The BBC reported today that Iain M. Banks lost his battle with cancer this morning. With the M. he wrote his science fiction, most notable of which was his Culture series, an amazing galaxy spanning utopian/anarchistic society which somehow was always at war.
101 pictures of C’Thulhu? Yep, not the band, but images from the books written by the guy they named themselves after, have been collected up over at The Lovecratfs Man. I have played with the big green guy a bit myself (OK, sometimes he’s red), here is an image and an animation I put together…
In 1945 Arthur C. Clarke lost a billion dollars by inventing geosynchronous communication satellites, because there was no technology capable of launching them into orbit until the late 1950s, and nothing that could reach geosynchronous orbit until the 1960s. Interestingly enough, in 1964, the same year the very first live TV news stories made it across the Atlantic on those satellites to become part of regular TV News programs, Clarke predicted how the new technology would change the world… and his description is spot on for the way we communicate today. Some people really do seem to be living in the future.
According to this Sci Fi London story, the first three books in C.J. Cherryh’s Foreigner series are about to be made into full production radio plays. They are calling them movie audios, but it is a full cast production with soundscape, which is the same thing as far as I can tell. I love radio plays, and the series of books, and look forward to being able to listen to them.
Ryo Ikehata’s light novel Calamity of a Certain Zombie Girl has begun production as an Anime, and there is already an initial trailer for it. If the name sounds familiar, Ikehata’s last published series to get turned into Anime was Blood+, an excellent little Vampire story. Thanks to Crunchyroll for the heads up on that one.
Marina Orlova is better known online under the name HotForWords, and she celebrated her 100 Millionth View on YouTube in the middle of 2008. In a recent posting she examined the origin of the name of her new cell phone, and tied it into Philip K. Dick’s classic work Do Androids Dream Of Electric Sheep, renamed to Bladerunner when they made the movie version. So for the 17 people in the world who don’t know Philip or Marina, here is her comment on his work…