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A true-to-the-book version of Frankenstein is coming to The Hallmark Channel on October 5th and 6th. If you get the channel, don’t miss this one!

Also, Anonymous Rex has been made into a movie for the SciFi Channel, airing on 13Nov04. The story is actually from Casual Rex, the prequil to Anonymous Rex, and the start of the series of books. Since they named it after the next book, there may be some hope that if it does well in the ratings, they will continue through the rest of the stories.

There is a Science And Fiction Symposium being held from 29Sep04 through 2Oct04 in San Francisco. What sets this apart from the average scifi Con is the fact that it is sponsored by 2 museums, and the guest speakers are both scifi writers and scientists. The list includes David Brin, Greg Benford, Dave Grossman, François Junod, Kim Stanley Robinson, Rudy Rucker, and a lot more. The museums behind it are the Science Fiction Museum and Hall of Fame in Seattle, and the House of Elsewhere in Switzerland. If you are anywhere on the Left Coast, try to make this one, and send me back a report!

Just a reminder that the new Radio Plays from the Hitchiker’s Guide to the Galaxy series hits the airwaves (including Webcast mode) starting on Tuesday 21 September at 6.30pm. That’s GMT or Universal Time, be sure to adjust for your timezone. They will repeat on Thursdays if you miss the Tuesday run. This will be the first of 6 all-new episodes, for more info check BBC Hitchiker’s and Above The Title.

The first Webcast link above takes you to their embeded player on the BBC web page, This One takes you to their stand-alone realplayer link. If you haven’t listened to the BBC Online before, you want to hit the site and test it before the event. You may have to download and install a player, or tweak your firewall or router settings to pull it in; and you don’t want to miss any of it because you were doing that when you could have been listening!

A serious run for the X-Prize money will be made on 29Sep04 by Paul Allen’s SpaceShipOne. This will be the first launch for the prize, and the second launch for SS1 after it’s suborbital flight in June. Their 2nd Prize launch is set for October 2nd.

The Ansari X-Prize is $10M, to be awarded to the first team that puts the equivalent of 3 men in orbit, lands, and repeats the feat in 2 weeks in the same vehicle. No governments need apply; this is strictly for real people and private organizations or companies. The Romanian Team had a successful test launch on the 13th (yesterday as I write this); the Da Vinci Team has a launch for the prize set up on October 2nd of their Wildfire; and there are 23 more teams in for the prize.

Right now, SpaceShipOne and Wildfire are neck-and-neck, and I am rooting for Da Vinci. Allen is financing SS1 with his Microsoft earnings, using a radical new engine developed by SpaceDev, and launching from the back of a modified aircraft. Da Vinci is an all-volunteer team from Canada, financed by an online casino, and launching from a balloon! Now there is my kind of space program, by the people, for the people!

If you want to learn more about the X-Prize and the attitude behind it, here are a few more links you can look into. For attitude, the best story I have seen comes from Space Daily. To learn more about the engine behind SS1 (and their satellite launch vehicle) check out Universe Today.
If you want to check out all the Teams involved in the contest, XPrize Primary is your best bet. If you want to get directly involved, either as a Teacher looking to fire up your student’s, or a participant looking to enter, be sure to look into Build A Rocket. And if you are a teacher, be aware there is a prize (the EGGs prize) for the middle school team who can meet the criteria!

For anyone who is still not sure if they want to see Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow, may I say you are Making a Mistake! If the movie’s home page didn’t convince you it was worth your time and money, let me point you to a wonderful interview with the lunatic behind the project, Kerry Conran. This is my kind of maniac; he spent most of the last decade building this movie on his home computer, but only 26 days filming the actors on set. In the process he may be spearheading a whole new breath of life into indi films, and big budget scifi movies as well. Using his approach, things like Ringworld or The Uplift Wars could be brought to the screen for less money than the national debt (or even the interest on it). And if this wasn’t enough, his next project may well be A Princess of Mars, the first book in the E.R.Burroughs John Carter of Mars series. Would I love to see that one as a movie; like so many other great SF books, the scope has often been beyond the technology of the movie industry. Maybe with this new paradigm, it will finally get made.

There are some great movies hitting the theaters in the next few weeks; at least one of these should catch your attention!

First up is Resident Evil 2, Apocalypse. I am not a horror fan, but from the trailers this looks like it may be more action than thriller. I have been waiting a long time for the next two, and am thrilled that it looks like Sky Captain and the World Of Tomorrow will finally come out on the 17th. On that same day another one I have been eagerly awaiting also hits the screen; Ghost in the Shell 2: Innocence. And word just got to me that there is an American release set for the Brit spoof Sean of the Dead. What fun, see you in the theaters!

The other thing Cross-Universe means to me is also known as Paratime, Otherwhen, Alternate History, and the Multiverse. The list from this group would take MANY entries, and is my favorite form of ‘What If’ entertainment. My introduction to it was through H. Beam Piper’s Lord Calvin of Otherwhen , a serious classic I had reread 5 times before I found my next example. For more detail on Piper’s stories, and a wonderful Sideways In Time site, be sure to check out UChronia’s Piper Page.

A few others include James P. Hogan’s Paths To Otherwhere , Joan Aiken’s Wolves series, anthologies such as Roads Not Taken , game universes like Steve Jackson and GURPS, and way more than I can go into here.

Eric Flint and Harry Turtledove are building some of my favorite new stories in this category; the history of alternate history goes back to Ben Disraeli in the early 1800’s, and Winston Churchill (at the same link) in 1931. I don’t find it a great surprise that the folks who lived their lives at the pivot points of history were some of the earliest contributors to this genre!

And drop by Alt.History , just for a grin.