racking the latest news not only on big-screen pictures but on television releases, too, Coming Soon is a natural gathering place for film fans wondering about anticipated films, programs or DVDs. Friendly in tone and exhaustive in its information-gathering, this site is a virtual library of data on upcoming media releases.
As its name suggests, Coming Soon whets the appetite of film fans with movie trailers, production stills, discussion forums and a movie database. It has links to news articles on both movies and television programs currently in production. Surfing to Superhero Hype allows visitors to track various famous superbeings as they travel—as they increasingly do—from comic books and graphic novels to live-action film and television projects. Want to know how many hours, minutes and seconds until the Hellboy movie is released? The answers on his fate, and that of every other film superhero, are here.
Other quirky sections of this Web page are the Weekend Warrior area, where Coming Soon predicts how well each week's newly released movies will do at the box office, and its Box Office Report, which has the actual numbers. The movie, TV and DVD reviews are informal in tone but packed with thought-provoking content; they also link up with discussion forums about each show in question. The interviews section has a daily audio clip that gives visitors a chance to hear about movies directly from the stars and directors who make them.
Where Coming Soon stands out from other Web sites covering the entertainment world is in its focus on time. This page not only knows what is going to happen, it knows when ... and the answers are freely available to anyone who cares to stop by.
— A.M. Dellamonica
Site of the Week—September 8, 2003
lternity.net serves as a nexus for fans of the defunct role-playing game Alternity, released in the mid-1990s and killed off a few years later by Wizards of the Coast to make way for
its new Star Wars d20 game.
Designed to provide rules for near- and far-future campaigns, Alternity's Gamemaster's Guide and Player's Handbook books were backed up by three campaign settings: the space opera Star*Drive, the X-Files-inspired Dark Matter and the post-apocalyptic Gamma World. Nowadays, the game is supported entirely by fan efforts, with Alternity.net having earned the title of "official fan site" from WotC.
It lives up to its designation: The site is crawling with information about the game. Neophytes would do well to visit the Downloads section first—there they can grab fast-play versions of the rules, an introduction to the Dark Matter campaign setting, and all-important character sheets. Long-time fans can also find a few treasures, such as the huge Warships supplement that WotC released as a PDF in the game's dying days.
Over in the "Resources" section, fans can discover all manner of tools to improve—or resurrect—their games. They are 40+ rules, nearly two dozen adventures, 50+ starships and numerous equipment, cybertech, weapon and vehicle write-ups. The "Projects" section lists numerous undertakings that fans are currently engaged in, while those desperate for a game can find players using the Online Gaming directory. Rounding out the site is a Gallery that holds numerous stellar maps, a few desktop images, and renderings of scenes, species and technology from the game; and the Books section, which lists all of the rule books and supplements released for the game.
— Ken Newquist
Site of the Week—September 2, 2003
ounded in 2105 (according to the "About Us" section of the Web page), Chronos Technologies will one day be a hotbed of scientific developments near and dear to an SF reader's heart: biotech, androids, medical nanotech and—most importantly—time travel. "Making Tomorrow's History Today" is its motto, and to that end the Chronos site offers a wealth of information on the theories surrounding time travel and the specifics of teleportation through the sixth dimension.
Writers of time-travel fiction often focus on the ramifications of meddling in past events without worrying overmuch about the mechanisms of the voyage to eras past. Chronos, on the other hand, is strongly concerned with hardware and logistics, discussing such technicalities as the placement of time gates in geologically stable regions, the required angle for a tachyon stream to meet a gravitic lens, and the need for time travelers to have an interspatial teleporter on hand once they have ventured into the past.
As for temporal paradoxes, Chronos has a single stern answer: They cannot occur. Rejecting free will, the site insists that "time travelers" are in fact visiting a parallel dimension: Any changes they make there will affect the future course of that timeline, but when the visitors returns home to their own dimension they will find no alteration. Their fate, Chronos insists, is predetermined.
Though its content is whimsically presented—check out the hilarious FAQ!—Chronos is utterly serious about time-travel theory. It presents a single, fully rounded view of the possibility of time travel. Offering this theory as a basis for philosophical and theoretical discussion, the site does make a few concessions to the realities of the present. For one, it provides a small series of links to time-travel movies, noting that though fictional treatments of the subject are scientifically flawed, they can be entertaining. For another, it has a series of site-related merchandise and goodies in its gift shop. No matter what its future holds, the Chronos site is definitely a highlight of the Web of today.
— A.M. Dellamonica
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