Astrid is a young woman living in Glasgow with her mum. She's a pretty solitary person, with no friends or connections. She takes solace and pleasure in the fantastical worlds of the comics she delves into and lives through, becoming the heroines in the stories; a space explorer, last ...

Living Forever

Robert Zemeckis, director of Back to the Future, Forest Gump, and Who Framed Roger Rabbit among other great movies, made a more obscure dark comedy called Death Becomes Her. The subject matter involves magic related to living forever…even after you're technically dead.

This has always been ...

I remember when cell phones began to get popular and pervasive. As a fan of horror movies, I said to myself “well, that's the end of a lot of horror stories!”

With cell phones, it doesn't matter if you're stuck at camp or in a creepy house ...

Malcolm Gladwell was in an interview, and expressed a theory, or mini-theory. He talked about the show Law and Order and how it works, with almost every episode a comforting victory of the system.

From there, he theorized four types of fictional approaches, calling them the Western, the Eastern, the ...

I've had the conversation multiple times - maybe based on something I read in the past - that the
business of taking care of your money, your credit, taxes and expenses is something that was never touched on when I went to school.

Well, these have been proclamations rather than conversations ...

Star Trek: A Piece of the Action

So this could be considered Part Three of my loose-knit series on science fiction: The Distorted Society.

This is a sci-fi convention where there is an Earth…or another planet, at least somewhat Earth-like, that has some aspect of society that is a ...

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Why aren't there more prettyboy bad-ass characters? Pretty girl bad-asses too! This character type is often a hall-mark of Japanese and Korean fiction more than anything ...

Ideas both big and deep can - and has - been explored in Sci Fi. Some themes that have resonated with me include ‘What it Means to be Human’. This could be said to be the point of ALL fiction in a way I suppose. But to explore humanity through the lens ...

When he created the Twilight Zone, Rod Serling was motivated by the desire to tell more meaningful stories. In his writing career up to then, his work had been heavily censored.

Serling realized that by setting his stories in fantastical situations, in alternate or futuristic versions of Earth, that he ...

I was fishing for smelts the other day and scooped up an old bottle, with a rolled-up paper inside. It contained the following:

In older literature I think it was common to have a story told by a narrator who was never a part of the action. Someone who may ...