A little over a year ago, we brought you a roundup of great Science Fiction & Fantasy classics available on the web. The free collection included everything from Aldous Huxley reading a dramatized version of Brave New World, to a BBC radio broadcast of Isaac Asimov’s influential Foundation Trilogy, to an audiobook version of C.S.

Starting in the 1960s, William Shatner, riding high on his Star Trek fame, began his idiosyncratic musical career. With his 1968 concept album, The Transformed Man, the actor gave us the first taste of his musical schtick. He wouldn’t sing songs. He would speak them, often in a melodramatic, exaggerated fashion.

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Last week we featured studio-executive notes on Blade Runner. “This movie gets worse every screening,” they said. “Deadly dull,”  they said. “More tits,” they said.

Growing up, I didn’t think about all the individual qualities that make a great movie. I just thought of Blade Runner. Whatever Ridley Scott’s 1982 adaptation of Philip K. Dick’s Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep had, it made for high cinematic quality indeed.

Although he died when he was only 53 years old, Philip K. Dick (1928 – 1982) published 44 novels and 121 short stories during his lifetime and solidified his position as the most literary of science fiction writers.

Sure, creators of television’s disposable sitcoms and game shows have to sell their wares, and strenuously, to network executives.

If his goal is to be taken seriously, William Shatner hasn’t always been his own best friend. His covers of pop hits launched a whole mini-genre of unintentionally bad celebrity recordings.

What if the very thing that made you feel crazy happy also made you smarter? That’s the question underlying the work of the Institute for Centrifugal Research, where scientists believe that spinning people around at a sufficiently high G-force will solve “even the trickiest challenges confronting mankind.”
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Back in July 2011, Neil de Grasse Tyson, our favorite living physicist, spent time with Nichelle Nichols, who played Lt. Uhura on the original Star Trek series (1966-1969). During the days when African-Americans were still fighting for legal equality in America, her role took on special importance.

You may remember In Search Of…, the television documentary series of the late seventies and early eighties that went after such obscure objects of fascination as the Loch Ness Monster, ancient aviators, the Dead Sea Scrolls, and “the coming ice age.