When Bruce Willis Actually Gets Sci-Fi Right (And When He Really Doesn’t)
I was probably around fourteen when *The Fifth Element* first rotated into my regular rewatch cycle, right around the time I was getting deep into...
Sci-Fi Culture
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Building Tomorrow’s Cities: What Sci-Fi Gets Right (And Very Wrong) About Vertical Living
I was hunched over my editing bay last Tuesday, cutting together some corporate footage of downtown Austin’s skyline, when I started thinking about why most...
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When Starships Meet Sorcery: An Engineer’s Guide to Stories That Break All the Rules
You know, after forty years of designing spacecraft components, you’d think I’d be a purist about keeping science fiction and fantasy in their separate corners....
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Why Sci-Fi Worlds Fall Apart (And How to Build Ones That Don’t)
I was cutting together footage for a corporate video last month—something about manufacturing efficiency, boring as hell—when I noticed something in the B-roll that stopped...
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Why Space Opera Still Gets My Old Engineer Heart Racing After All These Years
You know what happened last Tuesday? I was up on the stepladder trying to fix that wobbly shelf in my study — the one where...
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When Movies Stopped Being Movies and Started Being Doorways to Other Worlds
The first time I showed *2001: A Space Odyssey* to my AP English class, half the students fell asleep during the ape sequence. Can’t blame...
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After Reading Sci-Fi for Five Decades, I’m Tired of People Lumping It Together with Fantasy
People drive me absolutely crazy when they wave their hand and say “oh, you know, fantasy and sci-fi stuff” like they’re talking about two flavors...
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My Seven Years of Sci-Fi Conventions: What I Wish Someone Had Told Me Before My First WorldCon
That smell… man, you know exactly what I’m talking about if you’ve ever been to one of these things. It’s like someone mixed industrial carpet...
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Why Most Space Art Looks Fake (And How I’m Trying to Fix It)
So there I was, probably three years ago now, scrolling through some concept art for yet another Mars colonization project when it hit me –...
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How Box Office Bombs Become Genre Legends: A Film Editor’s Take on Cult Sci-Fi
You know, there’s something almost perverse about how the sci-fi films we treasure most today were absolute disasters when they first hit theatres. I’m talking...
