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Monday, March 19, 2012

AA Nom!

Children of Scarabaeus has been nominated for the Aurealis Award for Best SF Novel 2011. Wow!



You can see the other nominees here, on the blog of the Judge Coordinator Tehani Croft Wessely.

The 5 nominees in my category are:


Machine Man by Max Barry (Scribe Publications)
Children of Scarabaeus by Sara Creasy (HarperVoyager)
The Waterboys by Peter Docker (Fremantle Press)
Black Glass by Meg Mundell (Scribe Publications)
The Courier’s New Bicycle by Kim Westwood (HarperVoyager)

The Awards ceremony is on 12 May in Sydney - see you there!

Another trailer

Another upcoming sci-fi movie, Lockout - this is almost 5 straight minutes from the movie and to be honest it looks a bit silly, and the editing clunky, but maybe it's a rough cut.

Warning: needle/eyeball alert

What it has going for it:

  • space station setting
  • gritty grimy hardware
  • a cool monochrome look (hope it's not overdone)
  • a hero who quips "I'm gonna be sick" - cute
  • that hero being Guy Pearce (go Aussie!)

Sunday, March 18, 2012

Alien revisited... 30 years later

Ridley Scott's forthcoming Prometheus finally has a trailer - see here on io9:


I don't like horror movies but I love Alien, the first and second-best movie in the Aliens franchise. The reason I don't think of it as horror is because it's not supernatural and not particularly gory (Noodle interruptus alien birth notwithstanding). More than that, Alien, like Aliens, is thoroughly believable in the way it looks. Like the ambience in Firefly, I truly buy that the crew members live and work on that ship, with the same day-in day-out banter and boredom that eventually comes with any job. The characters and the sets create a world I can fall into, regardless of the plot.

An offshoot of the new movie is the Weyland Industries site. Weyland created the androids Ash and Bishop as well as the (alarmingly unstable) atmosphere processors from Aliens, and apparently a great many other innovations for space travel as well. In cut scenes from Aliens you see their logo on the colony buildings. Otherwise, the company is never actually mentioned by name - it's the ubiquitous "Company" in both the first and second movie, represented by the bland Ash and blander Burke and their nefarious plans.

(In a cool bit of metamoviemagic, the URL www.prometheusmovie.com redirects to the Weyland Industries site.)