Percival Everett offers a fresh perspective on Mark Twain’s adventure of Huck and Jim. Filled with humor, heartbreak, horror, and irony, Everett’s Pulitzer Prize winning novel is captivating, powerful and entertaining. Jim, as one will remember, is a runaway slave, and is later thought to have murdered Huck. The pair travel down the Mississippi tumbling…
Tag: slavery
Farscape (2000) – Liars, Guns and Money: Part 1 (A Not So Simple Plan), and Part 2 (With Friends Like These…)
Zhaan (Virginia Hey) is convinced that Stark (Paul Goddard) is still alive, and finding him again is only the first step in saving D’Argo’s (Anthony Simcoe) son, Jothee (Matthew Newton), who is about to be sold into slavery. Thus begins the penultimate story, Liars, Guns and Money, which spans three episodes, of the second season….
Farscape (2000) – Won’t Get Fooled Again, and The Locket
John Crichton (Ben Browder) insists he won’t get fooled again when he seems to be back on Earth, and nothing ever happened. But everyone seems to be there, D’Argo (Anthony Simcoe), Aeryn (Claudia Black), Chiana (Gigi Edgley), Rygel (voiced by Jonathan Hardy) and Zhaan (Virginia Hey). Lurking around the edges is Scorpius (Wayne Pygram) who…
Stargate SG-1 (2001) – Beast of Burden, and The Tomb
Daniel (Micheal Shanks) has been watching his Unas friend, Chaka (Dion Johnstone) only to discover that he’s been captured and made a slave. Beast of Burden was written by Peter DeLuise, and first aired on 10 August, 2001. Daniel and the rest of SG-1 go to investigate, and discover that Burrock (Larry Drake) and the…
Stargate SG-1 (2000) – Scorched Earth, and Beneath the Surface
O’Neill (Richard Dean Anderson) and the rest of SG-1 face a troubling and unique problem in Scorched Earth. Written by Joseph Mallozzi and Paul Mullie, this episode was first broadcast on 25 August, 2000. SG-1 has aided in the resettling of the Enkarans, finding a world with the exact atmosphere that they need. Mid-celebration, an…
The Bass Reeves Trilogy: Follow the Angels Follow the Doves (2020), Hell on the Border (2021), and The Forsaken and the Dead (2023) – Sidney Thompson
After watching Paramount’s Lawmen: Bass Reeves and seeing in the opening credits that it was based on two books in a historical fiction trilogy written by Sidney Thompson, I had to hunt them down and dig into this historical personage that no one seems to know about. Over the course of three novels, Thompson documents…
Lovecraft Country (2016) -Matt Ruff
This week I dove into Matt Ruff’s brilliantly entertaining Lovecraft Country, which takes all the things you love about a good Lovecraft story; otherworldly horror, science fiction mixed with horror, and some other familiar horror tropes, the creepy doll, the haunted house, and deliver it without Lovecraft’s far too prominent racism. As much as I…
The Adventures of Young Indiana Jones (1992/1996) – My First Adventure
I remember when I first heard about The Young Indiana Jones Chronicles coming along in the early 90s. I was excited by what I heard about it, it would tell the story of Indy’s youth, both as a child and a teen as it played out against the backdrop of the early 20th century and…
12 Years a Slave (2013) – Steve McQueen
What kind of species are we that we can enslave our fellows? There are two scenes in McQueen’s masterpiece 12 Years a Slave, that shook me to my core. The first was a scene in which Chiwetel Ejiofor’s Solomon Northup is left to hang, while life goes on around him, and another when Solomon is…
Star Trek: The Next Generation (1989) – The Measure of a Man, and The Dauphin
Captain’s log: stardate 42523.7 The Measure of a Man, definitely in the top ten Trek episodes of all time, this gem was written by Melinda M. Snodgrass this classic first aired on 13 February, 1989. Data (Brent Spiner) is on trial for his synthetic life as the debate on whether or not he is a…
The Mind Reels 