Tor has a nice list of genre related giveaways you can enter, some ending tonight. Copies of the DVDs for Blood Ties and Coraline, audio books, regular books, and even a ride into space are all linked from that excellent article by Megan Messinger. Meanwhile, in honor of the new Torchwood special, BBC America has posted a virtual Hub tour of the Cardiff facilities that’s a lot of fun.
I have already posted multiple times about Moon, the new hard sci-fi movie by Duncan Jones, but this time we are talking the actual orbital object over our heads. I have also recently posted about the LROC and Kaguya lunar missions, and the excellent images they returned to Earth. A team on the surface of this world has created a Lunar picture just as impressive; the Lunar World Record image, now acknowledged by Guinness. The project was put together as part of the International Year of Astronomy 2009 celebration, honoring and hosted by Sir Patric Moore. If you don’t know who he is, he mapped the Moon in the 50’s, creating the information used by both the Russian and American space program into the 60s and beyond. He also got his own Guinness Certificate for being the longest running television presenter of the BBC Sky at Night program, from 1957 until last year. IYA2009 also has The Moon for All Mankind going on, with Malta being the latest entry. And then the one that may end up being my favorite; you can relive the first manned Moon landing in real time, in every detail, including some that were not broadcast when it first happened! We Choose The Moon will take you through the entire event, but just like the first time it happened you only get one shot at experiencing it. The Retro-Launch takes off in 51 hours as I am writing this, and will unspool sequentially exactly as the original did until splashdown. I recommend using modern reminders like Twitter to make sure you don’t miss it. Discover Magazine also has a nice retrospective of the landing event freshly posted to honor the anniversary. I threw in the peek at the 1930’s version of the John Carter movie that almost was because I couldn’t resist, not because it fit with the rest of this post…
Test your Star Wars movie knowledge at the Star Wars movie quiz at SciFi Scanner (thanks on the heads-up on that one to SF Signal).
IO9 scores again, with two excellent articles today. The first talks about the new shows on SyFy, and how they are for the most part recycled old shows. They are right on the money about Warehouse 13, and the combination of two old favorites is quite entertaining (the web page is nicely done as well). They also touch on Eureka (I disagree with their conclusions on that one), and the forthcoming Alien Nation and (possibly?) Quantum Leap. The other article I enjoyed today was on science fiction lawyers, which is a larger list than I would have expected. And that’s surprising, because I knew everyone mentioned; but they forgot Eli Stone and a few others. The first teaser trailer is out for Burden, a movie that has already been nominated for multiple awards before being released. Independent films often make the festival circuits pre-release, and this one is no exception; you can see it at the DragonCon Film Festival in September, Action On Film IFF on the 25th, and the International Film Festival Ireland at the beginning of September.
Cory Doctorow worried that folks might not find the 404 Wine Bar for his pre-Play performance meet-and-greet the other night in Chicago. But everyone can find his latest story, serialized at TOR Online, and read it as each chapter gets uploaded. The story is Makers, and for those of us who get cross-eyed after staring at the screen for 18 hours a day it will come out in print in the fall (what date in the fall is a variable dependent on which continent you live on). Or perhaps for those of us who can’t wait for the serialization to finish up in Jan 2010. But there is an extra, Online-Level draw on this one; the images with each chapter! Download and collect them all, then download the Flash/Java App that will allow you to create your own image structure for the story. This is the extended (I.E., Complete) story originally told on Salon as ThemePunks. Now you can finally find out how it turns out! The folks at Barnstorming are doing the graphics, and they are building them to inter-connect. Which means the Flash App, whenever it gets released online, will allow you to take the various tiles and build your own cover for the book. All in all, this looks like a fun ride!
That’s right, today is Nicola Tesla’s 153rd Birthday. The man who invented AC power, the electric motor, the florescent light (years before Edison came up with the incandescent light bulb), the field of RC and the first Remote Control vehicle (a boat), the audio speaker, and Radio (no, it wasn’t Marconi; his patents were invalidated in 1943). He also invented the Tesla Coil and Broadcast Power (never deployed because no one could figure out how to put a meter on it for billing purposes), and there was a rumor that he built a book-sized vibrator that could topple buildings and caused an earthquake. He contributed to a lot of other fields, including Robotics and Radar, he has a ton of published articles and patents, and my favorite bit: he was the guy for whom the phrase Mad Scientist was coined! Happy Birthday, Nicky!