Publisher set to ignite: Pyr Books
With authors like critically-acclaimed Ian "Brasyl" McDonald on board, and more cool books on the way, Pyr is becoming the scifi indie publisher to watch. Attendees of WorldCon clearly thought so too. The Pyr party was packed with celebs and fans alike, and not just because of the tasty mojitos.

Authors set to conquer: David Marusek and Paolo Bacigalupi
Marusek's first novel, Counting Heads, won critical acclaim inside the world of scifi and beyond. The sequel, Mind Over Ship, is coming out in January — but reviewers are already reading galleys and getting excited over this tale about the construction of generation ships on a future Earth where the middle class has disappeared. Meanwhile, Bacigalupi has already won a ton of fans for his short fiction collection Pump Six — but now we're amped for his first novel, a YA adventure that involves ultra-fast sailboats in a peak oil world, plus pirates of the Arctic!

The editor every writer wants: Liz Gorinsky of Tor
She organized a roller derby outing at WorldCon, she edited Jeff VanderMeer's excellent novella Shriek, and she has impeccable taste in writing. We're waiting to see if Gorinsky is going to discover the next Ursula Le Guin.

Writer on the verge: Mary Robinette Kowal
Winner of the Campbell Award for best new writer, Kowal has over a dozen acclaimed short stories under her belt. She may be a successful professional puppeteer, but we'd like to see her pulling the strings on a novel or two as well.

Comeback kid: Amy Thomson
Author of the amazing novels Virtual Girl and The Color of Distance, Thomson is poised to grab the attention of new readers with her recently-finished novel Nomad. Blending hard scifi with a medieval setting that feels almost like fantasy, the novel takes place among people on a planet whose culture resembles that of ancient Mongolia. Thomson spent time in Mongolia to do research, and promises a tale that involves a lot of awesome horse-riding action. With people riveted by the movie Mongol in theaters (not to mention all the horsey enthusiasm generated by Seabiscuit), this could be the novel that puts Thomson back on the map.

We didn't see much more of Iron Man than you did if you watched the Superbowl commercial a few weeks ago, but director Jon Favreau did let it slip that he had to do some very creative editing to make this flick kid-friendly. No wonder, given that Iron Man as a character is about as dark as you can get: in recent series Civil War, he led the government crackdown on the superhero community, rounding up his cohorts and forcing them to be placed under surveillance under the Superhero Registration Act.

Starship Troopers III writer and director Ed Neumeier, who worked on the first film, said the new film will be a lot more darkly satirical. The soldiers are sick of the war, and just want to go home. It's based much more faithfully on the original Heinlein novel, and from what we could see from the hefty clips they showed us the action scenes will be fun and exciting to watch. A new generation of bugs have cool robo-suits that make them look like a cross between bug and Tripod from War of the Worlds.

And of course the biggest draw of the weekend was the new X-Files movie, which is being shot even as I write. The packed crowd of thousands was going crazy for every little word dropped by director Chris Carter, and the teeny taste of the movie we got to see was exciting. X-Files protagonists Scully and Mulder have always been morally ambiguous — even, at times, obviously insane. And the new flick has 9/11 looming over it like a dark cloud. The fans couldn't stop talking about conspiracy theories about how the original series was destroyed by the 9/11 disaster, and even Carter admitted the movie had to wait until the mood in the country was lighter again. Just to prove how light their moods were, stars Gillian Anderson and David Duchovny spent a while joking about how XF3 should be about Mulder's experiments with autoerotic asphyxiation. (And we got it on tape — you can see it if you click through.)

For the first major convention of the year, Wondercon was surprisingly light on any real news, with the biggest player, DC Comics first suggesting that they were going to tell us something big the next day, and then telling us that they'd rather wait until April after all. The lack of any major surprises to take away from the con (Both of the stories that actually did break, J. Michael Straczynski working for DC Comics and Brian Wood and Becky Cloonan working on new issues of Demo for Vertigo, seemed to be common knowledge on the con floor before their official announcements) seemed to affect the regular con-goers with an unusual feeling of malaise hitting even the 501st Legion as they performed con security. This wasn't helped by the no-shows from creators - not only was the Image Comics panel cancelled, but both Boom! Studios' Mark Waid and Aspen Studio's Michael Turner failed to make it to the show.

That isn't to say that the entire show was a disaster, mind you; the pros who did make it there were entertaining and available - Particular shout-outs should be given to Oni Press's James Lucas Jones (Expect me to tell you all about Wonton Soup very soon) as well as DC's Jann Jones and Dan DiDio, whose late-Sunday panel "For The Love of Comics" turned out to be a surprisingly enjoyable conversation not about upcoming DC Comics but what is awesome about comics in general (Goofiness and obsessive collecting being two of the answers), entirely free of the kind of hucksterism that you might expect from a DC panel.Bill Willingham proved to be a fine gentleman able to keep people's attention throughout the various panels he dominated (and I'm not just saying that because of his apology to me about this), and even if some DC panels may have been half-empty, the two showings of the animated version of Darwyn Cooke's New Frontier were packed with enthusiastic fans (With good reason; it's a better movie than I expected).

That's not even talking about Saturday's CBLDF party that we co-sponsored, populated by the creme de la creme of comics folk, from retailers to creators (Hi, Cecil!) to fans, with we journalist types mingling and posing for photos that I feel like I should be apologizing for; I didn't mean for my head to be that shiny. Overall, it may not have been the most exciting weekend in terms of comic conventions - that'll be San Diego Comic-Con in July - but it was definitely a fine, exhausting, one nonetheless.

Robot will be a "futuristic vigilante tale" of man versus robots, according to comments attributed to Shah Rukh Khan, the film star who bailed out of the lead role a month ago. Khan quit because he didn't like the script, but now Ajith Kumar (Vaali, pictured above) is set to star.

This all started with a remake of John Carpenter's The Fog back in 2005, and these foggy mutant films just keep rolling in. Based on the box office numbers from the Fog remake and The Mist (it's just about to drop out of the top ten, where it debuted at #8), it's unclear why Hollywood is so into this trend.

The good news is that comic book publisher Studio 407, publishers of Night & Fog, signed a first-look deal with Myriad Pictures, and that means its indie properties will begin the arduous Hollywood development cycle very soon. While it's nice to see deals with companies other than Marvel and DC, we hope there will be a few original storylines tossed into the mix.

Myriad, 407 On Drawing Board [Hollywood Reporter]