Posts Categorized: News

News

Luke, Leia, and Han confirmed forStar Wars: Episode VII, awkward love triangle speculated

By Aidan Moher March 7th, 2013
Star Wars Episode 7

George Lucas, from his awkward (though richly-furnished) office as the new ‘creative consultant’ on the Star Wars series (which, of course, he founded, raised to greatness… and then tarnished), recently confirmed, maybe accidentally, that Mark Hamill, Carrie Fisher and Harrison Ford will, after 30+ years, be reprising their roles in the next mainline Star Wars film.

Business Week, in conversation with Lucas, reports:

Asked whether members of the original Star Wars cast will appear in Episode VII and if he called them before the deal closed to keep them informed, Lucas says, “We had already signed Mark and Carrie and Harrison-or we were pretty much in final stages of negotiation. So I called them to say, ‘Look, this is what’s going on.’ ” He pauses. “Maybe I’m not supposed to say that. I think they want to announce that with some big whoop-de-do, but we were negotiating with them.” Then he adds: “I won’t say whether the negotiations were successful or not.”

Can anyone familiar with the Star Wars Expanded Universe stuff posit what timeframe and in what capacity Luke, Leia and Han might appear? Harrison Ford is 70 now, so it won’t be a spry, planet-hopping Han, surely. My grandfather-in-law is about 75. Man. Weird.

News

How big is Westeros compared to Earth?

By Aidan Moher March 7th, 2013
How big is Westeros compared to Earth?

File this one under: amusing, irrelevant, irreverent. Tor.com‘s Chris Lough, using some trusty math remembered from High School, has analyzed a map of ‘The Known World,’ from George R.R. Martin’s A Song of Ice and Fire, which holds Westeros, Asshai, Valyria and all of our other favourite locations from the series, and compared it agains the size of the planet you sit on while reading this. (Unless you’re Commander Hadfield or another member of the Space team aboard the ISS at the time this article was written.)

He details the process:

In inches, the distance from the wall to the south coast of Dorne is a very convenient 12, making each inch equivalent to 250 miles. The Known World map is 2 feet and 11 inches wide, minus the ornamental borders, totaling 8750 miles from east to west and 5750 miles from north to south.

The next thing we need to do is decide where the equator is on Planet Westeros. For the purposes of the forthcoming measurements, I’ve chosen the former site of the city of Valyria as being right on the equator. The lands to the north and south of it are clearly equatorial desert, jungle, and savannah, and there’s a certain poetry to having Valyria—the former center of civilization in A Song of Ice and Fire’s developed world—be literally in the center of the world.

Lough’s final tally? Whatever planet holds Westeros, it’s smaller than Earth, by about 10%. His conclusion:

The distance between Planet Westeros’ “Arctic Circle” and equator is 4125 miles. On Earth, the distance between the Arctic circle and equator is 4608 miles (give or take).

If you accept the equator and “Arctic Circle” where they are, this means that the planet that Westeros is on is smaller than Earth! To put it in numbers, Planet Westeros is only 89.51% the size of Earth.

I’m note sure if his math holds up to much scrutiny (I can’t even remember high school math these days), but it’s fun to think of the world in these terms, and also to wonder at the vast areas of the planet that haven’t yet been revealed. The map used in this experiment was published in The Lands of Ice and Fire, an official companion book to Martin’s series.

And, yes, I know that Westeros is a continent, not a planet.

News

The Hobbit: There And Back Again Delayed by Five Months, Coming December 2014

By Aidan Moher February 28th, 2013
The Hobbit

Rope of Silicon is reporting that The Hobbit: There and Back Again has been delayed by Warner Bros. and New Line Cinema. The final instalment of the trilogy is now targeting a December 17th, 2014 release, five months later than its original release date of July 14th, 2014.

Certainly disappointing news, but maybe not so surprising given the long-troubled production of the trilogy. It’s hard not to wonder if this is also the result of the studios deciding to expand the series of movies from two to three just months before The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey came to theatres. This new release schedule will mirror the three-movies-over-two-years schedule that The Lord of the Rings followed.

News

Words of Radiance by Brandon Sanderson announced, with release date

By Aidan Moher February 28th, 2013

The second volume of Brandon Sanderson’s oh-crap-Tor-needs-someone-to-fill-the-hole-left-by-the-end-of-the-Wheel-of-Time series, The Stormlight Archives, now has a name and a release date.

Words of Radiance by Brandon Sanderson

Sanderson speaks a bit about the project and the title:

The Way of Kings was Kaladin’s book. He will have a lot to do in Book Two, of course, and you can expect some great sequences within his viewpoint. However, the flashback sequences in Book Two belong to Shallan. In my notes for the series, I had planned for Shallan’s book to be named after the tome she is given at the end of the first novel: The Book of Endless Pages. On Roshar, that is a book of knowledge that can never be completed—because people should always be learning, studying, and adding what they’ve learned to it.

[…]

Lots of people weighed in with their feelings on Stormlight Two. For a while, I toyed with titles that still had “book” in them, as I liked how that fit with Shallan’s scholarly nature. The Book of Lies was one of these, as was The Book of Dusk and Dawn. (As a side note, being a fan of Magic: The Gathering makes naming things harder sometimes, since the creative team over at Wizards has named A LOT of cards—and the titles I think of sometimes sound too much like things they’ve done. That’s why Book of Fact and Fiction was dead the moment it occurred to me.)

[…]

In the last few months, the title that has really been sticking with me is Words of Radiance. (Admittedly, “radiance” is a synonym for “light,” but at least it’s a step away.) With “words,” it still has a slight tie to my original desire to have “book” in the title, and I believe it’s significantly meaningful for people who have read the first novel. It also works very well for reasons that I can’t tell you now without spoiling the story.

Hey, it’s not cover art (or even news about who the artist will be), but we all pathetically salivate for even the smallest drop of information about our favourite authors, don’t we? Words of Radiance is set for a tentative November, 2013 release.

News

Gardner Dozois joins Clarkesworld as Reprint Editor

By Aidan Moher February 26th, 2013

Clarkesworld40500On Friday, February 22nd, it was announced my Neil Clarke, editor of Clarkesworld Magazine, that the well-regarded Speculative Fiction magazine will be adding a new reprint section, headed by Gardener Dozois, an equally well-regarded anthologist.

The official press release details the additions:

Clarkesworld Magazine, a leading science fiction and fantasy magazine, has named award-winning editor Gardner Dozois (pronounced “doe-zwa”) to helm its new reprint department. In his role as reprint editor, every month Gardner will draw upon forty years of experience to select two exemplary science fiction stories published during the last three decades. The first of these stories are scheduled to appear in the April 2013 issue of the magazine’s online, digital and print editions.

“Since my heart attack last year, when readers responded with encouragement and support, I’ve been trying to find a way to say ‘thank you’,” said Neil Clarke, Clarkesworld Editor-in-Chief. “The reprint department had been on our wish list for some time and when the opportunity to work with someone of Gardner’s caliber arose, I knew I had found the perfect way to express my gratitude.”

Clarkesworld has long been one of my favourite SF magazines and it’s wonderful to see them joining together with someone like Dozois. With John Joseph Adams at Lightspeed, Ann VanderMeer and Ellen Datlow at Tor.com, and Johnathan Strahan at Eclipse, it’s interesting to see some of today’s best short fiction editors continuing to become as important to online markets as they are to the long-running tradition of print anthologies.