I read this a while ago and just kept forgetting to mention it here, but Paste magazine has an excellent article on the experimental animation of Tezuka Osamu, including a number of the videos themselves embedded in the story. Best known in North America as the creator of Astro Boy, Tezuka pretty much invented Japanese Anime in its modern form, as well as authoring an amazing number of Manga titles. The new Astro Boy Movie will be hitting theaters in October, while last February was Tezuka’s 80th birthday and the NHK’s 20th anniversary of their satellite service. In honor of that, the NHK is running specials from February until October about Tezuka Osamu’s contributions to Manga, Anime, and Japanese popular culture (you do have to scroll down a bit to get to the entry about it). In April of this year the 13th Tezuka Osamu Cultural Prize awards were handed out, the winners being those Manga and Artists deemed the best in Japan. Here is his 1962 experimental piece, “Male”…
TOR has put together a celebration of the Lunar landing which includes a lot of top-quality SF/F authors putting forward their own input on the topic. It is a little hard to find all the bits, but that’s all right; the team at SF Signal have compiled the links in one handy location for us! If you are one of those folks who love finding the Easter Eggs on DVDs, feel free to skip the cheet sheet and hunt them down on your own. Sci-Fi Heaven has put together their first podcast, called Continuum. The first episode is in standard several-geeks-babbling mode (pretty much the way I would do it, but with more voices), we will see how it evolves.
Alasdair Wilkins at io9 has a very nice article about Asimov’s Robots, focusing on how obeying the Three Laws can still end up with killer robots running around loose. David Brin also put together an interesting post yesterday covering a number of different topics, including the SIGMA group, which had another gathering this past week in D.C.. Wish I had known about the book signing the authors did at Reiter’s Bookstore as part of that event ahead of time, it would have been fun to attend.
Building and singing… the world does both. Here are two excellent examples.
Scalzi, Hayden, and Bucknell took part in a panel, recorded and now online, called A Study in Online Community Building, all about how to create the future of publishing in an online world. I expect you will enjoy this, but I hope you will learn from it as well. I certainly learned a bit, and thanks to Brenda Cooper for the link. And then the Stand By Me World Cover, courtesy of Zadi and by way of Gizmodo. Thanks, gang!
Playing For Change | Song Around The World “Stand By Me” from Concord Music Group on Vimeo.
Sad news, as yesterday we lost Philip Jose Farmer, one of the giants of science fiction. He started his career as an author with The Lovers, which treated sexuality in a frank and honest manor, and went on to create some excellent series, including Riverworld and the World of Tiers. He also wrote as a number of other authors, and created some of his best works doing it, including Venus on the Half Shell, which he wrote as Vonnegut’s fictional author Kilgore Trout, or his Tarzan books, including Lord of the Trees and Tarzan Alive. Those are just the tip of the iceberg; if you haven’t read Farmer yet, go get some and start reading. You will thank me for it, I promise. The SciFi Channel had commissioned a miniseries of Riverworld, but they only made and aired the pilot episode. The good news is they start filming in April to do the rest of the series. So there is still some Philip Farmer to look forward to.
Yesterday was Jules Verne’s birthday; he would have been 181 years old, which is kind of scary when you realize his books are still very readable today. If you’re looking for more recent authors words, check out the TOR YouTube page. There you can watch plenty of interviews with great authors, or watch examples of book trailers (video for words, what a concept).