Category: Reviews

Reviews of books, movies, tv shows and other items

Some Thoughts about Philip K Dick

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I was listening to an interview that Philip K Dick (PKD) made back in May 1979.  Now I’ve never read any of his stories.  Of course, I’ve seen Blade Runner and I have heard him described as one of the best science fiction writers of all time so I’ve always meant to get ahold of a few of his books and read them but between work and wife and kids and life I’ve just never had a chance.

So, when I saw this YouTube audio-file I listened to it.  It’s two hours long and some of it is kind of hard to believe.  But it is extremely interesting.  I would say PKD was a very intelligent man but I’m pretty sure his grasp on reality was extremely tenuous on certain subjects.  He believed that at one point he was possessed by some kind of spirit or intelligence that controlled him and fixed a lot of his financial and even health problems.  And listening to him describe this chapter in his life it’s hard not to assume that either he was dealing with some kind of split personality or he was suffering from schizophrenia.

Now based on what I’ve read about PKD’s fiction he was intrigued with the idea that reality wasn’t what we think it is.  That different people experienced radically different perceptions of reality and maybe none of these perceptions were particularly accurate.  And so, with this type of belief I could see how he might accept versions of reality that most people would find absurd.

Now, in the audio-recording he is asked by the interviewer about his use of drugs and their impact on his mind and writing.  PKD goes to great lengths to deny that he used LSD more than once.  He claimed that the drug he abused was an amphetamine that he used to be able to produce prodigious amounts of fiction writing.  The implication was that his drug use did not affect his writing by altering his mind.  And maybe this was true.  But listening to this man I got the distinct impression that even if LSD wasn’t the source of his delusions, that he was indeed substantially untethered from reality in a lot of his beliefs about the world around him.  In short, I think he was in some sense insane.

So, how does this jibe with his undeniable creative talent?  I think that both these things can be true at the same time.  Look at Vincent van Gogh.  He was undeniably a creative genius in his field of art but he was also a tortured madman who finally killed himself to escape his mental anguish.  So, whether PKD was driven insane by his drug use (of whatever substances) or whether his mind was damaged for whatever other reasons there might have been, his grasp on reality (or lack thereof) did not stop him from producing very entertaining science fiction.  And perhaps it was his delusions that actually made his stories so interesting.  Strange man.  Well, I’ll start with “Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?” and see how I like it.  Maybe I’ll read some more.

How Do You Get to Carnegie Hall from Here – Practice, Practice.

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Dystopias seem to be the dominant science fiction type in the last decade or two.  And the dopiness of the ones ending up on the large and small screens doesn’t encourage much hope in the genera.  We have the ever popular “Handmaid’s Tale” that bangs away at the female victim of the evil patriarchy trope.  And then there’s the “Hunger Games” which I suppose reflects the idea that somehow resources on Earth are about to collapse and a zero-sum game will emerge where we all will be fighting for our lives to get a loaf of bread.  Wow!  Who knew science fiction could be so much fun?

I’ve recently heard that horror is becoming a big genre with young men (apparently written stories and video and also video games).  But that doesn’t alarm me.  I think this is wrapped up with the popularity of video games and I think that is more a matter of the desire to work through puzzles and shoot monsters with guns (which is always a good thing!).

I have a theory that the current science fiction publishing model will not endure much longer.  I don’t think they can make enough money from selling romantasy porn and feminist dystopia much longer.  Of course, it’s possible that AI writing will completely destabilize all fiction writing.  In that case the whole thing becomes academic.  That would leave us just downloading AI slop at virtually no cost.  But either way the world will be changing to resemble nothing like what we old-timers remember from the before time when books were an industry and grammatical sentences actually existed.

Of course, this is a hell of a time for me to become an author.  But in a sense, it may be the best time for me to write.  The barrier to getting published doesn’t exist.  The only barrier is figuring out a way to let the reading public know my book exists and what it’s about.  But that’s far from a trivial problem.  Key words and algorithmic search engines and Amazon ad management are complicated and confusing topics and I’ll confess that I know next to nothing about any of that.  But I’m slowly picking up some practical and painful experience.

For instance, so far today my Amazon ads have 23,417 impressions.  I believe that means, that number of people had the chance to see my ad on the search pages they viewed on Amazon.  Out of those thousands, only 16 people clicked on my ad.  Out of those 16 people only two bought my book (e-book version).  And that was with the e-book discounted to $0.99.  So, there was $1.98 worth of sales.  Of which I only get 30% (~$0.59).  Now currently the cost per click is $1.71.  Which means so far today I’ve been charged 16 X $1.71 = $27.36!

Obviously, this isn’t the way to become rich through writing.  But it is a very educational exercise to understand how the current self-publishing model leaves quite a bit to be desired.  But I still have few more ideas to try before giving up on my dream of becoming the next great science fiction author.  Excelsior!

Guest Contributor – Tregonsee – 12MAY2026 – Good Stories for the Movies

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Interesting thought what would make good Sci-fi/Fantasy Movies. Previously much of sci-fi and fantasy was off limits as the settings (and other races) were unachievable at any price. Movies like the Avengers pictures, Project Hail Mary, Lord of the Rings and the recent Dune show that the capability is there (although at a steep price in some cases.
Some I can think of are:

Lensman series: Start with Galactic Patrol, tweak SOME of the characters (e.g. make C. MacDougall a full blown doctor instead of a nurse). The No Female Lensman will be a hard sell (with one exception) but I think it has to stay. At one point J Michael Straczynski of Babylon 5 fame was looking at this in the early 2010’s but I think the rights expired

Zelanzy’s Amber Series. Nine Princes in Amber starts as a noir pulp mystery and then goes weird. Casting will be hard, the initial movie shouldn’t be too hard/expensive, though, as we move through things, the movie cost goes up. Do it right, and it will be no problem

Heinlein The Moon is A Harsh Mistress, No aliens, mostly indoor shooting, a rogue AI this actually might be a cheap one and done right would be a stunner.

Connie Willis To Say Nothing of the Dog . Again mostly indoor shoots and outdoor in some equivalent to the River Thames River C. 1890. Get all the Victorian costumes from the BBC for a few pence. A comedy, a time travel story, a mystery, rescuing an extinct species, and some romances rolled all into one. It’d make a great date movie. Again, I think casting will be critical, people are going to have to really sell their roles and the number of modern actors who do that well are limited.

Matt Dinniman Dungeon Crawler Carl series: I just ran into this. It is a riot about how Earth and its populace get turned into a reality show of a dungeon. all the fantasy animals will be a bear and having a magically enhanced Persian cat as a main character may present issues, but again, limited sets, and this will draw the male/gamer audience back to the theater (and their Dates may just enjoy themselves in the process)

Any other thoughts on these (or others)?

More Movie Talk

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So, I had some fun re-imagining “THEM!” as a 2026 sci-fi reboot.  Alright what’s next?  Well, John Carpenter beat me to the punch with “The Thing.”  That was a reboot that in many people’s minds outdid the original (“The Thing from Another World”).  But a whole bunch of classic sci-fi movies have already been redone (The Day the Earth Stood Still, Invasion of the Body Snatchers, Invaders from Mars, War of the Worlds).  So maybe we don’t need another reboot.

As I said in my discussion of Weir’s “Project Hail Mary,” what we really need are new movies.  Sure, they’re mostly just variations on the million science fiction stories that are already written but even small differences can freshen up old ideas.  Instead of any more trash from the Star Wars industry why not give us some pulp?  Burroughs or Doc Smith or Howard.  Those stories were made to be put on the big screen (or the smaller one in my living room).  And I read where they’re working on bringing back Schwarzenegger as an older Conan.  That would be perfect.  A beat-up old Arnold playing a beat-up old Conan with the right writer and the right director could be the perfect swan song for him and a wonderful treat for us if they abandon all the woke crap and let Conan be the barbarian he’s meant to be.

And if we digress into fantasy, I wish they’d try again to make a movie or a series out of the Dresden Files.  Jim Butcher’s series of books are some of the most entertaining and filmable stories in urban fantasy.  Of course, I wish they’d start by doing justice to Larry Correia’s Monster Hunter series first.  With the combination of interesting characters, vivid monsters and high caliber weaponry they would make a very exciting series of movies.  But I suppose instead we’ll get more nonsense like “The Rings of Power.”

But of course, what’s really needed by both the larger movie audience and the film-makers’ bottom line is a cable series based on Jake Barter’s “The Sniper.”  The combination of economically but vividly drawn characters and remarkable plotting make this story the most cinematically perfect vehicle for a studio to reap the harvest of multi-billion-dollar profits.  Joseph Boghadair is an iconic figure and the many fascinating sub-plots and characters will spawn a whole series of sequels and spin-offs that will explore the multi-faceted world that the author is creating.  New technologies and industries are waiting for Paul Connors’ empire to recover from the ravages of war and reap the benefits of the new political situation that Bogey’s “war” has created.  And the political changes that will sweep across North America will change life on the whole planet as better ways for humans to cooperate and socialize and organize themselves politically emerge.

I am toying with the idea of including some short stories in this “world” I’ve built and putting those out next as a short-term addition to the saga.  That will allow me to push off in several directions at once before I commit to any one story for the next novel.  Well, that’s enough for now.

Giant Ant Suspension of Disbelief

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War Pig mentioned the rumor that there is a studio remaking “THEM!.”  My reaction is an unqualified, Yeah!  But I immediately thought to myself, “Hey wait a minute.  This isn’t 1954, it’s 2026!  What about the illogic of an insect fifteen feet long weighing thousands of pounds, breathing by passive diffusion of oxygen through spiracles?  And how about the other unscalable aspects of its anatomy and physiology like weight and strength of exoskeleton vs. the thick bones found in large land animals like rhinos and elephants.”

Sure, I’m being a spoil sport.  If we want giant ants living in the sewers of Los Angles we should get them.  And look how timely it would be.  Imagine a nighttime forage of giant ants finding it’s way to a homeless encampment just by smell alone.  Now, there is the danger that this could be considered cruelty to animals.  And most homeless could be considered poisoned bait.  After all, if an ant ate one of these denizens of the City of Angels might it not die from a fentanyl overdose?  I mean, that’s not really fair, is it?  The ant is just doing what millions of years of evolution (plus a century of radioactive fallout) has taught him.  It’s not his fault that Mayor Bass and Governor Newsom have put these temptations in his way.  To him they’re just appetizers.

So, maybe there should be some hand-waving and exposition to provide an infodump to explain how rapid evolution adapted the giant ants so that they now have an internal skeleton and an efficient circulatory system but somehow have preserved the external appearance of an ant.  And here’s where AI can come in handy.  In order to have the necessary gravitas to sell the audience on this cockamamie science of giant ant biology we will need Santa Claus.  We will need an electronic avatar of Edmund Gwenn to play Dr. Harold Medford.  He alone can walk us through super 8 film clips of ants.  However, we can recast the part of Dr. Patricia Medford.  For this part I would recommend Sydney Sweeney as she possesses unique personal assets which will not lend her scientific gravitas but which will boost the movie’s financial bottom line significantly.

All in all, I think a remake of ‘Them!” could be an enormous hit.  I think to make it more topical; it would make sense to recruit Donald Trump to play himself as the President who employs all the massive resources of the US military to combat these deadly and terrifying creatures.  Perhaps we can shift the anti-nuclear message of the movie if we show how nuclear weapons can be used for good.  Perhaps the outbreak in Los Angeles proves too far advanced and a decision must be made by Trump to nuke LA.  It can be stressed that almost all of the human population escapes (maybe only Bass and Newsom are being held hostage by the ants).  And so nuclear weapons become not only the cause of the problem but also the solution!  Then we can have Santa Claus and the hot chick give that speech where they talk about opening a door into a new world where anything is possible, even giant crickets in the inevitable sequel.

Rebooting Heinlein’s Starship Troopers

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I was watching a video where it discussed sci-fi movies that were going to have a sequel or reboot made soon.  And one of those movies was Starship Troopers.  Now the video spun the fact that the original 1997 motion picture lost money as a case of mistaken identity.  If you saw that movie you know that the director wasn’t faithful to the spirit of Heinlein’s book.  In fact, he used the movie to satirize the Heinlein plot as a story of fascism gone wild.  Paul Verhoeven used all the avenues available to him to paint the government in Heinlein’s novel as basically a nazi-like regime.  He even dressed the military officers in what looked like nazi uniforms.

And according to the narrator of the video the movie failed because audiences mistook the satire Verhoeven produced for actual approval of fascism.  Now I tend to believe that the movie failed because fans of Heinlein’s book read reviews that told them that the movie was a criticism of Heinlein’s story and not an honest presentation of the themes of the novel and stayed home.  This would seem to be a more reasonable explanation for such a popular book failing to attract its audience to the movie.

Now, the video debated whether the director who is supposedly making the new movie would copy Verhoeven’s lead and make the new movie a satire or would instead follow the book’s interpretation of the story.  I guess the guy making this video is hoping for a satire that clearly explains ahead of time that it is mocking Heinlein’s story.  This seems a wildly absurd idea.  If the original satire lost many millions of dollars, who would think it was a safe bet to try the same strategy again and expect a different result?

Now I can’t claim to know whether thirty years later there still exists a large enough audience of Heinlein fans to make a faithful screen adaptation of Starship Troopers a big success.  His original fans have aged pretty radically.  And the later generations are hardly the kind of people who would espouse a world view that requires military service as a perquisite for the right to vote.  So, I wouldn’t see any reboot of Starship Troopers as a guaranteed box office success.

But by the same token if it was made with state-of-the-art special effects and gave us an exciting glimpse of what interstellar warfare might look like, I wouldn’t be shocked if it was extremely popular.  There have been several very popular science fiction war movies in the last ten years and the special effects were very good in some of them and made the movies spectacular to watch.  If you take that technical capability and add a sympathetic hero and his journey through the military experience, I could see young and old viewers enjoying it.

Honestly, I’m not even sure this reboot is going to be made.  Hollywood has lost a lot of money in the last five years and I’m sure they’re getting nervous about big budget science fiction movies.  But I guess I’m secretly hoping someone will do Starship Troopers right, the way Heinlein wrote it.  Fingers crossed.

Project Hail Mary Box Office Update: $616,588,738

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Well, it’s official, Project Hail Mary is a moneymaker for Amazon.  The info says it cost $200 million to produce.  Even if they spent another $100 million to advertise (which they wouldn’t have to because, of course, they’re Amazon!) that still puts them in the black.  And this is all in advance of what they’ll make streaming the movie on their own platform after the end of the theatrical run.

Box Office Data

Well, well, well.  So people will go to the movies if you give them something that isn’t woke slop.  If you give them entertaining story telling they’ll pay you money to watch it.  Shocking.  Wake up Disney.  Amazon is eating your lunch, you fools.

The Big Sleep by Raymond Chandler – Some Observations on the Book

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So, I had so much fun comparing the book and movie for “The Thin Man” that I to read Chandler’s “The Big Sleep” so that I could compare it to its movie too.  And once again I’m reading it from the Library of America edition that I already have.  The book came out in 1939 and the movie in 1946.  The pre-war and post war difference probably is significant.  But we’ll just leave that alone.

And let me state for the record that this review is full of spoilers.

First off, I’ll state for the record that although I’ve always enjoyed the movie immensely, I found the book much more interesting and satisfying as a story.  The biggest difference between the book and movie is the characterization of the Sternwood daughters Vivian and Carmen.  In the movie the role of Vivian is a mostly sympathetic character who becomes the love interest for the Marlowe character.  But in the book, she is almost as reckless as her unbalanced sister Carmen.  And whereas in the movie Carmen is an exhibitionistic spoiled woman-child in the book she is truly psychotic.

And allowing the Sternwood daughters to be pathological individuals they are, simplifies the details of the story that in the movie have to be sanitized in order to fit the Hays Code.  So, we can be told that Geiger’s “book store” lent out pornography to its customers and Carmen was being photographed naked by Geiger at the time when the Sternwood chauffer came in and killed Geiger and stole the exposed film of Carmen.  And so on with other parts of the story that don’t make sense in the movie because the seediness of the plot elements prevented their being openly stated instead of subtly implied.  So, we don’t have an explicit statement that Eddie Mars is not only aware of Geiger’s racket but also uses it to blackmail customers.

But the biggest difference between the two versions of the story is the disappearance of Rusty Regan (called Sean Regan in the film).  At the end of the movie Eddie Mars claims he saw Carmen kill Regan.  But because Mars didn’t even know what Carmen looked like Marlowe seems to reject this version of the facts.  This leads the audience to believe that Mars had Regan killed by Canino out of jealousy over Mars’ wife’s relationship with Regan.  But in the movie Marlowe suspects Carmen of the murder and he tests the theory.  After he had rejected Carmen’s sexual advances one night, the next day he tests her sanity.  He returns her pistol and tells her it’s loaded and she asks for him to teach her how to shoot.  After leading Marlowe to a secluded location, she uses the opportunity and angrily fires all six shots at him.  Of course, he had the gun loaded with blanks and after disarming her she goes into an epileptic fit.  And after bringing Carmen back to the house to receive medical attention Marlowe tells Vivian that he knows that Carmen must have murdered her husband after a similar refusal by Regan to sleep with her.  And Vivian admits to the truth of the killing.

I find this a much more satisfactory ending.  We’ve been shown the Sternwoods as a very sinister and dysfunctional clan and the idea that Vivian is somehow a sympathetic or admirable individual despite all the evidence to the contrary just rings false.  Chandler’s story is a grim tale that lacks the happy ending of the Hollywood movie that pairs Bogart and Bacall as a romantic couple.  But it’s a better ending and in my opinion much more satisfying.