As a filmic adaptation of Boris and Arkady Strugatsky's 1972 novel Roadside Picnic, Tarkovsky's Stalker (1979) carries the viewer via philosophical drama into what is known as the “Zone”. Although directly taken from the novel, Stalker does not provide any exegesis on the origin of the Zone itself and we are left grasping to understand [...]
Alas, Babylon It seems only fitting that a man known for his debauchery throughout his life would, towards the end of his life, come to write a novel about society being given a clean slate after an overwhelming nuclear annihilation. But, to be fair, winning a clean slate (in the crudest form) for oneself [...]
John Wyndham's The Midwich Cukcoos (1957) falls directly into the trope that Brian Aldiss termed – originally in the pejorative sense – a “cosy catastrophe”. That is, fiction centering on the dramas and adventures of protagonists while some disaster has rendered the outside world irrelevant or completely obliterated. This is indeed what happens in the [...]
“What is Science Fiction?” is a question I find myself answering rather often when I tell friends and acquaintances what I read in my free time. And, each time I answer this question, I don't respond in quite the same way. Each one of my responses force me to try and encapsulate the most recent [...]
