Science Fiction, Fantasy, and Horror are replete with sports and games. Rollerball and Death Race 2000; The Running Man and Field of Dreams; The Hunger Games and Ready Player One; games of chance, sports, and competitions have been a part of the genre landscape for many years. Harry Potter had Quidditch, and the Triwizard Tournament.

Troy and David have created a two-part episode, The Spec Sports Spectacular, where they look at appearances of games and sports in speculative film, TV, and books.

Remember the number of times that poker appeared in Star Trek? Is that not the final scene in the TNG series, Captain Picard finally joining the poker game that his senior officers play?

And who can forget the games played on the Battlestar Galactica?

This episode is being broadcast on Saturday, June 24, 2023.

The Thing PT. 2

Troy and David return with Carolyn Clink and Sandra Kasturi, to look at The Thing. First and foremost, the 1982 film, but also the 1951 film, and the 2011 film.

They also do a Dream Cast and Schrodinger’s Cast, of six of the main characters in the 1982 movie.

They choose another actor or actress to fill the role, one the best actor (living or dead) which is the Dream Cast, and one unusual choice, for the Schrodinger’s Cast.

This episode is being broadcast on Saturday, June 10, 2023.

Carolyn Clink is a poet living in Mississauga, Ontario, Canada.

She won the Aurora Award for Best Poem/Song in 2022 for “Cat People Café” and in 2011 for “The ABCs of the End of the World.”

Her genre poetry publications include: Weird Tales, Analog, Imaginarium 2012: the Best Canadian Speculative Writing, Polar Starlight, Polar Borealis, On-Spec, Tesseracts, Frost Zone Zine, Eye to the Telescope, Tales of the Unanticipated, Room, and all 5 volumes of Northern Frights.

Sandra Kasturi is an award-winning poet, writer, and editor, with work appearing in many places including ON SPEC, several Tesseracts anthologies, and 80! Memories & Reflections on Ursula K. Le Guin.

Her two poetry collections are: The Animal Bridegroom (with an introduction by Neil Gaiman) and Come Late to the Love of Birds (both from Tightrope Books).

Sandra recently won second prize in The New Quarterly’s Nick Blatchford Occasional Verse Contest. She is also the winner of the Sunburst Award for her story “The Beautiful Gears of Dying” and ARC Magazine‘s Poem of the Year Award for “Old Men, Smoking.”