- HBO has finished filming the pilot for the upcoming A Game of Thrones series. Airlock Alpha thinks it’s going to be a hit because the source-material is so rich and kick-ass, and because the casting was so great. (I agree on all counts!)
- Likewise, The Voyage of the Dawn Treader has finished filming (or is just about finished).
- Not all teenage girls like Twilight. Myley Cyrus told a radio station, “I’ve never seen it and nor will I ever. I don’t believe in it. I don’t like vampires.” Ironically, she’s involved in a project with the producers of Twilight: a movie based on the young adult novel Wings in which a teenage girl learns she’s actually a fairy.
How many times have I read this headline? “XXXXX is the next Harry Potter Franchise!” Well, now they’re saying it about The Secrets of the Immortal Nicholas Flamel, a fantasy series by Michael Scott. Ironically, the fictional series involves the real-life historical character of Nicholas Flamel, who inspired J.K. Rowling through his work on the legendary “philosopher’s stone.”
- New Moon is a hit. Yawn.
- Ten episodes of The Twilight Zone you should see. These aren’t (just) the usual choices. Here’s the first list, which is the usual choices. I remarked to a famous author friend once that an idea of his was similar to an episode of The Twilight Zone, and he said to me words that are very, very true: “Everything since The Twilight Zone is a rip-off of them. When you think about it, they pretty much did it all.”
- Michael Moorcock is writing a Doctor Who novel.
- Over the weekend, I finally saw 2012. Yeah, Roland Emmerich is good at blowing things up, and it looked great. But man, what a bad movie. Let me see if I have this right: they crash-land a plane in a random spot on the continent of Asia and just happen to be within a half-hour’s drive of their destination, and they just happen to be picked up by truck heading that direction? This is one of only 50,000 complaints I had with the film.
- Brad Pitt may enter a Dark Void – a Bermuda Triangle-themed movie based on the video game.
- It costs less on Amazon? An independent bookseller explains why that’s not necessarily true: “Of every $100 you spend here, $68 stays in your community. For a big box store, $43 stays in the community, shopping online changes that to a big fat zero…We pay taxes in your town, our building and our business and our owner. More money that stays in the community, through schools, public works, etc. The sales tax you pay through us goes to your state.” She also points out that big businesses often kill small businesses with artificially low prices, but once their competition is gone, they either raise prices or slash inventory.
- An interview with author Michael Swanwick: “The Lord of the Rings is not the same book at age sixteen as it is at forty. On my first reading, it was the greatest adventure in the world. On my last, it was the saddest book I’d ever read. Everybody in it is in the process of losing everything they hold dear, and their task is to acknowledge the necessity of doing so, to make the sacrifice for the sake of those to come, and then to die. An adolescent simply couldn’t feel that the way an older man or woman might.”
