“Get your pitch to zero!” “Pitch is out. I can’t hold altitude.” “Correction, alpha hold is off. Trim selectors — emergency!” “Flight Com! I can’t hold it! She’s breaking up, she’s break –” One of the reasons I’m thrilled to have my novel FlashForward adapted for television on ABC is that one of my favorite shows [...]
Ray Barrett spoke one of the most famous lines in all of science fiction, at least for British and Canadian SF fans of my generation, in the opening credits of each episode of Gerry and Sylvia Anderson’s Stingray: “Anything can happen in the next half-hour.” Rest in peace, Commander Shore. SF Scope has an obituary. [...]
Readers of my fiction occasionally think they can tease out details about my private life from what I write. One such surmise I hear periodically is that I must have a thing for red-headed women (they cite Lenore from Rollback and Tess from End of an Era). I neither confirm nor deny this, but instead [...]
OMG. So, with one of the Chapters gift cards I got for Christmas, I bought Quark — the complete series — on DVD. This science-fiction sitcom from 1978 was created by Buck Henry and starred Richard Benjamin. I fondly remembered it, but … Wow, is it ever crappy. Obvious, dumb jokes; intrusive laugh track; terrible [...]
I attend a lot of science-fiction conventions, of course. At some, you find actors from past SF TV shows selling autographed photos of themselves. In my whole life, I have bought precisely one such: on Sunday, November 25, 2007, at LosCon 34 in Los Angeles I met Bob May, the actor who was inside the [...]
