SF Signal: May 2008 Archives

Thursday May 29, 2008

TRAILER: Futurama - The Beast with a Billion Backs

Futurama: The Beast with a Billion Backs is the 2nd Futurama film released straight-to-DVD and is hitting store shelves on June 24, 2008.

[via Roberson's Interminable Ramble]

Can You Name This Story? (Part 5)

Dave N. is looking for the name of a story that eludes him. Here is his description:

I don't remember the entire plot, but it involved the protagonist going to bed on what I believe was a Monday night & woke up very early in the morning. He found creatures, for lack of a better world, constructing all the things familiar to him, i.e. his house, the neighborhood, the town, etc., suggesting that the whole world was deconstructed during his sleep. He ended up somehow asking what day it was, or stating that today was Tuesday, and was told (I can't remember if it was from another human or one of the "creatures") that "Yesterday was Tuesday". Thanks for your help!!

- Dave N.

Can you name this story?

Shadow Unit Season 1 Ends with Serialized Novel

Emma Bull and Elizabeth Bear are ending the first season of Shadow Unit with a serialized novel called Refining Fire, being made available online piecemeal now through Saturday.

The Shadow Unit project is written by Emma Bull, Elizabeth Bear, Sarah Monette, Will Shetterly, and Amanda Downum. All 250,000 words of Season One--seven novellas, a novel, and "DVD extra" vignettes, plus artwork and interactive LiveJournals by three of the characters -- are free on the web under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial 3.0 United States License.

Authors Gather to Celebrate 60th Anniversary of Shirley Jackson's "The Lottery"

Ellen Datlow, who serves on the Board of Advisors for The Shirley Jackson Awards, writes in to tell us that she is hosting a reading of Shirley Jackson's work by award-winning and leading authors on July 23rd at the KGB Bar in New York City. Proceeds from the event, which coincides with the 60th anniversary of Shirley Jackson's classic short story "The Lottery", will benefit the Shirley Jackson Awards.

From the press release:

Shirley Jackson (1916-1965) wrote such classic novels as The Haunting of Hill House and We Have Always Lived in the Castle, as well as one of the most famous short stories in the English language, "The Lottery." "The Lottery" was first published on June 28, 1948 in The New Yorker.

Ms. Jackson's work continues to be a major influence on writers of every kind of fiction, from the most traditional genre offerings to the most innovative literary work. National Book Critics Circle Award-winning novelist Jonathan Lethem has called Jackson "one of this century's most luminous and strange American writers," and multiple generations of authors would agree.

Authors scheduled to appear att he reading include F. Brett Cox's, Jeffrey Ford, Jack Ketchum, Carrie Laben, John Langan, Sarah Langan, Peter Straub, David Wellington, and Jack Womack.

My first encounter with "The Lottery" was through a television set in a school classroom. I was amazed...

SF Tidbits for 5/29/08

The Telegraph profiles William Shatner, who talks candidly about the death of his wife, which he discusses at length in his new autobiography Up Till Now.

Boing Boing TV has Cory Doctorow reading from Little Brother.

A handwritten, 800-word, card-sized Harry Potter prequel written by J.K. Rowling is being auctioned to benefit English PEN, the writers' association, and the British charity Dyslexia Action. Nobel Prize winner Doris Lessing and novelist Margaret Atwood are also scheduled to provide auction items.

Free Fiction:
- StarShipSofa offers "Easy as Pie" by Rudy Rucker. Also available: an article by Peter Watts and Poetry by Laurel Winter. [via SFFaudio]
- John Scalzi will be writing new short short fiction for the Subterranean Press newsletter.
- Recently-free fiction at ManyBooks.net:
  - "The Nothing Equation" by Tom Godwin (1957).
  - "The Hunted Heroes" by Robert Silverberg (1956).
  - "Postmark Ganymede" by Robert Silverberg (1957).

Over at Futurismic, Jonathan McCalmont looks at the entanglement of science fiction with Young Adult literature, and wonders whether YA is the latest victim of science fiction's aggressive expansionist tendencies: "SF has proved itself not only to be a survivor but also a voracious predator and a cunning diplomat, endlessly subsuming or allying itself with smaller and related sub-cultures."

Weird Tales has recently started posting 365 Days of Blasphemous Horrors, a year of artwork based on the writings of H.P. Lovecraft and the Cthulhu Mythos.

SpaceWesterns podcast-interviews SFWA President-elect Russell Davis.

Event: The June 3rd New York Review of Science Fiction Reading features Thomas M. Disch and Karen Russell. [via Tachyon]

At SciFi Scanner, John Scalzi explains Why the Movie Version of Your Favorite SciFi Book Stinks and Kevin Maher looks at The Truly Alien Nature of Politics Revealed in They Live.

Can you guess which genre movies made Scene-Stealers' list of Top 10 Flops Turned Classics? Hint: It's not Waterworld.

Jeff VanderMeer is wondering about Unfilmable Novels.

Laughing Squid shares this grieving Stormtrooper poster: "I had friends on that Death Star..."

Topless Robot lists The 10 Most Blatant Star Wars Toy Rip-Offs of the '70s. I think I had one of those Black Hole robots.

Tube Bits for 05/29/2008

At right is the new teaser poster (and a more appropriate name than teaser I can't imagine) for the upcoming (2009) movie, Witchblade. Based on the Top Cow comic of the same name, let's hope it's better than the TNT series also based on the comic which starred Yancy Butler. All I can say is the character in the poster is no Yancy Butler.

The Star Trek and Media Science Fiction blog takes the recent news about the Sci Fi Channel broadening it's programming to ask: Is Sci-Fi just a brand which doesn't have the same meaning as "science fiction," or should NBC change Sci-Fi's name to more accurately represent its broader programming? Clearly, science fiction on Sci Fi is an endangered species, but almost everyone knows the Sci Fi Channel name, even if they don't watch it. But yes, it's more of a brand name right now.

Matthew Fox claims he is the only LOST actor who knows how the series ends. How will we know he's telling the truth? After it ends he can just say, "Yeah, that's what I knew was going to happen." Bastard.

Bolt City liked the new Speed Racer movie, including the part many critics hated: the story. He's basically saying that what the Wachowskis did for visual storytelling in The Matrix, they did for 'flashback' storytelling in Speed and using anime storytelling techniques to illustrate why many critics, and the public, didn't 'get' the way the movie was told. I haven't seen it yet, but I would agree that, if it follows the conventions of anime storytelling (and Speed Racer the TV show is anime), then it will be told, and shot, in a manner most people aren't used to. I still have to go see this, although my oldest has already told me he wants the DVD when it comes out.

On June 5th, NBC is premiering it's new Thursday night movie of the week series, Fear Itself. Basically, several horror film directors are taking turns making 'episodes' for a movie anthology series. See the trailer below:

To celebrate the season finale of LOST (remember kids, tonight at 9/8 CT. I fully expect minds to be blown.), the Fine Bros present their LOST parody season finale, starring the man with the hat. I think this is the best one yet...

Wednesday May 28, 2008

REVIEW: Ravenor by Dan Abnett

MY RATING:
For better or worse, I have an aversion to reading media tie-in novels. I think it stems from the many mediocre Star Trek books I read as a kid, so when the good folks over at The Black Library sent us a bunch of novels, all based either the Warhammer or Warhammer 40000 miniatures table-top games, I was leery about digging in. However, our own Tim has raved about how good author Dan Abnett's Horus Heresy novels are and then Chris Roberson named him one of his underrated authors. I looked at our stash and picked out the first book in the Ravenor series, entitled, appropriately enough, Ravenor. I'm glad I did.

The first thing you notice is the setting. Ravenor is set in the Warhammer 40000 universe. Warhammer 40k has been going strong for decades and, as such, there is a huge amount of backstory and history to the setting, much of it written by Abnett himself. As a result, you can't help but feel the depth and breadth of the universe Ravenor takes place in. It's a big, sprawling, Gothic-style universe, filled with high tech, SF goodness with a liberal dose of decay and squalor. There's also a fantastical element to the setting, which is touched on the book, that comes into play via Chaos, which is a parallel dimension, used for FTL travel, that is filled with creatures that are manifestations of human emotions. Abnett does a bang up job of detailing the various settings in the book and bringing the universe to life. It feels lived in, alive.

The story is about Inquisitor Gideon Ravenor and his team of operatives. The Imperial Inquisition is charged with finding and rooting out heresy against the God-Emperor of Man. Ravenor and his team have a very wide latitude when it comes to the actions they can take. This story is basically a special ops/wetwork style story, and not what you would normally think an inquisition style story might be about. Here, Ravenor and company are tasked with discovering and stopping the smuggling ring that is responsible for distributing a new, highly destructive substance called 'flects'. These 'flects' aren't a drug, per se, but what they are ties back into the idea of Chaos rather neatly, and is the hook to get the team into all sorts of problems. If there's one thing Abnett does well, it's write a kick-butt action sequence, of which several are littered throughout the story, with the ending set piece particularly interesting. There's good deal of action, violence and bloodshed, but Abnett never crosses the line into gratuitousness. The investigative sections are a bit slower, but the entire book is filled with Abnett's appropriately descriptive prose that makes this book into an interesting SF novel, not just a media tie-in novel.

The issues I had are fairly minor, and some are a result of Ravenor being a sequel of sorts to the previous Eisenhorn stories. As such, most of the main characters are given short shrift development-wise. We aren't given much backstory on them, as that was covered in earlier works, and the bad guys are 'bad' because they story demands bad guys to fight against. Of course, they are interestingly bad so it's a minor quibble. Another issue I had was with the setting. Yes, it's vast and detailed, but as one not familiar with the Warhammer 40k setting, there are things mentioned that fans of the universe would probably know but first time readers wouldn't. Things like various military groups, the political power structure, the various alien races, and such. Again, not a big deal as they don't play a big role, but there none the less.

The biggest issue I had was what I would call the 'miracle' escape. The characters would find themselves in seemingly impossible situations, only to escape because the story demands it. Deus ex machina, in other words. This is very apparent as the story rushes to its climax with the various characters strung out and encountering their own difficulties. The resolution contained a couple of improbably events that didn't sit well with me. And, of course, the book ends with you knowing there is a sequel, or two, in the offing. Which there are.

I'm glad I picked this novel up. I found much more than a mediocre media tie-in novel. I found a book that I enjoyed quite a bit and I think any SF fan would like, especially if you like psuedo-military SF with an emphasis on skullduggery and special operations. And if that gets you interested in the game, then it's really done it's job.

MIND MELD: Which Medium is Driving Science Fiction...Books or Film/TV?

Science fiction presents itself to us through different mediums, most notably through the written and visual. Have you ever wondered who owns it? Lou Anders has, and he submitted the following question:

Q: Although science fiction was born on paper, sci-fi presented through visual media (film and television) has significantly higher audiences. Which medium, then, is the driving force behind what science fiction is and where it's headed, and who is driving it?

John Scalzi

John Scalzi is damn precious. Hell, yeah, he's the motherf***ing princess.

This is like asking who is driving the food presentation industry, MacDonald's or the French Laundry. They both work in food, to be sure, and they're both good at what they do. But what they do is different enough that comparing the two in a general sense is silly.

To speak in wildly oversimplifying terms, written science fiction is about speculation; visual science fiction is about spectacle. The distinction was there from the beginning of science fiction as a visual medium: Georges Méliès' Le voyage dans la Lune was made not because Méliès' cared about showing men getting to the moon, but because he cared about showing off his state-of-the-art effects skills. Look at the list of the most successful science fiction films over the last three decades and you'll understand how much spectacle is privileged over speculation. It doesn't mean visual SF is doing something wrong; it means it's doing something fundamentally different than written SF.

Written and visual science fiction have different goals, so to say one is driving the other (or that either is driving both) isn't accurate. It's more accurate to say that each influences the other in a more or less indirect way. Visual sf influences written sf (to go to another, different metaphor) very much the way movies are currently influencing Broadway: Popular movies are now being turned into hit Broadway musicals; Popular sf movies, TV show and video games are turned into profitable book series. Written sf influences visual sf very much the way avant-garde musicians influence pop music: Glenn Branca influences Thurston Moore, who influences Frank Black, who influences Liz Phair, who influences Avril Lavinge, who sells trillions of albums and mp3s to bunches of 14-year-old girls who would pepper-spray Glenn Branca if he walked up to them in public.

For his part, Branca might be entirely horrified at the idea that he's in some small way responsible for Lavinge's smash #1 hit "Girlfriend." But on the other hand, it is catchy. It has a nice beat, and you can dance to it, as long as you don't think about it too hard. And as you can connect Branca to "Girlfriend," so too can you connect, say, Olaf Stapledon to Heroes. But being connected is not the same as driving the field. That's more like being in the backseat, shaking your head and saying "you should have taken that left. Now we're going to have to detour through all this crap."

Suffice to say written and visual sf will drive themselves, independently, and that's fine. And when they get hungry, one will pull over at MacDonalds, and one at the French Laundry. But which at which? Well, think: which one has more money? Yes, the irony, it burns.

Joseph Mallozzi

Joseph Mallozzi, along with his partner Paul Mullie, is the executive produce/showrunner for Stargate Atlantis. He also runs a Book Of The Month discussion at his website.

Off the top of your head, name your Top 10 favorite SF authors. Okay, now name your Top 10 favorite SF scriptwriters. I rest my case.

Sci-fi presented through visual media (film and television) has significantly higher audiences because, quite frankly, a lot of it demands little more from its audience than a couple of hours and the ability to focus. Reading, on the other hand, is a much more involved and time-consuming commitment that, unfortunately, appears to be losing its appeal among many SF consumers. Which is a damn shame because it is, without a doubt, the medium that is the driving force behind what the genre is and where it is headed.

Now, don't get me wrong. I'm not saying that film and television don't provide a forum for inventive science fiction ideas. They can and do. And they've certainly made great strides in the visual representations of possible futures. But the realities of film and television production work against them being a pioneering force whereas the literary arena allows for vaster, more daring, creator-driven initiatives. The reasons are threefold:

What was the last truly great science fiction movie you saw? That wasn't based on a literary property? Yes, it's been a while, and whatever title you come up with, I'm sure I can counter with a novel or short story that did it first. Sadly, creator-driven works are few and far between in film and television. Studios are far more interested in backing a proven winner which is why sequels and established properties are de rigueur. That said, great SF movies occasionally do get made. Children of Men comes to mind. "But wait!" many will argue. "The movie was very different from the book." All well and good and some may even prefer the movie over the book, but there's no denying the fact that the driving force behind both came from author P.D. James' original vision. Yes, every so often, SF fans can rejoice with the release of a Star Wars (the original) or a Firefly but, sadly, these are exceptions to the rule.
Literary writers are limited only by the power of their imaginations (and, on occasion, their editors). Scriptwriters, on the other hand, are limited by things like the unlikelihood of their script ever getting made and the costs associated with film and television production. Getting published is tough; getting produced even more so. Especially if you're a newbie looking to get an original concept off the ground. In the event you do buck the odds and manage to get it greenlit, there are a vast number of things that can go wrong and kill your prospective movie or television series before it goes to camera. And if lightning happens to strike twice and it does go into production, chances are good that the final product will bear only a passing resemblance to your original vision. Why? Well...
Writing a science fiction novel can be an incredibly lonely process and yet, at the end of the day, the entirety of the work - its vision, depth, and execution - belongs to one person. In the case of a movie or a television series, however, many players can lay partial claim to the end-product (or be part of the stampede to disassociate themselves from it if things go sideways). All that rests between that original concept and its big (or small screen) execution are the producers, studio/network executives, directors, and actors who will weigh in with their suggestions on how to improve things. More often than not, said improvements will run contrary to the author's original vision and, when push comes to shove, it's the writers that get the shove - right off the project if they prove uncooperative and unwilling to compromise. SF is expensive! Given the kind of money at stake, studios consider it bad business not to exercise some creative control over their investments. Publishers, on the other hand, can afford to take a gamble on the new, the different, and the challenging.

All that said - despite the odds, the visual medium is capable of producing new, different, and challenging SF ideas, although you're more likely to see it happen on television where the scriptwriters are afforded the opportunity to exercise more creative control over their scripts, as opposed to the world of theatrical features where the screenwriter is more of a hired gun and is lucky if he/she gets invited to set once filming begins (An aside: I know someone who wrote the script for a 100+million dollar feature. On his first day on set, he was introduced to the female lead. According to my buddy, upon hearing he was the scriptwriter, she looked at him "like something she'd found on the bottom of her shoe." Ah, show business). Still, the freedom enjoyed by writers of prose fiction is hard to beat. But the professional scriptwriter can take solace in the bigger paychecks.

So who's driving SF today? Hey, for every established author I could name, there are dozens of up-and-comers out there just waiting to break big.

As for where SF is headed? Damned if I, or anyone else, knows. And that's the beauty of it.

Lou Anders

A 2007/2008 Hugo Award and 2007 Chesley Award and 2006 World Fantasy Award nominee, Lou Anders is the editorial director of Prometheus Books' science fiction imprint Pyr, as well as the anthologies Outside the Box (Wildside Press, 2001), Live Without a Net (Roc, 2003), Projections: Science Fiction in Literature & Film (MonkeyBrain, December 2004), FutureShocks (Roc, January 2006), Fast Forward 1 (Pyr, February 2007), and the forthcoming Sideways in Crime (Solaris, June 2008) and Fast Forward 2 (Pyr, October 2008). In 2000, he served as the Executive Editor of Bookface.com, and before that he worked as the Los Angeles Liaison for Titan Publishing Group. He is the author of The Making of Star Trek: First Contact (Titan Books, 1996), and has published over 500 articles in such magazines as The Believer, Publishers Weekly, Dreamwatch, Star Trek Monthly, Star Wars Monthly, Babylon 5 Magazine, Sci Fi Universe, Doctor Who Magazine, and Manga Max. His articles and stories have been translated into Danish,Greek, German, Italian and French, and have appeared online at SFSite.com, RevolutionSF.com and InfinityPlus.co.uk. Visit him online at www.louanders.com and www.pyrsf.com.

Science fiction is a mountain. The literature is the snow on top. As it melts, it runs downhill, feeding into the streams that become the rushing rivers that is the ocean of media. The media measures its audience in the millions, and is therefore the aspect that most people see. Far fewer climb the mountain - it's a much harder journey than just dipping your bucket in the ocean, but affords special pleasures and richer rewards. The sea is big enough now that it feeds itself, producing science fiction that is informed only by other media science fiction. And, of course, the ocean now informs the snow as well - as ideas in the media are absorbed back into the literature - but the trickle from the snow on top still flows down, slowly being absorbed by and informing the waters below. It's vital the source always flow downhill, no matter how big a pool its destination. Because without it, the ocean will eventually dry up.

Gary K. Wolf

Gary K. Wolf is the veteran science fiction author best known for his novel Who Censored Roger Rabbit?, the basis for the hit film, Who Framed Roger Rabbit?, winner of four Academy Awards and the Hugo. His most recent publication is the pulp science fiction novel Space Vulture which he co-authored with his childhood friend Catholic Archbishop John J. Myers. Gary lives in Boston, Massachusetts.

Science fiction is a fictional testing ground for dreams and philosophies, a way to discuss and dissect the core nature of human existence, to explore not just how people do things, but why.

Visual media can obviously communicate certain aspects of science fiction better than print. Science fiction movies and TV programs can graphically portray incredible battles fought against bizarre creatures on hostile and wondrous worlds. Teams of technologists, cadres of computer wizards work together to dream up these fantastical sights and then to put them on a screen for all the world to see. Viewers get the sense of actually being there, surrounded by the action. But it's a hard-edged experience. What you see is literally what you get. There's very little left to the imagination.

Not so with print. That's all about projecting images inward rather than outward, engaging not just the gut reaction but also the mind's eye. It's best done by the loner, the solitary scribe offering up a written account of the oddities and conjectures unspooling within a single imagination. Print still works in science fiction, just as it always has. There's nothing so terrifying as monsters fabricated within the confines of a reader's own head; there is no love greater, no courage stronger than that which comes from deep within a reader's own heart.

The best science fiction movies tend to be those based on short stories. That's as much material as a movie can handle within its severely limited time span. Novels can go on for hundreds, even thousands of pages, leisurely taking the time to explore in great depth what it is that makes human beings different from all other creatures on the earth and off it.

It's not a question of choosing one or the other. There's more than enough room for both. The visual to make you gasp with awe and wonder and run shrieking from the room, print to make you sit down and think.

Joe R. Lansdale

Joe R. Lansdale is the author of over thirty novels, numerous short story collections. He has been an editor or co-editor of several volumes of fiction, and has won numerous awards for his work, including THE EDGAR, Seven BRAM STOKER AWARDS, Two NEW YORK TIMES NOTABLE BOOKS and many others.

It's impossible to know for sure. I know I entered into S.F. in the fifties through comics, and TV and film, and then became a reader. So for me those were the mediums that led me to fiction. But then, is it crime films that drive crime novels. I think it's a trade off, really, and one drives the other. It's always easier to see a movie than read a book.

Lucius Shepard

Lucius Shepard is a writer who lives in Vancouver. The Best of Lucius Shepard, a career retrospective, will appear this summer from Subterranean Press, and next year will see the publication of a new as yet untitled novel.

I'd say in both film and publishing that the bean counters are driving science fiction, and this threatens to homogenize the genre. Because movies are potentially more profitable than novels, this would incline one to say that films are the driving force behind science fiction publishing, and that publishing's traditional goal, the selling of books, has been affected in that the publishers seek out the franchise product, the trilogy, mass produced escapism that appeals to the widest possible segment of a dumb-downed audience in hopes that the product may be adapted to video games or films or both. Of course there are notable exceptions to this, but as a general statement it's true enough. But it's not that simple.

Real science fiction, that written without cynicism, without an eye toward possible movie options, books that are written mainly because they wanted to be written...that's another matter. It's my feeling that they will continue to be written and to prosper and fail as the case may be; but many will be relegated to the small presses, where not many will read them. This time has been called the Golden Age of Small Presses, but what that means for authors is that they'll be read by two or three thousand readers, significantly less in many instances. Thus science fiction of this sort is imperiled by the status quo, by the profusion of unaccomplished Internet writers, by movies that share a handful of basic plots, by studios capable of rendering brain-dead the work of writers like Phil Dick and others. It's too soon to say, but the signs--declining readership; a marketplace in which the traditional novel contained within a single volume (like say, Lord Jim or The Great Gatsby) is now called a "standalone" so as to differentiate it from the proliferation of multi-volume bug-crushers; etc - are not good. Speaking personally and not a little optimistically, I remain convinced that the mid-list writers who create the majority of the field's idiosyncratic visions will struggle along somehow, though likely not without holding down jobs that supplement their fiction income. Occasionally one of their ideas will float up and become an element of the creative/commercial process, and that idea will then be worked to death, retooled and dressed in different clothing until it becomes a cliché. The sensibility of greed and the aesthetic of maximum accessibility that inform the making of movies will increasingly inform the publishing world.

The genre is reshaping itself. The mainstream is writing science fiction; science fiction authors are writing out of the genre. Barring a technological breakthrough or cultural paradigm shift that makes self-publishing a viable option for quality fiction, the most talented of these writers will drift into the mainstream, leaving behind a writhing, suppurating mess from which the arms and legs of elves and princes and dark lords and romance writers protrude, and this mass eventually will coalesce and harden into the new "science fiction." I don't necessarily think this is a bad thing-it may actually prove to have been a blessing in disguise. But probably it does not auger well, and the ultimate future of print science fiction will be found on the backs of cereal boxes and in the scripts for interactive games.

Paul Levinson

Paul Levinson's The Silk Code won the 2000 Locus Award for Best First Novel. He has since published Borrowed Tides (2001), The Consciousness Plague (2002), The Pixel Eye (2003), and The Plot To Save Socrates (2006). His science fiction and mystery short stories have been nominated for Nebula, Hugo, Edgar, and Sturgeon Awards. His eight nonfiction books, including The Soft Edge (1997), Digital McLuhan (1999), Realspace (2003), and Cellphone (2004), have been the subject of major articles in the New York Times, Wired, the Christian Science Monitor, and have been translated into nine languages. New New Media will be published in 2009. Paul Levinson appears on "The O'Reilly Factor" (Fox News), "The CBS Evening News," the "NewsHour with Jim Lehrer" (PBS), "Nightline" (ABC), and numerous national and international TV and radio programs. He reviews the best of television in his InfiniteRegress.tv blog. Paul Levinson is Professor and Chair of Communication & Media Studies at Fordham University in New York City.

The driving force behind science fiction is now television - and, the reason, almost 100%, is Lost.

The series had a spectacular first year, a weak second and third year (with the exception of the finale), but has come back stronger than ever in the fourth season, now concluding. And whereas science fiction was always a flavor in the series, in this fourth season science fiction has become a mainspring. Desmond's mind projecting back and forth through his body in time is one of the best science fiction time travel stories ever told - right up there with Asimov's The End of Eternity, Heinlein's "By His Bootstraps," and the movie 12 Monkeys. (See my Desmond 1 and Desmond 2 for more.) In addition to that, we have some intriguing time anomalies on the island - which seems to be in a slightly different time than a ship just a little off the island. Great science fiction.

Other fine science fiction has also made its way on to the television screen in the past year - especially Journeyman and New Amsterdam. And The Sarah Connor Chronicles is doing a fine job of continuing the Terminator saga.

Great science fiction novels are still being published, and great movies still being made - but television is clearly where the future is.

Mike Resnick

Mike Resnick is the author of 50 novels, 200 short stories, a pair of screenplays, and the editor of 50 anthologies, as well as the executive editor of Jim Baen's Universe. According to Locus, he is the leading award winner, living or dead, of short fiction. His work has been translated into 22 languages.

The driving force remains the written word. I haven't watched any network series, science fiction or otherwise, in a quarter of a century, but I keep up with the movies, which are always ahead of TV anyway.

The problem, of course, is dividing the technology, which is clearly state of the art, with the stories, which are not. As good as the Star Wars films may have looked, they were telling 1930s stories. The Enterprise, its crew, its plots, were clearly mired in John Campbell's Astounding Stories of the 1940s. Even The Matrix, which had a 1990s cyberpunk look to it, had a typically dumb pulp plot: don't out-think the evil agents, just out-karate them.

One of the detriments is that the big budget films, and especially Lucas, Roddenbury, and their imitators, have conditioned the movie audiences (never the readers) to think that science fiction -must- have great special effects, pointy ears, cute robots, and the like. So when you come to some brilliant science fiction that doesn't have any of that, or even any special effects at all, such as Charly or Dr. Strangelove, most movie fans don't even think of it as being science fiction.

The literature will always lead, because a book that sells even 35,000 paperbacks these days can be successful, and since the author doesn't have to please 20 million less discriminating moviegoers, he's free to take the high ground, and let it trickle down to the moviegoing masses 30 or 40 years from now.

Charlie Jane Anders

Charlie Jane Anders is a news editor at io9.com

The future of science fiction is probably online, in a blend of written material, video and other media. The best science fiction of the future will be open source and collaborative, blurring the distinction between "creators" and "fans" to an increasing degree. As more people read e-books instead of paper books, and movies and television are streamed over the web, you'll see more people consuming science fiction online. And there will be obvious advantages in opening things up to collaboration. One major difference between science fiction and most other genres is worldbuilding. And the more people you have involved in your worldbuilding, the bigger and more realistic your world can be. So the most compelling science fictional worlds online will be ones that are, at least to some extent, open-source.

Paul Cornell

Paul Cornell writes SF, Doctor Who and Marvel Comics. He's got a short story coming up in all three remaining non-themed original SF anthologies.

TV and movie SF represents the wisdom of crowds, or perhaps the unconscious of crowds. That is to say, it's a summing up, by tiny steps, of how the mainstream views SF concepts. The look of military SF, the idea that the concept of 'the Marines' might still be valid in the future was developed by Aliens, Starship Troopers and a hundred knock-offs with no ideas of their own. But the weight of those knock-offs counts culturally too, serving to create an agreed vision of the future. The move from alien invasion to alien abduction happened in telefantasy too.

Certainly, prose SF is always first to any given concept, but public awareness depends not on one movie, but on dozens of Sci Fi Channel movies of the week, parody, advertising use, etc. That public awareness is important, in that SF seeks to portray what happens 'if this goes on', and such satire only really bites if the public recognises the truth of the future being described, as used to be the case with Arthur Clarke's descriptions of the vastly agreed-upon post-Apollo future of humanity in space.

So at the moment, to some degree, in this matter of the public's collective unconscious vision of where it might all go, what's to be done and what's wrong right now, TV and the movies are indeed taking the lead, the superhero trope, Lost and Battlestar Galactica all, for instance, asking 'is my instinct about what the look on that person's face means enough, or do I need some greater insight into their nature in order to be safe?' Dick got there first, but the development of that thought has happened largely outside of prose.

Mike Brotherton

Mike Brotherton is the author of the hard science fiction novels Spider Star (2008) and Star Dragon (2003), the latter being a finalist for the Campbell award. He's also a professor of astronomy at the University of Wyoming, Clarion West graduate, and founder of the Launch Pad Astronomy Workshop for Writers (www.launchpadworkshop.org). He blogs at www.mikebrotherton.com.

Science fiction in movies and TV certainly has more money and larger audiences. To the public, this is what science fiction is, but I don't fully accept the premise of the question.

Movies and TV are driven by money as much as anything, whereas written science fiction is driven by ideas, and there will tend to be more originality in the written work. Written work gets optioned, when it becomes popular enough, and becomes movies and TV shows. In that sense, there will always be some component of science fiction driven by the written word.

Similarly, I don't see either TV or film being the sole driving force now or any time in the foreseeable future. The media are too often interchangeable for one thing, with TV shows being made into movies, and movies being made into TV shows, and both are interchangeably watched on TV and the internet.

There have been some clear trends over the years, and some direct comparisons are possible by concepts that have lived both on TV and in movies. Let's start with some of the trends in both mediums and see where they're going.

First of all, good special effects have become cheaper. TV can now do what only movies used to be able to do. Movies still have more money to spend and continue to push the envelope, but since the 1930s screening of King Kong it's clear that simply adequate special effects coupled with a good story are sufficient to engross audiences. We'll have better effects in general in the future, but I don't see this as being a fundamental trend, although I'm hoping to be blown away by something new in the future. TV has shown another trend that's a positive advantage over movies: TV can do longer story arcs with a lot more character development. TV shows like Battlestar Galactica, Lost, and mini-series of Dune can tell stories that movies simply cannot manage. Even the extended director's cut of David Lynch's Dune has to resort to gimmicks and summary that are not very engaging (others have said worse).

There's a dark side of this trend. Character quality and development have increased in such TV shows, but seemingly at the expense of speculative elements. Once a premise is set, often the sf becomes background, and episodes rely only on characters without significant interaction with the unique situations. The creator of Battlestar Galactica has said that his show is not science fiction, but drama. A recent New York Times article about changes at the Sci-Fi Channel reveals that they are moving away from traditional science fiction toward a broader, vaguer "What if" concept that attracts more diverse demographics (e.g., women). I find this a little strange as in principal cable channels can attract niche audiences, but perhaps in the same way MTV and VHI changed their programing for ratings, changing from their original concepts, so too will go the Sci-Fi Channel.

Science fiction movies, on the other hand, do have to keep with a big, speculative concept. This is essential for marketing, if nothing else, and is needed to make an effective pitch. Movies have their own weaknesses, however, and often the concepts get spoiled by too many people messing around with the ideas. In general, TV creators can exercise a lot more control of their creative vision. Only a handful of directors in movies have had such control; Kubrick and Cameron come to mind, and theirs are among the best sf movies out there.

Finally, I wanted to say a few things about movie/TV cross-overs. Here are some I remember: Star Trek, X-Files, Firefly, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, and Logan's Run. Galaxy Quest is its own strange hybrid. Sometimes the movies were better and more influential, sometimes the TV series. This isn't very scientific, but I think it makes the case that neither clearly wins.

In conclusion, I don't think we're anywhere close to having a single driving force. Movies and TV both do different things well and poorly, and we're going to have both important for sf. I hate to waffle, but that's how I see it.

Lawrence Person

Lawrence Person is a science fiction writer living in Austin, Texas. His short fiction has appeared in Asimov's, Analog, Postscripts, Jim Baen's Universe, Fear, and several anthologies, including the Robert E. Howard tribute anthology Cross Plains Universe, The Mammoth Book of Extreme Science Fiction, and The Mammoth Book of Extreme Fantasy, while his non-fiction has appeared in National Review, Reason, Whole Earth Review, The Freeman, The World & I, Science Fiction Eye, The New York Review of Science Fiction, and Slashdot.org. He is also the once-and-future editor of the Hugo-nominated SF critical magazine Nova Express.

Written science fiction. Media science fiction are the shadows on the cave wall cast by the Platonic forms of written science fiction.

SF Tidbits for 5/28/08

Free Book: Hal Spacejock by Simon Haynes.

Science fiction publisher Baen Books is making its entire Webscriptions catalog of e-books free to the astronauts living aboard the International Space Station. [via SF Scope]

Interviews and Profiles:
- At Fantasybookspot, Jay Tomio interviews Ian Esslemont, author of Return Of The Crimson Guard.
- [via PS Publishing News Room]
- Barnes and Noble have a video interview with artist Stephen Youll. [via The Art Department]
- At SciFi Wire, John Joseph Adams profiles William H. Drinkard, author of Elom.
- SFX interviews editor Jo Fletcher, who dispenses with some writing advice.
- Author Mike Brotherton interviews Simon Haynes about his latest book Hal Spacejock: No Free Lunch.

John Scalzi turns the Whatever blog mike over to David J. Williams, author of The Mirrored Heavens.

Jeff Prucher, responds to critics who disliked the inclusion of fannish entries in his book Brave New Words: The Oxford Dictionary of Science Fiction.

John Picacio is previewing the cover art he did for the September '08 issue of Asimov's illustrating the lead story, "The Ice War" by Stephen Baxter, which John describes in his post.

Darth Mojo tells us about The Best Star Wars Movie You've Never Seen, which is a re-cut version of Episode II...one without comments about sand and the droid version of comic relief.

Screaming Blue Reviews lists 6 Forgotten Science Fiction Films of the 1970s.

In Pravda, Harry Harrison praises Russia and calls USA fascist state. [via Locus Online]