Aaaaaahhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh!!!!!!
This is it! Isaac Asimov’s Foundation will finally make it to visual media. After the rights passing through a few hands, they’ve finally made their way to HBO. Check out the entire article at The Wrap where Jonah Nolan talks about the new project. I’ll definitely keeping tabs on the development. No dates were given, so I’ll try to hold back most of my excitement until I hear more.
My wife was surprised that I had never read Brave New World. It seemed to her that this novel by Aldous Huxley was generally considered required reading in school. She ordered it for me along with 1984 by George Orwell, which by coincidence I haven’t read either. It seems that I somehow went to the wrong schools as a kid, and missed out on some classics. I’m trying to remedy this.
I wouldn’t really call Brave New World a sci-fi novel. It’s more of a criticism of utopian society. The setting is in London around 2540 AD, where society is broken down into castes. Human reproduction is done in a “hatchery” where babies are created in bottles and subjected to varying conditions in order to guide development into one of the five classes (Alpha, Beta, Gamma, Delta, Epsilon). Aside from modifying biological factors, each child is “trained” with techniques ranging from aversion therapy to repeating phrases over and over when they sleep.
First, let me say that Battlestar Galactica is by far my favorite Sci-Fi TV series of all time. I was addicted from the beginning of the 2003 miniseries and followed it up until the series finale this week. I liked it so much that prior to season 4.5, I re-watched all of the previous seasons so I would have them all fresh in my mind. In doing so, I managed to get my wife addicted as well and took her along for the ride. I highly recommend everyone watch the entire series.
Let me start off with a huge ***SPOILER ALERT***
continue past the break for my rant 🙂 (more…)
It has been a while since I have read anything by Timothy Zahn. I loved his Star Wars Thrawn Trilogy and Hand of Thrawn Duology. I also enjoyed the Conquerors’ Trilogy. I’d like to go back and re-read those sometime in the future, but for now I’m focusing on chipping away at my collection of books I haven’t read yet. I was very pleased at how well Zahn developed the Zhirrzh in the Conquerors’ Trilogy, so I was curious to see how well he does here in Manta’s Gift.
The Qanska are not the typical aliens you would expect so see in a Sci-Fi novel. They look like huge manta rays flying through the various levels of ever thicker atmosphere in Jupiter. The vast majority of aliens that I have read about have been humanoid. The ones that are not humanoid are usually portrayed as monsters (Starship Troopers), or there is a huge communication gap. Zahn challenges this stereotype and succeeds in describing a completely unique and intelligent alien race.
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