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By Thomas Anderson. That boy is our last hope...? Force Unleashed featured a few more Jedi and a whole other force-sensitive youth. Cover courtesy Amazon market. In this article, I will examine a phenomenon of writing in which stated absolutes become an unintended restriction on future storytelling. In many ways, this is a counterpart to an earlier article I wrote entitled “The Romulan Straitjacket” which focused on a similar facet but with a sense of time rather than space.

By Thomas Anderson. Well, not that sort of worldbuilding. (Logo from Alien franchise, copyright Disney; picture taken from Xenopedia.) The fantasy author Brandon Sanderson has become well-known for his advocacy of what he calls “Sanderson’s First Law (of Magic)”; that is, that an author's ability to solve conflict with magic is directly proportional to how well the reader understands said magic. In one sense, this is a manifesto against deus ex machina  and inventing new rule

By Thomas Anderson. The subject of our article, when he was Master of Trinity College, Cambridge in 1863; photograph taken by Ernest Edwards, courtesy wikimedia commons via the State Library of New South Wales. I’m aware that on Youtube nowadays there is an irritating prevalence of using the word “forgotten” (or “that you’ve never heard of”) in video titles, which is frequently not true. Possibly the worst case I saw was a video describing Vichy France as “the forgotten Nazi

By Thomas Anderson. Cover to the book, picture courtesy Amazon. This is the first article I’ve penned in my “Prequel Problems” series for quite a while, so it may be worth briefly recapping the purpose and goal behind these articles. As a voracious reader growing up, I was exposed to a number of examples of fiction (mostly children’s fiction) in which an author had to manage a fictional setting and character histories while releasing books in an anachronic order. The Chronicl

By Tom Anderson. The crew of Orville circa S1, image courtesy Amazon It’s been quite a while since I last penned an article in this...

By Thomas Anderson. Which unexpected famous figure lurks within...? (Image courtesy Amazon) ‘Paleonomism’ is a term I’ve just made up,...

By Thomas Anderson Not THAT Zeitgeist who died in the mid-2000s (and got better) - art by Mike Allred, from the cover of X-Force 116,...

By Tom Anderson. Blade Runner Spinner at the Peterson Museum in Los Angeles. This vehicle is in the SF section and not, alas, the...

By Tom Anderson. Picture courtesy Amazon. This entry in the Paleofuture article series, in which I look at classic works of science...

By Tom Anderson Artist impression of the planet Terminus. Picture courtesy Wikimedia Commons.     In a previous article , I discussed...

Review by Tom Anderson. Ringworld computer image. Geometrically correct according to Niven's dimensions. Picture courtesy Wikimedia...

By Tom Anderson Arthur C Clarke, 1965. Picture courtesy Wikimedia Commons. If you have not already read the first article in this series...

By Tom Anderson Older than the Editor. Picture courtesy Amazon. In the first part of this series, I discussed just why I had been...

By Tom Anderson The Jetsons, from Hanna-Barbera. Set in 2062. Is this what things will look like in 40 years time? Picture courtesy TV...

By Tom Anderson. If Agatha Christie were alive today, she'd turn in her grave at what Branagh did to Orient Express. Picture courtesy...

By Tom Anderson. How often does this man appear in Timelines of the 1970s and 1980s? Picture courtesy Wikimedia Commons. Although I have...

By Tom Anderson If they named it after the place, this could be a Los Alamos, a Hiroshima, or a Bikini. Picture courtesy Wikimedia...

By Tom Anderson An unexpected character, or Brother and Back Again. Picture courtesy One Wiki to Rule Them All. Many, perhaps most,...

By Tom Anderson. Filmed in Death Valley, so I'm told. Picture courtesy Wikimedia Commons. This topic may seem like a peculiar choice for...

By Tom Anderson Doesn't he look strange without the beard? Young Will Riker. Picture courtesy Star Trek Wiki. In my dedicated Star Trek...