The San Diego Comic Con, the biggest geek event of the year, looms large. It’s only a few weeks away and to prepare, the Con overlords have just released the complete convention schedule. It’s huge. To help you sort your way through it, we’ve filtered through it and dug out the most must-see events for the average sci-fi fan. For the complete schedule visit the Comic Con official site, otherwise there’s this: read this entry »
Category: in print
If you’re a Star Trek fan then it’s almost certain that, at some point, you’ve picked up a Trek paperback. These days they’re common place, the shelves any paperback section from Barnes & Nobles to your local grocery store are littered with them. For a geeky young JT trapped in the 80s though, the discovery of dozens of new Trek adventures on the shelves of my local library was a revelation. I spent summer after summer pouring over the work of writers like James Blish and Vonda McIntyre.
Not all of them are great, particularly these days when it’s all been watered down, but for every ten throwaway adventures occasionally there’s something utterly brilliant. Do yourself a favor and look into the Trek universe work of Peter David for instance. You won’t regret it.
They did more than simply rehash already used Trek themes and stories, they expanded the Trek universe, the mythology, sometimes in lasting ways. For instance, it’s thanks to those Star Trek novels that Mr. Sulu has a first name. read this entry »
Have Space Suit Will Travel is not Robert A. Heinlein’s best novel (by my reckoning that’s The Door into Summer), but it is one of his best novels that doesn’t rely on experimental sex and the flaunting of nudity taboos. Heinlein was a sci-fi master, but he was also an orgy guy.
So it makes sense that someone might be interested in picking it up and turning it into a movie, since it’s one of the few that can be made without an R-rating. Variety says Harry Kloor is developing a feature film based on Space Suit Will Travel. How serious this project is remains unclear. He’s doing it through his own production company, Jupiter 9 Prods, and he’s mostly known as a TV writer who did a lot of really awful stuff like Earth: Final Conflict, and not as a Hollywood mega-producer.
Actually as a Heinlein fan he doesn’t exactly seem like the guy you’d want touching the master’s better books. This one’s so simple though, if he gets money, it’s kind of hard to imagine anyone screwing it up. It’s the story of a teenager who wins a broken-down space suit in a contest, and ends up on an adventure which leads to man’s first alien contact.
Though it routinely ends up on best of all time lists, somehow the 1974 science fiction novel The Mote in God’s Eye never actually seems to get read. It deserves to be mentioned in the same breath with the work of masters and is in fact the greatest work of two of them, as a collaboration between greats Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle.
Maybe it’s the title that keeps so many otherwise dedicated hard sci-fi aficionados away from it. It sounds like a joke or some sort of bad pun. Read the book and it makes sense, but just sitting there and sitting at the cover, it seems like someone’s bad attempt at a Terry Pratchet parody rather than a serious science fiction story.
But serious is exactly what it is. In fact it may be one of the best books ever written. At the least it does something no other work of science fiction has ever done: It gets aliens right. read this entry »
In a way, I suppose it’s appropriate. Paul W.S. Anders, the guy who ruined two sci-fi franchises with his Aliens vs. Predator debacle, has been hired to direct a new, big screen take on Buck Rogers… in 3D of course. It’s appropriate because throughout its history Buck Rogers has always been relegated to being some sort of cheesy, clumsy, sci-fi cash-in. I was really hoping someone might take it seriously this time, but I suppose it’s par for the course where Buck’s concerned.
It’s not all bad news though. Art Marcum and Matt Holloway, who had a hand in writing the script for Iron Man, are working on a screenplay for Buck Rogers.
Buck Rogers has appeared in dozens of different incarnations since his creation in the 1920s. People are probably most familiar with the short lived, 1979 – 1981 television show in which Wil Gerard starred as an airforce pilot frozen for 500 years and reawakened in the 25th Century. read this entry »
Columbia Pictures is bringing the pulp-era Doc Savage series to life on the big screen. It’s in the hands of Shane Black, the guy responsible for the extremely awesome film noir movie Kiss Kiss Bang Bang. Here’s how Variety explains it:
Shane Black is attached to direct the film from a screenplay he is penning with Anthony Bagarozzi and Chuck Mondry. Neal Moritz (“Fast and Furious”) will produce through his Sony-based Original Film banner.
First appearing in pulp magazines published during the 30s and 40s, Doc Savage is a multi-talented man of science. A physician, surgeon, scientist, adventurer, inventor, explorer, researcher, and musician with outstanding mental and physical abilities honed by training form a team of scientists hired by his father. He puts his abilities to the test in a series of heroic, adventures.
James Cameron wants to fill in some of the gaps left in our knowledge of Pandora, and I’m not talking about explaining why Michelle Rodriguez basically commits suicide for no reason. Instead MTV says he’s working on writing an Avatar prequel. No, it’s not being used as the script for the next movie. Instead the plan is to release it as some sort of companion novel.
“[We] won’t have time to do [these stories] in the movie, or maybe in sequels,” Landau explained of what Cameron will be writing about. “[So the novel will] give a foundation for the world. “It would be something that would lead up to telling the story of the movie, but it would go into much more depth about all the stories that we didn’t have time to deal with — like the schoolhouse and Sigourney [Weaver's character] teaching at the schoolhouse; Jake on Earth and his backstory and how he came here; [the death of] Tommy, Jake’s brother; and Colonel Quaritch, how he ended up there and all that,” Landau explained.
Before Hollywood announces yet another reboot of some already beloved science fiction movie franchise, let’s give them a few better ideas. Since we’re talking about the entertainment industry, we can’t expect anything to original. But it doesn’t have to be. There’s a wealth of science fiction out there, just waiting for some movie studio to pick it up and do something with it. No more waiting. Drop that Back to the Future remake Hollywood and do something with these already brilliant sci-fi properties instead:
Futurama
The Pitch: A pizza delivery boy is accidentally frozen for a thousand years, and wakes up in the future. There he finds employment at the interplanetary delivery company, Planet Express, and struggles to fit in with the company’s strange assortment of employees. His best friend is an alcoholic robot, he’s in love with a smoking hot kung-fu Cyclops who finds him repulsive, and he’s employed by a mad scientist with an increasingly bad case of dementia. Hilarity ensues. Think Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy meets Encino Man.
Quantum Leap
The Pitch: A botched experiment sends Sam Becket leaping through time. But Sam can explain it better than I can. “It all started when a time travel experiment I was conducting went… “a little caca”. In the blink of a cosmic clock, I went from quantum physicist to Air Force test-pilot. Which could have been fun… if I knew how to fly. Fortunately, I had help – an observer from the project named Al. Unfortunately, Al’s a hologram, so all he can lend is moral support. Anyway, here I am, bouncing around in time, putting things right that once went wrong, a sort of time traveling Lone Ranger, with Al as my Tonto. And I don’t even need a mask… Oh Boy” read this entry »
For those of you who, like me, may be on the fence about whether to tune back in for more Doctor Who after the devastating departure of David Tennant, here’s an incentive: Neil Gaiman.
Gaiman is the celebrated author of things which are awesome (my favorite is Good Omens which he co-authored with Terry Pratchet) and he’s getting involved in Doctor Who. According to SFX Gaiman is writing a Who episode. Neil tells them:
As anyone who’s read my blog knows, I’m a big fan of a certain long-running British SF TV series. One that started watching — from behind the sofa — when I was three. And while I know it’s cruel to make you wait for things, in about 14 months from now, which is to say, NOT in the upcoming season but early in the one after that, it’s quite possible that I might have written an episode. And if I had, it would originally have been called “The House of Nothing”. But it definitely isn’t called that any more.
Countdown. You’ve got about 14 months.
In the late 80s authors Sharon Lee and Steve Miller wrote a series of three novels set in a galaxy far far away called Agent of Change, Conflict of Honors, and Carpe Diem. And then no one read them… or so they were told.
Their publisher claimed the series was a flop and so it seemed as though it would die right there. Enter the internet where, one day, Miller and Lee stumbled onto a Usenet group flush with fans who, all but demanded more in the series. The surprised authors went back to work and the series now spans more than ten books with more on the way.
Make it a point to read them all.
The Liaden Universe, the name most commonly used to encompass their work, is unlike anything you’ve read before. What’s most impressive about the Liaden books is the variety of settings and styles in which they take place. Agent of Change for instance, is an intimate spy novel focused on a small handful of characters engaged in a complex game of cat and mouse which is confined primarily to a single planet. Balance of Trade is the story of the crew aboard a massive, intergalactic merchant ship, making their way from one planet to the next. Local Custom is almost a romance novel, set amongst the complex politics of an honor driven society. The series contains massive war stories, smuggler runs, psychic warfare, and nearly every kind of science fiction you can imagine, but all in one universe. Best of all, it fits together. They aren’t random stories but larger parts of the same whole, each told in their own way and from their own angle. read this entry »