This is one of those movies that’s difficult for me. On the one hand, it’s mind-numbingly boring. It’s a poorly made movie in pretty much every way the quality of a movie can be judged. On the other hand, it’s a movie that’s terrible in a way that makes for pleasant background noise, like a song you would never buy but can deal with when it comes on the radio (radios are what we listened to before mp3 players). Movies like this existed primarily to give couples something to make out during at the drive-in, and judged by that criteria, well, The Incredible Petrified World is definitely a movie during which you’d rather do something else besides watch it. Whether that’s necking with your sweetheart or cleaning the toilet, there’s nothing wrong with having The Incredible Petrified World playing in the background.

Larry Buchanan is no stranger here at Teleport City. Not too many years ago, the B-Masters Cabal dedicated a round table theme to the film maker, celebrating his ability to take a small budget and amateur actors and turn them into a movie that looks like it had an even smaller budget and actors who were even worse than amateurs. The reason we know him, for the most part, is because in the 1960s, American International Pictures needed some quick and dirty filler for some open broadcast television slots. They hired Larry Buchanan to crank out a bunch of color remakes of famous old AIP movies. Thus we get movies like Zontar, The Thing from Venus, a remake of AIP’s earlier It Conquered the World.

I decided that it was time to revisit Dune, especially since, regardless of my recollection or lack of, I never finished the series. But, of course, I figured that if I was going to read/re-read Dune, I was going to reread all of it. And that meant starting at the narrative’s chronological beginning — in other words, starting with the books written by Frank’s son, Brian, and his partner, Kevin Anderson.

Now that I’ve finished the entire five-book run, I can look back with some amusement at how lukewarm my reaction tot he first book was, versus how much I like the series as a whole. This is, at least in part, because each book just barely works as it’s own self-contained story. The series is much more effective when you regard it as a single book that, in deference to considerations about someone’s ability to cart around a sprawling 2,000 page cube, has been split into easier to digest volumes.

I was surprised by Neon City. I didn’t expect much from it, but it really entertained me. I like sci-fi films that have nothing to say, and I like sci-fi films that are so preposterously ham-fisted with what they have to say that it becomes absurd. Neon City is the rare sci-fi film that has a little to say and says it well. Not a whole lot, but just enough to give it that extra bit of depth. Mad Max was really the opening salvo in the Reagan era post-apocalypse boom, even though it’s more outrageous sequel became the template. It’s debatable whether or not Neon City is the last film in the trend, but regardless, it’s fitting that it would be among the last and is, in spirit so much more similar to Mad Max than it is Road Warrior.

There was a time, starting in the 1970s with funk and overflowing into the nascent hip hop scene, when people really liked singing about outer space and the future. Whether it was Parliament and Funkadelic dressing up like outer space super heroes (plus a guy in a diaper), The Jonzun Crew’s Elizabethan space dandy look, Earth Wind and Fire fighting robots in a post apocalyptic future, or Sun Ra creating an entire, elaborate personal mythology involving outer space, alternate universes, Atlantic, and Egypt, the pervading sentiment was that one day, black people would pack up in a bunch of UFOs and get the hell off this shitty planet and go somewhere way more awesome. If they had to wear silver pyramids on their heads to do it… well, everyone has to make sacrifices.

And if there was one bone I’d pick with Neutron vs. The Death Robots, it would be that one: That the predictability of Neutron showing up — completely without explanation — whenever peril arises ends up robbing the film to some extent of drama and suspense. In a couple of cases, Neutron arrives so swiftly on the heels of the Death Robots that we don’t even have time to register the threat. On the other hand, though, I think that this is in part a result of the film’s approach to action being more about velocity than build-up, and scenes such as those certainly do contribute to an air of breathless excitement — almost as if we are watching a story projected directly from the brain of a sugar-addled eight-year-old boy who’s caught up in the excitement of recounting the action of the cartoon he’s just watched.

Together, the two novels weave the origin story of Miles Vorkosigan, who would become the central figure in the author’s long-running “Vorkosigan Saga.” I had a blast reading them, and they’ve gotten me excited about continuing my journey through the saga. next up is another two-novel ominbus, Young Miles. Really looking forward to it. The Vorkosigan Saga is shaping up to be one of my all-time favorites, a perfect blend of expert character writing and two-fisted romantic adventure.

The majority of the book is dedicated to exploring the relationship between humans and Moties as they try to feel each other out, but the lack of physical action never translates into tedium. The exploration is thoroughly fascinating. By the time the action kicks in, we’ve grow to like both sides so much that it greatly intensifies the reaction to the sense of impending doom that hovers over everything. The sequence in which the MacArthur is evacuated and one of the characters, a space trader named Horace Hussein Bury who is suspected of being involved with rebels, makes a terrifying discovery about the spacesuit evacuating behind him is riveting. If you’re looking for a novel that combines thoughtfulness with action, The Mote in God’s Eye has withstood the test of time very well. This is science fiction at its best.

Ah, the shame of the B-masters… and my dirty little secret is that I had not ever seen a Santo film. I’d seen a couple of Mexican wrestling films, but never one with the big silver masked guy. Now I have an excuse for this… Australia is a very multicultural society but amongst its diversified populace there aren’t many Mexicans. It’s funny, you can walk down a small shopping strip and find strange little shops that hire out Indian, Chinese, Italian, or Greek movies, or even bootlegs of the latest cinematic offerings, but Mexican films…nada!

Neuromancer represents a whole host of things for me, and I’ll start off with the negative. This is nothing negative about the book, mind you, but rather about myself. I read Neuromancer. I read it enthusiastically, devoured every word , and fell in love not so much with the story, which was good, but with William Gibson’s razor-sharp acumen with the written word, with his style, and above all, with his ability to articulately describe sensations and scenes in ways no one had ever thought of, and yet made absolute and perfect sense and conveyed exactly certain feelings and visions that could not, it would seem, ever have been described any other way. At least not effectively. And yet, despite my unbridled passion for the book, when I started talking about it to someone a few months ago, I discovered that all I had were vague impressions.

There’s considerably more to A Fire Upon the Deep than I’ve summarized here. After all, it’s several hundred pages long, and the story covers millions of light years and multiple planets. Vinge writes a mix of space opera — what we’d call action-adventure — and hard science fiction — which is concerned with creating and describing believable, technically detailed societies and science. The two styles of science fiction don’t always meet, and when they do, it’s not always pretty. But Vinge nails it, resulting in a book that shifts seamlessly between galaxy-spanning adventure, philosophy, and scientific detail.