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Dubai 2010 mocks the bluster of U.S. movie trailers, while showcasing lovely CG vistas of Future Dubai. But ad-agency Rolling Thunder inadvertently reveals Dubai's "futuristic city" status is just as hype-fueled as Bruckheimer. Update: Check out the famous spaceship cameos. More »
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Science fiction author John Varley has been seducing readers and boggling their minds since the 1970s, when he began publishing his Gaean Trilogy (Titan, Wizard, and Demon), as well as other novels like The Ophiuchi Hotline, set in his posthuman 8 Worlds universe. His most recent novel, Rolling Thunder, came out last week. It's the third in a trilogy that marks a departure for the author: set in the near future, the books explore what happens when environmental disasters force part of Earth's population to settle on Mars. In Rolling Thunder, a woman born and raised on Mars has to deal with the fallout of the perhaps-final assault on Earth's biosphere from giant, incomprehensible aliens. We caught up with Varley on email to ask him about the new book and what he thinks of contemporary space opera (hint: he hates it). More »
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Earth has suffered a massive climate disaster that submerges most of Florida, rips the United States into several mini-nations, and sends a band of freethinking scientists and entrepreneurs to found a colony (and a really great restaurant) on Mars. Many years later, two of these early colonists have a grandchild whose aspirations are a little more pedestrian than "save the world" or "found a new planetary outpost." She's the star of John Varley's latest novel Rolling Thunder, and she just wants to be an MP3 pop star, the most downloaded girl on the net. The third novel in Varley's latest series, the book focuses on a a girl named Podkayne, who at the age of eighteen joins the Martian Navy's Music, Arts and Drama Division. But just as her music is hitting big, her career is interrupted by several giant mountains on Galilean moon Europa coming to life and zooming into the central solar system. More »
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