Great review on Deadspin here.
In case you missed it, the in-cinemas-now Battleship is a sci-fi naval action movie bafflingly based on the license for the Hasbro board game. And by ‘based on’, I mean they have the same name. That’s it.
Category: Sci-Fi and Fantasy
THE AVENGERS IS A JOSS WHEDON MOVIE
I love The Avengers. And Film Crit Hulk. And Joss Whedon. This article ticks all of the boxes.
SO HULK REALLY LIKES JOSS WHEDON. HE MADE A LITTLE MOVIE RECENTLY. IT’S CALLED THE AVENGERS.
HERE’S WHY IT’S GREAT AND ALSO WHY IT TOTALLY FITS IN WITH EVERYTHING HE’S EVER DONE:
http://badassdigest.com/2012/05/18/film-crit-hulk-smash-the-avengers-is-a-joss-whedon-movie/
Trends in SF Futures
Great, if very nerdy, article at io9 here. They ‘worked with intrepid researchers Ben Vrignon and Gordon Jackson, who helped track down when “the future” was in a random sampling of over 250 works of science fiction (books, movies, TV, and some comics) created between 1880 and 2010’.
That’s less than twenty per decade, so it’s not going to be completely accurate, but still really interesting how trends changed.
Me? I’m not sure I could ever write anything pre-‘Far Future’. And my immediate reaction was actually ‘501 years? That’s not far, that’s near!’
Just me, maybe.
My New Obsession – Cover Art
My new inclination toward self-publishing has brought with it an unhealthy obsession with book covers. I must have spent over an hour today just flicking through designer’s websites listed on the Writers Café Yellow Pages. There’s also a great cover art category on A Dribble of Ink, which has inspired me.
My novel is (at the moment, at least) called ASCENSION POINT. It’s far-future space opera, fitting neatly alongside Iain M. Banks, Neil Asher, Alastair Reynolds, and the like. As such, when it comes time to publish I’m going to want a proper, space opera cover that fits the genre. Something like these…
A Quick Edit Update
I’m now four chapters into the first-pass edit of my novel, the goal of which is cutting out any obviously unnecessary text and just getting an initial feel for if the plot and character arcs hang together and make sense. I’ve been a bit surprised by how familiar these first few chapters are, and how little I’ve actually managed to cut – I can only guess that I reworked them quite a lot last year, before I moved to my later approach of just hammering out the scenes and not even reading them afterwards.
I’m expecting that’ll change soon: I’ve got my eye on chapter seven, which I think is about 3,000 words of nothing relevant to the plot happening, just some slow-burn character development. Pretty sure I’ll be able to tighten that up to about 1,500 and merge it with chapter six.
Editing’s fun!
The Avengers, and Shared Fictional Universes
Saw The Avengers over the weekend. I was a little worried it wouldn’t live up to the massive amount of hype, but happily it did.
BEST. MOVIE. EVER.
For anyone who hasn’t been following what Marvel did to build up to The Avengers there’s a great summary of the Marvel Cinematic Universe on Wikipedia. This kind of cross-pollination of characters across multiple storylines to place them in the same universe hadn’t been done in cinema before, despite being very common in SF and fantasy. (That I’m aware of at least. Correct me in the comments!)
King and Gaiman Talk About Writing
Neil Gaiman interviewed Stephen King a couple of months back. You can – and absolutely should – read about it on Neil’s site here.
That’s all.
Worlds Without End – Legends of SF
If you’ve not checked out Worlds Without End in my blogroll on the right, take a peek now. It’s OK, I’ll wait.
The site is an incredible resource, and ‘brings together the complete listings of novels, authors and publishers for 12 major awards in Science Fiction, Fantasy and Horror‘. I’ve mentioned ‘my inevitable Hugo Award’ enough times that you won’t be surprised that was the first place I went. And after spinning through the shortlists for the last 20 years I was awestruck by how many legendary names appear consistently, year on year.
Retro SF Movies that Everybody Should See
More retro-futurism stuff from io9 here.
There are some classics in here, and real favourites of mine. Moon was fantastic, minimalist and claustrophobic with a nice turn in growing tension. Dark City was brilliant as well, one of those cult classics that not enough people have seen.
I was a little surprised to see The Truman Show in the list, but it makes perfect sense – the combination of the cliché of suburban white picket fence America with Big Brother-style hi-tech surveillance absolutely makes it retro SF.
But I’m sorry – Flash Gordon was terrible, though.
The First of Many Awards? Versatile Blogger
I’ll be honest, at first I thought this was one of those annoying chain-letter-type things. You know, the sort you see on YouTube comment threads, where someone says ‘If you read this and don’t forward it to 50 people then your cat will die in a plane crash!’
But after a little bit of poking around, there seems to be no harm in it. No-one’s eventually being asked to forward their bank details to the Crown Prince of Nigeria, so setting cynicism firmly aside… Read more…
DAN HARRIS: 10% SCI, 90% FI 