SciFi

5 posts

Crasstalk Book Club Discussion: A Dance with Dragons

Artwork by Amok

For several weeks after George R. R. Martin’s A Dance with Dragons was released, I debated over how to proceed with reading it. Should I go back over all the preceding books that I hadn’t read in five years? Or should I read it side by side with A Feast for Crows, attempting to match chapter to chapter in chronological order? Ultimately, I decided to just dive right in, with some help from the wiki to refresh particular names or details.

Structure:

The fifth book in the series was the result of a publishing fiasco where the sequel to A Storm of Swords was split into two books due to its unwieldy size. Rather than dividing it chronologically, the volumes were split by region and character, with Feast covering southern Westeros and Dance focusing on the events in the North and the Eastern Continent. Unfortunately this resulted in a rather lackluster fourth novel that consisted of mostly fruitless plotting and intrigue and devoted the bulk of POV chapters to unrelatable or uninteresting characters like Cersei, Brienne, Sansa, and the Greyjoys. Continue reading

Saturday Night Drive-In

Happy Saturday! It’s been a while since we have done a Saturday night movie so tonight I have a special treat courtesy of the Internet Archives. This is The Legend of Boggy Creek, a classic horror docudrama from 1972. The movie examines the legend about a swamp monster in rural Arkansas. The movie has appearances by a number of the locals who had claimed to see the monster and also contains reenactments of alleged encounters with the creature. It’s actually pretty damn creepy. The movie is an obvious inspiration for later horror movies, most notably The Blair Witch Project. The movie spawned four sequels including one that was so good it was featured on Mystery Science Theater 3000.

 

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Saturday Night Movie Open Thread

Well hello gang. Hope you have had a wonderful day and are ready for a relaxing and possibly intoxicated evening. Tonight I have a very special (and by that I mean weird) movie for you. This is 1973’s Invasion of the Bee Girls. This involves a mad scientist and women who are genetically altered to kill my men by oversexing them to death. Hot! This is why the 1970s were the greatest decade in American history. Enjoy.

Have a wonderful night.

Hitler’s Flying Saucers?

The image at the beginning of this article is of a site in Germany known as The Henge (Fly Trap) where a magnetic levitation device – aka flying saucer – known as The Bell was reportedly developed by German scientists in the late 1930’s.

I watched a program the other night which I was surprised to see was not on the SciFi (SyFy) network, but on Canada’s History Television, one part in a series on the subject of extraterrestrials.  What follows is the network’s description of this episode.

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Ancient Aliens: Aliens and the Third Reich

If ancient aliens visited Earth in the remote past, could they have given us advanced technology, passed down through human history?And could this technology have helped the Third Reich build mysterious weapons and crafts far beyond the limits of 20th century science?

During World War II, there were reports that the Germans built an operational flying saucer, known as the Hanebu, which was said to use mythical technology found in ancient Indian texts. Another craft was rumored to have been constructed with the help of psychics and mediums who claimed to have received detailed blueprints from extraterrestrial beings.

Is it possible Hitler’s quest for world domination was aided and abetted by ancient extraterrestrial technology that was rediscovered? And could the allegedly rebuilt alien devices developed in Germany have played a role in America’s ability to land a man on the moon?

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The program posited that a number of Nazi scientists were recruited by the American government after the fall of the Third Reich. According to the show, these scientists were almost entirely responsible for the technology that resulted in the U.S. space program and putting the first man on the moon, aided in part by alien intelligence which had been passed on to them.  They cited Adolf Hitler’s devotion to occult mysticism as the impetus for the extraterrestrial contact.

The episode ended by purporting that many Nazi officers who disappeared after the fall of Berlin had actually been whisked away in a time machine. As if by means of validation they mentioned that Albert Einstein had deemed time travel to be theoretically possible.

My questions to you interesting – and hopefully interested – folks are such: (1) Why was this on a history channel? and (2) How fine is the line between genius and insanity?

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