EUtopias and Other Futures: A European Journal of Science Fiction

By Péter MARTON ** Join the  European Science Fiction group  on Facebook for related discussions. ** To answer the question raised in the title: I have no idea, other than: "why not." (I did it, anyway.) (Also, keep in mind that in Russia, Christmas Day is January 7, 2020.) This actually sums up the nature of my experience with this movie well: hailed as well as ridiculed as Russia's response to the Marvel superhero universe, Zashchitniki (The Guardians)   clearly entertains more when watched with little to no expectations. Or, basically, as trash, sifting through which one may strike gold sometimes.  Which is not to say that you will strike 24-karat gold in this case — it's just the idea of why you could embark on watching the movie in the first place, or at all. The plot is of the kind that even five-year-old children could quickly come up with, given the right incentives. But that should be no reason to bash this movie too badly. The team behind it s

The complete stories of J.G. Ballard (for reasons to be made clear below) By Péter MARTON ** Join the  European Science Fiction group  on Facebook for related discussions. ** Click-baiting headlines happen in the world of science, too, unfortunately (or — these days — necessarily?). Whatever we make of it, this article , reporting on some recent research, is certainly interesting to read. As we are informed there, plants are found to emit sounds, picked up "on an ultrasonic sound range between 20 and 150 kHz", inaudible to the human ear. These sounds apparently reflect the conditions that the plant finds itself in: "Stressed plants were found to emit significantly more sounds than plants from the comfortable control group. Not only were they noisier, but the researchers claim that they gave off different sounds depending on what was happening." Of course, research into the subject is not exactly new. Here is this article from 2013 , which makes it clea