Free Republic

Patrick Stewart returns to Star Trek and the role of Jean-Luc Picard in a new CBS streaming show, but the reason it exists at all is, unsurprisingly, political. The liberal actor told Variety this week that Picard is “me responding to the world of Brexit and Trump.” He also said that the United States (under Trump) and Britain (under Conservative Prime Minister Boris Johnson) are “completely f****d.” Talking to Variety’s Daniel Holloway, Stewart explained why his character is getting a revival: Trump seemed to be responsible for a lot of old TV shows coming back. In 2018, the creator of...

Save 30% on Soylent products

As the year 2019 draws to a close, one cannot cruise along the internet superhighway without seeing something related to Disney’s The Mandalorian. Telling the tale of a helmet-wearing bounty hunter and the childlike creature known to the internet as “Baby Yoda,” the show has reached critical acclaim for its creativity, production values and vast characters- including one suicide-happy bounty hunter droid named IG-11. [Spoiler Warning: If you’re easily hung up by spoilers, you should probably go watch the first season before continuing]

The brand new poster for Doctor Who was revealed on Friday. Lead stars Jodie Whittaker, Mandip Gill, Tosin Cole and Bradley Walsh returned to their roles in the exciting preview for series 12, which will be released in 2020. The actress, 37, transformed into the thirteenth Timelord once again, as she dressed in her characters signature look of a white-and-blue raincoat, a striped jumper, and her blue trousers with braces.

They took as their reference an existing mission study to send six humans to Mars and back in a five year timescale. The study found the spacecraft mass could be reduced by a third by removing the crew quarters with a similar reduction in consumables, equivalent to several tons of saved mass. Hibernation would take place in small individual pods that would double as cabins while the crew are awake. The assumption was that a drug would be administered to induce "torpor"—the term for the hibernating state. Like hibernating animals, the astronauts would be expected to acquire extra body fat...

A NEW politically correct BBC version of The War of the Worlds attacks religion and the British Empire and highlights climate change. It also creates a female lead for a character barely mentioned in HG Wells’s book.

Just Imagine is a 1930 science fiction musical-comedy film, directed by David Butler. The film is known for its art direction and special effects in its portrayal of New York City in an imagined 1980. Just Imagine stars El Brendel, Maureen O'Sullivan, John Garrick and Marjorie White. The film starts with a preamble showing life in 1880, where the people believed themselves the "last word in speed". It switches to 1930, with the streets crowded with automobiles and lined with electric lights and telephone wires. It then switches to 1980, where the tenement houses have morphed into 250-story buildings,...

November, 2019, seemed like an unfeasibly long way away back in 1982. But it's come around pretty quick, and as of today, we've caught up with the dystopian future world seen in Ridley Scott's iconic Blade Runner. Scott – with help from sci-fi legend Philip K. Dick, who wrote the book Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, on which the movie is based – foresaw flying vehicles and sentient androids in his version of 2019.

The BBC's highly-anticipated sci-fi drama, The War Of The Worlds, has dropped it's first trailer. Veering away from the 2005 Hollywood version - which starred Tom Cruise, was helmed by Steven Spielberg and was set in the present day - the three-part series takes place in Edwardian England, harking more accurately back to the source text. The novel - written by H. G. Wells and published in 1897 - sees martians, in the form of giant, spindly-legged machines - attack Earth, on hunt for resources.

Warp drive is one of the many futuristic ideas proposed in Star Trek, allowing for faster-than-light travel across the galaxy. Einstein's Theory of Relativity prevents anything from moving faster than light. In 1994, a theoretical physicist proposed a workaround: creating a bubble within space-time that would twist distances, allowing anything within the bubble to travel long distances. Many think it makes theoretical sense, but is practically unworkable. An undergrad at the University of Alabama wants to restart the conversation, and he's focused on how much energy such a bubble would need. Star Trek's science fiction has been intermingled with...

The John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer has been renamed The Astounding Award for Best New Writer. The award, which is sponsored by Dell Magazines and administered by the World Science Fiction Society, was named for the editor of Astounding Science Fiction (later Analog Science Fiction and Fact). Current Analog editor Trevor Quachri said, Campbell’s provocative editorials and opinions on race, slavery, and other matters often reflected positions that went beyond just the mores of his time and are today at odds with modern values, including those held by the award’s many nominees, winners, and supporters. As we...

here's an art to rebooting, a mixture that's equal parts nostalgia and novelty. Some franchises, like Star Wars, rely too heavily on the familiar, sacrificing what could otherwise be new and exciting. Other reboots offer so little of the familiar that it feels like something completely different, like how Star Trek: Discovery is Star Trek only in name. Very few films and TV shows (think: Blade Runner 2049) really nail this delicate mélange. But that's why Amazon's announcement about its exclusive TV series based on 1997's Event Horizon is so intriguing. This quirky, goth-horror space film is far from an...

Moira Greyland Peat wrote "The Last Closet", a criticism of the homosexual lifestyle that stands up to criticism because she was the child of two out homosexuals. She's been under attack for criticizing the LGBT movement and being a professed Christian. This is an interview with her by Tamara Wilhite.

Various sci-fi authors are facing page deletions on Wikipedia after various Left-wing editors nominated the pages for deletion on the grounds of the authors not being notable, or for their fanbase being “bigoted”, and “racist”, and filled with “hatred”. There’s currently a battleground on the author pages of Wikipedia where certain editors are attempting to erase an internet checkpoint for the authors due to disliking what little they’ve gleaned of their politics.

The official trailer for Star Trek: Picard has finally arrived -- and revealed a plethora of familiar faces to fans of Star Trek: The Next Generation, including Data and Seven of Nine. Sir Patrick Stewart, who returns to play Picard, was on hand at the San Diego Convention Center to deliver the exclusive sneak peek at the upcoming series, airing exclusively on CBS All Access (subscribe to CBS All Access here), which serves up a new take on his iconic character.

In a just world, O.J. Simpson would currently be serving the 24th year of a double life sentence; Ronald Reagan would have been president during America's bicentennial instead of Gerald Ford — and Galaxy Quest would've earned half-a-billion bucks at the box office when it came out in 1999. But inept and indifferent studio marketing (plus competition from another "sci-fi" comedy, Ghostbusters) relegated Galaxy Quest to semi-cult status. Which is ironically appropriate, given its plot: At a science fiction convention, fans await an appearance by the cast of Galaxy Quest, a hokey interstellar TV adventure series unceremoniously cancelled in the...

Kansas Citians had their eyes to the sky Thursday evening, trying to get a glimpse of two mysterious white, spherical objects floating over the city. The National Weather Service of Kansas City brought attention to the matter just before 8 p.m. and posted a photo to Twitter, adding it had “no explanation” for the small orbs.

It starts with a burger. In 2008 a Dutch professor named Mark Post presented the proof of concept for what he called “cultured meat.” Five years later, in a London TV studio, Mr. Post and his colleagues ate a burger they had grown from animal cells in a laboratory. Secretly funded by Sergey Brin, a co-founder of Google, the journey from petri dish to plate had cost $325,000 — making theirs the most expensive meal in history. Fortunately, the results were promising: Hanni Rützler, a nutrition scientist, concluded that the patty was “close to meat but not as juicy.” The...

Disney CEO Bob Iger confirmed during the MoffetNathanson Media & Communications Summit that the next Star Wars movie, released in 2022, will be written and directed by Game of Thrones creators David Benioff and D.B. Weiss. Disney had announced in February 2018 that Benioff and Weiss would write and produce a new trilogy of Star Wars films, which was separate from the current slate of films, and the other new trilogy The Last Jedi director Rian Johnson is creating. The studio revealed earlier this week that the next Star Wars movies will hit theaters on December 16, 2022, December 12,...

The greatest moment of Star Wars Celebration 2019 so far