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The fact that ProZD sounds exactly like Jason Alexander disturbs me greatly.

thought this was an odd choice for the new trailer

Original post by airlesscell

As a fan of alternate histories of various stripes, there’s nothing more disappointing that a story that imagines a world where history went differently, but almost everything is still exactly the same. The whole point of the concept is to have fun extrapolating the changes. On the subject of Beatles-themed alternate histories, Ian R. Macleod, one of my favorite sf/f authors working today, wrote a novella back in 1992 called “Snodgrass” which imagined Lennon leaving the Beatles in 1962 over a fight with a studio executive, only to spend the rest of his life being haunted by the road he never took. It was eventually adapted as a short drama a few years back with Ian Hart as a bitter Lennon in his fifties.

Can a Beatles Fan Believe in ‘Yesterday’?

Our resident hardcore Beatleologist on why this fantasy about a Fab Four-less world should have fixed its holes

… there’s no attempt to have fun with the Twilight Zone possibilities. There’s no humor about the “butterfly effect” in erasing the Beatles from the world they changed. It’s a parallel universe where Coldplay and Neutral Milk Hotel exist without the Fabs, and where all the men have longish haircuts that would have been unthinkable before the mop tops came along. As British critic Dorian Lynskey noted, “‘A world without the Beatles is a world that’s infinitely worse,’ says one character, in a film where a world without the Beatles is almost exactly the same.”

Yeah… I was about to make the argument that you can’t make a movie where everyone save one schlub “forgets”: the Beatles without re-imagining a musical climate in which the Beatles, arguably the biggest pop band of all time, nor their inevitable influence, never existed, but apparently this is too pedantic for Hollywood. 

Can and should! All those polar bears sitting around up there, thinking they’re better than me! I’ll settle their hash!!!!

Woof. I played my first game of Frostpunk this weekend, and I discovered I have no problems with founding a pseudoreligious cult of personality around myself to inspire a city of exiled 19th-century Londoners to keep working through a -150°C (-238°F) superblizzard. It’s not quite the same, I’ll admit, but I feel for ya.

Me @ The Last Of Us: Okay game, I’ve never met a Troy Baker-voiced character I actually liked. Ball’s in your court.

TLOS: challenge accepted

The mirror universe, transporter accidents, other parallel universes, time travel, cloning technology operated by unscrupulous doctors and scientists, the holodeck...the list goes on and on.

The “would you fuck your clone?” question is so uncomfortably real in Star Trek because of the Mirror Universe.

You know she had to do it to ‘em (by “them” I mean “the Teplans,” and by “it” I of course mean “virus-bomb their homeworld with super-HIV as punishment for rebellion, and also because it’s kinda funny”). She’s a real sweetheart, folks.

my new favorite timelines discourse is the recent critiques on the forums about this week’s new artwork, like how the diseased changeling founder’s flakes just don’t look quite flakey enough

“Order.

Kuvira is driven by a fierce desire to protect and guide the citizens of the Earth Kingdom and persistent on achieving national unity through the use of military force. She displays mastery in the use of metalbending, and also demonstrates considerable physical strength.” Art by KDEJ.

Where did this picture come from? It can’t be a player’s ship, since the game’s naming system won’t let you name a ship Enterprise, Defiant, or Voyager or use their registry numbers.

Enterprise B

Befitting my WWI obsession, I’d kill for a chocolate cake in the shape of a British Mark V. I want a goddamn rhomboid prism of cake, and I want it now.

I want a T-14 cake for my birthday sometime. I think the T-14 is among the more cake-like modern tanks, and also I am a Russian nationalist,

Tom Holt/K.J. Parker’s fantasy works do include some Byzantine names and allusions, but they tend to be rather mild. I think the Fencer trilogy (Colors in the Steel, Belly of the Bow, The Proof House) probably go the deepest into Byzantine allusions, with the first book being set in a massive Constantinople-like medieval city that is sacked by the end of the book. If you want to go the science-fiction route, Arkady Martine’s Teixcalaan books (currently just A Memory Called Empire and A Desolation Called Peace) rework the Byzantine Empire’s annexation of Armenia in the 11th century into a space opera setting.

Do you know of any (even halfway decent) fantasy set in a Byzantine setting? A Shadow and Bone set in Constantinople for example.

Sailing to Sarantium and its sequel Lord of Emperors, by Guy Gavriel Kay.