Stuff NZ reports:

The hush-hush project is understood to be in early development, with work on the first of the four books under way, industry sources say. Weta Workshops is also believed to be working on designs for the science fiction series, which features giant mobile cities. A spokesman for Jackson did not deny the project was on the books yesterday, but said "any comment should come from Peter". Jackson, who is understood to have had the rights to the books for some time, was unavailable for comment.

Not only that, but the article mentions that Jackson's also optioned the rights to Naomi Novik's Temeraire novels, set in an alternate history where the Napoelonic Wars are fought with dragons. All of a sudden, the idea of Jackson doing more book adaptations sounds pretty great.

Not Now but Now by MFK Fisher
Food writer MFK Fisher's only novel follows a spoiled, beautiful, wealthy young woman named Jennie who is somehow able to jump from one decade to another, as each time period proves to end badly for the willful girl. A morality tale with a time trick (and trains! lots of awesome trains!), Not Now but Now is a little known scifi-ish gem from an unexpected source.

Empire of the Sun by JG Ballard
Ballard's autobiographical tale of surviving the Japanese occupation of China as a young boy during WWII was seen as a major departure from the new wave of science fiction he pioneered in Crash and Memories of the Space Age. Upon closer inspection, however, Empire exhibits all the tell tale signs of a "Ballardian" novel. According to the Collins English Dictionary "Ballardian" is defined as "resembling or suggestive of the conditions described in J. G. Ballard's novels and stories, especially dystopian modernity, bleak man-made landscapes and the psychological effects of technological, social or environmental developments." A 10 year old British aristo separated from his parents in a hostile, war ravaged environment? Yeah, I'd say that definition is pretty spot on.

Into Thin Air by Jon Krakauer
Inhospitable atmosphere? Check. Expensive as hell expedition? Check. Terrifying yet incomprehensibly beautiful landscape? Check. Imminent death from the elements a very, very real possibility? OMG CHECK. Into Thin Air may ostensibly be about mountain climbing, but any sci fi fan worth their salt recognizes a book about space exploration when they see one.

Three Men in a Boat by Jerome K Jerome
Possibly the funniest book ever written about the Thames, Three Men in a Boat and Three Men on the Bummel served as the inspiration for Connie Willis' witty time travel/alternate history novel To Say Nothing of the Dog. Fans of Douglas Adams, Caroline Stevermere, and Agatha Christie will giggle themselves anglo reading this book.

Diamond As Big As the Ritz by F Scott Fitzgerald
Fitzgerald's only foray into the fantastic, Diamond As Big As the Ritz is a morality tale of perpetual slavery, a James Bond-ian villain cloistered inside a mountain stronghold, said Bond-ian villain's God complex, and laser shooting planes. This ain't no Bernice Bobs her Hair, son. This is some serious Outer Limits business.

It's a dicey proposition, calling something overrated, not least of all because it can seem like more of an insult than it's intended to be. For example, Battlestar Galactica was, at best, an amazing piece of television that managed to be thought-provoking, entertaining and addictive on a regular basis... but, by the time it closed out its run earlier this year with appearances at the UN and declarations of it being the greatest show on television ever, things were getting pretty close to overrating it. Personal taste comes into play a lot, as well; we're guilty of that as much as anyone (The strength of my Pushing Daisies love may have been somewhat out of proportion with the show itself, for example).

What we're looking for, then, isn't just the name of something (Movie, TV show, comic, book, creator, whatever) you consider overrated, but why. And, feel free to defend slighted favorites if you feel the need. We're just curious what you all think isn't as good as everyone thinks it is... Just make sure that The Venture Bros. isn't on the list, or there'll be trouble.

According to About.com, which compiles a weekly bestseller list based on combining data from major publications and online bookstores, the decade's ten biggest sellers included:

Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, by JK Rowling
Twilight, by Stephenie Meyer
The Da Vinci Code, by Dan Brown
The Road, by Cormac McCarthy
Dead Until Dark, by Charlaine Harris

These books topped the list, outselling Malcolm Gladwell's The Tipping Point and the book Freakonomics. Who needs nonfiction analysis when you can have wizards and sexy vampires?

via About.com

Greg Cox is one of the most prolific, and successful, authors of media tie-in novels, and he's won a loyal following for his many Star Trek books, including a trilogy filling in the backstory of much-loved villain Khan Noonien Singh. He's also written tie-in novels based on Alias, The 4400, Roswell, Underworld, Fantastic Four and Iron Man. He's also novelized the movies Ghost Rider, Daredevil and several others, plus DC Comics' big crossovers.

We talked to him about his new Terminator Salvation tie-in novel Cold War, out now from Titan Books, plus some of his other recent projects.

Cold War uses the same timeline as McG's recent movie, but only includes a couple of characters from the film: The main character is Losenko, the Russian general who appears briefly in the film, mentioning that Skynet is looking for Kyle Reese, and we learn all about Lysenko's backstory. Says Cox, "When I watched the movie, I was probably the only person who was mentally hanging on every scene with general Losenko," watching for every detail about the character to include in the book. Also in the book is General Ashdown (Michael Ironsides), the resistance leader who lives on a submarine. John Connor only pops in the book as a sort of mythological figure, giving inspirational speeches over the radio.

The new book takes place in Alaska and Russia, in two different time frames: 2003, right after Judgment Day, and then 2018. In 2003, the survivors are coping with the aftermath of the nuclear war, and Skynet is attacking them with really primitive Terminators, and the technology is close to what really existed in 2003. And then in 2018, Skynet has all the same tech it has in the movie — plus snowmobile Terminators, to navigate those frozen northern areas. It sounds like Cox had a lot of fun with the frosty settings:

My big gimmick was snowmobile Terminators. There's also a giant Terminator train. The trick is to try to find stuff in the [same] universe, that's slightly different. What haven't we seen yet? We haven't seen a Terminator train. The main reason for setting it in Alaska [was to include things like] dogsled chases, grizzly bears, avalanches, volcanos... We've seen so many chases on California highways, with fire trucks and emergency vehicles. I was looking for a whole different environment, not just recapitulating what people had done before.

Cox is somewhat surprised that the Terminator/grizzly bear fight has been the main thing people have talked about in his novel. "You can't have a Terminator in Alaska and not have him fight a grizzly bear. Okay, it's gratuitous, but how can I resist having a grizzly bear fight a Terminator?" And now that people have been so excited by it, "from now on, I put a grizzly bear in all my books." Spoiler alert: The bear doesn't stand a chance against a Terminator, says Cox.

There's also a Western-style train heist and loads of detail on a Russian submarine, plus lots of gritty war-movie-style action. Cox watched tons of World War II movies on TCM, read every Tom Clancy novel for the submarine details, and did loads of research on the world right after a nuclear war.

Cox says he watched Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles "religiously," but Titan Books and Halcyon were adamant that his book couldn't contain any references to T:SCC continuity. So don't expect Cameron to show up, but if anyone ever green-lights SCC novels, Cox will be first in line. The Terminator people were very keen to make sure Cox's book fit in with their vision of the universe, including making sure Skynet wasn't developing high technology too early after Judgment Day — and that meant loads of conference calls, notes and intensive feedback at every stage of the process.

Wrapping up The 4400

The amount of feedback you get from the licensors on a licensed property depends heavily on whether it's an ongoing concern, says Cox. With The 4400, for example, Cox wrote one tie-in novel while the series was on the air, and went through four different drafts in response to feedback. But when Cox wrote the first of two novels wrapping up the series after it ended, Welcome To Promise City, he got a more-or-less free hand. (The other novel, available now, is written by David Mack.) Cox, Mack and their editor cooked up an ending to the series together.

Except for tons of feedback from the fans. Cox says as soon as it was announced that he was writing a 4400 novel explaining what happened after the show's cancellation, he was bombarded with emails from fans all over the world demanding to know what he was going to do with their favorite subplots and characters. "I can't claim we wrapped up every loose end, but we tried to wrap up the important one," says Cox. He and Mack debated with their editor whether to tie up the end of the series with a neat bow, or leave a few things slightly open-ended in case they ended up doing more novels. They settled on the second approach, so if the books sell amazingly well, you might see further continuations of the story.

Novelizing Final Crisis

Cox novelized Infinite Crisis, 52 and Countdown for DC Comics, and now he's novelized Final Crisis, Grant Morrison's narrative-shredding uber-crossover starring the evil Darkseid. How on earth do you take Morrison's loopy storytelling and convert it into a single novel?

There was a lot of condensing involved, Cox admits:

There's not a lot of connective tissue in that series. [There are] a lot of scenes that jump from place to place. I've got to admit, the book is probably a bit more linear than the comic book, especially issue seven, which was jumping all over time. I actually just tried to tell it a bit more in chronological order, and maybe simplify it a bit.

The biggest problem with novelizing one of these sprawling DC crossovers is figuring out what subplots and tie-ins to leave out. The first week Cox was working on the Infinite Crisis novelization, he was trying to include all of the spin-off issues, including things like Rann-Thanagar War One-Shot, and every other miniseries and crossover issue, "and I realized this book is going to take me ten years, and it's going to be the size of The Wheel Of Time." So he began paring things down. Similarly, the Final Crisis book ignores a lot of tie-ins, sadly including the 3-D Superman tie-in series. "I apologize if your favorite scene is not in this book, but there's no way I can get in the 3-D tie in superman issue and the Batman issues and the special tie-in issue of Secret Six."

With novelizations of comics crossovers, "it's all about streamlining." It's the opposite of novelizing movie scripts, which is all about fleshing out the story and characters and adding new stuff to turn a 90-page script into a 300-to-400-page novel. "The script for Ghost Rider was not a terribly long script," notes Cox. He recalls coming across the novelization for Snakes On A Plane and marveling that Christa Faust had managed to get 400 pages out of that film. He felt like sending her fan mail.

Should Khan Come Back?

As the author of three Khan books, Cox is conflicted about whether Khan should appear in the next Star Trek movie. On the one hand, recasting Khan seems almost impossible, given how much Ricardo Montalban put his stamp on the character. On the other, Cox might have said the same thing about recasting Kirk, Spock and McCoy — and J.J. Abrams and crew pulled that off. The real question is, "do you do Botany Bay Khan, or crazy burned-out Wrath Of Khan Khan? There's the young virile but not quite crazy Khan, and then there's the obsessed spent-15-years-in-Hell Khan. And then there's the whole messy [subject of the] Eugenics Wars — when exactly did they take place? Did they take place during the Bill Clinton years?"

Cox is writing one of four new novels that take place in the movie's continuity, picking up where the movie left off. He's written a draft of his novel, but hasn't gotten feedback from Paramount yet, so everything is subject to change. But at least for now, his novel takes place six months after the end of the movie, and follows Captain Kirk and his crew on a stand-alone adventure. And he hints that, if Paramount approves, the fact that the Vulcans are refugees scattered across the universe will play a part in his novel's plot.

Total Oblivion, which has been getting rave reviews so far, deals with the problems of refugees pretty directly, as you can see from the synopsis:

In the summer between Macy Palmer's junior and senior year of high school in Minnesota, Scythians, Thracians, and other ancient European tribes invade the Midwest. America becomes a ravaged land where modern technology barely works, a strange plague is rampant, and American citizens flee for their lives. Many end up doing what the Empire – which comes equally out of nowhere to keep the peace – tells them to do. Macy and her family find themselves torn from their ordinary lives and in a refugee camp just outside of Minneapolis. They end up making a desperate journey down the Mississippi River, which has mutated into a dangerous waterway.

Macy loves her dysfunctional family but has to make difficult decisions about them during almost unbearable times. Through her journeys, she finds medieval skyscrapers and fast food joints run by horse lords, befriends an enigmatic submarine captain on the river, and stumbles onto a bizarre religious festival called Promcoming. None of those wonders, however, challenge her as much as just growing up, and keeping her compassion intact while doing so.

So DeNiro decided to combine his promotional efforts for the book with fundraising for Mercy Corps, which helps marginalized populations, including refugees, all over the world. But that's not all. If you make a donation to Mercy Corps via DeNiro's fundraising page, he'll write a special story fragment from the world of Total Oblivion, just for you. DeNiro explains:

In order to provide a more direct engagement with the book, in whose spirit this fundraiser is taking place, if you make a donation on this page, drop me a quick note (adeniroATgmail.com) and I'll send you something extra: a one-of-a-kind paragraph of ephemera and apocrypha set in the world of the novel, made just for you! It could be anything. And I can send it by post or email. I'm easy. (River transport of mail post is forthcoming.) Just let me know which you'd prefer and I'll get it out to you in about a week. So hopefully we can, in some small way, assist others in making an impactful change.

Here's the back-cover copy for Sureblood:

Torn apart by lies and deception...

Five years ago, rival space pirate captains Val Blue and Dake Sureblood stole one incredible night together. But their brief, passionate history ends with the assasination of Val's father and the condemnation of Dake's clan. Now, Val struggles prove her mettle-to herself and to dissenters within her own people. Every successful raid is a boot-heel ground in the burning memory of Dake Sureblood—and their secret son is a constant reminder of their shared past…

Ambushed and captured before he can clear his name, Dake Sureblood returns from hell to expose the true killer of Val's father. But as the identity of their enemy becomes chillingly clear, the former lovers must put aside their mistrust and join forces to protect their clans—and their precious son.

It sounds pretty thrilling, what with the rival space pirate captains and the raids and everything.

As science-fiction romance gains in popularity, the novels have been growing in word count and becoming more epic, emphasizing the sprawling story over the romance part. But publishers are stil hoping to pitch these books to regular romance readers. Thus, according to the always entertaining Galaxy Express blog, there's a constant tension between "man titty" covers like the above one, versus covers that actually depict what goes on in the book.

This discussion has been going on for a while, but it flared up again in response to this latest Harlequin cover. Writes Galaxy Express:

Where are the space pirates promised by the jacket copy? The cover conveys erotic romance to me... Perhaps it's a sign of these difficult economic times that romance publishers are ratcheting up the man titty/erotic romance campaigns. Seems like in order to capture as many sales as possible, they are attempting to appeal to every single romance reader regardless of individual taste (but all readers swoon for man titty cover? Really?). In the end, they will end up pleasing a number that in my totally biased opinion will fall short of potential.

Sexy and romantic covers? Great, awesome-why not a clinch cover for SUREBLOOD, with a starry background, perhaps? A fiercely accessorized, sexy space heroine with generous cleavage would be a great draw for male readers. Why do historical romances get clear historical visual cues and books like these don't? Ghettoization of SFR? Yes, in part, along with the corporate mentality that dictates standardization of art.

Is this cover fiasco another indication that romance publishers think their female readers are idiots when it comes to science fiction romance? Maybe Harlequin thinks the stories are both too science fictional and too exotic for readers to enjoy.

Count this as another vote for novels about space pirates to have covers depicting space pirates... preferably sexy ones. It's also just fascinating to see that every subgenre has its own worries about perceived marginalization. The issues are often the same, even if — as in this case — they're sort of opposite.

Deluxe Editions Of Science Fiction/Fantasy Classics

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Discover The Art Of Science Fiction, And Drool Over Collectibles

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Explore The Wonders Of Science!

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Additional reporting by Mary Ratliff.

There is a long-standing debate about how important science is to science fiction. Basically, the argument goes: If your technology is indistinguishable from magic — if it's all midi-chlorians and red matter that serve the plot but that are no more realistic than Polyjuice Potions or palantírs — then you're not really writing science fiction at all, just fantasy dressed up in lasers and robots.

And I tend to agree with that sentiment, at least when I've got my nitpicky copy editor green eyeshade on and I'm trying to be vewy, vewy caweful with my words. When I don't have the eyeshade on, of course — which is usually, since wearing it interferes with my beer helmet — I'm much less exacting and willing to welcome everyone from the X-Men to the Ghostbusters to the party, and probably even Taylor Lautner, because I'm hoping he'll bring his girlfriend. I guess I've always thought that was the best way to handle the problem: to admit that, yes, technically speaking, "science fiction" has a very specific meaning, and much of what we apply the term to doesn't actually meet that meaning's criteria; but also to acknowledge that for practical purposes, a lot of us who like stories about terraforming Mars like stories about dragons, too.

A Case of Conscience got me thinking about this some more, because this book is just packed with science, a lot of it the real kind. It runs the whole gamut of disciplines, from biology to geology to chemistry to physics to astronomy, and nearly all the crucial plot points hang on one of those. You've got:

• an alien planet that's valuable to Earthlings because of its massive reserves of lithium and tritium, which could be used to make nuclear weapons;
• its native species, which are suspected of being creatures of Satan by a Jesuit priest because even though they're peaceful and good-natured, their science fundamentally doesn't add up;
• and a climax that hinges on a couple of technological breakdowns.

And at first, I was going to suggest that the story could be told just as easily without any such level of veracity at all — that you could substitute dilithium or thiotimoline for the real elements, briefly explain how they work, etc., etc., and provide the reader with an entertainment that was more or less as thought-provoking as the real book is. Because despite all the science in A Case of Conscience, it's also very clearly an allegory, a piece of literature with a message, and the bulk of its second half reads like a cross between V and K-PAX and Network. So, I wondered, why all the scientific accuracy? Just for purposes of pedantry? The same way some of us* have to imagine our wives dead of a tragic** illness before we fantasize about delivering a pizza to Taylor Lautner's girlfriend?

But the more I thought about it, and especially the second and third plot points mentioned above, the more I realized that no, you couldn't tell this story without the science. At least not without doing ten times more work to concoct something a hundred times less believable.

James Blish not only trained as a scientist, but also worked as a science editor for a major corporation until he could earn enough of a livelihood from his fiction. And although a career background in science is certainly something a lot of SF writers have possessed, I have to say I'm especially impressed with how he managed to weave so many disparate aspects of it into a very neatly packaged story — one that takes its characters off into all different directions and still manages to resolve every thread at the end — in A Case of Conscience. This was an odd little book, one I'm not sure I liked, exactly, for the reasons I tend to like books — the characters, to a one, are pretty frickin' annoying, and a bit too visibly robotic in the service of the plot — but one that I suspect will linger with me much, much longer than any of the Hugo winners that came before it.

*Some of you, I mean, not me.

**Also painless.

"Blogging the Hugos" appears every other weekend. In the next installment: Starship Troopers, by Robert Heinlein, from 1960.

Moff's real name is Josh Wimmer, and he can usually be found here.

This list is alphabetical, and not in order of awesomeness. All are equally great and worthy of your attention. In deciding which would make the list and which wouldn't, we weighed not only our opinions, but also those of the critical community at large - looking at how each book was received by reviewers for mainstream publications as well as science fiction magazines. There were many, many books we love that almost made the cut - if we'd let ourselves go it would have been more like the 100 best books of the decade.

Also, all of the books on this list were originally published in English. Regrettably I'm not conversant enough in global science fiction to make an educated "best of" list that includes works written in other languages. I hope those of you who are will add your picks to the comments below.

Acacia: The War with the Mein, by David Anthony Durham (Doubleday)
According to the Washington Post:

From the first pages of Acacia, Durham, a respected historical novelist, demonstrates that he is a master of the fantasy epic. He quickly sets out in broad strokes the corrupt world that these unwitting children have been raised to rule. For 22 generations, the Akarans have presided over the empire of Acacia. And for 22 generations, they've sent a yearly shipment of child slaves to mysterious traders beyond their borders, "with no questions asked, no conditions imposed on what they did with them, and no possibility that the children would ever see Acacia again." In exchange, the Akarans get "mist," a drug that guarantees their subjects' "labor and submission." . . . Durham sacrifices nothing — not psychological acuity, not political complexity, not lyrical phrases — as he drives the plot of this gripping book forward. The names of people and places sound as if they've been recalled from a dusty past, not cobbled from J.R.R. Tolkien's Middle Earth, a far too common practice among fantasy writers. Tropes that sound outlandish — "dream-travel," for one — are credible in Durham's telling. And the story always surprises. Characters that seem poised to take center stage are killed abruptly. Evil often triumphs.

This is the first novel in Durham's planned Acacian Trilogy. The second novel, The Other Lands, has recently been published and the third is on the way.


Air, Or Have Not Have, by Geoff Ryman (Gollancz)
Air won the Clarke Award and was nominated for a Nebula. Here is what Strange Horizons' Geneva Melzack had to say about it:

Chung Mae lives in Kizuldah, a tiny mountain village in the country of Karzistan. The people in Kizuldah live traditional sorts of lives, making a living through farming and migrant manual labour. TV has barely arrived in the village when a national test of Air, a new form of virtual media technology, takes place, badly shaking up Kizuldah's traditional existence. The person most shaken up is Chung Mae herself, who is involved in an accident in the midst of the test that fuses her, in the virtual world of Air, with her elderly neighbour Old Mrs Tung, killing Mrs Tung in the process. Air tells the story of how Chung Mae learns to adapt to her new situation, and the work she has to do to help the rest of her village similarly adapt to the changes that the test has wrought and the further changes that she knows will come when Air is fully implemented in a year's time . . . It might be tempting to read Air as a book that is advocating change and the embracing of the new, but there's more to it than that. Change in Air is simply something that happens. It is inevitable. The future is not necessarily any better than the past, but it is coming nevertheless.

The Alchemy of Stone, by Ekaterina Sedia (Prime)
Here is what io9 had to say about this book when it came out last year:

With a face made of porcelain, a wind-up heart, and a talent for alchemy, Mattie is hardly a typical science fictional robot. While most novels about robots focus on how these humanoid machines are stronger and smarter than humans, Ekaterina Sedia's The Alchemy of Stone explores the vulnerability of mechanical beings who depend on humans for repairs and survival. Mattie is a rare emancipated automaton in an industrial city hovering on the edge of a workers' revolution. She's gone against the wishes of her Mechanic creator and joined the ranks of the biochemist-mystic Alchemists, selling medicines and perfumes to the city's middle class. Sedia's novel captures the surreal strangeness of a city whose power structure is about to be toppled, and her focus on Mattie's relationship with her creator allows her to grapple with the tiny power struggles inherent in all human relationships - especially those between men and women.

The Baroque Cycle, by Neal Stephenson (HarperCollins)
Love it or hate it, you have to admit that Stephenson's mammoth historical science series changed the way we think about science fiction - and managed to blow away both science fiction fans and the masses who made these novels bestsellers. Like Cryptnomicon, the Baroque Cycle blends the facts of science history with intense, intellectually-challenging adventures that make you feel smarter even when you whoop, "Dude, that was awesome!" It's a retelling of the revolutions in science and rationality during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Of the first novel in the series, the New York Times says:

Given the apparent depth of Stephenson's research, it seems clear that the anachronisms with which he seeds the novel are deliberate. Some are playful, as when a guard throws Daniel a letter with the words, ''You've got mail,'' or when the 17th-century Venetians succumb to ''Canal Rage'': ''They insist that gondoliers never used to scream at each other in this way. To them it is a symptom of the excessively rapid pace of change in the modern world, and they make an analogy to poisoning by quicksilver, which has turned so many alchemists into shaky, irritable lunatics.''

Confessions of Max Tivoli, by Andrew Sean Greer (Picador)
Very likely the true inspiration for the recent film The Case of Benjamin Button, this bestselling novel explores the life of Max Tivoli, a man who is growing younger - and his relationship with the woman he loves. Bookslut describes the novel like this:

With nothing known about his medical condition and no name for what he is, Max can only look to the few historical instances of cases similar to his — a pair of twins born in France as well as the son of a Viennese merchant. These bits of "research" lend a credibility to the story, making this fictional memoir seem all the more based on a factual account. Greer writes this story as if it were nonfiction — the actual diary of a man who wishes only to have his unique story known. "I burst into the world," he writes, "as if from the other end of life, and the days since then have been ones of physical reversion, of erasing the wrinkles in my hair, bringing younger muscle to my arms and dew to my skin, growing tall and then shrinking into the hairless, harmless boy who scrawls this pale confession." These are Max's experiences, regrets, and lost hopes, once found in a dusty, old attic — the efforts of an old man caught in a young boy's body, committing his life to literature.

Down And Out In the Magic Kingdom, by Cory Doctorow (Tor)
Doctorow burst into the mainstream with this hit novel about warring factions in Disneyland: Those who are trying to preserve the ancient amusement park from being made virtual, and those who are happy to see it digitized. It was also, famously, the novel where Doctorow invented the term "whuffie," a term that refers to cultural capital - or, as South Park would later put it, "internet dollars." As Nisi Shawl said in the Seattle Times:

Even when science fiction is based on solid predictions, it can demonstrate the pinwheeling pyrotechnics of a first-class fireworks display. A longtime observer of life online, Doctorow depicts a cashless economy based on the constant, automatic tracking of public reputations by a nameless online utility. Referred to as "The Bitchun Society" (a la President Lyndon Johnson's "Great Society"), the dominant lifestyle confers immortality (of a sort) on all participants. All one has to do is periodically record one's brain patterns — to be imprinted on force-grown clones in the event of an unwanted death. (No charge for this service; there's no charge for anything, as long as one maintains a high enough reputation.) It's that trick that allows hero Jules to investigate his own murder.

The Execution Channel, by Ken MacLeod (Tor)
One of the superlative MacLeod's most critically-acclaimed and internationally popular novels, it's the tale of a near-future anti-terrorist dystopia. Known for his complicated political writing, MacLeod spun a tale that captured the public's interest, and the attention of political subcultures, too.. The Socialist Review said of the book:

More spy thriller than science fiction, The Execution Channel is full of the paranoia and the obsessive zealotry of security services in a world where power struggles between states obscure all else. The story centres on James Travis, an IT engineer. His daughter, Roisin, is part of the anti-war movement, and his son, Alec, is in the army. Despite taking neither position, Travis is headhunted for French intelligence, ostensibly due to having made the statement: "I just hate the Yanks." When a nuclear explosion destroys a US controlled airbase in Scotland Roisin is witness to it as part of a peace camp outside. . . The Travis family and US conspiracy theorist and blogger Mark Dark [try] to make sense of the events amid lies and disinformation.

Glasshouse, by Charles Stross (Ace)
Stross produced a lot of great fiction in the 2000s, but Glasshouse, a novel about far-future gaming, espionage, war, and masculinity, was a standout. io9 chose it as one of the "science fiction novels that can change your life," and we said:

Stross has said he had the Stanford prison experiments in mind when he wrote this far-future tale of drifters who sign up for a "glasshouse" experiment to recreate the twentieth century in an isolated space habitat. They'll be arbitrarily assigned genders, and forced to engage in certain kinds of conformist behaviors for points. Our heroes, ill-at-ease in the genders they've been given, figure out that there's a deeper plot at work and must try to outsmart the glasshouse prison game while fighting mind viruses that can reorganize your whole consciousness. With unexpected twists and turns, this book is the very best mindfuck you've ever had.

Harry Potter Series, by JK Rowling (Bloomsbury)
Like Durham's Acacia series, the Harry Potter books challenged conventional wisdom about what should happen in a fantasy series. At the same time, Rowling helped revive traditional fantasy storytelling for millions of people across the world. And she gave grownups permission to love young adult writing again. Of the Harry Potter series, Entertainment Weekly's Tina Jordan says:

I'm amazed, when I sit back, at the sheer, immensely complicated arc of the story; Rowling has always said she had the entire seven-book series plotted out from the very beginning, and it's clear she did. I'm stunned at the way she managed to tie up so many of the plot strands, even while weaving in new ones (and while introducing new characters too, albeit no one very important). Having just reread the first six books, I now realize how many small clues were strewn throughout (and how few I managed to pick up). Yet despite the complicated plots and subplots, despite the effortless allusions to mythology and classic tales . . . Rowling winds up her tale with a stunningly beautiful simplicity.

Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell, by Susanna Clarke (Bloomsbury)
Another fantasy writer who completely transformed the genre in the past decade is Clarke, whose Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell is both a literary classic and a gorgeous, smart take on the thorny relationship between the kingdoms of Europe and the kingdom of Faerie. The Washington Post reviewed the bestseller like this:

[Clarke's] antiquarian romance ... resembles Umberto Eco's Foucault's Pendulum, Lawrence Norfolk's Lempriere's Dictionary and John Crowley's Aegypt sequence — deeply learned novels that reimagine the nature of history. For Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell is at heart a book about the present's relationship to the past. In its pages Clarke takes the accepted fabric of English culture and inserts just a single new thread: that during the Renaissance, magic actually worked. Alas, the actual ability to perform magic gradually faded away, even as the centuries-long reign of the powerful magician-sovereign of the North — John Uskglass, the Raven King — passed into the popular mind as a lost golden age.

Look to Windward, by Iain M. Banks (Orbit)
Look to Windward is a novel of galactic war and personal loss, human revenge and AI regret. It's also one of the most moving, intelligent novels in Banks' legendary Culture series. The UK Guardian describes the premise of the novel:

Eight centuries after the Culture fought off its greatest challenge, a war that raged for 50 years and destroyed entire solar systems, the glow from one of the exploding stars has just reached [the orbital world] Masaq'. "Tonight," as one visitor puts it, "you dance by the light of ancient mistakes." And now another chicken is coming home to roost. Billions have died because of the Culture's meddling in the neighbouring civilisation of Chel, where it set off a civil war, and some of the Chelgrians have decided to take revenge. Their instrument is a soldier called Quilan, who is sent to Masaq' on a mission that is a mystery even to him. He is one of the misguided yet decent villains who are a feature of these tales: complicit in a planned "gigadeathcrime", he is still honourable and courageous. As the moment of reckoning approaches, his memories take us back to the days before the war, when his existence still had meaning and his wife was alive.

The Mount, by Carol Emshwiller (Small Beer Press)
Poetic and intense, The Mount is a deceptively simple story about humans revolting against a group of alien conquerers who love humanity - as pets they can ride on. Here's what io9 said about it:

Carol Emshwiller's quiet, disturbing novel The Mount is about what happens when small alien invaders called Hoots take over the planet and begin breeding humans for transportation. Hoots have weak legs that fit perfectly around human necks, as well as superior weapons that easily convert the disobedient to dust. What's compelling about this beautifully-written novel, though, is that it's no simple "aliens oppress humans" tale. It explores what happens when humans get used to, and even enjoy, their servitude.

Oryx and Crake, by Margaret Atwood (Anchor)
A controversial story of virus apocalypse caused by corporate biotech run amok, this novel dazzled mainstream readers with its persuasive vision of the near-future. It was also a strong entry in science fiction's biopunk subgenre, a cautionary tale of what happens to so-called progress when piloted by greed. Said the New York Times:

Atwood's scenario gains great power and relevance from our current scientific preoccupation with bioengineering, cloning, tissue regeneration and agricultural hybrids, and she strikes a note of warning as unambiguous as Mary Shelley's in ''Frankenstein.'' This is the intention of the novel: to goad us to thought by making us screen in the mind a powerful vision of competence run amok. What Atwood could not have intended, and what is no less alarming and exponentially more urgent, is the resonance between her rampaging plague scenario and the recent global outbreak of SARS. Moving from book to newspaper, or newspaper to book, the reader realizes, with a jolt, how the threshold of difference has been lowered in recent months. The force of Atwood's imagining grows in direct proportion to our rising anxiety level. And so does the importance of her implicit caution.

Pattern Recognition, by William Gibson (Putnam)
Gibson reinvented himself in the 2000s as a writer of technothrillers that feel like science fiction despite being set in the present - or, in the case of Pattern Recognition, one year before the book's publication. An enthralling mix of Gibson's favorite obsessions - branding, computer technologies, and artisanal smuggling networks - the book is also a moving portrait of the emotional ties forged between fans of an obscure set of viral videos online. In Wired, Rudy Rucker wrote:

What Gibson gives us is an international spy thriller comparable to the slightly skewed tales of Jonathan Franzen or David Foster Wallace. His story's central McGuffin is a fragmentary, workstation-rendered romance movie known simply as The Footage. It consists of 100-odd supernally beautiful snippets of video that someone has anonymously posted on the Web. A rabid online cult has grown around the flick, and a Belgian advertising exec (with the improbable name of Hubertus Bigend) hires Cayce Pollard to find the maker. Bigend's goal: Tap into The Footage's primo street cred strategy for profit . . . Gibson pulls you in with big ideas that make solid material for word-of-mouth proselytizing. But Pattern Recognition's essential quality is the sensual pleasure of its language. Gibson has a knack for choosing - or coining - the right phrase. With a poet's touch, he tiles words into wonderful mosaics. An expressway is "Blade Runnered by half a century of use and pollution." The Tokyo skyline is "a floating jumble of electric Lego, studded with odd shapes you somehow wouldn't see elsewhere, as if you'd need special Tokyo add-ons to build this at home."

Perdido Street Station, by China Miéville (Del Rey)
The first of Miéville's stunning New Crobuzon novels, Perdido Street Station is a tour-de-force of worldbuilding and complicated, character-driven drama. Strange Horizons described the book like this:

New Crobuzon is full of alienated individuals, social groups, and species; Miéville's main characters live on the margins of society, either by choice, or social pressure, or both. Identities are fluid, allegiances shift suddenly; spies and moles infest the city and its underworld. Betrayal is commonplace, and trust is at a premium. The main character, Isaac Dan der Grimnebulin, embodies this tension. (Isaac — the sacrificial son? Isaac Newton? Both?) A marginalized scientist pursuing his own quixotic line of research — the "crisis engine" — he is also socially outcast by virtue of his romantic relationship with a xenian, a khepri artist named Lin. The khepri are partly insectile, partly anthropoid, and Lin, too, is an outcast from her society — an alienated artist who has broken away from her brood in pursuit of a more individualized art. Isaac and Lin's relationship leaves them vulnerable to blackmail and manipulation, and makes their lives in an already hazardous society even more precarious. The book's action begins with the appearance of yet another marginal, outcast character, a garuda (avian-derived) named Yagharek, who has been stripped of his wings by his species as punishment for crime; he commissions Isaac to help him regain his ability to fly. In the course of his research Isaac inadvertently unleashes. . . well, something Not At All Nice . . . The theme of the meaning and nature of consciousness, sentience, and rationality underlies the frantic action in the malevolent city. . . Perdido Street Station is an impressively imaginative novel from a promising new writer.

Rainbows End, by Vernor Vinge (Tor)
A masterpiece of plausible futuristic technologies, Rainbows End is also a very personal story of a man who has recovered from Alzheimers - only to discover that his once-magnificent mind is now healthy but average. At the UK Guardian, Wendy Grossman wrote:

Set in 2025, the characters are surrounded by logical extensions of today's developing technology. Wearable computing is commonplace. Tagging and ubiquitous networked sensors mean you can look at the landscape with your choice of overlay and detail. People send each other silent messages and Google for information within conversations with participants who may be physically present or might be remote projections. One character's projection is hijacked and becomes the front for three people. The owner of another remote intelligence is unknown. Several continents' top intelligence operatives try to solve a smart biological attack that infects a test population with the willingness to obey orders. Vinge makes two opening assumptions: no grand physical disaster occurs, and today's computing and communications trends continue.

Stories of Your Life And Others, by Ted Chiang (Orb)
Chiang is one of the legends of the science fiction world, often hailed as the best short story writer of his generation. With a keen interest in science, and a healthy love for magic, Chiang writes stories that are both gorgeous and profound. SFSite enthuses:

Stories of Your Life and Others abounds with examples of why Ted Chiang's stories have continued to be award winners. From "Understand", which both plays homage to and expands upon Daniel Keyes' classic "Flowers For Algernon" to "Story Of Your Life," in which a linguist confronts the relationship between language and reality, it will not take readers new to these stories very long to appreciate their quality and beauty. Science fiction has always depended on writers who work best at shorter lengths to continue to examine new ideas and push the boundaries of the field. In the decade plus a few years since he first started publishing, Ted Chiang has shown himself to be more than up to that task.

Time Traveler's Wife, by Audrey Niffenegger (MacAdam/Cage Books)
Critically-acclaimed, and this year released as a feature film, this is the tale of a man who suffers from a rare time-traveling condition. The question Niffenegger asks is how such a man could ever have a meaningful relationship, when he's constantly uprooted from the present and propelled to different eras. USA Today said:

Niffenegger, despite her moving, razor-edged prose, doesn't claim to be a romantic. She writes with the unflinching yet detached clarity of a war correspondent standing at the sidelines of an unfolding battle. She possesses a historian's eye for contextual detail. This is no romantic idyll. The ability to revisit one's past doesn't necessarily illuminate one's understanding of events. And knowing the future is not particularly a good thing, Niffenegger's story implies. This is what makes her story both compelling and unsettling. Time traveler Henry is limited in his capacity to change himself, let alone past or future events. His freakish condition brings Clare into his life, but it also keeps them from being resolutely happy; he never knows when he will disappear, and she never knows when - or in what shape - he'll return.

Tooth and Claw, by Jo Walton (Tor)
Winner of the World Fantasy Award, Tooth and Claw is an alternative history masterpiece from an author acclaimed for her facility with narrative time-tweaking. Satirical and scathing by turns, Tooth and Claw is a nineteenth century novel of manners in which dragons are the dominant species on Earth. Here's what io9 said about it:

Influenced by Victorian writer Anthony Trollope, Tooth And Claw is about the fate of two sisters whose father dies before they are married off. They cannot inherit his caverns, and he's left them almost no money. One goes to live with their married sister, whose husband is a cruel land owner who eats the children of his servants. The other goes to live with their brother, a pastor and new husband who lives in the caves of a very wealthy woman whose son takes a shine to her. Walton manages to translate Victorian details into dragon life, commenting on what is fashionable in cave decoration and describing the dangerous machinations of dragon bureaucrats. There's even a Middlemarch-esque subplot where one of the sisters gets involved with a movement to better the lives of the poor. And of course it's a romance – even dragons get a happy ending. The best part about Tooth And Claw is that it isn't just a simple parody. Certainly it is very witty, but it is also a fascinating thought experiment in which the most savage creatures of our imagination turn out to be the very best society that 19th century civilization has to offer.

World War Z, by Max Brooks (Crown)
A gamechanger in the horror/scifi world that hit just as the zombie craze was reaching manic intensity, Brooks' novel is written in a disturbing, satirical documentary style. The Onion AV Club said:

Brooks' acknowledgments conclude with thanks to historian Studs Terkel, zombie visionary George Romero, and John Hackett, who in 1978 wrote a book called The Third World War: August 1985. And he takes all three influences seriously. In fact, Brooks treats everything about his subject seriously. While that may sound like a ridiculous way to approach a book about a zombie apocalypse, he doesn't miss an opportunity to let his readers hear echoes of contemporary woes in the moans of the undead. When an outbreak of zombie-ism occurs in the near-future of Brooks' novel, it takes the world aback, serving as a stand-in for pandemic scares, Katrina, tsunamis, terrorism-basically any of the recent catastrophes that have reminded us how fragile civilization is beneath the surface.

Holbo is a philosophy professor when he isn't concocting weird tales of squid, and it shows. The book starts with his whimsical musings on the scientific names for "owl" and "squid," and then abruptly becomes a meditation on why squid and owl are considered "binary." Why can't they change places? It's a little like reading a Victorian children's book and suddenly discovering that in fact you're buried knee-deep in an essay on language and deconstruction. Which isn't to say it isn't completely fun and silly. I've excerpted a few pages from his book, which you can see all of on his Flickr stream, and buy a copy of at Blurb.

THR reported that Disney has picked up the rights to the brand new YA series Fallen. The first book is already out and there are three more yet to come, all of which Disney now own.

The story is strikingly similar to Meyer's vamp series. A misunderstood girl meets a mysterious boy that she's strangely drawn to. What's his ace in the hole? Why he's a fallen angel, doncha know, hence the title. Plus there's another angel, also fallen, that she's also drawn to, and they fight over her, as men are wont to do. Sign me up. And while we're at it bring on Legion, Hush Hush and Going Bovine.

via THR

After Coupland published the groundbreaking novel Generation X in the early 1990s, surly speculative writer Kurt Vonnegut gave a grumpy speech to some college students in which he scoffed at the term "Generation X" and suggested that they should instead be called "Generation A" since they were "at the beginning of a series of astonishing triumphs and failures." Clearly, that comment is the inspiration for this novel.

Like all of Coupland's novels, Generation A is written in immediately engaging, genuinely funny prose. He's the kind of writer who calls GMO corn a "carb dildo" and gives one of his characters a hilarious obsession with the show Starblazers. Shuttling quickly between the first-person perspectives of his five bee-stung characters - from Sri Lanka to New Zealand - Coupland quickly sketches in a five-mintues-into-the-future world where everything is just a little bleaker than it is today. Transportation has gotten incredibly expensive due to impending peak oil, and everybody seems to have gotten hooked on an antidepressant called Solon that makes time seem to pass more quickly and calms people's fears of the future. And somehow, all the bees in the world have gone extinct, which means no more wildflowers, very little fruit, and (of course) no honey.

Still the world is recognizably our own, especially once it's made familiar to us via the goofy, heartfelt patter of Coupland's characters. Harj survived the Indian Ocean tsunami (but his family didn't) and now he works in a Sri Lankan call center for Abercrombie & Fitch. In his spare time, he's created a fake e-commerce website that sells "celebrity room tones" - audio files that capture what silence sounds like in rooms that famous people live in. Zack creates cock-and-ball-shaped crop circles in his own cornfields; Julien is obsessed with World of Warcraft; Samantha is obsessed with various geotagging games online (creating "earth sandwiches" by taking a picture of a piece of bread on the ground in New Zealand, while somebody across the globe in Spain takes a picture of another piece of bread on the ground); and Diana is an evangelical Christian with Tourette's. And all of them have one thing in common: After they're stung by supposedly-extinct bees, they're scooped up by a team of scientists and forced to undergo weird tests in an underground facility in Atlanta.

The setup for the novel is simply terrific, and the subtext is intriguing from the start. Flowing beneath the surface of this quirky eco-thriller is a meditation on the way media consumption has become both an addiction and form of redemption for our characters - and, by extension, the whole human species. Locked into their quarantine cells in Atlanta, the main characters aren't allowed to have any books, computer, or television. They're forced to contemplate how stark and freaky their lives would be without reading and engaging with the world through everything from music to World of Warcraft. What's particularly smart is the way Coupland makes no distinction between the addictive allure of reading and the distractions of the internet. All are, ultimately, ways of feeding our minds with a combination of beauty and "carb dildo" garbage.

Once the bee-stung are released, they discover they can't return to their old lives. Something about them has changed profoundly, and they need to come together and talk about it. So they accept an invitation from Serge, one of the scientists who studied them, to visit a remote island together where he can study them further - and they can get to know each other. It turns out what Serge really wants them to do is tell stories. He hints mysteriously that this is part of what he's researching, and that storytelling is related to why the bees chose to sting them. We also begin to realize that somehow this research is related to the drug Solon.

The entire second half of the novel is taken up with the stories that our characters tell teach other. Some are clearly based on their life experiences; others are parables about storytelling itself and the meaning of human connection. Taken together, these tales begin to form an organic whole, a portrait of people obsessed with finding the words to explain their experiences even while they are unable to find other people to share those experiences with. It's a risky and weird right-turn for the novel to take, though not unexpected for Coupland. He's known for his joyful experiments with language and form.

While most of the stories were amusing to read, I wound up feeling like this section of the novel was fairly uneven. There were simply too many stories, without any exposition between them, and we lost the thread of the compelling tale that Coupland had set up for us in the riveting first half of the novel. Though the book has a great ending, Coupland simply gets derailed when the characters tell stories instead of figuring out what connects them to each other and the bees. Arguably, storytelling is what connects them, and we get hints from very early in the book that there is a molecule called an "eon" that is released into the bloodstream when humans experience stories. But many readers will grow frustrated with Coupland's way of exploring this idea.

Despite these problems, this is one of the rare science fiction novels that will make you laugh out loud. Coupland's comic prose is simply terrific, but never in a way that feels cheap or mean. He's completely in love with his characters, and their weird observations about the world are achingly true. Regardless of whether you adore or ignore the storytelling half of the novel, you'll be amused and diverted. Especially if you've liked Coupland's other novels, you won't want to miss this one.

Huffington broke the news that there was a new Wachowski movie, and she was appearing in it, by tweeting a series of pictures showing "how I'll look in 90 years." Including the one above and this one:

And Huffington also tweeted that it's a "futuristic movie on Iraq." (Presumably looking back at the Iraq war, not just about the country in general.)

No further details were forthcoming, even on Huffington's own site. Speculation among film bloggers is that the Wachowskis are simply doing screen tests for their next project. Cinematical's Erik Davis points out, in an email to Slashfilm, that the Wachowskis did option David Mitchell's novel Cloud Atlas, parts of which take place in a post-apocalyptic future. In Cloud Atlas, a series of nested stories take us forward in time from the nineteenth century to the distant future. It's not clear right now if the Wachowskis are producing the film and reported director Tom Tykwer is still on board, or if the Wachowskis have taken over the directing reins.

Update: Chud insists, based on inside sources, that the Wachowskis aren't actually filming a new movie at all:

In fact, [Huffington]'s participating in tests for their next project. They're just shooting a couple of days this month, but it's all just test footage. As to what that next project is... well, I'm trying to find out. But in the meantime know that the Wachowskis are not shooting a secret movie... I should mention that these are likely camera tests. They're shooting on the RED.

Oh, and here's a picture of Huffington with Lana Wachowski and her parents:

[Slashfilm via Obsessed With Film]

As with LOTR, Peter Jackson's adaptation of Alice Sebold's Bones is the sum of its aesthetic choices, times the auteur's vision. Jackson brings a vibrant surrealism and suspense to the adaptation, and it says a lot that he chose Brian Eno to do the music for it. Spoilers below.

The Lovely Bones is the story of young Susie Salmon, who's murdered by a serial killer, and who then observes the aftermath as a ghost. A girl in her early teens, Susie is compellingly played by the luminous Saoirse Ronan. She observes the grief of her family, and their floundering responses as the police consider every possible suspect but the right one; she experiences an afterlife that seems a strangely logical mix of its own rules and her internal world. (In places it's a little like a subtler version of What Dreams May Come, without the philosophy-and without a Cuba Gooding, Jr). She resists complete absorption into the next world, drawn back to psychically finger the residue of her own uncompleted life.

The novel's story is told by the murdered girl. In the book, Susie says: "My murderer was a man from our neighborhood. My mother liked his border flowers, and my dad talked to him once about fertilizer." This voice, as voice-over, usually simple, sometimes penetrating, neatly interlaces and tightens the film's narration. The use of voiceover is famously a cinematic bugaboo, a chain holding many films back - it mars Kubrick's otherwise brilliant film noir, The Killing - but occasionally it can work, and here's the occasion. Saoirse Ronan's voiceover brings the first-person voice of the novel into the film, so that we feel haunted by her as we watch events unfold. Jackson uses the voiceover just enough, and in just the right places.

We know early on - as in the novel - that Susie Salmon will be murdered, because she tells us so. But somehow Jackson makes us afraid for her anyway, though her doom is a kind of fait accompli from the first. Jackson stretches out the suspense about who does it for awhile, but by the end of the first act you know it's "Mr. Harvey." The psychopathic Mr Harvey, a predator who can be just charming enough to be well camouflaged, is played with creepy brilliance by Stanley Tucci - you absolutely know that this character is a guy from your neighborhood who's very fussy about his flowers, very punctual, lives alone. You accept that he builds dollhouses - perhaps miniature houses is a better description - as a hobby. And somehow his little quirks quite logically dovetail with the fact that he likes to rape, murder, and dismember young girls. We infer we shouldn't trust people who are too neat, wound too tight, and too charming. Good advice. The scenes where Mr. Harvey stalks Susie, and entraps her in the little pre-adolescent play-chamber he builds, like a dollhouse, under the cornfield - a resonantly symbolic setting - are quite frightening. One knows what will happen, and it doesn't help. Jackson's skills at suspense and the elucidation of fear – the bringing of background fear cracklingly into the foreground, at precisely the right moment - are powerfully in evidence.

The afterlife of The Lovely Bones has its various facets, like the Bible's "many mansions"; there is a kind of dark afterlife bardo feel to part of it, but there's also the freedom of living one's dreams, in a light-hearted way, as a fourteen year old girl. Never forget, when Jackson shows you her afterlife, that it's her afterlife. It's the afterlife of a girl in her early teens. In one segment that might strike some as a bit airyfairy, there is a Little Prince style planet; there are butterflies and teen-fantasy outfits. She even sees herself fleetingly on the cover of a teen magazine. But this isn't your afterlife. It's the afterlife of a girl who had teen heartthrob photos on her bedroom wall. That sequence is not overlong, and it makes sense. And it's just a portion of her life-after-death - other parts are almost Mordor-like; are certainly fraught with symbol and infused with a living presence, so that we're never surprised when it responds to psychological impulses from Susie or the mortal world. The scenes in the Next World are often spectacular - and yet they meld potently with the drama of the mortal world.

Susie's relationship with her father, likably played by Mark Wahlberg, is more powerful than her relationship with her mother - Rachel Weisz—whom we know largely from her grief. Her father is obsessed with finding her killer, and is thoroughly unsuited for it - eventually, spiritually guided by Susie in an understated way, he intuits the killer's identity. When he tries to do something about it, his fury bears bitter fruit, in keeping with the film's theme of acceptance over hatred.

It may be that the second act, at times, doesn't quite cohere, doesn't always lead immaculately into the third. Occasionally it seems episodic. But the film's imagery and characters exert a pull that draws us relentlessly along, and the third act plays out compellingly.

Susie's sister is the one who finds the evidence the blind, flailing adults overlook while Susan Sarandon, as the alcoholic, bohemian grandmother — holds the family together. Chainsmoking, endearingly incompetent , the character is wonderful, completely convincing, and sometimes quite funny. Sarandon may get a best-supporting-actress nomination for this - she simply becomes this woman.

Susie's murder has been with us from the first, in a way, but chronologically it comes right after she meets a stunningly Byronic young immigrant from Britain (reminiscent of the young man the girls love from the Twilight pictures), who might have been her soul-mate... had she not been murdered; had her life, with all its drama and joy, its highs and troughs not been brutally, maddeningly, senselessly and oh-so-pointlessly interrupted. This is one of the film's most poignant throughlines, and provides some of its emotional resolution, in time. Just in time - to rescue an ending that some might find a little unsatisfying.

The film strays in some places from Sebold's narrative, but the end belongs to the novel, a resolution as much emotional as plot-driven. It's a denouement written by an artist, not by a Hollywood screenwriter. There must have been some Suits feeling angst over that ending, when the studio distributors saw it. (I notice they aren't spending a lot of money promoting The Lovely Bones.) Not that it's a bad ending - it's just deep. And they don't like deep. Will they recognize the cunning symbolism of the faces in the dollhouse windows? The little ships suddenly taking shape in the bottles?

I found the ending to be just frustrating enough — about as frustrating as our world is. And it is another example of choices defining an adaptation. Some fans of the book may carp about certain freedoms Jackson took, but most will hopefully see that in this very creative, authoritative film Peter Jackson preserves the characters, the theme, the dread, the delight found in the novel - and has added just enough of his own.

John Shirley's newest novels are Black Glass: The Lost Cyberpunk Novel, and Bleak History

In an interview with Collider, Peter Jackson crushed the rumors about a 2012 release, and confirmed that the plan still is 2011 in December, which is soon, really soon. Methinks he may be singing a different tune come July.

Meanwhile, who's going to play Bilbo? IGN asked Jackson about the many actors that have been rumored to be in line [Daniel Radcliffe, Martin Freeman, James McAvoy and David Tennant]. Are any of them actually in the running? Jackson wouldn't rule any anyone out, because some of the names mentioned were not under consideration, and he didn't want fans to figure it out based on the process of elimination. Plus, he's still looking for an unknown that may be able to fill the role of Bilbo. (And presumably, handle his accelerated filming schedule, without any conflicts.)

Next, ultimate Tolkien site The One Ring, has the news that there's casting calls going out for — gasp — a woman to appear in this film. And since they probably wouldn't be casting bit parts and extras at this point, the fans speculate that maybe there's a she-dwarf in the mix. Or maybe it's the voice for something. And there are a lot of somethings lurking about in the woods and hills in this book. So your guess is as good as ours.

And finally, AICN Downunder is reporting, on top of their Brian Cox dwarf rumors, that Tom Waits may be joining the film as well. Both are still unconfirmed, and no one is sure what Waits would be cast as, so the whole thing is mere talk at this point. Still the man was amazing in Dracula and Dr. Parnassus, so nether he nor Cox would be a tough sell.