Yes, it is Worldcon time again, this time with Chicon 7, the 70th annual World Science Fiction Convention. It started on Thursday, august 30th, and runs through the holiday weekend, with an incredible line up of guests and events. One of the most important events each year is the presentation of the Hugo Awards, which has John Scalzi as Host and Toastmaster, and will be held at 8PM CDT tomorrow, September 7th. If like me you can’t be there physically, you can actually watch it Live on the Worldcon UStream channel as well as on the Hugo Awards CoveritLive page. You can go to the Worldcon UStream page now and watch last years Chelsea Awards, Hugo Awards, and a quite amusing presentation of Just A Minute that had me laughing up a storm. If I had a vote of what program out of this years offerings should also be sent out live or included as a recorded online video it would have to be the Filk Opera version of Tanya Huff’s Choice of Ending.
From the web site Space Facts, this little infographic gives a very clean representation of the relative sizes of the planets in our solar system. I think if they would have included Pluto its size compared to the others would have made the not-a-planet argument obvious.
The movie will be hitting the big screen on October 19th, but here is the first trailer to get you ready for Tai Chi 0, the Steampunk Kung-Fu movie. While the first two are variations on the same trailer, they are a little different to tilt them towards their target audiences in each country. The third one has more different footage and a different approach to the whole building a trailer process, and the three of them together give a fairly extensive view into the movie. It will be in theaters in September if you live in Asia, the rest of us have to wait a bit longer.
Star Wars Detours are a bunch of short animated comedy clips at the moment which I suspect will become a TV show and a DVD fairly soon… after all, it is from the Robot Chicken team. These are absolutely hysterical. And yes, they do have a Facebook Detours pageset.
Announced this past Saturday, Continuum has been renewed for a second season. Lots of other great announcements out of Fan Expo Canada, which ran in Toronto over the last weekend. For those of us who have been missing out because we live in the US, it was also announced Continuum will be coming to a major U.S. network, but no clues yet which one it is. Supposedly they will start with season one and dovetail straight into season two, which is kind of a clue that they won’t be hitting the screen any time too soon, since they just got the go-ahead to start production on season two. Still, I can’t wait!
While there are no exciting new movies this week, there is one exciting movie being released in IMAX for the first time: Flying Swords of Dragon Gate IMAX 3D. This is a 2011 remake of the classic Dragons Inn films from China, starring Jet Li, and the 3D is some of the best I have seen from that part of the world. It will only be around for 2 weeks, so catch it while you can.