Tag Archives: scifi

Review of Quantum Leap S2E2 “Ben & Teller”

ql 2-2-1

From the Quantum Leap episode “Ben & Teller” Ben (Raymond Lee) and Rebecca (Janet Montgomery).

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I just finished watching the Quantum Leap season 2 second episode Ben & Teller, apparently a pun on the magicians Penn and Teller. This also references that in this leap, Ben’s (Raymond Lee) “host” is a seventy-year-old bank teller named Lorena Chavez.

First of all, commercials are back, which is fine.

After the intro, the show opens with Jenn (Nanrisa Lee) at a high stakes poker game, apparently cleaning up. Somehow Ian (Mason Alexander Park) knows where she is, peeks their head in the door, and whispers “Turtle Time.” This is a code phrase Jenn made up in case she became a leaper and needed to identify herself to Quantum Leap project personnel.

It’s sort of like in the 1971 film The Andromeda Strain when project personnel were called to duty with the phrase, “There’s a fire.”

Jenn responds to Ian with, “Tell me you’re not about to say what you’re about to say.”

They find Magic (Ernie Hudson) at a jewelry store asking the person at the counter if the earrings he’s looking at would be an appropriate first anniversary gift. So Magic is married or re-married?

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Book Review of “Fire Time” (1974)

fire time

Cover for Poul Anderson’s 1974 novel “Fire Time”

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I wish I could say I liked Poul Anderson’s 1974 novel Fire Time. It was being offered from Amazon at a pretty low price and wasn’t available at my local public library. I’d read and liked other books by Anderson. I figured what the heck?

The novel begins with several prisoners being transported to a judge’s private residence on Earth. They had been charged with what seemed to be war crimes, and the judge, who was elderly and infirm, was the only one willing to hear their side of the story. The book proceeds from this point as testimony which could either be really good or really bad.

I couldn’t get past the sort of “muddiness” of the narrative. I tried, but as much as I wanted, the story didn’t pull me in. I never lost myself in this world. It’s a world describing a difficult orbit around three different starts sometimes resulting in “Fire Time,” a catastrophic heating up of the planet’s northern hemisphere that collapses civilization.

You’d think that would be enough.

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“Shoot the Devil II: Dark Matter” Coming Soon!

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Some of my regular readers may remember that a short story of mine “Wolf in the Wind” was included in the 2022 Crucifixion Press anthology Shoot the Devil: Ten Tales of Humans Defeating the Demonic. It’s a collection of science fiction, fantasy, and horror stories generally from a Christian perspective that depicts people combatting and defeating literal evil. My own story was less religious, but nonetheless, a battle in the supernatural realm involving a female occult detective in the 1880s west.

Apparently, it did pretty well, so well in fact that the publisher decided to print a sequel. It should go on pre-sale on October 15, 2023 and is called “Shoot the Devil 2: Dark Matter.”

Basically, it’s the same theme only in space.

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If I Could Turn Back Time

desk

PHOTO PROMPT © Jennifer Pendergast

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“No! This is not what I meant!”

Eight-year-old Erin pounded her fists on the back of the chair and then recoiled when it hurt so much. She squealed in her too squeaky, little girl voice.

She wanted to go back and fix the past. The experiment held that promise. The forty-two-year-old physicist stepped into the acceleration chamber and vanished.

It was thirty-four years ago. Her old bedroom. She thought she’d arrive as herself; as an adult. Instead, she was projected into her younger body.

The door opened and she cringed.

“Daddy’s here, Erin.”

The horror was starting all over again.

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Book Review of “Hacking Galileo” by Fenton Wood

hack

© James Pyles

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I became aware of Fenton Wood (a pseudonym) when he reviewed my SciFi/Fantasy novelette Ice on twitter (but alas not on Amazon or goodreads).

Curious, I took a look at his twitter/X account, which led me to his e-book Hacking Galileo.

It had fabulous reviews, an interesting premise, and was reasonably priced, so I downloaded it onto my Kindle Fire.

The first words you read in the book after the usual preamble stuff is “This is a work of fiction.” Wood then goes on to explain the inspirations and influences for various parts of his story, the background of some of the technical details, when he “cheated,” making certain events happen at a slightly different point in history for the sake of the plot, and how security at Cray Research and Bell Telephone Company weren’t quite as lame as he depicted.

That’s really important because the rest of the book is written from the point of view of a man who, in the 1980s, was part of a teenage hacker group, really just a bunch of high school friends in Palmdale, California, who performed acts of hacking from the interesting to the fantastic.

The main character Roger O. Miller (ROM, see what he did there?) is writing and recounting events that happened thirty years ago where he and his three friends actually saved the world from destruction by an alien space probe. There’s a lot of build up to get to that point, but almost all of it is fascinating.

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Book Review of “A Call to Duty”

call to duty

Cover for the Weber and Zahn novel “A Call to Duty”

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After I returned my previous book to the library, I was wandering the stacks trying to decide if anything looked interesting. I eventually came across A Call to Duty (2016) by David Weber and Timothy Zahn. It’s the first book in the four-part Manticore Ascendant series which, in turn, is part of the much larger Honorverse published by Baen Books.

I should say that I’m particularly fond of Baen, not just because of the quality of titles they publish, but because they are a truly egalitarian science fiction/fantasy publisher. They don’t hold your politics or social views against you if you happen to be a tad bit conservative (as opposed to many other publishing houses and official SciFi organizations).

That said, I haven’t specifically targeted a disproportionate number of novels from Baen for my reading list. I tend to read whatever gets my attention at the moment.

A few years back, I did read and review Weber’s flagship Honorverse novel On Basilisk Station. I had the same issues with Basilisk as with Call to Duty, they tend to drag.

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Book Review of “Pushing Ice” (2005)

pushing ice

Photo Credit: James Pyles

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It’s been over five years since I read and reviewed one of Alastair Reynolds’ books so I guess reviewing Pushing Ice is long overdue.

I actually keep a list of books I want to read. Which books I read and when depends somewhat on whether or not I can find them in my local public library system. I mean chances are, I’ll only read the book once (so many books, so little time), so I can hardly afford to buy them all (one wonders how people afford to buy all of the brand new SciFi books being put out just to be able to vote on them for the Hugos, Nebulas, or other much vaunted awards?).

This book started off slowly. I didn’t expect that. After all, in the beginning of the tale, humanity has moved out into the solar system, so much so, that they’re mining comets for ice (water). Then, to everyone’s shock, one of Saturn’s moons Janus breaks orbit and starts accelerating toward interstellar space. Turns out it wasn’t a moon at all but some sort of alien scout or observation post.

The people with all the money, the United Economic Entities (UEE) offers the closest ice mining ship, the Rockhopper, commanded by Bella Lind, a lot of money if it will chase, catch up to, and study Janus for the few days they can before the moon outruns them. After much angst and voting, they agree to. But that’s not the beginning of the story.

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Rewellagans

robot

Image found at the Weight of Thought Facebook page. Attributed to Victor Dimitrov: https://www.artstation.com/artwork/qQOaZn

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“Rewellagans,” insisted five-and-a-half year old Joannie Palmer as she pointed up at the machine. She had led me into a glade I’d never visited before, one covered with several varieties of long grasses and surrounded by tall but otherwise unremarkable trees.

“I can see that.” As her Grandpa, I’m expected to understand everything even when I don’t have a clue. “But what is it?” I knew what it was and it was impossible. Joannie’s “Rewellagans” was a six-meter tall humanoid robot, but something out of an old 1950s B-science fiction film. It’s technology that had never existed and could never exist.

Don’t you see it on the machine’s right shoulder. No, on our right. It’s the robot’s left shoulder.”

She kept pointing as if by sheer effort she could make me see it.

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Film Review of “They Live” (1988)

they live

Scene from the 1988 film “They Live”

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I’ve been seeing memes based on this film for years, but last night I finally got around to watching John Carpenter’s They Live (1988) starring Roddy Piper, Keith David, and Meg Foster.

This is supposed to be one of those “cult classics” and I can see why. That said, it hardly qualifies as one of Carpenter’s best movies. The plot had holes big enough to drive a truck through, the acting for the most part was pretty flat (especially from Foster, which surprised me), and at best, it was a middle-of-the-road movie.

Actually, Keith David as Frank turned in a good performance as did Peter Jason as Gilbert, and George “Buck” Flower (more on him in a minute) as the Drifter.

The basic story is about a homeless construction worker named Nada played by Piper (the character is never named in the movie) who wanders into L.A. Along the way he encounters a blind Street Preacher (Raymond St. Jacques) who rants less about God and Hell and more about how “they” are taking away our freedom and turning us into slaves.

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Little (Synthetic) Girl Lost

brenda's bus

PHOTO PROMPT © Brenda Cox

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It was illegal for her to be in Shenzhen let alone to time shift into the past. Fortunately, she had enough power left to transmogrify into a western tourist and evade her pursuers. As she boarded the double-decker street bus, she did attract some male attention, but for predictable reasons.

He kept a home in the Bantian district where her transportation was heading. If Dr. Kao didn’t have the technology in 1998 to fix her, she’d have to spend the next thirty years pretending to age to reach her present. Could she warn her former self to avoid the accident?

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