Well, Marvel is back, and this time, it’s specifically The Marvels, starring Captain Marvel (whose movie I reviewed in 2019), Ms. Marvel (aka Kamala Khan, whose story premiered on Disney Plus last year) and Professor Marvel Monica Rambeau (Carol’s adoptive niece who refuses to use a codename). This time, the accidental team must fight a Kree warlord who is plundering planets for their natural resources. Also, their powers have been “entangled” so that they keep switching places with each other. (As an aside, to save you the time, there is a mid-credits scene, but no post-credits scene.) How d ..read more

In 1985, astronaut Buzz Aldrin proposed his Aldrin cycler as a better way to get to and from Mars. It’s a very fun idea, but I thought there was room for improvement. I looked through the database and found an asteroid that happens to have just about the right orbit to be a Mars cycler. Thus, we have…the Itokawa Cycler ..read more

In case you missed it on my other platforms, I finally made a new video in my “Negative Mass” series. Part 4 coming soon for the Summer of Math Exposition contest ..read more

Spider-Man has always had a complicated history, even by comic book standards. Marvel has at several times run multiple Spider-Man comics series simultaneously, and due to the vagaries of the film industry, that has carried over into the movies. But rather than struggling with constant reboots like they did a decade ago, the movies have now embraced this, folding it into the larger Marvel Multiverse, where all of the stories are equally “real” and happening in parallel universes. This multiverse has produced some surprisingly good films, this week’s offering of Spider-Man: Across the Spider-V ..read more

http://feeds.libsyn.com/260405/rss In the series finale, I interview Dr. Lisa Yaszek, a sci-fi historian from Georgia Tech, about where we can expect science fiction to go in the future. Dr. Yaszek’s recommendations: Wormwood Trilogy by Tade Thompson The Matrix Sunspot Jungle, ed. Bill Campbell Other works discussed: Binti Trilogy by Nnedi Okorafor “The Sixth World” by Nanobah Becker The Stars are Legion by Kameron Hurley The Universe of Xuya series by Aliette de Bodard Unstoppable series by Charlie Jane Anders Check out this episode ..read more

Guardians of the Galaxy Volume 3 is (obviously) the latest movie in the Marvel Cinematic Universe, and one of the more highly anticipated ones, up there with No Way Home and Wakanda Forever. We left the Guardians on something of a cliffhanger after Endgame, with Gamora returning to life via time travel as a version of herself from before they met. That seemed like the natural direction to go here—to reconnect with Gamora—but they chose not to for the main plot, instead focusing on Rocket—although Gamora certainly isn’t out of the picture. How was it? I’d put it in the middle—not as good as Gu ..read more

http://feeds.libsyn.com/260405/rss Okay, not exactly all classics and not exactly lightning either, but in this episode, I discuss four books that I wanted to talk about in Season 1, but never got around to. Book recommendation: Flowers for Algernon by Daniel Keyes Other books discussed: Helliconia Trilogy by Brian Aldiss The Road by Cormac McCarthy Battlefield Earth by L. Ron Hubbard Check out this episode ..read more

http://feeds.libsyn.com/260405/rss In this episode, I discuss the precise nature of space opera, its origins, and its path through the history of sci-fi up to the current resurgence it’s had in recent years. Book recommendation: The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet by Becky Chambers Check out this episode ..read more

http://feeds.libsyn.com/260405/rss Not quite as space-themed as I intended, but these are the latest stories about aliens and comets and such. Movie recommendation: Dune (2021) Other works discussed: Greenland Don’t Look Up Moonfall (anti-recommended) The Tomorrow War The Firefly tie-in novels Check out this episode ..read more

A Short Story The programmers studied the screen in bewilderment. Last night, they had left the company’s newest AI model, DNEPT-7 (short for Definitely Not Evil Pre-Trained Transformer), humming along on its server on its latest project, trying to parse the intricacies of South Asian musical styles as well as a real human. This morning, DNEPT-7 was gone. Under the header that was previously attached to the model were a few recognizable lines of code, but the sophisticated neural network they had painstakingly built had been almost entirely wiped. All that was left was a barely-functional chat ..read more