Tenser, said the Tensor

Earthless

A couple of recent reviews by Anoop over at Special Circumstances reminded me of an odd little sub-sub-genre of science fiction that I noticed a few years ago: stories in which human (or post-human) civilization has spread across the solar system, but in which the Earth is somehow unavailable—devastated, off-limits, or ignored.  There's no name that I know of for this genre, but I privately think of it as "Earthless circumsolar civilization fiction".  I find the fictional histories of these stories particularly fascinating: scattered populations of refugees, cut off from the mother planet, whose cultures evolve in weird and unexpected ways.  In this post, I survey the best exemplars of this kind of fiction that I am aware of, and then discuss some of the similarities and differences among them.  [Warning: spoilers aplenty.]

Straylight Run

There's two kinds of people in the world: those who, upon discovering that there is a band named Straylight Run, will react by saying, "Oooo, cool name—wish I'd thought of that," and those who will react by saying, "Stray what-now?"

(If you're in the second category and don't get the reference, there's a hint after the jump.)

Blast from the Past

How much of a geek does it make me that when I saw this, I immediately thought of this?

Flash Gordon

I re-watched the 1980 version of Flash Gordon yesterday. I hadn't seen it for many years, but TiVo picked it up. Now, I can't claim that I had high expectations going in. I remembered it as being mediocre. Turns out I remembered wrong: it's a terrible, terrible movie.

15 Minutes!

Holy cow, Qov is gonna be famous! Go to the site for the upcoming documentary Earthlings, move the mouse cursor over "About the Movie", select "Meet the K.L.I.", then click on "click here to view". That's her, third from the left!