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Are you tired of movies that have nothing going for them but big robots, bigger explosions and occasionally Megan Fox?  Have you had enough of swoopy starships that can escape from black holes, but never from plot holes?  John Scalzi says:

The answer to that is actually the solution, which is that if you want studios to make those sorts of movies, go out of your way to see them in the theater, rather than just waiting until they wash up on Starz or HBO. It’s not that humans are getting stupider, it’s that people interested in entertainment that doesn’t EXPLODE aren’t going into theaters. So, you know. Go.

So I went.  This afternoon I saw Moon.  Phenomenal movie.  Directed by Duncan Jones, and starring Sam Rockwell as Sam Bell, the movie’s main, and very nearly only character, Moon hearkens back to the more realistic SF style exemplified by Kubrick and Clarke’s 2001: A Space Odyssey, except where Kubrick created a movie grand in sweep, and distant in its view of humans, Moon turns the formula upside down to focus on character, and shows us a man who gets to spend far too much time isolated on the far side of the Moon, getting to know himself.

And he is in quite a predicament, the nature of which will not be revealed here.  Rockwell gives a terrific performance.  He has a gift for simply being sympathetic, even when the characters he plays should be annoying – like Guy Fleegman, the whiny second string cast member from Galaxy Quest - or could be outright repulsive - like Zaphod Beeblebrox, quite possibly the most egotistical character in all of fiction, in The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy.  This time he’s just playing an ordinary guy with the worst job on or off Earth, stuck a situation that’s hellish enough before the accident that sets off the events of the movie.  Once Sam begins to understand the true nature of his situation, he goes through the emotional reactions you’d expect, but without the overwrought melodrama that so often characterizes these things in the movies.  This is helped along by a clever script by Nathan Parker that doesn’t waste time belaboring the obvious, and leaves things that can go without saying unsaid.

The only major character in the movie other than Sam is GERTY, the HAL-like robot that functions as Sam’s assistant and caretaker, voiced by Kevin Spacey.  Here again, the usual clichés are deftly avoided.  The company Sam and GERTY work for may be as soulless as Weyland-Yutani, but GERTY’s motivations are far more complex than than those of Ash, the Weyland-Yutani robot that served the crew of the Nostromo to the xenomorph in Alien, another of this movie’s antecedents.

Sigh.  I hate to bring this up - I know Jones must want to be known more for his own work than for his family - but there’s no getting around it.  The movie may be vastly different in detail, but the feel of it - simultaneously bleak and optimistic, lonely and isolated and enraptured - captures perfectly the emotional range of his father’s first big hit:

For here
Am I sitting in a tin can
Far above the world
Planet earth is blue
And theres nothing I can do

Though Im past one hundred thousand miles
Im feeling very still
And I think my spaceship knows which way to go
Tell me wife I love her very much she knows

I need this:

Anybody got $5,200.00 plus shipping I could borrow?

Actually, it looks a little too skinny. I doubt if even Bolaji Badejo couldn’t fit into that.

Quoth John Scalzi:

<cranky writer hat>

– because, look, people: World building is hard. You want us to have to build an entire universe from scratch every single time we write a book? Well, okay. You want us to have to run a marathon every time we walk down to the corner store to get some milk, too? Or maybe assemble a car from the wheels up, every time we want to drive to the mall? We spend all this time building this ginchy universe and its rules, and then you say “Oh, that world again?” No one ever pulls that shit with other genres. People don’t go up to Carl Hiaasen and say “What? Another book on Earth?” And he didn’t even make up that planet! It’s an open source planet! Damn slacker.

</cranky writer hat>

I know better than this.

War of the Worlds. The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. I, Robot. Starship Troopers. The Puppetmasters. Watchers. Watchers II. Watchers III. 2010. Dune.

So many great books. So many bad movies. They’ve adapted Dean Koontz’s Watchers three times and still couldn’t produce anything worth… um… watching.

I know better than to get excited over the prospect of a great novel being adapted into a movie.

And yet, as an old-school acolyte of the Shrike cult, this just gives me the shivers in a good way:

Producer Graham King has set up Dan Simmons’ award-winning science fiction book series Hyperion Cantos at Warner Brothers, with Trevor Sands on board to adapt the first two books as one feature, according to The Hollywood Reporter. King is producing via his GK Films banner.

The first book, Hyperion, won the Hugo Award for best novel in 1990, while the second, The Fall of Hyperion, was nominated for a Nebula Award for best novel.

Hyperion deals with a space war, with most of the action taking place on a planet named Hyperion, known not only for its electricity-spewing trees but also for the Time Tombs, large artifacts that can move through time. The tombs are guarded by a monster called the Shrike, which impales people on metal trees.

King acquired the rights to the series several years ago, but its structure–inspired by Boccaccio’s Decameron and Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales–and its multiple timelines made the task of adapting it into a feature unwieldy and challenging.

I hope that they understand that they really—really—don’t want to piss off the Shrike.

The Hugo nominations are out.

Scalzi comments.

Via John Scalzi, who got it Via Charles Stross, who got it via AP, Arthur C. Clarke has died.

The experience of reading 2001: A Space Odyssey and 2010: Odyssey Two when I was thirteen was one of the things that made me want to become an SF writer in the first place.

I’d tried watching Kubrick’s movie, which I’d been told was some kind of masterpiece, but I could never make sense of the “dawn of man” sequence, and Heywood Floyd’s trip to the moon was so devoid of conflict and action that my Star Wars-addled brain just couldn’t stay with it until after I picked up the book, which grabbed me from page one and explained everything as it went. It was a bit disconcerting to start 2010 and find out that the Discovery had stopped at Jupiter—hey, what happened to Saturn, and Japetus?—but the plot was gripping nonetheless, and it all made sense once I went back and watched 2001 again, and discovered a brilliant and poetic and astonishing movie that I hadn’t been able to perceive before.

After that, Childhood’s End, Rendezvous With Rama, Songs of Distant Earth… I was hooked. Clarke is second only to Stephen King as an influence on my early writing efforts.

Thanks for every word, Arthur. You will be missed.

See Also: The NY Times obit by Gerald Jonas.

Ooh! Free fiction (via SF Signal):

FREE WRITTEN FICTION

• “The Nine Billion Names of God“
• “Rescue Party“
• “The Star“

FREE AUDIO FICTION

• “A Walk In The Dark“
• “Summertime On Icarus“
• “The Haunted Spacesuit“
• “The Nine Billion Names Of God“
• “The Sentinel” (basis for 2001: A Space Odyssey)
• “The Star“

White Rabbit, Star Trek-style:

Um…

300 Leads Saturn Nominations

Zack Snyder’s 300 led the field of nominees announced Feb. 20 for the 34th annual Saturn Awards, with 10 nominations by the Academy of Science Fiction, Fantasy and Horror Films.

Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix followed with nine nominations, and Tim Burton’s Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street got eight nods.

In television, ABC’s Lost dominated, with seven nominations. Showtime’s Dexter received five nods, and NBC’s Heroes scored four.

I don’t want to rain on anybody’s parade here—and congratulations to all the nominees, really—but can someone please explain to me why a historical drama, even one based on a comic book, is leading the nominations for science fiction, fantasy and horror awards?

Here’s a depressing post about the future of SF ezines and the short fiction market in general:

So will this business model work? It’s hard to say; with the exception of Chizine, these publications are relatively new, and I wasn’t given access to any actual income figures for what these magazines are pulling in. And when I asked Mamatas, who reads submissions for Clarkesworld, about the probability of ezines becoming profitable, he gave a sobering reply. “I think it’s important to note that most fiction magazines in the print world are either university-backed non-profits, labors of love, or the least successful of a cross-subsidized bundle of properties that are kept around because fiction copy is much cheaper than non-fiction copy,” he said. “In the periodical trade in general, churn is also very high. Magazines come and go all the time, regardless of their subject, market, or demographic. The magazine business is ultimately the business of selling people disposable content. The challenge of the ezine isn’t all that much different than the challenge of any other magazine, except that if anyone knew what the “best bet” was, they likely wouldn’t try it out on SF ezines when they could launch another massive slick with 75% ad pages.”

Patton Oswalt on Star Wars:

I agree with every word of it. Every word.

Cory Doctorow’s theory of fanfic:

I have a theory about the cognitive basis for both fanfic and the arguments against it from some authors: as social animals, we have a lot of specialized systems for modelling and anticipating the actions and beliefs of others. The ability to predict whether another human is likely to kill you or mate with you is pro-survival.

I think that when we experience stories, we spin up that “person-simulator” we use on real people and use it to render out the people in the story. It’s how we come to care about them, to empathize with them, to worry about the danger they find themselves in and to cheer them on as they strive to overcome adversity.

When you close the book — or turn off the tube — the simulator doesn’t power down. Those modelled “people” go on living a life in your autonomous imaginative faculty, inhabiting the same numinous zone where the dead relations of whom you say, “Oh, if only great-aunt Foofaw were here, she’d just love this,” the same zone as the characters in your life who are offstage but nevertheless “on your mind.”

This is likewise true for authors. Just because the book is done, it doesn’t mean that the simulator in which the characters have been playing out their lives switches off. The romantic tale of the author whose characters “just refused to go where he put them,” is not just auctorial histrionics. Once you’ve realized the characters in your own mind, they acquire the same limited autonomy that your conceptions of real people enjoy.

So it’s only natural that readers will haul off and write a story — or even a whole novel — about the characters whose adventures they enjoy. Those “people” have taken up residence in the minds of the audience and will continue to dance and caper without the further intervention of the author.

This comes in the context of talking about Steven Brust’s unauthorized Firefly fanfic novel.

If you don’t know what Firefly is, here, get acquainted:

Don’t hold back, Harlan. Tell us what you really think:

Taken from Harlan Ellison’s online community, reproduced in its unedited entirety below:

HARLAN ELLISON ON THE WRITERS STRIKE SETTLEMENT

YOU HAVE MY PERMISSION TO RE-POST THIS ANYWHERE:

Creds: got here in 1962, written for just about everybody, won the Writers Guild Award four times for solo work, sat on the WGAw Board twice, worked on negotiating committees, and was out on the picket lines with my NICK COUNTER SLEEPS WITH THE FISHE$$$ sign. You may have heard my name. I am a Union guy, I am a Guild guy, I am loyal. I fuckin’ LOVE the Guild.

And I voted NO on accepting this deal.

My reasons are good, and they are plentiful; Patric Verrone will be saddened by what I am about to say; long-time friends will shake their heads; but this I say without equivocation…

THEY BEAT US LIKE A YELLOW DOG. IT IS A SHIT DEAL. We finally got a timorous generation that has never had to strike, to get their asses out there, and we had to put up with the usual cowardly spineless babbling horse’s asses who kept mumbling “lessgo bac’ta work” over and over, as if it would make them one iota a better writer. But after months on the line, and them finally bouncing that pus-sucking dipthong Nick Counter, we rushed headlong into a shabby, scabrous, underfed shovelfulla shit clutched to the affections of toss-in-the-towel summer soldiers trembling before the Awe of the Alliance.

My Guild did what it did in 1988. It trembled and sold us out. It gave away the EXACT co-terminus expiration date with SAG for some bullshit short-line substitute; it got us no more control of our words; it sneak-abandoned the animator and reality beanfield hands before anyone even forced it on them; it made nice so no one would think we were meanies; it let the Alliance play us like the village idiot. The WGAw folded like a Texaco Road Map from back in the day.

And I am ashamed of this Guild, as I was when Shavelson was the prexy, and we wasted our efforts and lost out on technology that we had to strike for THIS time. 17 days of streaming tv!!!????? Geezus, you bleating wimps, why not just turn over your old granny for gang-rape?

You deserve all the opprobrium you get. While this nutty festschrift of demented pleasure at being allowed to go back to work in the rice paddy is filling your cowardly hearts with joy and relief that the grips and the staff at the Ivy and street sweepers won’t be saying nasty shit behind your back, remember this:

You are their bitches. They outslugged you, outthought you, outmaneuvered you; and in the end you ripped off your pants, painted yer asses blue, and said yes sir, may I have another.

Please excuse my temerity. I’m just a sad old man who has fallen among Quislings, Turncoats, Hacks and Cowards.

I must go now to whoops. My gorge has become buoyant.

Respectfully, Yr. Pal, Harlan Ellison

Off The Pink notes 5 Things LOST can teach us about storytelling. I agree with all of them, but I think #3 is most interesting:

Complicated stories require predictable structures: Lost is a rat’s nest of conspiracy, conflicting motivations, shifting relationships, and backstory, backstory, backstory. . . One of the only ways it keeps the whole from becoming completely unintelligible is by adhering to a very rigid structure. Not just the alternation of flashbacks and island time, but in the narrative uses of each. Up to now, with only two exceptions I can think of, the flashbacks were character studies, more or less narratively self-contained, and could cover an arbitrary amount of time. The island segments are explicitly linear, and are home to the major multi-episode narrative arcs of the Lost storyline. That’s oversimplified (especially now we’ve seemed to have crossed a temporal Rubicon and are into flashforwards now) but the point is, after two or three episodes, the structure is apparent and provides a framework to keep the audience form becoming disoriented in the complex multi-character multi-era story.

One of the things I find interesting about the structure of the show in the last couple of episodes is that the flash forward episodes are usually structured very much as flashbacks. The flashback sequences always served to illuminate the events taking place in the “present” island sequences, and now the island scenes appear to serve as flashbacks that illuminate the “present” flash forward scenes. This adds a level of complexity to the writing that is just astounding. I don’t think they’re planning to do this, but it would be really poetic if they could maintain symmetry by using nothing but flash forwards from here on out.

If they can maintain this quality of writing and put an ending on it that doesn’t fall apart into ridiculous gibberish like the X-Files finalé, this show will become a towering landmark in television history, and long form storytelling in general.

In a related note, I watched last season’s finalé when they recently reran it, this time looking for clues and inconsistencies that should have tipped me off to the flashforward. The moment I saw Jack talking on a black RAZR—which was introduced a year after Oceanic 815 crashed—I should have known. These people are damn clever.

Wired Science interviews Paolo Bacigalupi. Terrific Harlan Ellison anecdote:

Harlan Ellison called me up out of the blue. It was soon after the short story had come out and I was in my house mopping the floor and I get this phone call and this man on the other end was like ‘This is Harlan Ellison, do you know who I am?’ and I was like ‘Yeah, yeah, um yeah.’ So he says, ‘Go get your story.’ So I do. He then proceeds to basically critique every single aspect of my entire story.

He starts out by saying ‘At first I thought that you were some sort of professional writing under a pseudonym because, you know, nobody has a name like Bacigalupi, I know the Abbot and Costello routine blah blah blah…’ He goes off about how Paolo Bacigalupi is obviously a pseudonym or a joke name of some sort. Now he’s getting a bit worked up. He says, ‘You know, I thought you were a professional, and then I got to page 5 and right down there at the bottom you used the word jerked… and then 2 sentences later you used the word jerky–you took all of the power out of the fucking word!’

I’m sitting there on the line sort of terrified of this man just haranguing me. At the end of that whole conversation - a conversation in which he critiques, line by line, my entire story - he finishes up by saying, ‘Well you got some potential, but don’t write in genre, it’s a waste of time. Don’t get stuck in it like I got stuck in it.’ And then he hangs up.

That was the last thing that I heard from this guy–I don’t know what it was–sort of like a love tap I guess, but I actually sort of got to me. I proceeded to write a bunch of stories that weren’t science fiction. I wrote historical fiction novels set in China, I went on and wrote a landscape… I don’t know what you call it… sort of landscape porn I guess is the best word for it. You know, one of those love of place and the rural west sort of stories. Then I wrote a mystery/western story and none of those genres is related to sci-fi in any way, shape or form, and none of them sold.

At the end of all of that, I’m sitting there with all of the rejection letters in my hands and thinking: Well, you know, actually I kind of liked writing science fiction and then I went back into it and started doing the short stories, and that’s when I started writing things like “The Fluted Girl,” and “The People of Sand and Slag” and started finding my niche. It’s been a long process.

Okay, this one’s for real:

Go to Moviefone for a larger version.

Update: And here’s what it comes from:

Get the inside scoop on Star Trek at TrekRumors.com:

On-Screen Endorsement Deals Rumored for Star Trek XI

A studio document obtained by our sources shows that the following brands have paid for on-screen placement in Star Trek:

• General Motors (Specifically Chevrolet)
• Red Bull
• Samsung
• LG
• Motorola (for the communicators?)
• Swanson’s Frozen Dinners
• Culligan Water
• Bose Home Audio

While this may look like an invasive amount of endorsement, the memo we’ve obtained discusses making the placement in the feature as seamless as possible as to not detract from the audience experience. While fans may protest sight unseen, it’s obvious why such things have to take place. Star Trek XI’s budget, when combined with fiscal concerns on Paramount’s part, means that the studio needs to take every chance it can to get outside financing.

Yep. I believe every word of it.

Jay Lake has been kind enough to post the 2008 preliminary Nebula ballot.

Update:  And SF Signal is posting links to the stories as they come online.

Carol Pinchefsky asks, “Is There Nepotism in Science Fiction?” Allow me to answer that:

Duh. Of course there is.

Actually, this requires some clarification, because with the exception of an odd anecdote about a Marvel Comics artist, what Pinchefsky is calling “nepotism” is what the rest of us usually call “networking.”

Everybody does it, and they do it everywhere. Read any self-help book about getting a job, or any book on building a successful business, and you’ll find networking listed as a crucial skill, the thing that gets you a job or a contract when that other guy out on the street, the one with no contacts, doesn’t even know about it. This is not a bad thing.

Okay, I suppose in some idealized world where everyone gets by purely on merit, the idea of using established contacts to get a job—or if you’re an employer, to fill a job without having to sort through the resumés of a hundred strangers—would be anathema, but, here in the real world, such networking is a lubricant that makes business function more smoothly.

Is there some reason why the publishing business should be any different? That’s the subtext of the article, but anybody who has been in the writing game for any significant amount of time has heard plenty of lurid tales about invitation-only anthologies, books bought from outlines, and those last minute emergencies where a magazine editor needs to plug a hole in the table of contents right now! These editors are going to rely on people they know. They don’t have to wonder if a writer is going to finish on time or whether he’s difficult to work with, or whether she doesn’t have the chops to do the job in the first place. They’d be foolish not to.

And there’s no way it stops there. Editors get far more manuscripts than they have publishing slots, which means hard choices have to made sometimes, and anything could tip the balance. More to the point, they’re human, just like the rest of us, which means that even if they aren’t trying to exploit their positions and shovel contracts at their friends, they can’t help but take relationship considerations into account on some level. Anyone trying to break into the business should expect that.

And I, for one, am not going to speculate about how many editors—and writers—actually do have enough larceny in their souls to misuse the system. I want to get published too, y’know?