The best Sci-Fi TV Show that I have ever watched was “Star Trek”. I was just a 10 year old boy growing when I started watching it. Star Trek really fired my imagination as a kid. I wanted to study Aeronautical Engineering and even become an Astronaut after watching Star Trek.

Captain James T. Kirk was the ultimate space adventurer and human being for me. He was ably supported by Mr. Spock. It was always a wonder to me in the 1980’s how an alien like Mr. Spock, with long sharp upwardly turned ears, could work well with a human being like Captain Kirk.

Every member of Federation Starship Enterprise was exciting in his or her own way.

With their tricorders (sort of a cross between smartphones, and pocket-sized fruit machines / ATM’s) in hand, they walk around on a planet’s surface, scanning for life. Many episodes showed how Mr. Spock and Captain Kirk, with their combined alien and human intelligence, avoided collision course between asteroids / flying planets / flying objects and Starship Enterprise. One episode even showed how Mr. Spock, the alien, had developed human feelings and almost fell in love with a woman crew member, Uhura.

I can also never forget how Captain Kirk and Dr. Leonard “Bones” McCoy would get beamed down onto planets and planetary stations in outer space. They would then get beamed back up into Starship Enterprise by Montgomery “Scotty” Scott. I simply loved the famous line of Captain Kirk, which was “Beam me up, Scotty”, and it was spoken into his remote mobile phone to Scotty who would be seated in Starship Enterprise.

Most of the things that I saw in the 1980’s TV show have become realities today. For example, most of the countries of the world are in the Space Exploration arena. We have sensor based doors which open when a person goes near the door like in Starship Enterprise. We have mobile phones, and we also have aliens visiting our Planet Earth in the form of Unidentified Flying Objects (UFO’s). To imagine that such great Sci-Fi ideas were conceived as early as 1966 and are a reality in 2010 is a wonder in itself.

The best Sci-Fi TV Show that I have ever watched was “Star Trek”. I was just a 10 year old boy growing when I started watching it. Star Trek really fired my imagination as a kid. I wanted to study Aeronautical Engineering and even become an Astronaut after watching Star Trek.

Captain James T. Kirk was the ultimate space adventurer and human being for me. He was ably supported by Mr. Spock. It was always a wonder to me in the 1980’s how an alien like Mr. Spock, with long sharp upwardly turned ears, could work well with a human being like Captain Kirk.

Every member of Federation Starship Enterprise was exciting in his or her own way.

With their tricorders (sort of a cross between smartphones, and pocket-sized fruit machines / ATM’s) in hand, they walk around on a planet’s surface, scanning for life. Many episodes showed how Mr. Spock and Captain Kirk, with their combined alien and human intelligence, avoided collision course between asteroids / flying planets / flying objects and Starship Enterprise. One episode even showed how Mr. Spock, the alien, had developed human feelings and almost fell in love with a woman crew member, Uhura.

I can also never forget how Captain Kirk and Dr. Leonard “Bones” McCoy would get beamed down onto planets and planetary stations in outer space. They would then get beamed back up into Starship Enterprise by Montgomery “Scotty” Scott. I simply loved the famous line of Captain Kirk, which was “Beam me up, Scotty”, and it was spoken into his remote mobile phone to Scotty who would be seated in Starship Enterprise.

Most of the things that I saw in the 1980’s TV show have become realities today. For example, most of the countries of the world are in the Space Exploration arena. We have sensor based doors which open when a person goes near the door like in Starship Enterprise. We have mobile phones, and we also have aliens visiting our Planet Earth in the form of Unidentified Flying Objects (UFO’s). To imagine that such great Sci-Fi ideas were conceived as early as 1966 and are a reality in 2010 is a wonder in itself.

There is a constant battle going on between what they represent (non –human beings) and what they actually once were: humans. The series presents a quite tense irony intertwined with parody, which wants to highlight that we, humans, most of times take everything for granted and live a superficial life.

The werewolf, the vampire and the ghost are all mythical representations that stand for the exact opposite of what human beings are. All the three characters represent beings with a much stronger conscience than most individuals have. John is a vampire who is torn between his cravings for blood and his conscience, which tells him to abandon his natural behavior, because it is just not right. The werewolf John is in a situation, which he hates with all his heart, but still, he needs to cope with it. The viewers can easily see that he is in a constant denial of the self, because he refers to his condition as a thing that occurs once in a month, and solve it by locking himself in a cage or going and living in camper vans in the woods for the night. Anna, the female protagonist of the show, is a ghost. She clearly cannot let go of the living, and she constantly revisits the place she lived in with her loved one.

The whole show can be interpreted as an allegory for real life: people struggling to make decisions, the battle between right and wrong, being afraid of certain situations, and so on. You can find in the series, just as in real life, comedy and drama connected sometimes in the most unusual manner. If you are up to watching something interesting and fresh, with good acting and witty dialogue, it is definitely a series worth to check out. Life is important, being human is important, so go learn these from the three characters.

The character of bob has grown in comparison to the earlier series. Keeping this in mind, the author has plotted the story in such a way that it gets darker with every chapter. The story is narrated by Bob, whose main work is to collect and file reports of his missions. The cases are so challenging that it is uncertain to guess whether he will survive through his mission or not.

Teapot is an inhabitant of a human body. The body, which is believed to be the eater of souls, is kept in the Laundry’s labs for experimentation purposes. Inspite of the dangers haunting the Laundry, Bob decides to work there in order to fight chaos and disorder. Unlike the earlier two books, the Full Memorandum mostly revolves around the secret office of Bob’s and the house shared by Mo and him. There are a number of excursions that involve haunted airplanes and abandoned railway tunnels, where a bystander is killed. The climax happens in the London Cemetery though. The staff for the Laundry is obtained by co-opting them instead of killing them and discovering the mathematics power.

It becomes utterly difficult to track who’s who as the story progresses and you are left guessing throughout. In the first book, Bob was noticed by the firm as a secret and clever hacker. The code of the time is Case Nightmare Green, which shows the high imagination level of Charles Stross.

A passionate fiction movie fan like me has been often disappointed and misled by the great deal of fanfare and trailers which come with promise of much thrill and excitement with every new movie. In reality these movies are insipid and offer very little by way of entertainment. When I visit some blog sites I find there are many more people who feel the same. Below are some movies which have lost something in way of content and good direction.

The First part of Transformers was a Michael Bay movie which came as a pleasant change to film fare in the 80s. It was action packed and also had a reasonably good storyline. However the Revenge of the fallen threw all the good points of the earlier one out of the window and retained only the bad points. Most of the action scenes were unnecessary and tended to confuse the viewer and throw him off the track.

The Planet of the Apes was another such movie which had no solid script. The characters were flat and uni dimensional. The characters human or otherwise were not worth a second glance. Another movie which is a total waste of time is the Aeon flux series. I would seriously rather have my nose reshaping then watch this again. This is an animated series with a watered down story and has no solid content in it whatsoever.

I however felt that Avatar was a movie which does not come into the category of uninteresting films. It is a real wonder how the film maker has two hundred separate pieces in their imagination and brings it together at the final moment. The camera work was brilliant and the direction was aggressive and was done with a eye to every minute detail.

Those were the days, before relationship issues and debt problems. Star Trek V1, first edition, Rodenberry pure. That guy knew what it meant to write sci-fi and he knew what people wanted. As a kid I just loved it pure and simple with Kirk, Spock and the guys encountering weird and wonderful aliens and planets on a weekly basis, each one leaving them on the edge of death and each time with them escaping. Obviously someone always died but I didn’t cotton on that it was always Mr X in his red shirt; only later would I appreciate that when Kirk assembled his away team would he ensure that Mr X came along to take the bullet. Or ray gun blast.

Come to think of it they seemed to have a never ending supply of Mr X’s and never so much gave a thought for the dozens of Mrs X’s out there getting a visit from Starship Command or whoever it was that sent a man round to deliver the bad news. Anyway as I got older I easily appreciated why the ladies on-board were all young, pretty and wearing mini skirts. Gene knew what was important in my weekly dose of space travel for sure and was catering for all ages of boys and men.

Add in those improbable solutions to everyday space issues such as laser weapons, long distance communicators in the hand and obviously transporter technology and I was all but drooling. Then lets ignore obvious major issues such as warp drive 0 to 4 times light speed in the blink of an eye without crushing everybody against the walls and we had everything I could want, not only in space travel entertainment, but in my life ahead. So what if I might end up working in an office, under the hood of a car or moving stuff from A to B in a warehouse, whilst watching Kirk and the gang I could dream of far away planets where no man had gone before, beautiful and strangely human like alien women and death defying feats of bravery.

So if anyone is listening up there and they have the password to the transporter… beam me up!

Elsa (Sarah Polley) and Clive (Adrien Brody) are two lovers of biochemistry who have cured every illness and ailment found in animals and they approach their financers to secure equity release and assist them in carrying out similar research for the human race too. This does not discourage Elsa in the least and after continual persistence, she manages to convince Clive too and together they begin their research in dark basement of the company’s lab. After much hard work, they come out with a creature, a female who has the legs of an ostrich and can grow wings. This creature, which they fondly call as Dren( the reverse of nerd), grows 10 times faster than a human. To avoid distraction, the three shift to a barn opposite Elsa’s mother’s home. Soon Dren becomes emotional, headstrong and intelligent.

The story takes a twist when Dren starts favoring a company that is against her own creators. And then, everything goes off the handle and leaves the audience off-guard. Most of the audience found the climax of the movie horrendous and disgusting but maybe that’s exactly what Natali wanted to achieve. It is the final scene that kept the audience waiting. So, if you are in a good mood and are looking for an interesting movie, Splice isn’t a bad choice after all.

The title of this post is quite the statement I am sure you will all agree. Even in the opinionated and divided world of Sci-Fi fandom, I haven’t met too many people who would disagree with me on this one. Let’s look at some of the Science Fiction movies to have graced us over the last ten years.

After the disappointment of Star Wars: The Phantom Menace, we then had to endure the tragically bad Attack of the Clones before finally getting a half decent movie in Revenge of the Sith. I am not sure why George Lucas chose to virtually destroy his Star Wars franchise this decade but he nearly succeeded. If it wasn’t for that third instalment then I am sure Science Fiction fans all over the world would have been in uproar.

There have also been some very good Science Fiction movies in the last ten years, don’t get me wrong. We have had Minority Report, starring Tom Cruise and War of the Worlds starring…Tom Cruise again. Both of these movies were good (minus Dakota Fanning’s relentless screaming in War of the Worlds) and are right up there with the best the decade has had to offer.

Moving on, we also had The Matrix sequels (both nowhere near as good as the original from 1999). We have also had Terminator 3 and Terminator Salvation, along with Transformers 1 and 2 (which seriously may as well have been about O2 & O2 XDA Phones for Sale). But let us be honest, none of these movies were particularly good and certainly wouldn’t rank alongside even Minority Report.

In 2009, we were gifted with two fantastic Science Fiction movies and one that was wildly over hyped (I am, of course, talking about Avatar). Star Trek and District 9 fought it out to be my favourite sci-fi movie of the last decade and it was the brilliance of the story, its themes and the way it was shot that won it for District 9.

On such a low budget in comparison to the other blockbusters and with a cast of nobodies, this movie was everything sci-fi is supposed to be and it was a welcome change from the cliched stories we are used to.

Most people aren’t aware of their carbon footprint. And up until recently I was one of them, so I am hardly one to preach! But, despite what many might think, it is actually quite easy to work out. You can do so by visiting a number of different websites and inputting your information (honestly, come on now), and this is something that is discussed over at Enigin Advice.

Now, I know that some of you may be thinking Why should I bother? The world will still keep going round if I don’t, so what’s the point? And the simple answer is yes, the world will still keep going round if you don’t bother, and yes, you are but one person and, finally, yes, you can’t exactly do a lot to save the planet on your own. But look at it like this: if we all thought that then nothing would change. Even the nightmarish carbon emitters that are China and the U.S. are made up of lots of individuals deciding to do or not do something, when it comes down to it. So, in fact, the power of the individual is great. By word of mouth and telling others to check their carbon footprint we can all see where we can make savings, and that has to be a good thing, right?

If you’re not convinced then look at it from this perspective: wasting energy is also wasting money. And you wouldn’t want to do that now, would you?

No, I thought not. Now get to it!

5. Lady Jessica is our fifth placed heroine. She, along with Paul Atreides are the only survivors of House Atreides after a sneak attack by the evil Baron Harkonnen. Fighting her emotions as a grieving widow, and staying strong to protect her son shows great courage. She not only battles with herself, but the vast desert landscapes around her, the rest of her Bene Gesserit sisterhood and the Harkonnen forces; a true heroine.

4. Coming in at number four is Eowyn of Rohan. She doesn’t appear all that much and she certainly isn’t one of the main characters. However, she can wield a blade, she secretly joins her uncle’s army against his orders and, together with a Hobbit, she takes down the most powerful servant of Sauron; The Witch King of Angmar. For that reason only, she deserves to be here.

3. Putting aside the outfit she wore as Jabba the Hutt’s slave (which should put her on this list on its own) Princess Leia Organa was instrumental in the victory that the Rebel Alliance had over the Empire. After watching her home planet’s destruction, you could forgive Leia for falling into a pit of despair. However, she brushed herself off, gathered a resistance and beat down the most powerful duo in the universe. Well done.

2. She took on the T-800 Terminator and she took on the Terminator T-1000 and she lived to tell the tale. Sarah Connor did things that most of mankind failed to do and that was take on a seemingly unstoppable cyborg and win. Sure she had some help, but for a mother with no training and just a pair of saucony running shoes, her own grit and determination to see her through, she deserves all the credit. John Connor should be very thankful he had her as a mother.

1. Number one on this list of the greatest heroines of sci fi and fantasy is Ellen Ripley. The often scantily clad, and low ranking, Warrant Officer of the Nostromo battled one of science fiction’s most fearsome enemies: the Alien. Without any conventional weapons Ripley manages to defeat the Alien and, along with the ship’s cat “Jones”, is the only survivor. Unlike anyone else in this list, she accomplished her achievement entirely on her own.