After months of accusations and cross-accusations regarding The Hobbit movie, Peter Jackson and Inline finally agreed that Guillermo del Toro would direct, and the screenplay would be written by Philippa Boyens and Peter Jackson. Jackson is the Executive Producer, and he and del Toro have just announced that there will be not one Hobbit film, but two. The Hobbit Part One will be released in December 2011, with The Hobbit part two following in December 2012. The two movies, according to del Toro and Jackson, will encompass not just the core plot of the novel, but the activities of the White Council and Gandalf's travels to Dol Guldur. You can read more about it here, but most of our questions—like who and what and where—are still unanswered. The official site, which mostly has lots and lots of speculation, is here.

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This week the New York Times is carrying an Op-Ed piece by Seth Shostak, an astronomer with the SETI institute, about how we will never make it out of our own solar system. I find it greatly amusing that someone who works for SETI - possibly the single most heedlessly optimistic science program operating in the world today - is the one to throw down the wet blanket on dreams of interstellar travel.

Shostak, the little buzzkill, points out the obvious: given the technology currently at hand, interstellar travel is simply not feasible.

"[…] such sci-fi crafts would get embarrassingly bad mileage. The energy required to reach even the nearest stars in a decade or less with a very modest-size starship (say, the tonnage of the 17th-century Mayflower) equals the total energy consumed in the United States last year. At 10 cents per kilowatt-hour, that's a fuel bill of $5 trillion."

Blah blah blah! YES OKAY, if you do the math, interstellar travel is not actually possible today, or in the near future.

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IO9 is carrying bits from an interview by Pushing Daisies creator Bryan Fuller, on what he would like to do with Star Trek. I think a lot of us are hungry for a real Star Trek reboot, and not the time travel "everything's the same but the characters are younger" thing we're going to get this summer.

Among other things, Fuller would want to give Star Trek a full-on Battlestar Galactica re-imagining, featuring Rosario Dawson as a lead character. (Thankfully, he's careful to specify that she wouldn't need to be a captain. Call me ageist, but I think 30 is a little young for a starship captain.) He then adds that "Angela Bassett as a captain would rock my boat."

THIS. Although personally, I'd rather see CCH Pounder as a captain. Because she is SO AWESOME, that's why.

Here are some other suggestions for a real Star Trek reboot:

1. The Prime Directive

Scrap it. Let's face it, the Prime Directive is a namby-pamby weasel way for the writers to get out of having to take sides.

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By now I'm sure you've heard of Amazon Fail. If you were out doing things like having Easter dinner this weekend and happened to miss the internet, here's a quick recap: a bunch of GLBT books were removed from Amazon search results. Aside from assuring everyone that they are working to fix it, Amazon has declined to comment further.

While this was most likely a boneheaded programming error, it certainly looks from the outside like a conspiracy to sweep GLBT authors and books with GLBT themes under the rug. I sincerely doubt that this is the case, but I can't fault anyone for taking the harsher view. At the very least, it's an appalling disaster, and one which has apparently been going on for several months before it rolled onto Twitter and into the global internet consciousness.

Two books by openly gay science fiction authors have been caught up in Amazon Fail: David Gerrold's The Martian Child, and Nicola Griffith's Ammonite. Science fiction blog IO9 asked David Gerrold and Nicola Griffith for their reactions.

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Independent comic book publisher Boom! Studios has announced that they are releasing a new version of Philip K. Dick's classic novel, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? This version promises to be considerably more faithful to the original than certain earlier adaptations. (Adaptations which I love, don't get me wrong, but Blade Runner* is probably more accurately described as "inspired by" rather than "adapted from.")

According to science fiction news blog IO9, this new version of Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? will "mix comic art with the original text" and "will include the full text of Dick's 1968 novel [...] alongside brand new sequential illustrations for something more than just illustrated prose."

I have to admit, I was a little puzzled by this description. It's not quite a comic book graphic novel, and not quite a book with lots of pretty pictures. The project is certainly ambitious - it will include all of the original text, and be released in 24 installments, one per month for the next two years.

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I've been thinking a lot about the trailer for the upcoming Star Trek movie. (It's hard not to - it's plastered all over the few time slots and channels that I watch.) Mostly what I think is, "Why?"

Allow me to summarize the trailer:

"Hi, I'm James Kirk! KABOOOOOM!!! I'm Doctor McCoy! BLAM!!! I'm Mr. Spock! KAPOWIEEEE, ZOOM! [brief clip of sexy scene between Kirk and unknown female; we note again that Starfleet uniform includes boxer shorts] PEW PEW PEW!!!"

The trailer is laughably transparent. This is Star Trek shown through the diffracting prism of big budget action movies like "Pearl Harbor" and "Armageddon." The trailer promises us that things will be blown up, and that our favorite characters will perform bizarre and unlikely stunts.

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The Hugo Awards committee has announced its nominees for 2009, and I have to agree with Neil Gaiman and John Scalzi: I pity the awards voters this year!

The nominees for Best Novel are:

* Anathem, by Neal Stephenson
* The Graveyard Book, by Neil Gaiman
* Little Brother, by Cory Doctorow
* Saturn's Children, by Charles Stross
* Zoe's Tale, by John Scalzi

This is the first year I can remember when I've already read almost all of the nominated novels. (The only one I haven't read yet is Saturn's Children, although it's on my stack.) Yay, me!

Some thoughts:

Anathem

This book is a huge literary accomplishment. I was amazed by its scope and reach, and floored by the way that Stephenson continues to tie all of his books together. After reading Anathem, it behooves the reader to go back and re-read both Cryptonomicon and System of the World (which I consider to be one massive novel, instead of three big novels, much less nine regular-sized novels).

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On March 17th, 1948, William Gibson was born in South Carolina. Wired has an excellent overview of Gibson's life in their article here.

Just the thought of William Gibson makes me feel both nostalgic and very old. How could something I once considered so cutting edge be so fusty? Kids these days, most of them have never even heard of Neuromancer, much less read it. And I no longer recommend it to them, because I'm sad to say, it has not aged well.

Pictured with this article is my own tattered copy of Neuromancer, which I bought at the Chicago O'Hare airport in 1984 at the age of 12, when I was traveling back home from a visit to New York State. The visit had not gone well. I dove into the book on the airplane to escape from my life. What I found in Neuromancer blew my little twelve year old mind.

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The Sci Fi Channel recently announced that it would rebrand itself as "The SyFy Channel." Although admittedly this has more to do with their inability to brand a common term like "sci fi," their meaningless re-shuffle has raised the hackles of geeks across the internet. (The American television-watching internet, that is.)

Various marketing people have stepped up to proclaim that the rebranding will allow the channel to widen its audience. By not painting themselves into a corner, the network is now free to explore fantasy and the wider realm of speculative fiction.

These are the statements which really stick in our collective craw. Some may remember a time when the Sci Fi Channel actually showed science fiction. In recent years it has devolved into the network that airs giant blocks of terrible monster films, sprinkled with bits of shows like ECW Wrestling, Ghost Hunters, and (notably) Battlestar Galactica.

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In doing the research for this series of articles, I have found that lesbians outnumber gay men in science fiction by about a factor of ten. I suppose it would be disingenuous of me to pretend that I don't understand why this is. Given science fiction's classic target demographic, and given that demographic's propensity to consider lesbians "hot," and gay men "icky."

IO9 recently posted a list of female-dominated cultures in science fiction novels, and the comments on the post are an excellent example of this. (Note also the commenter who asked if there were any worlds filled with gay men, and the resounding silence in response.)

Certainly I can see how there would be a tendency for the media industry to green-light novels with the possibility for lesbian sex, and take a pass on novels with sex between gay men. After all, the media is in the business of selling things that its audience wants to buy.

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