Raritania

I recently revisited Erich Maria Remarque's All Quiet on the Western Front . The book is not a sprawling epic in the manner of War and P...

I recently had occasion to think about how we never left the '80s in the really important things--in our economics and politics, the rig...

Recently running into a commercial for the Will Ferrell-John C. Reilly vehicle Holmes & Watson on On Demand I was surprised that I didn...

Once upon a time cops and, especially in the '80s, the commando, were the characteristic figures of the action movie, a relatively groun...

Writing about the military techno-thriller I generally focused on print works. This was for several reasons--because this is where the ove...

The screen adaptation of Shintaro Ishihara's second novel, Crazed Fruit , ran on TCM some time ago. I understand the movie has been re...

Considering the unending debate on obesity my thoughts go back to what George Orwell had to say of the dietary habits of the poor in his jou...

Recently I chanced upon John Rhys-Davies' nasty behavior toward Green Party MP Caroline Lucas on the BBC's Question Time . In partic...

I have been struck time and again by the number of trolls who claim to be intellectually superior to anyone they are likely to meet in their...

Nathan Farrugia's The Chimera Vector being the sort of thriller where plot twists and "big reveals" are critical to the enter...

Those who delve into the history of the more commercial kinds of fiction--the old pulps and paperbacks and so on--encounter what seem like e...

Recently reading David Sirota's Back to Our Future I thought again that the 1980s do define our decade, though the explanation I find s...

The original, EON-produced James Bond movies of the early 1960s are generally regarded as the starting point for the modern action film--the...

Darko Suvin's collection Metamorphoses of Science Fiction includes such classics of his criticism as "Estrangement and Cognition...

The last time I checked one still could not say the words "asshole" or "bullshit" on network television. Yet, academics ...