Lots of folks like to mix up literary styles, such as horror and comedy, or mystery and romance. You all know I’m partial to both sci-fi and westerns. For the longest time, the big-city critics called this combination the lowest of the low. Yet when a fellow named Joss Whedon dreamed up a show called […]
Technology fads come and go as they vie for the attention of our fickle media. One such fad was nanotechnology, the branch of engineering which operates at or near the molecular scale, around 1-100 nanometers in size. In the 1990’s it was the darling of the science media here in America. When the most outrageous […]
“Made in Abyss” is a recent anime series from Kinema Citrus, first aired in 2017. It is based on a manga by Akihito Tsukushi which began in 2012. I wouldn’t call it steampunk, but it’s more steampunk in spirit than many stories that claim that label. It has a Victorian-era feel, with nineteenth-century technology, exploited […]
The next in our series of Steampunk Holidays is the birthday of pioneer science fiction author Jules Verne, born February 8, 1828, in Nantes, France. Verne wrote such classics as From the Earth To the Moon, Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea, Journey to the Center of the Earth, The Mysterious Island, and Around the […]
Lately, on the sci-fi blogs that I follow there’s been a resurgence in interest in the classics of the “golden age” of the 1950’s and earlier. These were works that readers loved but critics derided as “pulp,” often unfairly. I began my own exploration of the classics by re-reading a book that I read many […]
(With a shout out to Steve Miller.) The Western genre, so popular in my youth, has fallen out of favor in recent years. It survives mainly in “shoot ’em up” video games like Red Dead Redemption. Yet it has had a lasting influence on other genres, especially science fiction. Though despised by sci fi purists, […]
George Donnelly’s Donald Trump anthology, Steaks, Walls and Dossiers: The Best Trump Anthology Ever is now available on Kindle. It’s full of humorous and fantastical stories about our controversial 45th President, and features a story written by yours truly, called “Operation Code Name Bimbo.” It’s available in e-book form right now for 99 cents, so […]
