This one looks better every time I see a new trailer. You can see them all at the Planet 51 official website, so you will know if you want to see it come November. And then there is the trailer for Tokyo!, the movie William Gibson tweeted about today (or yesterday, depending on your time zone), also looking very interesting. Robert J Sawyer, who already holds a number of awards, including the Hugo and Nebula, is up for another one. The Aurora Awards has his short story collection Identity Theft and other stories on the short list for Best Long-Form Work In English. Until the voting ends, you can read it online here.
J Michael Straczynski did the best SF TV series ever *, Babylon5. He has now taken on another epic story; he is bringing Lensman to the Big Screen. The brainchild of E.E. “Doc” Smith, Lensman is a huge and complex story, and it couldn’t be in better hands. Besides the many books, part of it has been done as an anime, and of course there are audio book versions available. If you didn’t already know, Lensman is the original Space Opera, inventing the sub-genre. Some claim it was also the very first science fiction series ever written, but with a first story publish date of January 1934, I think Edgar Rice Burroughs’s John Carter of Mars** series beat it to print with the February 1912 story Under the Moons of Mars. Which everyone remembers is also being made into a movie now, right?
*: Possibly now eclipsed by the new Battlestar Galactica, but maybe not: I’m going to re-watch both before I decide. You should do the same.
**: Notice how I avoided the whole science-fiction-vs-fantasy category argument for both book series by pretending it didn’t exist. Which it doesn’t when comparing these two works, since both of them would end up on the same side of the argument as voiced by any given debater; which side they ended up on would depend on who was doing the debating.
The British Fantasy Society has announced the 2009 nominees for the British Fantasy Awards 2009. A few of the folks up for the competition include Neil Gaiman’s Graveyard Book, Interzone and SFX, both for Best Magazine, Doctor Who for best TV Program, and both Iron Man and The Dark Night are up for best movie. The awards will be presented at Fantasycon 2009 in September.
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.
Fancast has a few video pieces and a nice blog entry about upcoming SciFi series Flash Forward and V. Flash Forward is based on the Robert J Sawyer book of the same name, while V is of course a remake of that classic 80s TV series. I am looking forward to both. John Scalzi has a history lesson for us about pre-Star Wars SciFi hit movies. I never knew the number one movie in 1916 was a version of 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea, which I am now going to watch.
Not books about Pirates, but pirating books. Ursela K LeGuin recently found some of her own books available online as downloads, even though neither she nor her publishers had authorized their release in that media. Text pirating has now joined audio and video as a top copyright violation, mostly due to the growing popularity of portable text viewers. There are a lot of legally free books and stories you can read online or download for your portable player (kindle, palmtop, cell phone, etc.). Some are there as a marketing tool to increase sales, some are available because the author released it under a creative commons or equivalent copyright license, some because the copyright has expired. Like everything else, there is a history and controversies about copyright laws, with multinational companies on one side, users of the intellectual properties on the other, and the actual creators lining up on both sides depending on individual inclination and attitude. Personally, I consider it the authors right to decide how they want their works to be made available. Having their work distributed without their permission and without compensation does not create a sustainable creative environment; authors deserve a payday as well.