ary Westfahl is a well-known scholar and critic in the science-fiction field. With regular columns in Interzone magazine, among other venues, he has proven that he can lay down the critical law in a scintillating fashion on writers from Robert Heinlein to Harlan Ellison. What might be less advertised about the man is that he's an expert on SF films as well. And as I can personally testify, from hearing him deliver a speech on Japanese monster movies, his sharp wit and clever phrasings make listening to what he has to say sometimes more enjoyable than watching the actual films under discussion.
Now Web surfers can partake of Westfahl's pithy observations and sonorous prose stylings by visiting Gary Westfahl's Biographical Encyclopedia of Science Fiction Film. This text-only site contains nearly 100 entries, arranged alphabetically by name, on a variety of folks associated with the SF cinema, from writers and actors and directors to fans and critics. (And more are being added all the time, as Westfahl's busy schedule allows.) Westfahl offers an overview of each person's career, as well as salient moments from their on-screen and off-screen lives. And the best part is, like any critic worth his salt, he's determinedly, wonderfully opinionated. Consider this line from the Nick Adams entry: "Once you link together the phrases 'handsome young actor,' 'absolutely no talent' and 'briefly famous,' it is almost inevitable that 'recurring star of bad science-fiction movies' will be added to the string."
But there's more than just clever dissing at play here. Westfahl comes up with tons of valuable insights as well. Take this one into the talent of minor writer Jerry Sohl: "Screenwriter Sohl fully recognized that he was no good, a midget struggling to stay afloat in a big man's game; and he could occasionally exploit that sense of his own inadequacy to produce scenarios that exhibited, if not talent, a gleeful childishness ... " It's these kinds of apercus that will keep you glued to the screen at Westfahl's intriguing encyclopedia.
— Paul Di Filippo
Site of the Week—November 18, 2002
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
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