Unsurprisingly, casting Wolverine in the original X-Men movie wasn't a smooth process; the character's unusual attributes in the comics - short, hairy and not particularly physically attractive, yet charming nonetheless, and capable of stunts and animal temper - aren't exactly the kind of thing that would make most actors want to sign on for the role, after all. That didn't stop X-Men writer Chris Claremont from thinking big, however, as he admitted in a recent interview:

Back in the day when we first started kicking around idea, my choice for Wolverine was Bob Hoskins. That was totally late 20th century, and it's not relevant to today's market.

By the time that Bryan Singer was attached to the project, more "relevant" thinking had prevailed, and taller, more attractive actors were being considered; both Mel Gibson and Russell Crowe were offered the role, but both declined (Crowe was apparently interested, but wanted more money to sign on). Soon afterwards, Singer found his perfect leading man: Mission: Impossible II's Dougray Scott.

Sadly, in what was to become a bit of a running theme in his career, Scott became a footnote as opposed to a star when he had to drop out of the production due to M:I2 going over schedule by two months, meaning that he'd be unavailable for the start of the X-Men shoot (Scott was also rumored to be taking over the role of James Bond, following the departure of Pierce Brosnan. You have to wonder if he dreams of terrible accidents befalling both Hugh Jackman and Daniel Craig, sometimes). With filming already having been underway for three weeks, Jackman - then an unknown - was hurredly cast in the role, and the rest was franchise history.

(Wolverine wasn't the only character quickly recast in X-Men; James Marsden only became Cyclops when James Caviezel's shooting schedule for Frequency caused him to back out of the movie. Ugly Betty's Eric Mabius was also in the running.)

Oddly enough, casting an Australian as the Canadian superhero was following a precedent set by Wolverine's first non-comic book appearance, in a 1982 episode of Spider-Man And His Amazing Friends:

His altered citizenship continued through 1989's failed X-Men pilot, "Pryde of the X-Men":

Apparently, American casting directors have no idea where Canada is, much to Hugh Jackman's benefit. But at least you now know why Gibson and Crowe were offered the gig.

Sawyer has written over a dozen novels and won both Hugo and Nebula awards for his work. He's set a number of his books at famous Canadian science facilities, and he's excited to witness the everyday workings of another exceptional lab.

Sawyer told the CBC:

I spent a lot of time visiting science labs over the years, but it's always the VIP tour. You are in and you are out in a couple of hours, and everyone has shown you all the things they want you to see but none of the day-to-day grind of the work as well. I want to get the flavour of that.

The synchrotron, called the Canadian Light Source, uses magnets to speed up subatomic particles in beams of light so that their behavior can be observed and experimented on. It can be used to study everything from theoretical physics to applied medical science.

I had a chance to hang out with Sawyer during WorldCon last year, when we went with a group of writers to visit another famous facility: the old NORAD base located deep under Cheyenne Mountain in Colorado. He's a truly nice guy, and pleasingly obsessed with e-books. Sawyer's next trilogy, coming out this year, is about how the World Wide Web evolves into an artificial intelligence.

While Sawyer is in residence at the Saskatoon facility in June and July of this year, he'll also make himself available to local writers who would like to book hour-long meetings with him.

Image via Canadian Light Source.

Heather admitted that she and her husband played Star Wars music in their wedding. But that's nothing to be ashamed of, when you consider that through this meetup I discovered that here on the prairies there is another human being besides me who thinks Doom is a great movie - it was Phreak711, who (I'm sad to report) also likes Knight Rider. So maybe it's not so good that he shares my passion for tongue-shooting aliens after all.

Pam arrived first and took home a copy of Shadow of the Scorpion. Congrats, Pam!

The verdict? Great meetup, and Saskatoon geeks should have io9 meetups more often! If you're in Toontown and want to arrange the next meetup (maybe not on New Year's Eve, eh?), feel free to use the comment here to set it up. Or start a thread on io9's Facebook group.

Photo via Ani.

Here is a detail from one of Altmejd's bodies.

And here is another one of his half-metal, half-grotesque pieces.

But this one, featuring a bunch of mirror people in a mirrored room, is the one that really freaks me out. The people are all industrial-shiny surfaces, covered in scary spikes. They're like beautiful but deadly robots who came out a little malformed from the factory.

Altmejd has a solo exhibit coming up in London in mid-October.

David Altmejd [artist site]

Foot closeup via Eglantine.

According to the CBC:

The JHL-40 takes elements of a blimp and a helicopter to lift up to 40 tonnes in one load and travel up to 320 kilometres without refuelling. It will have a top speed of 70 knots. Company officials said Tuesday the aircraft should help oil and gas companies in particular because they'll be able to use it to transport equipment and materials without having to build roads in remote regions.

The zeppelins are going to be rolled out in 2012. I'm looking forward to passenger model to take me up to northern Saskatchewan, so I can hang out by the lakes all summer long in a land without roads. (Thanks, Andrew!)

Blimp on Steroids [CBC]

Over 3700 people have already applied for the final two positions in Canada's four-strong team to spend half a year aboard the International Space Station on a research mission. Canada's Chief Astronaut Steve MacLean explains what qualities the ideal applicant should have:

[We're looking to find out h]ow trainable the individuals are. To be an astronaut requires a versatile set of skills and we need to find out in an individual can multitask, has good situational awareness ... and good hand-eye co-ordination... Is the individual a happy camper and a good team player? Does he or she get along well with a group?

If it wasn't seeming enough like the kind of job interview you've already been on multiple times in your life, MacLean then adds the ultimate cliche:

We want to get individuals who are looking at this as a career.

Yes, that's right; if you were hoping to spend six months about a multi-billion dollar piece of space hardware just for shits and giggles, turns out this isn't for you. Wait until Richard Branson gets Virgin Galactic going and apply for a job then, I guess.

Canada seeks super-fit geniuses to fill space program vacancies [Canada.com]

Gibson refers to Godzilla a lot in his work, sometimes casually (a sound in Spook Country is "like Godzilla's footsteps") and sometimes wryly (an earthquake that levels Japan is called Godzilla in his Bridge novels). So I had to know what he really thinks about Godzilla movies.

He replied:

I watched them growing up, and saw the original Godzilla movie. I think of Godzilla as that original character. Even though I saw the [Americanized Raymond Burr version], I thought I picked up on the dark meaning of the original. I thought I knew what they were trying to say with that movie. But I saw all those old monster movies. I was really disturbed by Mothra. Something about the tiny little twins who sang woefully.

Though he grew up mostly in rural southwest Virginia, Gibson has spent his entire adult life living in Vancouver, Canada. And yet in his world-spanning novels, Canada rarely makes an appearance. Until the ending of Spook Country, which takes place in Vancouver. I was curious about where Gibson sees Canada fitting into his geopolitical dreamscape, and where he sees Canada heading in the future.

Gibson said:

Douglas Coupland's descriptions of Vancouver circa City of Glass are closest to my sense of the place. It's hemmed in and separated from the rest of the world by an ocean, a border, mountains. And then there's the unknown and incomprehensible north. Vancouver sits there, insulated to some extent, but picking up influences from across the ocean and across the border. The signals seem to be amplified by those symbolic barriers. Psychogeographically, I identify with greater Vancouver more than I do with the rest of Canada, which I have a fondness for and good feelings for. Vancouver's peculiar culture feels like home.

I like it because I grew up in a really extreme monoculture in southwestern Virgina. I was surrounded by Southern white folks – this was in badass Appalachia, up in the hollers where my mother's family had been forever. Having that experience in a small town made me happiest in big cities. Especially in radically multicultural big cities – as far as you can get from monoculture. I'm happiest where people are generally not even of recognizable ethic derivations. I'm into hybrid vigor.

Canada is set up to run on steady immigration. It feels like a twenty first century country to me because it's not interested in power. It negotiates and does business. It gets along with other countries. The power part is very nineteenth century. 99 percent of ideology we have today is very nineteenth century. The twentieth century was about technology, and the nineteenth was ideology.

I asked him about Spook Country, an explicitly political novel where it seems like ideologies are shaping the way people use technology. For example, the characters repurpose technologies like iPods for the purposes of espionage.

He explained:

In Spook Country, old ideologies hang around and shape the initial phases of a longterm change that it will never be able to keep up with. The digital realm is inherently porous. These days we're all coming to the attention of the authorities as a matter of course. But the really new thing is that the authorities are coming to our attention. It's more difficult for authorities to keep their secrets. it's working both ways. We live in the era of the leak, the document that doesn't get wiped off the hard drive. That drive you thought was wiped shows up in a pawn shop in Vegas. It's equally porous in both directions. But individuals have a better chance of applying transparency to their lives and transactions on the internet than states and corporations do. If we continue in this direction, I believe people in the future will wield unimaginable tools of forensic transparency — and they'll aim them back at history. They'll find out about what every major player did all the way back with tools we can't imagine today. There will be no more lost cities.

Since we were talking politics, I asked Gibson about whether he sees his work as political. After all, he has said that he fled to Canada to dodge the draft. And I wonder if those politics have seeped into his work. He laughed when I brought up the draft-dodging.

He said:

Well, [that was] political and it's also true that I wanted to get laid [with hippie chicks]. I've had to engage in this kind of grudging self-examination because of my ever-changing Wikipedia entry [which mentions early interviews where he talked about being a draft dodger]. When I started out as a writer I took credit for draft evasion where I shouldn't have. I washed up in Canada with some vague idea of evading the draft but then I was never drafted so I never had to make the call. I don't know what I would have done if I'd really been drafted. I wasn't a tightly wrapped package at that time. if somebody had drafted me I might have wept and gone. I wouldn't have liked it of course.

In my novels, I've done my best to avoid political didacticism. Consciously I never work from any sort of expressed political philosophy. To the extent that I have one it strives to be open — open to change. I try very hard to attain what E.M. Forster described: “Let the characters get completely out of my control.” Some of the characters are completely out of my control and get frankly political. Often when they'd just been awakened from a nap, like when Milgram is awakened from a nap [in Spook Country] and finds himself telling Brown that Brown and his ilk are bringing down the country. That was the Rize talking. Milgram would have a lot more going on consciously if he weren't cramming all that benzodiazanine.

I asked Gibson why he thinks so many people characterize his work as dystopian, especially since he tends to favor happy endings.

He said:

None of us ever live in dystopia. That's an imaginary extreme. They just live in shitty cultures. And these societies [in my books] seem dystopian to middle class white people in North America. They don't seem dystopian if you live in Rio or anywhere in Africa. Most people in Africa would happily immigrate to the Sprawl.

I don't think a writer can hit the dystopic key without being misanthropic. I'm actually not misanthropic. I think people are capable of wonderful things. I'm quite fond of them and enjoy their company. I can't do Jonathan Swift. I don't have it in me to do that. I also don't have it in me to say to reader, “This is all real.” I'm enough of a postmodernist that I go in and out of believing in my own narrative. The happy endings, such as they, are are actually a function of that. They're the "that's all folks” at the end, waving the big three-fingered glove. I want to remind people that they're reading a novel about an imaginary future. If I had my way, I'd even be reminding people about the whole culture of reminding people.

I asked him please not to get meta like that, since it would take him into Thomas "Gravity's Rainbow" Pyncheon territory.

He said:

In Pyncheon you're never allowed to believe in the characters. He's making moves all the way through to remind you that these are cartoons. I have a little bit of that. I don't want people to be completely sucked into the mechanism. They should remember that they're riding on a rollercoaster. But I roll with the human characters.

So what's next for Gibson? What's he working on now? He was a little mysterious but did say:

I have a historic tendency to write three book sets, but I'm unlikely to do it next time out. I always start from nothing – no idea. I daydream about writing a Civil War novel. I happen to know a fair bit about the Civil War. But I don't get to make those choices – the saving grace of my method is that they're made for me. And I can't say anything about it beforehand, or I feel locked in.

Here's hoping for a near-future Gibson novel where new forensic technologies allow people to reconstruct the Civil War in perfect detail. Of course just by writing that, I have guaranteed that it won't happen. Sorry, Civil War buffs!

You can get Spook Country in paperpack! [via Amazon]

If a comet or asteroid doesn't slam into the planet between now and then, ending civilization, it will greatly improve our chances of killing ourselves off, instead of being snuffed out by some cosmic accident. Thank you, Canucks.

As this New Scientist article says, astronomers on the ground have been looking for potentially threatening asteroids for decades, but even a small space telescope like NEOSSat will really help us out:

Scientists are using ground-based telescopes to track down more of the near-Earth objects (NEOs) to determine if any could potentially hit the planet in the foreseeable future. But some of these objects are difficult to see from the ground.

t will rely on a telescope with a 15-centimetre mirror, smaller than many backyard telescopes used by amateur astronomers. Chief scientists for the mission are Alan Hildebrand of the University of Calgary and Brad Wallace of Defence Research and Development Canada.

Despite its modest dimensions, the spacecraft's unique vantage point in space may allow it to spot objects that are difficult to see from the ground.

Most of the NEOs found so far have elongated orbits that extend far away from the Sun. But some never venture much beyond Earth's orbit.

These stay close to the Sun in the sky, meaning they must be observed when the Sun is not far below the horizon - before sunrise and after sunset. At those times, the glow of the sky can make the objects hard to see.

Operating above the atmosphere, NEOSSat will have a clearer view of such objects. It is expected to catalogue at least 50% of the ones that span more than 1 kilometre.

These close-in objects are more dangerous than their more far-flung siblings because they spend more time in the vicinity of Earth, where there is the potential for a collision, says Timothy Spahr. An astronomer at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics in Cambridge, Massachusetts, US, Spahr co-authored a 2007 NASA report to the US Congress on the risk to Earth from NEOs.

NEOSSat only weighs about 60kg and cost $10 million to build...about what it costs for a candy bar in the Pentagon cafeteria. And for that pittance all we get is an unprecedented level of interplanetary defense. We owe you one, Canada.

Source: New Scientist (image: TreeHugger)

The photo, taken by Jeff Kerr, was the Astronomy Picture of the Day yesterday. It showcases why the shelf cloud is particularly menacing — not only does it presage a storm, but it's attached to another bank of clouds above it. So it's literally a gigantic wall of cloud leading a cold front. (Though it's not the same as a wall cloud, which trails a storm system rather than leading it.)

Also, this image shows off the amazing beauty of the Saskatchewan prairies and reminds me that sometimes Earth is the most alien-looking planet I know.