Tor.com content by

Ryan Britt

God Bless Pastiche! The 7 Best Non-Traditional Christmas Carols of Film and TV

If I had a pet reindeer, or any kind of creature that resembled a fawn or Bambi-style animal, I’d name it Dickens. Come on. How adorable would it be to have a little pet deer named Dickens? Here Dickens! Come have a sugar cube! That’s a good little Dickens. What’s your favorite story? What’s that you say, “A Christmas Carol?” Well, I don’t feel like reading to you, because you’re a little deer, so let’s watch a movie or a TV special instead. Whatyda say? And then, as a gift to Dickens, I would have to compile a list of movie and TV adaptations of Charles Dickens’s awesome book—A Christmas Carol—and I’d want those adaptations to be somehow a little bit different from their source material, because deer like stuff that’s new.

What are the best non-traditional versions of A Christmas Carol? These.

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The Man Who Demolished Boring Science Fiction: Alfred Bester

Thinking about telepaths when telepaths are in the room is hard because they know you’re thinking about them. This is why—on most days—I’m glad I never actually had the chance to meet science fiction legend Alfred Bester, because my thoughts about him would have been disgustingly gushing and I’m sure he would have heard those thoughts because he was likely a real deal telepath and I would have been embarrassed. I’m kidding. I’m super sad I didn’t get to meet him! (But he was probably a real telepath…)

Today would have been Bester’s 102nd birthday. He won the first Hugo award for a novel ever, and made everything in SF way more fun. Here’s why he’s still the best.

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Series: On This Day

Philip K. Dick Scanned Our Brains, Darkly

In his afterword to a 1977 paperback collection called The Best of Philip K. Dick, PKD writes about the notion of questioning reality. At one point, Dick says the world made “sense” to him:

“I used to dig in the garden, and there isn’t anything fantastic or ultradimensional about crab grass…unless you are a sf writer, in which case, pretty soon you’re viewing crabgrass with suspicion. What are its real motives? And who sent it in the first place? The question I always found myself asking was, What is it really?”

Looking back on his work today, on the 86th anniversary of Dick’s birthday, the escape from the conspiracy of the mundane is a concept that certainly dominates the oeuvre of perhaps the most famous science fiction author ever. And why not? Don’t we all wish our lives were a little more interesting, a little more fantastic than perhaps they are?

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Series: On This Day

Celebrating Arthur C. Clarke’s Odyssey

Today we mark what would have been the 97th birthday of the great Arthur C. Clarke. Often credited with making fantastic predictions in his science fiction that actually came true, Clarke is among the most recognized and celebrated authors of the previous century. Perhaps the hardest of “hard science fiction” writers, Clarke was the authority on futurism and concepts both mind-bending and fascinatingly plausible. Known best for the novel 2001: A Space Odyssey and the epic film of the same name, Arthur C. Clarke is probably the writer most responsible for making futuristic space travel look realistic in our mind’s eye.

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Series: On This Day

The Pros and Cons of That Star Trek Beyond Trailer

I needed help. Paramount put out a trailer for Star Trek Beyond, a movie that I think I kind of need to be good and evocative of Star Trek, and I thought it was the worst thing ever.

In flew Ryan Britt, noted Star Wars and geek culture expert, to assure me that the trailer wasn’t the worst thing ever. That there were, in fact, some good takeaways!

Being of two-and-a-half minds about everything, we thought we’d list out the pros and cons of the latest trailer for this thing we love called Star Trek. Because there’s truly a full spectrum of reaction here. So let’s consider the trailer beyond our own perspective!

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Why Peter Capaldi is the Über-Doctor

In Paul Cornell’s recent comic book series Doctor Who: Four Doctors, he has the 12th Doctor saying: “Posh Doctor and Baby Doctor seem to think I’m Scary Doctor.” The fact that this dialogue is in a Doctor Who comic book and not on the actual show is totally a crime, but it’s also immediately recognizable as being a legit Peter Capaldi quip—something he would definitely say if he was faced with both Matt Smith’s (Baby) and David Tennant’s (Posh) Doctors. But, with the ludicrously awesome one-two punch of this season’s finale—“Heaven Sent” and “Hell Bent”—Peter Capaldi’s Doctor isn’t just Scary Doctor or Angry Doctor or Aging-Rocker-Who-Wears-a-Hoodie-Doctor. Instead, he is the Every Doctor, all the Doctors all the time; the über-Doctor!

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Series: Doctor Who on Tor.com

Happy Birthday, Madeleine L’Engle!

Today marks the birthday of an author who forever changed the way we feel about time travel, alternate dimensions, and dark and stormy nights. Madeleine L’Engle was born on November 29th in New York City and started writing almost right away. Her first story was composed at age 8, and she went on to pen a universe of novels, poems, and non-fiction throughout her amazing and inspirational career.

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Series: On This Day

The Ghost of Hayden Christensen: Why Anakin MUST Appear in Episode VII

The very end of the super-duper 2004 special edition of Return of the Jedi finds Luke gazing out to see Obi-Wan smiling, Yoda smiling, Anakin smiling, and the audience freaking out. Instead of Sebastian Shaw as an old Anakin, Hayden Christensen suddenly shimmered into view, smirking awkwardly, complete with his big Jedi mullet. And the haters began to hate. But, now with Episode VII so close to release, there’s paradoxically one person I don’t think they can leave out, and that person is Hayden Christensen! Here’s why the ghost of Hayden must return!

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An Alternate History Primer: The Man in the High Castle

Some alternate universes would be fun to visit, like a universe where I was born as a shape-shifting unicorn. Or that other universe where cheese quesadillas are legally required to be free. But an alternate universe you probably don’t want to vacation in is depicted in Philip K. Dick’s novel The Man in the High Castle: a world where WWII went super-differently than we remember. (Spoiler alert: someone other than the Allies won.) Poised to officially launch as an Amazon TV series this Friday, now is the perfect time to revisit the totally classic science fiction novel that started it all. Here’s everything you need to know/remember about the novel version of The Man in the High Castle.

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Get Ready to Love Mark Gatiss

“Can we just sit here and watch this Spider-Man cartoon?” Mark Gatiss smiles slyly but it’s not clear if he’s completely kidding. We’re sitting on a couch in The Museum of the Moving Image in Queens, New York where a small retro-TV is playing an appropriately retro episode of Spider-Man and His Amazing Friends. “I love cartoons,” Gatiss tells me. “Did you ever see the old Star Trek cartoon? It’s brilliant. It’s basically like season four.”

The guy sitting next to me might look like Mycroft Holmes, but he barely sounds like him at all. This guy is softer, more childlike, more down to talk about whatever, so long as those things are James Bond, Sherlock Holmes, Doctor Who, superheroes, Star Trek… In short, if you meet Mark Gatiss, you want to be best friends with him instantly.

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Listen, Kurt Vonnegut Changed Your Life

Today would have been the 93rd birthday of beloved author Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. Throughout his career as a writer and a human being, Vonnegut shouldered many labels: sci-fi writer, satirist, humorist, humanist, political activist, and cranky old man. Luckily for us, he was all of those things and more.

But best of all, Kurt Vonnegut was a man who reminded us that our primary function on Earth is to “fart around, and don’t let anyone tell you any different.”

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Series: On This Day

The Spy Who Loved Clichés: Why Spectre Stumbles

In “Four Benches,” a play by Ethan Coen (of the Coen brothers) a worn-out British secret agent character bemoans that he can’t stand the “abstract concepts” his organization deals in because he’s left without “one single meaningful feeling word.” This could easily describe the entirety of Spectre, a new James Bond movie that while dismantling the great groundwork of its predecessor—Skyfall—also tries to remove meaning and feeling from every single scene.  And yet, somehow, it’s still marginally watchable.

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Lincoln Michel’s Upright Beasts Has Monsters Hiding in Every Page

There are a lot of analogies for why writing short stories is so difficult; but I think the image of someone constructing a jigsaw puzzle while totally unsure as to what the image is supposed to be is the most apt. To do this once in your life—write a killer short story—is a total miracle. But if you’re some kind deranged monster like Lincoln Michel, you can churn these puppies out in your sleep. And in Upright Beasts (his first collection) he mashes up every genre imaginable and packs his stories into a book that feels pregnant with other books.

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Series: Genre in the Mainstream

Lemony Snicket’s Why Is This Night Different From All Other Nights? is a Bittersweet Masterpiece

As a book critic, I’d say that few authors have the unique voice and quirky prose-styling of Daniel Handler. But as a reader and super-fan of both A Series of Unfortunate Events, and the newer series—All the Wrong Questions—I am convinced that the ability to casually break my heart is a dark super-power held only by Handler’s alter-ego: the author/fictional character known as Lemony Snicket.

And even though I know he’s not real, I’m weeping about Lemony Snicket right now. In his new book, the last in All the Wrong Questions—Why is this Night Different From All Other Nights? he’s really outdone himself.

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This Review Has Already Happened: Fox’s Minority Report

Despite supposedly being all about predicting the future, the 2002 film version of Minority Report is mostly about Tom Cruise running around. It was like he was jealous of Harrison Ford in The Fugitive and demanded that Steven Spielberg give him a movie with even more running plus cooler clothes. In fact, Minority Report the movie has such a cool aesthetic that Fox decided to base an entire TV show off of it.

How tired are you of hearing that such-and-such-show is a “procedural?” Yeah me too. But sorry! Minority Report the TV show is mostly a procedural with a weird dose of nostalgia for a movie that’s not really even all that classic.

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