April 2009

Constantine: Set Aside The Fan Rage And Give It Another Try

IO9 is reporting that plans for a sequel to Constantine are still in the works. I have mixed feelings about this: I felt that they did well enough with the first movie that going for a sequel is just going to ruin it. I've always felt that Constantine is an underappreciated movie. I was a big fan of the original comic Hellblazer for many years (I still have the first 125-ish issues, which is as many as I was able to buy before the cover prices forced me to scale back my comics budget). To say I was leery of Constantine is to understate the matter greatly. Is Keanu Reeves an accurate representation of John Constantine? Well… not entirely. Alan Moore famously had Quadrophenia-era Sting in mind when he first sketched Constantine, and Keanu Reeves is no Quadrophenia-era Sting. But honestly, I thought he did pretty well. Given that the location was moved from England to Los Angeles, I felt that Keanu was probably one of the better casting choices they could have made.

LOTR, Hobbit, Books and Films

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.

SETI Astronomer Gives A Thumbs-Down To Interstellar Travel

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.

Five Ways To REALLY Reboot Star Trek

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.

Nicola Griffith and David Gerrold Hit By Amazon Fail

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.

Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? Gets A New Incarnation

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.