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I don’t know what it is, but for some reason, in the warmer months my reading tastes gravitate strongly toward science fiction (and the occasional horror book). I associate fantasy with the cooler months. Why this is, I’ve never really figured out; I’ve read many a fantasy novel set in warm locales, so it’s not as if the cooling weather puts me in mind of the snowy journeys through the Misty Mountains in The Lord of the Rings. This isn’t to say that I won’t read any fantasy at all during the warm periods, but…well, summer is when I wantDown the rabbit hole….

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I saw Green Lantern a while back, and I’ve been struggling since then to figure out how to write about it. I liked the movie, quite a bit. I grant some of its flaws, but for the life of me, I can’t justify the enormous piling-on of the critics who have ripped the film and given it an awful reputation. That, plus what I understand to be lackluster box office, seems to cast doubt on any hopes that Green Lantern might be the start of a franchise. Maybe DVD sales will help, but in this era of slackening DVD salesDown the rabbit hole….

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Time to talk about some books I’ve read recently. :: Somehow, in my life as a science fiction reader, I’d never read Dune until just a few weeks ago. Now, that’s nothing really abnormal; there are lots of SF classics I haven’t read. I haven’t read Dhalgren. I haven’t read The Book of the New Sun. I’ve read only one of Banks’s Culture novels. I still haven’t read A Canticle for Leibowitz. And I haven’t read…well, you get the idea. So, why not Dune? I actually started it, ten or eleven years ago, but it either didn’t grab me orDown the rabbit hole….

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I’ve been meaning to get to this for a while, but various things have distracted me and kept it pushed down the priority list for several months. But now, it really is time to start the final edition of Fixing the Prequels, by turning to the final film in the trilogy, Revenge of the Sith. Before I begin, it’s worth a reminder of what I’m about here. I love the Prequel Trilogy (abbreviated ‘PT’ hereafter), and have since I saw each individual film on first release. I found them all involving, exciting, and in the case of Revenge, emotionally crushingDown the rabbit hole….

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Post corrected below. Regarding a bit of recent reading: :: Some years ago — I don’t recall how long — I read the first few volumes in Lois McMaster Bujold’s series of books on the adventures of a man named Miles Vorkosigan. I’m not sure that the series has an “official” name, so for my purposes, I’ll call it the Vorkosigan Chronicles. I’d been hearing about these books for years; it consists of a long series of self-contained novels about Miles Vorkosigan and the people around him, and every time a new book in the sequence would come out, I’dDown the rabbit hole….

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A while back I posted about an old SF B-movie I saw when I was a kid, Battle Beyond the Stars. I saw Battle in this old, somewhat beat-up theater in Hillsboro, OR that often showed double features – which I remember my parents sending me off to with their blessing, only now realizing that it was probably a great way to get an annoying kid out of the house for a few hours. Battle was the main feature that day; the lead-in was another SF flick called Starcrash. Yup, I saw Starcrash in its theatrical run. If you’re aDown the rabbit hole….

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I just saw this article about the Green Lantern movie that is currently in production. It’s sounding like a pretty nifty production: See, here’s the the thing – I can’t tell you how Green Lantern will be as a movie, but after visiting the New Orleans set of the film I can tell you that director Martin Campbell and company are working to make the biggest, most epic, most sweeping, most cosmic superhero film yet. Forget Hal Jordan versus muggers in an alley, Green Lantern is really about Hal Jordan battling to save not himself, not his girlfriend, not evenDown the rabbit hole….

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A couple of book notes: :: A while back, Michael May recommended a book called Napoleon’s Pyramids, which sounded right up my alley: I had high hopes for Napoleon’s Pyramids. It promised a lot: a swashbuckling hero, a mysterious medallion, an evil count, and an Indiana Jones-esque adventure to unlock the secrets of the pyramids. I’ve learned to be skeptical though about stories that sound too good to be true. There’s always something wrong. The hero is unlikable, the Maguffin is dull, the villain is unbelievable, or the adventure is a bait-and-switch that promises much more than it ever intendedDown the rabbit hole….

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A while back I bought a copy of Kate Elliott’s novel Jaran on the assumption that it was, at least kinda-sorta, a space opera. It turns out to not really be a space opera at all; it’s more of a future planetary romance type of book. No matter; those are only matters of taxonomy and nomenclature. It’s not a space opera simply because very little of it takes place in space. So what is Jaran about, then? It turns out to be a science fictional romance story, as well as a tale of an epic journey, a clash-of-cultures novel, andDown the rabbit hole….

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Time to catch up on some recent reading! :: Sports From Hell: My Search for the World’s Dumbest Competition by Rick Reilly is a fun piece of sportswriting in which Reilly travels the world in search of really bizarre sports. The ones he finds are both familiar (the “Rock Paper Scissors” championships) and utterly unexpected (World Sauna Championships). Some of these he tries, some he only watches from afar, but all in all, the book is a funny and fascinating look into the world of organized competition. Despite having built a society, we humans still revere competition and have aDown the rabbit hole….