Tag: science fiction

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Warning: this review may contain spoilers.

Human fascination with extraterrestrial life has never been merely a scientific curiosity. It belongs, rather, to that deeper region where metaphysics, fear, hope, and civilizational fatigue begin to overlap. The alien is not only an imagined inhabitant of distant stars; it is a mirror placed before mankind, forcing us to contemplate the possibility that our history, our religions, our wars, and our self-importance may be provincial episodes within a far vaster order.

Popular culture has absorbed this fascination with unusual intensity because it allows the cosmic question to enter ordinary life. (more…)

2,909 words

A kind of pulp-fiction Kafka, a prophet.
Eric P. Nash, reviewing Philip K. Dick’s Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?  For the New York Times in 1968.

“Which is better, the book or the movie?” It’s a question friends ask one another, and is at least as old as cinema. In all probability, it is a revised, post-cinema version of “book or theatre-play?” It’s always rewarding to see a favorite book translated onto the silver screen, but it is also a pleasure to work backwards, should you happen to see the film before you read the book. (more…)

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To you, a robot is a robot. Gears and metal; electricity and positrons – Mind and iron! Human-made! If necessary, human-destroyed! But you haven’t worked with them, so you don’t know them. They’re a cleaner better breed than we are.
-Isaac Asimov, I, Robot
(more…)

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It was a chilly October day in London, and the year was 1975. A television writer approaching the offices of the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) walked at a brisk pace to his appointment. (more…)

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Dune: Prophecy is a six-part, seven-hour HBO miniseries based on Brian Herbert and Kevin J. Anderson’s Great Schools of Dune trilogy (2012–2016). Brian Herbert is the son of Frank Herbert, the creator of Dune and the author of the first six Dune novels. After Frank Herbert’s death, Brian Herbert and Kevin J. Anderson began publishing a series of novels set in the Dune universe.

Only two of these novels, Hunters of Dune (2006) and Sandworms of Dune (2007), are based on Frank Herbert’s notes (for Dune 7). (more…)

1,920 words

Raw, analog interfaces and whirring computers, primitive digital readouts, clicking binary code, churning cogitators, and flashing buttons. Eerie red light transfusing a zero-gravity space, the silent cockpit of a spaceship, and the white lights of the Mother artificial intelligence mainframe room. The tortured, dying machines of the analog age. (more…)

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Brendan Heard, Editor,
Aegeon: Science Fiction Illustrated
Aureus Press, Issues 1-10, 2022-2024

Voyage to the depths of space and fight a multi-headed hydra while piloting a gleaming land speeder over the snow-covered surface-tundra of a distant ice world or heroically fend off the denizens of a necromancer’s resurrections while saving the beautiful maiden resplendent in metallic-hued swimwear. The entire Western world, nay the universe, depends on the power of real science fiction infused with heroic vitalism, a prior essentialism tinged with fantasy, horror, and the primordial pan-psychism of our ancestors. (more…)

Frank Herbert. Photo courtesy of Wikimedia  Commons

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Frank Herbert was born on this day in 1920 in Tacoma, Washington. Herbert is best-known as the creator of Dune, which is the most widely-read and influential science fiction novel of all time. Herbert, moreover, is an artist of the Right. As I wrote in my review of Denis Villeneuve’s Dune, Part 1:

Frank Herbert’s vision of the future was deeply reactionary. He depicts a world where liberal democracy failed and has been replaced by a feudal imperium. (more…)

Image courtesy of Theen Moy on Flickr.

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If I could always read, I should never feel the want of company. — Lord Byron

There’s more to life than books, you know,
But not much more.
— Morrissey (more…)

1,990 words

Frank Herbert’s original novel Dune (1965) is a brilliant synthesis of the futurism of science fiction and the archaism of fantasy literature. Denis Villeneuve’s continuing film adaptation Dune: Part Two is now in theaters. It is a bit better than the first part, but has all the same problems, and a few new ones, so I can’t recommend it. Like the first part, it is not terrible, just mediocre: dull to my eyes, grating to my ears, trying to my patience, an insult to my intelligence, and worst of all: just another Hollywood attack on white people. (more…)

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It’s always nice when the stars align for a particular film, even when the planets and everything else in the sky do not, and the stars in question are hard to see. Regarding the 2013 Tom Cruise science fiction film Oblivion, one telescope reveals 4D levels of Eurocentric defiance against the modern world, while another tells us that such conclusions are probably the signs of an overzealous critic. The film could also be seen as a subtle allegory for the Jewish Question — one profound enough to even provide an answer. In any event, Oblivion offers two hours of inspiring — if somewhat uneven — entertainment, which will be hard to forget once one connects all the twinkling dots in the sky, regardless if the filmmakers had put them there on purpose. (more…)

Frank Herbert. Photo courtesy of Wikimedia  Commons

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This talk was delivered on Sunday, October 8th, at a Counter-Currents gathering in the Dallas-Fort Worth area. I want to thank everyone who helped organize the event and everyone who came out to attend. I love Texas and am frankly puzzled by its one-star rating.

It is just a coincidence that today’s gathering falls on the birthday of Frank Herbert, the author of Dune, which is the best-selling and most influential science fiction book of all time. Without Dune, there would be no Star Wars. Without Dune, there would be no Warhammer 40K. (more…)

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Part 1 of 3 (Part 2 here)

Harold Armstead Covington (1953-2018), to paraphrase Franklin Roosevelt’s mellifluous rhetoric regarding Pearl Harbor, is a man of infamy. (more…)