The Science Fiction Tribune-Register Newspaper

Ultimate X-Men #97
Writer: Aron E. Coilete
Artist: Mark Brooks
Publisher: Marvel Comics

Well it’s not Brooks fault. The art isn’t exceptional but it’s certainly serviceable. The plot and scripting though is just plain terrible. It’s barely coherent with no flow at all. Any sort of recognisable characterization is thrown out the window. As is logic, since there’s no way the team could come back from this in the space of a few pages.

Several weeks ago I saw one of my favorite bands play live, the Raconteurs. At the show I bought a limited edition tour poster created by the artist Rob Jones.

His work is quite striking, and I especially like the steampunk look he’s applied to the Raconteurs. Check out the posters here and also here, and you can begin to imagine a story for these brash young lads in the…

Upcoming games? Videogames meta-discussion? News about the intersection of videogames and science fiction? If you…

I’m pleased to announce the winners of our Masters of Science Fiction DVD competition. Thank you for all the entries. The following lucky people will be receiving the DVD set in the mail:

I’m very pleased with the success of this giveaway so if I receive further opportunities to offer…

Iâ€™m a fan of Star Wars. Iâ€™ve been a fan of Star Wars since I watched the original movie in theaters at roughly the age of four. So, itâ€™s not surprising that I share my love of Star Wars with my children. When the new movie came out, we decided to see it.

After reading a number of poor reviews of Star Wars: Clone Wars, I went into the movie theaters with low,…

Sheriff Carter is in a state over the upcoming wedding between Drs. Stark and Blake. If that isn’t bad enough for him his sister has arrived for a visit. Of course the romantic tension between Allison and Carter has been a recurring theme of Eureka since episode one so it’s easy to sympathize with him as he has to give her away to Stark.

Didi and Phil Gilson contacted me to let me know about a new science fiction feature film Gaea: Beyond the Son. The Gilsons have already published a novel of the same story (written as P. D. Gilson). The movie is being produced by Greentrees films who hope to begin production in 2009.

Gaea: Beyond The Son is about a father who is separated from his son through war, over 30 yeasr…

I’ve written some less than complimentary things about modern Star Wars recently and I’m hardly the only one (though to be fair there are a number of defenders too). Over at SF Signal JP Frantz has announced that Star Wars Must Die! Don’t get too upset, he doesn’t mean it literally. What he’s looking for is a fresh new direction for Star Wars.

So by now of course you know that this is the last season of Stargate Atlantis. Hopefully they plan to go out with a bang. The Ghost in the Machine starts off in very familiar territory with our in the puddle jumper and doing what they do best (squabbling).

Incidentally is the puddle jumper the least impressive looking spaceship is scifi history?

From there things go bad with some weird systems failures.…

If you’re a fan of post-apocalyptic fiction you may want to keep an eye out for Paul Kane’s new book The Afterblight Chronicles: Arrowhead which will be published in September in the UK and then in November here in the US.

Kane is playing on the legend of Robin Hood in this book which is set in an England that has reverted to the Middle Ages after a virus killed 90%…

The other day I posted the claim that There Is No Such Thing As Science Fiction Fandom. It was as I acknowledged in the article, an over-reaching claim. But I basically stand by the point I was making that fandom has splintered into many specialized form and there really isn’t an overall fandom at this point.

Over at dashPunk, C. E. Dorsett posted a rebuttal of sorts suggesting that it’s not…

A robot dog show. Well that’s the town of Eureka for you. But of course it’s not that simple. We have what initially appears to be a break in, followed by tremors (I’ve got to say the “mucous” looked awfully like green colored foam) and then there’s the dead dog. How does a robotic dog die? Well that’s the question isn’t it. And of course there are no earthquakes in…

I’m a little late to the game on this one, but I think it’s worth a moment of your time. The Deadbooks Project is described as a Hyper-Serialization of the Dead Books SF/Horror series by Hasso Wuerslin. The project launched last week (thanks to N. E. Lilly for linking to it in last week’s Internet News).

And what is Hyper-Serialization exactly. Well the intent seems to be to combine narration, actors, sound…

While browsing through the instant viewing options on Netflix I found this treasure from my early childhood: Johnny Sokko and His Flying Robot. This was one of my favorite programs when I was 8, and I still find it hugely entertaining 30 years later. They may have to surgically remove the stupid grin that’s on my face right now.

It can also be found on Amazon Unbox video download for…

Guardians of the Galaxy #4
Writer: Dan Abnett & Andy Lanning
Artist: Paul Pelettier
Publisher: Marvel Comics

The Guardians of the Galaxy gets a Secret Invasion tie-in this month. Which is a little odd because it’s not set on earth. But they make it work, sealing off the station and ramping up the paranoia. I’m still not quite sure what to make of Major Victory’s arrival. Is he part of the team or just…

The novel The Stainless Steel Rat actually comprises of a novellas The Stainless Steel Rat and The Misplaced Battleship which were then rounded out with additional material completing the story. Perhaps inevitably the origins do show through in the flow of the story.

Harrison’s Stainless Steel Rat is a career criminal. He’s not out to hurt people, he’s just out for himself. But “Slippery” Jim diGriz is outsmarted by the Special…

The Sci Fi Channel has greenlit a two hour movie based on their Stargate Atlantis series. Sci Fi will of course have the television premiere for the movie which will aslo get a DVD release.

The Stargate Atlantis movie will be written by executive producers Joseph Mallozzi and Paul Mullie and will follow Atlantis’ fifth and final season (which is set to conclude in January 2009). It seems at this new…

After cutting his teeth on Inferno! and Warhammer Monthly (the only comic book ever to win an Eagle Award and get canceled in the same week), Christian Dunn spent many years as the Commissioning Editor of both Black Flame and Solaris. He is now safely ensconced back in the bosom of Black Library as their Range Development Editor where runs the e-book, Print on Demand and audio ranges, as well as being responsible for unearthing new writing talent.

He lives in Nottingham, England and always keeps a freshly greased chainsaw under his pillow in anticipation of the inevitable zombie apocalypse.

SF SIGNAL: Hi Christian! Thanks for agreeing to do the interview. First off, could you tell us more about Black Library's new Print on Demand book line? Do you have an official name for it yet?

CHRISTIAN DUNN: In a nutshell, the Print on Demand range is Black Library's opportunity to not only bring back many of the out-of-print novels from our ten year back catalogue but also introduce new titles that we don't think fit our main range but know that readers would like to see. Readers will be able to visit our website and order Print on Demand titles just as they would any other Black Library title. The only difference being that PoD titles are Trade Paperback format and they take slightly longer to ship than a regular title due to being made to order.

Because there's very little difference to the reader in the way that they can order these titles and the look and feel of the finished books, we made the decision not to separately brand the PoD line. PoD titles will be flagged as such on the website so that readers know that the book they'll receive will differ slightly from the Black Library books that they've been used to, but we won't be calling the range anything fancy.

However, we are branding some of the books within the PoD range as 'Heretic Tomes'. One of the great opportunities with PoD is to bring back older titles - some of which even pre-date Black Library - that no longer accurately reflect the Warhammer or Warhammer 40,000 universes. These are the kind of novels that we wouldn't want to put on the shelves of a Games Workshop or bookstore because anybody unfamiliar with Warhammer or Warhammer 40,000 might get the wrong idea and come away with an inaccurate picture of our fictional universes. They're all still great stories though, so badging them as Heretic Tomes allows us to get the books back into the hands of fans but also tip them off that the background and IP might be a bit different from what they're used to. The first Heretic Tome - the first of our PoD releases in fact - is Ian Watson's Space Marine which has been OOP for at least fifteen years but has consistently been one of the most requested titles for us to reprint. I know Ian's very happy for it to be coming back into print as he mentions it to me every time I see him at a convention!

SFS: What made Black Library go the Print on Demand route? What are the implications of the print-on-demand method?

CD: Over the past ten years we've published over 300 novels. Add to that the hundreds of short stories and dozens of comic books, graphic novels, art books and background books and it equals enough titles to fill several shelves of the SF/F section of the average bookstore. Obviously, it's not practical to keep that many titles in print at any one time - the BL editorial office would have to double up as a book warehouse and, as much as we love being surrounded by books, thousands of copies of hundreds of different titles might be considered a fire risk! PoD is the perfect solution. No warehouses full of books but potential access to our entire back catalogue. In theory, no title should ever go out of print again.

Some of the implications were surprising and not immediately obvious. The first thing we did when the call was made to launch PoD, was to ignore everything about conventional publishing and treat PoD as something entirely new and different, not only in terms of manufacture and distribution but right down to the way the books themselves are put together. When a publisher releases a mass market title there are certain expectations regarding that book, not only from the publisher but also from the supplier and the end user. For instance, because the book needs to be displayed on a shelf in a bookstore, the title of the book and the author's name are generally printed on both the front cover and the spine. The reader expects this, the retailer expects this and so the publisher - unless making a bold design decision - meets those expectations by printing that information on the front cover and spine. Likewise, the book needs to stand out from the other titles vying for attention on the shelves and cover artwork and design that is reflective of content and genre becomes another expectation. Ditto blurb on the back cover of the book so that when the reader picks it up, they're given a short synopsis to try and convince them to take the book over to the cash register and buy it. Even an RRP and barcode on the back of the book is an expectation as the publisher and/or distributor uses it for tracking stock and the supplier uses it at point of sale to scan the item into the cash register. PoD removes these expectations. Because the only way of obtaining PoD titles is via our website, the webpage itself can display all of the information the reader needs to decide whether this is a book they'd like to read. Because the book is never seen on a bookstore shelf, the need for the title and author name on the front cover is eliminated altogether and the cover art and design can become something more than just a tool purely to sell the book.

The one expectation that did hold over was printing the title and author name on the spine; although stores display the vast majority of titles spine-out on their shelves, it's also how most readers shelve their collections so we opted to retain this for our PoD titles.

PoD publishing is a weird hybrid between traditional and digital publishing - physical product but only sold electronically - and I think this is a direction the mass market will take in years to come. As online book retailers keep increasing their market share, the way a book cover looks displayed at an inch-and-a-half high on a monitor will begin to take precedence over how it looks at 6 ¾ inches on a bookstore shelf and, at the same time, remove many of those expectations I've outlined above. By taking the step into PoD publishing now, we'll be better equipped when the mass market shifts in the future.

SFS: What are the titles that you'll be releasing this year? Why those books?

CD: Our current plan is not to officially announce titles in advance - beyond the first few months' releases - but instead make the titles available the instant they are announced. Publicly releasing a schedule upfront sort of defeats the purpose of Print on Demand - we'll print the book on demand for you but only if you demand it be printed in 3 months' time!? It also allows us to be flexible with the titles we release as PoD. If, for instance, a main range title goes out of print and we start amassing orders that indicate demand for that title, but not sufficient to push the button on a full reprint then we can slot it in as a PoD release. If we've announced 3, 6 or even 12 months out then we lose that flexibility.

We can also have a bit of fun building anticipation for the titles by dropping hints in various venues. When copies of the latest Dan Abnett hardcover, Blood Pact, arrived in the BL office, I put a photograph of it on our blog. It took one keen-eyed fan about 4 minutes to notice that the hardcover had been placed on one of our proof copies of The Gothic War Omnibus which is the March 2010 PoD release. I've also dropped a few hints on Facebook and Twitter and if anybody was following the 'What Are You Reading' thread on the old Black Library forums then pretty much everything I said I was reading during the second half of 2009 will be coming out as a PoD title during 2010. Except for those non-Black Library books I read of course...

Shall I drop another hint here? Alright then, our April release is an anthology of Blood Angels comic strips and short stories, and contains one all-new story along with the prose version of Heart of Rage that was previously only available as an audio drama. Wait a minute, that's more of an announcement than a hint!

SFS: How do you gauge that there's a demand for a certain title? How can readers inform Black Library that they want a certain title back in print?

CD: With older books we rely on the feedback we get from readers when we meet them, or from postings on our old forums and Facebook group. Space Marine is the book that we've been asked to bring back more than any other and, after years of saying we weren't going to reprint it, when the technology came along to allow us to release it in a way that makes it viable in relatively small quantities, it took us a split-second to decide to launch with it. There are a few other titles that we still get requests for and they're all on my very long list of titles to get back into print.

With more recent titles, it's a case of monitoring how quickly a book has sold through in the various channels and deciding whether it's worth pushing the button on a full reprint, making the title available through PoD or allowing it to go out of print and bringing it back as a PoD title at some later date. As with older titles though, if there's enough reader feedback to suggest that even a newer title should come back into print then we'll listen.

SFS: What's your official title in the company? How did you get involved with Black Library and this project?

CD: My official job title is Range Development Editor which, translated out of doublespeak, means 'that guy who does all the things that aren't novels or part of the main range'. My brief is to run the Print on Demand, audio drama and e-book ranges along with editing our short story anthologies and recruiting new talent to the BL author roster. As the 'Range Development' bit of my job title suggests, I also look for opportunities to try new things. We're already well down the road to recording and releasing our first abridged audio book and, as part of our e-book strategy, plans are afoot to launch our first digital-only publishing venture. I can't say much more at this stage but it will be a good reason for fans of short fiction to come back and visit our website on a monthly basis.

The Print on Demand range is a weird kind of homecoming for me, weird in the sense that I never really went away. Before I was the Commissioning Editor for both Solaris and Black Flame - which, like Black Library, were both BL Publishing imprints - I ran the Necromunda, Dark Future and Blood Bowl novel ranges for Black Library and prior to that I was the editor of both Inferno! and Warhammer Monthly. Even though I've spent the past five years on the Solaris and Black Flame imprints, I still shared office space with the Black Library crew and kept up to speed with what was happening. Because most of the PoD titles are reprints from the early days of Black Library, I actually worked on them the first time around.

SFS: What are your immediate goals for the line and how is this different from the rest of Black Library?

CD: The first goal is to get the message out there about the new range. Because there's no physical product on the shelves in stores, a lot of the traditional methods of marketing books aren't as effective. As I said earlier, dropping hints on various websites and social networks helps because you're effectively one mouse click away from the book's webpage. Getting the books out there and into the hands of readers will be the biggest help on this front. Once they see that not only are we reissuing great books but that we're also putting out great looking books that you can't get anywhere else, word will spread.

Beyond that, once the range has been up and running for a while we plan to introduce titles that were never released in the mass market. Initially, these will take the form of new anthologies of previously published material where the theme is a lot tighter than those we'd release as part of the main range. The aforementioned Blood Angels anthology is the first title of that nature and we have plans to do PoD exclusive anthologies themed around other Space Marine Chapters too. We also have two brand new titles that have been commissioned specifically for the PoD range which are unlike anything Black Library have published before. They're penciled in for late 2010 and should cause a bit of a stir once word gets out.

As for the rest of Black Library? They can concentrate on putting out all of those great books that will eventually become part of the PoD range!

SFS: Aside from the cover design, are there any changes you're going to make to the re-released books such as minor editing? Or will we see more of what you hinted with the Blood Angels anthology, by including bonus content?

CD: There are a few titles in our back catalogue that despite being very good stories in their own right, didn't accurately capture the Warhammer or Warhammer 40,000 background. Some of these titles couldn't be re-edited to fit the background without fundamentally altering the plot and these will be released under the Heretic Tomes branding. Others, where some of the details didn't capture the flavor of the background, will undergo rewriting and editing before being re-released as PoD titles. Most of the books are just fine and dandy as they are though and will come out with only a few minor typos being fixed.

Where possible, a PoD title will have some kind of bonus material. The Gothic War Omnibus, for instance, includes an 8-page comic strip featuring the lead character from the Gothic War novels while the planned omnibus of the four Dark Future novels that Jack Yeovil wrote for us back in the early 90s will include a previously unpublished Eugene Byrne novel featuring the lead character from Demon Download. We received our office copies of The Book of Blood - the Blood Angels anthology you mentioned in the question - last week and the comic book pages in there are as sharp as I've ever seen grayscale comic book art reproduced, so you can expect to see a lot more comic book material included as PoD bonus content!

SFS: What's the appeal of the Warhammer universe to you? What makes you keep coming back to it?

CD: Although my natural inclination is more towards SF, I did end up reading a lot of fantasy during my tenure at Solaris. The overwhelming majority left me disappointed though, sometimes through poor writing, sometimes through lack of originality but mainly through poor world-building. For me, world-building works best in fantasy novels when the plot itself is helping shape that world or when the author is trying to do something radically different with their setting, which sadly isn't the case with many of the current crop of fantasy titles. With Warhammer the world-building has already been done, and over the past 30 years has undergone a bit of remodeling and reconstruction, leaving authors free to concentrate on telling a great story rather than having to invent over-elaborate magic systems, royal lineages, and economic models.

And that's why it keeps reeling me in: because there's still a heck of a lot of great stories to tell in the Warhammer world.

SFS: I visited The Black Library webpage and it's still waiting for a relaunch. Where can readers find more information about Print on Demand?

CD: The Black Library blog and Facebook group have been filling the temporary gap left by the website and there's information about the PoD range as well as Heretic Tomes in both those locations.

As soon as blacklibrary.com is back online you'll be able to start ordering the first two PoD titles with at least one title being added every month after that.

My wife and I went to see Avatar the week that it came out, and we both enjoyed it tremendously. It was big and beautiful and exciting and fun. And if the plot was a little predictable, and if the characters were a little flat, there are worse things. I was excited just to see some big space opera happening on a movie screen again. Full of color and aliens and emotions besides scowls.

But as we were walking out of the theater, there was one thing which had caught and held my attention, and it was something specific which was missing from the ending credits.

Avatar, of course, wasn't adapted from anything. It came out of James Cameron's head.

(We can argue, of course, that it was adapted from Pocahontas, perhaps, and fair enough, but you get my point).

The reason this interested me is, nearly everything that hits the theaters is adapted from something.

"Based on the comic book series by Alan Moore", "based on the television series created by Gene Roddenberry", "based on the series of words-put-in-rows by Stephanie Meyer"... And we can go further afield than that: "based on the newspaper strip by Jim Davis", "based on the action figure G.I. Joe", for haven's sakes.

The only thing we haven't yet seen adapted are breakfast cereal mascots. Get Michael Bay to produce a Cap'n Crunch movie. Give it a techno soundtrack and you've got a summer blockbuster.

We know that the vast majority of things Hollywood produces are adaptations, because people comment on it fairly regularly, both on the street and in interviews. "Hollywood just rehashes everything, they've run out of original ideas," is neck-in-neck with the other common grumble, "MTV doesn't play any damn music videos now."

Adaptations are such a fact of life, something like Avatar - or, another sterling example, any of the perfect pieces of cinematic artwork created by Pixar - catches our attention for sheer fact that it isn't based off anything at all.

So why are all the major Hollywood films based on something? Why are so few of them original works? Even though clearly, when you look at films like Avatar or Star Wars, the original works can be huge money-makers? Why does it seem like Hollywood's run out of original ideas and is just content to cannibalize the rest of the artistic world? You probably don't need me to explain this to you, but I'll spell it out anyway, for the sake of completion if nothing else.

One of the main reasons is time. If you had to wait for every director's dream project to grow and be built and gestate, Hollywood would turn out amazing love-filled films, true, but it wouldn't be able to turn thirty of them out in the summer. And it wouldn't be able to afford them, which is the second reason.

Money is sunk into Harry Potter films, not because the idea requires the artistic fulfillment that only cinema can provide (the movies are terrific, but the books were fine all by themselves), but because they know there's already a fan base sitting there, eager to pay money to see films. That's money in the bank. Likewise, Mission Impossible 3, or yet another The Fast & The Furious sequel. These put away money which is occasionally used (by accident, the cynical might say) to fund smaller, more artistic, more-loved projects which aren't going to be massive summer tent-poles. It goes for the directors and filmmakers as well. Yes, you're waiting to make your amazing artistic piece of cinema, but in the meantime, you're going to make The Da Vinci Code 2: Code Harder because it puts money in your bank account, and makes the studio more inclined to let you make your own film.

The third reason, of course, is a combination of the previous two: Hollywood is a corporate landscape, not a place full of artistic people being creative. It's companies with bottom lines, trying to churn out as much product as they possibly can. That's what they're interested. And if you can mulch the whole rest of the artistic world and make it product, then you're going to do it.

The final reason is, of course, that this stuff is popular, so they keep doing it. Like novels, and albums, publishers and film companies produce the work and advertise it as hard as they can and hope like hell that this thing becomes the runaway phenomenon of the summer, of the year, of the decade. But you don't really know. If you could aim bestsellers, then you'd have three or four writers churning them out, aiming them precisely, and nothing much else.

But it doesn't work like that. So you make a Transformers movie, and it does well, and you think "okay..." and make another one. That one does well too, well enough. Right. Time to head down the toy aisle at Toys R Us and see what else we can do. Stretch Armstrong: The Film! Polly Pocket X! Probably a Play-Doh movie, starring a Baldwin brother. And you throw as many of these out there as you can until they start slipping in sales, and then you find the next thing. (Whether or not they slip in quality, or ever had any quality to slip out of, is not of concern.)

Finally, is it true that Hollywood has "run out of ideas?" Well, I guess, except I don't think they ever had many ideas in the first place. Individual filmmakers have ideas and eventually make them. But Hollywood itself doesn't tend to. It just says "More of that, right now!" over and over. Moreover, Hollywood's been adapting things since time out of mind. I can go all the way back to black and white silent films and find adaptations of Frankenstein, or Dracula, for example.

(An aside: if you want, you can go pre-cinema and find people adapting novels to the theater stage. It was a huge problem in the late 1800s. Charles Dickens would release a play, or a novel, and it would be adapted in pirated version over in the United States extremely quickly. He came over and fought for copyright laws just to prevent that sort of piracy. You could probably have a lengthy and fascinating discussion on why we need to take any great piece of art we love and adapt it into other mediums, but that would make this an awful long parenthetical.)

So are adaptations and based-upons good things or bad? Both, naturally. And I want to look at both sides of the argument.

The first good evidence I'd offer up are comic book movies. Specifically, super-hero films. And actually, I can build quite a lot of my argument just from those sort of films, although we won't stay there.

I don't know how many times I've come out of a super-hero film with friends, be it Batman Begins or Iron Man or Hellboy or whatever else you can think of, and the first question someone asks me (the token comic-book-reading-guy) is "so was that a lot like the comic book?"

And my answer is usually "well, yes and no," and I go no further. We'd wind up in a huge discussion about the changes made, the ways it was faithful or not, and so on, and I'd bore everyone out of the room and mysteriously find myself going to future films all on my own.

The best thing about super-hero films made out of continuing series is, it's the perfect entry point for someone who hasn't been reading and following comics all their lives. It's even a good point for someone who hasn't been following that character all that closely. How easy is it, these days, to follow the X-Men? There's A huge number of issues of X-Men going back decades. And there's also Astonishing X-Men and X-Factor and New X-Men and Young X-Men and Wolverine and X-Men: First Class and I bet there's a few others I've forgotten. The point is, they all frequently weave together, except when they don't, or when they're unrelated, or when they've gotten relaunched, or when they're doing one-off annual special stories, or....

It's one of the chief delights of comics, the huge interwoven fabric of these decades-long stories. But it's also one of the major hurdles to bringing people into the comic book fandom. With the films, what you get is a two hour story, and all you need to know is what it tells you. It will wrap up more or less. And when a sequel comes along, all you need to know to enjoy that is the first film, if that. Sometimes, the plot of the film will have some relationship to the comic, but not always exactly. And even if it does, it's just one storyline out of a myriad.

Another wonderful thing about adaptations is when you get a filmmaker who really loves the source material. Someone who is a definite fan. Examples of this one hardly seem necessary, but it's irresistible to offer up a few. Peter Jackson, with the Lord of the Rings films. Sam Raimi with the Spider-Man films. Guillermo del Toro with the Hellboy films.

They can be wonderful. The Spider-Man films (the first two; I see no reason to acknowledge that a third one was made) weren't spot-on faithful to the comic books, but they were full of love, and full of the same playful attitude that made the comic books such a pleasure to read. Likewise, the Lord of the Rings films took wide pleasure in altering the stories, but they were done with care and love and produced films you could be happy with. In cases like these, the joy of the films is getting to watch someone who cares as much about these pieces of art as you do, playing with them and showing you.

My favorite instances, though, are movies like Batman Begins/The Dark Knight or Hellboy 1 and 2. I think these are slightly different than the others, in that they aren't building off of any particular existing storyline. "Hellboy 1" sort of did. Mostly, the films are talented directors taking the notion of these characters and seeing what they can do with them.

The result can be amazing. Frankly, the Christopher Nolan Batman films have been the most interesting thing done with Batman in a number of years, in either comic or film. Taking the character and trying to build him logically, and then putting him in a Gotham city which had crime, and poor people, and slums...it was magic. It made Batman interesting. It meant we could logically explore the character of Bruce Wayne, and later, logically explore the creation of the Joker.

The Hellboy films are a particular treat, in that Guillermo del Toro and Mike Mignola (who created the Hellboy comics) seem to exist on the same creative wavelength. One has only to watch Pan's Labyrinth, that amazing and brutal and perfect fairy tale by Guillermo del Toro, to realize that he comes at fantasy the same way as Mignola. In the first Hellboy film, you get a loose adaptation of a comic storyline. But in the second film, you get him and Mignola coming together and creating something original, which contains the flavor of both creators (and half the calories? No, that's not right...).

I mentioned above the changes they made in making the Lord of the Rings films, which segues me nicely into my next point: People complain, or compliment, or at least discuss the changes made in beloved story lines when they make the transition to film. It's another common argument I not only hear all the time, but I also argue myself. It can be a good thing, though. It can be the thing that makes the film work, where the comic might not have, or the book.

For an example of this, I again return to comic books. Specifically, the X-Men movies. In the third film, X-Men: The Last Stand, we visit the Phoenix storyline, the famous story from the Chris Claremont run on the X-Men comics. To explain it here would actually take the rest of the day, because it's a very long, rather complicated story. It wanders into outer space and back, we have the Shi'ar and galactic empires and rebels and crystals and...it's a huge story. It was a great story when I was a kid.

But putting it into a film? Well, it wouldn't work even a little. You'd be trying to combine the previous X-Men films with Star Wars, and you'd produce this hilarious mash-up that satisfied no one. So instead, they re-wrote the thing. The Phoenix was a hyper-powerful repressed aspect of Jean Grey, buried away by Charles Xavier, and now it's surfacing and, well, dissolving people. (A lot of people hated the third X-Men film. I may as well state here, it was my favorite of the trilogy. It was big and silly and over-the-top in its action and excessively melodramatic...and therefore, felt exactly like some of my old favorite X-Men comics). We combine this new Phoenix story with some Magneto stuff, put all of that within the context of a Joss Whedon Astonishing X-Men storyline, and we've got a film that has completely re-written lots of stuff. If you ask me, it works really well.

The Lord of the Rings is another good example. The movies are hugely streamlined from the books. They'd have to be, or it would be an hour into the film before fifty-year-old Frodo even gets around to leaving the Shire, and another two hours before he left Tom Bombadil's company.

A really small example was how much better the ending of the Watchmen movie functioned, once you removed the space squid. (I'm hesitant to use this as an example, since in this author's opinion, nothing else of that film was of any use except the opening credit sequence).

So in other words, a good adaptation can take elements of the original piece of artwork and change them into something which works better. Sometimes, they feel like a second draft of the original work. It can be disappointing if what you're after is a slavish adaptation of the original piece, but I find that with some thought, I'm usually happier with the change. If the filmmaker cared, and understood the art.

Sometimes, I'm not happier, and that's when we get into the bad news side of adaptations.

The first evidence I offer up that adaptations are bad things are comic book films. They can be truly appalling. They haven't all been "Iron Man," unfortunately. We've also had Catwoman, and Elektra. Depending on what you thought of them, we have the Fantastic 4 films and the Daredevil film. (I find them camp, but enjoy the Fantastic 4 films. I enjoyed Daredevil when it came out, but tried to revisit it last year and found it to be unwatchable). These films are, at the very best, a nuisance. A cheap cash-in. There's no one in love with them making really interesting films. They mostly exist to be sold in bundle packs for about seven dollars, come Christmas time.

Books have the same problem, or worse, because there's so much more material to try and turn into a couple-hour coherent story. I recently went to see The Lovely Bones with my wife, the new film by Peter Jackson. We both came out of it thinking it had been dreadful, disjointed nonsense. (Just a personal opinion. Perhaps you disagree, and that's fine by me).

The problem with adapting and streamlining and changing things is that when it doesn't work, it's pretty appalling. I found the new ending they did for The Mist, based on the Stephen King story, to be so horrible and insulting to the viewer, it had the aftershock effect of putting me off Stephen King books for months.

I mentioned Alan Moore above, and you could do a lengthy article just on Alan Moore and Hollywood. In fact, it's been done a number of times. They're eager to take all of his books -- except Lost Girls, and I cannot imagine the reason for that -- and turn them into films as quickly as possible. Unfortunately, they've done a pretty uniformly bad job. If Alan Moore has touched the book, then what you can expect is an amazing book, and an abysmal film.

From Hell, a book designed to not be a "whodunit," but to be a "whydunit" and explore the London around the Jack the Ripper crimes, the mentality of the killer, the reactions, an exploration of violence, and of many other things. The film was a greasy "whodunit," following all the tropes that he'd been trying to avoid.

The League of Extraordinary Gentleman was, like Spider-Man 3, non-existent, please.

V for Vendetta, a graphic novel about fascism and anarchy, in which he tried to show that the fascists weren't cardboard Nazi bad guys, but were human beings, some of them good and some of them bad. In the film, they're all howling bad guys. But the worst bit there would be the ending bit, if you'll give me enough rope for just a moment, as I rant. A whole film about the individual standing up in an oppressive system, about anarchy versus a fascist state, and how do we end the film? By having everyone dress exactly the same and be faceless as they march against the fascists. Thus missing the whole entire point of not only the book, but their own film. (There. I'm done.)

Watchmen, in which the director clearly loved the original material, but couldn't take a comic that was designed to be unfilmable and actually turn it into a coherent, moving film you could get invested in. Instead, you got a pretty film which felt like a greatest hits of scenes from the comic he had liked, animated with actors, none of them quite linking up into a cogent story.

If I seem to be fixating on Alan Moore, it's because all his works provide such excellent examples of Hollywood doing a terrible job adapting something. They're the opposite of things like Spider-Man or Iron Man or Hellboy. Made with love or not, they miss the tone and feel and intent of the original work.

The biggest problem I perceive with adaptations, however, is that they overwhelm the original films that are made, sometimes. I think it's too bad that most people will know Independence Day before they'll know about The Fountain. some of it's personal taste, sure: I don't think the whole world is going to really enjoy The Fountain, nor am I trying to make that argument. It's just that for every hundred million dollars sunk into something like Transformers, I would be happier to see the money used to make a number of thoughtful, intelligent, original stories. I'd rather see new art being made, art that hadn't existed before, rather than taking an action figure and turning it into a film. It can be great fun, absolutely...but I'm not convinced it really adds to the world in any meaningful fashion. The equivalent, to my mind, would be if commercial jingles were expected to be up for MTV Awards and get actual radio play time in the setlist.

So is it that Hollywood has simply "run out of original ideas?" No, they were never much interested in them in the first place. Individual filmmakers - some of them, thank god - are, and this occasionally leads to original films. The hive-mind which we can call "Hollywood," though, would like to adapt something which made a lot of money in another form, in the hopes that it will make them a lot of money in movie form. Unfortunately, this has never worked, since no Hollywood film has ever, in the history of cinema, actually made a profit. Avatar and Titanic have probably just about broken even.

What your attitude is toward adaptations and based-upons, I don't know (but I hope you'll tell me in the comments). I take a fairly easygoing attitude toward them. Like all films, I go in hoping it will give me something enjoyable. I take what I can, and leave what I can't. If the film doesn't give me anything, or actively insults my intelligence, then I tend to dismiss it as tripe. I was never any good at getting irate when a beloved piece of work was adapted and changed. "How dare they leave This Bit I Love out!" was never something I was going to shout.

Anyway, getting mad about them is a sure-fire way to spike your blood pressure and not accomplish a whole lot else, since they aren't going away. They do make money, adaptations. And you don't have to advertise them as mightily, because people already know the initial item. We already knew what Harry Potter was before the films. We know what Transformers are. They're going to keep turning things out which started life as something else. You may as well be easygoing about it.

Because if you're not, then when Uwe Boll gets around to making a Cap'n Crunch film, you are going to have no choice but to go on a shooting spree.

We're pleased to welcome Andrew Liptak to our army of SF Signal Irregulars. As is customary, we asked Andrew to write about himself in the third person, here's what he wrote:

While Andrew is ordering us bagels, a custom that I maintain will one day yield me actual bagels, check out his review of WE by John Dickinson.

REVIEW SUMMARY: A noble attempt to create a hard-science fiction novel for the young adult market.

BRIEF SYNOPSIS: Paul Munro is a communications specialist who is sent off to a distant moon to try and discover why the base is having issues with communications between it and Earth. While there, he sees humanity for what it has really become.

MY REVIEW:
PROS: Author John Dickinson has some ingredients to a good novel here: a strong theme of changes in how society functions runs through the novel as Munro looks back on Earth and adapts to his new home, coupled with some hard science fiction that helps give the novel some framework in which to work.
CONS: WE is undermined by sloppy writing, poor, wooden characters and a plot that ultimately isn't satisfying.
BOTTOM LINE A young adult novel with an interesting premise, but one that is undermined by its execution.

John Dickinson's story WE is a young adult novel that sees its main character, Paul Munro into the depths of space as a communications specialist for a remote scientific outpost far from Earth. At the start, Munro has been severed from a dominant global communications network, the World Ear (WE): something akin to the popular social networking site Facebook, implanted into a person's head, allowing communications between people at vast speeds, with the ability to gather information as fast as can be thought up. Due to the conditions of the moon where he has been sent, he's unable to utilize the World Ear, and is left cut off from the rest of human society, with three others also stationed on the moon. The eight year journey out to the base took its toll on Munro, and his fellow scientists who arrived beforehand, wasting away his body, and essentially banishing him from Earth and the World Ear. The transition leaves him bitter and paranoid as he adapts to life on the base, and while separated from Earth, comes to realize the true nature of the World Ear, and what has happened to the Human race.

The central message within the story revolves around technology and its impact in human society. As Munro leaves Earth unexpectedly, he is completely severed from everything that he has known, and has a difficult time adapting to a much slower form of communications: the spoken word. While separated, he's surrounded by several other team members who have been disconnected for a longer period of time, and who have far different views on how they see the World Ear - it's a much more harmful and dangerous tool for humanity to use on a regular basis. This sort of storyline is nothing new in Science Fiction, and Dickinson does a good job at articulating exactly how it functions, and just how people come to depend upon it.

The book is a noble attempt to create a hard-science fiction novel for the young adult market, and Dickinson weaves in quite a bit of hard science to the story, from creating a fairly alien and hostile environment to the travel times of signals. This sort of story is a good one, I think, for a generation that largely seems uninterested in reading and learning some of these basics, and hopefully, some young reader will be inspired to look beyond the story for more information on the world around us.

That being said, the book is undermined by an incredibly weak story with fairly poor writing and even poorer characters. It's unfortunate, with some of the good things going for the book. While reading this novel, I learned about halfway through that it was marketed to the Young Adult demographic, which helps to excuse some aspects of the book, but not very many. Indeed, there is a large and growing market for young adult books, with some incredibly well written, thought out and conceptualized stories for young adults, demonstrating that these books can stand toe to toe with their counterparts destined for older readers. The writing in WE is weak and at points, frustrating to read. Amongst one of the most important lessons that can be learned for writing is for an author to show what is happening, not telling the reader what is going on, something that Dickinson never applies in this story, with long passages telling the reader what is going on. While this might be the case because the book is classified as Young Adult, it is not an excusable error for any level of reading.

From the beginning, I had some issues with the story. The protagonist, Paul Munro, is abruptly taken from Earth, separated from the World Ear and sent out to this outpost, an eight year trip that cripples him, but at no point did I really believe that Munro was either the best candidate for the job, or adequately prepared for it. He never seemed prepared or ready - even willing - for this sort of position, and I would have imagined that anyone being sent out on a fairly important mission, as this seems to have been, would be properly prepared for such a thing - Munro, a communications specialist, cannot even talk, having either forgotten or never learned, yet picks up the ability and the English language quickly enough to interact with the rest of his base. Once on the base and able to move around, I still could not entirely believe that Munro was suited for the job - he drops into paranoia rather quickly, and has numerous issues with his fellow teammates. Furthermore, he is wholly unprepared for the job, which makes little sense to me: wouldn't someone being sent off for a mission be prepared, trained and vetted for years prior to an important mission? None of those things happen, and our protagonist is essentially bundled up and shipped off without warning. For me, that killed the believability of the story, and Munro never becomes a relatable, or likeable character, and I found myself wishing that I'd picked up something else to read.

Other issues are present with the story. While the technology and its impact on human culture storyline is more prevalent in the story, it is not a consistent one, and is dropped in favor of another plot involving the station's mission: first contact. While neither plot is bad in and of itself, the execution of the story leaves a lot to be desired, as neither one is given the proper amount of focus or attention at any part of the story. In an ideal world, the two stories would be better intertwined, with one plot working to fulfill the other one, imparting the reader with some sort of deeper message or revelation that they could then apply to their outlook on the world.

Unfortunately, WE is an unremarkable story that, while it has some good themes and ideas within the story, ultimately fails due to a poor story, characters and writing.

Night Shade Books has published the table of contents for the upcoming collection Fritz Leiber: Selected Stories, edited by Jonathan Strahan (who reflects on the book's creation) and Charles N. Brown:

This week's Mind Meld topic was suggested by John Klima. We asked this week's panelists (including John):

Farah Mendlesohn used to edit Foundation, the International Review of Science Fiction, is the President of the International Association of the Fantastic of the Arts, and is about to send McFarland a Manuscript about Children's and Teen science fiction. She has read around 400 of these books so you don't have to.

Jeff Carlson is the international bestselling author of the Plague Year trilogy and an opinionated jackass... er, a wide-read and passionate fan of the genre! Readers can find free fiction, videos, contests, reading lists and more on his web site at www.jverse.com.

What the heck is up with the lasting popularity of George R. Stewart's Earth Abides?

As you'd probably guess, I'm a huge fan of post-apocalyptic fiction and consider myself well-read in this subgenre. I regularly encounter people who praise or defend Earth Abides as one of the greatest PA novels ever written...

Why?

The storytelling is clunky at best, the hero survives the global pandemic only because of a chance encounter with a rattlesnake that bites him and apparently - implausibly - the snake's venom acts as a vaccine against the killer virus. (But then why does anyone else survive? And... really? Our hero is the hero because he was stupid enough to step on a rattlesnake? Some resumé!)

I'll grant you that the book has a few great scenes. The part where the smart kid figures out they can use the spare tires mounted on the back of jeeps to create a full set of four good tires is fun. At the end of the novel, when the hero's savage descendants have worked out a capricious rationale for using penny arrowheads to hunt one prey and nickel arrowheads for another - that's genius. It's obscure and sad and very human.

Otherwise? Bleh. I've heard it argued that the characters in Earth Abides are "common man," not action heroes. I say common man is smarter. Our hero can't even teach kids to read! What a buffoon!!!

For my money, for a classic apocalyptic novel, give me Lucifer's Hammer or On The Beach - smart people doing smart things to the best of their ability in impossible situations.

As for my favorite that no one else likes, how about The Gandalara Cycle?

First, I'd better backtrack and confess that I don't get epic fantasy at all. Harry Potter leaves me cold, the Twilight phenom bewilders me, and so many of the other chart-topping series just seem like the same thing over and over and over again.

I accept the clear truth that it's me who's wrong. You can't argue with eighty million rabid fans... and I don't believe The Gandalara Cycle was unpopular. The copies on my shelves are tattered paperbacks. When I looked to replace one, I found reprints. Publishers don't reprint books that don't do well. Nevertheless, when I've pushed these books on friends, I've heard responses such as, "Oh, gawd, those books are so corny." People tell me they were irritated by the forever-driven-apart romance between the hero and heroine. Or they say they saw big reveal at the end coming a mile away. One guy even launched into a biological criticism of the series' unlikely environment.

Man, I just think it's great storytelling with magnetic characters. Admittedly, the series suffers a bit because it was lopped into seven thin installments and the last six, trying to work as stand-alones, are salted with backstory to bring new readers up to speed. Nearly half of the last book is unnecessary rehashing. Arg.

When I'm emperor of the universe, a fine-eyed editor will go back through the series, remove the recaps, and we'll re-issue The Gandalara Cycle as a single speedy volume. Bwah ha ha ha.

While I'm dreaming, I'd also like to recommend a "lost" book instead of a loved or hated one. Will someone please explain to me how it's possible, especially given his success, that John Barnes' The Man Who Pulled Down The Sky out of print? Two years ago at a book signing for a different writer, I actually pulled aside a Tor rep who was on scene and personally (but pleasantly!) accosted him on this matter.

Published in 1986 as Barnes' debut novel, The Man Who Pulled Down The Sky is an edgy, dark, high concept and utterly captivating read much like his triumphant Kaleidoscope Century. It's absolutely bug nuts. Awesome. Wizard.

If you like sci fi, find a copy. That's my hot tip for the day.

Shaun Duke is a graduate student at the University of Florida studying science fiction, postcolonialism, and fantasy. He is also the editor-in-chief of Survival By Storytelling Magazine and can be found on his blog, The World in the Satin Bag.

As for the book I hate that everyone else loves, I'd have to pick The Lord of the Rings (which also might ruin any respect anyone out there has for me). I should clarify, though: I don't hate LOTR because I think it's a bad book, per se; I have to give Tolkien props for pioneering (not creating) the fantasy genre as we know it. The thing is, the books are incredibly boring. The guy could build realistic worlds and languages, but he was not a great writer by a long shot. His prose wanders, the story takes forever and a day to get to the point, there are too many wasted pages in The Fellowship of the Ring (the first third of the book is practically wasted space; don't get me started on the Council of Elrond scene), etc. But everyone else seems to adore the thing as a book, rather than a cultural product. I think that's a terrible oversight in our collective consciousness.

Adam Roberts teaches literature and creative writing at Royal Holloway, University of London. His most recent novel, Yellow Blue Tibia (Gollancz 2009) includes a robot Stalin. Some day soon, all SF novels will come with one of those fitted as standard.

Jay Garmon is a writer, editor and consummate trivia geek. He's been cited as a source by the Wikipedia (which is to damn with faint praise) and appears weekly on TechTalk radio in Chicago. You can follow his pedantic ramblings at www.jaygarmon.net.

As to the book I love that everyone else seems to hate, I'll go with Singularity Sky, the "forgotten" first novel by Charles Stross. I actually first discovered Stross in the pages of Asimov's when I read "Lobsters," the foundational short story for Accelerando. I was hooked then, and when his first novel came out, I grabbed it with both hands and adored every page. Everyone else I know, however, seems to view Stross's longform freshman effort as opaque and too post-modern. Frankly, that's what I love about it; he fires idea at you with blinding speed and dares you to keep up with the three-ring circus of high concepts being put on in every chapter. A sentient post-scarcity economy traveling to backwater worlds granting material wishes in exchange for folklore stories? A transcendent godlike artificial intelligence that governs time travel and space-operatically Balkanized all of humanity as a mode of self-defense? Spacefaring secret agents manipulated into clich

Solar Flare

SF Signal

SCIFI Scanner