April 2006 Archives
Stargate SG-1 Hits Milestone - Slice of SciFi
...only surpassed in the world market by the nearly 4-decade long "Doctor Who".
How did that happen? Does anyone love it that much? Or is it just that no one hates it that much?
This could be fun, Mike Myers will star in How to Upstage a Robot Rising, a comedy based on a manual written by Daniel H. Wilson.
Personally I like So I Married An Axe Murderer best out of all Myer's films. So make it like that, if you're reading. Please.
Empire interviews JJ Abram who says "...hey hear rumours of what the thing was going to be and ran with a story that is not entirely accurate."
Oh he's teasing everybody again, aren't you satisfied with Lost doing that?!?
Sounds interesting as well (busy bees at SCI FI), perhaps they'll follow the BBC model of loads of extra online content? It's working really well for Doctor Who.
Via Sci Fi Wire the SciFi channel have announced Caprica, a spin off from Battlestar Galactica.
Key facts:
- It's set on Caprica half a century before the events of Battlestar Galactica.
A breakthrough in robotics is about to occur, creating the first living robot: a Cylon.
It follows lives of two families, the Graystones and the Adamas.
It's a Science Fiction Dallas!. Sounds cool though.
The official site has not been updated yet, but I got it from Notes From Coode Street and Locus Online that Geoff Ryman has won this year's Arthur C. Clarke Award for gis novel air. That's the double along with the BSFA award.
Star Wars fan film extroidanaire Return of Pink Five, Vol. 1 is online now, and it made me chuckle.
Ever wanted to read an entire article just about the new X-Jet in X-Men 3? Here it is IGN: X3: The New X-Jet.
Personally I just looked at the picture.
The BBC has just put live a prototype of it's entire catalogue. It's very cool. (Here's the developers blog)
Of course the first thing I did was search forprogrammes classified as science fiction (genre). You get this nice sparkline...
Where the start is 1930 and the end is 2006. Looks like there was a big dip around the year 2000, wonder why.
For each episode it contains loads of details such as broadcast history, contributors, description and so on. Here's the page for the Doctor Who episode Rose as an example. Each page also has an RDF feed so you can subscribe to updates. Awesome.
Locus has put interview excerpts with Justina Robson and Elizabeth Bear online.
I haven't read any Elizabeth Bear but they sound my kind of thing, "“There's a lot in those books that's intentionally a tour of the last 30 years of science fiction: a cyberpunk thread, a military history thread, a singularity thread."
[Via SF Signal]
The third film adaptation of the awesome I Am Legend now has a star attached to it, Will Smith. This version of the film has been in production hell for ages and I don't have a good feeling about it. I mean Will Smith and a quote that says "To survive, he must battle mutants that wreak havoc during the night" doesn't exactly help me believe that the version will be faithful to the book.
"a 26-part comedy-fantasy series set in outer space, and will be a mixture of live action and CGI."
Blimey. Three Doctor Who series on the go....
Wookieepedia is a Star Wars Wiki. My question is why? Why not put all the entries in wikipedia?
The most interesting thing for me about the recent announcment that J.J. Abrams will produce and direct the 11th "Trek" feature is the fuss is caused and the press that it's generated. The blogosphere was set on fire by the news.
Personally I couldn't care less if there's a new Star Trek film, but a new film by the creator of Lost? Yes please.
Imagine the fun that the web guys must have had making
The Doctor and Rose end up in 1879 (despite aiming for 1979) and encounter Queen Victoria and something strange in a big Scottish house.
SPOILERS AHEAD
Channel4 is showing trailers for Lost season 2 non-stop at the moment. It's that wonderful scene with the island all peacful, then the plane crashes. Very cool.
The trailer however does promise "answers". Ermmm. Not really!
The air date for the first episode of season two is Tuesday 2nd May.
Via SFSignal, John Joseph Adams reviews Doctor Who, the first three episodes of the new incarnation (not sure how to describe the seasons, is that season 1? Or season 27?).
Anyway, JJA hates it. He's never seen Doctor Who before. He's clearly wrong. (As is anyone else who doesn't like it, no room for discussion).
I think that many viewers in the US have misaligned expectations. It's family entertainment, aimed at kids and their dads (although apparently women are now watching with David Tennant as the Doctor). And it's wonderful.
Better can that Doctor Who pastiche story I was going to send to F&SF then ;-)
I watched the last episode of Surface on Tuesday night.
Then I shrugged.
Shame that the quality of the great few episodes at the start couldn't be maintained. Perhaps it should have been a miniseries?
Oh well.
Doctor Who is back! With an entertaining episode that was funny, scary and action packed. Fantastic.
Spoilers ahead...
The Philip K. Dick Award winner is...
WAR SURF by M. M. Buckner (Ace Books)
...with a special citation was given to:
NATURAL HISTORY by Justina Robson (Bantam Spectra)
Hmmm. What's a special citation? Runner up?
And the winners of the BSFA awards are...
Best Novel of 2005: Air, by Geoff Ryman (Gollancz)
Best Short Fiction: 'Magic for Beginners' by Kelly Link
Best Artwork: Cover of Interzone #200 -- Pawel Lewandowski
Non-Fiction Award: Soundings: Reviews 1992-1996 -- Gary K Wolfe (Beccon Publications)
Which seems right to me. Congratulations everyone.
It's amazing how much publicity the BBC is putting out for Doctor Who. There are trailers on TV. Trailers on the web. TARDISODES on your mobile phone. Trailers on radio, and not just Radio 1 as you would expect but also Radio 4, which are at opposite ends of the spectrum. There are interviews with David Tennant everywhere. John Barrowman has been presenting This Morning all week. BBC3 has been reshowing the last series. Totally Doctor Who has started on CBBC. Newspapers have articles. Magazines have articles.
It's everywhere.
And the first episode is tomorrow.
Anyone who's read recent Jon Courtenay Grimwood fiction will know to expect some crime aspect to his fiction, however 9 Tail Fox is a crime novel , albeit with a SF concept at its core. The blurb doesn't even mention Science Fiction so perhaps this is an attempt to break out of the SF genre?
The writing is great, the characters perfectly realised and the city, San Francisco, is described wonderfully, you get a real sense of place and feel. The plot is quite simple on the surface and complicated underneath, clues dropped here and there. I have to say I had completely failed to work out what was going on when the ending revealed all. Maybe that's just my inexperience with crime novels?
At the end, all though I enjoyed it, I felt a little disappointed that it wasn't more SF. Overall I prefer Pashazade. But if you want a cool, stylish crime novel with an SF twist then you probably won't find any better.
CBBC now has Totally Doctor Who listed for this Friday at 6.30pm. Although it's a kid show they may be interesting Doctor Who stuff on it. For example Blue Peter has traditionally had interviews with the actors and SFX guys, and I imagine this show will have more in that vein. (I'm trying to supply you with excuses to watch it if you don't have kids!)
UPDATE
The first showing is on Thursday at 5pm.
Last night's Doctor Who Confidential (not yet online), shown on BBC3 as part of their Doctor Who night, was a look back at the first series of the rebooted Doctor Who. It contained interviews with all the main protaganists, Russell T Davies, producers, directors, actors etc. There was a lot of footage reshown from the last year's series, but also a smattering of teasers from the coming series.
My favourite of which was a clip from the K9 episode. Very funny. Can't remember it verbatim, but it was something like.
Doctor: "Mickey you stay in the car with K9. And don't forget to open the window."
Mickey: "He's a robot dog, why does he need the window open?"
Doctor: "I meant for you."
All in all the news series looks great, and David Tennant looks brilliant. Roll on Saturday.
Also we got to see some production sketches from Torchwood, and some talk about how it will be more adult, Earth based and allow different settings to be utilised.
It's Eastercon this coming weekend, up in Glasgow. I'm not going but I'll be watching Technorati, Google and Flickr for commentary.
Via The Slush God, Fantasy and Science Fiction's stories on the Hugo Ballot are now online.
They are the amazingly wonderful "Magic for Beginners" by Kelly Link and two I haven't yet read "The Calorie Man" by Paolo Bacigalupi and "Two Hearts" by Peter S. Beagle.
The full programme for Alt-Fiction is online now, and I just bought a ticket!
It's on Saturday 6th May, in Derby (that's in the middle of England if you don't live in the UK). It includes three parallel tracks and includes authors such as Richard Morgan, James Lovegrove and Justina Robson in a combination of workshops, discussions, readings and Q&A sessions. Check out the full schedule.
Outpost Gallifrey has all the times and dates for Doctor Who and related shows. The headline?
Doctor Who 7.15pm, Saturday 15 April, BBC One
And in the mean time BBC3 are reshowing the first series, two every night starting from 7pm. Watched the first two last night and enjoyed them even more than the last time.
The full-length one, not the back from the dead runcible ansible infinite matrix one.
I loved The Brief History of the Dead, so did SCI FI Weekly, they gave it an A+.
Via The Mumpsimus Publishers Weekly has an article Too Geeky for Its Own Good? which summarises the response to Dave Itzkoff's NYT column. A nice piece. I like all this controversy and argument about SF.
Whoah. If you're up to date with season two of lost you should check out the UV Map/Diagram (SPOLIERS FOR THE UK!).
They must have had fun making that.
Aha, Asimov's Science Fiction has all of their Hugo nominees online, not just Ian McDonald.
[Via Emerald City]
(But that's what happens when you blog in order of feeds read)
Can't remember if I've blogge dthis before, so I'll do it again anyway, The Little Goddess by Ian McDonald is online. Read it.
Superman Returns now has a page especally for webmasters (which in this day and age is basically all of us). It's got lots of pretty graphics and photos and video clips that you can cut and paste into your own site.
SFX have a transcript of a very funny Q&A with David Tennant and Billie Piper about the new season of Doctor Who. You can feel the chemistry between them just from the words.
Keith Brooke talks about John Christopher's Tripods trilogy on infinity plus.
I remember these books from the BBC TV series, although I read the books after. Great stuff.
The trailers for the new season of Doctor Who are online and showing all over BBC1.
On top of that the first TARDISODE is online! Even better if you have a new fangled groovy phone, it's available straight to your mobile. It's a 46 second trailer for the first episode about New Earth, shot as an infomercial. What a cool idea.
I heard a lot of hype around Ted Chiang's short stories, a handful produced over a few years and everyone saying they were brilliant. Therefore I had high expectations. I'm glad to say that it didn't let me down.
