Edward Ashton burst onto the science fiction scene with his ‘cloning meets first contact meets colonisation’ tale Mickey 7 (now the long-delayed movie Mickey 17 directed by Bong Joon Ho and starring Robert Pattinson). Mickey 7 was followed up by a less successful sequel Antimatter Blues. For his third book, Ashton does something different although…
Lots of great speculative fiction books involve steam trains. Some highlights of this China Mieville’s Iron Council, Terry Pratchett’s Raising Steam to Harry Potter’s Hogwarts Express. And of course, being steam driven, trains often feature in pretty much anything written in the steampunk sub-genre. Sarah Brooks’ debut draws on some of this but also on…
A Quiet Place: Day One is an origin story. But it could have been named how to avoid a “cat”astrophe – with all the screen time given to a moggy. The film goes back to when the blind but noise-sensitive creatures featured in A Quiet Place (2018) and A Quiet Place Part II (2020) invaded…
Fantasy and science fiction novels often use an ongoing war as the central driving narrative force. In Premee Mohamed’s new book, The Siege of Burning Grass, two rival powers have been at war for years – the Varkal and the Med’ariz. Both forces are hungry for new territory, have absorbed smaller countries into their domains…
George Miller’s latest opus in the “extended Mad Max Universe [TM]” is Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga. The film delivers two things Australian audiences love: fast cars and, um… Greek mythology (?). Yep, Miller takes a page from the likes of Theo Angelopoulos (Ulysses’ Gaze) and the Coen Brothers (O Brother, Where Art Thou) by…
More monkey business. Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes is another reboot … reset … reconfiguration of the 1968 movie Planet of the Apes, which starred Charlton Heston and Roddy McDowall. In fact, this is the tenth picture in the extended franchise (and was mostly shot in Australia). But does it live up to…
The speculative fiction genre got a bit of a kick in the teeth back in 2000 with the release of China Miéville’s Perdito Street Station and Jeff Vandemeer’s City of Saints and Sinners. With these came the advent of what has become known as ‘New Weird’. One source in 2023, defined New Weird novels as…
The second installment in Denis Villeneuve’s adaptation of Frank Herbert’s epic 1965 sci-fi novel picks up where Dune (2021) left off. In this chapter, the exiled Duke of House Atreides, Paul (Timothy Chalamet) establishes himself as a leader. You may remember that in Part One, basically the whole House Atreides was massacred by the evil…
Where did it all go so wrong? After several era-defining movies, the Marvel franchise seems to be sputtering. Judging by the ill-conceived and frankly illogical The Marvels, it seems to have run out of ideas for these characters. The Marvels draws together Captain Marvel (2019), the Disney + mini-series Ms Marvel and a few scattered…
AI is a hot topic right now, so it’s only natural filmmakers would want to explore it. One of them is Garth Davis (Lion), who adopts a measured but sometimes oblique approach in Foe. Davis is clearly passionate about the project, having worked with novelist Iain Reid to adapt Reid’s novel of the same name…
