I have family in town this week, which is always a lot of fun, but it means computer time has been available in inverse proportion to the availability of wondering why buses are so late. Also late is this roundup of stuff that happened much earlier in the week!
First up: my latest recap for Turn, “Eternity How Long”, which is another solid episode in which the few and the powerful engage community scapegoats to see how far they can push everyone before they break. (Answer: farther than you think, always.) It’s nicely cynical, and I feel like the show is getting stronger the more it concentrates on the community dynamics and parallels, which is good news for the series. It’s not great news for me, as its slow burn and muddy time slot mean it might not be at AV Club much longer. (If you love it, now’s the time to let them know. If not, I might still continue to check in on it here, particularly if they manage to handle Abraham and Mary’s relationship without sidelining her any more. If they sideline her I’ll probably also be taking notes, they’ll just be angrier.)
Second up: It doesn’t take much to get me to wax romantic about near space and its mythical narrative functions. Near space is so beautiful, so tantalizingly within reach yet so deeply unknown, that movies almost unanimously agree it’s so meaningful just to be there that you wouldn’t even mind the horrible death that probably awaits you if you’re in a movie about near space. Particularly in the last few years, as the possibility of space travel becomes increasingly uncertain, fictional space has become a hot topic. At Strange Horizons this month, I talk a little about the state of near-future space travel, both in the real world and in recent cinema, in which space is more often an environment of great focus than just a medium of transit (though the title invokes a franchise in which space is an open sea, not a rocky shore). “The Final Frontier:The Beautiful Fatalism of Near Space” is up now.
Source:
http://ift.tt/1mhPpOT