io9

Posts Tagged “

Review

”

Heroes Has Lost Its Spirit Guide and Is Growing Slime Fingers

Last night's Heroes returned to a problem the show had in its first season — too many characters doing too many random things — without returning to that season's strengths. What was rewarding about that season was that we watched our main characters coming together and pulling the narrative threads of the show into an intricate but neat pattern. But with each new episode of season 3 (and last night's "I Am Become Death" was no exception) we are seeing the characters drift into aimless, unconnected scenarios tied to a future of even more pointless confusion. Why are we still watching this show? I've got a few reasons, with spoilers, so be warned. More »

7:00 AM on Tue Oct 7 2008
By Annalee Newitz
8,116 views, 133 comments

Latest by RufusBrocchus: The thing that bugged me the most is how future Peter manage to get his future self's clothes inside the more »

the night sessions review

Do Protestant Terrorist Robots Have Souls?

Ken MacLeod's latest novel, The Night Sessions, is about a near-future Earth that's ruled by atheists who have driven Christians into the closet. The "Faith Wars" have purged governments in the East and West of their religious leaders, and left in their wake a fairly peaceful world order. Still, the population is filled with people and sentient robots haunted by memories of the violent "God Squads" who led the anti-religious purges. In this novel, released last month in the UK, MacLeod has stuck to the near-present time frame of his last novel The Execution Channel, while also bringing in the kinds of far-future concerns about posthuman selfhood that made his Engines of Light trilogy so brilliant. An intricate murder mystery about Protestant terrorist factions of the future, The Night Sessions is also a strangely moving tale of the emotional bonds between humans and robots. MacLeod has given us a crisp novel of speculation made achingly realistic by his characters' believable, messy lives. More »

5:49 PM on Mon Oct 6 2008
By Annalee Newitz
1,828 views, 33 comments

Latest by Klebert L. Hall: @corpore-metal: Possibly. Can you give examples? It also depends upon how big a community/society you're talking about, and how thorough. If you just more »

fringe recap

Fringe: The U.S. Government is Using Psychics to Tap the Ghost Network

I know there are going to be Fringe haters out there the whole season, but I have to admit the show sort of won my heart last night. Maybe it was the moment mad scientist Walter Bishop started singing the words "when I was in a mental institution," or maybe it was the pro-homebrew drug agenda, or maybe it was the scene where an office drone freaks out and does cheesy comic book art in his cubicle. The weirdo dark comedy tone in the show really came together in last night's episode, "The Ghost Network," which was all about wiretapping the spirit world. OMG DEA FBI! Spoilers ahead! More »

7:00 AM on Wed Sep 24 2008
By Annalee Newitz
2,356 views, 43 comments

Latest by bonniegrrl: I love this show. In fact, it's getting better with each episode. A truly mad scientist who self-medicates, forgets the more »

heroes recap

Heroes: Why Don't We Do It In the Lab?

You can tell that Tim Kring, creator of mega-mutant soap Heroes, was overcompensating in a big way last night. In the exciting two-hour premiere, he proved to the world that he can make his scenes smaller, shorter, and faster than anybody else's scenes. No more of those long, dreary trips to Feudal Japan like last season. This season began with scenes so bursty and brief they made YouTube vids look leisurely. The time-travel freakout plot that causes mutant virus mania was practically incomprehensible (a perennial danger with time travel plots), but still fun in a whacked-out, 1980s DC Comics way. Plus, everybody's getting laid. Spoilers ahead! More »

1:20 PM on Tue Sep 23 2008
By Annalee Newitz
9,565 views, 188 comments

Latest by MerrillGebronie: Heroes have an amazing first season to live up to. You may feel dissapointed from the beginning, but Tim Kring more »

igor review

Igor Explains the US Economy to Five-Year-Olds

In the kingdom of Malaria, where new CGI kids' flick Igor takes place, the weather has changed. The once-sunny farmlands are now shrouded in a permanent, toxic rainstorm and everyone has become poor. At least, until King Malbert comes along and reinvents the economy by instructing everyone to build evil machines they'll unleash on the rest of the world — unless the world pays them off. The world quakes in fear and showers Malaria with money. It's a wee liberal parable about the U.S. economy, whose industries pump toxins into the atmosphere and menace the world with high-tech weapons. And what will save the world from the nasty, bad U.S.? Hollywood show business! Spoilers and political allegory ahead . . . More »

5:31 PM on Sat Sep 20 2008
By Annalee Newitz
2,869 views, 25 comments

Latest by Ornament: are ya sure it isn't russia they're trying to depict? or india? more »

fringe

Last Night's Fringe Was More Torturous Than the Leaked Version

Despite protestations to the contrary, I persist in believing that the Fringe PR team deliberately leaked the spooky science show's 90 minute pilot a couple of months ago. Just so they could say things like, "The transmitted version of the pilot is totally different — you'll have to see how great it is now." No one knows how many of us saw the leaked pilot, but the ratings for last night's premiere are in and they are pretty meh. 9 million tuned in to learn all about the "pattern" and what it looks like to watch people melt (which was pretty cool actually). So how did the transmitted version stack up to the leaked version? We watched them side-by-side, and have the differences for you below. Spoilers ahead. More »

3:37 PM on Wed Sep 10 2008
By Annalee Newitz
8,903 views, 84 comments

Latest by emptee_head: It was his old lab, it wasn't some random lab in Harvard. And what exactly makes it seem like more »

anathem

Neal Stephenson's Tale of Two Planets

[ http://digg.com/api/diggthis.php?u=http://digg.com/space/Anathem_Neal_Stephenson_s_Tale_of_Two_Planets ] Neal Stephenson's new novel Anathem comes out next week, and there's something very timely about his tale of aliens on a parallel Earth whose inhabitants are locked into an occasionally-catastrophic conflict between scientific and religious institutions. The planet Arbre, which is very much like Earth in some ways, differs from our world one major respect. Its religious and scientific institutions are essentially reversed. Monks called the avout live ascetic lives studying science in gracious, ancient "maths," while the so called "saecular" world is populated with Deolators (god-worshipers) who are obsessed with religion and technology. Stephenson's world-building skills, honed by the exacting work he did on his recent Baroque Cycle trilogy, are at their best here. Anathem is that rarest of things: A stately novel of ideas packed with cool tech, terrific fight scenes, aliens, and even a little ESP. More »

5:30 PM on Thu Sep 4 2008
By Annalee Newitz
5,973 views, 34 comments

Latest by EltonCroesus: People come up through the labyrinth too. more »

review

Babylon AD: Yet Another Scifi Flick About the Virgin Mary

So we already know that Babylon AD director Mathieu Kassovitz has said that his own movie is horrible, but that didn't stop us from getting up at the crack of ass this morning and going to see a 10:20 AM show so we could bring you the scoop on this near-future actioner with Vin Diesel. There were no press screenings of this film — usually a bad sign. Though many reviewers blame the film's confusion-plus-explosions plot on the shit edit that Fox did of Kassovitz' film about future refugees, I think the problem with this movie is more than that. The problem is the fact that it's about the Virgin Mary. Spoilers ahead! More »

4:00 PM on Sat Aug 30 2008
By Annalee Newitz
8,657 views, 65 comments

Latest by PhilR8: I just saw this movie and, uh... what. the. fuck. I enjoyed it for the aforementioned "near-future worldbuilding" - more »

review

How Mad Can a Scientist Get?

You probably already knew that Nikola Tesla, who developed alternating current electricity, was so OCD that he couldn't eat food until he'd determined its exact mass. But did you know that Jack Whiteside Parsons, founder of NASA's Jet Propulsion Lab, was a Pagan who loved orgies? Or that Marie Curie, who discovered radium and coined the term "radioactive," suffered bouts of depression because as a woman she wasn't allowed to work as a professor even after she'd won two Nobel Prizes? This week you can delve into the lives (and madness) of well-known scientists with a new book from Daniel "How to Survive a Robot Uprising" Wilson and Anna C. Long, The Mad Scientist Hall of Fame. More »

2:40 PM on Tue Aug 19 2008
By Annalee Newitz
5,250 views, 33 comments

Latest by rovroman: Did Josef Mengele make the list? more »

review