m. c. de marco

Jon Evans at Tor.com explains some of the South African cultural references in District 9:

District Six. A famous ghetto in Cape Town, always South Africa’s most liberal city, in which people of all races coexisted harmoniously even during the apartheid years. In the 1970s, more than 60,000 people were forcibly removed from the district and resettled elsewhere, on the grounds that interracial interaction bred conflict.

Purple Pawn has a list of Star Trek-inspired games, just in time for the movie. Unfortunately they’re mostly wargames, but a few RPGs came up in the comments.

Michael Burstein reviews the new Star Trek movie:

The obvious question: is the new re-envisioning of the old characters worth the wiping out of decades of established continuity?

The answer is an unqualified yes. By letting the audience know that the franchise is starting over, the filmmakers have managed to create a film that is both appealing to diehard fans and accessible to people coming to Star Trek for the first time.

Via Daring Fireball: the Iconfactory has some free Star Trek icons up in honor of the forthcoming movie. Get your phasers while they last…

Via Universal Hub: derspatchel posts mini-reviews of all the movies scheduled for this year’s Sci-Fi Marathon at the Somerville Theater the thing people do instead of (or after) Boskone. The 34th annual marathon will be happening on President’s Day weekend, February 15th and 16th.

Also via FireflyFans: Serenity, the Firefly movie, will be showing on the SciFi Channel Saturday, January 3rd at 9pm.

I’ve been wanting to see Fido (rated R for “zombie-related violence”) for a while. I was not disappointed in this cross between Shaun of the Dead and Lassie, although the reviews at Rotten Tomatoes were mixed and heavy with allegations that the movie is one idea stretched too far.

That one idea is the zombie control collar. In a technicolor alternate 1950s, space radiation raises the dead and the terrible Zombie War pushes them back down again. Like WWII, the Zombie War leads to peace and prosperity for the survivors, safe behind their chain-link Iron Curtain, with zombie maids, butlers, and gardeners for all. But whenever someone dies of natural causes or a tame zombie’s collar malfunctions, the traditional cheesy carnage ensues.