- Merlin is coming to the US! The show about the early days of Camelot will air on NBC Sundays at 8, starting June 21, and Pink Raygun has several clips.
- The 2009 Bram Stoker Awards were announced, along with the 2009 British Fantasy Award nominees, the Mythopoetic Award finalists, and the John W. Campbell Award finalists (for best novel; not to be confused with the best new author award of the same name).
- Science fiction author Paul O. Williams, 1983 winner of the John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer and best known for the post-apocalyptic Pelbar Cycle, passed away at the beginning of June. I never read his books, but his haiku are amazing. (via SF Scope)
- Cory Doctorow’s Little Brother hits the stage in Chicago. Has anyone been to see it? Planning to go?
- Andy Serkis, Hugo Weaving, and Sir Ian McKellen are all set to return for Guillermo del Toro’s Hobbit(ses). I’m still not sure why it’s going to be two movies when they managed to do the whole Lord of the Rings in three, but hey—the more opening-night parties, the merrier.
- I’m not even a Batwoman fan and I’m excited by these stunning covers. I really hope cover #3 isn’t an indication of Batwoman’s unecessary and sticky end, but I will cheerfully ogle it anyway.
- Hwaet! Benjamin Bagby recites Beowulf in the original Old English while accompanying himself on the harp and dramatic gesture. Also, sorry, JP, but it doesn’t sound even vaguely like Scottish, but like a delightful mash-up of German and Finnish with teeny bits of English mixed in; there are subtitles so you, too, can exclaim when you recognize “cween” and “hearpe.”
- Shawn Speakman talks about Terry Brooks and the interrogation school of editing.
- In a tiny, germy blast from the past, scientists who uncovered a 120,000 year-old microbe trapped in a Greenland glacier have now gotten it to wake up and reproduce. It doesn’t really do anything else, but the team leader says that “these extremely cold environments are the best analogues of possible extraterrestrial habitats” and could be used to further our understanding of what life could survive on other planets.
- You can’t get something from nothing, but the Fraunhofer Institute for Interfacial Engineering and Biotechnology can get water from air. Apparently you can make like a Fremen on a variety of scales, from personal to industrial. It will be interesting to see how this technology gets distributed and utilized once it’s out of the prototype phase.
Just quickly, that link about “Batwoman’s unecessary and sticky end” just blew my computer up with Viruses. Looks like the site is infected.
Only one of the Jackson/del Toro films is actually going to be The Hobbit. The second film is supposed to be based on all the supplemental material and cover the period from the end of The Hobbit to the start of LoTR.
@R.Fife #1
Thanks for the heads-up. Team Tor.com works on Macs for the most part (except for Torie, she insists on rocking Windows), so infected sites rarely bother us. Link broken.
Is this Merlin related to the mini-series that aired a few years back?
No, it’s the first season of a BBC series; main way of describing is that Arthur is Prince of Camelot, Morgana is his foster sister, Uther (Anthony Stewart Head) is King of Camelot, Guinevere is Morgana’s maidservant, and Merlin arrives in the first episode, same age as Arthur. Oh, and did we mention that Uther banned magic and magic is a death penalty offense? And Merlin, through events, ends up Arthur’s manservant?
(Oh, and there’s a dragon in the basement below the dungeons. I’m not joking!)
BBC’s Merlin is great fun. I watched the whole season with my son and daughter and we had a great time. Looking forward to more.
Hope that dragon wants to be there. An annoyed dragon is a terrible thing to face. [Grin]
Merlin is great fun. Series 2 should be turning up here in the UK fairly soon. Watch out for the court genealogist, one Geoffrey of Monmouth.
R.Fife @@@@@ 1, I’m so sorry! I didn’t have any problems with it, but I hope your computer is okay…. I’ll see if I can let them know that the site is giving people viruses. It was Women in Refrigerators, a list of female superheroes who have been killed or had their powers taken away, many to inspire revenge from their male counterparts, prove the bad guys were serious, demonstrate they made a mistake, etc.
DemetriosX@@@@@2, that’s what I thought, too, but apparently they’re now saying that the two movies will be The Hobbit, slightly expanded to add some more Gandalf and White Council, and that if they do a bridging movie it will be yet a third. They might not stop until they’ve done Silmarillion: The Musical!