Category Archives: science fiction

Movie Review of “Thor: Ragnarok”

thor-ragnarok

Promotional image for “Thor: Ragnarok” (2017)

I watched Thor: Ragnarok (2017) last week and loved it. It wasn’t the perfect film, but of the three “Thor” movies, it was clearly the best.

Things I Liked

I really liked the dynamic, both between Thor (Chris Hemsworth) and the Hulk (Mark Ruffalo), and between Thor and Banner (although, in a way, it’s the same thing). I’m glad that Thor not only was able to hold his own against the Hulk, but actually beat him, that is until the Grandmaster (Jeff Goldblum) cheated by triggering Thor’s pain-inducing device.

They ended up being “odd couple” buddies, which brings up another point.

The two previous Thor films and just about any solo movie version of the Hulk have all been pretty blah. These are characters who have successfully carried their own comic book titles for decades. Why don’t they translate well to film?

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Melting

sinking

© Kayla Erin

“Why are you doing this to me?” Charlotte was terrified as she felt herself slowly dissolving. Where was she? How had she gotten here?

“I promise, it’s for the best.” His voice was soothing, melodic, and sensual. His touch…she could feel hands, but not hands, caressing her body, touching her everywhere, probing every part of her.

“Please don’t.”

He didn’t stop. She hated him, hated what he was doing to her, but it was so much more intense than any sex she’d ever had, even with her husband. How could she hate it and it still felt so exciting?

“Stop it! Don’t! Please! She climaxed three times, wailing and writhing, and then what she felt became more intense, but in a completely different way.

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The Emulation of Keekik

garlic farm

Rows of garlic on a farm. (Photo: Gary Weathers/Getty Images)

The other local farmers had an easement agreement with Straen so they could cross his land and water their herds, but Keekik’s passionate desire for emulation put him above the law, or so he believed. True, he had no herds of his own, being only sixteen, and a stable hand on Logi’s farm, but now, crouching behind a tree at the edge of Straen’s property, he felt that ownership was inherently evil, and that resources should be available to all who desired access.

Experiencing an almost ethereal since of giddiness at his self-assigned empowerment, the excitable lad sprung from his hiding place, across the artificial boundary between Logi’s and Straen’s farms, and ran with enough vigor to clean his employer’s stables for a week (though he loathed the task).

Racing past the soil enhancement equipment, he knew exactly what he was going to say. His words would be exoteric when he arrived at the lake where all of the caretakers for the farmers were watering the herds of cukol.

Finally, he passed the last open gate that gave him entry to the gathering at the water. The thin, pale skinned boy climbed up a dozer machine that was sitting idle for the moment, took a wide stance, raised his arms above his head and cried, “Brothers and sisters, hear me,” as loud as he could.

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Far From The One You Love

collage

Collage – no image credit given

“You get a strange feeling when you’re about to leave a place, like you’ll not only miss the people you love but you’ll miss the person you are now at this time and place because you’ll never be this way ever again.” -Azar Nafisi

“You said that to me right before I moved away.” Alex remembered looking into sixteen-year-old Victoria’s pale blue eyes as they teared up just moments before he left her.

“Is it happening? Are you changing?”

“A little, but then it’s hard to notice because nothing’s the same as back home. What about you? Are you any different?”

“Not really.”

“Have you changed your hair?”

“Nope. Still pink pigtails still bunched up in groups. I am wearing big, spiral earrings now instead of tiny pink shells.”

“But I liked those shells, particularly the blood-red arrows painted on each one. They went so well with the blue flowers woven in your hair.”

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The Secret of NYU Flight 4

project mogul balloon

Project Mogul was an US Airforce secret project to detect nuclear test acoustically with microphones mounted on high altitude balloons – Photo found at factrepublic.com

“Weather balloon my ass,” groused Bill Brazel, who was the first to find the wreckage. “Ain’t no weather balloon with all that machinery attached.”

“You settle down and eat your dinner and don’t stick your nose in the government’s business.” Bill’s wife Ethel sat down at the table with her own plate of stew.

“Trying to keep me out of trouble?”

Her face softened into a smile as she patted his forearm. “Just don’t want my husband getting mixed up in such things.”

“You’ve always been so good to me.” The cowboy smiled back.

The new Ethel’s thoughts drifted to the pod hidden in the corner of their basement, feeding off of the corpse of the original woman. Tonight it would duplicate and replace Bill. Tomorrow, they’d go to work on their neighbors, all thanks to the alien spores which had been inadvertently captured by the failed high altitude balloon.

I wrote this for the What Pegman Saw challenge. The idea is to take a Google Maps image/location and use it as the prompt for crafting a piece of flash fiction no more than 150 words long. My word count is 150.

Today, the Pegman takes us to Roswell, New Mexico. Naturally, my first thought was of the 1947 Roswell UFO Incident. While the government claimed it was a weather balloon that had crashed, by the 1970s and beyond, conspiracy theorists spread various ideas about one or more alien spaceships having been found near Roswell, and that the government had covered it up.

Actually, there was a government cover up, but no aliens were involved. It was a balloon that had crashed, but it was part of Project Mogul which “was a top secret project by the US Army Air Forces involving microphones flown on high-altitude balloons, whose primary purpose was long-distance detection of sound waves generated by Soviet atomic bomb tests.” The object that crashed was “a Project Mogul balloon, probably NYU Flight 4 launched June 4, 1947. Unlike a weather balloon, the Project Mogul paraphernalia was massive and contained unusual types of materials,” so it could have looked alien to the untrained eye.

I also leveraged the 1956 film Invasion of the Body Snatchers. If the alien takeover began near Roswell just over 70 years ago, would there be any humans left by now?

To read other stories based on the prompt, visit InLinkz.com.

Oh, ranch foreman Bill Brazel was the first person to find the wreckage, but the dialog and everything else about the scene in which I depict him is fictional.

Brothers

flagon

Found at “The Flagon” twitter account

“One for sorrow, two for mirth.” Tom raised his flagon of ale at the bar, smiling at his brother.

“Aye, brother. Here’s to mirth.” Chris raised his as well and clumsily pressed the two together. Then they both drained their drinks by half and slammed them down on the counter before them.

Tom leaned over and hugged his elder sibling. I’ve missed you, Chris. You don’t know how boring things are when you’re not around.”

Chris broke from the clinch and patted Tom on both shoulders. “I must admit the same. Life just isn’t as much fun when you’re not with me. Whoa.” The large blond had to grab the edge of the bar to keep from teetering off his stool.

“Had one ale too many, eh, brother?” Tom took another drink, but just a sip.

“Not at all, Tom. The stool must be faulty. Here. Another toast. To family.” He again lifted his flagon.

“Yes, dear brother. Family.” Tapping their containers together, they both took another long swallow. Then setting his drink down, Tom said, “Of course, there isn’t much family left. Our father…”

“Yes, the dear departed. I miss him a great deal.”

“In spite of the lies he told?”

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Book Review of Echo Volume 2: The Taste of Ashes

echo2

Cover for Echo Vol 2: A Taste of Ashes

It’s been over two years since I reviewed Kent Wayne’s (pen name) military science fiction novel Echo Vol I: Approaching Shatter. I’ve had volumes 2 and 3 on my Kindle Fire forever, but just hadn’t managed to get around to reading them (so many books, so little time). But then, I hit just the right break in my reading schedule and inserted Echo Volume 2: The Taste of Ashes.

Echo I set the stage for the action in Echo 2, which is an adrenaline-fueled, supercharged, watch-the-body-count-rise, military “gore-fest.” No kidding, for nearly the first half of the book, the protagonist Atriya is constantly battling hordes of enemy Dissidents without a single break.

In the book’s Afterword, Wayne admits he probably could have shifted the scene a little bit or avoided describing, second by second, everything Atriya was going through in microscopic detail. My personal opinion is that he should probably just repackage Vol I and II as a single novel, since it would even things out a bit.

I’m not being particularly critical when I say this. I enjoyed the action, although there were times when, even with the Crusader’s advanced augmentations, he seemed more superhuman than any of his contemporaries.

So what’s going on?

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The Shoals of Time

water

© Sue Vincent

Finally, brethren, whatever is true, whatever is honorable, whatever is right, whatever is pure, whatever is lovely, whatever is of good repute, if there is any excellence and if anything worthy of praise, dwell on these things. The things you have learned and received and heard and seen in me, practice these things, and the God of peace will be with you.

–Philippians 4:8-9 (NASB)

They say time is like water with currents, eddies, backwashes, yet it flows inevitably in one direction, from the past into the future. I’m standing on a narrow shoal looking out over a shallow sea. The clouds are particularly lovely at dawn, the subtle blues intermixed with hints of pink and white.

Of course, it’s all an illusion. No, that’s not fair. It’s better to say it’s all a metaphor. Even though I’m dead, my human senses and cognitive processing won’t allow me to perceive time as it truly is.

I’ve heard it said that there’s no such thing as time, it’s just human perception as we have to organize and make sense of our moment by moment existence. I’m living, well, not in a corporeal sense, proof that’s untrue.

I used to be a man, a living human being, just like other living human beings. I woke up, went to the bathroom, ate breakfast, brushed my teeth, got dressed, checked my email, and went to work just like everybody else.

And then I died, just like everybody else.

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The Liars

ox head

1361226489r9nsl MorgueFile

Loren Jackson stopped her Jeep Wrangler in front of Erwin’s rundown one-room shack located a ten miles south of Barstow. He said the isolation helped him keep his head clear. Time was running out, and the investigative reporter needed answers, whether corroborated or not. The Senate vote to confirm was only two days away.

Over the past ten years, she had used the aged recluse to point her in the right direction in half a dozen exclusive stories. She’d even won a Pulitzer for breaking the Clinton scandal, though it didn’t garner her much favor in the eyes of her progressive colleagues. The psychic had never failed her, so she was confident he would come through this time as well.

It was still early morning and cold in the desert as her booted left foot stepped across the open threshold. He was sitting cross-legged, eyes fluttering, holding what looked like a cow’s skull on his lap.

“What the heck is that thing?”

He opened his eyes and looked up. “A symbol. They sometimes manifest when I come out of a trance.”

“What’s it mean? What did you find out? Which one of them is telling the truth.”

“They’re both lying.”

I wrote this for Week 40 of the Flash Fiction for the Purposeful Practitioner challenge. The idea is to use the image above as the prompt for crafting a piece of flash fiction no more than 200 words long. My word count is 200.

I know, I’m taking liberties with the prompt, but the whole Brett Kavanaugh confirmation three-ring circus hearings have been weighing heavily on my mind for a while now. I keep considering the allegations and what’s come up so far from the FBI’s investigation, tossing them back and forth in my thoughts. There are a few things.

It seems that none of the people at the party where Dr. Ford alleges she was sexually assaulted even remember being there:

Each has said previously that they do not recall the gathering Ford described. Eric B. Bruce, Smyth’s attorney, issued a statement Monday saying Smyth “truthfully answered every question the FBI asked him and, consistent with the information he previously provided to the Senate Judiciary Committee, he indicated that he has no knowledge of the small party or gathering described by Dr. Christine Blasey Ford, nor does he have any knowledge of the allegations of improper conduct she has leveled against Brett Kavanaugh.”

At least one of Kavanaugh’s friends have stated Kavanaugh is an aggressive and belligerent drunk, which could support Ford’s allegations that he assaulted her while intoxicated.

On the other hand, the various phobias Dr. Ford states she continues to suffer from (including a fear of flying even though she regularly flies) have been refuted in a letter from an anonymous party claiming to be Ford’s ex boyfriend.

I know. A witness claiming Kavanaugh has a history of being aggressive when drunk and an anonymous ex-boyfriend saying that Ford isn’t claustrophobic because she once lived in a 500 sq ft apartment and lived for a time in Hawaii (and unless she took a ship, she most likely got there by flying). It’s not much to go on, but consider this.

Let’s say that those allegations are factual. It means both Kavanaugh and Ford lied under oath and are both guilty of perjury:

A person convicted of perjury under federal law may face up to five years in prison and fines. The punishment for perjury under state law varies from state to state, but perjury is a felony and carries a possible prison sentence of at least one year, plus fines and probation.

If proven, then technically, they both could go to prison. It probably won’t go that way, but even if Ford’s allegations against Kavanaugh are established to be factual, in all likelihood (again, assuming a friend and an ex-boyfriend are correct) they both did lie.

Anyway, back to the photo challenge. To read other stories based on the prompt, and so far, mine’s the only one, visit InLinkz.com.

Natalie

artist studio

© Natalie Ruka

Natalie had calculated the exact number of images and other objects suspended on the wall at a glance. She filed away that value, along with item categorizations, for later use. She did the same for the books, opened and closed, the number of light sources, active and inactive, brushes, pencils, liquid, semi-liquid, and solids containers. In less time than it would have taken her to brush her long, thick, brunette hair, she had learned everything she considered relevant about the room’s interior.

However, she had yet to discover what it all meant, at least beyond the literal understanding.

“Noel Gray is an artist.” She uttered the words like a holy revelation, even though she had been provided with that information before arriving here. She correlated what she knew of art in general, then of graphic design, types, media, notable examples of artists and their works, and then compared that data to everything in the room and what she knew of Noel Gray so she could construct the necessary context.

George had related to her what he believed was necessary for her to know about her assignment, and then had the Uber deliver her to the address just past noon. The front door was open, which she expected, and her instructions only said to go to Noel’s studio and wait.

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