ollywood loves time travel, but doesn't love solving the paradoxes and conundrums it generates. Temporal Anomalies does.
Charging in where screenwriters fear to tread, the site dissects movie after movie, pointing out flaws in the cinematic logic while at the same time trying to find some way for the events depicted to have happened. More often than not, this literary surgery involves some creative reworking of the movie's plot lines.
The site analyzes 21 time-travel movies, starting with James Cameron's classic Terminator and Terminator 2, continuing through the Back to the Future trilogy and culminating with modern films such as Frequency and Kate & Leopold. The site also looks at three Star Trek movies—The Voyage Home, Generations and First Contact—as well as a few less famous films like Flight of the Navigator and Peggy Sue Got Married. The movie writeups are exhaustive and entertaining, but they're not for the timid—the writing here could inspire days' worth of arguments over temporal mechanics.
"The Time Primer," which outlines the author's approach to time travel and defines the terms used throughout the site, is required reading for anyone visiting the site. "The Science of Time Travel," which takes a layman's look at modern theories of breaking the time barrier, is also worth a quick look.
— Kenneth Newquist
Site of the Week—November 4, 2002
ust now embarking on its second year on the Web, The Zone is a one-time print magazine that has reinvented itself in electronic form. In the process, it has become an invaluable source of in-depth information on the SF field, offering book and movie reviews, recent news, writer profiles—and just about anything else that can be distilled into a concise, well-written article.
A quick browse through The Zone's main page offers enough reading to suck in a visitor for hours: interviews with Ursula K. Le Guin, Jeanne Cavelos and Jeffrey Thomas, a profile of Jack Vance, a section on the worst SF films ever made (rated on the basis of toxicity) and more besides. By digging back into older issues, browsers can find a dense and gem-packed catalog of other offerings. Highlights include an article on the career of Lord of the Rings director Peter Jackson, an interview with Connie Willis and a season-by-season analysis of Buffy the Vampire Slayer.
The Zone also runs contests that allowing guests to win recently released DVDs, an exhaustive and offbeat links page, capsule comments on television programs and DVD/video releases and several top-10 lists, including a series wherein genre authors list their favorite 10 SF Novels. These shorter features are welcome additions to the more serious articles, making The Zone one of those pages truly worth visiting again and again.
— A.M. Dellamonica
Site of the Week—October 28, 2002
et me confess to a secret sin: I read encyclopedias for fun. Now, I know this vice is not to everyone's taste. However, I suspect that there are many more of my trivia- and factoid-devouring kind out there than is commonly assumed. And I know one fellow member of this species who is intent on sharing his vast hoard of knowledge with the rest of us. That man is Jess Nevins. Jess runs several sites where you can learn about the myriad fictional heroes created during the long history of popular literature. One site is devoted to Victorian exemplars. Another focuses on comic-book protagonists. But the one under examination today covers the years from the end of Victoria's reign to 1939.
Pulp and Adventure Heroes of the Pre-War Years is basically nothing more—and nothing less—than a mammoth online encyclopedia organized by character name. Click on a letter of the alphabet—the choices represented under each letter are arrayed nicely on the main page—and you are brought to the generous blocks of text detailing the history of everyone from Dusty Ayres to Zorro.
The mad fecundity of the pulpsters thus presented is astounding. The reader will be moved to a deep nostalgia for a time never personally experienced, when legions of fans eagerly awaited the next installment of, say, the adventures of Rafael Sabatini's Captain Blood. And, of course, the hokey absurdity of some characters provides plenty of laughs. How about "The Man with the Molten Face," whose prosthetic facial features could be altered—after a good hot soak—into a number of identities?
Finally, Nevins' links are outstanding. Often within an entry he provides buttons for reaching pages on the author in question or even entire e-texts. His master list of other pop-culture sites is astonishing as well. There's enough information here to croggle even Doc Savage!
— Paul Di Filippo
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