Category: News

SF&SF Book Reviews

SF&SF Book Reviews

Neth Space reviews Tobias S. Buckell’s first novel, the alien-planet adventure novel Crystal Rain.

The Agony Column reviews Paul McAuley’s Cowboy Angels.

Monsters & Critics reviews an anthology called Many Bloody Returns, though I can’t quite read who the editors are.

SciFi Weekly reviews Emma Bull’s new Wild West fantasy novel, Territory.

SFF World reviews Dave Duncan’s Mother of Lies, the second of two books in his current fantasy series.

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F&SF Interviews

F&SF Interviews

John Scalzi (wearing his Ficlets hat) interviews Justina Robson, author of Keeping It Real.

Cory Doctorow was interviewed by the CBC’s Q (a radio show of some kind, I think, though it could also be a godlike transdimensional entity) and that link above will take you straight to an MP3 of it. [via the author]

Reason Online has an article profiling Robert A. Heinlein, with a focus on his connection to Los Angeles.

SciFi Wire talks to Benjamin Rosenbaum about his Hugo- and Sturgeon- nominated story, “The House Beyond Your Sky.”

Pink Raygun interviews) horror writer David J. Schow.

Hot podcast links!

Hot podcast links!

The holiday heat is finally cooling down and I can finally take the headphones off and sit back with a frosty iced tea and gather up all the news and notes from this week’s round of Big ComicMix Broadcasts:

• Even though Andrew Pepoy’s performance of The Hourglass in the Stop Time Chronicles has passed, the comic book based show itself continues from the Chicago Tap Theater. Get more info of upcoming events here.

 

• To get info on the advance release of the Ultimate #100 Project trade pb (featuring all 100 versions of that cover), plan on being at Wizard World Chicago – OR get info from The Hero Initaiative here. Remember you cab always order it from your retailer as well in the September Previews.

• The rebirth of Nexus is coming very soon – and there is a lot of preview material here, including a chance to join the NEXUS ARMY!

Stargate fans can preview the film written and produced by the cast and crew here. You can also get a copy of A Dog’s Breakfast at ITunes or Amazon Unbox.

• Don’t forget to check out Danielle Corsetto’s Girls With Sling Shots, updated three times a week – right here. Look for GWS coming to a comic shop soon as well.

Starting next week, we begin our Countdown To San Diego on the Big ComicMix Broadcasts. It’s arguably the nation’s biggest pop culture event (or as some call it, “The Geek Prom”), so don’t miss out. We’ll also have more summer reading tips, a big ol’ pile of new comics and DVDs to preview – and this little movie about some Boy Wizard! 

Rest up – you’re gonna need it!

RIC MEYERS: Slings and Extras

RIC MEYERS: Slings and Extras

Another week, another pair of good examples as to how DVD extras can enhance, deepen, and illuminate a previous viewing experience…especially when the subject matter is show business itself.

First stop, north of the border, and one of Canada’s best television series. For years I’ve been enjoying Slings & Arrows, the tragicomedic travails of a Shakespearean Festival Theatrical Troupe. Created by some of the same folk who made the hit Broadway musical The Drowsy Chaperone, and The Kids in the Hall, it has been consistently engrossing in its three seasons (of six episodes each).

In the first season, we were introduced to the core cast as they tried to get the theater on its feet and mount a memorable production of Hamlet. Season two saw more complications amid the cast and crew as they battled the “Scottish Play (Macbeth).” Arriving on DVD this week is the third (and most say, last) season, in which a production of King Lear is the focal point.

The first two seasons set the bar high in terms of Shakespearean drama and human comedy, but this third season does not disappoint in any way. In fact, it manages to resonate the first two seasons as well as cap off the tales of once-institutionalized artistic director Geoffrey Tennant (Paul Gross), the love of his life Anna Conroy (Susan Coyne), the troupe’s financial director Richard Smith-Jones (former Hall Kid Mark McKinney), and the ghost of the former artistic director Oliver Welles (Stephen Ouimette) … and, yes, you read that right.

In addition, each season features a new cast of actors who play actors who are brought in to star in the season’s featured play, and, if anything, the third time’s the charm. William Hutt, a beloved Canadian actor, stars as Charles Kingman, a beloved Canadian actor who takes on Lear in more ways than one (in fact, Hutt died shortly after completing his role as a dying actor playing a dying King). Playing the actress playing Lear’s honorable daughter is Sarah Polley, the luminous star of such movies as The Sweet Hereafter and director of the recent art house film success Away From Her (she’s also the daughter of Mark Polley, who has been featured in all three seasons of the show as one of the troupe’s supporting players).

Suffice to say that all three box sets of the series are worthwhile. Now, onto the extras on this latest, and reportedly, last season. There’s interviews with star Paul Gross (who you might remember from the Canadian Mountie at large CBS series Due South) and co-writer/co-star Susan Coyne. In addition, there’s bloopers, outtakes, deleted scenes, photo galleries, and even song lyrics, but what makes the extras extra special are uninterrupted, unedited, and extended sequences from the “final” production of King Lear itself, which take on additional dimension once you’ve seen the backstage drama that went into creating them.

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Transformers with a side of Ratatouille

Transformers with a side of Ratatouille

Box Office Mojo’s weekend movie estimates show that Transformers made a whopping $67.6 million, including $22 million on Friday alone. The total gross so far is $152.5 million since Wednesday. Per theater grosses were $16,853, more than double what the next ranked film, Ratatouille, took in.

The Pixar rat did okay, though, with a weekend haul of over $29 mil, and a per-theater gross of $7,367. So far, it’s made more than $109.5 million.

The other top-tenners are Live Free or Die Hard ($17.4 million), License to Wed ($10.4 million), Evan Almighty ($8.4 million), 1408 ($7.14 million), Knocked Up ($5.19 million), Fantastic Four: Rise of the Silver Surfer ($4.15 million), Sicko ($3.65 milion) and Ocean’s Thirteen ($3.525 million).

Knocked Up, which cost abou $30 milion, has earned more than $132 million so far this summer, making it the most profitable non-documentary film on the list so far.

Happy 60th Anniversary to the Flying Saucer

Happy 60th Anniversary to the Flying Saucer

On this day sixty years ago, reports came  from the Roswell Army Air Field that a "flying disc" had been recovered from a nearby ranch, and an industry was born.

Since then, we’ve had books, movies, TV shows, comic books, and rock and roll music all discussing whatever happened at Roswell with varying degrees of fictionality and believability. And just remember that it all started with a crashed– sorry, we’d like to tell you, but you’re not really cleared for that.

MICHAEL H. PRICE: Amazing Colossal Sculptures

MICHAEL H. PRICE: Amazing Colossal Sculptures

Last week’s dispatch from this quarter drew some parallels between cartooning and Fine Artsy facial studies, as provoked by an exhibition called The Mirror and the Mask: Portraiture in the Age of Picasso, at the Kimbell Art Museum of Fort Worth, Texas. A companion opener at the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth has less of an academic mouthful of a title – Ron Mueck, plain and simple – but digs comparably deep into the function of portraiture during Times of Anxiety (which is to say, all times) by concentrating upon the assembled work of one present-day artist. Namely, Ron Mueck, Muppeteer-turned-monumental sculptor.

So I’ll be expecting my Hearty Handshake any day now from the Greater (than what?) Fort Worth Chamber of Commerce, on account of doing my bit for provincial tourism and the hometown’s arts-and-farces scene. These exhibitions, of course, are anything but provinciable.

Mueck will require little introduction, although some of his now-cryptic, now-blatant clay-into-silicone signature-pieces are more widely recognized than his name. The Untitled (Seated Woman), a smaller-than-real piece of unnervingly lifelike resonance, has been an object of worldwide fascination since its début in 2002 as a fixture of the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth. Send this one out on institutional loan or place it in temporary storage, and the North Texas enthusiasts will mount a massed protest. Mueck’s namesake exhibit has previously graced the Brooklyn Museum and the National Gallery of Canada, in Ottawa. It will remain on view at Fort Worth’s Modern through Oct. 21.

I find that Mueck’s works, though engaging if approached cold and without preamble, make a great deal more sense when regarded in a pop-literary context – all due respect to the stodgier curatorial realm. The tinier human figures might leave the absorbed viewer feeling a great deal like Mr. Swift’s Lem Gulliver, awakening to find himself confronted with motionless Lilliputians. Mueck’s larger-than-life figures reduce the observer, conversely, to the state of the awestruck expeditioners of 1933’s King Kong, edging warily past a fallen Stegosaurus. Mueck sums up his approach with a simple manifesto: “Life-size is ordinary.” Which recalls this echo from Old Hollywood:

“It’s not big enough!” raged the filmmaking artist Merian C. Cooper (1893-1973), on so many occasions that his Hollywood crews learned to anticipate his demands – by thinking in unreal proportions and translating such impressions to the movie screen.

How big? Well, that 1933 accept-no-substitutes original Kong is Cooper’s chief surviving brainchild.

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Science Fiction/Fantasy Book Reviews

Science Fiction/Fantasy Book Reviews

SF Signal reviews the novelization of the Transfomers movie by Alan Dean Foster.

Fantasy Book Critic reviews The Dark River by John Twelve Hawks.

Pat’s Fantasy Hotlist shamelessly plugs Tad Williams’s Otherland series.

Strange Horizons continues reviewing John Crowley’s AEgypt novels this week with a look at the second book, Love & Sleep.

Book Fetish covers Marjorie M. Liu’s paranormal romance Soul Song.

Clare Light does quick reviews of Laurie J. Marks’s Water Logic and Walter Mosley’s 47.

Interzone reviews Marianne de Pierres’s new space opera Dark Light.

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Silver Age Great Nick Cardy Speaks!

Silver Age Great Nick Cardy Speaks!

Some call it the "luckiest day of the year,"  but to us it’s just another day soaking in the warm glow of Pop Culture! The Big ComicMix Weekend Broadcast goes a little old skool with news on new Pokemon and the new Magic cards, a tip on a new film from the Stargate folks, Homer In The Air plus a talk with one of the best comic craftsmen of the last four decades (guess who?) … and the story of a guy who dropped this clothes on Broadway and then went on to have a hit song!

Press The Button, and if a bunch of "7s" turn up on your screen, call a priest!