Science Fantasy Friday: Spock’s Hero’s Journey

The new film is out and reviews and spoilers can be found all over the net, but for the moment, Monomythic.com would like to step back and look at what it takes to make the hero of Star Trek.

Not Kirk, but Spock.

There are no spoilers for the J.J. Abrams Star Trek film here, but there is plenty of geek speak. A spoiler-filled analysis will come another day.

Science Fantasy Friday: Complete Idiot’s Guide to the Future

What better way to end a week of time travelers, pop star political leaders and consumerist dystopian futures than with a science fiction movie that ties all of them together.

Idiocracy paints a dismal, horrific (yet strangely hilarious) view of the future – and it is a future that seems to be looming just over the horizon.

Science Fantasy Friday: Real Heroes Wear Masks

Mexican cinema is rarely the first thing that comes to mind when thinking of classic sci-fi B-movies, but for several decades, that’s where the real heroes fought aliens, zombies, vampires and werewolves.

A real hero could be recognized immediately – not with his cleft chin or spit-curled hair, but with his mask.

They are the luchadores, the masked wrestlers gaining increasing fame (if not yet popularity) in the states thanks to Nacho Libre and Mucha Lucha, but for fans of these fighting heroes, one stands above all others: El Santo.

And he didn’t fight alone.

Science Fantasy Friday: Dr. Jekyll and the Fountain of Youth

“Jekyll had more than a father’s interest; Hyde had more than a son’s indifference.”

Robert Louis Stevenson’s The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde has been adapted a thousand times in a thousand ways, but what if the traditional view of Hyde as an ape-like beast is wrong?

Throughout the book Hyde is visibly younger than the elderly Jekyll. Had the good doctor discovered the fountain of youth?

Science Fantasy Friday: The Day the Master Stood Still

With the new film being released on DVD and Blu-Ray this week, packaged with the classic movie for good measure, it seems like a good time to look back at how Klaatu and Gort got started.

Reviews were mixed, but the complaint heard most often from sci-fi geeks is: it should never have been remade. True, the 1951 movie was a classic, but it wasn’t the original. That title falls to the suspense pulp Farewell to the Master, published eleven years earlier in Astounding Science Fiction.

I’m a fan of pulps, so I’ll go ahead and review it here… with spoilers.

Science Fantasy Friday: Frank vs. the Volcano

This was originally posted as an entry for the LJ community History Time and is reposted here for simplicity’s sake. Other than posts from obsolete websites (like Kick-Ass Robots) or personal blogs, very few entries for this site will be reposted from elsewhere.

Also, before it comes up, I know “science fantasy” is a term for a specific genre of speculative fiction, but the terms “sci fi” and “fantasy” are better known by the general public and “Speculative Fiction Friday” reminded me too much of Jim Cramer.

Before we begin, a few facts should be established.

First, Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley all but invented science fiction. Others had used science in stories before, and fantasy, at some level, had been around for centuries, but Shelley successfully turned science – hard science of the time – into the driving force behind the plot of her novel.

Second, vampires are not the century’s old romantic bloodsucking monsters they are commonly thought to be. Vampires were originally a series of rural legends about unhallowed dead causing trouble for the living. By “unhallowed” I mean “not properly buried” and by “trouble” I mean “causing bad luck” (crops failing or grandma falling sick, that kind of thing). They weren’t the vampires we think of today until John William Polidori wrote his penny dreadful about a “Vampyre” that stalked the elite of Europe by seducing women and promising power before causing pain and suffering in his victims.

That out of the way, I want to bring add a layer to these horror stories not often discussed: the birth of science fiction and the modern vampire might not have happened if a volcano didn’t explode on the other side of the planet.