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.
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.
Word has come out that the new season of Dollhouse will be starting a week later than the announced original air date, but this is not a bad thing. They made the move to give a bit of extra production time to the team, since they only start building the new episodes this month. If Fox wasn’t already aware there was a serious following for the program, they probably got a clue when their sales servers crashed from people hammering on it to order the limited edition season 1 box set available only to Comic-Con 2009 attendees. Fox finally got it right, now can NBC do the same with Day One? The last TV show built by Javier Grillo-Marxuach, the creator of Day One, was The Middleman, which comes out on DVD on July 28th.
At least the finest Steampunk TV I have seen so far. The new show Warehouse 13 has some quality Steampunk props, including a 2-way TV communicator built by Phylo T Farnsworth, a ray gun assembled by Nikola Tesla, and a computer keyboard that had to at least be inspired by Jake’s Steampunk Workshop, if he hasn’t been hired to build the props for this show. Watch it now, along with a Tesla short…
SFX has a nice interview with the producer of Torchwood about the new special Children of Earth. Originally the BBC America presentation was announced as happening 5 hours or so after it aired in the UK, but that has changed. It starts tomorrow night, July 6th, in the British Isles, and three Torchwood Radio Plays aired last week on BBC Radio 4 (you still have a few days to listen to them in streaming format, but they are only downloadable in the UK). The Torchwood special is being held until the launch of BBC America HD on July 20th. Also airing in Hi Def that week is the new Doctor Who special Planet of the Dead, the series finale of Primeval, and the series premiere of Being Human.
If you haven’t seen the web sites the viral marketing department has put up for the new movie District 9, the bad guys are located at Multi-National United, while the resistance lives at MNU Spreads Lies. The movie has a scheduled release date of August 14th in the US, and is based on the short film Alive in Joburg.
It is a slow week in Sci-Fi; there are no new episodes on TV this week, because of the holiday coming up (why waste them when the audience isn’t watching TV?). There could have been a monster movie released, since holiday weekends do good box office, but no. Probably no-one wanted to compete with last weeks Transformers 2 and next weeks Blood, The Last Vampire (see the latest trailer here or watch the one before that, below). I don’t know about the book/graphics novel releases; I basically empty my wallet on the counter every time I hit a Borders/Barnes and Nobel/Waldenbooks, and I find if I do my best to ignore the release announcements I can keep from going in more than twice a month. On DVD this week the Stargate Atlantis final season and only half of season 3 of Eureka was all we got (except for a few anime titles I went looking for, but none of my local outlets stocked them). I love Eureka, but why would I buy half a season? Do they think I want to pay $60 for the privilege of being made to wait for the whole thing, when instant gratification would cost me $35? The flip side of that coin is the fact that only the first half of season 3 has aired so far, with the second half kicking off next Friday, July 10th. So if you want to catch up on the story so far, it may be the way to go for you. Yes, this is a slow week in Sci-Fi, but next week promises to be better.