Do NOT miss this one! Check Anonymous Rex for details. The SciFi Channel will be airing it at the beginning of November, and I am looking forward to see how well they translated the first book in the series into TV mode. Please note, by First Book I mean the Prequil, Casual Rex. If they get good enough numbers in the ratings, I am hoping they continue through the series, and make more of these. The closest thing I have found to a Home Page for the author (the same Eric Garcia who wrote Matchstick Men) is a rather disappointing Amazon front; if anyone knows where his true home page lives, please send me the link! The Interview he did at the MysteryOne web sight is worth a visit, and has convinced me I need to go out and get a copy of his AudioBook version, if only to hear him sing! LOL… Too bad the link they list for him there goes to one of those now-owned-by-a-domain-name-seller companies.
The edge of science, which is where scifi lives. The Singularity is the most important of them, and the one that will make its mark soon. But all of them are worth a visit, and worth at least some thought.
Interestingly enough, it isn’t a scifi mag, but a science one, that has the best story about the Singularity. Which should catch your attention, since it isn’t fiction, and will be here in the next few years!
Some other interesting things worth your time to check out include Advances in Nanotechnology… wait, this one isn’t scifi either, but a report on our advances! OK, how about the Exploration of Mars. Nope, another true story. So let’s go for a scifi classic, the one about not putting all our Eggs In One Basket. After all, survival is only a story, right?
Hmmm… It looks like the things that were scifi when I was growing up may be the way the world works today. That maybe being the case, I should offer a few other links, like the one to Neil Stephenson’s interview, or maybe C.L.Moore’s wonderful stories. Or maybe just to a few basic links, like Locus Mag, one of the most important sites on the web for Geeks Like Me! LOL…
I hope you find one or more of these links useful, and worth your time to check out. I like them all, and will be happy to chat with you about any and all of them!
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!
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.
I have wanted to do an entry on scifi cross-universe pages for a while, but the phrase means two different things to me, and I couldn’t decide which to do first. So the heck with it, here are examples of the first, the next entry will start on the other!
In Fan circles, a cross-universe story is one where characters from 2 different fictional universes get together (also called Shared Universe stories) and interact. Some of them can be quite outrageous, like the classic “You Can’t Do That On Trek” site, where fans contributed some of the funniest Photoshopped images you ever saw (I’ll post the link if I can ever find a live version of it; the Paramount legal dept. blue meanies went after it pretty hard, my last good link to it died in 2001). Another great one, still online, is Stone Trek ; Star Trek meets the Flintstones! What makes this one special is the Flash Webisodes, nine at last count and still growing. And the list goes on, with FanFic , Logical Comparisons , RPG’s , Board/Model Games , and more. Each of these categories deserves it’s own entry here, with lot’s of details and info.
It isn’t just the Fan’s who have fun with this. The difference is, the Pro’s actually make money with it. Authors sometimes open up their worlds for others to play in; like Keith Laumer’s BOLO, Fred Saberhagen’s Berserker, and David Weber’s Honorverse, to name a few. (BTW, seen the ads for Sky Captain? Wouldn’t Angelina Jolie make the perfect Honor Harrington, when it’s time to make the movies?). Sometimes a group of authors rally around a concept and build the universe in parallel, like Wild Cards, The Fleet, and Chicks In Chainmail. And if you don’t know what any of those are, run, don’t walk, to your nearest library or bookstore; You are missing something wonderful!
Books aren’t the only media; comics have a long history of this kind of thing, starting with single meetings within the same House (Batman showing up in a Superman issue kind of thing). Then they took it between Houses, although mostly the independents. Then a few brave souls took it between media types, with things like The League Of Extraordinary Gentlemen. And let’s not forget the movies, with offerings like the film version of Extraordinary Gentlemen, or Alien Vs. Predator. But then, movies were doing it back in the Frankenstein Meets The Wolfman days.
OK, see why I didn’t want to get started? This is just the tip of the iceberg on this topic, almost no intro at all compared to what lives in this realm. If you haven’t been there before, I hope at least one link here fires your imagination. I will be returning to this topic a lot in future entries’, count on it!