Cyborg Assassins I Have Known

I'm currently reading and enjoying the novel Soon I Will Be Invincible by Austin Grossman. I bought the book because of the opening chapter, "Foiled Again," narrated by an incarcerated super-villain named Dr. Impossible. It is unarguably in the vein of Dr. Horrible's Sing-Along Blog, and (for me at least) that's a good thing. The other half of the narrative is from the point of view of an ex-government cyborg special agent who is trying to find her place in the world after beating the crap out of a team mate who made the mistake of speculating within ear shot just how much of her anatomy might be original parts. As I mentioned last year around this time, I enjoy a long (albeit wary) friendship with an android kill-bot known as cs10. She gets extremely cross when I don't pass on good reads as soon as I find them, and since she sometimes scans this blog, and since this novel prominently features a cyborg assassin as a principal character, and since making cs10 "extremely cross" can have dire consequences, I am mentioning the book right now, before I have even finished it.

(Special thanks to Forbidden Planet International, from whom I snagged an image of the UK edition of the book, which is waaay cooler than the American cover.)

Destination Moon

Just wanted to plug Moon, a science fiction film that is making the independent theater circuit. For those who like their science fiction carefully-paced and cerebral (think 2001), this is a movie for you. The film is full of my favorite kind of special effects—invisible ones. There is a lot of very clever camera work and computer graphics, but their purpose is to support the story, not "wow" the viewer.

I am deliberately abstaining from including links to the movie's website, as I think the trailer and the synopsis reveal more than most people would want to know. If you like the paranoid and claustrophobic (but very human) films of such directors as Stanley Kubrick and Ridley Scott, then just go see the movie.

Trust me.