Just finished watching the Galactica season premiere. I don’t want to say anything spoileriffic about it, because one of my favourite readers hasn’t even seen season 3 yet! (Said reader should probably avoid looking at the comments section of this post….) But I have a hypothesis, and a prediction, as to why our gun-toting friend takes the action she takes in the last scene of tonight’s episode; my guess can be inferred from 1 Samuel 24: 8-13. We’ll see if I’m right next week.
Tag Archives | Science Fiction
How Swamp Thing Got His Groove Back
Swamp Thing was always a much-better-than-average comic book. But it didn’t become a great comic book until Alan Moore (of Watchmen and
V for Vendetta fame) started writing it, in a classic 45-issue run that revolutionised the comics industry and, inter alia, directly laid the foundations for a still more celebrated work, Neil Gaiman’s Sandman.
In this video, Moore explains some of the reasoning that led him to take Swamp Thing in a new direction (with a fairly obvious ethico-political subtext – Moore is an anarchist, after all). In most genre fiction, Moore notes, “transformation is seen as horror, change is seen as a source of horror, and the status quo is seen as source of comfort and stability.” Hence prior to Moore’s run the scientist-turned-monster protagonist spent a lot of time shambling around “bound by fungus and feeling sorry for himself … like Hamlet covered in snot,” whereas Moore decided to have Swamp Thing embrace his new status, “exploring the possibilities of change and transformation, trying to show it as a positive thing.”
Shia LaBeouf Is A “Genius”!
Apparently. New Indy IV teaser here.
Shiny News
Another Firefly/Serenity comic book is on the way. No substitute for another movie or tv show, but we of the brown coats take what we can get. (Conical hat tip to Norm Singleton.)
A Song I Wrote All By Myself
Man-Thing
I think I fear you
but I wanna know for sure
so come on and
hold me tight
AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAGGGHHH!!!!!!!!!!
… I fear you …
Ruwarchy!
[cross-posted at Liberty & Power]
I note with interest that my old friend Mary Ruwart is entering the race for the LP nomination. Leaving aside the tangled question of whether electoral politics is an appropriate venue for libertarian activism (for the record, my view is that it shouldn’t be central but is not forbidden either), I have to point out that Mary is clearly a more acceptable candidate to those of a left-libertarian persuasion than is Ron Paul.
On such issues as abortion, immigration, punishment, plutocracy, constitutionalism, gay marriage, and patents and copyrights, her positions, while not always perfect, are at least broadly left-libertarian, while on the issues of foreign policy and the war on terror she’s actually more radically antiwar than Paul. Plus she’s even an anarchist, though she doesn’t trumpet it or use the term. Go Mary!
In not-especially-related news, I’m pleased to see that Ken MacLeod’s Fall Revolution tetralogy, the ultimate left-libertarian science-fiction epic, is being re-released in a two-volume edition.