Jurassic World brought us the more dinosaurs, more action, and more Chris Pratt than ever before, not to mention selling more tickets than anything that came before. It was everything you could want in a summer blockbuster…or was it?

Cast: Chris Pratt…Owen / Bryce Dallas Howard…Claire / Irrfan Khan…Masrani / Vincent D’Onofrio…Hoskins / Ty Simpkins…Gray / Nick Robinson…Zach / Jake Johnson…Lowery / Omar Sy…Barry / BD Wong…Dr. Henry Wu / Judy Greer…Karen

I enjoyed the dino-heck out of Jurassic World, just like millions of other viewer that plunked down dollars and yen (Jurassic World was one of the five US movies allowed to screen in China this year), and as summer blockbusters go, it was a slam dunk. Not as much fun as Guardians of the Galaxy, but with wider appeal. Not as smart as Jurassic Park, but with bigger dinosaurs. Continue reading →

The Flicker Men by Ted Kosmatka is what the best sf should be; a story that compels the reader to grapple with the questions that drive the conflict, writing so good that you’re fixed in place like a pithed frog, and characters that you care about from the opening sentence.

There are no spaceships and square-jawed heroes here, nor is there a single LGBTn (where n is whatever comes next) character– or maybe there are, but they just aren’t wearing a sign. That’s fine in both cases; this book is nonstop terrific. It’s a story about people simultaneously chasing and being chased by their own demons while trying to pull back the veil of mystery underlying the nature of reality and should appeal to all you zombies. It also has real science–or as close to real science as I’ve seen in one of the best novels I’ve read in a long time. Continue reading →

Thomas Easton and Judith Dial’s Decopunk lead off with a cogent essay declaring Steampunk to have run out of itself, pointing out that it was always more fantasy than sf, and criticizing it for putting on Victorian blinders when it came to social injustice. Their remedy to this being to offer up the decade of deco as a more suitable venue for a re-imagined past.  To the ramparts folks, cry havoc and loose the dogs of war!

Unfortunately for Thomas and Judith, writers are closer kin to cats.
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A.C. Hadfield’s second novel, again featuring freelance adventurer Carson Mach and crew, The Lost Voyager, comes off as something of a budget-priced cross between The Expanse series and Guardians of the Galaxy, but that’s not a bad thing, just what it is. Hadfield has consciously assembles all the classic characters here for a ship for hire series. The Intrepid is an small exploration ship with a few more cannons than average, her captain, Carson Mach, is a charismatically iconoclastic former military officer who’s in a relationship with the human hybrid assassin that came to kill him but stayed for breakfast, his best friend is the professional “hunter” and general bad-ass who saved his life way during the war, and the other crew members are assorted leftovers from recent wars with aliens, including a slightly mad scientist and his AI pet. Now former enemies and allies are all working to meld together into a team.

Today’s mission, which will clear a host of debts and fines against the captain and crew if they live, is to find out what happened to the missing mining vessel Voyager, which we know was forced down on a the planet it was heading towards and then attacked by big mean alien somethings. They’re also supposed to wipe the data from the computers at the mining facility in the system, because it contains sensitive information.
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Before Tomorrowland is more or less a prequel to Tomorrrowland, the movie, but you’ll have a hard time matching up the threads between them. Of course, some of them wound up on the cutting room floor, but even so, it’s lacking as a prequel. The action takes place around the first Worldcon and the1939 New York World’s Fair, when a secret society of scientists, the Plus Ultra gang, prepares to unveil the existence of a world of tomorrow, today. Somehow they discovered a fantastic world just a wormhole, or something away, and are keen to build the kind of techno-utopia that science fiction fans have been dreaming of.

Only it turns out that those dreams are really just a marketing campaign by Howard Hughes (and pretty much every historical science figure you can name from Tesla to Einstein). There really wasn’t a science fiction golden age, we discover. Instead, we find that it was a vision of the future funded and encouraged by Plus Ultra.

WELCOME: WORLD SCIENCE FICTION CONVENTION. And what a fiction it was. Three men in front of the building wore garish costumes, probably inspired by publications Plus Ultra funded. Henry had files on dozens of magazines, book editors, and press agents, all operating under Plus Ultra’s thumb. Hugo Gernsback, the editor/ publisher of Amazing Stories, was one such honorary member of Plus Ultra, who used his magazines to plant ideas in culture and even, on occasion, recruit innocents.

Jensen, Jeff (2015-04-07). Before Tomorrowland (Digital Picture Book) (Kindle Locations 1015-1019). Disney Book Group. Kindle Edition.

Much to Plus Ultra’s chagrin, instead of a future full of promise and progress, fans insist on one full of alien invaders, mutant hordes and, global apocalypse. But they’re still scanning the crowd for a few dreamers with good hearts and they find two; Clara, a woman who put off chasing her dreams of being an illustrator for too long, now being eaten away by cancer, and her son Lee, who hasn’t really started dreaming yet. Clara’s dragged Lee to New York on the promise of taking him to see Lou Gehrig’s final appearance at Yankee Stadium, but she’s there to go to the first Worldcon in hopes of showing her portfolio to some publishers.

That’s interrupted by the arrival of a robot with the uploaded consciousness of a boy who was horribly burned in an accident working on Amelia Earhart’s rocket plane at the Plus Ultra testing grounds and a bunch of Nazis lead by a renegade Plus Ultra scientist who wants to get the robot body back for himself, and destroy the “good” guys in the process. Yes, you read that all correctly.

The science is outlandish, of course, claiming the mantle of super-science beyond what the years have brought to fruition, except where stealing from today helps the writers out. The writing is either dreadful or brilliantly hyperbolic in what I’m sure is supposed to be a period affectation rather than a failure to hire an actual sciene fiction writer. Cory Doctorow could have made this work, and he probably wouldn’t even have needed the Nazis.

The picture drawn of fandom isn’t pretty, though it’s fairly accurate. In a prescient echo of modern times, there was a faction of fandom barred from entry to the con because they had a social justice agenda for science fiction, while the organizers wanted it to remain free of stuff like that. Ironically, the barred group, the Futurians, don’t appear to have been co-opted by Plus Ultra who had thier own social agenda, but that’s utopia for you. There can be only one, and well, they were kind of far to the left of things.

I was hoping, as I expect Disney still is, that the book (and movie) would give people a way to reconnect to the Tomrrowland vision that’s crumbling in the corner of their theme park…but that’s not going to happen here. That the ending of the book doesn’t quite dovetail with the beginning of the movie is actually a blessing, as the movie comes much closer to getting the job done.

What Disney has missed is that the vision of the future people had in 1939 didn’t need a secret history to be something wonderful. It needed someone who understood it well enough to reveal that wonder to a new generation.