Tag: scifi

Categories
ALA Books LITA Media Personal presentation

Interviewing Dr. Vernor Vinge

Dr. Vernor VingeIn one of the more surreal occurrences in my working life, I will have the opportunity to interview one of the titans of the Science Fiction world, Dr. Vernor Vinge, at the ALA Midwinter Meeting 2011 in San Diego, CA. The interview itself will be on Saturday, Jan 8th, from 1:30-3:30pm Pacific time in the San Diego Convention Center Room 29 A-D.

Plans are in place to livestream the interview at the LITA Ustream channel, and in addition to a set of questions from myself, I’ve decided to set up ways to take questions from just about anyone who wants. At the bottom of this post is an embedded Google Form where you can ask your question of Dr. Vinge…I’ll sort through any in the next 2 weeks and pick the best of the bunch for inclusion. In addition, during the interview itself, we will be taking questions not only from the live audience but also from Twitter (use the hashtag #alamw_vinge) and from the Facebook Event page.

So: hit the form below, and ask your question now. Watch the interview live on Saturday, January 8th at 1:30 Pacific time, and ask your questions as they occur to you. I, along with several awesome librarians, will try our best to collapse all of these streams into an entertaining and informative couple of hours for all.
**********

Categories
Books Media

Snow Crash

Betsy surprised me a few days ago with this, which she claims is either a late birthday or early father’s day present: a signed, numbered, limited edition of Snow Crash by Neal Stephenson.IMG_3153.JPG

It’s put out by Subterranean Press, and is gorgeous. Subterranean is a press that specialized in high quality printings of limited edition fantasy, scifi, and horror…I want to own nearly everything they print.

But for now, I will just stare and covet my copy of my preciou….I mean, Snow Crash.

Categories
Digital Culture

Make your own Battlestar

Battlestar castI got on the Galactica bandwagon well after most everyone I know…I watched the first few episodes, but never really got sucked in.

Then I got tired of everyone I know talking about it around me, so I just decided I’d catch up on the fraking thing and see what the buzz was about. I’m still not caught up (just finished Season 2) but it’s a good show. There are tons of things I have serious issues with, and I’m just not quite able to get the complete suspension of disbelief going like for Firefly or Heroes. But it’s good, solid, sci-fi TV.

One of the reasons that I decided to start watching, believe it or not, was the coolness of the show’s creators and promotional team. They just launched a Battlestar Galactica VideoMaker page that has on it clips and sound effects to use in your own Galactica videos…amazingly forward thinking of them, and a great way to garner my respect. They were also one of the very first shows to include podcasts of commentaries, which is an amazingly great way to interact with your audience, and add value to your product.

I definitely appreciate the willingness of the Network to involve the audience in new ways, and think this is one of the few ways that commercial video will survive. We are quickly moving into an entertainment era that is post-consumer, and the really interesting shows are providing alternate means of interaction beyond the passive. It’s a brave new world out there, and we’ll see who’s around in 10 years.

Categories
Digital Culture

More Sci-Fi Sexuality

This is brilliant. Potentially NSFW.

Categories
Digital Culture

Never go over in america, volume 1

I really, really don’t understand Germany. Or Germans. I give you: The Dreamship Surprise!

Dreamship SurpriseSpace in the year 2304: in a UFO that crash-landed in the Nevada desert 300 years ago, mankind found the scientific guidelines which were used to colonize Mars half a century later. Now the descendants of the first colonists are on their way back to Earth. Led by their unbelievably wicked Regulator Rogul and his unbelievably even more wicked disciple Jens Maul, they are up to no good. In fact, the Martians are planning to subjugate the blue planet to the red one. With a huge array of spaceships, a conquest of Earth seems imminent. And only the crazy crew of Dreamship Surprise can “help”: Captain Kork, engineer Shrotty and first officer Mr. Spuck. But instead of fighting intergalactic crime, they´re busy with their choreography for the upcoming “Miss Waikiki Pageant”. With the help of the space cowboy and taxi-pilot Rock, they set out to save the earth from invasion…

Watch the trailer for the ultimate in gay space heroes. The only one I could find to embed is in Japanese (with German audio)…so be warned. Wonderfully off-kilter gay sci-fi movies…there’s just not enough of them.

I dare anyone to find a more homosexual sci-fi picture than this:

cast

Just another example of the sort of thing that would never happen here. This film had the largest theatrical opening in the history of Germany. And it doesn’t even have The Hoff in it.

Categories
Digital Culture

Best. Lightsaber. Duel. Ever.

Categories
Digital Culture

A Scanner Darkly

Wow. I can’t wait for this movie….the effects look incredible. Is this the first time that an animation technique has been used as an effect over an entire film? The only thing that I can think comes close is Tron…other examples anyone?