We’re about three weeks into the new fall television season and even with the first round of cancellations under our collective groaning belt (so long Lone Star and My Generation, we never really wanted to know you) we’re still left with a dearth of quality and/or entertaining shows. Last season there was a glut of science fiction/fantasy shows (well, mostly just science fiction) and almost all of them proved downright disappointing upon execution—here’s lookin’ at you, FlashForward and V—or just couldn’t follow through with fans’ expectations (you listening, Caprica?).
[“Television? The word is half Greek and half Latin. No good will come of it.” - C.P. Scott]
Halloween is my favorite holiday and so it should come as no surprise it is my favorite theme for board and card games as well. What follows are my picks for the top 10 Halloween board and card games available in the 2010 season. You won’t find these games in your local WalMart but with a little research online they should be readily available. If you’re fortunate enough to have a gaming specialty shop near you I strongly encourage a visit, many shop owners provide demonstration copies and space to try new games.
Arkham Horror published by Fantasy Flight Games is the granddaddy of Cthulhu and cooperative board games. Players work together taking the roles of 1926 era investigators, racing through the city of Arkham trying to close gates to outer worlds while mythos creatures slowly fill the streets. Visits to various city locations can provide investigators with valuable clues, powerful weapons, and sanity draining spells but are just as likely to result in assault, abduction, or worse. If the investigators are unable to seal the gates before the city is overrun with creatures, a Great Old One is awoken. Once awoken players must use the resources they have collected in one final climactic battle against the elder god to save themselves and the rest of humanity.
What starts as a normal workday ends with the forced insertion of a larval Ceti eel into your inner ear. Face it, we’ve all been there. But have you thought to fight this invasive alien presence by, oh, slapping a Puppet Masters slug to your back or swallowing one of those Dreamcatcher intestinal weasels?
The sci-fi nursery rhyme basically writes itself. Allow enough fictional parasitic monsters to crawl inside you and your body quickly becomes a parasite battleground. And hey, if they’re too busy fighting each other for squatter’s rights in your large intestines then maybe they won’t have time to take over your brain or burst out of your abdomen, right?
Such parasitic turf wars actually go down inside host organisms, according to a study published this week in the journal Science. The team of British and Argentinean researchers looked into the heated conflict zone we call the common field vole and observed some actual benefits for the host organism.
But wait, don’t graft that tingler bug to your spine just yet. It’s not all sunshine and happy faces.
The full title of this remarkable work is—take a deep breath—The Master Key, An Electrical Fairy Tale, Founded Upon the Mysteries of Electricity And The Optimism Of Its Devotees. It Was Written For Boys, But Others May Read It.
Well, then. Thanks for clearing that up, L. Frank Baum!
After that, people can be forgiven for hesitating to even approach the book. (At least one online bookstore has mistaken the title for the book synopsis, and cannot be blamed for this error.) I hope you’ll forgive me if I just refer to it as The Master Key for the rest of this post.
Each week, Frequency Rotation probes a different song with a science fiction or fantasy theme. Genre, musical quality, and overall seriousness may vary.
Say you want to write a song about Watchmen, Alan Moore’s and Dave Gibbons’ landmark graphic novel. Which of the book’s many superheroes would you sing about? The detached, godlike Dr. Manhattan? The morally complex (or is that totally amoral) Comedian? The grim, Nietzschean Rorscach? All of the above?
If you’re Franz Nicolay, solo artist and former keyboardist of The Hold Steady, you skip all of those obvious choices and head straight for one of Watchmen’s true underdogs: Hollis Mason, retired auto mechanic and the erstwhile masked adventurer once known as Nite Owl.
It seems like an old fashioned way of writing science fiction to take one new technological innovation and examine all the implications, and Other Days, Other Eyes (1972) is indeed an old fashioned book. Having said that, it holds up rather well. The technological innovation is “slow glass” a form of glass that by complicated scientific gobbledegook handwavium slows down light passing through it, so that what you see through a window made of it is yesterday, or ten years ago, depending on how the glass was tuned. The book is a fix-up, three short stories set within the frame of the novel, covering slow glass from invention through all its implications and exploitations, and similarly covering the collapse of the marriage of its inventer, Alban Garrod.
[Read more: The eyes of God could see everywhere—no plot spoilers]
Not that it's hard to get your favorite Star Trek quote printed on a shirt these days, but now you can do it on the up and up: CBS is allowing fans to design and sell Star Trek merchandise on CafePress, as long as it follows the rules ‘n’ regs. They unfortunately bar any representations of the actors we know and love, but fans are coming up with fun riffs on redshirts, Starfleet Academy merch, and other geeky joys left, right, and bearing three one six, mark four.
Thanks for the tip, Eugene!
A few months ago, I blogged about Flowtown’s attempt to revamp Randall Munroe’s original Map of Online Communities, first published in May, 2007, by creating the 2010 Social Networking Map. While it was interesting to compare the two versions, the newer map left something to be desired; in the comments, readers debated the shift in terminology from “online communities” to “social networks” and the omission of communities like 4chan, Fark, Reddit, Digg, and QQ, among others. Happily, Munroe has reclaimed his title as Official Cartographer of the Interwebs with a new and wondrous update of his own...Rather than expound at length upon its awesomeness, I’ll just post it here and let the LOLs commence:
Check out the giant version of the map here, and for the record: I love xkcd so much.
Bridget McGovern has definitely traveled through the harrowing Plains of Awkwardly Public Family Interactions, and would rather face a night swim through troll-infested waters.
Welcome to Wednesday Comics Pull-List, here on Tor.com! Every week we post reviews of a select handful of this week’s comic releases. From those reviews, we let you know what we would pull for keeps.
This week’s batch includes:
There’s a lot of Marvel Comics releases in there, but alternate reality Supermen and Batman are who win the day.
Tor.com was down for about twenty minutes this afternoon due to a database error, and we lost all of the site's content from this morning onward. We're back up now, with today's posts restored, but unfortunately any comments made since this morning are gone. Which stinks, because there were some great conversations happening.
Lost comments also means lost entries in the Scott Westerfeld Behemoth giveaway, so we're extending the giveaway until noon tomorrow to give people a chance to re-enter.
We apologize for the inconvenience. Everything should be running smoothly now, though. (Stubby flies again!)
Okay, so there is no way to go about reviewing Behemoth if nothing is said about Leviathan, even if both books stand on their own well enough. Except if you read Behemoth first, you’d want to go right back out and get Leviathan anyway, to make sure you got the full experience.
Leviathan is set at the beginning of World War I, with the death of Archduke Ferdinand by Serbs. As such, we can’t exactly pin it down to the era of steam technology, so it’s more fittingly dieselpunk. Nonetheless, the historicity and scale of tech retrofitted into the past fit nicely into steampunk conventions.
Within this history, it’s obvious that Westerfeld has done his homework, down to little details that add a delicious accuracy to enhance certain scenes, while being very clear where he has strayed. As such, there isn’t one break-off point between this story and recorded history, but a blend of both.
The two major factions within the new geopolitical landscape are very reasonably set: in the bits of Europe that is Catholic, the predominant tech is mechanical, with hulking machines that are deeply reminiscent of HG Wells’ land ironclads. The British, by contrast, are Darwinists, with the conceit that Darwin discovered DNA and developed the technology to harness it, to the point that the British fabricate their own biological ecosystems in a fashion that serves their purposes.
This is how we get Leviathan, which is, to put it bluntly, a flying whale.
Begun in 2007, Buffy: The Vampire Slayer has continued on in canonical form not through television, or films, but through comics. Plotted and partially penned by show creator Joss Whedon, the 40-issue season is now coming to a close.
As befitting a season finale, Joss is writing the closing arc “Last Gleaming,” but he’s not alone. Scott Allie, the Buffy series editor at Dark Horse—and ever-present voice in the letter column—is joining Joss as co-writer.
Today’s release of Buffy #37 (check back here this afternoon for a review) marks Allie’s first credited issue, so I sat down for a quick interview with Scott regarding the change, what’s forthcoming in the Season 8 finale, and what plot elements Buffy readers can expect to see again as the season concludes.
I’ve always been fascinated by the politics and social issues of the post-WWII era: McCarthy and the war against Communism, the beginnings of Women’s Lib, the arrival of television. These things changed the American landscape forever.
And this is one of the many reasons why I latched onto Caprica so fiercely.
Lud-in-the-Mist is an unusual fantasy first published in 1926, before The Hobbit and considerably before the existence of fantasy as a marketing genre. It would be recognised as one of the founding works of the genre except for the way it has rarely been noticed and seldom reprinted. It’s a book that is itself in the tradition of Rossetti’s Goblin Market (1862) and Dunsany’s The King of Elfland’s Daughter (1924). It’s very clearly an influence on Susannah Clarke’s Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell, and Neil Gaiman’s Stardust and the work of Greer Gilman, so perhaps it has contributed to a particular strand of fantasy, a particular way of approaching the numinous.
Lud-in-the-Mist is a sleepy comfortable settled town in Dorimare, a country that borders on Faery but which has turned its back on Faery and all the possibilities of Faery. The book is poised on that edge in which the uncanny spills into the mundane. It’s also beautifully written and a joy to read aloud. The theme, and the shape of the story, is pretty much that of The Bacchae, which isn’t unknown as a modern plot (Joanne Harris’s Chocolat) but is an unusual one to borrow, especially in this kind of setting. The story is shot through with folklore and country superstitions and the looming presence of the faery folk under the edges of the everyday.
[Read more: Lud-in-the-Mist had all the things that make an old town pleasant]
It’s now officially official that Peter Jackson is directing The Hobbit. While Jackson directing a two-part adaptation had been considered a fait accompli for some time (since the previous announcement that he was directing), it is now absolutely, for sure going to happen, you bet. The repetition of the announcement makes one wonder, though, if all is as it seems.
At long last, we arrive at “Mount Doom,” chapter VI.3 of The Return of the King in The Lord of the Rings saga. Spoilers for the entire book after the jump.
Earlier this morning we asked folks following us on Twitter who would make a good Rand al’Thor in a Wheel of Time movie or TV mini-series. (We haven’t heard of anything like that being planned, sorry to say. We’re just curious.) Some interesting initial responses regarding our beloved lantern-jawed loobie below the cut.
What makes a given show perfect for any one science fiction fan?
I am a thoroughgoing history nerd. The first chapter books I read, as a tad, belonged to my mother when she was a kid. They were wholesome historical goodness. Most, in fact, were biographies of great U.S. women: presidential wives, Julia Howe, Jane Adams, Louisa May Alcott, and Clara Barton. I got an early start on science fiction with Madeleine L’Engle’s A Wrinkle in Time, Alexander Key’s The Forgotten Door, and Ray Bradbury’s The Illustrated Man. My favorite Star Trek: TOS episode was, naturally “The City on the Edge of Forever.”
Atop that and for no reason I’ve ever been able to articulate, I have always been something of a sucker for Donald Bellisario’s shows: the original Battlestar Galactica, Magnum P.I., and even (embarrassingly enough) Airwolf.
You can see where this is going. When Teh Bellisario decided to take a lot of U.S. history, mix in time travel, and spice it all with the one-two charm punch of Scott Bakula and Dean Stockwell, I never had a chance.
Quantum Leap began its five year run as I was wrapping up high school. I had no money and no access to cable TV: keeping up was a challenge. So, a number of years ago, I took it into my head to rewatch them on Space, which is Canada’s version of the Syfy Channel. I was expecting to be a little disappointed, honestly, to find the stories hadn’t worn well, to be put off by ’80s cheese. Time hadn’t been kind to Galactica, after all.
I couldn’t have been more wrong.
At the heart of John M. Ford's Growing Up Weightless (1993) is a train trip by a group of teenaged roleplayers across the far side of the moon. It's also the story of how thirteen year old Matt Ronay discovers what growing up means, and how his father Albin writes a symphony about water on the moon. It's set four generations after Luna became independent—and that's Lunna, not Loonam, and absolutely never call it “the Moon,” as if it were something Earth owned. This is a future with complex history that feels real. There's a story going on in the background about water and sacrifice and power politics. In fact there's a lot going on here—of course there is, it's a John M. Ford novel—but most of all it's about Matt Ronay and his roleplaying group making a trip from Copernicus to Tsiolkovsky Observatory on the train, two days there and two days back, without asking permission or telling their parents where they're going. It's wonderful.
Despite its critical acclaim, I Am Legend did little to improve the somewhat dire financial straits of its author’s growing family, which his eldest child, Bettina (fictionalized in “Little Girl Lost”), dramatically described in The Richard Matheson Companion. Writing during the morning while cutting out airplane parts for Douglas Aircraft in Santa Monica by night, he resolved that if his next effort did not bear greater fruit, he would abandon his literary aspirations and work for his older brother, Robert. So Matheson returned to his boyhood home of New York to rent a house in Sound Beach on Long Island, whose cellar he used as the primary setting for his fourth novel.
Said novel, The Shrinking Man, changed the course of literary and cinematic history, because Matheson made the sale of the film rights to Universal, then known as Universal-International, contingent on his being allowed to write the screenplay. That sale, bolstered by the film’s box-office success, enabled him to move back to California permanently and devote himself to a full-time writing career. Even before the book’s publication as a Gold Medal paperback original in 1956, Matheson was in Hollywood, hard at work on the script, although in a letter to William H. Peden, his college writing professor, he expressed characteristic frustration at repeating himself.
Let the Right One In versus Let Me In by Brit Mandelo
Scott Westerfeld Interview & Behemoth Giveaway by Megan Messinger
Quantum Leap: “Genesis” by A.M. Dellamonica
