Science Fiction/Fantasy News & Links

Mark Evanier shows off the cover to his upcoming book Kirby: King of Comics, and explains what this book is (a big, heavily-illustrated look at Jack Kirby’s comics work) and what his next book will be (a much longer, text-heavy biography of Kirby).
Columnist Alex Stein, in the Guardian, likes to argue with a friend about the use and importance of science fiction. (He’s on the side of the angels) Sadly, Stein seems to be content to argue that there’s some good stuff out there amid the dreck, rather than calling the friend on his category error – the unnamed friend stacks the deck by using the new Transformers movie as the SF exemplar and “some new French slow-burner about adultery” as his example of “real life.” The equivalents of a good serious “real life” movie are movies like Gattaca, or 2001, or Blade Runner; if you want a “mainstream” comparison movie on the same level as Transformers, you’ll have to dig up something like Monster-In-Law. Defenders of SF need to point out that there’s just as much “real life” dreck as fantastic dreck – and our dreck at least has cool pictures to go with the lousy plots.
The Baltimore Sun reports on an exhibition of Star Wars paraphernalia at Geppi’s Entertainment Museum in Baltimore. The materials are all from the collection of Thomas Atkinson, who runs the Star Toys Museum. (more…)

I should warn you about these link-lists: Mondays tend to be longer than usual (since there’s a lot of content that goes up on the weekend, or early on Monday), and the beginning of the month tends to be longer than usual. Since we’re just past both of those things, this is going to be a really long one…




Pat’s Fantasy Hotlist

