“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?