Somewhere in the Doctor Who production offices, deep within the BBC Wales complex (if there is such a place — go with me here) there is surely a list of “Stories Not to Pitch Us.” Nearly all serials have a list like this, consisting of stories ideas that are unsuitable because they change the lead [...]

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I love (and write) science fiction, but there are a bunch of things that show up a lot in SF movies, novels that have become such a part of the furniture of the genre that nobody bothers to ask whether they make any sense. An unquestioned assumption is not necessarily something that’s implausible or impossible [...]

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Last Sunday’s episode of For Better or For Worse presents an interesting paradox: the punchline involved John, the husband,writing on a dollar bill, but Canada (where the strip is set) did away with dollar bills in favour of coins in 1987. FBOFW true believers will, of course, remember that creator Lynn Johnston re-booted the strip [...]

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Two things happened to me recently that dovetailed in an odd way: first, I broke my arm in a bicycle accident; second, I picked up volumes 1-6 of Marvel’s Essential X-Men books for a very reasonable price. The upshot of the first event was that I had to have a metal plate and screws attached [...]

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(Spoilers follow, I guess) I finally got a chance to see Inception a couple of days ago and while I enjoyed it, there were a few things that puzzled me. Not that the movie was confusing — honestly, one of its bigger flaws was that it often seemed to feel the need to spell things [...]

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I had an interesting experience this weekend at a yard sale on my street. While digging through a bin full of kids’ clothes in hopes of finding some for my two-year-old son, I had a Spider-Man t-shirt thrust into my hands. “Trust me,” said the father of the boy whose old toys and clothes were [...]

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Some some of you may have heard that story about the venerable Canadian history magazine The Beaver changing its name because of the confusion it caused over exactly what kind of magazine it was, and apparently also because a lot of school Internet filters blocked it. It was a funny enough story that even the [...]

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Well, it was inevitable: US politicians are using the recent blizzard in Washington DC as proof that global warming doesn’t exist. I’m going to pass over this for now, save to mention in passing the strong resemblance between climate change denialists and creationists in their tendency to seize on any evidence against the other position [...]

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As we await the airing of the first episode of Lost’s final season, our minds naturally drift back to other, similar experiences… other times we’ve seen the final seasons and episodes of complex, episodic shows… final episodes which often sucked. Like Battlestar Galactica. Shows like Lost and BSG (my fingers are getting tired) have a [...]

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So, having just heard that they’re making a movie of Eagle of the Ninth – which when I had to read it in Grade Six I though was the coolest book ever – I fully expect every other book I have ever had to read for school to be adapted to the screen, post-haste, starting [...]

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Retrospectives, whether of a year, decade or century, are really predictions: what willl still be appreciated in ten years or longer? What will history forget, and what will it view kindly? With that in mind, I’m going to nominate the past ten years as the decade non-fiction comics went mainstream. So far as the last [...]

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In an act of shameless self-promotion, I’ve posted my short story “The Coldest War” (which originally appeared in the February 2009 issue of Asimov’s Science Fiction) online here. If you’re a Canadian citizen (not necessarily living in Canada) or a permanent resident, you can follow the handy-dandy links to the Aurora Awards nomination page once [...]

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So far the revival of V has been fairly reliably dull and nonsensical, but this week’s episode brought the first throw-the-remote moment when Our Heroes discover that a key part of the alien invaders’ plan is… flu shots. In what may be the most needlessly convoluted plan in the history of convoluted plans, the Visitors, [...]

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Last week, as you may have heard, Fox cancelled Dollhouse. Also last week, as you probably didn’t hear, whatever network aired Hank cancelled it too. Neither was a surprise: they were both solidly bottom-of-the barrel performers — Dollhouse was considered a worse bet than reruns of House to run during Sweeps Week, while Hank was [...]

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You can read an interview I did with Larry Gonick, author of (among many other books) The Cartoon History of the Universe, over at the Talk Media Blog.

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