Death Robots From Mars

Welcome

Please be warned that this blog may contain spoilers. My aim is not to just provide a review of selected works, but to place them within a context relating to other works and authors, which may in some cases mean giving away some of the plot.

I discovered Science Fiction via 1950s B movies at a very tender age, and upgraded to literature when I was about 11. I have been addicted to SF ever since.
The literary SF is a very different beast to that of film or TV, which generally lags thirty years behind what is going on in short stories and novels. One would have thought, with the advent of CGI, that intelligent SF movies would finally be produced. Of course, it does not require CGI for intelligent SF to be produced on the screen. Some intelligent SF has of course been produced for cinema and TV, but sadly, very little of it.
Fans of SciFi, as opposed to SF, are far more interested in the romantic relationships between their heroes than the science.
That’s fine, so far as it goes, but these series tend to be romantic dramas with a futuristic setting.
I think it was David Pringle that said (and apologies if I am misrepresenting him) that long running SciFi series tend to devolve into soaps. This was most apparent in ‘Star Trek – Voyager’ where the romantic entanglements of the crew (which became somewhat ludicrous at times) became more important than the SF elements of the storyline. Meaningless technobabble was slotted into the scripts, usually involving ‘anomalies’ or ‘polarities’ in vague connected strings, to cover up the lack of any discernible science.
And yes, we still have this in SF literature, but I feel that there are many authors pushing the boundaries and putting out a quality product, as there have been for well over a hundred years. I’m hoping to introduce people to some of this history and maybe reintroduce those just as, if not more, familiar with this wonderful legacy than am I.

Roddy Williams
LONDON

roddy_w@hotmail.com