Big Daddy from Kotaku
Alien from azhrialilu
Tentacle alien from Swishrelic
The Light Knight from batsax
Batman by birdsigh
Cthulhu by demona_hw
Dalek by UT Events
Dalek by Afraid Of Ducks
Master Chief from sleepi_tama
Jabba from Godlesswanderer
Optimus Prime from dalangalma
Snobot from frauclouds
Robot from gremlindog
Space Invader from gremlindog
TARDIS from MommaHeva
Temple of Doom from Geektopia
Totoro from Super Punch
Darth Vader from greycap
An alternate universe where we're all snowmen from VoIP

So why are these cities so overwhelmingly large? And where do they come from? Here's a list, by region:

North America:

The city of North Am (in Magnus Robot Fighter) does just what it sounds like — it covers almost the entirety of North America, giving you lots and lots of space in which to (what else?) fight robots.

The Maze is a huge network of underground parking garages that stretches all the way from New York to Los Angeles, in the movie Circuitry Man.

Lots and lots of SF stories predict a huge swathe of city stretching along the East Coast of the United States. One of the most famous is Judge Dredd's Mega-City One, which eventually stretches all the way down to Florida.

In Neuromancer and other books by William Gibson, a mega-city stretching from Boston to Atlanta is known as the Boston-Atlanta Metropolitan Axis (BAMA) or The Sprawl.

In He, She And It by Marge Piercy, the urban megalopolis that stretches from the former Boston to the former Atlanta is called The Glop.

And similarly, in the novel The Rise Of The Conglomerates by Thomas Nevins, a huge sprawling "Conglomerate City" occupies most of the East Coast of the United States.

There's also BosWash, the city that stretches from Manchester, NH to Virginia Beach, Virginia. It was first predicted in the 1961 book Megalopolis: The Urbanized Northeastern Seaboard of the United States by Jean Gottman.

The City in Transmetropolitan is commonly believed to be a megacity including New York and stretching as far West as the Great Lakes, which are referred to as its Western lakes.

The Greater Chicago Industrial Zone: In Halo, the former city of Chicago now covers the former states of Illinois, Wisconsin, Indiana. And Chicago is no longer really part of the United States — the people in this city-state consider thesmelves citizens of the United Nations.

In real life, some urban planners talk about an area called ChiPitts, which comprises Chicago and Pittsburgh, and everything in between.

Texarkana in A Canticle For Leibowitz, appears to cover a huge chunk of the former Texas and Arkansas, and becomes the capitol of an empire that rules the Western Hemisphere — and eventually wipes out its main rival, New Rome. (Map from Wikipedia page.)

Texas City, in the Judge Dredd comic, covers a huge area of the former Southwest — including Texas, of course.

Bay City is a massive conurbation covering San Francisco as well as its outlying areas, in Richard K. Morgan's Altered Carbon.

San Angeles appears in many different works of fiction, and it usually encompasses Los Angeles, San Diego and sometimes Santa Barbara. It's the setting for Demolition Man.

Mega-City Two also accounts for five thousand miles of California coastline — or it did, until it was nuked — in the Judge Dredd comic.

South America:

Sao Paulo/Rio: In Ben Bova's Mars, the rural poor stream into the cities of Sao Paolo and Rio De Janeiro in such huge numbers, the two cities grow into "a single urban megacity more than three hundred kilometers wide, that stretched from the beaches to the inland hills, sparkling high-rise towers for the rich, sprawling filthy slums for the poor, and smoggy lung-corroding pollution for all."

Ciudad Baranquilla, aka Banana City, is the mega city that covers most of Central America in the Judge Dredd comics.

Europe:

Greater London — in Sunstorm by Arthur C. Clarke and Stephen Baxter, London has grown outwards massively, swallowing up tons of villages and formerly independent towns. Clarke and Baxter describe London as spreading out, "kilometer upon kilometer of houses and factories... the scattered, helpless city that lay helpless below" a passing airplane.

Edinburgh/Glasgow — it's not strictly speaking science fiction, but there's a lot of talk about these two Scottish cities combining into one megalopolis in the coming century. The two cities could soon be linked by a high-speed maglev train. But it doesn't appear that any science fiction authors have written about EdinGow yet.

Metropia, in the animated film of the same name, is a massive network of subway systems and "undergrounds" linking all the cities in continental Europe. The world is running out of oil, so the leaders come up with the plan to link all of the subway systems into one huge network — which appears to be haunted.

City Europe, in the Chung Kuo series by David Wingrove, covers an enormous area of continental Europe, from Scandinavia to the Mediterranean. The city is made up of a series of "stacks" with the richest people living on the top levels and the poorest down in the wastelands below.

The south of England is occupied by Brit-Cit in Judge Dredd. Plus East Meg One is another mega-city in the Judge Dredd universe, which covers a big chunk of the former Soviet Union, including Moscow.

And of course, there's East-Meg One, the Soviet mega-city in Judge Dredd, which sprawls around the remains of Moscow — until it gets destroyed in a war with Mega-City One.

Africa:

Pan-Africa is a continent-wide quasi-state comprising several mega-cities in the Judge Dredd universe: they include Umar (the former Libya), Simba City (Cameroon), Luxor (Egypt), New Jerusalem (the northeast of Ethiopia), and Casablanca.

Gauteng is another one that doesn't appear to have popped up in science fiction very much, but it's talked about a lot in real life. In a nutshell, Johannesburg (a city already growing way past its capacity) joins up with Pretoria/Tshwane and a number of other municipalities, to form a single megacity. There are already plans to join them via a high-speed "Gautrain."

Asia:

Mega-Tokyo in Bubblegum Crisis. An earthquake splits Tokyo in two, and as the city rebuilds, it gets even larger and much more sprawling, coming to be known as Mega Tokyo. Here's a map of Mega Tokyo, from B-Club Special (via Igarashi) Likewise, Akira takes place in Neo Tokyo, a sprawling metropolis of steel and neon. And the anime Cyber-City Oedo 808 takes place in a fictional future "Edo," or Tokyo, which is apparently much larger than the existing city.

And real-life urban planners talk about the Taiheiyo Belt, which will cover the Pacific coast of Japan including Tokyo, Osaka and Nagoya.

A single continuous robotic structure known as The Host covers almost all the islands of Japan, and 50 million people live inside it, in Magnus Robot Fighter and Rai.

And of course, Judge Dredd does not leave Asia untouched — Hondo City covers most of Japan, from Hokkaido all the way down to Wakayama.

Australia:

Greater Sydney is predicted to encompass a region spanning from Melbourne, all the way up to Queensland along the coast. But as with Edinburgh/Glasgow and Gauteng, it doesn't appear that anybody's written science fiction about this megalopolis yet.

The South Pole:

A continent-wide city called Antarcto covers the whole of the Antarctic, in Magnus, Robot Fighter. Because robot-fighting is best served... cold.

And of course, the city of Holy Terra, or just Terra, occupies almost the entire planet's surface in Warhammer 40,000.

Additional reporting by Alexis Brown. Map layout by Stephanie Fox.

[IGN] (Via)

After seeing District 9, we're sad we'll never get to see Halo done by Neill Blomkamp and Peter Jackson, because those are some storytelling and visual-effects chops. The truth is, video game movies don't have to suck — as long as someone better than Uwe Boll is in the director's chair, and you avoid the kind of bizarre decisions that went into giving us Doom.

So here are the ten movies that have a better chance of reaching screens than Halo right now - some of which might even be great.

The game: Dead Space.
Who's in? D.J. Caruso, director of Disturbia and Eagle Eye (and in line to direct Y: The Last Man) was announced as director of this film recently.
What's the Hollywood summary? As Variety puts it, "Set in deep space in the 26th Century, the thriller focuses on an engineer who responds to a distress signal from a mining ship, only to find it infested with monstrous creatures called Necromorphs, human corpses that have been re-animated by an alien virus. The engineer and his team retrofit most of their weapons from tools on the mining ship, and try to stay alive long enough to discover the "hive mind" that is controlling the creatures."
Is it really more likely than Halo? There's a production deal, but nobody's written a script yet, and Caruso still wants to make a Y movie. He's also in pre-production on a movie called Jack The Giant Killer, and working on The Defenders, according to IMDB.

The game: BioShock
Who's in? Gore Verbinsiki, director of the Pirates Of The Caribbean movies. With a screenplay by John Logan (Gladiator, Star Trek: Nemesis).
What's the Hollywood summary? Says Variety, "Story takes place in the underwater city Rapture, where a pilot crash-lands near a secret entrance and becomes involved in a power struggle."
Is it really more likely than Halo? Maybe not. Back in April, Universal put the project on hold due to concerns about its high budget (around $160 million.) But Variety adds: "All parties vow that "Bioshock" will not become another "Halo," the would-be live-action adaptation of the Microsoft game that was canceled when Universal and Fox got cold feet over budget fears." So there you go. They vow. And Verbinski bailed out of Pirates 4 to do this project, so he's motivated.

The game: Duke Nukem
Who's in? Depth Entertainment, the studio that produced Max Payne. (So if you liked Max Payne, you're all set.)
What's the Hollywood summary? No details are available, but basically a wisecracking guy fights aliens. Says Scott Miller with 3-D Realms: "We're taking an all-new direction this time around. I haven't seen that old material in years, and can't even remember what it was about. So, we're starting from scratch on a story. Our first order of business is to create a Duke Nukem storyverse, which is similar to a story bible, and fleshes out all of the characters, their histories, motives, and gives a very detailed description of the Duke Nukem "universe." Once this is created, we then have the foundation to create a story and a script. This storyverse document will also be useful for future projects."
Is it really more likely than Halo? Max Payne got made, didn't it? Picture Mark Wahlberg in a tank top.

The game: Area 51
Who's in? Comics god Grant Morrison was hired to write the screenplay in 2007 for Paramount Pictures. No director or stars are attached, though.
What's the Hollywood summary? Says Variety, "Set in the U.S. government's most top-secret military facility, storyline revolves around a hazardous materials specialist who is called in to investigate a viral outbreak that could be extra-terrestrial in nature."
Is it really more likely than Halo? Um, well... there's been no movement since Morrison was attached as screenwriter in 2007.

The game: Mass Effect
Who's in? Avi Arad, former head of Marvel movies and producer of the Spider-Man and X-Men movies, signed on last September.
What's the Hollywood summary? The story follows Commander Shepherd and his crew as they save alien species from the systematic eradication that a random species must face every 50,000 years from a pitiless mechanical foe. And a crusty bureaucray stands in their way at every turn.
Is it really more likely than Halo? Arad has a track record of getting movies made, obvously — but there's been no news in almost a year.

The game: inFAMOUS
Who's in? It was announced in late July8 that Sheldon Turner, writer of The Longest Yard remake and Up In The Air, pitched a movie adaptation and Sony picked it up. Former Marvel exec Avi Arad (and Ari Arad) will produce.
What's the Hollywood summary? Says the Hollywood Reporter, "inFAMOUS centers on bike messenger Cole MacGrath, who survives an explosion that destroys entire blocks of Empire City only to find he has new electricity-derived super powers."
Is it really more likely than Halo? Sony seems highly motivated to make it happen, especially since sister company Sony Computer Entertainment published the game, from Sucker Punch Prods.

The game: Asteroids
Who's in? It was just announced that Lorenzo di Bonaventura (G.I. Joe) will be producing, with a screenplay by Matthew Lopez (Race To Witch Mountain.) No director or stars yet. (Insert your own joke about various Hollywood stars who could play convincing chunks of space rock.)
What's the Hollywood summary? Says di Bonaventura, "We've crafted a really strong, deep mythology for the thing. Without divulging too much about it, it's two lead characters – two brothers – who have to go through a seminal experience to figure out their relationship, against this huge backdrop."
Is it really more likely than Halo? Well, G.I. Joe did pretty well. So, yeah.

The game: World Of Warcraft
Who's in? Sam Raimi is signed up to direct, after he's done making Spider-Man 4. Charles Roven (The Dark Knight) is producing.
What's the Hollywood summary? Says the Guardian, Warcraft "is set in a medieval-style fantasy world called Azeroth populated by humans and such Lord of the Rings-style races as orcs, trolls and dwarves, but also the undead and blood elves. Players must choose whether to join the nefarious Horde or the Alliance faction."
Is it really more likely than Halo? It's pretty much a done deal. Raimi is supervising the start of production while he works on Spidey. It may even be decent.

The game: Gears Of War
Who's in? Len Wiseman (Live Free Or Die Hard) is directing, from a script by Chris Morgan (Wanted), with Bowen and Godfrey of Temple Hill producing for New Line. Dwayne "The Rock" Johnson won't star, because "a Doom connection would not be smart for us," says Wiseman. But he's hoping Kate Beckinsale will play Maria, the doomed wife of second-in-command Dominic Santiago.
What's the Hollywood summary? Wiseman told Comic Con that the movie will include Emergence Day, when the enemy Locusts emerged from underground and revealed themselves to the human inhabitants of the distant planet Sera. That would make the movie a prequel to the games, which take place long after Emergence Day. Also, Wiseman says there would be more bad-ass female soldiers.
Is it really more likely than Halo? It's still in the early stages, but Wiseman seems pretty determined to make it a reality.

The game: The Sims
Who's in? John Davis (Norbit, Eragon) is producing for Fox, with a screenplay by Brian Lynch.
What's the Hollywood summary? A couple of kids get their hands on the Sims Enhancement Pack, says Davis, and then mayhem results: "What they realize is that they can scan their world in, because this is the most life-like, real Sims game ever. As they are playing this, they are all of a sudden realising [that] what they are playing on the game is having an effect on the real world. So in effect, through the game, they are able to control their world. It's wish fulfillment, and obviously it turns against them."
Is it really more likely than Halo? It was announced in 2007 and has been stalled since then. But never underestimate Hollywood's sadism.

I sat down with Buckell at WorldCon last week. First we talked about Arctic Rising, and where he is with it.

Buckell said:

It's a near-future cyberpunk ecothriller. I'm just working on the first third of it. It's the first of two books I'm doing for Tor, and both will be ecothrillers.

I'm trying to write something that's [politically] moderate ecological SF. I did something similar in short fiction in the last year, with my story in Metatropolis, and now I'm taking it into novel form. Some people called me a raging liberal for writing [that story]. But I want to piss off liberals and conservatives – all of their solutions are problematic. Dogma gets in the way of what need to be done about the environment.

There are already responses on the ground to what we're facing that are agnostic – in third world, for example, where people have already figured out ways to reduce your impact on the earth. It's criminal that it's hard for me to find a showerhead that doesn't have an on-off switch that's detachable. I grew up on a boat and all the showerheads were like that. Now I routinely use oodles of water because my showerhead doesn't turn off. Little things like that add up. In St. Thomas, people get water by catching rainwater on the roof.

I realized that there are not many people interested in engaging with this stuff. It's in the political background and in science magazines. But there's not as much engagement with it in science fiction as I've been hoping for. That's why I want to do a James Bondesque adventure with climate change. I love adventure. What I hate about polemical novels is two characters talking to each other.

I asked Buckell if he'd consider doing another franchise tie-in like he did with the Halo novel, and he said that he only did the Halo book because he truly loves Halo. There are few other franchises he feels that way about, but, he admitted, "If anybody was ever to ask me to do something Wolverine-related - good grief I'd do it in a heartbeat."

Instead of playing in other people's franchises, he's interested in creating his own. He said:

You become a mini-consortium if you can. Given how much fun I've had with Halo games, comics, and reading and writing Halo books, I'd love to do different media with my stuff. There's a possible chance of a graphic short story adaptation coming up for me. I would completely dig seeing cross media stuff happen with my work.

One of the most arresting aspects of Buckell's writing is his facility with fight scenes, which are incredibly hard to write well. I asked him what his secret is for planning and executing one of his trademark action-packed scenes. He said:

Fight scenes are all about the stakes. If you took a Jackie Chan movie and novelize it, it would be weird. In fiction, you have to figure out the consequences of the fight scene. What the stakes are, what led the characters there. You need to consider the emotional side of the fight to make it feel like it's a major problem the character has to overcome.

As an action-oriented, blow-things-up writer from the beginning, my juvenalia is filled with fight scenes, but I wasn't able to make them interesting until I figured out they exist in a larger context. The reader is reading it like "oh crap oh crap" and that's what provides the tension. Really effective fight scenes are no more than a paragraph – the important parts are the anticipation and fallout. The shorter you write, the faster it feels to the reader. A page-long fight is the equivalent of slow motion – you've brought the book to a standstill. You can do it stylistically in a John Woo flash, but if you want a balls-to-the-wall, ugly, brief human thing, you've got a paragraph to get to of the action, and then you need to get back into stakes.

When I write fight scenes, I spend time trying to draw out the environment [the characters] are in. Tim Powers taught me that characters need to interact with the physicality of the environment. A fight scene lets you block out the physical nature of something. They climb around in it, and that lets you describe the interior of an airship. You get to provide exposition as well as a fight scene or moments of drama. More effective to have a character back up and fall over a couch than to say "There's a room and a couch and then they fight."

We told you last month about Beattie's desire to make a movie based on the popular Halo franchise and we showed you concept art from his pitch last August. But it seems that we weren't the only ones who noticed the passion in the GI Joe writer's words; Steven Spielberg is, according to IESB's sources, in active negotiations to sign onto the project — in the process, resurrecting it from the dead state it's collapsed into — because of Beattie's pitch.

Whether or not this means that the movie will ever get made, remains to be seen — Halo has already defeated Peter Jackson, after all.

Master Chief and HALO May Be Coming to the Big Screen Sooner than Expected with a New Big Name Producer [IESB]

Blame it on publishers focusing on con announcements and con exclusive releases, but this week's haul at your local store seems surprisingly light. (DC only really has the hardcover release of Final Crisis: Rogues' Revenge to recommend, while Dark Horse offers up the prequel-era Star Wars Omnibus: Menace Revealed and the first issue of a new Emily The Strange series to non-con-goers.)

But if you're looking for books tying into your favorite moving picture media, you're actually in for a great week - IDW has Doctor Who: Room With A Deja View and Star Trek: Spock - Reflections #1. And Boom! has Farscape: Gone & Back #1. Even Marvel is getting in on the act, with the first issue of new videogame tie-in Halo: Helljumper.

Marvel, to be fair, is pushing the boat out with their books, offering the first issue of martial arts exploitation comic Immortal Weapons and the extra-sized #600s of both Incredible Hulk and Amazing Spider-Man (That last one being all-new material, no filler).

More superhero thrills can be found in Dynamite's Project Superpowers: Chapter Two #1. But not even that updating of Golden Age craziness can compete with the genuine article of insanity known as You Shall Die By Your Own Evil Creation, the second (and final) collection of Fletcher Hanks' comics from 1939-1941, each one a celebration of a man with a special talent for both cartooning and self-destruction. (We reviewed the first volume here.)

If you're not headed to SDCC - and, really, why not? - then the Comic Shop Locator would be of use to you, as would the full shipping list from Diamond Distrubutors. To everyone else: I'll see you there. I'll be the one looking slightly stressed. Well, one of the ones looking slightly stressed...

Beattie talked to SciFi Wire about the Halo movie that he wants to make so much, he's even come up with his own concept art:

I just think it's an amazing story about this child that no one cares about and who cares for no one else, who kind of ends up saving all of humanity... "I wouldn't want to stand in the way of it getting made, but I firmly believe that the first Halo movie needs to be the Fall of Reach story, because it sets up all the characters, the world, the Covenant, the big struggle between mankind and the aliens, all that stuff... that's where my money is.

But why make a Halo movie in the first place?

I think not every video game should be made into a movie, just like not every book should be made into a movie. Not every comic book should, but certain ones definitely should, because they're so visual, the characters are so rich and the mythology is so vast that they should. Halo is definitely one of the shoulds... It's like our generation's Star Wars. The whole Halo nation that's out there, and a 100,000-year history of the Halo universe, it's just breathtaking and so much fun to play in that sandbox. I've read every book, played every game, every graphic novel. It's just a fun world to be in.

And, as every wish made on the internet comes true in some strange way - just try it, if you don't believe me - Beattie's IMDB listing already lists his fantasy Halo movie as having been announced. Now that's fast.

Why Stuart Beattie believes his Halo film will work [SciFi Wire]

The NZ Herald has an interview with Jackson, and the article also explains a bit more of this movie's plot, which revolves around

a multinational corporation, MNU, charged with policing the aliens while trying to find out their technological secrets. When an MNU agent is accidentally exposed to a mysterious alien substance, he finds himself a hunted man.

And Jackson explains how heart-breaking it was when the Halo movie that he and director Neill Blomkamp were going to make fell through, and how they decided to turn Blomkamp's short film Alive In Joburg into a low-budget feature film instead. And then Jackson adds:

It's difficult for a young film-maker to do anything that is based on life experience to some degree because if you are in your 20s you haven't had much life experience. You sometimes feel that there is some kid making a film and it is just based on some other movies that he has seen.

But Neill grew up in the dying days of apartheid in South Africa and he saw all the ugliness and all the brutality and how it affects people in different ways and all that is in the movie.

You just totally understand how he was approaching it from an authentic place - from a real South African perspective. He really loves Africa and he's tried to put a lot of it into the movie.

As for Blomkamp, he says he has a love/hate relationship with Johannesburg, and that the city's insane crime level gives it a feeling of living on the edge. And it turns out the filming of District 9 coincided with real-life massacres of Zimbabwean refugees living in nearby shanty towns:

It was completely barbaric what happened and that was the same day we started rolling cameras on a film that was about the residents of Joburg wanting a foreign race out. So all of a sudden I am making a film which within South African has this massive political point of view but really that isn't what we set out to do. So I hope that the residents of Joburg don't take it the wrong way.

And the article describes District 9 as RoboCop-meets-fake-documentary. Which doesn't sound like a bad thing at all. [NZ Herald]

According to a press release from Tor Books:

The first novel in this new trilogy will be published in early 2010. An unabridged audiobook edition will publish simultaneously with the new novel.

A science fiction icon and winner of the field's highest awards, Greg Bear has signed on to write three "Halo" novels set in the time of the Forerunners, the creators and builders of the Halos. Almost nothing is known for sure about this ancient race. Worshipped by the Covenant as gods, their engineering relics pepper the galaxy, and their connection to humanity remains unanswered. Devoted fans of both the books and games will finally get to delve deep into the era of these enigmatic beings, and discover for themselves the epic story behind one of the great mysteries of the "Halo" universe: the complete disappearance of the Forerunners from existence. "Greg Bear is truly a living legend of science fiction. To have him at play in the Halo universe will be exciting not just to Halo fans but to science fiction fans on a whole," says Eric Raab, Tor editor.

The major announcements at the Cup o' Joe panel, when Marvel Editor-in-Chief Joe Quesada answers fan questions, deal with Marvel's Ultimate Universe. When Ultimatum comes to a close, Marvel will be ending the Ultimate Marvel line and has announced one-shot Requiem books for Ultimate X-Men, written by Heroes' Aron Coleite, Ultimate Final Four, written by Heroes' Joe Pokaski, and a two-part Requiem story for Ultimate Spider-Man, written by Brian Bendis. Look for the first Ultimate Spider-Man Requiem in May, and the final three Requiem books in June.

Ultimate fans need not despair, though. Quesada announced that the Ultimate stories will continue in Ultimate Comics, a new line to be launched in July. Brian Bendis is on Ultimate Comics Spider-Man, with art by David LaFuente. Bendis promises that the series will trace the events following Ultimatum and, though it won't be a reboot, it does feature a new cast of characters, and we may see someone new in the Spidey suit.

Also on deck for Marvel is pair of limited run series based on Halo the video game franchise about cybernetic soldiers battling a theocratic alien empire. The panel revealed few details about the series, but announced that the first five-issue series, written by Peter David with art by Eric Nguyen, will launch this summer, and the second series Halo: Spartan Black launches this winter, written by Fred Van Lente with art by Francis Portela.

Counting down...

5. Arian Camilleri's Shudderblind website mostly consists of his efforts in portraiture photography. His series of photos featuring a miniature skeleton is captivating. They're both comic and tragic, making the little guy the Hamlet of the miniature form. Standing, lying down or in a pile of ash, the skeletal hero is almost too human to bear. There's something about the loneliness of the skeleton's plight that's more hopeless-feeling than three of the four Saw sequels.

4. Erik Deutscher's Animal Instinct Studios uses Star Wars and other scifi elements to create sprawling scenes with insane amounts of detail. His talent for photography brings the whole thing to life. Check out this awsome fight between a bunch of stormtroopers and rebels in a forest setting:

3. This diorama, built to advertise Halo 3, stands 12 feet tall and is peopled with 8 to 19-inch hand-crafted figures. Sure, it was made for a marketing campaign, but hey, that was one hell of a campaign. And any scene that ranges 12 feet high has to be enough to grab your attention.

2. Lego miniaturist Andrew Lee is doing plenty of exciting work with the materials you played with as a child, featuring robots made out of Lego and mechas that are worth taking a long look at. He did some of his best work with the machinery from The Matrix, putting more consistency into his designs than the Wachowskis did into the last two films.

1. Unlike most of our other miniaturists, Greg Easton's talents are less on the technical side, and more on the conceptual tip. Based in Cranston, Rhode Island, Easton has a talent for using off-the-shelf figurines to create something captivating and amusing, as in this Hellboy series.

Marvel's third issue of Halo: Uprising (delayed, if rumors are to believed, because Bungie changed the direction of the next Halo game mid-production) isn't the only treat that the House of Ideas has in store for you this week - They're also expanding their Secret Invasion with three new mini-series about the Skrull attacks starring the Inhumans (written by Heroes writer Joe Pokaski), Thor (written by Casanova and The Invincible Iron Man's Matt Fraction) and the X-Men. And if even that just leaves you hungry for more Mighty Marvel Action, then there's also X-Men Origins: Jean Gray, a one-shot starring everyone's favorite telekinetic redhead with some stunning art by Mike Mayhew.

DC Comics, in comparison, take it relatively lightly; in addition to the fourth part of Batman RIP, there's the launch of Final Crisis: Revelations (which sees the new Question take on her former partner-turned-official-personification-of-the-wrath-of-God, Cris Allen) as well as the long-awaited (by me) collection of 1988's most awesome crossover, Millennium. Alternatively, you could take that $100 you have laying around and spend it on the oversized hardcover Absolute League of Extraordinary Gentlemen: The Black Dossier.

To get back to the tie-in books of the week, though: Moonstone has the first issue (of two) for Buckaroo Banzai: The Prequel, while IDW pushes both boundaries and your wallet with the following: Transformers Best Of The UK: Time Wars, Transformers Animated: Arrival, Igor: The Movie Adaptation (in both comic form and collected edition), as well as the first issue of Scott Lobdell's Galaxy Quest: Global Warning. Most importantly of all, however, is Viper Comics' sole release of the week, The Middleman: The Collected Series Indispensability, which collects all of the original comic series into one handy-dandy, easy-to-carry-and-just-as-easy-to-read 336 page book for your entertainment enjoyment. If you like the TV show, you owe it to yourself (and your local comic store) to pick this up.

That local comic store can be found here, in case you're wondering. And if you're also wondering what else is coming out this week? You can find your answer here. You can thank me later.

It's... a Burger King Joker, I guess? Or perhaps an Emperor Joker? But what with a conference center full of Heath Ledger-alikes, it was nice to see a different take on ol' smiley.
And here's the Joker's Dark Knight nemesis, looking just as impressive as he did with millions of dollars' worth of CGI behind him.
You can just imagine the conversation here, can't you? "Okay, I'm gonna be Arnold Terminator. I'll look bad-ass and have blood all over me. You can be the other guy from T2. Here. Stick this on your hand and dress like a cop."
Dear DC Comics:
This is why a Question movie would look awesome.
Am I the only person who finds this Plastic (Wo)Man strangely sexy? If so, forget I said anything.
He may play a faceless hard-ass in the Halo videogames, but in real life? The Master Chief is a nerd just like you and me.
Hulk Smash! Or, if his plush muscles are anything to go by, maybe he'll just cuddle you to death.
The stars of Star Wars: Episode 2.5: When Those Clones Were Kids.
Sadly, when you tried to open up his chest in real life, it was already full of blood and guts and shit.
While I didn't see any Doctor Mrs. The Monarchs - and shame on all of you for that, collective Comic-Con attendees - this awesome Dr. Henry Killinger (complete with Monarch Henchman) almost made up for it.
No, your eyes really aren't deceiving you; that really is Teela and Evil-Lyn cosying up to the terrifying mascot of Mattel, "Matty". I'm telling you, Matty freaked me out last weekend.
Now that he's lost his main squeeze to a freakily-headed corporate mascot, poor Skeletor has nothing better to do than just hang around the con, heartbroken.
There are two children who are going to grow up to resent their parents. Do you think that when the little girl hits puberty and starts rebelling against her mom and dad, they'll make her wear the Dark Phoenix outfit instead?
You know what makes this Starscream so great? The incredibly happy, smiling face. He may be a murderous killing machine out to enslave humanity, but look at him - He's so cute!
Possibly the best outfits of the entire con - Human Tie Fighters. The only thing that would've made this better would be if someone had thought to decorate the entire con like the surface of the Death Star, so that at the end of Sunday, they could've run around it, while a gang of kids dressed as the Millennium Falcon pretended to shoot at them before shouting "You're all clear, kid! Now let's blow this thing so we can all go home!"

Four Days, Four Hundred Cosplay Photos. Welcome to the Ultimate Geek Gallery [Maximum PC]

Marvel Comics are keeping their side of the bargain, admittedly; if you're not interested in the hardcover reprint of poorly-drawn 1980s miniseries Kitty Pryde and Wolverine or the Skrulls! oneshot (pretty much a collection of fact files to bring you up to speed about Secret Invasion's Secret Invaders), then you're pretty much limited to two books: the reprint of the first couple of issues of the Halo: Uprising comic to remind you what happened now that the end is finally nigh, and the far-more-enjoyable-than-it-has-any-right-to-be 500th issue of Uncanny X-Men, where the team moves to San Francisco and parties at the SFMoMA. In other weeks, it'd easily be the must-have book of the week.

Sadly, though, DC are doing their best to claim that title for themselves with the long-long-long awaited return of Ambush Bug in Ambush Bug: Year None, wherein Keith Giffen's fourth-wall breaking snarkfest takes the last five years of DC's output to task for being confusing, depressing and just plain not fun. You know you want to read that. Collections-wise, you can catch up on space religion in the unfortunately-named-but-actually-fun Countdown To Adventure (starring Animal Man, Starfire and Adam Strange from 52), catch up on the joys of matrimony with Green Arrow/Black Canary: The Road To The Altar, and catch up on how the mighty have fallen with Authority: Prime, where superhero comics' one-time most daring title is reduced to generic continuity schlock. If that last sentence made no sense to you, then perhaps you should avoid superheroes altogether and pick up the X-Files Special, instead.

Image Comics are also making a strong showing this week: The next big Witchblade storyline begins in the first issue of Broken Trinity, Mark Millar and Tony Harris get their political satire on with the debut of War Heroes, Mike Allred's Madman questions reality in the first collection of Madman Atomic Comics, and Tori Amos finally becomes the comic character she's always wanted to be in the indie-creator-tastic anthology Comic Book Tattoo.

And just in case none of that is enough for you, consider the two takes on post-Buffy female heroes available in the indie comicsphere this week: Oni Press' The Apocalypstix finally bring their post-nuclear brand of rock, roll and kick-ass to stores at the same time as Cassie Hack of po-mo horror book Hack/Slash teams up with real-life emo pornlets in the Hack/Slash Annual Featuring The Suicide Girls. And, yes, I wish I was joking about that last one as well.

As ever! All of these books and many, many, more are listed here for your perusal and, if you've somehow made it this far without knowing where your local comic book store happens to be, you can find that out by clicking here. It's probably a great week to go to the store, really, because chances are they may be really quiet...

With the continued, somewhat inexplicable, success of Hancock, it seems that the only constant in Hollywood math is "(Will Smith) + (4th of July Weekend) x (Genre Movie) = $$$." Bearing that in mind, we thought that it's be kind of us to demonstrate to some stalled SF movie projects just to how to use the Fresh Prince of Bel-Air (and, let's face it, wherever else he wants to be the Prince of, these days) to get their movies up and running again.

Halo
Will Smith is...: The Mysterious Master Chief.
Why This Works: Sure, in the games (and the novels, and the comic books), you never see Master Chief's face, but just as that didn't work for the Judge Dredd movie, it's not going to work here, either. Pull up that visor and let's see the sensitive man underneath who knows that war is hell and space war even moreso. Smith got an Oscar nomination for The Pursuit of Happyness, so let's see him bring the pain here. Literally.

The Six Million Dollar Man
Will Smith is...: Well, Steve Austen, obviously.
Why This Works: Isn't it time to ruin another '70s TV show with the same kind of comedy treatment that worked so well for Starsky And Hutch? Put Smith in the familiar role and let him play it for laughs - Austen's cybernetic upgrade not only gives him more strength, super-powered eyesight and the ability to run surprisingly quickly, but also the power to loosen up his uptight white boss, played by Billy Bob Thornton, continuing his streak of slumming it in broad comedies. Throw in a Will Farrell cameo and it's box office gold, baby.

Ghostbusters 3
Will Smith is...: Nerdy accountant Louis Tully.
Why This Works: So Rick Moranis doesn't want to come back to the role that made him famous? That's no problem - Replace him with an even bigger star. Here's your explanation as to how it happened: Between movies, Tully had a terrible accident that forced him to have an incredible amount of reconstructive surgery. When he recovered from the surgery, he was a changed man: Tall, attractive, charismatic... and no longer afraid of no ghosts.

Green Lantern
Will Smith is...: Hal Jordan. Admit it; you thought I was going to say John Stewart, didn't you?
Why This Works: Smith takes on the role of ladykiller test pilot Jordan, the one man who can save the world through the power of his mind. It's the next step of Smith's Independence Day role, but with the added benefit of a lack of Jeff Goldblum's scientist hacker. Plus, who wouldn't want to see Smith in this role, besides the legion of fanboys who'd get upset that they didn't pick a white actor?

Wild Wild West 2
Will Smith is...: Captain James West.
Why This Works: ...Okay, maybe this is the exception that proves the rule. Never mind.

The creator creator allows you to design a unique look for your critter, and to pack it with attributes that will aid it in its quest for survival. A social animal will have to make friends and influence creatures. A herbivore can only eat fruit it can reach, and a predator can only feed on prey it can outrun or outfox and outfight. You can guess which path my Chlororaptor is designed to take.

Your critter's biology - the choices that you made while creating and upgrading your creature - will influence the culture that develops as your creature moves into the civilization phase of the game. Twitchy many-eyed herbivores built by nature to constantly search for and flee from trouble do not easily develop into Klingons. The game is likely to be more forgiving than evolution, but one can imagine a player sighing, "The appendix...what was I thinking?" You can also add my creatures to your games. Spore is kind enough to keep track of the statistics, giving me a chance to see how successful my voracious sack of algae tends to be.

Environment, change, and consequence aren't the whole story, but they are a pretty good introduction. As a teacher I've always been interested in entertainment that manages to educate without being obnoxious. If science is done entirely without a sense of play it ends up being wearisome and fruitless. And Spore isn't the only game to figure that out.

Programs like Folding@home use your home computer or Playstation 3 to process the dynamics of protein folding. Proteins are long chains of amino acids that are wadded together in specific ways. Fold them into the wrong shape, and at best you'll have a nonfunctional protein. At worst, you could be looking at the beginning of Alzheimer's. The math to describe protein folding is typically too much for a single computer to handle, but thousands of idle PS3s between games of Call of Duty 4 can do a lot of sums.

With apologies to the King of All Cosmos, this is how I imagine Folding@home on a PS3.

Foldit takes this approach a step further. Instead of taking advantage of computers, Foldit takes advantage of users. Teams of folders compete to produce the best 3D shape for a given protein. Human beings are good at manipulating 3D shapes and solving puzzles - computers aren't, or, at least, aren't yet. Given the rules of how different pieces of a protein will interact with one another, what likely shapes will it assume? Give a computer this problem and it will laboriously and ponderously churn its way to an answer that might be obvious to you or I (for a simple protein). Give the same computer the wrong algorithm or starting conditions, and you'll get nowhere fast.

Dr. Leeroy Jenkins prematurely rearranges a protein, much to the chagrin of his Foldit guild.

Games like this take advantage of what NYU digital studies professor Clay Shirky has called the cognitive surplus - the spare time to ponder and participate that technology and culture have been steadily generating ever since the human race moved past subsistence. Though some of the surplus ends up devoted to projects like Wikipedia, much of it is naturally expended creating and consuming art and entertainment. The amount of work required to appreciate entertainment varies, but many would argue that the complexity of popular television narratives has increased significantly. A good narrative is a puzzle with people in it, and requires a bit of that cognitive surplus to enjoy.

The alternate reality game I Love Bees tapped into that surplus with a vengeance. A beekeeper's website begins to display disjointed and enigmatic fragments of text. What follows is a complex narrative involving the Halo universe and an damaged artificial intelligence. Players were rewarded for solving puzzles given to them by the game team with a new clue or an advancement of the plot towards. In Why I Love Bees: A Case Study in Collective Intelligence Gaming, Dr. Jane McGonigal discusses how players - without prompting from the game team - naturally developed strategies for distributing workload and solving puzzles efficiently. Given a list of numbers that could be GPS coordinates, the mathematically inclined began working out alternate theories while the more physically adventurous (and geographically fortunate) began visiting locations and looking for commonalities. A relay puzzle required the communication of facts given to the players via payphone increasingly quickly to the next player at a distant payphone - one break in the chain, and that part of the narrative ends. Despite a scant 15-second pause from one call to the next during the most challenging part of the puzzle, the players never wavered. Another part of the game involved an artificial computer language, which the players were so successful at deciphering that, by the end of the game, the game team was using the player documentation to write hints.

Expert analysis of data, peer review, and the effective coordination of large groups in an emergency emerged in-game. These are talents that are useful for more than finding out what happened to a fictional bee fancier's web page. The energy, brilliance, and sheer bloody-mindedness of your gamers is a largely untapped resource. I imagine Final Fantasy minigames where players fold magical widgets into protein shapes for bonuses, or an alternate reality game where FEMA takes notes. Hybridize real problems with compelling narratives, and you may find that you and your guild inadvertently cured cancer.

Based on the Fall of Reach prequel novel, Beattie's script follows a soldier named John from his conscription into the USNC to his transformation into the Master Chief. Then we see the horrific first contact with the Covenant, leading to the fall of the USNC base on Reach, which only the Master Chief survives. Beattie also has sketched out the plots for two sequels. Now will Microsoft pay attention? [Latino Review, which swears this isn't an April Fools thing.]

Preuss, who is currently designing book covers for science fiction novels by Gene Wolf and others, says that this picture of the inner life of a halo world is actually a sequel to an image he created of the outside of the halo world a few years ago. He writes:

This time I wanted to show you how this giant ringworld could look from the inside and how a civilisation would live there.