The Big Idea

South Korean filmmakers have featured zombies on multiple occasions, as the linked page shows. Yet their newest edition of a zombie story on Netflix, The Kingdom, has some aspects you won't see in a zombie feature produced in the United States. First, it's got an aspect of political intrigue that leaks over into moral commentary that I'll talk about in a bit. Second, it's a period piece, set roughly in the year 1600 in Korea. And third, its take on zombies is different from anything I've seen before. I've only seen the first four episodes of the first season as of the moment of writing this post, so I can't possibly give away how season one ends, nor can I say anything at all about season two, which Netflix recently released. However, if you don't want to know anything at all about this series before watching it, skip this post, because I will talk about some general aspects and background of the story. Different Zombies The origin of the idea of ...

Twelve Monkeys  (or   12 Monkeys ) is both the title of a 1995 film and also a 47 episode SyFy channel TV series that debuted in January of 2015 and ended in 2018. A caveat to my post here is that I’ve seen the 1995 movie though not the series and will mainly talk about the film, though I’m familiar with the series and will reference how its view of fatalism is different from its source material. Both the film and the series feature a virus that wipes out the vast majority of humanity. And both ponder the issue of whether it’s really possible to change fate. I’ll talk about what I believe the Bible has to say on that topic near the end. By the way, some  spoilers  about the film are in this article–in case you’ve never seen it and were hoping to be surprised. (But that was 25 years ago–surely you’ve seen it by now, right? 🙂 ) Cassandra Both versions of  12 Monkeys  do something all my favorite science fiction does; they use the lives of ch...

I'm going to talk about a story anthology I've had the good fortune to work on, but I'll get to that in a bit. First I'm going to talk about some bigger ideas (which is what this blog focuses on, after all) and work my way to the new book after a bit. So let me start out by noting that sometimes innovative ideas are complex and mind-blowing. Relativity and Quantum Mechanics are like that--it takes mental work to wrap your head around the way these principles of physics really work...and you can never be fully confident, especially with Quantum Mechanics, that you really do get what's going on. But there are other ideas that immediately strike everybody--well, almost everybody--as great ideas. Such notions hit people with the feeling, "Why didn't anyone think of that before ?" Such putting meat or cheese between two slices of bread and eating it that way--believe it or not, there was a time nobody did that. In Ancient Rome, for example, you might ...

I happened to see Star Wars, The Last Jedi yesterday in a very clean and inexpensive theater in Monterrey, Mexico (just here for a short time this trip). Watching a moving in the United States increasingly seems like a waste of money, but I digress from my point...which is commentary on the movie itself. While I am going to commit some SPOILERS they will be of a general nature. I am not going to reveal how the story ends or some of the key bits of information the tale gives out. I do share some story details, but deliberately out of context. And while this is also a general review, I am going to focus on one aspect of the story that caught my attention that may not be the first thing most people think of with this movie. Note that I had several problems with Episode Seven that I hoped this movie would not repeat. I felt The Force Awakens 1) copied far too much from the Star Wars A New Hope, 2) presented an insufficiently powerful villain in Kylo Ren, 3) an over-powered new chara...

Last week I traveled to the Guadalajara Book Fair, one of the largest book fairs in the world and the largest in Latin America from what I've heard. I attended a number of events and looked around the entire grounds, but only in Guadalajara for four out of nine days of the fair. I did this with a specific purpose in mind. As an Evangelical Christian who writes science fiction and fantasy, who speaks Spanish and French proficiently and who has a Mexican wife, I was looking at the prospects of selling Christian-themed speculative fiction in Latin America. Some things I wanted to know included: 1. Are any Christian publishers already selling speculative fiction in Latin America? 2. Is any speculative fiction being sold at all at the fair? And if so, by which authors? Published by whom? 3. Factor X. What might I learn at the fair that I don't even know could be possible? Probably I spent the most time on point number 2 . I don't know how many books were on sale at the fair...

I'm  coming to the end of what proved to be a month-long ordeal, JRTC (Joint Readiness Training Center), at Fort Polk, Louisiana. I am here with my Army Reserve unit, naturally, where we spent a week on orders prior to going to Louisiana, a week preparing to go to our field training in Louisiana, and then two weeks “in the box,” i.e. in the midst of our particular war scenario. I'd  like to write a post about the war scenario itself, but a particular incident that happened coming out of the field yesterday gave me something to write about first. My fellow civil affairs troops were looking for a good meal after a week of eating field rations (both MREs—Meals Ready to Eat—and “First Strike” rations) and were talking pizza, but I wanted to save money and instead of cough up money for pizza, trudged over to the military dining facility at the rather primitive location we wound up being billeted in, “FOB Warrior.” Military dining isn’t usually bad. The modern Army ...

Doing something boring for the Army (waiting for Reserve Soldiers to check into a building), I happened to find out something really interesting via reading an old magazine lying around, something worthy of a blog post. A scientific study conducted interviews with WWII veterans--the group including veterans who had been highly decorated for valor. The purpose was specifically to determine what the relationship was between leadership traits and heroism, with the presumption that the WWII survey results would be broadly applicable to heroes in all wars (which makes sense, but may not actually be true). The study did find, as I imagined the people who created it expected, that veterans who described themselves as “strong leaders” were more likely to have received a reward for valor than those who did not describe themselves that way. That particular factoid didn’t really interest me. What  did  catch my eye is the fact the study found there were two differen...