Anybody remember the video game Joust? Yeah, me neither. But apparently they’re making a movie based on it.
Seriously, I think anything can get greenlit into a movie deal, as long as the studio already owns it in some other format.
Day: August 30, 2007
This feels low somehow…
Via Heather.
Science fiction is dead! So says Ridley Scott. Sounds to me like he just hasn’t been paying attention. There’s been plenty of science fiction as good as, if not better than, 2001: A Space Odyssey in the nearly forty years since that film was made. Every time someone says this or that genre is dead, there are usually half a dozen easy examples to prove them wrong. The half dozen that spring to my mind of interesting, challenging, unique, enjoyable and, more importantly, recent science fiction? How about:
Gattaca
Primer
12 Monkeys
Solaris
Donnie Darko
Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind
And I can think of more. Is there a lot of terrible and derivative science fiction being produced? Of course there is. But when wasn’t there? When in the history of human culture has Sturgeon’s Law not applied?
I think I’ve just found my new desktop picture. It’s by J.R. Blackwell, whose story, “The Role of Plumage in the Mating Habits of the Karraw,” appears in Kaleidotrope #2.
Oh, and speaking of Kaleidotrope…This post by John Klima of Electric Velocipede — third in a really informative series on starting your own zine — has got me thinking that maybe I need to invest in layout software more versatile than MS Word to put together my own. But there are pretty hefty price tags attached to packages like Quark and InDesign, even with the educational discount (which I can’t get). And as much as I enjoy putting together the zine and publishing these great stories, Kaleidotrope is still pretty much a money-losing operation.
Any thoughts or suggestions?
And it’s a wonderful thing being an honoured foreign guest somewhere like that — you get shown all the cool stuff, get to see Pandas, red ones and giant ones, and then find yourself put in a blue disposable smock and gloves (to protect the pandas from you, asnd not the other way around) and you get a year-old Panda placed on your lap. Utter, utter happiness. Better than any number of awards. Makes being a writer completely worthwhile. I suspect that world peace and harmony would come about in weeks if people just got to put pandas on their laps every few months. Honest.
This is why most people become writers, isn’t it? For the pandas?