Booksigning at the Stately Raven

I spent last night at the Stately Raven book store in Findlay Ohio. The store is an independent bookstore which opened up in a converted church building and recently won an award for the “Best Bookstore in Ohio”. The store has a really cool science fiction room which, unlike most other local places, is actually stocked with the sci fi writers I read!

Last nite I met up with Tobias Buckell, aka Toby, and Gregory Frost, as well as a few other science fiction aficionados from the surrounding area. After picking up a copy of Frost’s Shadowbridge and John Scalzi’s The Last Colony we made our way to a local restaurant for some food and drinks. I had a good time and look forward to digging in to Shadowbridge this week.

It was really exciting to meet another author, as I already know Toby. I hope that the Stately Raven pulls in some other local authors. I also need to get myself up to Penguicon next May to bask in the presence of Sci Fi authors and geeks!

Who Will Lead the Sci Fi Movie Revolution?

Mark Harris of Entertainment Weekly wrote a great (IMHO) article about the State of Science Fiction movies as a genre. He lambasted the genre for being too wrapped up in nostalgia and not taking chances.

Ideally, sci-fi’s next rescuer should be someone whose ideas about the future derive from somewhere — anywhere — other than old sci-fi. It can be done. Just a year ago, no movie genre looked deader than the Western. Then 2007 brought us not only a familiar but lively overhaul of 3:10 to Yuma but also the gorgeously arty mood piece The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford and a handful of extraordinary films — the Coens’ No Country for Old Men, Paul Thomas Anderson’s There Will Be Blood, and even, in its way, Paul Haggis’ In the Valley of Elah — that drew deeply and inventively on different aspects of Western conventions and mythmaking to create something new, often stunning, and not instantly identifiable by genre. Sci-fi desperately needs filmmakers who are interested in bending the form toward their own passions and obsessions as artists. 2001 has come and gone, and right now the future looks too much like something we’ve already seen.

In reading this several authors come to mind but I am pulling a blank for directors at the moment. Do you know who could direct a new science fiction film which would bring the genre out of its nostalgic vegetative state? If so leave their name in the comments.
We need new settings, new plots, new universes, new futures.

I want to see some adaptations or original works from Cory Doctorow, Tobias Buckell, John Scalzi, Scott Sigler, hell not sure Vernor Vinge’s latest is suitable for a movie adaptation but its something different. All these authors bring me to the point that not every future has to be of the “bad guy in the hulking ship with deathstars” universe. We can have all other types of settings, alternate modes of transportation, some steampunk maybe? Can I get a sci fi film with a Dirigible? Alternate futures near and far away, please someone wow me.

I for one will welcome our new Sci Fi Film making overlords…if they don’t muck it up.