August 2007 Archives

"But for now, infinity plus will remain online as an archive, no longer updated."

"Variety is reporting that Keanu Reeves has agreed to star as Klaatu in Twentieth Century Fox's upcoming remake of the classic 1951 sf film The Day the Earth Stood Still." 
"The producers say the story will be updated for the new film."

"Star Wars couple Natalie Portman and Hayden Christensen have been voted as having the least plausible on-screen chemistry by film fans."

Ken the Elvis Trooper is celebrating 30 years since the death of the King Of Rock''n'Roll. (Which seems a strange anniversary to celebrate, but there you go.)

Movable Type 4.0 has been released.  I'm going to upgrade soon(ish). Can't decide whether to do a new design then upgrade or just upgrade and design incremently as I feel like it (that's agile development!).

Due to the wonders of static html publishing everything should still be accessible. Probably. But just warning you if things go badly wrong.

The next season of Torchwood starts in "the new year". Suitably vague. I suppose I will have to watch it, which does not fill me with excitement.

"...expect to bump into some familiar alien enemies from Doctor Who.."

The Edinburgh International Book Festival started on Saturday. If you know who you're looking for you might be able to navigate the website to find if they're speaking (no filter by genre!).

Iain Banks is on tomorrow night, but the event is sold out. If you're going, please ask lots of questions about The Culture to annoy the literary types.

Comics Britannia season launches on BBC Four

Starts in September. Some detaills from the press release:

"Narrated by comedy writer Armando Iannucci (The Thick Of It), Comics Britannia will feature comics legends who wrote and drew the original strips, comics experts and a range of celebrity fans who re-live their favourite comic strip moments and characters."

"Bash Street Kids, Dennis the Menace, Roy of The Rovers, Fat Slags, Watchmen, V for Vendetta and many more are brought to life using a special graphics style that allows the audience literally to step inside the comics."

Here's a compilation of episodes from the classic series of Doctor Who

Via SFSignal

There's plenty more Who on YouTube, how about all the onscreen regenerations?

Oooh, pretty.

Via The Genre Files. 

And the Orbit blog has some of the new spaceship names. 

You’ll Clean That Up Before You Leave.

Indeed. 

Ansible 241, August 2007

CrunchGear talks about the rumours of a Doctor Who videogame, including what they would and would not like to see. They then go on to talk about other BBC TV series that they would like to see as games: Life On Mars? Red Dwarf.

The two for me that sprang to mind are Spooks and Hustle. Charles Stross has a game in Halting State called Spooks and pretty much covers the logical evolution of that game...

I don't really know anything about XFire, but they emailed me (and probably every other SF website in the universe) to say that they're having a Sci-Fi week, which is five days of Live Chats with a selection of authors, artists, and creators. I have no idea what a Live Chat is (their captilisation), I assume it's a text based browser thingy.

The guest list is: Charles Stross, Vernor Vinge, Peter Watts, Dan Abnett, Jim Butcher, Brian Herbert, Kevin J. Anderson, James Patrick Kelly, Larry Niven, Jerry Pournelle, R. Stevens and Michael Whelan

Which is rather impressive.

Unfortunately you have to sign up for XFire to take part, so I won't be doing it, I'll wait for someone to scrape a transcript and blog it. The timings however quite sensible for us who live in The One Timezone To Rule Them All (GMT), starting at 9pm BST.

Paris Hilton has joined the cast of futuristic musical film “Repo! The Genetic Opera.” Which apparently requires her to pose naked bar for some boots and a microphone lead.

The film is about the survival of the human race after a mysterious epidemic develops:

"The movie will tell the tale of a time when human organs, ravaged by the future plague, could be replaced by expensive man-made counterparts. The new organs could be paid off in installments. Just don’t get behind on your payments, or the Repo Man (or woman) will pay a gruesome visit."

Musical. SF. Paris Hilton. Erm.

Via Capt. Xerox's blog 

"if a few of the episodes were sub-par, three of them were absolutely tip-top"

"disLOCATIONS is having its very own official launch party, on Monday 13th August, 7.00 pm, at this lovely little amphitheatre attached to Peterborough Central library (Cambridgeshire); wine and nibbles courtesy of yours truly. In addition to myself, contributors Pat Cadigan, Ian Watson, Chaz Brenchley, Amanda Hemingway and Andy West will all be present, for a brief talk, some tantalising readings from the anthology, then general mingling, nattering and drinking."

And now for something completely different.
So, not content with far future Science Fiction, and Fantasy of the It's-Really-SF variety, Charles Stross has also produced a could-be-happening-now SF-Horror-Spy novel, The Atrocity Archives. You could even call it a supernatural thriller if you fancy categorisation by the latest publishing industry genre-de-jour. Or perhaps it's best just to give up on the categories completely.

The UK paperback edition of The Atrocity Archives, published by Orbit, contains a foreword by Ken McLeod, The Atrocity Archives novel, the Hugo winning novella The Concrete Jungle and a lengthy, fascinating, afterword by Mr. Stross discussing the book and it's influences.

From the start the story is fun. It's set in what has become known as The Laundryverse. The Laundry is a fictional secret British Intelligence service, which looks after the Occult side of things (as you do). The modern day setting and geek hero Bob seem to suit Stross, details of bureaucratic offices and downtrodden IT guys seem oh so real (especially if you have worked in/as either), and blackly funny. There's a wit running through the book that appealed to me: the fact that demons from other dimensions can be summoned by some hard maths; The Laundry with it's matrix management, dodgy IT infrastructure and occult weapons cache; the accurate descriptions of sharing a house with geeks. I chuckled quite a bit.

Both The Atrocity Archives and The Concrete Jungle have spy-thriller plots, with other stuff chucked in. The Atrocity Archives has a slower start, due to the setup, both of situation and character, but escalates to a wild climax. The Concrete Jungle dives in and gets straight up to speed immediately, thanks in part to the setup being dealt with previously. Interestingly this means that any other sequels should benefit from this too, like The Jennifer Morgue, which is the next book in the universe. Both stories have that "I'll just read a couple more pages" factor, just like Glasshouse, that meant I hardly put the book down. Although sometimes I long for a touch more poetic language in Stross's books he definitely seems to have cracked the art of crafting a cracking plot.

This is the book to attract the (now almost legendary) non-SF Slashdot geek crowd, the book that horror, thriller, spy fans should read. Forget the Ludlum knock-offs that aren't Ludlum anymore, read this. And for SF fans there's parallel universes, crazy maths and big scary monsters. Great fun.

The Atrocity Archives is a book I can envisage as a classy BBC TV series: take the budget from Spooks (never been the same since series two) and the team from Life On Mars, mix together and voila. In fact, commission Charlie to write new, original episodes! (Anyone from the Beeb reading?)

The post today included (well, okay, entirely consisted of) something that made me jump up and down with excitement. Courtesy of George at Orbit, a proof copy of Charles Stross's Halting State, the much anticipated (by me anyway) second person POV book. Coool.

So that's what I'm doing this weekend then.

Charles Stross has news that The Attrocity Archives is on sale as an ebook (with DRM) for £3 from WH Smiths. Interesting. There's a comment thread too (Cory Doctorow responds).

I've just finished reading The Attrocity Archives (yesterday in fact) and the review may well be written tonight if I have a moment. (Here's the spoiler : I liked it).

So the question is do you want to pay £3.99 for the paperback from Amazon or get the ebook for £3. (I discount the postage on Amazon, I don't know about you but I always buy a few things at once to get the Super Saver delivery). Personally I'd always rather have the paperback. (Although surely someone's hacked the ebook DRM by now?)

The other problem I have is that I worked on the WHSmiths site's back end ordering system....but that's another story.

Yes, I know that the next series of Doctor Who has only just started filming, yes I know that David Tennant hasn't confirmed that he's leaving, yes I know it's The Sun but this story just arrived via the wonders of RSS Nesbitt tipped as new Dr Who. James Nesbitt as the next Doctor because he's worked with Steven Moffat, who is rumoured to replace Russell T Davies at the end of the next series when he is rumoured to step down as head writer.

That's a lot of what-if rumours. Speculative journalism. SJ on SF.

This morning the latest issues of the BSFA magazines Matrix and Vector arrived in the mail. It seemed a bit odd that vector was the May/June issue, but Niall explains what happened.

I shall read them tonight.