Millions of years in the future, when the sun is dying, the Earth has become tidally locked and attached to the moon with cob-like webs make by giant spider looking plants. Half of the planet is always in the daytime and half is always night. Most life lives in the perpetual afternoon . Plants dominate, they hunt, they fly, they hop, they graze, they even fight battles with one another. Humans survived but they look little like the humans of today. They are smaller and have green skin and live in matriarchal tribes hopping through the branches of a giant Banyan tree trying to survive the last years of life on Earth. This is the setting of Hothouse by Brian Aldiss a story that begins as one of survival in the afternoon on Earth but ends up being a deep musing on intelligence and humanity. Hothouse was originally published as a group of short stories that won the Hugo Award for Short Fiction in 1962 . We follow a tribe of future humans as...
I was excited to go back into the 1900's mainly for one great early director of science fiction films, Georges Méliès ! If you take a film class, his film, "A Trip to the Moon" is usually the first one you will see. Georges Méliès is very important in not just science fiction film history but in film history in general because he one of the first to experiment with special effects like substitution splices, time-lapse photography, dissolves, and multiple exposures, things we take for granted today. Though the technology was primitive, he still made beautiful films that hold up well to this day. Watching his movies is like watching a dream. A Trip to the Moon is based very loosely on a book by Jules Verne. The movie is more fantastical than Verne's original story with the astronomers in the movie fighting a moon army and saving the moon people from an oppressive moon king. ...
I decided to end my year by reading a new book, I Think We've Been Here Before, published in September 2024. It was listed on my Kindle Unlimited as science fiction and had a free audiobook with it. This book ended up not being the best book to end my year with. I finished the book feeling very depressed. Scientists discover that the world will be destroyed by a cosmic blast in a few months. The story centers on a family in rural Saskatchewan and their daughter in Berlin. The family wants to unite together for one more Christmas before the world ends. As we go along the story, strange coincidences keep happening. Things in the background keep changing. Messages seem to come from nowhere. What is the mystery behind all of it? This story really affected me because I live in Germany and my adult kids live in America. I read it right before we all reunited in London for Christmas. I understood the feelings of wanting only to be with family. There were also themes of regret...
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