Highway To Mars

We have just had an interesting experience in outrage in Australia with the census.  Something so boring has been handled so badly that it will take years to rebuild trust with the community. The thing about “outrage” though is why?  So the census didn’t go to plan, how did that in any way change the […]

The Matrix delves much further into Transhumanism in the second outing as the machine world.  While parts 2&3 of the matrix have their flaws to me they are complex and nuanced views of the future of machine and human politics.  More importantly they highlight that like humans machines are unlikely to find change easy.  Despite all […]

The matrix fits somewhere between Transhumanism and the Singularity.  While it delves into the machine world in a way no movie has before, it also delves into what it means to go beyond the normal definition of what it means to be human.  I with there were more movies like the matrix series that combine […]

Life, Don’t talk to me about life.  That is unless you add a dash of Universe and lashings of Everything.  Cricket is not the most exciting sport.  In fact, they had to cut it down to nothing just to get people to watch it.  So why you would write an entire book based on the […]

William Gibson has to get a look in if you are going to talk transhumanism, it’s just unfortunate that there isn’t an entry that better showcases Gibsons skills than 1995’s Johnny Mnemonic.  None the less the core of Gibsons ideas come through.  The only problem with Gibson’s Cyberpunk world is it hasn’t come true and […]

This was I think the best piece we did under the Martians are Here.  It had a great story – Zombies told with a serious tone and by this stage we had a clear creative vision of what we wanted to achieve.  While it’s a simple enough piece I think overall it is the most […]

We finally made it to a new topic, Transhumanism and where better to start than the 1982 classic Blade Runner.  What is a life lived half as long but twice as bright?  We will never know but what we do know is it ends dramatically no matter how you want to look at it. Blade […]

The last entry into the Singularity is the honorary epilogue. This is a pretty typical 1950s science fiction story of boy being meets girl being and they fall in love while all around them the world is going to hell in a hand basket at the hands of a monster. I have really enjoyed our […]

Star Trek is one of the tent pole science fiction series that is loved around the world.  It challenged the establishment and in any other world would have put Science Fiction on the mainstream map as a story telling medium.  Alas, that road was a long one to travel. Uhura was not one of the […]

In the last official part of “The Singularity” (yes there is an epilogue…) we look at the Movie Her.  This is an important part of the discussion on the singularity as human relationships are evolving through technology in the same way that most other parts of our lives are.  Already phones, with their cameras always […]

Mass Effect explores almost every portion of the singularity and has provides all manner of answers to how it will work.  The best part is you can try out multiple answers to the same problem.  In this 2 part episode we look specifically at the singularity elements of Mass Effect and even though we don’t get […]

Mass Effect explores almost every portion of the singularity and has provides all manner of answers to how it will work.  The best part is you can try out multiple answers to the same problem.  In this 2 part episode we look specifically at the singularity elements of Mass Effect and even though we don’t get […]

The Hitchhikers Guide TV series follows a similar storyline to the Vinyl edition, swapping out the Hagunemnon for an epic sun dive during a rock concert.  With it’s 80’s British TV charms there is a lot to like about the TV Series.  It fleshes out the world building of the radio play while remaining pretty much faithful […]

My favourite independent piece during the run of The Martians are Here.  This is First Contact as I suspect it will be.

This is the story of Pinocchio set in the modern world.  Unlike Pinocchio, David is in fact conceivable as a creation and as such the question is not “Can I ever be a real boy” but when will the world work out there isn’t that much of a difference.  In a world where our teens […]

When you think militaristic robots gone awol, Terminator comes to mind.  The unstoppable machine hell bent on destroying the Connor family are the poster children for the Singularity gone wrong.  Skynet has it in for humanity, in particular it’s future leader and will do anything including screwing with the timeline to remove him. The one thing […]

The dark crystal is one of those movies which you either love or hate.  Personally I loved it, it’s imaginative, crazy and has some great central characters.  It also demonstrates the power of strong female characters. Kira embodies a great many capabilities all of them positive.  She is decisive, resourceful, compassionate, protective and self sacrificing. […]

Number 5 is alive!  We are back in the eighties where Robots were innocent, well except when checking out software and men were naive.  Well not much has changed really.  This movie is a lot of fun and proves you can present scientific concepts in a kind of friendly way that makes it more accessible. […]

The Restaurant at the End of the Universe, aka the day Douglas Adams discovered cut and paste. This book is actually something of a technical challenge given portions were hand written and cut and paste was actually somewhat new technology at least at the desktop.  The book however addresses a number of the weaknesses of […]

It seems a little odd to me that the two films that have really caught my attention this year are a french black and white film and a silent film.  In both cases it’s the story telling, without the distraction of effects or modern demands to fit in more and more content the film maker […]