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The new movie Dune: Part Two, directed by Denis Villeneuve, adapts the second half of Frank Herbert’s classic novel Dune. Science fiction author Matthew Kressel was blown away by the film’s breathtaking visuals.

“I was on the edge of my seat for the whole movie,” Kressel says in Episode 563 of the Geek’s Guide to the Galaxy podcast. “It’s one of the best films I’ve ever seen.”

TV writer Andrea Kail, a lifelong Dune fan, calls Dune: Part Two a perfect movie. “It was like a religious experience,” she says. “Genuinely. It was awe-inspiring, the way you feel in church if you’re very religious.”

Geek’s Guide to the Galaxy host David Barr Kirtley loved Dune: Part Two, but warns that Dune purists might need to adjust their expectations. “This movie seems like basically a rewrite of the book,” he says. “So many of the scenes I don’t think are in the book—I don’t remember them. So many things are changed pretty dramatically. They’re basically 99-100 percent good changes in my opinion, but it seems like they made pretty dramatic changes to the material compared to the first movie.”

Science fiction author Rajan Khanna had mixed feelings about Dune: Part Two, but is glad that it’s helping to create more Dune fans. “It’s exciting to have certain things enter the modern vernacular that I’ve had in my head for a long time, stuff about spice and sandworms and things,” he says. “I’m happy to see stuff like this succeed. Stuff that we love finally finding an audience and being done well is always great.”

Listen to the complete interview with Matthew Kressel, Andrea Kail, and Rajan Khanna in Episode 563 of Geek’s Guide to the Galaxy (above). And check out some highlights from the discussion below.

Rajan Khanna on Dune vs. Dune: Part Two:

The first film had to set up a lot of the language, especially if you’re not used to Dune, how the world works, how the technology works, the shields and all that. They were very careful in the first film to show how the shields worked and the red meant that something was penetrating. So I think in this film they got to be like, “You saw the first film, you know how it works, now we can just unload it on you,” and I think that worked to its benefit for sure.

Andrea Kail on Paul Atreides and Chani:

In the book it’s more like, “Oh, he dreams about her and it’s destiny,” but we don’t see them actually falling in love. I don’t feel it. In this we see the love story, we see why they fall in love, and it’s sweet and it’s quiet and it’s real. I understand why they love each other. That’s one of the parts where I was crying, that dune scene where he’s telling her about the seas on Caladan, how you swim in the water, and the scene where she teaches him how to sandwalk. It was like watching two kids dancing. It was so beautiful. I was just tearing up.

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Matthew Kressel on sandworms:

The earlier adaptations, the Lynch version and the Syfy version, when they ride the worms I’m like, “OK, that looks difficult. It’s like a rock wall in a gym. It looks really hard but I could probably do it.” In this movie, I’m like, “No way.” Just the speed of it and the enormity of it. How do they even see where they’re going? There’s so much sand blowing around. I just thought that was so cool, and the final battle scene where they’re riding the worms into battle and they’re flying the Atreides banner, and you’re like, “Holy cow.” I got chills from that.

David Barr Kirtley on film audiences:

The fact that this seems to have been embraced so fervently by a mass audience just to me is such an encouraging sign that you can make a big budget, serious science fiction movie, and not have to dumb it down, and not have to make it a “crowd pleaser.” So I think people have maybe not been giving audiences enough credit, that people will go to see this sort of movie, even if it’s three hours long and has a downer ending and everything, if it’s good. So that’s just another reason I love this movie and the phenomenon of this movie.

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1899, a science fiction series from Baran bo Odar and Jantje Friese, creators of the hit TV show Dark, premiered on Netflix in November 2022. TV producer Ruairi Carroll enjoyed the show’s mysterious characters and storyline.

“Whatever way Netflix algorithms work, it was being pushed on my screen all the time,” Carroll says in Episode 562 of the Geek’s Guide to the Galaxy podcast. “And I was seeing a lot of trailers on YouTube, because I follow the Netflix channel on YouTube. And I kind of burned through it to begin with, and had a great time, I’ve got to say.”

Despite the fanfare, 1899 was quickly canceled, concluding the series on a painful cliffhanger that left the show’s many mysteries completely unresolved. Geek’s Guide to the Galaxy host David Barr Kirtley was disappointed that Netflix would end the show in such a frustrating way. “It’s been more than a year since the show came out, and I’m still just constantly seeing people grousing on social media like, ‘How could Netflix fund this stupid show or this stupid show? Why don’t they give us more 1899? That’s what we really want,'” he says.

Fantasy author Erin Lindsey enjoyed 1899, but understands why the show was canceled, given the many indications that the story was spinning out of control. “There was some serious storytelling entropy going on,” she says. “I think it was going pretty well for the first few episodes, and then each episode got exponentially weirder after that, to the point that I had lost patience by the end.”

So is there any hope that 1899 fans will ever find out what it all means? TV writer Andrea Kail hopes the answers will be forthcoming in one form or another. “Here’s my proposal for Netflix, or at least the producers,” she says. “Could you please just tell me what happened? Explain it to me. I don’t care, write it out. I just want to know. I just want to know what happens next.”

Listen to the complete interview with Ruairi Carroll, Erin Lindsey, and Andrea Kail in Episode 562 of Geek’s Guide to the Galaxy (above). And check out some highlights from the discussion below.

Andrea Kail on mysteries:

Does it all have to make sense? I’ve been having this conversation with my friend lately. She doesn’t like mysteries. She wants everything explained to her as you go, and I’m just like, “Well, let it go in the moment. Eventually maybe you’ll get an explanation, and sometimes not getting an explanation is still satisfactory.” That’s probably just me as a reader/viewer. It doesn’t bother me … I like not having all the questions answered. I am very much a “let it wash over me” person, especially if my first impression, when I’m doing that, is that it’s great.

Ruairi Carroll on Mystery Box shows:

I don’t mind the Mystery Box thing. Well, I can take it to a certain extent. I kind of fell out of Lost. I enjoyed The Leftovers from a couple of years ago, and Dark. But then sometimes I do run out of road with it. And I’ll be honest with you, there are days where I was quite happy to skip over something that was a Mystery Box and just put on Reacher on Amazon, and just watch a big man hit people … Just go with it, that’s the only thing I can say about these Mystery Box things. Just go with it. You’ll either bang your head off the wall for the rest of the night thinking about it, or you’ll be like, “OK, I’m firing up Jack Reacher.”

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David Barr Kirtley on Dark vs. 1899:

What happened to me with Dark is that at the end of Season 1, I was like, “There’s no way they can possibly wrap this up. There’s no way this all makes sense.” And then at the end of Season 2, I was like, “OK, they did a surprisingly good job—way better than I was expecting—of making this all make sense, so I’m hopeful that in Season 3 everything will actually make sense.” And then with Season 3, I was like, “Eh, I still have a list of like a hundred things that they never answered that were kind of important.” So if this had followed the same pattern, I’m sure a lot of things would have been answered in a satisfactory way, but I’m still left with the overwhelming impression that at the end of Season 3 there would have been a list of a hundred things that nobody can answer.”

Erin Lindsey on Baran bo Odar and Jantje Friese:

I think if anyone’s going to pull off [a Mystery Box show], it could well be these guys. We’ve picked it apart. That’s our job, a little bit, on this show, but this was an enjoyable show. It was flawed, in my opinion, but it was enjoyable, and I think that even if I preferred Dark to this, I continue to be impressed by the attention to detail and just the pure ambition of what these guys are putting out, and they could well nail it one day. I would recommend this show as enjoyable if flawed, and I will watch the next thing they put out, and the next thing after that, because I have a feeling that one of these days they’re going to hit it out of the park.

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Deliver Us, a 2018 novel by Christopher Robinson and Gavin Kovite, takes a hilarious look at the future of drone delivery. The plot revolves around a social media activist named Piper Prince who attempts to stop Amazon from taking over her Detroit neighborhood.

“It’s written in a Coen brothers sort of tone,” Robinson says in Episode 561 of the Geek’s Guide to the Galaxy podcast. “A Big Lebowski sort of tone. I wanted the world and the characters to be slightly pitched up from reality. So Jeff Bezos and his S-Team are characters in the book, and they are a little bit like the boardroom characters from The Hudsucker Proxy.”

Robinson sees Detroit as the perfect setting for a novel about the collision between social justice activism and breakneck technological disruption, given the city’s rich history and uncertain future. “It’s a place that was the arsenal of democracy,” he says. “The Jetsons future is a future that was extrapolated from what Detroit used to be. Detroit was the place of the greatest technological innovation in the US for a while.”

Robinson worked hard to get the details right, meeting with various members of the Detroit community and also doing extensive research on Bezos. He also got feedback from his wife, author and activist Amanda Knox. “As he was writing it with Gavin, I was reading everything they wrote,” Knox says. “I was telling them when I thought, ‘This feels long, this feels overexplained, go into this more, this is super funny, this is not so funny, I don’t really understand this character’s motivation.’ All of those little factors that go into how you write a story.”

Readers might expect Deliver Us to be firmly on the side of the activists, but Robinson was careful to portray both sides of a complicated argument. “I think that’s one of the things that ties Amanda and I together is that we don’t really believe in evil,” he says. “We believe in humans who are complex and flawed, and who are many things at once. And I think that about Bezos and Amazon as well.”

Listen to the complete interview with Christopher Robinson and Amanda Knox in Episode 561 of Geek’s Guide to the Galaxy (above). And check out some highlights from the discussion below.

Christopher Robinson on his viral wedding proposal:

There was a data crystal from the future that had rocketed back in time, and on that data crystal, in the crevice of a smoldering meteorite, it had a fractured, partial entry from the Encyclopedia Galactica about the Knox-Robinson coalescence, which was the future union in life together of Amanda Knox and Christopher Robinson. So it was an encyclopedia article about us and our life together. When Amanda came and discovered this I was like, “Oh wait, I was thinking about doing this, but I guess it already happened in the future. So I guess I’m doing it now?” She didn’t know what was happening. She thought maybe I was leading her on a scavenger hunt.

Amanda Knox on The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy:

That got me through some rough times in prison. Douglas Adams was my go-to. I had The Ultimate Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, and that kept me company in a very difficult time. I was in a cell with five other people, and one of them was unpredictably violent, and I spent a lot of time just sitting on my bunk trying to be invisible. I had earplugs in my ears so I wouldn’t have to listen to people screaming, and I just needed some escape, and it was the perfect escape for me because it was so light, it was so fun, it was everything I needed in that moment. It was everything my reality wasn’t.

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Christopher Robinson on characterization:

I actually created D&D-style character sheets for all of the characters in Deliver Us, to try to fully imagine who they were. Obviously they don’t have a “move silent” skill or “pick lock,” but I replaced those with social skills and things that people in our modern, contemporary society would have. So for instance, for each character I knew what their “flirtation” skill was, and I knew what their “navigate awkwardness” score was. And I somewhat arbitrarily assigned those things. I also had “What are the five items they have on their person at any given time?” I knew the answer to that question for every character.

Christopher Robinson on the Labyrinths podcast:

We did one episode of Labyrinths with this guy Itiel Dror, who is one of the world’s leading experts on cognitive bias, especially as it affects forensic science, which is super interesting. Because a lot of people think that things like fingerprinting is just a cut and dry science. A print either matches or it doesn’t. But in fact it’s much more of an art, as is DNA comparison and analysis, another thing people tend to think of as just a cut-and-dried science. And Dror has shown, through some very clever study designs, that these people are extremely subject to the various cognitive biases that afflict us all, such that if they’re told extraneous information like that a suspect confessed, they will often change their analysis and say, “Oh, well actually this print does match,” when before they thought it didn’t. And that’s very troubling.

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The science fiction series For All Mankind, which recently wrapped up its fourth season on Apple TV+, explores an alternate timeline in which the United States and the Soviet Union establish a Mars colony in the 1990s. Science fiction editor John Joseph Adams was impressed with the series’ quality and ambition.

“It’s a fantastic show,” Adams says in Episode 560 of the Geek’s Guide to the Galaxy podcast. “It’s definitely one of the best science fiction shows ever, and everyone should definitely watch it.”

Geek’s Guide to the Galaxy host David Barr Kirtley agrees that For All Mankind is a first-rate work of science fiction. “It’s one of the only shows on television that presents the idea that the future could be better, and humanity could progress, that competence and intellect and trying to make the world a better place could actually work, and could actually have a positive impact,” he says.

For All Mankind has received strong reviews, but so far the show hasn’t attracted the kind of audience it deserves. Screenwriter Rafael Jordan thinks the show’s innovative concept—an alternate history story that unfolds over decades—might be a bit too challenging to communicate to potential viewers. “There seems to be a lack of awareness about what the show is exactly,” he says. “I’ll admit I was late to the show. I don’t think I started watching until Season 2, because I didn’t really realize what it was.”

Writer Sara Lynn Michener hopes the show attracts enough viewers to continue through its planned seven-season arc. “A lot is asked of the viewers in this show, and I actually really like that,” she says. “But it also causes me to be concerned that we’re not going to get the seven seasons that we deserve.”

Listen to the complete interview with John Joseph Adams, Rafael Jordan, and Sara Lynn Michener in Episode 560 of Geek’s Guide to the Galaxy (above). And check out some highlights from the discussion below.

Sara Lynn Michener on Dev Ayesa:

They had so many options in terms of “let’s explore the tech bro.” They could have gone the Silicon Valley method, they could have made it this ridiculous character, they could have made it an obviously evil character. But they made it a minority character who has a genuinely fascinating backstory and a genuinely fascinating character. He exudes confidence and peace and wisdom, in this really scary way. So there are scary aspects to the character, for sure, and you’re kind of wondering all the time, “Is he evil or is he good?” … And the result is that this feels like a much more normal, much more realistic character.

John Joseph Adams on Seasons 3 and 4:

I feel like Seasons 1 and 2 were largely perfect, and I really struggled to come up with criticisms, but with Seasons 3 and 4 I definitely found it easy to come up with criticisms. I feel like the science fiction/space aspects are still good, but then the drama side of things, I felt like that’s where it isn’t as good, almost like they had the same team who was working on all of the speculative stuff, but they have a different team that’s working on the drama stuff. I mean, I don’t imagine they have separate teams for that, but that’s what it kind of feels like.

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Rafael Jordan on Season 5:

I was able to attend a Season 4 finale screening here in LA, which was fantastic, and they did talk about future seasons a bit. They definitely have full confidence that they’re going to see it through. I don’t think they’ve gotten the official word yet, but they’re definitely moving forward. … During the Q&A [Joel Kinnamon] went on at length about the [old age makeup]. At one point, after he’s just gone on about how hard it was to go through, he’s like, “Oh my god, I just realized I’m going to have to do it all again next season.” There was a moment where I think the producers were like, “You just told everyone you’re definitely going to be back for the whole season.”

David Barr Kirtley on science fiction:

One of the reasons I really liked Season 4 so much is because it showed these science fiction things that I grew up reading about, like asteroid mining and Martian colonies—realistic Martian colonies, not like Total Recall Martian colonies—that you just don’t really see so much in film and TV, the more grounded kind of things like that. … People say, “It’s just like The Expanse.” Well no, it’s like this whole tradition of science fiction that had all these things. Maybe if you primarily watch movies and TV, that’s your closest reference point, but they’re both drawing on this really long tradition.

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Children of Dune, the third book in author Frank Herbert’s Dune series, explores the lives of Leto and Ghanima Atreides, the twin children of Paul Atreides, the hero of the first novel. TV writer Andrea Kail was impressed by the book’s thoughtful examination of complex ideas.

“This is a very philosophical book, much more so than Dune was,” Kail says in Episode 559 of the Geek’s Guide to the Galaxy podcast. “The number of historical and philosophical references in this just blew my mind.”

Science fiction author Matthew Kressel agrees that Children of Dune is a smart, well-researched book. “I was trying to figure out all the religious references,” he says. “I have Buddhist, Hindu, obviously Christian, Jewish references, ancient Egyptian. There’s also Jungian psychology. I mean, there’s so much in there.”

Children of Dune excels when it comes to ideas and worldbuilding, but the pacing and characterization can feel a bit dated. Science fiction author Rajan Khanna warns that the book is sometimes pointlessly obscure. “A lot of stuff gets revealed right before it becomes relevant, and it could have been woven throughout a little bit better,” he says. “And there’s a lot of playing coy with the reader. ‘Oh, I’m going to talk about this stuff that nobody else knows,’ and that bugged me.”

Geek’s Guide to the Galaxy host David Barr Kirtley admires the ambition and vision of Children of Dune but didn’t necessarily enjoy reading it. “It seemed like an intellectual exercise,” he says. “It didn’t seem like [Herbert] was that interested in the characters. He had all these ideas he wanted to explore, and he was sort of going through the motions with the characters is how it read to me, because the ideas were what he was really interested in.”

Listen to the complete interview with Andrea Kail, Matthew Kressel, and Rajan Khanna in Episode 559 of Geek’s Guide to the Galaxy (above). And check out some highlights from the discussion below.

Matthew Kressel on worldbuilding:

I found myself at times just blown away by how deep and resonant and powerful the ideas are, and just the depth of thought that Herbert put into this, and just going back and reviewing all the plot threads and how they fit together, and how he had to plan that from the beginning, and just the philosophical undertones of it. … I almost feel like Herbert himself is taking spice and seeing the future of humanity. This book feels real. It feels like it’s a lived-in world. When you read this book you experience it along with the characters, and it is so vivid and so real in my mind. I think it’s as good as the first book.

David Barr Kirtley on character motivation:

Far and away my number one problem with this book is that I found it constantly frustrating that I didn’t know: ‘What side is this person on? What do they actually want? Are they a double agent? Are they telling the truth in this scene or are they hiding something?’ I’m OK with a couple of characters where you’re not sure what their agenda is, but I felt like there was just nobody here that I could identify with and that I was with emotionally. So often characters have plans and there’s a throwaway line to explain their motivations that was like a hundred pages earlier or a hundred pages later, or doesn’t appear at all.

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Andrea Kail on Jessica Atreides:

Jessica is a villain. She’s incredibly selfish. She’s selfish when she gives birth to a son when she’s supposed to give birth to a daughter, leading to all of this. She’s selfish when she takes the Water of Life when she’s pregnant. She knows what it’ll do and she does it anyway. She sacrifices her daughter to save her son. And then she ran out on her two-year-old daughter and left her there to deal alone with the consequences of her actions instead of staying on Dune and being the guide that she needed. Alia’s downfall is specifically because of Jessica, and I came out of this horrified by what a terrible person Jessica is.

Rajan Khanna on Leto Atreides:

The second biggest thing I hated about this book was superpowered worm-flesh Leto, because he just starts throwing doors and punching worms and jumping off cliffs. I’m like, “How does that happen just from wearing the sandtrout on your body? How is this organism which is supposed to be very primitive giving you super strength?” I guess if you want to slide through the desert they’re designed to do that, but how is he super strong from that kind of stuff? I don’t get it. … I love superhero comics and movies and all that stuff, but it felt like suddenly a comic book hero jumped into this Dune novel that I was reading, and it was jarring.

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The Netflix series Bodies is a time travel mystery about four detectives in different time periods attempting to solve the same murder. TV writer Andrea Kail was immediately captivated by the show’s intriguing premise.

“This came up in a list of upcoming shows on Netflix, and I’m like, ‘A detective show that’s also speculative fiction? Oh my god. Hello, wheelhouse,'” Kail says in Episode 558 of the Geek’s Guide to the Galaxy podcast. “So I was anticipating this for months.”

Bodies is based on a 2015 graphic novel by Torchwood writer Si Spencer. Geek’s Guide to the Galaxy host David Barr Kirtley was impressed at the way that showrunner Paul Tomalin was able to adapt such an experimental, impressionistic graphic novel. “Paul Tomalin made the story much more conventional—almost entirely in good ways,” Kirtley says. “He took this really trippy comic and tied the storylines together and made it make a lot more sense.”

Fantasy author Erin Lindsey enjoyed how Bodies keeps its focus squarely on the characters, unlike many time travel stories in which the intricacies of the plot threaten to overwhelm the story. “All of that [time travel] stuff is just scaffolding, and I really love that about it,” Lindsey says. “It’s there enough to intrigue and to direct, but ultimately this is four separate stories about four different people that are all interesting in their own right, and that’s what I connect to, personally.”

TV producer Ruairi Carroll appreciates Bodies as a fun time travel yarn that won’t make your head spin. “You can think about this, but you can also let it kind of wash over you, and that’s what I enjoyed about it,” he says. “I think this is designed to be a more enjoyable, entertaining program than some of the harder stuff like Dark.”

Listen to the complete interview with Andrea Kail, Erin Lindsey, and Ruairi Carroll in Episode 558 of Geek’s Guide to the Galaxy (above). And check out some highlights from the discussion below.

Erin Lindsey on multiple timelines:

They do jump a lot between these different timelines. One thing that they did that I thought was particularly clever was they don’t drop the future timeline into the equation until the very end of the first episode. You think you’ve got it figured out: “OK we’ve got our Victorian detective, our Second World War detective, and our modern detective, and we’re jumping back and forth between these three.” You’re just starting to feel comfortable, and then right at the very end it’s like, “Welcome to the future. What?”

David Barr Kirtley on logical problems:

I did have a long list of logical questions. Actually on a second watch it semi-addressed a lot of them. You’re like, “Why didn’t they do this? Why didn’t they do that?” And then at some point a character will say, “Oh, we just can’t do that. We tried and it didn’t work.” It doesn’t really logically make sense why they couldn’t, but since they addressed it I’m willing to sort of give them half credit for all that stuff. They anticipated all the objections and had a character say, “We can’t do that,” even though it’s very hand-wavy.

Andrea Kail on Gabriel Howell and Kate Ashfield:

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The two actors that I thought were outstanding were the teenager playing Elias Mannix—I thought he was fantastic. The pain turning into anger, and his eyes were so expressive. I thought he was great. And also the woman who played his adoptive mother. … She was the nice little Regency housewife from Sanditon, where she’s just sweet and everyone loves her. And she’s just a fucking lunatic in this. The scene where she’s being questioned and she just loses her shit and does that whole, “Ooh, I said too much,” and bites her tongue off. She was so good.

Ruairi Carroll on Bodies vs. Dark:

I thought Dark was way above this, to be honest with you. I thought overall it looked better, everything about it … There was a lot more going on in Dark. There were three seasons. We had how many different timelines, we had multiple characters, there was a lot going on. And that was part of the fun, trying to keep track of it all. At the same time I think I’d be more inclined to go back and rewatch this than Dark. It’s an easier watch. After sitting through three seasons of Dark, I’d be like, “Oh wow, I don’t know if I can put myself through that again.”

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The Dungeons & Dragons video game Baldur’s Gate 3 has become a cultural phenomenon, winning countless accolades including Game of the Year. One of the game’s biggest fans is science fiction editor John Joseph Adams, who has played Baldur’s Gate 3 for more than 1,000 hours.

“It’s absolutely an amazing game,” Adams says in Episode 557 of the Geek’s Guide to the Galaxy podcast. “I think it’s the best game I’ve ever played.”

Baldur’s Gate 3 features a branching storyline with 174 hours of cutscenes. Adams thinks that the story and writing compare favorably to some of the best books and movies he’s ever experienced. “I would say that it compares in quality to any entertainment,” he says. “Once I became an editor, I did worry about playing these kinds of games, that I was going to feel that the stories aren’t up to snuff at the level I have to understand it to be an editor, but this game just really takes it to a whole new level.”

Adams does feel that the game is far from perfect. Some of the issues include unbalanced gameplay, inadequate dialog options, and puzzling plot developments. “There are a lot of problems with it,” he says. “There are a lot of frustrating things where it’s like, ‘Well, this could have easily been fixed and been awesome.’ But then everything else is just so amazing that it’s like, ‘I don’t care. Best game ever.'”

Overall, Adams feels that Baldur’s Gate 3 perfectly captures the magic of Dungeons & Dragons, and that the game’s biggest issue is that it’s so addictive. “Do be careful if you have deadlines, or if you want to maintain relationships and you care about spending time with other people,” he says. “I can’t think of anything I’ve ever spent this much time on and been this obsessed with, except for D&D itself.”

Listen to the complete interview with John Joseph Adams in Episode 557 (above). And check out some highlights from the discussion below.

John Joseph Adams on branding:

So the game comes out, and “Baldur’s Gate 3” is on the top title. That’s all the branding. I see Larian Studios branding. Where is the “Dungeons & Dragons” branding on this game? I don’t see “Dungeons & Dragons” anywhere. There’s a little spot on the bottom of the launch screen that says “Wizards of the Coast” next to Larian Studios, but it’s very small … I’ve heard people say that maybe they were trying to hedge their bets in case it didn’t pan out as well as everyone was hoping, but it just seems crazy. How can you not have your branding on there?

John Joseph Adams on sex scenes:

It’s a very horny game, I will say that. They have had to do patches to make some of the characters less horny … You gain approval from [characters], and once you reach certain stages of approval, maybe they start to like you. And it’s like, “Man, can’t I just talk to you like a friend? I’m trying to be nice to you because I like you. I don’t want to sleep with you.” This one guy Gale—he’s the wizard—he’s notorious for just being the horniest. He always wants to sleep with you. And it’s like, “Come on, man. I thought we were just having a nice discussion. You were teaching me about magic. I didn’t mean for it to go this far.”

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John Joseph Adams on AI:

The AI is pretty bad. It’s very easy for [Jaheira] to get killed in the assault on Moonrise Towers, just because she does ridiculous stupid stuff. She’s a druid. She’ll cast ice storm on top of allies, and it turns the floor icy—not as bad as sleet storm, but it does turn the floor icy—and then she runs into it, and then she slips and falls. So it’s like, “What are you doing?” She gets killed a lot because she has low armor class and not that many hit points, and there’s some really bad dudes in that first fight. So it’s easy for her to get killed, and if she does get killed, no one ever says anything about her ever again.

John Joseph Adams on multitasking:

I’ve been so obsessed with this game, at a certain point I was like, “God, I’ve got to stop playing it. I’ve got to get some work done.” A while ago I started using a text-to-speech program to take text stories and make them into audio so I could listen to them, and I’ve gotten it to work pretty well. So I can sit there and listen to things and do something else. And so I was like, “OK, I’ve played Baldur’s Gate 3 enough that I don’t really need any of the dialog—much as it pains me not to hear all the great voice acting, but I’ve heard it all before and I still want to play it. So now I can sit at the computer all day playing Baldur’s Gate 3, but then also get a lot of work done.

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The Apple TV+ series For All Mankind is an alternate history story in which the Soviet Union beats the United States to the moon, leading to a greatly intensified space race. Screenwriter Rafael Jordan was excited to see another science fiction show from Ronald D. Moore, creator of the hit series Battlestar Galactica.

“I’ve been saying for two or three years that this is probably the best show on TV, and it’s not the first time we’ve said that about a Ron Moore show,” Jordan says in Episode 556 of the Geek’s Guide to the Galaxy podcast.

Geek’s Guide to the Galaxy host David Barr Kirtley thinks that For All Mankind will appeal to a wider audience than most outer space shows, since its first season revolves around the familiar and relatable world of the Apollo program. “It starts off with this fairly realistic world of the ’70s, so if you’re someone who’s put off by super science fiction stuff, it kind of eases you into it,” he says. “And then by the time you’re hooked, then the fusion reactors and all that kind of stuff starts coming in.”

For All Mankind also features top-notch dialogue and characterization. Writer Sara Lynn Michener thinks the show will appeal to anyone who likes the knotty domestic drama of shows like Mad Men. “Very few characters, if any, ever feel like they’re just there to provide filler and there to provide something else for the main characters,” she says. “Every time you think that you’re going to write them off as some sort of caricature, you’re wrong, and they’re going to come back around and be real again in a new way, in a refreshing way, and I absolutely love that about this show.”

For All Mankind is currently airing its fourth season, out of a planned seven. Lightspeed magazine editor John Joseph Adams hopes the show becomes one of the rare science fiction series to last that long. “I think this is one of the best science fiction shows probably ever, certainly the best alternate history show,” he says. “Everybody watch it and get your friends to watch it, because we’ve got to get those seven seasons.”

Listen to the complete interview with Rafael Jordan, Sara Lynn Michener, and John Joseph Adams in Episode 556 of Geek’s Guide to the Galaxy (above). And check out some highlights from the discussion below.

Rafael Jordan on alternate history:

For once my background as a musician ties into this, and there’s really nothing they can do about this, but as the timelines start to diverge from reality, they use a lot of specific songs from certain years to create the mood. And I dig that, but also those songs wouldn’t exist any more. They would be different. “Come As You Are” by Nirvana. That song wouldn’t exist in this new timeline. It would be slightly different, because music is a reflection of the times and culture. … In the perfect version of this show they would have had the extra money to hire bands to make fake songs in the style of the times.

John Joseph Adams on the Season 2 finale:

What they figure out is that they can basically cover every inch of them with duct tape. So they basically make spacesuits out of duct tape, because that’s what they have, and they have some kind of face masks that they can put on them. And they explain in excruciating detail, “Any bit of your skin that’s exposed is just going to balloon.” It sounds completely awful, and you can see the angst on their faces as it’s explained what’s going to happen to them. And they have 15 seconds to get from where they are to this control panel on the outside, and it’s so intense. It’s just incredible.

David Barr Kirtley on astronaut Garrett Reisman:

Ron Moore calls [Garrett Reisman] and says, “I have an idea I’d like to bounce off you.” So they meet up, and Ron Moore says, “I’m thinking about doing a show about NASA in the ’70s, or maybe make it an alternate history thing, where we start off that way but then it diverges from actual history. One or the other.” And Garrett Reisman says, “Well, when I was in Russia I saw their lander”—their lunar lander that they built that they never used. And he’s like, “Most people don’t realize how close the Russians actually came to beating us to the moon.” And so they started talking about, “Whoa, what if that had happened? Then this would have happened, and this would have happened.” So that’s where the show’s origin was.

Sara Lynn Michener on Apple TV+:

I remember being very worried when this show came out, because I was literally pleading with people to watch it. Because I desperately wanted it to have all of the seasons, and I had read somewhere that they have a whole planned seven-season arc. And I want to see every bit of it. So I remember when it came out I was just like, “Why am I the only person talking about this show?” … I think Apple TV+ is smart enough to look at the long game and say, “Hey, if we finish this show, we can keep making money off of it in perpetuity,” and that is such a smarter way of doing stuff like this, because they’re aware shows go through ebbs and flows of popularity.

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Kyle Newman, director of the cult classic Fanboys, recently coauthored the book Lore and Legends: A Visual Celebration of the World’s Greatest Roleplaying Game. The book chronicles the astounding success of the Dungeons & Dragons 5th Edition ruleset, which launched in 2014.

“This book explores D&D being nearly extinct in the early 2010s, up to now, where you’ve got 50 to 60 million people playing the game and it’s a household name again,” Newman says in Episode 555 of the Geek’s Guide to the Galaxy podcast. “So how did they go from 2 to 3 million people playing the game to 60?”

The D&D revival is due to a confluence of factors, including ’80s nostalgia, the rise of geek culture, and digital technology. “You’ve got D&D on all types of television shows—Community, Big Bang Theory,” Newman says. “There’s actual play, the Critical Role explosion, which contributed. There’s a tremendous ruleset that contributed to it. There’s the ease with which one can learn how to play D&D. You can go online to YouTube and learn how to play, and suddenly this game that seemed so complicated or taboo, it’s like, ‘Oh, it’s just people getting together and telling a story and having fun.'”

An increasing number of celebrities have also declared their love for D&D, including Dwayne Johnson, Steven Colbert, and Drew Barrymore. Newman plays in a star-studded D&D campaign run by True Blood actor Joe Manganiello. “We were a few sessions in and then Tom Morello joined the group,” Newman says, “and then a few more sessions in and Dan Weiss joined—cocreator of Game of Thrones—and then Dave Benioff joined. The Big Show—the WWE wrestler—would fly in from Florida. Vince Vaughn joined the team. It was a very fun and boisterous group of people.”

Newman and Manganiello are also hard at work on an official D&D documentary, which is slated for release in 2024. “Next year’s the 50th anniversary, and the game is as vibrant and relevant as ever,” Newman says. “It took a family of people, a legacy of people, a lineage, to understand the tradition and continue it. So that’s what we really get into. You understand that this is a game not just made by one man, and it’s survived because of the people who play it and the people who love it.”

Listen to the complete interview with Kyle Newman in Episode 555 of Geek’s Guide to the Galaxy (above). And check out some highlights from the discussion below.

Kyle Newman on The Hollow:

[Writer Hans Rodionoff and producer Mason Novick] called me up one Sunday morning and said, “What are you doing?” And I was like, “Oh, flying home tomorrow,” and they’re like, “No you’re not. Meet us at Starbucks.” So I go to the Starbucks on Sunday morning, and they’re like, “We need you to come to set. Our director has quit. The movie’s fully financed. We need someone to take over and shoot the movie. Let’s go.” And I was like, “I need to read it.” And they’re like, “No, no, we’re going to set now.” And sure enough, outside the door a white van was parked, waiting to take me to set.

Kyle Newman on D&D characters:

These characters—Van Richten and Tasha and Xanathar and Mordenkainen and Acererak—they weren’t invented for 5th Edition. These are people that were in their lexicon of villains and heroes that are cover stars again, and they’re finding new ways to make them relevant for a modern audience. So if you’ve never played it, it’s exciting and you get into it and learn about the characters, but if you have played it, then you know that Xanathar is not a character that was invented for Xanathar’s Guide to Everything. He’s a character that has been around for a long time.

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Kyle Newman on Heroes Feast Flavors of the Multiverse:

There’s exquisite photography and food styling, but on top of that there’s photography that captures these places, that isn’t about food, and trying to bring to life places like Shadowfell or the planet Krynn. We got to shoot at a northern California vineyard that has a medieval castle on its property, with its own dungeon and everything. … A lot of the book is not just about the food, but it’s about the lore and the traditions surrounding the people and the food. So it is a cookbook, but it’s also a sourcebook of sorts for the cultures and settings.

Kyle Newman on Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves:

The quality of the movie was incredible. You look at Rotten Tomatoes, critically it’s loved. Everyone who saw the movie really enjoyed it. I think it was just that the studio made a mistake releasing the movie. They pushed it a month and backed it right up to Super Mario Bros., which was the biggest movie of the year until Barbie. … All of the things that were in the control of the filmmakers went well. They made a good movie and people liked the movie. Was it marketed correctly? Was it released at the right time? That’s out of their hands, and that shouldn’t be a determinant in if you make a sequel or not.

Xanathar's Guide to Everything (Dungeons & Dragons)

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Entrepreneur Andrew Yang ran a surprisingly successful presidential campaign in 2020, captivating the internet with fresh ideas and a fun, geeky persona. More than any other candidate, Yang seemed to channel the optimistic spirit of science fiction shows like Star Trek.

“There are a bunch of things that are happening now that mean we should be thinking more ambitiously about what our society could and should look like, and I ran for president on those ideas,” Yang says in Episode 554 of the Geek’s Guide to the Galaxy podcast. “I’d like to think that I was the presidential candidate that a lot of science fiction and fantasy people would recognize as one of their own.”

Yang, author of the nonfiction books Forward and The War on Normal People, recently released his first novel, The Last Election, about a plot by the Joint Chiefs of Staff to seize power in the wake of a disputed election. “People like stories more than they like anything else, people understand stories better, so I thought, ‘You know what? Maybe we can do this as a narrative,'” Yang says. “It’s meant to be a combination of near-term speculative science fiction/fiction with a lot of real-life details.”

Yang collaborated on the book with Canadian journalist Stephen Marche, author of the nonfiction book The Next Civil War. “When I reached out about this, he snapped it up and saw that it was a great way for him to get some of the research he’d done for The Next Civil War into a book,” Yang says. “He thought that because he knew journalism so well and I knew politics so well, that we’d each bring those to the table.”

The Last Election is marketed as a paranoid political thriller in the vein of Seven Days in May or The Manchurian Candidate, but Yang warns that the scenario it describes is all too plausible. “All the crazy stuff you can imagine happening out there in American politics is more or less happening,” he says. “You have people questioning election results, you have riots, you have threats of violence. You have a majority of the American people who don’t know who to trust and don’t know where to turn. So could you have an election where literally people are refusing to acknowledge that the other side won as quickly as 2024? Sure. In a way we’re already experiencing versions of that.”

Listen to the complete interview with Andrew Yang in Episode 554 of Geek’s Guide to the Galaxy (above). And check out some highlights from the discussion below.

Andrew Yang on Dungeons & Dragons:

When I became an entrepreneur I used to joke that it was because I played Dungeons & Dragons, because I always dreamed of going into the woods and killing the dragon, not being a scribe, which is what I thought my corporate job was like. … We went through the canon of basic D&D at the time, so it was Keep on the Borderlands and on up from there. The Isle of Dread, Castle Amber—which was way too hard, everyone dies. It’s very good though. Master of the Desert Nomads, Temple of Death. Saga of the Shadow Lord I believe we played. I’m looking at the dates on these things now. It’s ’81, ’83, ’84. It was around that period. Those were the major modules that formed my childhood.

Andrew Yang on Star Wars: Episode IX—The Rise of Skywalker:

We had about a half a million donors to the campaign, and so we said, “Hey, let’s just bring some donors to this premiere of a movie that I want to see anyway.” My team was really clever, because they knew integrating things that I would enjoy doing would make me happier and more energized. People can sense when you’re bullshitting and sense when you actually like something. So it was obviously something I was excited about, to go see the Star Wars movie, and some donors were excited too, so we went and saw it. … I did the [presidential] debate in southern California and then went straight to a late-late showing. It was fun.

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Andrew Yang on universal basic income:

One reason why I think my campaign was so interesting to people is because it wasn’t born of an interest group. It was born of a desire to improve people’s lives, and then it cribbed from things that just happened to influence me, and science fiction and fantasy was certainly one of those major influences. But also facts. I mean, when I talk about AI and UBI [universal basic income], this stuff is going to happen, so let’s not present it as if it’s science fiction. … AI being real speeds us up in some ways because people look at it and say, “Hey, I’m actually concerned about that. It could even affect me.” So I think [UBI] is closer in terms of time, but the path there is still very fraught.

*Andrew Yang on the Forward* podcast:**

I came off the presidential trail and said, “OK, how are we going to make this stuff happen in real life?” And then I started a podcast—Mark Cuban and Jack Dorsey I think were a couple of the first guests—just trying to make all of these good things happen. … A recent one that people would probably dig is Walter Isaacson talking about his Elon Musk biography. Because if there’s one person who’s pushed our use of technology forward, it’s probably Elon. And reading that book, holy crap did I learn a lot, so interviewing Walter was fun. That’s an example of something I was really gratified by, because getting to talk to Elon’s biographer was really remarkable.

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The Next Civil War: Dispatches from the American Future

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Susan Palwick's short story is the kind of thing fans either love her or hate her for.

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Forty years later, the books are still influential. In 'Dice Men: The Origin Story of Games Workshop,' Ian Livingstone talks about their success and about Games Workshop's other hit: Warhammer 40,000.

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The Apple TV+ series adapts a beloved Hugh Howey novel.

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Filmmakers in the '70s were good at predicting things like AI and climate change, but their stories often fell short on entertainment.

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The fantasy and science fiction author held court at fan conventions for years, gathering new acolytes as he went.

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Phil Plait, creator of the popular astronomy blog Bad Astronomy, credits his interest in outer space partly to his childhood love of science fiction movies such as Angry Red Planet and Robinson Crusoe on Mars.

“I’m a huge science fiction dork,” Plait says in Episode 541 of the Geek’s Guide to the Galaxy podcast. “I’ve watched every TV show, just about, and movies and everything, read tons of books. I love science fiction.”

In his new book, Under Alien Skies, Plait explores what various cosmic vistas would look like for a person who was physically present, studying them with ordinary human eyesight. “I open each chapter with a short vignette, basically a fictional tale,” he says. “Most of the time it’s in second person. So I say ‘You are at this planet,’ ‘You are standing on the bridge of your starship,’ ‘You are standing there watching a dust storm approach you on Mars.’ And that way hopefully it’s even more of an immersive experience for the reader.”

Plait hopes that the book will serve as a valuable resource for filmmakers and science fiction authors looking to inject an extra dose of reality into their speculative visions. “I’ve actually done some consulting for movies and TV shows, and even a couple of video games,” he says. “So I kind of know that process of advising writers, or other folks who are involved in the entertainment business, of what the real science is.”

As much as Plait enjoys seeing science fiction that incorporates real science, he recognizes that the ultimate aim of any book or movie is to tell a good story. “Even if they don’t get the science correct, it’s OK, because you’re still inspiring people,” he says. “And if they get the science right? Hey, bonus.”

Listen to the complete interview with Philip Plait in Episode 541 of Geek’s Guide to the Galaxy (above). And check out some highlights from the discussion below.

Phil Plait on Mars:

On Earth, the sky is blue during the day, and then when the sun sets, around the sun you can get red sky, because of haze and junk that’s floating in the air, which tends to absorb or scatter away blue and green light. The end process is that that light doesn’t get to your eye, just the redder stuff does, and so the sun looks red and the sky looks red around the sun. But on Mars it’s the opposite. There’s all this dust in the air, and that dust is iron oxide, it’s rust, and it floats in the atmosphere and tints the sky red. But at sunset, it tends to scatter the blue light toward you. So during the day the sky is red, but at sunset—and sunrise of course, as well—the sky is kind of blue.

Phil Plait on science consulting:

I got an email from one of the digital effects people [on The Expanse] saying, “Hey, we’ve got a shot coming up where we’re going close to Jupiter. What would that look like?” So I wrote a few paragraphs and then sent it away, and then when that episode aired it was like, “Oh look! They did all that.” That was really cool. … I did some consulting for the movie Arrival, and again that was a complete, bizarre circumstance where I was consulting with a production company on something completely different, and they said, “Hey, we’ve got this script for this movie coming out, if you want to take a look at it and check the science of it.” And I did, and made a few notes and sent it back and forgot about it. And then years later the movie comes out, and I’m watching it and I’m like, “Hey wait a minute! I remember this scene.” So it was really cool. It’s fun how that stuff works out sometimes.

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Phil Plait on asteroids:

A lot of small asteroids are actually what we call “rubble piles.” They are huge collections of rock, from tiny ones smaller than pebbles up to boulders that could be as big as a house or more. But they’re not one solid object. It’s not a gigantic rock in space. … If you were on a spaceship approaching an asteroid a mile across, it has negligible gravity. So you’re in your spaceship and you’re hanging off the side of this thing, and you jump from your spaceship to the asteroid, it might not have a solid surface for you to land on. You might just sink up to and past the top of your spacesuit, just to be able to stand on this. So I thought that was kind of a funny way to open that chapter, with an astronaut basically stuck inside an asteroid, a few meters down, and his compatriot has to come and get him.

Phil Plait on globular clusters:

There’s another kind of cluster called a globular cluster, and these are roughly spherical clusters of hundreds of thousands or even a million stars. … When you go outside at night, from the darkest site on Earth you’ll see a few thousand stars in the sky, and it looks like the sky is just covered in stars. But in a globular cluster you could have 50 times that many stars in the sky, and a lot of them would be so bright—because these are red giant stars, or other stars that are very luminous and very bright, and quite close to this planet, because these clusters aren’t that big—that you could read by them. They would cast shadows on the ground. And so you could have thousands of stars like that in your sky.

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The new movie Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves brings the popular tabletop role-playing game to life with great writing and strong production values. Michael Witwer, author of Empire of Imagination: Gary Gygax and the Birth of Dungeons & Dragons, is glad that D&D fans have finally gotten the movie they deserve.

“This movie loves D&D, and you can feel it in every fiber and grain of the film,” Witwer says in Episode 540 of the Geek’s Guide to the Galaxy podcast. “I enjoyed every minute of it.”

Honor Among Thieves is first and foremost a comedy. Science fiction editor John Joseph Adams says the film does a good job of replicating the improvised absurdity of a typical D&D adventure. “The movie really does feel like a D&D campaign,” he says. “There’s a bunch of stuff that’s silly, or doesn’t make a lot of sense, but that’s how D&D is, so it kind of works.”

Ben Riggs, author of Slaying the Dragon: A Secret History of Dungeons & Dragons, was impressed at the amount of D&D lore that was included in the film. “Given all the things that this movie does, given that it explains this new fantasy world, a rather complicated plot, and also has to make D&D rules nerds happy, it does it pretty seamlessly and gracefully,” he says. “There’s never a rough patch where you’re like, ‘OK, now we’re getting 10 minutes on the backstory of this city.'”

Geek’s Guide to the Galaxy host David Barr Kirtley hopes that Honor Among Thieves will help to finally dispel the notion that Dungeons & Dragons is something niche and peculiar. “My friends and I tried to organize a D&D club at my high school, and the administration just totally wouldn’t allow it, because of the supposed nefarious influence of D&D,” he says. “So to go from that to having such a huge mainstream hit movie, with all these stars and everything, it really does feel like we won. The nerds won.”

Listen to the complete interview with Michael Witwer, John Joseph Adams, and Ben Riggs in Episode 540 of Geek’s Guide to the Galaxy (above). And check out some highlights from the discussion below.

Michael Witwer on John Francis Daley:

I knew John Francis Daley was one of the directors, and that resonated with me because Freaks and Geeks was one of my favorite shows when it was on … The entire cast is future stars, like everyone, and John Francis Daley is the main character, Sam. And on that show they play D&D a few times—that show has a lot of D&D themes. So I knew he had a background in it, whether that was him or just his character. Because I currently work on other D&D books, I study them all really carefully, and he was one of the contributors to Icewind Dale: Rime of the Frost Maiden, which was a 2020 adventure. And I remember seeing his name on the contributor list and thinking, what’s that about? So I started to realize, oh, this person’s really into this, and he’s even working with Wizards staff on their tabletop game. That’s a really good sign.

Ben Riggs on the displacer beast:

The design of the creature is just so fantastic. It’s creepy. Even though it’s a panther with a couple tentacles, at first you’re creeped out … I thought that the way they were deployed in the maze was really, really cool. You basically had a redshirt fight one of them first to kind of explain the rules of the displacer beast, so that you could then know the stakes when they’re chasing down Chris Pine. The writers thought about this—clearly. That’s not a mistake, that’s not some happy accident. They thought, how are we going to explain the rules of this monster to the audience in order to make this scene as suspenseful as possible? And they did it.

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David Barr Kirtley on humor:

One of the directors said, “Ours is a movie that doesn’t take itself with great seriousness, but it’s never a spoof.” And I don’t think it’s entirely accurate to say it’s never a spoof. I think it’s sometimes a spoof. Like the part where Xenk walks straight over the rock. Come on, that’s a spoof … I loved the movie, I thought it was hilarious, but it is a comedy, and at some level I’m maybe a little bit disappointed that we haven’t gotten a good, serious Dungeons & Dragons movie. I think this will be a good stepping stone that will hopefully help make that happen, and we’ll get a serious Drizzt story or a serious Dragonlance story or something like that.

Michael Witwer on his novel Vivian Van Tassel and the Secret of Midnight Lake:

Gary Gygax used to wander around this abandoned sanitarium in Lake Geneva called the Oakwood Sanitarium. I started studying these sanitariums in Lake Geneva, and it turns out there were half a dozen of them around town, and I thought it was such an interesting backdrop to this otherwise kind of mysterious, interesting resort town in southern Wisconsin where [Gygax] lived and did a lot of his work. It occurred to me how interesting it would be if Gary didn’t imagine these fantasy creatures, but he actually saw them with his own eyes. What if people were being committed to these sanitariums because they were seeing “delusions” of creatures in the woods that were like bears with the face of owls, or perhaps a panther with tentacles coming out of its back. I thought that was an interesting place to start, and that kind of led me down a long road.

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HBO’s hit series The Last of Us is based on a popular video game from Naughty Dog. Science fiction author Zach Chapman appreciates that the show is a faithful adaptation of one of his favorite games.

“The show is in many episodes a shot-for-shot remake of the game,” Chapman says in Episode 539 of the Geek’s Guide to the Galaxy podcast. “The script is almost exactly the same, you just don’t get the gameplay.”

The Last of Us has a reputation as one of the best video game stories ever told. Geek’s Guide to the Galaxy host David Barr Kirtley thinks that reputation is well-deserved. “This is definitely a must-watch show,” he says. “It almost seems like a story that’s so good that someone had to write it sooner or later. It’s almost like it exists in the ether and was just waiting for somebody to instantiate it.”

The Last of Us is set in a post-apocalyptic America crawling with zombie-like “infected.” Horror author Theresa DeLucci says the show’s likable, well-drawn characters set it apart from other zombie stories. “Here’s a story where things are shitty, but also hopeful and loving and humorous and complicated, and not everybody you meet is going to be an absolute shitheel looking to screw you over,” she says. “You might make some friends, you might fall in love, you might find a family. And I think that’s what makes people like this show a lot and come back to it and not feel like it’s a Walking Dead retread.”

One of the show’s strongest episodes, “Long, Long Time,” explores a same-sex relationship as it develops over the course of 20 years. Fantasy author Erin Lindsey thinks that episode was the highlight of the show. “I would love to see more scriptwriters and networks take a risk on putting out episodes like that that are more about heart and more about people, and less about moving at breakneck speed from one slaughterfest to the next,” she says.

Listen to the complete interview with Zach Chapman, Theresa DeLucci, and Erin Lindsey in Episode 539 of Geek’s Guide to the Galaxy (above). And check out some highlights from the discussion below.

Theresa DeLucci on expectations:

I’m a super-fan. I’ve been playing this game since the beta in 2013. Right before it came out I went to PAX Prime and got to go see an early preview of the game, and I still have my T-shirt and my poster. I’ve cosplayed as Ellie before with my husband, who played Joel—he’s much taller than me, and has a good beard. I’ve written about it and replayed this game over and over. So I had some pretty sky-high expectations. … I went to an early screening at a theater here in New York City that they completely re-dressed to look like the New York QZ with actors and zombies. You could tell they’re doing the Game of Thrones treatment for this. They knew what they had when they picked this up.

Erin Lindsey on world-building:

I think the [show’s] time frame is implausible bordering on ridiculous. Everybody eats this flour within the same 48-hour period, and everything starts to go to shit. You would see some kind of staggered timeline, I think, depending on the origin of this flour and where it gets to supermarket shelves the soonest. … You see by Episode 2 that these vestigial institutions still exist. In whatever mangled, fascist form, we sort of recognize life in the QZ. There is some authority established, there’s still running water in some places, an endless supply of ammunition for some reason. And that to me is incompatible with the timeline that they put forward. If you’ve witnessed crises break out in the world, you know that even the most prepared military or federal disaster authority in the world does not set up with the snap of a finger.

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Zach Chapman on The Last of Us video game:

You have to strategize how you’re going to go about taking out these monsters, and usually you’re doing it in a quiet way. A lot of the game you’re strategizing, using improvised weapons that you’re picking up and creating, like bricks. You pick a brick up from the corner of a building and bash one of their heads in. And there were no examples of Pedro Pascal doing that in the show, that made him seem crafty. … There was none of the brutal “smash someone multiple times in the face with a brick” or “stab them with a shiv.” That doesn’t happen in the show, and I think, at least for me, it dropped the ball a little bit.

David Barr Kirtley on characterization:

When Ellie first sees the Mortal Kombat II machine, she’s just completely exuberant, and is like, “Oh my god! It’s Mortal Kombat II! This is so awesome. There’s this character and she swallows you whole and barfs out your bones!” And we find out later that just a couple of days ago, her best friend and first crush died under horrible circumstances shortly after they had played Mortal Kombat II together for the first time. And it just seemed odd to me that she didn’t have a more negative reaction when she saw the Mortal Kombat II game, given what associations you’d think it must have had for her—and fairly fresh ones. I thought in some of the early episodes she was spunky in a way that didn’t totally fit for me once we find out what happened to her just a couple days earlier.

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The Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy 2022, which collects 20 of the best fantasy and science fiction stories of the past year, features a wide range of characters and settings. Guest editor Rebecca Roanhorse made the final selections for this year’s volume.

“This is not your father’s science fiction and fantasy collection,” Roanhorse says in Episode 538 of the Geek’s Guide to the Galaxy podcast. “I’m excited to see what people are writing, and where the genre is going, and what sort of new voices can be discovered, and how far we can push boundaries and still tell universal stories.”

P. Djèlí Clark‘s genre-bending “If the Martians Have Magic” features Haitian priests battling the alien invaders from The War of the Worlds. “I always think my stories are too weird,” Clark says. “That’s just normal. I always think, ‘This story is going to be weird,’ because I throw in there what I want. And the more people might think, ‘Well, wait a minute. It’s this Martian invasion, what is a Haitian vodun priest doing in there?,’ the more I know that people might think that’s a little weird, the more I want to do it.”

Series editor John Joseph Adams read thousands of stories in order to assemble a longlist of possible candidates. One of the stories in the book, “The Algorithm Will See You Now” by Justin C. Key, just barely made the cutoff, being published in the anthology Vital: The Future of Healthcare on December 31. “It’s a small press, and I don’t know if they realized what they were doing by releasing it literally on the last day of the year, just because of award eligibility reasons and, for instance, for this, I could have easily missed it,” Adams says. “I’m glad I didn’t, obviously.”

Geek’s Guide to the Galaxy host David Barr Kirtley was especially impressed with the story “Delete Your First Memory for Free” by Kel Coleman, which tackles the theme of memory erasure, an idea that’s been explored in science fiction films such as Total Recall and Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind.

“I can’t think of one other than ‘Delete Your First Memory for Free’ that treats memory erasure as basically just a good thing,” Kirtley says. “I think the natural way for the story to go is to have this theme that if you erase your mistakes and erase your pain, then you’re erasing yourself and what makes you human and what makes you an individual, so it was a novel treatment to have the idea, ‘Maybe this would just be good.'”

Listen to the complete interview with Rebecca Roanhorse, P. Djèlí Clark, and John Joseph Adams in Episode 538 of Geek’s Guide to the Galaxy (above). And check out some highlights from the discussion below.

David Barr Kirtley on “Skinder’s Veil” by Kelly Link:

The basic setup is that there’s this flailing grad student, and a friend of his is housesitting this house in remote Vermont, and she has a family emergency and asks if he can cover for her. He agrees, and goes out to this house, and she gives him these directions that the guy who owns the house has a lot of friends that stop by, and if they show up at the back door he should let them in and just let them hang out, do whatever they want. But the owner might show up, and he will come to the front door, and under no circumstances are you to let him into his own house. So it’s this very, very odd, intriguing setup, and that was really hitting me reading it, that when you create a mystery like this—why can’t you let the owner into his own house?—it just makes you want to read the story so much and find out what’s going on.

*P. Djèlí Clark on “I Was a Teenage Space Jockey” by Stephen Graham Jones:*

I grew up in the ’80s, so I remember a lot of [arcade games]. The whole time I’m reading Stephen’s story I’m also thinking of The Last Starfighter, because so much of it is clearly based on growing up in the ’80s with arcade games. And yeah, I was at the arcade. Now, I didn’t have the bully problem. Bullies didn’t last long in my neighborhood, that’s all I’ve got to say. You didn’t last long if you were a bully in my neighborhood, that wasn’t going to happen. There wasn’t a pecking order like that. It was going to be rough on you if you decided, “I’m going to take up the occupation of bully.” So that was stuff that I would see on TV, and I’d be like, “Look at these bullies. These are interesting creatures.”

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John Joseph Adams on science fiction vs. fantasy:

We want [The Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy] to be equally appealing to both people who say they like science fiction and people who say they like fantasy, and so we want to have it 50/50. But then there are these stories that are touching on both things, that could be either, or both. And so how do you count those when you’re cramming them into slots? … In general, a little drop of fantasy in a story that’s otherwise entirely science fiction kind of makes it fantasy. It’s like the fantasy is so powerful—there’s so much powerful magic in that drop of fantasy—that it turns the whole story into fantasy. Because science fiction is supposed to be speculative, and theoretically possible based on actual, existing scientific knowledge, and so when you drop in magic, then everything is kind of touched by this fantasy.

Rebecca Roanhorse on “Let All the Children Boogie” by Sam J. Miller:

I feel like this story really captures that nebulous time in adolescence where you’re trying to figure out who you are, and everything feels sticky and new, and music is a balm in your life. … I think that’s a feeling you have in adolescence, that these songs are so emotionally profound for me, because I’m trying to find words to figure out who I am and what is my identity, and these artists seem to have some sort of insight into life that you don’t have as a teenager. So I thought this story was very effective. I thought it was very, very cool, just capturing that moment in time and what that feels like, and how intense that friendship can be, or that budding romance can be, and how someone like David Bowie, of all people, can capture that in a way that you yourself cannot articulate.

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The 1969 novel Dune Messiah is a sequel to Frank Herbert’s sci-fi classic Dune. TV writer Andrea Kail is a diehard fan of the original Dune, but has always found the sequel disappointing.

“Overall, as a book, it just feels like it’s very unformed,” Kail says in Episode 537 of the Geek’s Guide to the Galaxy podcast. “It just felt like, ‘These are the ideas, and I put these ideas down, and here’s a first draft. Now let’s go back and fix it.’ And then, no, never went back to fix it.”

Dune Messiah picks up 12 years after the original novel, when the young hero Paul Atreides has become a despotic emperor. Geek’s Guide to the Galaxy host David Barr Kirtley loved the concept of the book, but felt that Paul’s supernatural powers made the story less exciting than it might have been.

“The reason I wanted to read this is because I was really fascinated by this idea that you take the messiah hero from the first book that everybody loves and show him having flaws and becoming a bad ruler,” he says. “But I was a little disappointed in that I felt like Paul wasn’t actually flawed. Because he has no choice, because he’s doing his best to try to avoid the worst futures he can see, I felt like that made it less interesting than if he was actually making choices and succumbing to the temptations of power.”

Science fiction author Rajan Khanna enjoyed the book despite its flaws, and says that certain scenes from it are still burned into his brain from the first time he read it. “It doesn’t live up to the first novel, but I also think it’s really hard for anything to live up to that novel, because it’s one of my favorite novels of all time,” he says. “But I do think that there’s a lot of cool stuff in there.”

Science fiction author Matthew Kressel had mixed feelings about Dune Messiah, but that hasn’t dimmed his enthusiasm for the Dune series as a whole. “The universe that Herbert created is amazing,” he says. “I had a little bit of a problem with the execution. The first two thirds it’s kind of slow, but then it picks up in the last third. I have some problems with the ending, but still I’m excited to continue reading the next book.”

Listen to the complete interview with Andrea Kail, Rajan Khanna, and Matthew Kressel in Episode 537 of Geek’s Guide to the Galaxy (above). And check out some highlights from the discussion below.

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Andrea Kail on reading Dune Messiah:

Dune is one of the books that made me want to be a writer. It was one of the three foundational books of my childhood that formed who I was. And so I read it when I was maybe about 13 or 14 and just gobbled it up. And of course, the first thing you do when you finish a book that you love is you go run for the sequel. So I ran for the sequel, and I read Dune Messiah, and it was not the same. It was a very different experience. It was very perplexing. It was depressing. I just didn’t know what was going on. And I read them all—I went on to read the next two that were available at the time—but it just kind of put me off the whole thing, so to speak. So coming back to it now, I was hoping for a different experience, reading it again as an adult. And I didn’t actually get that. It was sort of the same experience.

Matthew Kressel on point of view:

So much [in Dune Messiah] happens off-screen, which is kind of crazy when you think about it, because Herbert does this point-of-view switching in the middle of the page, which almost no writer does today—or at least in speculative fiction that I read, I hardly ever see that point-of-view switching. And what I mean by that, if people aren’t clear about it, is that you’re in someone’s head and then you’re immediately in someone else’s head on the same page. Most writers, they’ll put either a scene break or a chapter break to switch that, but Herbert doesn’t do that. So it’s not like he can’t be in their point of view when this happens, he just decides not to.

David Barr Kirtley on female characters:

I thought all the female characters were not well deployed in this novel. I’ll just talk about Alia a little bit. She’s a young teenager at this point in the story, but she was born with the knowledge and memories of this whole line of wise old women. And she just acts like a teenager. It was such a weird characterization of her, given what’s established about her, that her mind has this whole archive of all these different lives and wisdom. But it seems like that doesn’t affect her characterization almost at all, in a way I found really, really odd.

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The Netflix series Arcane, a collaboration between Riot Games and Studio Fortiche, is an animated show based on the popular computer game League of Legends. Science fiction author Zach Chapman loved Arcane, despite having never played League of Legends.

“You don’t have to have any knowledge of the game,” Chapman says in Episode 536 of the Geek’s Guide to the Galaxy podcast. “In fact, less knowledge of the game is even better. It doesn’t need any of that. It just works really great as a standalone show.”

Geek’s Guide to the Galaxy host David Barr Kirtley was blown away by the show’s visual style, a distinctive blend of 2D and 3D elements. “I’m looking forward to seeing more of this art style,” he says. “You can freeze any frame, and it looks like a really good illustration from a Dungeons & Dragons manual. So I think it’s super cool.”

Fantasy author Lara Elena Donnelly was excited to see an animated series that contains complex characters and adult themes. “There are parts of it that almost feel like you’re watching a Scorsese cop movie where no one is good,” she says. “Everyone has their own agenda, everyone thinks their way is the best way, and they’re all trying to play each other. It has a lot of sophisticated power dynamics that are very surprising in an animated video game adaptation.”

Fantasy author Erin Lindsey also enjoyed Arcane, but warns that the show doesn’t really hit its stride until Episode 3. “I think the first couple of episodes can lull you into a sense that you’ve seen these plot beats before and that you’ve seen this story before,” she says. “You haven’t. It will surprise you again and again.”

Listen to the complete interview with Zach Chapman, Lara Elena Donnelly, and Erin Lindsey in Episode 536 of Geek’s Guide to the Galaxy (above). And check out some highlights from the discussion below.

Zach Chapman on character design:

It’s very clear that the [characters] were designed by a video game company. A lot of the characters look like Activision characters. Jinx, to me, looks like Junkrat—though I’m pretty sure she came before Junkrat. And Ekko looks and kind of acts like DJ from Overwatch 2 … There’s a beauty to the design that goes down to a very minute level of detail that’s just really impressive. There’s a scene in Episode 5 where there’s this shark-looking street vendor, and he gives Vi some food and some intel. And the design of that character has more personality than any of the designs in Blood of Zeus, for example. He’s in one scene and he looks amazing.

David Barr Kirtley on character death:

What convinces Victor that his experiments are too dangerous is that his lab assistant, who has a crush on him, gets incinerated by his experiment. And I think that character had maybe one previous scene where she had made any sort of impression on me. So when she dies, my reaction was split between horror and like, “Wait, who was that again?” So I felt like either that character should have been developed a little bit more or some character that we cared about more should have been incinerated, for that moment to have the impact that it might have had.

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Erin Lindsey on Arcane Season 2:

I really don’t know who’s going to be left alive. I think Jayce has to survive, but I could totally see Mel dying. That’s part of the brutal irony of having her symbolically and literally reject her family legacy as she sits there and removes the ring of her house, when her house is this overseas power that’s known for its brutal ruthlessness. And her mum wasn’t in the room, so her mum definitely survives. And she’s probably going to be cranky about it and use this as an opportunity to leverage her position and take over. And I can see Jayce—since we’ve already established that traumatic events change his personality drastically from one minute to the next—I can see him also using Mel’s death as the thing that turns him to the dark side.

Lara Elena Donnelly on Studio Fortiche:

I’m so happy that this got made. I’m astonished that it got made a little bit, because there’s just nothing else like it on television. Watching it, I was just like, “How did they say, ‘Yes, let’s do this. Let’s do nine almost-hour-long animated episodes of this show that’s not for kids’?” It’s just amazing to me that it got made. I’m so happy it got made, and I want them to make more of it. And they are making more of it, and I’m 100 percent going to watch it. When they’re done with Arcane, I would love to see them do more animated TV and movies, because they just produce absolutely breathtaking work.

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Gene Wolfe was one of the science fiction field’s most respected literary craftsmen. On their podcast ReReading Wolfe, hosts James Wynn and Craig Brewer provide in-depth analysis of Wolfe’s masterpiece The Book of the New Sun.

“You have to talk about a Gene Wolfe story after you’ve read it,” Wynn says in Episode 535 of the Geek’s Guide to the Galaxy podcast. “There’s a reason why it’s called ReReading Wolfe. There’s a statement by John Clute, who said, ‘You can’t read a Gene Wolfe story, you can only reread a Gene Wolfe story.’ So you have to read it, and then you reread it, and then you still want to talk to someone about it.”

The Book of the New Sun is a dense, allusive work that initially presents itself as sword and sorcery, gradually reveals itself as planetary romance, then becomes increasingly concerned with theology and metaphysics. The book’s disjointed plot and dreamlike logic can make it a challenge for newcomers. “Wolfe breaks every rule that any kind of writing workshop is going to tell you,” Brewer says. “If you just jump in thinking, ‘Oh, people say this is a good book’ and you’re not prepared for it, it’s like reading James Joyce or something, where someone says, ‘Oh, Ulysses is important. I guess I should go read that,’ and they’re like, ‘What the hell?'”

Wolfe fans have spent four decades debating the meaning of Book of the New Sun, but many of the story’s basic plot points remain in dispute. “This has really come home to me when we were doing this podcast, that there’s no consensus about these books,” Wynn says. “There is one little scene in the beginning of Claw of the Conciliator where Severian executes a woman, and when we got through it, we said what we thought, we got people writing in. It ended up that there’s probably at least four groups of theories about what happens in that event. And I changed my mind after the conversation about what’s happening.”

Brewer hopes that Wolfe’s papers, which have been donated to Northern Illinois University, will provide additional insight into the author’s work. “One thing I’m really looking forward to seeing is what his drafts were like,” he says. “When you look at a draft of a story, does it start off much more straightforward and then he complicates it over time? Or is it really that strange right at the beginning, and then maybe he tries to figure out some way to do something afterwards? I just don’t know. But that’s one thing that I’m hoping getting a chance to really dive into his papers at some point would show us.”

Listen to the complete interview with James Wynn and Craig Brewer in Episode 535 of Geek’s Guide to the Galaxy (above). And check out some highlights from the discussion below.

James Wynn on discovering Gene Wolfe:

I read [Book of the New Sun] and I really did just push through. My wife said, “You’ve sure been reading those books a long time.” I said, “Yeah.” She said, “Well, is it good?” “I’m not sure.” “Then why are you reading it?” I said, “Well, I have to find out how it ends.” I did push through, and then I discovered that there wasn’t really an ending, and so that was disturbing. I told my friend that I think this Wolfe guy is a so-so writer, but he’s an amazing creator of worlds. And it really wasn’t until I read The Fifth Head of Cerberus that I “got” The Book of the New Sun. And then I said, “Oh, now I understand. He’s the greatest science fiction writer that ever lived.” And that’s literally what I told people after that.

James Wynn on interpreting Gene Wolfe:

The thing about Wolfe is that he is highly allusive. So it’s very hard to tell where the text ends and where the allusion begins. Obviously there are references to the life of Christ in The Book of the New Sun. You’re supposed to pick up on that. The Inca god Inti or Apu-punchau is a key aspect. And when you take a look at some of the mythology of Apu-punchau, you begin to realize, “Oh wow, there is some connectivity between this fellow Severian and that god of the sun in Inca mythology.” You can’t just read this story deductively, and that’s something that’s kind of a little drum I beat all the time. You have to read it inductively. You are invited to spin a story to connect the dots, because frankly there are not enough dots for you to just eliminate all of the “impossible” and only end up with the “necessary.”

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Craig Brewer on Alzabo Soup and The Gene Wolfe Literary Podcast:

We talk to people all the time who are like, “I’ve listened to all the other podcasts, and I’m glad you guys started too, because it’s another one now I can go to,” and we still find new, different things to say. We all kind of have different approaches. The Alzabo Soup guys were kind of doing a non-spoilery handholding through your first time reading Book of the New Sun. Now they’re on to Book of the Long Sun. And the Gene Wolf Literary Podcast guys are going through his whole career chronologically. They started with his first stories and are still in the middle of his novel Peace right now. And then we came along and we’re like, “No, we’re going to pretend like you’ve listened to all that stuff and read it all a bunch of times, and we’re going to be deep in the weeds.” We didn’t know if we’d have 10 people be interested, and so the fact that we’ve gotten so many people who are still interested now is kind of mind-blowing.

Craig Brewer on weird fiction:

I’ve often considered that Wolfe is actually a weird writer. And when you read weird fiction, you go in and the surreality and the strangeness of it is supposed to be taken at face value. It’s supposed to be something that—yeah, you puzzle through, you think about what the consequences of that are—but with weird writing, you don’t get frustrated if the answer doesn’t immediately clarify itself. I think that’s one issue sometimes that people have, is they’re like, “Well, Wolfe, if he’s writing science fiction, OK, I need the explanation. I need to know in the end how everything lines up perfectly so that I can go back and map everything in there.” And I’m not positive it’s there, like that. The answers that you’re looking for may be there thematically, or they may be there on a more metaphoric level.

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Roger Zelazny, author of novels such as Lord of Light and A Night in the Lonesome October, was one of science fiction’s most treasured voices. Sci-fi author and editor Warren Lapine credits Zelazny’s books with rescuing him from the life of a juvenile delinquent.

“Roger Zelazny is a writer’s writer,” Lapine says in Episode 534 of the Geek’s Guide to the Galaxy podcast. “He makes people want to write. You read what he’s doing, and you can tell he’s having so much fun, you’re like, ‘I’ve got to be able to do that.’ And so I immediately wanted to become a writer. Well, you don’t drop out of school and learn how to write, so I was suddenly a straight-A student, and I went to college, and I had a whole different life than I ever would have had, had it not been for Roger Zelazny.”

Lapine’s latest project is Immer, Zlaz, which collects hundreds of letters that Zelazny wrote to his best friend Carl Yoke. Zelazny was a private person who rarely spoke about his opinions or personal life, and his letters offer a rare glimpse into his thought process. “It’s just really, really fascinating,” Lapine says. “If you want to know who Roger Zelazny was, these letters do that for you.”

Zelazny’s early work was showered with praise, but critics were less enthused with his later output, such as the popular 10-volume Amber series. But Lapine says that critics are off base when they dismiss Amber as lightweight, commercial writing. “Most of the critics in science fiction don’t even have a degree in English lit, and so they haven’t even got a clue,” Lapine says. “All the stuff that’s going on in Amber, the levels and the number of literary allusions in there is absolutely gobsmacking. There’s almost a literary allusion on every single page. But if you haven’t read all that stuff, you’re not going to catch it. If you haven’t read any of the Jacobean plays, you’re going to miss all those.”

In recent years Lapine has worked closely with the Zelazny estate to bring many of Zelazny’s older titles back into print. He believes strongly that all of the author’s dozens of books are worth reading. “Even his most slight book is better than a lot of writers’ best books,” Lapine says. “I know we’ll have other people who will be able to show just as much virtuosity, but it hasn’t happened yet in my lifetime—before or since his passing. There’s just nothing like reading Zelazny.”

Listen to the complete interview with Warren Lapine in Episode 534 of Geek’s Guide to the Galaxy (above). And check out some highlights from the discussion below.

Warren Lapine on meeting Zelazny:

I’m interviewing Roger, and I’ve got the tape there, and at some points he’s sitting in the chair upside down, with his head hanging where people’s feet would be, talking in the direction of the microphone of the tape recorder, and he’s spinning around in the chair. At one point he’s standing on top of the chair, talking down to it, and then he’s standing on the top of the back of the chair. He was in constant motion, just kind of twirling around in the chair, up and down and around. I’ve never had anyone I’ve interviewed be anything like that. It was fascinating. And he never broke a chain of thought. He was really focused, really good at answering interview questions. But it was surreal.

Warren Lapine on Deus Irae:

[Zelazny] showed the chunk that he had written to Philip K. Dick, and Dick got unblocked and immediately wrote the next chapter and sent it to Roger, and then Roger read it, and then he’d write a chapter and send it back to Philip K. Dick. And what’s really interesting for me in those letters is you can see that when the letters start, Philip K. Dick is in a horrible place. He has no money, no prospects, nothing’s going right for him. And in the last letter, he’s talking about how [Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?] is doing wonderfully. The money is coming in, and this book sold better than anything he’d ever written before. Philip K. Dick was just in so much of a different and better place than he had been when they were writing to each other during the very early days with the book.

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Warren Lapine on George R. R. Martin:

Reading [Immer, Zlaz] today, a modern reader will think that Roger is dropping George R. R. Martin’s name all over the damn place. But what they won’t realize is that [George] hadn’t written A Game of Thrones yet, and he wasn’t half as well known as Roger. So [Roger] was just talking about his friend. It may feel like he’s dropping the name of the most famous fantasy author in the world, but he wasn’t. … I remember when I first met George, and people would be like, “Who’s George R. R. Martin?” I’d be like, “Oh, he wrote Fevre Dream.” That was his best-selling novel, a New York Times best-selling vampire novel. That’s what he was known for. I remember hanging out with him at conventions, and there was nobody around but a couple of us. Now you couldn’t get close to him at a convention.

Warren Lapine on Zelazny versus the critics:

Some people are like, “It’s like he had all these magic tricks, and he just kept putting them back in his bag.” And I’m like, “Well, how many times do you want to watch him pull a rabbit out of the hat?” I mean, if he’s pulling the same rabbit out of the same hat, when does it stop being a trick? He was doing all these tricks, and doing all these things he wanted to see about, and I’ve never quite understood why—once he was finished trying all those experiments that he was after—that they thought he should keep experimenting on stuff that didn’t have any interest for him. They all wanted him to keep being this dazzling writer who went places no one had ever gone. And he was just like, “But I was done with that now. I knew where the edges were.”

The Great Book of Amber: The Complete Amber Chronicles, 1-10 (Chronicles of Amber)

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The new Star Wars series Andor, a prequel to the 2016 film Rogue One, is a dramatic examination of the early days of the Rebel Alliance. Science fiction author Matt London was impressed by the show’s sophisticated characterization and dialog.

“There’s so much subtext in the dialog of Andor, and there’s so much communicated in the silences,” London says in Episode 533 of the Geek’s Guide to the Galaxy podcast. “It’s not passive viewing. I think it takes an active mind to engage. It’s not a kid’s show.”

TV writer Andrea Kail agrees that Andor is a mature, complex piece of storytelling. “In every other Star Wars, there’s black and there’s white,” she says. “There’s no crossover. Everything in this show is about moral ambiguity. It’s about the gray tones in every single situation. And that, for me, is why this is an adult show. Nothing is black and white in the world. Everybody makes choices, and some of those choices hurt other people. That’s the way life is, and that’s the way war is.”

Andor largely eschews many Star Wars staples, such as wacky creatures and funny droids, focusing instead on the realities of power and violence. Fantasy author Erin Lindsey, who worked for many years as a UN aid worker, found the show’s depiction of politics to be completely believable. “I think there are clearly people on the writing team who are students of spy novels like [those by] John le Carré and who are students of politics and students of history, who are really looking at how revolution has happened here on Earth and what that looks like,” she says.

Despite its high quality, Andor‘s ratings have lagged behind Star Wars shows like Obi-Wan Kenobi and The Mandalorian. Geek’s Guide to the Galaxy host David Barr Kirtley hopes that Andor will attract a larger audience in season 2. “It’s so good,” he says. “It deserves higher ratings than it’s gotten so far. And I definitely want to see more shows like this. This is the kind of show—especially the kind of Star Wars show—that I’ve been pining after for all these years. So please let’s all just give it as much support as we can.”

Listen to the complete interview with Matt London, Andrea Kail, and Erin Lindsey in Episode 533 of Geek’s Guide to the Galaxy (above). And check out some highlights from the discussion below.

Andrea Kail on Obi-Wan Kenobi:

I hate spunky little girl characters. The thing about Leia is she’s a smart woman, and the child that they portrayed is a spoiled little girl who goes running off because she doesn’t want to do what she has to do, and in the process she gets a whole bunch of people killed. And that is never addressed. She’s just this cute little girl and everybody’s supposed to love her. I’m sorry. She’s a spoiled child who got a bunch of people killed because she didn’t want to go to something with her parents. … When you have this much money and also a great cast, and then you put as your center character a spoiled child, that makes me crazy.

David Barr Kirtley on characterization:

There was a description I heard once of a deep character, which is that this is a character who can do something that completely surprises you, but it’s completely consistent with everything that you know about them. And [Andor] is full of deep characters. In so many science fiction shows and Star Wars shows, the characters are one-dimensional in the sense that in every scene they have the exact same personality, and you never see them in any moment that’s different from that. But you see these characters in these private, vulnerable moments where you see different but completely consistent sides to them.

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Erin Lindsey on Syril Karn and Dedra Meero:

What makes a government of any kind work is the technocrats and the apparatchiks and the bureaucrats, and they have a variety of different motivations. And one of the things that they’ve got [in Andor] is these two characters who showcase very clearly the degree to which personal ambition is the sort of be-all and end-all of motivations for these characters. What I hope we see going forward is at least a couple of characters who are doing the wrong things for the right reasons. Because imperialism was overwhelmingly a project that was enacted by a bunch of people who legitimately thought they were doing the right thing.

Matt London on the Andor season finale:

I think I expected more of a payoff in the final episode. A lot of people are going to be like, “What? There’s so much incredible stuff that happens in the final episode.” It’s true, there is. But I think that there’s messaging in the show that to defeat an empire you of have to become a terrorist, and to defeat an empire people are going to have to die—there are going to be sacrifices. And so I felt like in some ways maybe, in the spirit of realism, the body count should have been higher. … We already know how this story ends, right? Everyone dies in a ball of fire. So why are we holding on to some of these characters? Couldn’t we give them more definitive conclusions?

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In his new book Origins of the Wheel of Time, historian Michael Livingston explores the real-world myths and legends that Robert Jordan used to construct his epic fantasy series The Wheel of Time. Those influences include characters and motifs from Europe, West Africa, the Middle East, and Japan, among others.

“He’s not confined in any way,” Livingston says in Episode 532 of the Geek’s Guide to the Galaxy podcast. “He has no guardrails. The world is his oyster, because literally everything can be a part of The Wheel of Time. It’s an incredible sort of thing to try to do.”

Livingston lives in Charleston, South Carolina, and teaches at The Citadel, which gives him a leg up when it comes to researching Jordan, who attended The Citadel and lived in Charleston for most of his life. “Living here, and working at the place where he went to school and that meant so much to him as an alma mater, certainly was a huge advantage,” Livingston says. “When I’m reading the books, and I read the name of an inn, I’m like, ‘That’s that pub next to his house. I know that place.’”

As The Wheel of Time expanded to more than 10 volumes, Jordan was often accused of deliberately padding out the series. But Livingston found nothing in the author’s voluminous notes to suggest that that was the case. “I get that cynicism, but it’s not really fixed in reality,” he says. “They weren’t, then or now, trying to milk more dollars out of the fans. He wanted to tell a story, and he wanted to do it right, and he had the success that he could do it the way he thought was best.”

Origins of The Wheel of Time has already been a hit with Jordan fans, but Livingston hopes the book will reach a wider audience as well. “What I’m talking about is biography, how he did what he did, his relationship to Tolkien, and just seeing how an author developed as a writer and developed a project,” he says. “Just to see an artist at work—I hope anyway—has a connection point to anybody.”

Listen to the complete interview with Michael Livingston in Episode 532 of Geek’s Guide to the Galaxy (above). And check out some highlights from the discussion below.

Michael Livingston on Origins of the Wheel of Time:

We pitched it to the estate, to Jordan’s widow and former editor Harriet. I sent the email expecting no—”No, you can’t do this”—and instead it was like, “I think it’s a great idea. You’re the only person who can do it, and I’ve already talked to the head of Tor Books, they’re expecting it.” It went from zero to a hundred really quick. And yeah, at that point everybody was engaged in the thing. It was really wild to have that experience of a fully authorized [project]. I could look at anything I wanted, I could talk to anybody I wanted, and there was such a warm, welcoming openness from everybody on that side, and at Tor. The copy editor that copy edited The Wheel of Time books was my copy editor. We did everything we could to make it so that everybody who would know about it had touched it.

Michael Livingston on Robert Jordan’s desk:

Here in Charleston we had a book signing. It was the only real official book signing we did, and a bunch of people came from literally all over the world—we had somebody from England who flew in for the book signing—and I gave a little lecture, here at the school. I was like, “Man, you guys came so far. Do you want to come see the desk?” And they said yeah, they really would love to do that. So they all came up—it must have been about 20 people ultimately crowding the hallway, trying to get pictures of it. They were like, “Can we sit at the desk?” “Yeah, you can sit at the desk. I do it every day.” … It’s not an everyday occurrence as a professor that you have people lining up in the hallway to take pictures of your office. It’s a little bit like, “I need to keep my office cleaner than other people, I think. It’s a museum now.”

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Michael Livingston on Thermopylae:

It’s a strange area geographically, and in fact has undergone huge changes to the landscape as a result. Where the coastline was in Leonidas’ day, when you go there, you can hardly see the water. It’s kilometers different, where the coastline is. The ground that he was fighting on is way beneath your feet. This isn’t just a meter down—the Middle Ages are about a meter down, the ancient world a couple meters—this is a dozen or more meters down, because of the weird geography of that place. And that weird geography is why it was this place of battle for so long, because that geography made it a kind of choke point. So yeah it’s radically different today. You have to get through a pretty sizable amount of work to try to reconstruct that as best we can, to try to understand what happened.

Michael Livingston on J. R. R. Tolkien:

He says in a letter at one point—I’m paraphrasing—but he says, “As for where I got the word ‘hobbit,’ I’ll leave it to future students, I don’t want to deprive them of the fun.” It’s kind of like he threw down this gauntlet, and everyone just ignored it. … Tolkien loved making these linguistic jokes that only those who saw behind the linguistic constructions would get. Like the fact that it’s “Theodin King.” That’s the head of Rohan, “Theodin King.” Well “Theodin” means “king,” so his name is “king king.” Or “Bree Hill.” “Bree” is the word “hill” in Welsh, so that’s “hill hill.” He knew that, and he just thought that was hilarious, he thought that was a riot, that most people couldn’t see that, but he could see it. And the same I think is true of “hobbit” and “Bilbo Baggins” and a number of other things.

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'Gears of War' designer Cliff Bleszinski talks about his new, surprisingly personal book about the life of a game creator.

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Vernor Vinge's 1992 novel also foretold a lot of social media discourse.

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The state is home to an unusually high concentration of science fiction writers and a strong mix of science and superstition.

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"Divergent" author Veronica Roth's new novel is about a young woman coming to terms with the authoritarian regime that manipulated her.

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The classic 1959 novel by Walter M. Miller Jr. is full of fascinating themes, but some could have been handled better.

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In their new book, brothers Steven, Jay, and Bob Novella explore 10 "futurism fallacies" that have bedeviled earlier predictions.

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In her new book, theoretical physicist Sabine Hossenfelder argues a few of her colleagues can take wild ideas a little too far.

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Hulu's latest installment, Prey, proves that the franchise is better when it tells tight stories using smaller budgets.

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Ken and Roberta Williams, the cofounders of Sierra Online, have created a remake of the genre-defining Colossal Cave Adventure.

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Lori Garver's new memoir details her struggles to get NASA colleagues to embrace SpaceX and Blue Origin.

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In 'Slaying the Dragon,' author Ben Riggs goes deep into the backstory of TSR to reveal a company in disarray.

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Chris Matheson examines his father's legacy in a new book called 'Conversations With the Father.'

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Adam-Troy Castro's short story remains one of the author's best, even years later.

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For the novel, Laura J. Mixon wanted to tell a story that took a more realistic approach to space adventure.

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Robert Heinlein's classic 1966 novel explores the idea of a lunar colony declaring independence from Earth.

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'Love, Death + Robots' director David S. F. Wilson wants to make an atmospheric animated feature film.

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The Showtime sequel to Nicolas Roeg's film takes place 45 years after the events in the original.

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The warnings about political violence in Stephen Marche's latest book are like something out of science fiction.

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Author Christopher M. Cevasco says there's a surprising lack of crossover between the two.

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Author Ben Burgis observes that the genre often focuses on the politics of feudal systems but rarely on collective struggle.

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The Apple TV+ show is one of 2022's smartest series.

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Many of author Maureen McHugh's stories explore the relationship between moms and their children—an element that's often sidelined in fantasy and science fiction.

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Amazon's new series, based on Robert Jordan's books, stumbles a bit in its adaptation and won't please every reader.

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The film hasn't lost any of its creepy charm since it premiered in 1982.

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Larry Niven's 1970 novel will need some character and plot changes for its forthcoming TV adaptation.

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Carol Pinchefsky's book Turn Your Fandom Into Cash helps people monetize their hobbies.

Turn Your Fandom Into Cash: A Geeky Guide to Turn Your Passion Into a Business (or at least a Side Hustle)

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The show has a lot more action than Isaac Asimov's novels, but it's lacking in the late author's braininess.

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The recent movie Ghostbusters: Afterlife, directed by Jason Reitman, is a direct sequel to the two original Ghostbusters films from the 1980s. Fantasy author Christopher M. Cevasco found Afterlife to be an enjoyable return to the Ghostbusters universe.

“The story itself was kind of threadbare, but I was willing to forgive that because I was having so much fun just spending time with the characters,” Cevasco says in Episode 502 of the Geek’s Guide to the Galaxy podcast. “It’s nothing that’s going to win any Academy Awards or anything, but it was a fun popcorn film, which is what the originals were only ever intended to be.”

Writer Sara Lynn Michener enjoyed Afterlife, but says that Ghostbusters really needs to find a fresh approach if the franchise is going to continue. “I feel like there’s so much potential to take Ghostbusters to a new place entirely,” she says. “They could make a scary Ghostbusters—one that’s genuinely scary, where the stakes are actually high, where people are actually killed. They could do all kinds of things.”

Afterlife moves the action away from New York City to a small town in Oklahoma. Geek’s Guide to the Galaxy host David Barr Kirtley loves the idea of a town founded by Gozer-worshippers, and thinks it would make a great setting for a horror film. “I enjoyed this movie just fine, but I’m not at all excited about a sequel to this movie if it’s just kind of more of the same,” he says. “But if they were to make a sequel that’s more of a genuine horror movie, something like Evil Dead, where it’s funny and genuinely disturbing or frightening, that would be really interesting.”

Science fiction author Robert Repino agrees that a more horror-focused approach may be just what the franchise needs. “There’s got to be a script floating around at Blumhouse for a scary Ghostbusters,” he says. “They’re the people to do it, right? Get it to Jordan Peele.”

Listen to the complete interview with Sara Lynn Michener, Christopher M. Cevasco, and Robert Repino in Episode 502 of Geek’s Guide to the Galaxy (above). And check out some highlights from the discussion below.

Sara Lynn Michener on Ghostbusters (2016):

The 2016 Ghostbusters movie is my favorite for very specific reasons. I love Paul Feig. He did A Simple Favor, which is one of the funniest movies I’ve ever watched in my life. He really understands “gender politics” humor. I don’t know how else to describe it. It’s a very specific thing, but it is hilarious when it is done right. But yeah, I definitely picked up on a lot of the cynical stuff that was going on, and it was incredibly groan-worthy, especially given how much I loved the film, and again, I am “the fans” just as much as the average dude who is Gen X is “the fans,” and every time I hear they’re “giving it back to the fans,” it’s like, “Hello? Who do you think I am? I grew up on this stuff too.”

David Barr Kirtley on nostalgia:

The kids start busting ghosts, and then after they bust their first ghost they get sent to jail. And everything up until then I was pretty much into. And then Phoebe, the teenage daughter, says, “I want my one phone call.” And the police chief says, “Who you gonna call?” Which was the catchphrase for the original movie. So it’s this very obvious meta-joke. And at that point I was kind of like, “Oh no, here we go.” And from that point it just got more and more self-referential, and just shoveling all this stuff that you remember at you, just piling it higher and higher, so that by the end of the movie I felt like just the weight of all the in-jokes and references and call-backs and nostalgia had just completely buried any kind of story or characters underneath it.”

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Christopher M. Cevasco on ghosts:

To me the single biggest missed opportunity was “we have a Ghostbuster who becomes a ghost,” and that fact went almost unremarked. I mean, these are people who spent their entire lives studying ghosts and ghostly phenomenon, and then when the other three Ghostbusters show up at the end, not one of them is [curious]. I wanted to see Ray Stantz go over and be like, “Dude! What’s it actually like? How does it feel? Oh my god, this is so cool! We actually have an inside man now. We can find out what’s happening.” Or even to get some sense that Spengler, who becomes the ghost, how is his spirit reacting to that? There are any number of ways that could have been explored.”

Robert Repino on plot:

I wonder how different the movie would be if, instead of characters stumbling upon this secret, it’s instead characters who, from the very beginning, are going to Oklahoma specifically to find out what happened to Egon. So it’s Ghostbusters 3: The Search for Egon. That might have gotten things off to a better start. Now the problem of course is that you lose some of that wonder that you have where Phoebe realizes, “Oh wow, my grandfather’s ghost is talking to me.” … But maybe by having the characters have a specific goal from the beginning, instead of just stumbling into this situation and being like, “OK, I guess we’re busting ghosts now,” maybe that could have worked better.

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Terry Pratchett was the author of more than 50 novels, many of them set in the fantastic land of Discworld. Writer and comedian Marc Burrows explores the author’s life in his recent book The Magic of Terry Pratchett, the first full-length Pratchett biography.

“He’s got a fascinating story,” Burrows says in Episode 501 of the Geek’s Guide to the Galaxy podcast. “It begins and ends in really, really interesting ways, and in the middle he’s briefly the biggest-selling author in [Britain]. So that’s a good story that no one has told before.”

Pratchett rose to popularity in the mid-1980s with humorous, pun-filled novels such as The Colour of Magic. The decade was a high point for the “funny fantasy” movement, in which authors like Pratchett, Robert Asprin, and Craig Shaw Gardner poked fun at the fantasy genre’s many absurdities. “The reason Pratchett took off is because fantasy was popular, and he had the idea of doing for fantasy what Douglas Adams did for sci-fi,” Burrows says. “That’s the elevator pitch for the first Discworld novel.”

But as the Discworld series developed, Pratchett’s approach became more and more thoughtful. Over dozens of books he used fantasy and young adult literature as a playground to explore a wide range of serious topics such as discrimination, authoritarianism, and mortality. Readers took notice. By the end of his life Pratchett had achieved bestseller status, inspired a devoted fan following, and been knighted by Queen Elizabeth II.

“He started to get the big awards and the critical acclaim,” Burrows says. “Which I think he was very, very pleased about on the one hand, but on the other hand he always defended himself as a genre writer, and always felt that rather than saying he was more than a fantasy writer—more than a comic fantasy writer or a sci-fi writer—it was the genre of fantasy and science fiction itself that was worthy of praise.”

A second Terry Pratchett biography, Terry Pratchett: A Life with Footnotes, will be released later this year, written by Pratchett’s longtime friend and assistant Rob Wilkins. Burrows is looking forward to seeing what insights the new volume brings. “I like the idea that the two books will actually complement each other, and that mine will be a really nice appendix to the official story,” he says. “So I’m hoping that rather than disproving or making mine redundant, they’ll actually work together.”

Listen to the complete interview with Marc Burrows in Episode 501 of Geek’s Guide to the Galaxy (above). And check out some highlights from the discussion below.

Marc Burrows on Terry Pratchett anecdotes:

Pratchett was a storyteller at heart. That was his gift. He was an amazing storyteller, and he could never resist the urge to give his own anecdotes a polish. It made him a very entertaining interview—he prepared for interviews rigorously. He’s really quotable in interviews, because before he started the press for a new book, he would prepare lines that he knew would be great pull quotes. He’d been a journalist, so he knew exactly what to say. But yeah, he would always give his stories a bit of polish … He just had a knack for knowing how to tell a story, and why not apply that to your own life? No one’s checking until after you’re dead and some chump comes along and writes a book about you.

Marc Burrows on publishing:

The German publisher butchered Pratchett’s work. The stuff in the mid-’80s and ’90s, it’s genuinely funny. They didn’t like the cover to Mort—the fourth Discworld novel—for some reason, so instead they used the cover for the next book in the series, Wyrd Sisters. … Mort is a book about Death’s apprentice, and Wyrd Sisters is a Shakespeare parody about witches. There are basically no witches in Mort—there’s a witch, briefly. It’s clearly the cover of a completely different book. Then of course they’ve got to publish the next book, which is Wyrd Sisters, and they need a new cover for that, so they just use it again. So there’s two Discworld novels in the ’90s German production that have exactly the same cover.

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Marc Burrows on fandom:

Terry Pratchett never wanted to be ‘cool.’ He actually thrived and relished not being cool. That wasn’t who he was. He liked to play the outsider, he liked to play the nerd. He liked the fact that he was his audience. He was writing for himself … He knew that his books were read by a mainstream crowd—you can’t be that successful and only have an audience of nerds. But he also knew that the core audience, the ones that drove the fandom—and the fandom is what powered the success—he knew that they were him. They were exactly the kind of person he had been in the ’60s when he was going to conventions and getting nervous about meeting Arthur C. Clarke in the toilet, and writing letters to sci-fi authors. He was that person.

Marc Burrows on marketing:

My publishers are great, but they’re not a huge name, so I kind of realized that I knew how to sell this book probably better than anybody else would, in that I knew Discworld fandom. … I ended up doing 500 pre-sales just from me—not from Amazon or bookshops or direct from my publisher or anything like that, just through me—which was brilliant, but I hadn’t quite anticipated what having 500 copies of a book in your house would be like. They turned up in a truck, and the truck driver seemed very confused that he was delivering to what turned out to be a residential apartment in northeast London and not a warehouse. So yeah, for a while we lived amongst cardboard, and getting them all mailed out was an industrial operation.

Terry Pratchett: A Life With Footnotes: The Official Biography

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In Steven Spielberg’s classic 1977 movie Close Encounters of the Third Kind, an ordinary man gets caught up in momentous events involving alien visitors. TV writer Andrea Kail says the film continues to fill her with awe.

“It stands up better than most movies I’ve ever seen, including the special effects,” Kail says in Episode 498 of the Geek’s Guide to the Galaxy podcast. “It’s shocking how well it’s done. It doesn’t look dated in any way. I think it’s a stunning movie.”

Science fiction author Matthew Kressel says the film should be a model for screenwriters everywhere. “This is, by far, Spielberg’s best film,” he says. “I’ve studied it. I don’t write for TV or film—I write fiction—but just the beats, the timing. It’s so perfect. Everything is so well-paced.”

Geek’s Guide to the Galaxy host David Barr Kirtley agrees that Close Encounters works well visually and emotionally, but he finds the aliens’ behavior a bit too puzzling. “If they’ve already abducted people from World War II, why do they need to communicate with music?” he says. “How do they not realize the mom is going to be scared when they abduct her little kid?”

But humor writer Tom Gerencer loves the film’s many mysteries, which have captivated him for more than 40 years. “I absolutely love that they haven’t gone back and made a prequel or sequel to try to answer all the questions,” he says. “I don’t want somebody going in and saying, ‘Here’s the official canon explanation of what was really going on.’ Because what I love more is what it created in my mind, this huge mystery I can work on.”

Listen to the complete interview with Andrea Kail, Matthew Kressel, and Tom Gerencer in Episode 498 of Geek’s Guide to the Galaxy (above). And check out some highlights from the discussion below.

Andrea Kail on Close Encounters of the Third Kind:

If a [movie scene] seems really long, I’ll go back and time it, just for my own benefit as a writer. Every scene that seems really long—every time—it comes out at 3 minutes. Anything that seems excruciatingly long is 3:30. So I actually started timing the scenes in this movie as I was watching it. The longest ones are 3:30—the air traffic control scene and the fight scene in the house right at the beginning, where the kids are screaming, and she’s screaming at him, and he’s ignoring her. It was really painful, actually, to watch. Both of those scenes are 3:30, which usually means it’s a really overlong scene. But both of them I found really, really tense. I thought they were incredibly well done.

Matthew Kressel on Explorers:

I remember as a kid hating it once we met the aliens because I thought they were really cheesy and stupid. But as an adult, I thought there was actually a really smart message in it. It was almost like the anti-Close Encounters. We expect the aliens to be these spiritual, vast, intelligent beings who impart all this wisdom, and they could be just as screwed up as we are. I like where the kid looks at the giant alien screaming at the two children aliens, and he goes, “Oh, that’s the dad.” He knew. He recognized that there’s messed up stuff all across the universe, not just at home on Earth. That part of it I enjoyed quite a bit.

David Barr Kirtley on Dark Star:

It was a collaboration between [John Carpenter] and Dan O’Bannon, when they were film students at USC. It was originally a 45-minute student film, and then somehow it got shown to an executive, who was like, ‘Oh, we could make this into a real movie.’ So they added a bunch of stuff, including the whole thing with the beach ball alien, to pad it out to feature length … [O’Bannon] added in this thing where he’s hunting down the alien, and it was supposed to be funny, but when he showed it to people no one laughed. And he was like, “Hmm, maybe I should make this not funny.” So he rewrote it as Alien, and that’s where the movie Alien came from.

Tom Gerencer on Tron:

It’s one of those movies that I watch every few years, and I absolutely love it. It has a cool story. It’s not science fiction—it’s fantasy with a technological setting. It rolls together a lot of cool elements that somebody who is my age grew up immersed in—gladiator movies, video game culture, religion—and pulls them all together and synthesizes them into this totally new, richly imagined world … The video game was huge when it came out. That was my favorite video game in the arcade. When I would get my free tokens for getting an A in school, I would go right into the arcade near us, and I would pump them into that Tron game. And now when I watch the movie, that video game just comes back to me. It was so much fun.

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In the recent Netflix movie Don’t Look Up, a pair of scientists attempt to warn an indifferent public that a comet is about to crash into the Earth. Science fiction editor John Joseph Adams says the film is a hilarious example of satirical sci-fi.

“I was really surprised at how much I enjoyed that aspect of it,” Adams says in Episode 497 of the Geek’s Guide to the Galaxy podcast. “I thought maybe the science fiction stuff or the humor stuff would be done well, but not both.”

The movie is intended as a metaphor for climate change, but Geek’s Guide to the Galaxy host David Barr Kirtley says the film’s portrait of a culture poisoned by triviality and narcissism invites multiple readings. “The climate change metaphor is pretty obvious when it’s scientists trying to alert the media to danger and being ignored,” he says. “But I feel like so much of the satire is directed at the media that that’s what sticks in my mind more.”

Don’t Look Up is currently the number two most-watched movie on Netflix, but it has received mixed reviews from critics. Humor writer Tom Gerencer says the film may have struck a little too close to home for some reviewers. “I think a lot of the critics went into this thinking, ‘I know what this is. It’s going to point the finger at the people I don’t like,'” he says. “And then it pointed the finger at everyone, including them, and they’re like, ‘That’s really uncomfortable. I don’t like that.'”

Fantasy author Erin Lindsey enjoyed Don’t Look Up but wishes it had shown a bit more depth and ambition. “I would like to see more movies that attempt to do what this movie was attempting to do,” she says. “I would just plead with the writers to please not make it so American-centric, because it is deeply ironic to me that you would make an allegory about global climate change so obsessively navel-gazing on the United States.”

Listen to the complete interview with John Joseph Adams, Tom Gerencer, and Erin Lindsey in Episode 497 of Geek’s Guide to the Galaxy (above). And check out some highlights from the discussion below.

Erin Lindsey on politics:

I worked for the UN for a very, very long time, including sitting in on Security Council meetings—the closed door meetings, not the ones you see on TV … It was funny to me because one of the scenes that my sister singled out as being ridiculous was that first scene in the White House, where they brief the president and she’s not overwhelmingly alarmed by this news. And actually I thought that scene was, perhaps depressingly enough, relatively realistic. I’ve seen the way world leaders can actually become inured, to a certain degree. There’s a point where Meryl Streep’s character says something to the effect of, “Do you have any idea how many ‘end of the world’ meetings I’ve had?” And really that’s only a slight exaggeration. So a lot of the way that went down—those opening scenes—really was quite realistic.

Tom Gerencer on religion:

Toward the end there’s this scene where Jennifer Lawrence’s boyfriend starts praying. And I was like, “OK, here we go. They’re going to start dragging religion through the mud.” And I was like, “Whatever. They’re dragging everybody else through the mud. Who cares?” But they really didn’t. They had him start praying, and he was like, “Do you think it’s stupid?” And she was like, “No, I think it’s kind of sweet.” That develops later on in the movie and becomes sort of a theme, that he has this genuine religion or connection to God, whatever you want to call it, that they didn’t make fun of at all. They treated it kind of reverently, and I was touched by that. Here’s where they had an opportunity to lampoon religion, and they didn’t.

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John Joseph Adams on The Hopkins Manuscript:

When they want to mine the comet for rare minerals, that reminded me of this satirical apocalypse novel called The Hopkins Manuscript … In the book, the moon comes loose from its orbit, and it’s going to crash into the Earth, and people are doing similar things where they’re bickering—though they don’t disbelieve that it’s happening. This is right after World War I, and the world has just had this immense conflict, and then there’s peace. But then the moon crashes into the Atlantic Ocean, and it just smashes flat like a pancake, making new land in between North America and Europe that’s full of minerals, and so everybody goes to war again over this new resource. [Don’t Look Up] reminded me a lot of that, just because there were so many different commonalities.

David Barr Kirtley on the environment:

There’s something about [the last scene] that was so memorable and horrifying. I feel like 20 years from now, when I think of this movie, that’s the thing that’s going to pop into my head … I guess one very slight misgiving I have about this movie is that so often I hear people say really dumb stuff like, “Oh, if the environment gets too bad on Earth, we’ll just go to another planet,” and this sort of fed into that. I’m sure most people understand that that’s not going to happen, that we’re nowhere even remotely close to being able to send people to another planet. But I feel like there are enough people who don’t understand that somehow that I just want to do whatever I can to get the message out. As environmental activists say, “There is no Planet B.” We’re not going to another planet. You can get that out of your head right now.

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The Matrix Resurrections, directed by Lana Wachowski, largely eschews big action set pieces in favor of a more intimate story about love and mortality. Screenwriter Rafael Jordan was initially disappointed with the film but came to appreciate it more after repeated viewings.

“I definitely think it was secondary for Lana that people actually like the movie right away,” Jordan says in Episode 496 of the Geek’s Guide to the Galaxy podcast. “I don’t think she cares. And that’s the subtle genius of it. I think it’s going to become really appreciated over time, but not soon enough that they’re going to make her make more movies.”

Over the past 20 years, Wachowski has seen fans and critics largely pan the third Matrix movie, seen the Matrix’s “red pill” imagery co-opted by the political right, and faced relentless pressure to churn out more Matrix sequels. Geek’s Guide to the Galaxy host David Barr Kirtley sees clear parallels between those struggles and Resurrections’ “swarm mode,” in which the heroes are attacked by waves of mindless enemies.

“In the first movie, the symbol of the oppressive system that is keeping you down is a government agent, and in this one it’s masses of people on their phones,” he says. “To a large extent, anxiety about people controlling our lives has shifted from the government to online hate mobs.”

Resurrections features the return of Keanu Reeves and Carrie-Ann Moss, now in their fifties. Horror writer Theresa DeLucci enjoyed seeing more mature actors headlining a sci-fi action film. “I think [Reeves] did a wonderful job conveying decades of exhaustion, regret, weakness, and fallibility,” she says. “I loved it when they’re like, ‘Are you going to fly now?’ And he’s like, ‘Screw that.’ Right, you’re fifty-something years old. Screw that, you don’t have to fly anymore.”

Science fiction professor Lisa Yaszek says that despite its focus on aging and loss, Resurrections manages to retain an optimistic streak.

“It feels to me very much like a contemporary cyberpunk story, not just in that it’s moved from a gee-whiz sort of attitude about the internet to a more jaded attitude, but really more in terms of hope,” she says. “There’s this hope that people can connect and think logically and rationally and creatively and maybe make the world a better place. And I think that’s the ultimate science fiction message.”

Listen to the complete interview with Rafael Jordan, Theresa DeLucci, and Lisa Yaszek in Episode 496 of Geek’s Guide to the Galaxy (above). And check out some highlights from the discussion below.

David Barr Kirtley on The Matrix:

For people who weren’t around when The Matrix came out, I feel like it had this cultural impact that’s hard to overstate. I remember people saying, “This is our generation’s Star Wars,” and that’s really how it felt. Everyone had seen it. Before that there had been some movies about virtual reality, like Johnny Mnemonic or The Lawnmower Man that really only the hardcore science fiction fans would have gone to see, but with The Matrix everybody saw it, and everybody was familiar with all these concepts—like the idea of uploading martial arts skills into your brain in a second—these really cool sci-fi concepts that now everyone was familiar with.

Theresa DeLucci on The Matrix Revolutions:

I really can barely remember anything about it … I remember being in the theater though. Everyone was very excited. It was the IMAX movie premiere in New York City, the biggest screen ever. It was like a nightclub. People were in all their Matrix gear—glowing goggles and light sticks. My friend was so excited. And then you get toward the end of the movie, when Trinity dies, and her death scene was just so overwrought and bad that people started heckling. Neo’s like, “You can’t die,” and she says, “Yes I can,” and someone in the theater just yelled out, perfectly timed, “So do it already!” I remember that more than anything else in the movie.

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Lisa Yaszek on The Matrix Resurrections:

I went in with no expectations, and I enjoyed it. Was it as groundbreaking as the first one? No, but how could it be? It’s the fourth in a series. But I still thought it really did honor to the series. I thought the story was logical. Since day one the Wachowskis have insisted that these movies are really about love, and I thought, “Boy, Lana really doubled down on that this time.” I think that that’s interesting, and it almost makes me want to go back and rewatch the three original ones through this different frame. Not thinking about, “Is it a metaphor for capitalism? Is it a metaphor for trans-ness? Is it a metaphor for our media-saturated society?” Maybe it’s just a science fiction story about love.

Rafael Jordan on screenwriting:

In the first film, Neo is unplugged from the Matrix in the 32nd minute. That marks the end of Act 1 and the beginning of Act 2—like I said, that first script is airtight. In this one, he doesn’t wake up in the real world until the 52nd minute, and that’s just way too long. That’s when Act 2 starts, when they finally go to Io and all that stuff. The audience isn’t necessarily aware of these screenwriting rules consciously, but they start to check out of a movie when things aren’t progressing fast enough, and it’s no coincidence this film was 20 minutes longer than the others, because it took too long to get to that point. So I just wish it had been a six-episode, four- or five-hour [TV show].

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Ada Palmer is a professor of European history at the University of Chicago. Her four-volume science fiction series, Terra Ignota, was inspired by 18th-century philosophers such as Voltaire and Diderot.

“I wanted to write a story that Voltaire might have written if Voltaire had been able to read the last 70 years’ worth of science fiction and have all of those tools at his disposal,” Palmer says in Episode 495 of the Geek’s Guide to the Galaxy podcast.

Palmer says that Voltaire could actually be considered the first science fiction writer, thanks to a piece he wrote in 1752. “Voltaire has a short story called ‘Micromégas,’ in which an alien from Saturn and an alien from a star near Sirius come to Earth, and they are enormous, and they explore the Earth and have trouble finding life-forms because to them a whale is the size of a flea,” she says. “They eventually realize that that tiny little speck of wood on the ground is a ship, and it’s full of living things, and they make contact. So it’s a first-contact story.”

Mary Shelley’s 1818 novel Frankenstein is often considered the first science fiction novel. Voltaire was writing much earlier than Shelley, so does he deserve the title instead? It depends on your definition of science fiction.

“[‘Micromégas’] doesn’t involve technology,” Palmer says, “so if you define science fiction as depending upon technology—and being about, in the Frankenstein sense, ‘Is man’s knowledge giving us access to powers beyond what we’ve had before? What does that mean?’—it isn’t asking that. But aliens and first contact is a very core science fictional element.”

So there’s no clear-cut answer to the question of who should be considered the first science fiction writer. Given a sufficiently loose definition of the term, even a 2nd-century writer like Lucian of Samosata could be a candidate. Ultimately, Palmer says it’s more important to ask the question than to arrive at any particular answer.

“I don’t want to argue, ‘Yes definitely, everybody’s histories of science fiction should start with Voltaire,'” she says. “But I do want to argue that everybody’s histories of science fiction will be richer by discussing whether Voltaire is the beginning of science fiction, or whether it’s earlier or whether it’s later. Because that gets at the question of what science fiction is.”

Listen to the complete interview with Ada Palmer in Episode 495 of Geek’s Guide to the Galaxy (above). And check out some highlights from the discussion below.

Ada Palmer on science fiction conventions:

The wonderful thing about science fiction and fantasy fandom, unlike so many other literary genres, is that when you go to a conference, the author isn’t off in the green room and only occasionally appearing for an event and then vanishing; the authors are hanging out in the halls, and you can chat with people, and you get to know people through the internet. So I got to know lots of authors from meeting them at conventions, and from being a panelist before I was an author—because I would be talking about music, or I would be talking about history, or I would be talking about anime and manga and cosplay, which were all arenas that I worked in. So I got to know people, and be known by people, through that wonderful and often so supportive world.

Ada Palmer on the Terra Ignota series:

There’s this global network of flying cars so fast they can get you from anywhere on Earth to anywhere else on Earth in about two hours. So suddenly everywhere on Earth is commuting distance. You can live in the Bahamas and have a lunch meeting in Tokyo and eat at a restaurant in Paris, and your spouse—who also lives in the Bahamas—can have a lunch meeting in Toronto and another one in Antarctica, and this is a perfectly reasonable travel day, especially with self-driving vehicles that let you do work while you’re in the car. So once that’s been true for a couple of generations, people don’t live in a place because they have political ties with it, they live in a place because there’s a great house there that their parents really liked at the time their parents were buying a house, and it no longer makes sense for geography to be the determiner of political identity.

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Ada Palmer on the Terraforming Mars board game:

The players are each a corporation, and the UN is giving you funding to incentivize this, but you also make profits on your own, and you’re competing with the other corporations to terraform Mars best … I’ve noticed from playing Terraforming Mars that if you play it competitively, and then separately you play it collaboratively, where you say, “OK, we’re going to ignore competing with each other for points, and we’re going to work together to try to make sure that all the resources end up in the hands of the company that will use them the most efficiently,” you terraform Mars way better, way faster. So the board game is intended to be a celebration of this capitalist model of doing space but actually also shows that just teaming up and everyone helping everyone get ahead makes everyone score more and achieve more terraforming of Mars.

Ada Palmer on Diderot:

[Jacques the Fatalist] is Diderot’s strange 18th-century philosophical novel about the meanderings of a man who’s a valet in the company of his master. It has this exquisitely warm prose style, in which Diderot directly addresses the reader with great intimacy and vulnerability … Reading that book feels like reading a time capsule, where you’re meeting Diderot and being his friend, in a way that’s very different from any other book that I’ve ever read. You come out of the end of it feeling like Diderot has shared his raw, incomplete, uncertain, deeply, deeply human thoughts and feelings with you, and asked for your thoughts and your opinions in return, in a way that’s just exquisite.

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One of the most bizarre movies of the 1980s was Howard the Duck, based on the minor comic book character of same name. TV writer Andrea Kail was aware of the movie’s awful reputation, but was still surprised at how bad it was.

“I pretty much watched the entire thing with my jaw on the floor,” Kail says in Episode 494 of the Geek’s Guide to the Galaxy podcast. “It was insanely terrible in every possible way.”

Geek’s Guide to the Galaxy host David Barr Kirtley remembers loving Howard the Duck when he watched it as an 8-year-old, but agrees that the movie is a train wreck. “It’s a really weird combination of a kid’s movie, an Animal House-style sex comedy, and a horror movie,” he says. “Some of those things could go together, but the kids and the sex comedy part doesn’t work together.”

Howard the Duck was produced by George Lucas, hot off the success of the original Star Wars trilogy. Humor writer Tom Gerencer says that fame had clearly gone to the director’s head. “[Howard the Duck] works as a comic,” he says, “but then thinking that you could take that and it would work as a live-action movie just takes the kind of egomania you only get after you just made the biggest-selling movie of all time and you think, ‘I can do anything.'”

Science fiction author Matthew Kressel was appalled by Howard the Duck, but notes that the film does have its defenders. “I know some people love this movie,” he says. “If you go on the Gen X Reddit forum, every now and then they do, ‘What was your favorite movie of the ’80s?’ and Howard the Duck came up. Some people are like, ‘I love Howard the Duck! Oh yeah, it was so funny.'”

Listen to the complete interview with Andrea Kail, Tom Gerencer, and Matthew Kressel in Episode 494 of Geek’s Guide to the Galaxy (above). And check out some highlights from the discussion below.

Tom Gerencer on Weird Science:

“I still love it as a story of two nerds who desperately want the wrong thing and then almost learn to want the right thing. Having said that, I do want to get into the politics. I feel like every movie from the ’80s that we discuss, we spend 10 minutes excusing the casual racism and sexism. ‘Well of course they killed puppies in this movie. Back then that’s what we did. We killed puppies.’ I think after a while I start to feel like I’m doing something wrong by saying that every time. … Every kid in my class endlessly quoted the [jazz club] scene, and we thought it was great. And watching it as a grown-up I was cringing through the whole thing. I was just like, ‘Ugh, this is horrible.'”

David Barr Kirtley on Innerspace:

“The character arc, I think, is supposed to be that Dennis Quaid is confident but not caring—and that’s why he has this whole fight with Meg Ryan at the beginning—and Martin Short is caring but not confident. They form this team, and then over the course of the movie Dennis Quaid teaches Martin Short to be more confident and Martin Short teaches Dennis Quaid to be more caring. And it sort of does that in terms of Martin Short’s character development, but doesn’t really do anything with Dennis Quaid’s character development. And I think that’s the biggest missing hole in this movie for me, is that then he gets back together with Meg Ryan at the end, and they get married, and it’s like, ‘Well wait, none of their relationship issues were addressed or resolved or even really mentioned in this whole movie.'”

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Matthew Kressel on Escape from New York:

“I think the setup of the film is great. I love this idea of: ‘Crime is so bad, let’s just wall off Manhattan and put all the criminals in there and let them fend for themselves.’ … You know the scene in the film where they’re like, ‘Oh, this is Broadway! Why are you driving down Broadway?’ And everyone’s just throwing stuff at their car. This actually would happen if you drove down certain streets in the city. I remember people throwing stuff at our car, like fireworks, and of course there were the squeegee men who would put stuff on your windshield, then clean it off and ask for $5. The city was pretty bad. So I love it that John Carpenter is like, ‘Yeah, we’re going to just take this to the extreme. The city’s so bad it’s now a prison colony.'”

Andrea Kail on Night of the Comet:

“I think I did see it in the theater, and I was—I’m fairly sure—the same age as the characters at the time. It really hit me exactly where it should. I knew those characters because I was those characters—selfish, self-involved, rebellious against parents. There’s the scene where she goes, ‘The stores are open. What do you want to do?’ And they go shopping. Everything about it was exactly who I was. … And watching it again, it held up to me. There are some quibbles about the ridiculousness of the science, but just as an adventure story it moves really well, the characters are fun, and it’s funny. The scene in the shopping mall with the evil stock boys is fantastic.”

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Brent Spiner played the likably naive android Lieutenant Commander Data for seven seasons on Star Trek: The Next Generation. His new book Fan Fiction: A Mem-Noir Inspired by True Events tells a fictional story in which Spiner is stalked by an obsessive fan during the early days of the show.

“The book is a hybrid,” Spiner says in Episode 493 of the Geek’s Guide to the Galaxy podcast. “It’s a thriller, it’s a memoir, it’s primarily a black comedy, it’s a novel. There are things that are inspired by true events in it, there are real people in it, and there are completely fictional people in it. So it just seemed that was a good way to describe it, as a ‘mem-noir.'”

Fan Fiction gives a fascinating look into the life of a working actor while also featuring a zany mystery plot that sees Spiner romancing a pair of beautiful twins who may or may not be stalking him. “I could have written the book and made it a completely different sci-fi show that this actor worked on who had a completely different name, but I just didn’t think it would be as fun,” Spiner says. “It takes place 30 years ago, so it was fun for me to be young again, and try to think as my young self.”

The book features appearances by many of Spiner’s Next Generation co-stars, including Patrick Stewart, LeVar Burton, Michael Dorn, Jonathan Frakes, Gates McFadden, and Marina Sirtis, all of whose voices appear in the audiobook. “Patrick came in to the studio, and we read together,” Spiner says. “LeVar came in, Dorn came in. Jonathan and Genie were in Maine, so we had to do it over the phone. Gates came in too. Marina was in London, so we did it over the phone intercontinentally.”

Spiner’s main goal was to entertain the reader, but the book also deals with serious themes of trauma and obsession. “Two of the themes that I was dealing with—or trying to deal with—were fear and fandom, and I think both of those things are common denominators to all people,” he says. “We all experience fear—that may be the common denominator—and the fact that we all admire or hold someone in high regard is also, I think, common to everybody.”

Listen to the complete interview with Brent Spiner in Episode 493 of Geek’s Guide to the Galaxy (above). And check out some highlights from the discussion below.

Brent Spiner on Star Trek and philosophy:

“[Star Trek] has grown into a cultural phenomenon. I don’t know that anybody actually lives their life based on the teachings of Star Trek, but certainly they come into play, because they’re all very positive, and I think there are a lot of people who plug into that. There are a lot of things about Star Trek that are really high-minded, particularly just sort of the general acceptance of everyone&mdsahno matter what you look like or sound like or believe in, there’s acceptance. [Gene Roddenberry]’s whole thing was that in the future we’ll celebrate the differences in one another, and that would be really nice, wouldn’t it? And to a degree there are people who do that, and I think they’re among our healthier people.”

Brent Spiner on celebrity:

“It’s a really fulfilling experience to put someone on a pedestal, but it’s even better to knock them off of that pedestal once you’ve put them on it. So I would say don’t take it too seriously. In most cases it’s not particularly real. I hear from a lot of people on social networks who feel they have a personal connection to me, but I don’t think it’s really me. It’s Data. And I think that sense of entitlement is the result of playing a character that was accessible to all beings without judgment, and that’s really attractive. So I don’t think it’s really about me so much. … It’s not just fans, it’s humanity, I think, to love someone and then to hate that person because you love them so much. It’s like somehow they’ve taken control of you in some way.”

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Brent Spiner on Data and autism:

“[Oliver Sacks] told me about it years before, but I didn’t really put it together, because I didn’t quite understand it at the time. But since the years that I started doing conventions and meeting a lot of people one-on-one, I’ve had so many kids who’ve come up to my table and said, ‘I have Asperger’s or ‘I’m somewhere on the spectrum,’ and ‘Data was the character I could identify with on television, and that’s been so meaningful to me.’ If I had known about it in full, if I’d really understood it at the time, I probably would have pushed the writers to write towards that more, and I probably would have blown the whole thing, so it’s better that I didn’t understand, because I think it worked out pretty well.”

Brent Spiner on watching Star Trek:

“We were working 16 hours a day most of the time, 10 months out of the year. I had read the scripts, I’d memorized the lines, and then we were into the next episode. I think I watched maybe the first 10, just to get a feel for the show and what was going on, and after that I didn’t really feel it was time effective to watch it, because I’d already been Data 16 hours a day, I didn’t really need to spend my off time watching the thing I’d already read. I knew how they all turned out. I did a thing last weekend at the Skirball Center here in LA. It’s a museum, and they’re having a whole Star Trek retrospective, and they asked me if I would come because they were screening ‘The Measure of a Man.’ … I said, ‘I’m happy to come, but I have to be transparent and tell you I’ve never seen it.’ So I came in early and watched the show with everybody else, so I would at least be semi-articulate.”

Fan Fiction: A Mem-Noir: Inspired by True Events

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The new anthology The Best American Science Fiction & Fantasy 2021 collects 20 of the best short stories of the year. Series editor John Joseph Adams was particularly impressed with Ted Kosmatka’s story “The Beast Adjoins,” which presents a fresh take on the idea of an AI uprising.

“It’s so great,” Adams says in Episode 492 of the Geek’s Guide to the Galaxy podcast. “It pushes all the sense-of-wonder buttons; it’s got all this cool character stuff in there. It feels enormous. There’s so much going on in the story. I just love it.”

The story riffs on the Von Neumann-Wigner interpretation of quantum mechanics, positing a future in which advanced AIs are unable to function without humans present. Guest editor Veronica Roth, author of Divergent, found the story extremely creepy. “I reached the part where the machines were using people attached to the front of themselves to keep time moving, and I was like, ‘This is revolting. I love it,'” she says. “It has haunted me ever since I read it. I can’t stop thinking about it.”

Fantasy author Yohanca Delgado agrees that “The Beast Adjoins” is an unsettling story. “It’s such a beautifully realized and chilling premise, this reversal of what we imagine AI can do for us,” she says. “There’s a passage where [the AIs] are creating human tail lights—humans in jars that are just an eye and a blob of flesh. It’s such incredibly horrific writing. I’m a huge fan.”

For now “The Beast Adjoins” exists only as a stand-alone short story, but Geek’s Guide to the Galaxy host David Barr Kirtley wonders if the story could be expanded. “I just feel like this is such an interesting premise—these AIs that can only function when humans are observing them,” he says. “I feel like there are probably a lot of other narratives you could spin out of that.”

Listen to the complete interview with John Joseph Adams, Veronica Roth, and Yohanca Delgado in Episode 492 of Geek’s Guide to the Galaxy (above). And check out some highlights from the discussion below.

Yohanca Delgado on the Clarion workshop:

“At Clarion I skipped a week, and was just rocking back and forth in a panic in my room, because I was like, ‘I have to write something. I have this idea, and I can’t seem to write something else, but I also feel—you know that feeling when you want to write something, but you’re not quite ready? Like, you don’t feel like you’re the writer you need to be to tackle it yet … And the schedule at Clarion is relentless. I’d already missed a week, I couldn’t miss another one. I talked to Andy Duncan, who is a wonderful human, and basically he was like, ‘I don’t understand why you’re not just doing this.’ Which is sometimes what you need to hear. You need somebody to shake you by the shoulders and tell you, ‘Just go do it.'”

Yohanca Delgado on her story “Our Language”:

“My family is from the Dominican Republic and Cuba. I didn’t know of any Latin American or Caribbean monsters, so I set off on this research project to find them … The ciguapa is this woman—there are some stories that have it be male as well, but I was interested more specifically in the idea of it being a woman—who is very small and charming, in a feral way, and whose legs grow backwards. I found that to be a really interesting monster to think about. What would her powers be? What does it all mean? In researching this, I found that it’s really rooted in indigenous and enslaved folks’ stories. Because her real superpower was being able to escape. And I thought that dovetailed really beautifully with some conversations around gender and gender oppression.”

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John Joseph Adams on the pandemic:

“Most people who are publishing a science fiction/fantasy magazine are not doing it as a job—it’s a side thing that they’re doing. They have some other regular job that pays the bills. So maybe because they were saving an hour commute to and from work every day, they had more time to work on their [magazines]. I honestly would have expected there to be a lot more closing up and ceasing publication, just because a lot of people lost their jobs once the pandemic hit, and there was just a lot of belt-tightening that was needed for almost everyone. So I was really surprised to see that everyone was so resilient. Maybe it was partly because everyone was thinking, ‘People need this right now.’ So it was more important to stick around, rather than close up, because we need this to look forward to when we’re dealing with all this scary bleakness out in the real world.”

David Barr Kirtley on “The Pill” by Meg Elison:

“One way in which this story is science fiction, in a really good way, is it doesn’t just present an idea then stick with that static situation, it keeps complicating it and keeps introducing these new twists … One of the things that is often said about science fiction is that a science fiction writer’s job isn’t to predict the automobile—anyone could predict the automobile. Your job is to predict the Interstate Highway System and the suburbs, to look at the second-order effects of these technological changes. And I thought the story functioned really well in that way as a science fiction story, where it’s not just about ‘How does this new technology affect the protagonist?’—though it certainly goes into that—but also ‘How does it affect the wider society?'”

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The new Denis Villeneuve movie Dune was adapted from the 1965 novel by Frank Herbert. TV writer Andrea Kail says the new movie is vastly more successful than earlier adaptations of the story.

“It lived up to every single one of my expectations,” Kail says in Episode 491 of the Geek’s Guide to the Galaxy podcast. “It was exactly what I was hoping for in an adaptation of one of my favorite books of all time.”

Geek’s Guide to the Galaxy host David Barr Kirtley agrees that Dune is a first-rate adaptation. “It’s just so nice to have science fiction movies made by people who actually respect the source material,” he says. “In contrast to the ’80s, where so often they would take a book and the director would just be like, ‘I have so many better ideas than this stupid book,’ and they would change everything.”

Fantasy author Rajan Khanna enjoyed the film, but wishes it had included more of the novel’s rich worldbuilding. “A lot of the weird stuff got skipped—a lot of the stuff about the mentats, and Dr. Yueh and his whole conditioning, and more in-depth on the Bene Gesserit and the Kwisatz Haderach, and the guild navigators,” he says. “That stuff being given minimal exposure in this film was a disappointment to me, because I think one of the great things about the novel is the weird stuff that he comes up with.”

Science fiction author Matthew Kressel is hopeful that an extended edition of Dune might restore some of his favorite scenes from the book. He’s also excited to see more of the Dune universe in the upcoming sequel Dune: Part Two. “This was the Dune film that I’ve wanted for so long,” he says. “And I’m excited about the sequel. It’s a long time to wait, but we waited long enough for this one, so I can wait another year or two.”

Listen to the complete interview with Andrea Kail, Rajan Khanna, and Matthew Kressel in Episode 491 of Geek’s Guide to the Galaxy (above). And check out some highlights from the discussion below.

Rajan Khanna on adaptation:

“I’m not the target audience for this film. Even though I love Dune as a novel, film adaptations are mostly not necessary to me. I have a book that I can read, and that book has certain things, and a film adaptation for me is always going to be an exercise in ‘Oh, they changed that’ and ‘Oh, interesting how they handled this.’ Sometimes it can be amazing, but I’m not one of the people who is like, ‘I really hope they remake Dune as a movie and make it really good.’ So that comes into play in terms of my expectations. If this was a terrible movie, I would have been disappointed, but I wouldn’t have felt betrayed in any way, or that it ruined my one chance at having a good Dune adaptation.”

Matthew Kressel on pacing:

“There was a part in the film, maybe two-thirds to three-quarters of the way through, where I felt like we were just playing ‘chase the mouse.’ It was basically like, chase scene, pause, fight scene, chase scene, pause, fight scene. There was a point, right around the time where they go to that research station, and Dr. Kynes shows them the plants and explains that she wants to make a green Arrakis, where I was like, ‘This is cool,’ and then immediately there was another fight scene … All those scenes were really great, but there was a moment where I was a little less invested in it because it went on for a so long. I think I wanted, in those moments, just a beat more story.”

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Andrea Kail on characterization:

“It’s a coming-of-age story. [Paul] is becoming a man—not only assuming his father’s role as Duke, but also breaking away from his mother’s control. Because she says, ‘We have to get off-world,’ and he cuts her off and says, ‘No. Our path is through the desert,’ and she just has to accept it. There’s a shot, right near the end, where he and Chani are looking at each other, and then he looks at his mother. She knows he’s been having these dreams, and she’s figured out that this is the girl he’s been dreaming about. They smile at each other a little, then Paul walks off, and you see this very subtle change in Jessica’s face from ‘happy’ to ‘stony.’ And the implication is, she doesn’t want him with her.”

David Barr Kirtley on Hollywood:

“I always just assumed that every two or three months there would be some big, blockbuster science fiction movie coming out that we could talk about, and there really haven’t been for the last two years, because of the pandemic. I never really appreciated how much of a loss that would feel to me, and how difficult it would make it, honestly, doing a weekly science fiction podcast. … So I appreciate all the more how precarious Hollywood actually is. It seems so powerful, but it could all go away if people don’t watch these movies and go to theaters. So I have a newfound appreciation for directors like Denis Villeneuve and movies like this, and I just hope everyone does what they can to support them, if you want things like this to keep existing.”

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The 1985 film Enemy Mine tells the story of two soldiers—one human and one alien—who become unlikely allies when they are stranded together on a desolate planet. TV writer Andrea Kail says that even a standout performance by Louis Gossett Jr. can’t save the movie.

“I remember really liking this movie when I saw it however many years ago, but it did not stand up to my memory,” Kail says in Episode 490 of the Geek’s Guide to the Galaxy podcast. “It was shot like a B-movie. Dennis Quaid was over-the-top, the music was overwrought. I just found it so much less enjoyable than it should have been.”

Geek’s Guide to the Galaxy host David Barr Kirtley agrees that the film is lackluster, which is a shame considering that it’s based on an award-winning novella by Barry Longyear. “The [novella] is really, really touching,” Kirtley says. “It’s the story of this guy learning to understand another culture, and then passing it on to a child. That’s what it’s about. It’s beautiful.”

The movie builds to a corny, tacked-on finale in which the human soldier goes on a gory rampage. Humor writer Tom Gerencer says the ending is particularly odd given the pacifistic themes of the rest of the film. “The whole part where he’s killing everyone, I’m like, ‘What’s the point here?'” he says. “Now he’s learned to be peaceful, and he’s just killing all these people?”

Science fiction author Matthew Kressel says the time is right for a new version of Enemy Mine that stays closer to the source material. “I think this movie could be remade, if they did it with modern special effects,” he says. “I think it’s a timeless message—that we shouldn’t dehumanize somebody just because they’re unfamiliar to us.”

Listen to the complete interview with Andrea Kail, Tom Gerencer, and Matthew Kressel in Episode 490 of Geek’s Guide to the Galaxy (above). And check out some highlights from the discussion below.

David Barr Kirtley on The Last Starfighter:

“When I saw it as a kid, it seemed much more serious and dramatic to me, and watching it now the tone is more like Galaxy Quest. It’s really, really silly—in a fun way. … I think they say this is a federation of 800 worlds or something, and they only have 12 fighter pilots to fight for them? And then they have this wall of satellites to defend them from the bad guys, and it’s like, ‘No, dudes, we’re in outer space.’ I mean, presumably it would have to be a sphere around all 800 worlds. So how many of these things are we talking about? Maybe that’s why they only have 12 fighter pilots—because they spent all their money on this gigantic wall.”

Matthew Kressel on Enemy Mine:

“Whenever we fight another group, we dehumanize them in order to be able to kill them. ‘Oh, they’re inhuman monsters!’ When you see them as another person—in this case it’s an alien—but when you see the soul of them, face to face, and that they’re just like you, and in some ways better than you, I think that’s a powerful message. … [The alien] says, ‘We were here a thousand years before you,’ and clearly it’s one of those things where both sides think they’re right, but they both essentially want the same things. So when we get to the end, where Davidge is reciting the ancient lineage on the Drac homeworld, I found that unexpectedly moving.”

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Tom Gerencer on Flight of the Navigator:

“I had only ever seen the part where he’s flying around on the spaceship with Pee-wee Herman talking to him, so I was like, ‘That movie is absolutely stupid.’ And then when I had to go back last week and watch this movie from start to finish, I was like, ‘Holy crap, that’s so cool that he shows up, and he hasn’t aged, but it’s eight years later, and his parents are all bereaved.’ I was like, ‘Wow, I had no idea this movie had something cool about it.’ So I really enjoyed that, and by virtue of that I enjoyed watching the rest of the movie too, because I was like, ‘Now there’s context, and I understand what’s going on.’ So I really enjoyed this movie, but mostly because I had only ever seen the part with no plot in it.”

Andrea Kail on Short Circuit:

“I have very fond memories of this movie. I remember when I was a teenager thinking it was absolutely hilarious. There was one line that I hadn’t thought of in years, but as soon as Fisher Stevens said it, I was like, ‘Oh my god. I remember saying that back and forth with my friend at the time,’ because we thought it was so hilarious. It was the line, ‘I’m sporting a tremendous woody right now.’ And we would say it in that horrible Indian accent. I thought it was hilarious then, and I see it now and it’s so cringeworthy and awful. We’ve been doing all these ’80s movies—the bad ones, the good ones—and it feels to me like we’re not only being nostalgic, but also confronting the ghosts of our past: the casual racism, the misogyny that was so prevalent in the ’80s.”

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Following the unexpected success of Dungeons & Dragons in the late ’70s, game designers Gary Gygax and Dave Arneson waged a decade-long battle over who should be considered the true creator of D&D. Gaming historian Jon Peterson chronicles that struggle in his new book Game Wizards: The Epic Battle for Dungeons & Dragons.

“I managed to find enough sources that most of the questions I thought were interesting I can at least shed some light on,” Peterson says in Episode 489 of the Geek’s Guide to the Galaxy podcast. “A lot don’t have definitive answers, but I think I can at least paint enough of a picture.”

Game Wizards may come as a shock for many D&D fans. Peterson’s account quotes extensively from primary sources, including letters and legal documents, many of which paint Gygax and Arneson as deeply flawed people. “It’s not fun to write something that is, ultimately, pretty negative,” Peterson says. “But at the same time, I think it’s necessary. If you don’t get the nuances of these business and legal circumstances, there are just causes and effects that you’re not going to understand.”

Peterson tried hard to treat all of his characters with respect and sympathy. “Everyone made mistakes, and everyone had their egos and everything else,” he says. “But I think they were trying to make the best of a situation nobody expected they’d be in. Suddenly they’re in it, and what are they going to do? So I hope no one comes across in this as a villain.”

As for the question of who should be considered the true creator of Dungeons & Dragons, Peterson believes the game was clearly a group effort. “It’s drawing on all these different sources and experiences, and all these different inputs that went into it—whether that’s Braunsteins, whether that’s all these different phenomena that were going on in the time leading up to D&D,” he says. “It’s never the right thing to break down the invention of something with this kind of cultural significance to one single individual.”

Listen to the complete interview with Jon Peterson in Episode 489 of Geek’s Guide to the Galaxy (above). And check out some highlights from the discussion below.

Jon Peterson on Dave Arneson:

“There were three awards that were given to D&D [at the 1978 Origins Game Fair], including the award for “Best All-Time Role-Playing Game Rules.” It’s an awards ceremony, and it’s not a huge one, but TSR employees would go up and get their trophy, and thank people, and sit back down. Arneson actually ran up on stage to grab that all-time greatest role-playing rules trophy, and there was a bit of a dispute. Should these trophies go to the company that published the game, or should they go to the designer? Arneson ran this whole publicity campaign to try to convince people that awards like this should go to designers and not to companies. … But ultimately there wasn’t a lot of sympathy, even among the wargame publishers in the industry, for his position, and he did not end up getting all three trophies for himself.”

Jon Peterson on Gary Gygax:

“Gygax was great in person. Everybody who met him—before he became ‘Gary Gygax’ and everyone had all this anger over the success of D&D—just remarked on how eager he was to help, how he wanted to sit down and play games with you, help you design games, help you perfect your own rules. He was a really gregarious, outgoing, friendly guy. … It’s just once those skills start having to be applied to running a medium-sized business, where now there’s a lot of people on staff, there’s many layers of management, there’s process, and this group needs to agree with this group, and they need to go execute on this general strategy, and you can’t micro-manage everything, as soon as it became that kind of company, he just hated it. He wanted out.”

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Jon Peterson on the Satanic Panic:

“You see people [at TSR] saying things like, ‘Yes, there’s all this gnashing of teeth about the occult, but the reason people find the occult compelling is that there might—just maybe—be something to it.’ I don’t think they meant anything more with that than they do with, say, astrology. When you read your horoscope in the newspaper, is there something to it? Probably not, but there was just this background level, especially coming out of the 1970s, of crystals and New Age-ism and American watered-down spiritualism. And I think they did want to tap into that—or at least they were aware it was part of the market that was out there. But Gygax and Arneson identified as Christians—strongly—so as a consequence of that I don’t think they were really trying to take some provocative stand about the possible veracity of occultism.”

Jon Peterson on Ben Riggs:

“Ben Riggs is putting out a book that will come out next year, which is called Slaying the Dragon. It focuses mostly—though not exclusively—on the period after Game Wizards ends. … As soon as Game Wizards was announced, a lot of people who follow Ben, who knew that his book was coming, were like, ‘Oh my god. Is somebody trying to beat you to the punch? Is Peterson trying to sneak this in before you?’ So we did a video at Gen Con this year just to say, ‘Actually, we’re buds. We have known that we’re both doing these books forever, and we’ve been coordinating about this to make sure that they’re going to be on the same page.’ This isn’t going to be something where you’re going to be asking, ‘Is Riggs right or is Peterson right?’ Hopefully we’ve aligned these pretty much as well as we can.”

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