Star Trek Week: The Wrap-Up

I must confess, this past week was a lot more fun than I’d expected. We’ll have to do this again, and soon. Next week is New Book Release Week—Yes! After ages of incubation STUPEFYING STORIES #23 is at last beginning to peck its way out of its shell! So next week our primary posts will be all about the authors and stories that make up SS#23.But—I also must confess that it...

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The Star Trek Death Scene You Always Wanted to See

by Henry VogelCaptain Kirk looked at the colonists marching toward the landing party. And the marching was the problem. The colonists marched in lockstep with their eyes locked on Kirk and his crew. The ground quaked with each step as thousands of feet pounded the ground simultaneously, the tramp of their feet the only sound made by the mob. Kirk glanced at his landing party—all...

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Did the Federation Assimilate the Borg?

by Guy StewartThe Borg have creeped me out from day one. But it’s become more than just the creepiness of a TV show. There is a startling bit of the Borg right around some corner you’re likely to turn next week. When someone with a Bluetooth in their ear turns toward me and sweeps me with that little blue light, I get the chills. They make me think of a ...

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Script Treatment: “Wesley Crusher Returns Again”

FAX TRANSMITTAL TO: Gene Roddenberry, Paramount StudiosFROM: Bruce Bethke, Auteurs Sans FiertéDATE: 12 October 1988RE: ST:TNG Season 3 Script TreatmentWORKING TITLE: “Wesley Crusher Returns Again for the Last Time, No Kidding!”Okay Gene, here’s the outline. Returning from a mission dirtside, the Away Team discovers that a freak malfunction of the transporter contrast...

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And the best captain in Star Fleet is...

 by Guy StewartThe best captain in Star Fleet is not named Kirk or Picard?! What is this madness?!?!?!But seriously, consider...Captain, father, diplomat, religious figure? For three seasons, Benjamin Sisko held the rank of Captain, and was then promoted to Commander for the last three. In my humble opinion, Sisko blew away Kirk (both Shatner and Pine), Picard,...

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Gaming’s a Bitch, and Then You Die

by Pete Wood I’m going against the grain here, but I hate the Black Mirror episode, U.S.S. Callister. Fans love it. IMDB gives it an 8.3 out of 10, the same rating as Citizen Kane. The television industry loved it. It snagged four Emmy awards in 2018 from seven nominations. It won for best television movie, as well as writing, editing, and sound ...

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It’s Star Trek Week!

To boldly go to exactly the same place we’ve been going to for the past 55 years... A few years back we were at Dragon*Con, where among other things they had a world’s record gathering of nearly 600 people in Star Trek costumes.Six hundred people. That’s probably more people than ever had speaking parts in the original series, the spinoff series, and all the movies combined....

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Review: The Day of the Triffids

We’re going to close out WE’RE DOOMED! Week by putting in a plug for one of my all-time personal favorite end-of-the-world stories, John Wyndham’s The Day of the Triffids. No, not any of the movies ostensibly based on it. I’m talking about the original novel. The movies are the problem. Most of us know this story from either the 1962 British movie or one of the many...

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Movie Review: The Midnight Sky

Usually it’s like pulling teeth to get fresh blog content. This time, though, both Guy Stewart and Pete Wood were champing at the bit to write reviews of this movie. Rather than choose between them, I thought, “Why not both?” Guy is an old sci-fi hand who’s best known for his stories in ANALOG, and is someone who’s been part of the Stupefying Stories crew since before...

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Just Kidding. We’re Doomed After All.

In science fiction there has always been a profound tension between utopia and dystopia. This tension pre-dates Hugo Gernsback’s invention of the term “science fiction” by a considerable margin. If you were to go plodding back through the wastelands of 19th Century popular literature, you would find a lot of examples of utopian science fiction, and most of it would be...

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We’re Not Doomed?

Thinking further on it: perhaps the critical qualifier here is almost. This could be one of the key ways in which SF differs from all other literary forms. Not only does it afford the writer the opportunity to posit a deity-free Eschaton, thus eliminating the need to follow the script laid out in Revelations, it also offers the possibility of a survivable Apocalypse, which...

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We’re Doomed!

It’s the stereotypical post-WWII sci-fi story. The human race has been wiped out by a planetary catastrophe. The sole survivors are an American astronaut and a Soviet cosmonaut, both in orbit in their separate spaceships. Diminishing oxygen supplies force them both to land on some remote tropical island paradise that’s the only place left untouched by the disaster,...

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Movie Review: The Thing, by Pete Wood

Or more properly, The Thing about John Carpenter’s Biggest Misfire. I love John Carpenter movies. The director’s unorthodox characters are smart and resourceful and act logically in extraordinary situations. Convict Snake Plissken (Kurt Russell) in Escape from New York, Teenage babysitter Laurie (Jamie Lee Curtis) in the original Halloween, and Roddy Piper’s homeless drifter...

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Talking Shop • Getting Down to Work

 Q: An aspiring writer asks, “How do you know when you’re ready to begin writing your story? I know my general theme. I have a plot outline with a few major holes I haven’t figured out yet. I’ve written extensive character bios for all my main characters and character sketches for all the minor ones, and have written a detailed description of the setting and its history....

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