Raritania

I have, for the most part, ignored Star Trek since the untimely but unsurprising demise of Star Trek: Enterprise . I have seen the first two...

It seems that since at least The Sopranos, but especially during this past decade, I have heard people say over and over and over again tha...

MILD SPOILERS AHEAD After revisiting Timothy Zahn's sequel trilogy to the original Star Wars trilogy I found myself picking up the du...

Those who have gone on flogging the James Bond series in print as in film have made much of being true to the original. "Not the last t...

Watching Star Trek one does not hear its sociology spelled out, but most conclude that the Federation is the sort of thing that Wellsians an...

I recently played all the way through the original Dragon Warrior --something I haven't done since I first got the game way back when it...

Some time ago I ran into the Des McAnuff film version of Honore de Balzac's classic Cousin Bette . The novel is a sprawling soap opera...

Checking the reviews of John Green's Paper Towns on Amazon I was struck by how many were annoyed with Quentin's adulation of Margo-...

On the bestseller lists Rick Riordan stood comparison with Suzanne Collins and Stephanie Meyer as a writer of young adult fantasy and scienc...

To say that James Bond is the most famous of fictional spies, defining if not the image of the spy then at least a particular popular image ...

I have long regarded what we so inaccurately call "self-help" with deep distaste. Ultimately, the reason for all that is that it...

In 1971 Robert Ludlum became a name in the spy genre with The Scarlatti Inheritance . Counting the works he produced under two pseudonyms (J...

In 1953 the "international man of mystery"-type spy was an old, well-worn, frankly stale tradition. It had already been a half cen...

MILD SPOILERS I will say up front--for the benefit of those who have never read this blog before--that I tend to be less than enthusiasti...

If you're one of those who thinks that any and everything that is ever said of any artistic work is entirely "subjective," an...