In 1985, the now cult classic film adaptation of H.P. Lovecraft’s Re-Animator had its theatrical release. It stars Bruce Abbott as medical student Dan Cain and Jeffrey Combs as scientist Herbert West, the titular re-animator, who moves in with Dan and drags him into his dangerous and morally questionable experiments to conquer death. Herbert is [...]
INTRODUCTION The 1973 film Westworld was the first effort of filmmakers to bring to screen a rendition of “machine vision,” with the camera adopting the point of view of the Gunslinger android on the hunt for the lead character Martin. Martin had previously damaged the android’s “vision” with acid, and thus the Gunslinger’s sight is [...]
Stars in My Pocket Like Grains of Sand is a 1984 science fiction novel by Samuel R. Delaney that explores questions of class, mental health, consciousness, and sexuality in a future where humans have explored and inhabited over six thousand planets, many with their own sentient inhabitants. Delaney, himself a black gay man (though he [...]
Speculative fiction is an expansive and interconnected genre, so parsing down where the sub-genre "science fiction" begins and ends and what exactly its traits are is as subjective a question as any. When compared with genres in the same family, like fantasy, what appears to define science fiction is the rooting of its extranormal elements [...]
