Book View Cafe is a new online publishing venture by a consortium of writers, many of whom are friends of ours here at ComicMix. According to their website, “Offerings range from novels to flash fiction and include both reprints and new work. Here on the Book View Cafe Blog, the authors talk about their work and offer ideas and opinions on the wider world of fiction.”

Visitors to the site, which went live this week, can sample long out-of-print works from the authors, read their blog posts, and soon buy premium content.

Authors include Sarah Zettel, Ursula K Le Guin, Vonda McIntyre, Irene Radford, Brenda Clough, Laura Ann Gilman, Susan Wright, and many others.

The subject matter is widely diverse across all lines of popular fiction. “Ideally,” the site states, “it would also provide you with a wider selection of fiction from some of your favorite authors than you’ve had before, and provide us a more direct link with our readers.  Of course, we also wanted to take advantage of the internet to get the word out about our books.”

As Gilman said on her blog, “The offerings on BookView Cafe will refresh on a regular basis, and range from novels to flash fiction and include both reprints and new work (and, yes, that includes new stories and novel out-takes from the Cosa Nostradamus books!).”
 

Doctor Who is about to turn 45, young for a Time Lord but old for a television character.  To celebrate, the BBC has opened up it s archive which has detailed information on the series from its early development through current production.

Among the fascinating artifacts is a 1962 report discussing whether the BBC should make a sci-fi drama, concept notes written in 1963 forming a summary of ideas for just such a program, and background notes by C E Webber and Sydney Newman in which they outline the format for the new series that had been christened Doctor Who.

The site welcomes fans and says:

“Explore the origins of a TV legend with this collection of documents and images. It’s now the number one family favorite, but Doctor Who had a difficult birth, emerging from the imagination of some of BBC Drama’s top minds.

Here, we tell the story of the creation of Doctor Who from the very beginning, starting with a report on the possibility of making science fiction for television and leading up to the moment a new drama series is announced in the pages of Radio Times.”

With the DVD for Wanted due out December 2, Top Cow and Image have published a new edition of their movie edition trade collection of the Mark Millar/J.G. Jones miniseries that inspired the hit film starring Angelina Jolie, James McAvoy and Morgan Freeman.

The Wanted Movie Edition, retailing for $19.99, contains the hit comic story and features interviews with the director and cast of the film, a character dossier, deleted scenes, a making-of-the-comic featurette and more.
 

The Days Before is an original science fiction screenplay from newcomer Chad St. John that was just purchased by Warner Bros. Gianni Nunnari (300) will develop the project for the studio, according to Variety.

The trade says, the “story centers on aliens invading Earth by traveling backwards through time and wiping out humanity — yesterday by yesterday — while one man stays a yesterday ahead of them, trying to convince the world that the end is coming again.”

St. John previously wrote The Further Adventures of Doc Holiday for Bruce Willis, although it was never produced.

Once again I’m left with a stack of books that are sequels to other books – that’s what comics is about, isn’t it? stories that never end? – and so I shoved three of them together due to some vague shojo similarities. And they are…

Nephilim, Vol. 2
By Anna Hanamaki
Aurora, July 2008, $10.95

The first volume of Nephilim – which I reviewed back in August – looked a lot like an adventure story, with daring escapes, swordfights, chase scenes, and two battling empires. But it had within it the hints of the emotion-drenched shojo romance it was destined to eventually be. By the end of that book, the dashing nobleman Guy had saved the Nephilim Abel (one of a nearly-genocided race of people who all change sex at night, which must make pregnancies interesting) and they’d seemingly shared a “we both love each other” moment before they were rudely separated.

But it’s now a year later, and Abel is searching for Guy, while swanning over the one moment when he said he wanted to be her husband. (She’s a shojo heroine, so she spends a lot of time in a romantic reverie and hardly any time noticing the world in front of her.) The background is still of a world vaguely at war, between two large powerful countries, with the poor Nephilim (what of them are left) stuck in the middle. But that’s really just for added drama: the focus here has shifted decisively to “but does he luuuuuuuve me?!” territory.

Abel does catch back up with Guy, as we knew she would. She eventually learns he has a Tragic Secret (related to a Weakness He Is Too Much Of An Honorable Man To Tell, and which Threatens His Life when he Performs Great Deeds), and, even worse, that he has what looks like another romantic entanglement. (Interestingly – since he seemingly originally was interested in Abel during the day, when she was a boy – the woman he’s canoodling with now has a short, severe haircut and an tough, commanding attitude that some might even call “manly.”) (more…)

Happy Birthday, Rene Magritte.

Britian’s ITV has a showreel for their upcoming season, with new content of interest for fans:

• The first video clips I’ve seen for the remake of The Prisoner, starring James Caviezel (The Passion of the Christ) as Number Six and Ian McKellen (X-Men, Lord Of The Rings) as Number Two. You can read more at AMC’s Prisoner production blog, with many entries by Sir Ian himself.
• Law & Order: London, starring Jamie Bamber (Battlestar Galactica) in the traditional younger detective role and Freema Agyeman (Doctor Who, Torchwood, Survivors) in the traditional female DA role. Character names? It’s Law & Order, you know the roles. Although seeing DAs in wigs is a bit weird. At least they kept the "da-dum" sound.
• Clips for season 3 of Primeval.
• A new series called Whitechapel that, as far as I can tell, has nothing to do with Warren Ellis. Unless he’s trying to recreate the Jack the Ripper killings for fun and profit. Which, come to think of it, Warren might do.

And for the obligatory comics connection, they keep using the soundtrack for The Dark Knight over clips. You’d think that soundtrack won an Oscar or someth– oops, sorry. Sore subject?

Any hits? Misses? Impending disasters? Leave your comments below.

Ukrainian-born actress Olga Kurylenko addressed being the latest Bond girl in Quantum of Solace when she met with Australian press.

"That’s not what an actor hopes to play", she said, referring to the many women Bond has encountered. "They’ve mostly been dull and just arm-candy."

The 29 year-old actress plays Camille, a woman also on a mission of revenge, much like Bond. Unlike her feminine predecessors, she did not manage to bed the secret agent. "Yeah, I liked [the older ones] but I especially liked Casino Royale", she says. "The Bond girl is also a lot more interesting in that one. That’s what inspired me to go and audition for this one".

Having gotten the part, she then trained for the physical work which pleased her. "It was amazing. It was the first time I’d experienced doing such action stuff", says. "I trained a lot. I trained all the time, all the time – every free moment I had. They brought me in a month before I started shooting and during that month I just trained with the stunt people. They taught me how to fight- just basic fighting with fists and kicking and punching, so not like Asian martial-arts like Michelle Yeoh [in Tomorrow Never Dies]. This was more tough military-style fighting.

"I also had to learn how to skydive – we shot it in a wind tunnel but I still needed to train for a month to know how to do it properly."

Kurylenko was also seen this fall in Max Payne and expects to find a career in American films. "They know me in France – they’ve known me since 2004 when I did The Ring Finger — but America doesn’t me. Hitman was my first English-speaking part, and my second was Bond — I only did 3 days work on Max Payne, in the middle of filming Bond, so that doesn’t really count. Hitman did get me an American agent and it did open doors to an extent but this one more so, because it’s just so big!"