Yes, it is time once again for Sci-Fi London, that truly amazing film festival held at the Apollo Piccadilly Circus and many nearby locations. This is the eighth year for the festival, and it is bigger and better than ever, starting Wednesday the 29th and running through Monday the 4th. It has become the event where the Arthur C Clarke Award is handed out, as well as the Sci-Fi London Awards. For those who want to build their own, they have created the SFL Lab where scientists, comic artists, leading genre writers and filmmakers will present a full program of classes, including things like Filmaking for small screens. For the more gonzo build-your-own types they held the 48 Hour Film Challenge a few weeks ago (so they could show the results at the SFL festival). They handed out titles, dialog, and props to 71 teams on Saturday, and on Monday 55 of those teams returned with finished films. They will be doing many World and UK Premiers, including the films The Hunt for Gollum, Eyeborgs, Eraser Children, The Clone Returns Home, and one of my personal favorites, Cyborg She. They will be screening X-Men Origins: Wolverine before it opens in UK theaters. And so much more; wish I could get the time off from work to be there, but at least I can watch Sci-Fi London TV!
When those in the US finish filing their taxes, here is an event to help you relax; Beer Wars. The movie will be showing at a few hundred theaters across the country, another of the Fathom Events series. Besides the documentary itself, there will be a live panel discussion by some of the leaders of the craft brewing scene. A little later in the month the same group will be running Death Note: Change the World, the third live action installment to the franchise. The presentation will be on the 29th of April for those who prefer original-audio subtitled, and the 30th for people who prefer an English dubbed soundtrack. These live action films join the Manga and Anime collections to give you more choices on how to enjoy the series. If you are not already familier with the story, you can watch the anime online at Joost for free to bring you up to speed before the event.
Word is that Greg Bear will be writing the HALO Forerunners trilogy books, due out next year from TOR Books. Considering his background for writing epic galaxy-spanning SciFi, this is a good choice. The classic SciFi Anime Van Dread has just been released as a complete series box set by Funimation. With a slogan like If the enemy doesn’t kill them, their hormones will you have to suspect this one is silly fun (and it is, watch free episodes online at the previous link to prove it). Funimation is also running a 6 hour anime marathon at the Comic Book SciFi Con in LA on April 26th.
A report from SciFi Wire says that Fox will not air episode 13 of Dollhouse, which would either be the season or series finale. After the way they let Idol run long, making sure those of us who depend on recording Fringe in order to see it would never see the end of the episode, I am scratching the network off my good-guys list. Wait, I did that last year. And the year before. And pretty much every year since they canceled Firefly (or was it Buffy?). So just like Firefly, Harsh Realms, and so many shows before it, you will have to wait for the DVD in July before you can see all the episodes. John Scalzi has a nice article in praise of Dark Star and other B movies, which is appropriate. The site he posted on, AMC, has just launched a B Movies Classics site, where you can watch many of them online for free. They also have the original Prisoner series and some other goodies.
There are tons of places to watch science fiction online, with each site having its share. Sometimes it can be hard to find what you are looking for, but the Crotchety Old Fan’s Classic Science Fiction Channel makes it a bit easier. He doesn’t host the films or TV shows himself, but links to the content on Archive.org, Hulu, Veoh, Classic Cinema Online, and more, filtering it for the good stuff so you don’t have to hunt for it. There is a new issue of Antipodian SF online, with a new URL for the down-under site. They are still tweaking the new layout, but the content (excellent free flash-sf stories) is all in place for the December issue. If you are looking for back issues, they are archived at Pandora, the National Library of Australia’s online repository. Not to be confused with the Pandora Internet Radio service, and yes, that link is to my indi/anime/jrock oriented station.