SF/F/H Link Post for 2014-05-27

Interviews & Profiles

• Escapist interviews Wolfgang Baur and Steve Winter, writers of the new Dungeons & Dragons.
• The Guardian interviews AM Homes, author of May We Be Forgiven.
• ScienceFiction.com interviews Christopher Priest, author of The Adjacent.
• TechCrunch interviews Hugh Howey, author of Wool Omnibus.

News

• Doctor Who Season 8 to Air in August 2014

Events & Event News

• Tor.com has posted a calendar of Steampunk Events for June 2014

Crowd Funding

• A Mythos Grimmly – a Lovecraftian Fairy Tale Anthology featuring Twenty-five fortunate meetings between Lovecraftian Mythos and fairy tales of days gone by!
• The Scifies Anthology – a comic book featuring several stories written by me and illustrated by a host of seasoned as well as up-and-coming comic book artists.

Articles

• Book Review: The Wall Street Journal reviews The Girl in the Road by Monica Byrne. Sci-fi has long claimed to be the multicultural literature of the future. This is the real thing.
• Book Review: Bibliotropic calls Crux by Ramex Naam a complex and intelligent sci-fi thriller with incredible commentary on humanity.
• Book Review: The Little Red Reviewer says Wild and Wishful, Dark and Dreaming by Alethea Kontis takes you new places and shows you paths you didn’t see before.
• 11 questions about X-Men Days Of Future Past answered
• 11 Video Games for Bookworms: From The Great Gatsby to Dune.
• The Digital Methods Initiative has launched a project designed to explore cli-fi in order to understand and categorize fictional scenarios about the future, and the role of human actors in those scenarios. The site offers a PDF visualizing the novels.
• BoingBoing remembers Infamous imaginary games from science fiction.
• Business Insider on 5 Things You Should Know Before Seeing X-Men: Days Of Future Past
• Clever Girl offers advice on How To Write a Sue-ish Character Without Sueism, citing The Dresden Series’ Harry Dresden as a positive example.
• ComicBook compares X-Men: Days of Future Past to the X:Men: The Animated Series adaptation.
• David Brin reflects upon Noah, the Tower of Babel… and Science
• Den of Geek wonders Is X-Men immune to the reboot cycle?
• The Dissolve takes a look at Godzilla, Monsters, and the state of the calling-card movie.
• Do Androids Dream of Electric Free Speech? Visions of the First Amendment in Science Fiction.
• Flavorwire has a gallery of 8 Literary Homes You Can Buy Right Now, while LitReactor offers 3 Very Good Reasons To Buy Ray Bradbury’s House. Now where to secure the astronomical loan?
• The fool’s errand of Ranking Joss Whedon’s Most Heartbreaking Character Deaths.
• Gender in a blender: In a world of only female pronouns, Ann Leckie’s new science fiction novel, Ancillary Justice, poses some disturbing questions about gender identity.
• Godzilla’s Godzilla Problem: Should Gareth Edwards have shown more of his titular monster? Not necessarily. But he shouldn’t have made him a narrative afterthought in his own reboot.
• Kevin McLenithan writes that “in Godzilla’s world we are dwarfed by beings far greater and older than ourselves, and our own best efforts cannot halt oncoming destruction.”
• N.K. Jemisin’s Wiscon 38 Guest of Honor Speech.
• Popular Culture as Common Ground: Doctor Who as a Third Space for Interreligious Dialogue
• The recent Godzilla remake is the first post-human blockbuster: “This is a story about exposing the myopia of the human perspective and then humiliating our inherently egocentric POV.”
• Singularity & Co. publisher makes ebooks out of sci-fi cult classics.
• Slate wonders is Godzilla male or female? What gender is the movie monster?
• The Strain: Del Toro and the new face of the apocalypse. (Coming soon to FX)
• The true size of the Seven Kingdoms of Game of Thrones, according to The Daily Dot.
• Understanding Christopher Nolan’s Upcoming Sci-Fi Movie Interstellar: Here are some theories and fun-facts you ought to know before watching Interstellar.
• Utopia or Dystopia on The Kingdom of Machines.
• What Does “She” in Science Fiction Tell Us About Language on Earth? Ancillary Justice gender pronouns: Comparing sci fi and natural language in Ann Leckie’s Nebula winner.
• Violent, dystopian children’s fiction is nothing new, The Conversation reminds us.
• What Today’s Sequels Need to Learn From the Indiana Jones Movies
• Wired has compiled George R. R. Martin’s 14 Greatest LiveJournal Entries.
• Wired also lists 5 Comics You Should Read After Seeing X-Men: Days of Future Past.
• With Indefinite lifespan in our future, experts are left pondering responses.
• WND’s Drew Zahn applauds Christian themes in the latest X-Men movie, despite its “overriding evolutionary themes” and repeated blue nudity. “Days of Future Past departs from the franchise’s more questionable storylines to present another significant theme instead, one that even conservative Christians can celebrate – the hope of redemption.”
• Writing Science Fiction and Fantasy: A Few Quick Tips from WriteWorld.
• X-Men: Days of Future Past comparisons to Terminator have it backwards.
• Zen and the art of fantasy writing: Fantasy Authors Aidan Harte and Brian Staveley discuss what it means to build a world all your own.

Art

• Nicolas Ferrand Gallery.
• Beautiful Concept Art by Kim Solomon.
• Digital Art by Houston Sharp.
• The Pit and the Pendulum illustration by Chet Phillips.
• So you`ve found me by Serio.
• Gorgeous Cover Art From Iron Man Series Industrial Revolution.

More Fun Stuff

• 10 Massive Facts About the Godzilla Franchise
• Anglophenia takes a look at The Poetry of Doctor Who
• Anime News Network on Anime Robots That Made the Jump From Sci-Fi to Reality
• Beware the Hairy Mango #231: “Knocked Up by Matthew Sanborn Smith.
• The Bucky Barnes Twitter was epically hilarious in the run to the release of The Winter Soldier.
• Infographic: Just How Big is Space?
• It’s official. Batman will never work at Walmart. Spider-Man may still have a shot, though.
• Like something out of sci-fi, special operations forces could be outfitted with Iron Man armour.
• Listen to “Knocked Up” by Matthew Sanborn at Beware the Hairy Mango.
• Japanese Pocari Sweat sports drink is striving to go where no ad has gone before: the moon. Lunar Dream is their campaign to get kids to submit their dreams to include in a “dream capsule,” on SpaceX’s Falcon 9, as part of the company’s first moon landing in October 2015.
• Read an excerpt from The Young Elites by Marie Lu at The Nerdist.
• Retronaut takes us Behind the Scenes of Dune.
• ScaryLetter.com brings you a new kind of horror fiction: tales which take the form of terrifying personalized paper letters mailed to your home.
• Surviving Our Shrinking Apartments Means Living in a Mixed Reality: In the future, overcrowding in the world’s cities could force people to live in minuscule, 100-square-foot apartments with no windows, relying on a mix of digital and physical reality to make it bearable.
• A system promises scanning human dreams and produce images like a sci-fi movie.
• Watch a trailer for the upcoming Doctor Who Comics from Titan.
• Beautiful Batman Coffee Table.