Category: General sci-fi

Lost in Space

I’m very excited that Netflix is rebooting the old Lost in Space show (starts this Friday), and I’ll come back later and tell you what I think of it, but right now, I want to reminisce about the original show, which was aired for three seasons on CBS back in 1965-1968. Yep, this was ten years before Star Wars, and a year before Star Trek, and the first season was still in black-and-white. With a theme song written by the awesome John Williams! Continue reading “Lost in Space”

So what’s Space Opera anyway?

Isn’t that just a bunch of Klingons singing about honor and their love of bat’leths?

My novel fits neatly into the Science Fiction subcategory of Space Opera. No, don’t worry, there’s nobody singing in alien languages (although there is a dance show in one scene…).  For now, I’ll say that Space Opera refers to tales of galaxy-spanning civilizations, the most obvious screen examples being Star Wars and Star Trek.

Continue reading “So what’s Space Opera anyway?”

It always comes down to a fistfight

Have you ever noticed that in many sci-fi movies and TV shows, the final resolution between the hero and the villain is almost always some form of fistfight? We can have all these great space battles and high-tech weapons, but when it comes right down to it, Captain Kirk usually defeated his foe with his bare knuckles Continue reading “It always comes down to a fistfight”

Problem: How to get to another star

So if you’re going to write a story about traveling to other stars and meeting aliens and all that, you have to decide how you’re going to do that: either accept that you can’t go faster than the speed of light and that you’ll need to take a long time to get there, or come up with a way to defy physics. Continue reading “Problem: How to get to another star”