hough it may be difficult for younger fans to imagine, there was a period not terribly long ago when the idea of traveling to the moon, or even into outer space, was considered science fiction. For children growing up at that time, the sparks that frequently ignited an interest in SF—and, more
often than not, real-life science, too—were colorful books filled with drawings of complex space stations and futuristic spaceships. Dreams of Space chronicles those inspiring images, focusing not on the juvenile fiction literature of the day, but rather the rosy forecasts of humanity's imminent conquest of the cosmos.
The site is divided into five sections, highlighting both cover art and internal graphics. "Imagination" showcases books published prior to 1949, with "Preflight" looking at works issued from 1949 to 1953 and "Countdown" concentrating on volumes printed between 1954 and 1956. Tomes from the dawn of the Space Age (i.e., 1957 to 1960) are covered in "Liftoff," while publications from 1961 through 1974 are brought to light in "Flight and Touchdown." Seminal titles like The Conquest of Space (1949) and The First Book of Space Travel (1953) are featured, along with dozens of lesser-known yet equally inspired illustrations. Among these relatively uncelebrated images are striking black-and-white drawings from By Rocket to the Moon (1931), the lush designs of Space Flight: The Coming Exploration of the Universe (1959) and a pair of sketches from The
Next 50 Years on the Moon (1974) that are optimistically captioned "We're into the 1980s or perhaps the early 1990s. Actual construction of a permanent lunar colony has begun."
Book-jacket text excerpts and a short history of outer-space art are also available, plus two separate indexes, one presenting thumbnail biographies of important artists and illustrators and another offering information on various authors and editors. Maintained by John Sisson, Dreams of Space is a fascinating site that ingeniously documents how imagery that was once kid stuff ultimately became, as Carl Sagan might have said, true "starstuff."
— Jeff Berkwits
Site of the Week—November 11, 2002
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
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