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So, thirty years have passed since the release of Star Wars Episode V: The Empire Strikes Back. Wow, I guess. As luck would have it, I watched the film not too long ago — a couple of months, probably — and it still holds up extremely well. This is unsurprising, of course; the film is a bona fide classic. I’ve read some tributes here and there around the Interweb and around Blogistan specifically, and I’ve found myself of mixed mind about the good words being said about the movie, mainly because a very large portion of comment seems to beDown the rabbit hole….

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Remember my post a short while ago about the goofy 1980 B-movie space western Battle Beyond the Stars? I just figured that post represented a pleasant trip down geek memory lane for me and maybe a few others who recalled that obscure film. I certainly never figured that Battle was any kind of going concern. Well, guess what: Battle actually is a going concern. It’s being revisited, in the form of a prequel comic book! I am so going to read this. Details here. The world needs more space opera comic books! Share This PostDown the rabbit hole….

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Battle Beyond the Stars is a movie that seems to confound expectations. If you watch it expecting a good movie, you’ll be disappointed. But on the other hand, if you watch it expecting a bad movie, you may be disappointed in the other direction. Battle came out in 1980, one of a string of flicks to come out in the years after something happened in 1977 to suddenly make the entertainment industry think that there was a market out there for science fiction, especially in the form of explodey-spaceshippy-goodness. Battle was produced by Roger Corman, the king of the low-budgetDown the rabbit hole….

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AICN reports that John Carter of Mars is now shooting. I loved the first book in Edgar Rice Burroughs’s series when I read it some time ago (note to self: read the rest of those books), and I have to admit to being thrilled at the possibility of a good movie springing from that book. We’re talking serious skiffy adventure here, folks — for all the plaudits heaped on so many great SF novels for their forward-looking and insightful delvings into the nature of humanity and our place in the universe and how we deal with our technology and theDown the rabbit hole….

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I’ve read a couple more space opera novels lately: :: The Price of the Stars by Debra Doyle and James MacDonald was actually a re-read for me. The first time I read it was almost eight years ago, and I remember liking it but finding it a bit disappointing; it felt, at the time, like a retread of a number of tropes from Star Wars used in the service of a fairly unremarkable plot. Someone else, in the interim (I don’t remember who it was), told me that it was a better book than that, so I decided to giveDown the rabbit hole….

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It’s been a while since I updated the books that The Daughter and I have been reading at bedtimes, so here are some capsules. Some of the most satisfying and entertaining reading I’ve done lately has come at night, as I read these books aloud to The Daughter, one chapter per night. What’s nice about reading aloud is that you can’t skim. At all. When reading silently, I do tend to slip into skimming once in a while, if I sense that I’m reading a passage that may not entirely be crucial to the action. Reading aloud re-directs my readingDown the rabbit hole….

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A couple of Star Trek related notes: :: Ron Moore confirms what many have suspected over the years: that the technobabble on Star Trek: The Next Generation was just made up, fill-in-the-blanks type stuff. “It became the solution to so many plot lines and so many stories,” Moore said. “It was so mechanical that we had science consultants who would just come up with the words for us and we’d just write ‘tech’ in the script. You know, Picard would say ‘Commander La Forge, tech the tech to the warp drive.’ I’m serious. If you look at those scripts, you’llDown the rabbit hole….

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Hey, remember the movie The Black Hole? I ran across a clip of it on YouTube the other day, and I’ve been thinking a bit about it. Maybe I should track down a DVD at some point. (Spoilers here, but the movie’s 30 years old, so….) The fine folks at Disney made The Black Hole in 1979. It was their entry in the “Hey, the kids do sure like that Star Wars, so we needs ourselves a space movie too!” sweepstakes that resulted in lots of space opera stuff, some of it not bad (Battlestar Galactica), some of it campyDown the rabbit hole….

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Notes on a couple of space opera reads I’ve done lately: :: I greatly enjoyed Andre Norton’s Moon of Three Rings a few months back, so more recently I read another by her, The Zero Stone. Where Moon of Three Rings was more planetary romance than space opera, The Zero Stone actually is full-on space opera. Murdoc Jern is a jeweler by trade, who has learned the ropes of the business from his father and is now traveling the galaxy with a business associate, trading in rare gems from many different worlds, when his associate is killed and Jern hasDown the rabbit hole….

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I wrote once before on the initial graphic novel set in the Firefly universe, Those Left Behind. Now there are two such graphic novels; Those Left Behind has been joined by Better Days. While I’ll pretty much jump at nearly any chance to revisit this universe, neither of these two graphic novels is completely satisfying, which is oddly disappointing considering my belief that comics is the ideal medium for the Firefly universe to live on, if live on it does. The problem with each one boils down simply to the fact that they are too short. It took me aboutDown the rabbit hole….