Ever since William Gibson gave us the term cyberspace in his novel Neuromancer, fiction has featured the concept of a parallel virtual space in many forms. Entire worlds that exist side by side with the real world. Some of my favorites include the Idlewild trilogy by Nick Sagan, Natural History by Justina Robson, and Snow Crash by Neal Stephenson.

Now that MMORPGs – Massive Multiplayer Online Role-Playing Games (sometimes shortened to MMO) – are becoming more and more mainstream, where World of Warcraft is a household name as much as The Matrix, we’ll see authors finding ways to integrate this particular breed of cyberspace into their fiction.

The big question I want to ask: Is this setting entertaining? To the average gamer, it’s not much of a stretch. However, to the average reader – even those that could find cyberspace an entertaining setting even without being computer programmers or network specialists – how does an MMORPG setting come off?

Don’t expect any detailed reviews with ratings and whatnot, but I’d like to talk about what games I’m currently playing: Mass Effect 2, Dear Esther, Atom Zombie Smasher, and Binding of Isaac. Also: Why I’m not playing Saints Row the Third.

A few weeks ago I saw Super 8. While the film was enjoyable and of course extremely well-directed and well-produced (almost to a fault), it struck me how non-sci-fi this science fiction movie was. I think you could argue that the movie was about the dream of film-making, and the sci-fi elements were just there to provide a backdrop to the real story.

That’s fine with me, but it got me thinking about how this year has been a little lacking in terms of sci-fi movies. There are a few, sure, but does anyone else get the sense that movie-makers think they can sate the sci-fi crowd with comic-book superhero movies? I mean, even Cowboys and Aliens was originally a graphic novel.

2011 might be a little bit of a rut for sci-fi, but it hasn’t been all-bad the last few years. Thinking back, I came up with a list of my favorite true science fiction movies that came out between 2005 and 2010.

Hello, world!

My name is Jason W. LaPier. I’m an author and a web developer. I love science fiction: books, movies, TV shows, video games, and so forth. And of course, I love books and movies and video games even if they’re not sci-fi. Basically, we’re talking escapism. Real life sucks… so come escape with me.

Oh and here are some pictures of my dogs.