Six Great Indie Sci-Fi Movies You Might Have Missed

Let me talk about my gigantic man-crush on Sam Rockwell which has burned like a hellfire within me ever since Confessions of a Dangerous Mind and hasn’t even been swayed by the Geneva Convention-defying The Hitch-Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy.

Also, Primer. Who doesn’t love Primer, other than everyone I’ve ever subjected to it?

The Guardian Presents the State of Science Fiction Address 2012

Come talk about this with me and the CSICON crew, and as a bonus, hear about my [mostly fake] magnum opus to be released in the near future!

"Norris burst out a single, explosive, “Haw!” He looked down at the thing. “May be that things from other worlds don’t have to be evil just because they’re different. But that thing was! Child of Nature, eh? Well, it was a hell of an evil Nature."

from John W. Campbell’s “Who Goes There?” — the source material for The Thing, originally published in Astounding Stories, August 1938. A free ebook text can be found here (or you can read it online here).

If you haven’t seen John Carpenter’s The Thing, watch John Carpenter’s The Thing. It’s a near-perfect sci-fi/horror. You may also find me in line for the prequel in a fortnight’s time.

Relevant: “The Things,” by Peter Watts (Clarkesworld, January 2010).

Csicon EXCLUSIVE: info on the upcoming Doctor Who movie!

I started writing for the nerd-centric website CSICON.org. Linked is my first post, concerning the leaked script for the Doctor Who film that was announced yesterday (and which I fear I may have invoked).

Let it never be said that I won’t run a joke into the ground.

"The Cold Equations" — Tom Godwin

He let his eyes rest on the narrow white door of the closet. There, just inside, another man lived and breathed and was beginning to feel assured that discovery of his presence would now be too late for the pilot to alter the situation. It was too late; for the man behind the door it was far later than he thought and in a way he would find it terrible to believe.

Tom Godwin’s traumatic short story originally appeared in Astounding Science Fiction, August 1954; reprinted in Lightspeed, July 2011.

"I was then, and remain today, a giant nerd."

I wrote a post for SciFiNow.co.uk. It’s about Star Wars and my first encounter with that galaxy. It brought up a lot of feelings for me.

Peter M. Ball, "On the Destruction of Copenhagen by the War-Machines of the Merfolk"

When it starts we’re in a hotel room, the two of us curled up on a double bed. It’s a two-star kind of place: cracks in the walls, curtains covered in faded daisies, the clinging smell of camphor attaching itself after the first few of minutes of your stay. The television stutters as we flick through the channels, colours bleeding together and rendering the devastation a fuzzy blue or green. Still, we see it happen: the great machines of the merfolk coming up over the shore, rampaging through the city with devastating effect.

"Ponies" by Kij Johnson

Ponies

You can read Kij Johnson’s Ponies, joint winner of this year’s Nebula award, under the link. WARNING: distressing, awesome, and distressingly awesome.

It was tied with Harlan Ellison’s How Interesting: A Tiny Man, which I’m sure is “out there,” but I’m not linking to it in a thousand years lest Ellison’s flying monkeys tap on my window in the witching hour.

Robert A Heinlein, –All You Zombies–

I was polishing a brandy snifter when the Unmarried Mother came in. I noted the time—10:17 P. M. zone five, or eastern time, November 7th, 1970. Temporal agents always notice time and date; we must.

One of my favourite short stories. The full text is under the link; enjoy! Now go find a collection, preferably including the architectural mindscrew And He Built a Crooked House.