Word: sci
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...York shows provide classic entertainment. Prom Queens is a way-too-familiar pastiche of '50s high school intrigue and sci-fi frissons; it plays like Little Shop of Grease. Hasselfree's The Edge of the Knife, with a soap-opera setting, gets most of its humor from the audience; participants are asked to guess the murderer's identity and motive. A bit higher up the food chain, Forever Plaid uses the singers' plangent harmonics to camouflage a thin book. And you need a doctorate in Broadway shows and lore to get all the jokes in the new edition of Forbidden...
Like one of King's long-winded novels, Golden Years takes its sweet time unfolding. But the result is unusually dense and evocative TV drama. At times the show recalls another TV excursion into paranoid sci-fi: The Prisoner. That short-lived cult hit came and went during the summer...
KURT VONNEGUT'S MONKEY HOUSE (Showtime, May 15 and 20). Three adaptations of short stories by the sci-fi fabulist. Hardly first-rate Vonnegut (more like second-rate Rod Serling), but more fun than most anything else on TV this month...
Book Publishing: Scientology mischiefmaking has even moved to the book industry. Since 1985 at least a dozen Hubbard books, printed by a church company, have made best-seller lists. They range from a 5,000-page sci-fi decology (Black Genesis, The Enemy Within, An Alien Affair) to the 40-year-old Dianetics. In 1988 the trade publication Publishers Weekly awarded the dead author a plaque commemorating the appearance of Dianetics on its best-seller list for 100 consecutive weeks...
...strong a case for the late as for the early Ernst. Some of the sculpture of his post-1939 years was remarkable -- especially the big totemic Capricorn, 1948 -- but his apocalyptic paintings, like the vision of creepy, fungal disaster recorded in Europe After the Rain, 1940-42, look like sci-fi cliche. By the '50s he was thinking illustratively rather than pictorially. To some extent he always had, but now the visions were more diffuse, and the paintings of his last decade (he died in 1976) are feebly hermetic. No matter. He was always a painter for the young...