SF/F/H Link Post for 2014-07-28

Interviews & Profiles

• A Backwards Story interviews Susan Dennard, author of Strange and Ever After.
• Beauty in Ruins interviews Bill Kirton, author of The Sparrow Conundrum.
• Beauty in Ruins interviews Rik Stone, author of Birth of an Assassin.
• Gingernuts of Horror interviews Dave Eisenstark, writer of Monkey Love.
• The Qwillery interviews Shane Berryhill, author of Bad Mojo.
• Suvudu interviews Fred Gambino, the artist behind The Art of Fred Gambino: Dark Shepherd.
• Suvudu interviews Joe Abercrombie, author of Half a King.

News

• Chris Carter and Fox in talks to reboot The X-Files. We want to believe.
• The Jack Williamson library, the third largest science fiction library in the United States, just opened in Portales, NM. It contains more than 30-thousand volumes of various science fiction novels.
• Sam Raimi is making a movie out of The Last of Us.

Crowd Funding

• National Buy a Book Day – a grassroots effort to help raise awareness of a critical part of our cultural heritage in need of help becoming an official non-profit.
• OTHER WORLDS – a powerful new Sci-Fi action-packed adventure series.

Articles

• Book Review: The Guardian reviews Half a King by Joe Abercrombie “His ambitious saga is convincingly doorstopper-ish and starts off promisingly, but as I find myself racing through it, ticking off clichés one by one, my hopes start to wilt”
• Movie Review: The Guardian calls Earth to Echo “derivative sci-fi”
• 3 Reasons We Can Stop Worrying About Guardians of the Galaxy
• As news spreads that Disney will be adding Leia themed toys to its merchandise, more and commentators are noting how often Leia is shown as a slave in kidworld. Considering the The Terrible Unspoken Implications Of Star Wars’ Slave Leia is this on-going criticism Slut-shaming Princess Leia or protecting childhood from adult sexuality? The debate is not a new one. Many fans have come out In Defense of Slave Leia, and almost as many have come out In Response to In Defense of Slave Leia. The controversy is part of why Star Wars is so Terrifying for Women. BtchFlcks thoughtfully posed the question earlier of whether Princess Leia is a Feminist Icon or Sexist Trope? Of course, it isn’t just women discussing the controversy, Having previously written an article titled “Don’t Dress as Slave Leia” and then, a rather more nuanced rehash in which he explored why telling people not to dress as Slave Leia is not itself free from problems, Ryan (of Mad Art Lab) has decided that, actually, he’s going to dress as Slave Leia this con season; or, rather, Slave Leo. Carrie Fisher discussed the costume in a 1983 interview with Rolling Stone. (Via)
• Ascension is An Alternate History About a Planned Community in Space
• Brian K. Vaughn And Fiona Staples Reveal What’s Ahead For Saga
• Black Girls Hunger for Heroes, Too: What happens when two great black women fiction writers get together to talk about race in young adult literature? That’s exactly what happens in the conversation below, where Zetta Elliott, a black feminist writer of poetry, plays, essays, novels, and stories for children, and award-winning Haitian-American speculative fiction writer Ibi Aanu Zoboi decided to discuss current young adult sci-fi.
• Everything You Need To Know About Marvel’s New Star Wars Comics
• NASA Quietly Building an eBook Empire
• Pacific Rim and Oculus Rift go together like robots and kaiju
• Peter Jackson Says Battle of the Five Armies is His Favorite Hobbit Movie, sort of like how my favorite flavor of ice cream is which ever one is in my mouth at any given moment.
• A single publisher going it alone won’t counter the might of Amazon
• Tom Hiddleston Sent An Amazing Email To Director Joss Whedon After Reading The Avengers Script
• Two researchers from the Indian Institute of Astrophysics investigate the feasibility of the imaginary world of Kalgash, a planetary system based on the novel Nightfall.
• We Are So Ready for The Kilt to Drop on Ron D. Moore’s Outlander Series
• What to Expect From Lucy Based on Its Director’s Other Films
• Where literature and gaming collide: “Game narratives tend to drink from a narrow pond; they swig space operas and Tolkien, swish them about their mouths and trickle them into rows of polished glasses. There’s nothing wrong with science fiction and fantasy, just as there’s nothing wrong with escapism. But there is something wrong with lazy writing, with cynical pandering”
• Why We Love And We Hate Reading For Pleasure
• Wired has a feature on The Hard-Core Fanatics Who Make Comic-Con So Great

Art

• The Art of Science Competition Reveals the Hidden Beauty of the Microcosm
• The Avengers: Age Of Ultron Poster Is Complete, And now, So Is Your Life
• Hot Digital Art by Deryl Braun

More Fun Stuff

• After over a decade in development hell, George Miller’s return to the Mad Max franchise, Mad Max: Fury Road, has emerged at San Diego Comic-Con with a teaser trailer.
• The Eleven Best Metal Songs About Literature
• US reveals secret plans for ’60s moon base. Blueprints show outpost was to have bulldozers, cabins, groovy sunken living rooms
• Watch the first full-length trailer for the TV adaptation of Outlander, the book that provided teenage sci-fi fans with a better sex education than their ninth grade health class.
• Watch the Avengers: Age of Ultron panel from Comic-Con.
• Watch the Dark Horse’s Whedonverse panel from Comic-Con.
• Watch the Marvel Avengers Age of Ultron Panel from Comic-Con.
• Watch the trailer for Hot Tub Time Machine 2 from Comic-Con.
• Watch the trailer for Constantine from Comic-Con.
• We’ve studied Mars for decades, but still have no major theories. What’s up with that?