The Science Fiction Poetry Association has announced the winners of the 2008 Dwarf Stars contest. As the name implies, this competition is for very short poems (10 lines or less), which allows them to post all 3 of the winners on the awards page. They have also opened nominations for the 2009 Rhysling Awards. The Guardian ran a nice story about Steampunk, which looks very much like the author recently got his hands on a copy of Jeff and Ann VandeerMeer’s instant classic anthology of the same name and was amazed. As well he should have been; I told everyone last May this was a book they did not want to miss, and ordered my own copy before it hit the bookstores.
The Images of Science Fiction are worth checking out, in all their forms. Sometimes it is High Art, like these Giger sites. Sometimes it is only Comics, also known as Manga, like SteamPowered. Sometimes the best images are Animated, and sometimes the animations are Online, this time as a Menu Structure for StarTrek fans.
For anyone who is still not sure if they want to see Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow, may I say you are Making a Mistake! If the movie’s home page didn’t convince you it was worth your time and money, let me point you to a wonderful interview with the lunatic behind the project, Kerry Conran. This is my kind of maniac; he spent most of the last decade building this movie on his home computer, but only 26 days filming the actors on set. In the process he may be spearheading a whole new breath of life into indi films, and big budget scifi movies as well. Using his approach, things like Ringworld or The Uplift Wars could be brought to the screen for less money than the national debt (or even the interest on it). And if this wasn’t enough, his next project may well be A Princess of Mars, the first book in the E.R.Burroughs John Carter of Mars series. Would I love to see that one as a movie; like so many other great SF books, the scope has often been beyond the technology of the movie industry. Maybe with this new paradigm, it will finally get made.