SF/F/H Link Post for 2014-10-22

Interviews & Profiles

• Fox13Now interviews Ilima Todd, author of Remake.
• Lytherus interviews Tessa Gratton & Natalie C. Parker of The Strange Maid & Beware the Wild.
• My Bookish Ways interviews Ben Tripp, author of The Accidental Highwayman.
• Nicky Peacock interviews Michelle L Johnson, author of Divinity.
• Qwillery interviews Laura Morrigan, author of A Tiger’s Tale.
• Reddit recently held an AMA with Gale Anne Hurd, producer of Terminator, Aliens, and The Abyss.
• Teleread interviews Michael Kelly of Year’s Best Weird Fiction Vol. 1.
• Tor.com interviews Elizabeth Bradley, author of the introduction to a new Penguin Classics edition of Washington Irving’s The Legend of Sleepy Hollow and Other Stories.
• Urban Fantasy Investigation interviews Karen Greco, author of Tainted Blood.

News

• Amazon and Simon & Schuster reach compromise deal
• Entrepreneur Sets Up Fund to Invest in “Sci-Fi” Start-ups
• The tractor beam is here! Researchers conduct groundbreaking experiment.
• New release from Infinity Plus: The Iron Wire by Garry Kilworth.

Events & Event News

• Margaret Atwood Fans Invited to Take Part in a Wattpad Writing Contest
• Stephen King will appear at Barnes & Nobles in Union Square, NYC on Tuesday November 11, 2014 at noon to sign his latest novel, Revival!

Crowd Funding

• Not Our Kind: Tales of (Not) Belonging – A genre-defying diverse collection of fantasy and sci-fi stories of cultures, their problems, and seeing life from a new point of view
• SofaCON 2 – Help fund SofaCON 2 a live online science fiction convention with special guests David Brin, Joe Haldeman and Kim Stanley Robinson.
• Straight Into Darkness by Robert L. Slater.

Articles

• Book Review: Paul Di Filippo reviews Nyctophobia by Christopher Fowler
• Movie Review: Extraterrestrial is an alien thriller you’ve seen a million times before.
• According to the NYTimes, Fiction Writers Help Scientists Push Known Boundaries
• The Daily Record explains Why watching Lynda Bellingham’s Doctor Who appearance is the only thing Whovians should do this evening.
• Digital Spy reviews how Logan’s Run changed sci-fi blockbusters forever.
• The Economics of Star Trek and That Star Trek economy thing seek to answer the question of whether or not a future with no money, where people simply pursue interesting activities in order to better themselves and others, is necessarily communist or socialist?
• Flavorwire remembers Best Debut Novels Since 1950.
• Giant Freakin Robot explains The Beautifully Simple Reason You’ll Never See Back To The Future 4
• How George R.R. Martin got his “Game” on
• Mark A. Altman has some ideas for turning Star Trek into the next big media franchise: “The fact is, it’s time for Paramount and CBS to start treating Star Trek like a business, and not just an annuity they can cash in every few years. They have their own Marvel, their own Star Wars, their own Guardians of the Galaxy, but it’s time to start treating Star Trek like Marvel and DC and devise, dare I say it, a transmedia strategy that delivers on the promise of this franchise which will not only satisfy the millions of fans craving more Star Trek but also fill the studio coffer.”
• 16 Things You Didn’t Know About Octavia Butler
• Marvel wants to give us the next Hunger Games
• The New Republic asks Can Science Fiction Writers Predict Technology’s Future?
• PJ Media remembers The 10 Most Influential Science Fiction Stories of the 1910s.
• Sciencefiction.com suggests 10 Great Books For Your Halloween Reading.
• Sifting through decades of publications, oral history and archival records, Michael Kmet sets the record straight on numerous aspects Star Trek: TOS production history lore. Was “Spock’s Brain” originally conceived as a comedy episode? Did Roddenberry write the lyrics to the theme song as a cash grab? Which of the Mercury Seven did Roddenberry try to get as guest stars?
• Super-Intelligent Humans Are Coming: Genetic engineering will one day create the smartest humans who have ever lived.
• Techreview offers a new essay from Isaac Asimov entitled “How Do People Get New Ideas?“
• Understanding Jean Baudrillard with Pumpkin Spice Lattes: “Back in the day you were stuck with what was seasonal – you ate tomatoes and watermelon when it was summer, and when old man winter rolled in, you were stuck with nature’s shit bag – like potatoes and kale – a vegetable god intended you to hate and smite you with.”

Art

• Bob Ekstein draws the Endangered Bookstores of NYC, including Forbidden Planet.
• “Pacwars” is a mash-up of Star Wars and Pac-Man
• A tutorial on How to Make a Door Wreath Using Old Books, if you can bear to tear apart books.
• Why carve a pumpkin when you can grow a Pumpkinstein?

More Fun Stuff

• Accessible Star Wars lets disabled feel the force: “A Star Wars sci-fi convention has been set up for people with disabilities. Feel the Force Day was set up so that as many people as possible could access and experience Star Wars.”
• An astronaut answers Seattle librarians’ question from the International Space Station
• Evghenia is on Mars. She has enough water to survive for another two hundred and eighty days. In the meantime, she reminisces about her favorite and least favorite things on earth, comments on the space-speculation of poets Bowie and Elton, writes about her heroes, and criticizes Elon Musk and NASA and all the many people who have failed to be on Mars first. (She is understandably proud of her significant accomplishment.) She also writes about goatbot, who she built herself and who is her only friend, and occasionally tells jokes and sings songs and reminisces about her past and present. Definitely a Twitter account worth following. (Via Metafilter)
• Fashion does cyberpunk: Designer Beams Dystopian Runway Show to the Web to Launch H&M Line
• Flavorwire reveals Cultural Icons’ Favorite Books
• “The Greatest American Jedi” is a video mash-up created by Robert Jones of the original Star Wars and the intro music from ABC’s 1980s comedy-drama TV show The Greatest American Hero.
• The NoSleep SubReddit is great place to scare up some October chills. Do not browse before bed.
• Open Road Media created this video featuring sci-fi and fantasy heavyweights Patricia C. Wrede, Ellen Datlow, Elizabeth Hand, and N.K. Jemison talking about the women who have influenced them and the power of genre writing to change perceptions on gender, race, and feminism.
• Read an excerpt from The Art of Eating Zombie by Lauren Wilson at ThisKevin.
• Read an excerpt from Willful Child by Steven Erikson at Tor.com.
• Read the short story “Separation Anxiety” by Mike Medeiros at Sciencefiction.com.
• Watch a One minute horror film directed by Ignacio F. Rodó, based on this two sentence horror story from an AskReddit thread last year.
• Watch “The Invaders: Angie’s Blog,” An All-Ages Science Fiction Webseries
• Watch “Bag Man,” a short film about a young New Yorker who finds an alien death ray.
• Watch a trailer for Ambition at Kinja.