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Science Fiction/Fantasy Interviews

  • Uncategorized
  • July 5, 2007
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The LA Times profiles “the Dean of Science Fiction,” Robert A Heinlein, in preparation for the 100th anniversary of his birth on Saturday.

Michael Cassutt’s new column at SciFi Weekly is also about Heinlein, and gives more details of the Heinlein Centennial going on this coming weekend in Kansas City (Heinlein’s birthplace).

 

The Globe and Mail lists and profiles Canada’s “best-kept secrets in the arts” – among them, Hugo-winning science fiction writer Robert Charles Wilson.

 

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Dennis Hopper Is Doing What?

hopperdennis-1922054Approximately several hundred websites are reporting Dennis Hopper might be guest-villaining in Doctor Who next season. ComicMix is now officially number several hundred and one. It’s also being reported by the London Sun and the British magazine TV Times.

Evidently, the one-time Easy Rider star and two-time G. W. Bush supporter is a big Whoer. When the BBC discovered this, they moved with uncommon speed to get at least a cameo out of the noted actor.

Ultimate Spiders A-Plenty

The Big ComicMix Broadcast is back with a bang after the 4th with a tip on how to latch on to those Ultimate Spider-Man #100 covers, Girls gone wild in our Summer Reading Rundown and The Top Ten in the Comic Shops last month … plus the eternal question of when does a hit not sound like a hit?

Press The Button – maybe your crusty old Dell will transform into an IPhone?

GLENN HAUMAN: Who made comics piracy big?

gh_100-3978857There’s a thread going on over on The Engine where Warren Ellis is practicing knuckleballs with Molotov cocktails again and taking a snapshot of comic book piracy. The thread has some interesting points, and it reminds me who really made piracy popular.

Not the first comics pirate, incidentally — people have been making fake copies of comic books as far back as Warren’s Eerie #1 and, later, Dave Sim’s Cerebus #1, and it probably predates that with the undergrounds. Nor are we discussing printers overprinting copies and selling them without reporting them to the publisher — we aren’t even talking about scanners of comics, who have been doing it and trading them ever since scanners started showing up at work– in fact, the first bootleg scans I ever got were from other comics professionals, the folks whose oxen are theoretically getting gored.

No, I’m talking about the guy who made it important to pirate comics, to distribute scanned copies far and wide, and to make it cool to read bootleg copies of the Internet.

His name? (more…)

Bid on dinner with Joss Whedon at Comic-Con

There are some parties at San Diego that are impossible to get into. Sometimes, it’s better to get into a nice quiet upscale dinner, and even those can be amazing — I happened to be at one two years ago where the food was great and the stories were stunning.

But this might be the topper for the year: Joss Whedon (Astonishing X-Men, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Captain America’s surrender in Civil War) is auctioning off five seats at a dinner table with him at the San Diego Comic-Con this year. Bidding is up to over $4000 a seat with a week to go. Here’s a link to one of the seats, but check on eBay as there are five separate ones and eBay didn’t set this up as a Dutch Auction.

Dinner will be on July 27th in San Diego, and 100% of the proceeds will go to benefit Equality Now. Here’s Joss making a speech for them:

Hat tip: Heidi MacDonald.

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MOVIE REVIEW: Transformers

bumblebee_2007movie-6340859When this summer hit, only one image popped into my head, and it wasn’t a black spider, a drunk pirate, or a dorky kid with glasses. All I saw since day one was a semi truck that turned into a 50-foot robot. So as you can assume, going into the film my expectations were a little high, and you had better believe they were met with bells on.

Seeing as this film is truly the ultimate summer blockbuster (thanks, Mr. Bay), I’m going to have to break down this film like I do all others with the acting, the plot, and of course the one thing that ties the entire movie together: the effects.

Starting with the worst note and working our way up, the acting wasn’t the worst I’ve seen in a Bay film, but wasn’t exactly Gone with the Wind. I don’t know about you, but I expect when I’m going to see a movie about giant robots from space, I want Gone with the Wind.

Putting aside my disdain for Shia LaBeouf, I was just like every other fanboy out there on the Internet that rolled his or her eyes when the list of cameo’s for the flick got released. Bernie Mac’s presence in the film was completely superfluous, other than about eight seconds, his entire sequence should have gotten well acquainted with the floor. As well as John Turturro’s scenes. Turturro plays the cocky secret government agency role very well, but after about 10 minutes, it becomes too much to handle, and he needs to go away. When doing the entire exposition scene of Megatron and the plot-focusing All-Spark cube, there was no need for a cocky government type. Just faces of awe.

LaBeouf and Megan Fox did a decent job of playing the frightened kids… at first. But once the imminent threat of world domination became second priority to LeBeouf’s parents finding him alone in a room with a girl, the film kind of lost its head. As scary as chracter actor Kevin Dunn can be, a gigantic robot with a sword is far scarier. Finally, Jon Voight, Josh Duhamel, and Tyrese “Hero For Hire” Gibson played roles that were both aiding in the “Bay” way of showing the how disasters effect people on a human level, but these characters were effortlessly forgettable in comparison to the robots.

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Science Fiction/Fantasy Magazine News

The fifth issue of Helix, a free on-line magazine dedicated to publishing stories too extreme for regular print SF/F magazines, has just been published, with new stories by Esther Friesner, Brenda Clough, and others.

Locus, the newsmagazine of the SF/Fantasy field, has mailed their July issue, and posted a profile page about it on their website. The July issue includes interviews with Peter S. Beagle and Paolo Bacigalupi, results from this year’s Locus Poll, and lots of news and reviews.

There’s a new issue of SF Site for July, with lots of reviews, a listing of new books received, and whatnot.

Strange Horizons has an update every Monday, and this week is no exception; new this time is a story by Jerome Steuart and a poem by David Lunde. (more…)

JOHN OSTRANDER: Fireworks

ostrander100-5980790It’s America’s birthday and what better way to celebrate than with fireworks? Yeah, I know – the Fourth of July was yesterday but if your neighborhood is anything like mine, people have been setting things off since last weekend and will probably continue through this weekend. So let’s see if we can set off a few here.

I hold these truths to be self-evident.

Item: Democracy is a radical experiment and one that could still fail. The notion that all men – and, as we have come to understand it, all women – are created equal and are endowed with certain inalienable rights was certainly a radical notion in a world where the right to rule came by birth or by force of arms. Instead, we maintained that People could, should, and had the right to govern themselves and the right of any government to rule rested within the consent of the People. That’s just crazy talk – or so much of the world in the late 1700s thought. That was chaos – anarchy. Heck, it scares a lot of people today and that includes our own citizens, a lot of whom would be more than willing to trade freedoms (well, certainly OTHER peoples’ freedoms) for a little more security for themselves and their own. In the overall scheme of things, folks, two hundred twenty five years is nothing. We blow it and it’ll just be noted as an interesting aberration.

And we’re really close to blowing it. Voting is a pain and we can’t be bothered to turn out in real numbers even for the Presidential elections; we abide rigged elections and voting machines; we let ourselves be led like lemmings by polls and attack ads.

I’m not a political innocent; I was raised in Mayor Richard J. Daley’s Chicago. I know the difference between political theory and political reality. We, the People, increasingly vote for appearances rather than bother to look at issues. We assume that, because America has been around for two hundred years, it will be forever. History says the odds are way against that. We are an experiment and the results are not yet in, folks. (more…)

John Rogers on the Cheney Administration

  • Uncategorized
  • July 4, 2007

On this American Independence Day, Blue Beetle and Transformers: The Movie writer John Rogers has a post that sums up the feeling that many have in America today: 

We are faced with utterly shameless men. Cheney and the rest are looking our representatives right in the eye and saying "You don’t have the balls to take down a government. You don’t have the sheer testicular fortitude to call us lying sonuvabitches when we lie, to stop us from kicking the rule of law and the Constitution in the ass. You just don’t. What’s beyond that abyss — what that would do to our government and our identity as a nation — terrifies you too much. So get the fuck out of our way."

And to a great degree, the White House is right. You peel this back, and you reveal that the greatest country in the world has been run, for the last six and a half years, by men who do not give a shit about the Constitution, or fair play, or honesty. No, not just run by corrupt men, or bribe-takers, or adulterers or whatever, we could handle that –no we’d be admitting It Went Wrong.

There is a sizeable population in America that just does not, cannot wrap their head around the fact that the President may be a Bad Man who does Bad Things. He’s President of America. We’re Americans. We’re the good guys. Remember, the Nixon mythos in America is that the system worked. "See, in America, even the President is not above the law."

As they say, read the whole thing.

Stuff to Read for Free Online

zefra-9592566Harper’s magazine has an excerpt from Karl Schroeder’s Crisis in Zefra in their July issue, but the whole thing — a fake non-fictional account of a near-future African peacekeeping mission that Schroeder did for the Canadian army a few years ago – is also available online, in a form that makes it look creepily real.

Eric Flint posts “snippets” of all of his current novels on his blog – that sounds like little bitty things, but each day he posts good-sized chunks, and he does dozens of “snippets” for each book. For example, today there’s snippet 30 of 1634: The Bavarian Crisis, snippet 17 of The Mirror of Worlds, and snippet 52 of Pyramid Power.

John Scalzi (the most recent winner of the Campbell Award for Best New Writer) posted a list of his work that’s available for free online, which includes his entire first novel, Agent to the Stars. (Agent is pretty good, actually; it’s the first thing I read by Scalzi, and it made me want to track down his other books.)

Tobias Buckell has posted the first third of his current novel Ragamuffin on the ‘net for everyone to read.

BestSF.net has posted Jonathan Sherwood’s story “Under the Graying Sea,” originally from the Februarty 2006 issue of Asimov’s.

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