2013-04-22
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Stills of Andrea Riseborough and Tom Cruise from Joseph Kosinski’s Oblivion.
2012-03-09
Reality vs Science Fiction
The Guardian, 29 Febrary 2012:
Soak the English: Welsh want paying for any water piped across the border
Politicians say rain-rich country must be compensated if ‘increasingly valuable resource’ is sent to drought-hit England
Frederik Pohl, The Cool War, 1981:
During the London water shortage just before the completion of the Rape of Scotland waterworks, Irish nationalists went around turning on hydrants and covert sympathizers left their taps running. It worked so well that Palestinian refugees, circumcised and trained for the occasion, repeated the process in Haifa to such an extent that two hundred thousand acres of orange groves died for lack of irrigation.
2011-05-18
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2010-12-05
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How can I do a Pan Am image dump without including an image from 2001? Here’s a space flight attendant, but that Flickr account has more screen grabs (including Pan Am ones) in this 2001 set. (via)
2010-10-08
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2010-05-07
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… looking even more like something out of Silent Running than it does now.
2010-04-01
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Carey Mulligan, interviewed on Collider.com. The previous paragraph gives away the premise of Never Let Me Go, the film (adapted from the Kazio Ishiguro novel) in which she stars next.
For me, that process Mulligan describes - not quite understanding the world in a book, but discovering what it is that makes it different - is a huge part of the joy of science fiction. Sure, a lot of people think that it involves “space suits and aliens” (as Mulligan says in the same paragraph), but the best work doesn’t involve that at all.
(Having said that, I never did finish the novel; it spent a bit too much time with characters as characters, rather than action as a character, to abuse a quote from An Education.)
2010-03-10
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Reaching for Stars When Space Thrilled and Paranoia Ruled - an article in the New York Times on the upcoming book, “Another Science Fiction: Advertising the Space Race 1957-1962.”
There’s some great stuff in the “interactive viewer”, and unlike the Wired ads, which inspire more mirth than admiration, a lot of these are actually beautiful. I’m looking forward to getting a copy of the book.
