Astounding Science Fiction
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 Movie Review: Prometheus
Ridley Scott foreruns his classic and groundbreaking “Alien” with a compelling and existential film that reaches wide, but ultimately fails. Visually and cinematically stunning, “Prometheus” indulges in the action and one-liners that summer moviegoers may be craving while also bringing a sense of eerie irony. It falls prey to many of the pitfalls found in the “genre” formula, yet it holds a bizarre and resonant quality that other blockbusters lack. This is perhaps what makes this film a particular disappointment. If there were no potential, then the letdown would be less stinging. Read more
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 Enter a Future: Fantastic Tales from
Asimov’s Science Fiction
By Sheila Williams
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Welcome. Please come in. Enter some futures. Feel free to pull up a chair and sit down with these fantastic stories from Asimov’s Science Fiction magazine. No two of these futures is the same. Yet, while the characters cope with presents that are removed from our own to varying degrees, the dilemmas they face are never removed from the joys and terrors of the human condition. Many of these stories are… Read more.
Weep for Day by Indrapramit Das
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I was eight years old the first time I saw a real, living Nightmare. My parents took my brother and me on a trip from the City-of-Long-Shadows to the hills at Evening’s edge, where one of my father’s clients had a manse. Father was a railway contractor. He hired out labor and resources to the privateers extending the frontiers of civilization toward the frozen wilderness of the dark Behind-the-Sun. Aptly, we took a train up to the foothills of the great Penumbral Mountains.
It was the first time my brother and I had been on a train, though we’d seen them tumble through the city with their cacophonic engines, cumulous tails of smoke and steam billowing like blood over the rooftops when the red light of our sun caught them. It was also the first time we had been anywhere close to Night—Behind-the-Sun—where the Nightmares lived. Just a decade before we took that trip, it would have been impossible to go as far into Evening as we were doing with such casual comfort and ease.
Father had prodded the new glass of the train windows, pointing to the power-lines crisscrossing the sky in tandem with the gleaming lines of metal railroads silvering the hazy landscape of progress. He sat between my brother Velag and me, our heads propped against the bulk of his belly, which bulged against his rough crimson waistcoat. I clutched that coat and breathed in the sweet . . . Read the full excerpt... |
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