[SF/F/H Link Post] Carrie Fisher Pressured to Lose Weight for “The Force Awakens”; Intro to Steampunk and Grimdark; “2001: A Space Odyssey” is the Best Movie Ever

Interviews & Profiles

• George Lucas tells the Washington Post that he feels “divorced” from The Force Awakens; has avoided Internet since 2000; still defending Greedo shooting first.
• Marc Turner interviews Adrian Tchaikovsky, author of War Master’s Gate.
• NPR interviews Thomas Levenson, author of The Hunt for Vulcan.
• Orbit interviews An interview with Rachel Aaron, author of The Spirit Thief.
• The Qwillery interviews Kate Ormand, author of The Wanderers.
• Reddit recently held an AMA for I’m Patrick Rothfuss, author of Auri’s OCD Adventures. Make certain you upvote my demand for a KickStarter campaign to adapt it into a game.
• SFFWorld interviews Mike Resnick, author of The Prison in Antares.

News

• Carrie Fisher Pressured to Lose Weight for Star Wars: The Force Awakens.
• Doctor Who Christmas Special 2015 News: Title, Synopsis, Photos, River Song Details.
• Doctor Who Ratings Fall To A Record Low (Again.)
• Meet The Husbands of River Song with Who this Christmas.
• Peter Jackson kind of announces that he’ll direct Doctor Who.

Events & Event News

• Meet creator/writer Matt Hawkins at The Comic Bug in Culver City, CA and Manhattan Beach, CA, who will be handing out FREE copies of SYMMETRY #1. RSVP on Facebook.
• Noted feminist sci-fi author Alice B. Sheldon is subject of two-day symposium at University of Oregon.

Crowd Funding

• AWAKENED – Book 1 – The Gods and Guardians Trilogy – Superpowers, heroes, aliens and more collide in this Science Fiction tale.
• The Cora Chronicles: Genesis – one of the last Sentinels, remains the last line of defense against an unknown enemy laying siege to her planet. Together with a handful of allies, she must find a way to protect the one thing this enemy had come to destroy – humans.
• Cthulhu Tales – Storytelling Card Game of the Cthulhu Mythos – Locked in a sanatorium after a terrifying encounter with the Mythos, can you convince your friends that you’re sane enough to go home?
• Touching Evil: The Hardcover Graphic Novel – The first story arc of the award-winning comic Touching Evil is collected into a 240 page HARDCOVER GRAPHIC NOVEL!

Articles

• Movie Review: Story Of Your Life: looking ahead to a must-see sci-fi film.
• TV Review: The First Second of Eternity in Doctor Who “Heaven Sent.”
• TV Review: Into the Badlands Brings Martial Arts Back to American TV—And It’s a Bloodbath… I’ve Never Seen Fight Scenes This Great on TV raves io9.
• 10 classic sci-fi novels that would make great TV or movies right now.
• 10 Reasons why 2001: A Space Odyssey stands as the best Sci-Fi movie ever made.
• An introduction to Stephen King’s short fiction.
• B&N Bestsellers in Science Fiction & Fantasy for November 2015.
• Cory Doctorow asks Could solutions to serious problems facing the world come from the imaginations of science-fiction authors?
• Doctor Who Shows Just How Much Hard Work Goes Into The Doctor’s Easy Victories.
• Madeleine L’Engle, The YA Author For The Oddball In Everyone.
• The Marvel Universe Needs to Get Dark: Marvel’s small screen heroes are leading its big screen do-gooders into the future. If they’ll listen.
• Michael Livingston of The Shards of Heaven on The Challenge of Historical Fantasy.
• Star Trek is as out-of-date today as Buck Rogers was in 1980. (Take the hint!)
• Star Wars’s Jar Jar Binks – what went wrong? Short answer: everything.
• Steampunk and Grimdark: a brief introduction from Hodderscape.
• Terry Gilliam on the Difference Between Kubrick & Spielberg: Kubrick Makes You Think, Spielberg Wraps Everything Up with Neat Little Bows.
• Utopian and Dystopian Visions of Afrofuturism: Is this a true moment of change, or are we just seeing more characters of color in sci-fi?
• Where did the word ‘Taser’ come from? A century-old racist science fiction novel.
• Why the time is now for YA speculative fiction.
• Your Heart Is a Weapon the Size of Your Fist: Love as Politics in The Hunger Games.

Art

• “Adeptus Mechanicus” by Baklaher.
• “Battle over Kamino – The Tie Dal Wave” by Kurt Miller.
• “A Knight of Ren” by The Ninjabot.
• Stunning Collection of STAR WARS Vector Art by Orlando Arocena.

More Fun Stuff

• 10 or so things you should know about Albert Einstein and his theories of relativity It’s been 100 years since Albert Einstein completed his theories of relativity. They were radical. They reshaped the way physicists view space, time, gravity, even the universe. But try explaining them to a child.
• Cover Reveal: BURNED by Benedict Jacka.
• Discover Sunny’s Origins in This Exclusive Look at the Into the Badlands Comic.
• The Great Stan Lee Reads Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Raven.”
• Infographic: The 10 Most Earth-Like Exoplanets Discovered So Far.
• Jar Jar Binks Goes Head-To-Head With A Blender.
• Neil deGrasse Tyson Settles The Age-Old Debate: Enterprise or Millennium Falcon?
• Read the short story “Puppeteer” by Hernán Ortiz at Columbia Journal.
• Watch the first episode of Syfy’s The Expanse Online.
• Will Eisner’s “The Spirit” 75th Anniversary Celebration with Jules Feiffer and Paul Levitz.