SG-1 Video Card Game Launches
Gamers will be able to go on missions with SG-1 in the new Stargate Trading Card Game, a video game being released by Sony Online Entertainment, director of development Scott Martins told SCI FI Wire.
Headstone Blends Guns, Ghosts
Bram Stoker Award-winning author Tom Piccirilli, whose novel Headstone City was named a finalist for this year’s award, told SCI FI Wire that the book is a guns-and-ghosts novel about two former childhood friends.
Blade’s Mead Talks Art
Visual futurist and Blade Runner concept artist Syd Mead–who was recently named a Spectrum Grand Master–told SCI FI Wire that he didn’t expect his work on that seminal SF movie to be so well-regarded.
Magazines Anonymous
I’m starting to get really sick of these new magazines that pop up online and don’t bother to say anywhere who the people are behind them. Doesn’t that bother you all as *writers*? I mean, when a new magazine pops up, wouldn’t you like you know who’s involved with it before you submit something?
I mean, come on–haven’t they ever heard of a *masthead*? Also, for those that do actually deign to tell us who’s editing the thing, it doesn’t hurt to, you know, actually tell us who you are besides your name. I’m just sayin’.
Marvel Card Game Trades Up
The Marvel Trading Card Game is the video-game recreation of the hard-copy card game from Upper Deck. Players can create decks that team up characters from anywhere in the Marvel universe.
Magic Poses Dilemma
Australian fantasy author Justine Larbalestier, whose novel Magic or Madness was named a finalist for the Andre Norton Award for best young-adult SF/fantasy novel of the year, told SCI FI Wire that the book came about because she’s cranky.
Comment Moderation
A note about the comments —
Your comment will automatically be held for moderation if you include a URL, either in the URL field or in the body of the comment. Sometimes I’m not able to approve comments right away, so they might sit in the queue for a few hours, so if you want your comment to show up right away, avoid using URLs.
BTW, I appreciate the database suggestions; after I have time to think about it some more and try out some of these suggestions, I’ll post about it again. Do keep the ideas coming, if you have any…
SCI FI Weekly: Interview with Kim Stanley Robinson
SCI FI Weekly just published a Q&A I did with Kim Stanley Robinson, in which we mainly discuss his Science in the Capitol trilogy, and Global Warming.
Your Mars books were about terraforming Mars; the Science in the Capital series is to some degree are about terraforming Earth (to repair the effects of global warming). What are our chances of doing either before it’s too late?
Robinson: We are the major force changing the surface and atmosphere of Earth now (we’re faster than the natural processes changing it, I mean), so terraforming is indeed physically possible, but we’re not used to thinking of ourselves in that role. It would require a changed paradigm, which admitted that we have become some kind of conscious “global biosphere maintenance stewards,” and that environmental thinking now ought to include an openness to at least the concept of doing things deliberately to reduce our impacts. We have to reconceptualize wilderness as being a kind of ethical position as well as a piece of land, meaning active and conscious stewardship on our part. This is a kind of interaction with the Earth that has been going on semi-consciously since the beginning of humankind, but now it’s become obvious, and it is a frightening thing to contemplate, because it’s a stupendously complex system and we don’t know enough to do what we now need to. And the unintended further consequences of anything we might try are hard to predict.
Even so, we may eventually agree through the U.N. or something else to try some things, if we get desperate enough. The crux may come if the Western Antarctic Ice Sheet begins to detach in a big way. About a quarter of the world’s population lives very near the coastline, and the disruptions there could be so severe that we would contemplate mitigating actions.
Beyond that, I think it’s best not to put the problem as a question concerning whether we are “too late” or not, because either answer leads to a kind of non-active response: i.e., if it’s not too late, I don’t have to change, and if it is too late, then there’s no point in changing, so either way–party on! Also, in some sense, encompassing all life on Earth, it will never be “too late,” in that even if we trigger a mass extinction event, the surviving life would quickly fill the empty niches and evolve onward. You can’t kill life on Earth, short of toasting it in an expanding sun or whatnot. But you can kill a lot of species, and wreck a lot of biomes, and you can probably wreck human civilization for a time, which would kill a lot of people. So I think it’s better to think of it in terms of “do we save more or do we save less,” of the other species in particular.
Lunar Knights Hunts Vamps
Lunar Knights, Konami’s new game for the Nintendo DS, is an action role-playing game featuring a pair of vampire hunters, Dennis Lee at Konami Digital Entertainment told SCI FI Wire.
Darkness Celebrates 10th Year
The Darkness, the Top Cow comic that combines the Mafia with magic, is celebrating its 10th anniversary this year and was inspired by a love for antiheroes and the dark side of humanity, Marc Silvestri, founder and chief executive of Top Cow Productions, told SCI FI Wire.