

Category Archives: Science Fiction














ww1 horse, cavalry, gas mask, lance


One of the Best Examples Is Star Wars:







Imperial walker vs. a WW1 tank




Imperial Snowtroopers vs. WW1 machine gunners













House Atreides Officer vs. Imperial German Officer

We can also compare with some other officers and enlisted…















I will close with one last example.











Why Star Wars OT Appeals More To Men: Aesthetics

In Star Wars, the original trilogy, the ships, gear, and guns all had a no-nonsense gritty, used look.
It was the sort of aesthetic that was sure captivate male sensibilities.

Han Solo’s ship, the Milennium Falcon was no shiny new vessel, it was a beaten up, but functional tin can. Random protuding pipes, cables, electronics with the occasional dent or scorch mark say it all. What guy who’s ever worked on a car or electronics wouldn’t want his own Falcon?:

Millenium Falcon

And lets face it, the ships, military vehicles, artillery depicted in the OT tend to be a uniform unpainted gray. Why would anyone one paint them beyond necessary insignia or identification numbers? The rebels and imperials alike seem to care a whole lot more about going out and winning than making their military hardware look pretty.

One minor character distinguished himself merely by showing up with a beat up old suit of armor dented and scratched with the marks of many battles. As soon as viewers saw this masked man, they knew he must be a badass. Thus this character went on to become a major part of the Star Wars franchise:

Boba Fett Demotivational

Let’s compare now to the aesthetic of the new trilogy. One example should suffice to illustrate my point:

N-1 Starfighter

Not only is the ship bedecked in resplendent gold and silver, even its afterburners emit a soft fuschia glow that inpires fear in the enemy as it flies over a tropical blue gem of a planet that brings to mind beaches and drinks served with little umbrellas. Indeed the ship itself resembles some kind of colorful creature we’d be delighted to see while snorkeling in warm, tropical waters.

I will extend our inquiry to another franchise: The Elder Scrolls

The gritty, exotic look of Morrowind:

Balmora Streets

All around, in this town, we see chipped mud-plaster walls stained dark by years of smoke from lamps and cooking fires. Like Mos Eisley space port, the place feels genuinely lived in. The locals have a rangy, hungry look to them and ragged, slapped together armor and clothing that immediately tells us life around here isn’t easy. The aesthetic successfully drives in the fact we’re in a remote border province on the most visceral level.

Now for the polished and happy look of Oblivion:

oblivion screenshot elven ruin

To make my point, let’s compare the aesthetic to that of Lisa Frank, a line of notebooks and folders marketed to little girls:

Lisa Frank Penguin

Even as a guy charges at us with a bloodied sword we can’t help but bask in the serene glow of the bright cerulean afternoon and admire the bandit’s improbably spotless suit of elven armor. Truly a museum piece.
Yes, the soft glow and bright colors put us at ease even as he’s trying his best to kill us.
The graphics are technically superior but the aesthetic is inferior; it fails to make us feel the setting of the adventure at the gut level.

After all nothing says adventure for men like savage border outposts, uncharted settlements, nicked unadorned blades with a spotting of rust, sooty fireplaces in taverns, and hastily improvised hyperdrives.

Classic Tropes: The Red Shirt

“He’s dead, Jim.”

Never injured or even critically injured. Always dead outright. This has been the sorry fate of red-uniformed security officers in the Star Trek Universe. Even when the actual red shirts went out of style, you’d always know in shows such as Voyager: A new crew member shows up who we’ve never seen before on a ship that supposedly only contains 150 people. We know this character will either die on an away team or from an exploding control panel.

Red Shirt Pieta

Red Shirt Pieta

TV Tropes has long proven a favorite site of mine for ironic humor.
Some other fun entries.
Space Jews
Black Dude Dies First

You can look up favorite movies, games, books, and graphic novels to see a long list of all the tropes that apply.
Even better, you can find all kinds of stories about how the tropes have been ‘averted’ or ‘played straight’ in real life.

For every trope there are aversions.

Here’s a Red Shirt from real life.

Mr. Garibaldi

Mr. Garibaldi

Instead of getting instantly killed, he helped create the modern nation of Italy; a nation without precedent since the Roman Empire.

Even in the time of Rome’s power, a unified Italian peninsula was largely held together by force.
The Southern portion was distinct because much of the area had been populated by Greek settlements.
Indeed, modern day Southern Italy was known as ‘Greater Greece’ and Republican Rome had to fight a series of bitter wars against the Greek city states that held sway there.

It’s from these wars that we get the term, ‘Pyrrhic Victory.’

Our Place In The Cosmos

Frederik Pohl’s Gateway: The Parser Game

This is parser gaming at its best.

Inspired by some of the basic ideas in an(excellent) science fiction novel, it has a plot that includes virtual reality hacking, existential philosophy, and dangerous space exploration. Better yet, all the puzzles logically make sense if you think everything through.

The programmers thought of just about every command you could type in, especially the vulgar and violent ones. Finding these easter eggs is definitely part of the fun.

It can be downloaded for free here.

And it can be played using an emulator like DosBox

Dyson Sphere


Since then, other variant designs involving building an artificial structure or series of structures to encompass a star have been proposed in exploratory engineering or described in science fiction under the name “Dyson sphere”. These later proposals have not been limited to solar-power stations. Many involve habitation or industrial elements. Most fictional depictions describe a solid shell of matter enclosing a star, which is considered the least plausible variant of the idea (see below). Link

Sid Meier’s Alpha Centauri : Quotes From The Game


  • Academician Prokhor Zakharov, “Address to the Faculty”
Some would ask, how could a perfect God create a universe filled with so much that is evil. They have missed a greater conundrum: why would a perfect God create a universe at all?

  • Sister Miriam Godwinson, “But for the Grace of God”
  • Chairman Sheng-ji Yang, “Looking God in the Eye”
  • CEO Nwabudike Morgan “The Ethics of Greed”

Warhammer Fantasy Battle Report: Orcs vs. Skaven

%d bloggers like this: