Word: sci-fi
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Last week, while earthlings nearly a billion miles away marveled as they monitored its progress, an all-seeing but unmanned spacecraft no larger than a compact car completed the final and most spectacular phase of an epochal journey. Beating Buck Rogers and the faithful Wilma, sci-fi heroes of the pre-Star Trek generation, by five centuries, Voyager 1 brushed past the ringed planet Saturn, second largest member of the sun's family, and provided the best images yet of that strange and wondrous world, a far-off realm in the solar system never before glimpsed with such glittering...
Like its characters, Resurrection is a sympathetic but irreconcilable olio of extremes. The film swerves between irony and sentimentality, human drama and melodrama, powerful acting and shameless hammery-sometimes in the same sequence or shot. Screenwriter Carlino and Director Petrie have previously worked in the genres of sci-fi schizophrenia (Seconds and Sybil) and domestic conflict (The Great Santini and Eleanor and Franklin). Here, they have tried to blend the two forms, but the film does not always gel. The problem may stem from a lack of faith in its "small," challenging story. When in doubt, Carlino inserts a violent...
This is not a scene from a 1950s sci-fi film, but a bizarre aftermath of Hurricane Allen, which early in August inundated coastal areas that were bone-dry because of drought, causing salt-marsh mosquito eggs to hatch. Suddenly the mosquito, slightly larger at ¼ in. long than the common backyard variety, became a major plague. So far, the insects have killed at least 49 cows and horses but no humans, though several Texans have been chased indoors or into cars by the voracious bugs...
...wife changes costumes, wigs and personalities to deflate the husband's romantic notions. Director Bliss Hebert wittily stages the action with an array of modish accouterments undreamed of by Schoenberg, including Visa cards and telephones with TV monitors; Maxine Willi Klein's sleek set looks like a sci-fi Better Homes and Gardens; and the cast, especially Soprano Mary Shearer as the wife, delivers a slyly spirited performance. Slight as it is, this is the kind of production that Schoenberg's reputation could use more of. Even the sort of people who only played tennis with...
Back in 1971, Philip José Farmer abandoned the sci-fi world of space opera with a book that introduced this "Riverworld," titled To Your Scattered Bodies Go. In a tantalizing curtain raiser, Sir Richard Francis Burton, searcher for the source of the Nile, translator of The Arabian Nights, soldier, swordsman and linguist, dies in Trieste in 1890 (as did the historical Burton). Moments later-or is it millenniums?-he awakens, naked and bewildered, on the bank of the river. Burton's reaction is entirely in character. While other resurrectees stagger about in shock, the world's most...