- I admit, I find Star Trek Mistakes rather fascinating. A few of them are just little continuity goofs — a photograph used for a character they thought they’d never revisit, for instance — and a few could have perfectly reasonable explanations. But it’s sort of incredible just how many times the Trek writers contradicted not just the show’s long history, but also themselves. [via]
- Speaking of Trek, here’s a look at an alternate universe, where Sulu was black and Uhura was white. What might have been… [via]
- I’m naturally suspicious of most re-makes (as I may have mentioned before), but I just don’t understand the thinking behind this one. A Three Stooges “upgrade”? What made the Three Stooges funny were the actors, their chemistry and comedic timing, and it’s tough to see how any re-make will rise above the level of bad impressions. I don’t know about you, but I don’t really want to see Russell Crowe or Mel Gibson dressed up like Moe Howard.
- John Scalzi offers some advice to our new President-elect, based on the past presidencies of science fiction. For my money, his most important advice? “…if you do turn a major city into a prison, don’t ever, ever, fly over it.”
- All this time, I thought Speaker for the Dead was a direct Ender’s Game sequel. Orson Scott Card just proved me wrong. Well, it’s his universe. I’m guessing this book fills in the gaps — unnecessarily so, in my opinion — between the first two books in the series. There’s been a lot written recently against the Ender’s Game series, namely how it’s bad for us, and heaven knows Card’s politics aren’t always nice (or even well-hinged). But I genuinely liked the first two books. The third book…well, not as much. Xenocide felt like an overly talky companion to Speaker, tying up a lot of that book’s loose threads, but in the most polemically way possible. I haven’t read any of the Ender’s Shadow books, or even the final book in the original series. (Although I do own a copy.) I worry that Card is going the “Brian Herbert of Dune” route. We don’t need to know what every character was doing at every moment of a mythology’s lifetime. In fact, we probably shouldn’t.