[via Topless Robot]

The film comes out July 16th, 2010.

[via Apple]

The whole park is supposed to be up and running in the Spring of 2010 in Universal orlando Resort. First video via the Leaky Cauldron.

Grossman explained his disappointment in JK Rowling's choice of future for her boy hero to Newsarama.com:

I loved Harry Potter, but that epilogue was such an astounding failure of imagination on Rowling's part! And in a way, it throws the entirety of all seven novels into doubt retroactively.

I felt the problem she failed to solve was the question of, "here's a young man who can do magic, who has defeated the enemy of humanity when her was 18 – what's the rest of his life look like?" And the best she can imagine is that he marries his high school sweetheart and puts on a big gut and lives in the suburbs. What a disaster!

He went on to say,

There has to be some better fate for Harry Potter than what he gets. I think that's something of the message of [Grossman's new book] The Magicians – you're not going to go to Narnia, but there has to be something better than that bourgeois suburban mediocrity that seems like the only alternative.

Somewhere, a million Potter fans are sharpening their knives in preparation for revenge.

The MAGIC of Lev Grossman [Newsarama.com]

Based on the book by Rick Riordan, this story follows a trendily coiffed youth, who finds out he is part God or something. Then he rides the elevator in the Empire State Building to, presumably, Mount Olympus. In the book, he gets sent on a wild adventure stuck in the middle of a giant God war.

It's got the Harry Potter touch, which is probably due to director Chris Columbus' previous work on Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets and Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone.

I love things that fuse reality and fantasy, and I was always jealous of the Potter nods to London, but now New York has it's own secret modern day mythology... and the Empire State Building's employees will forever have to scratch off Omega stickers on their elevators.

[Via Moviefone]

Love Potion No. 9
The authority on pop culture love potion movies. Staring Tate Donovan and Sandra Bullock, two biochemists who happen upon a love potion. The best part is they both use it the best way possible. The man runs rampant in a sorority house, while the social-climbing lady dates a prince.

Buffy The Vampire Slayer
Even though we loved watching Joyce try and seduce Xander, the varsity jacket of love takes the cake for hilarious love deeds done while under its power. Especially when Willow tries to turn the desired youth into a girl while Buffy attempts to blow up Principal Wood, all in the name of love.

The Craft
The scariest of all love spells. When one little high school witch tries to get the boy to notice her, it comes back times three and he practically rapes her in the woods.

Harry Potter and the Half Blood Prince
Romilda Vayne puts a temporary love potion into Chocolate Cauldrons meant for Harry but Ron accidentally eats them. Poor Ron, he's in love and doesn't know why.

Loved to Death Tales From The Crypt
This Crypt tale is all about too much of a good thing. When you slip the woman you desire a love potion and all she wants to do is have sex nonstop all the time, you may get over-loved, and end up hating yourself in the morning.

New York City has been taken over by sorcery, and io9 just happened to be there while all the mystical madness was going down. Upon hearing that Jerry Bruckheimer's rebooted live-action Sorcerer's Apprentice was filming, I scuttled all the way to the Brooklyn subway station, in hopes of glimpsing some magic in the making.

Just missing Bruckheimer - is that your muffin, Jerry? - I wandered around the set, hoping to catch a wave of Nicolas Cage's wand. (Cage plays the role of modern-day wizard.) And then I practically ran smack-dab into his young apprentice, Jay Baruchel, taking a break from the witchcraft. I approached the indie film star and told him I loved Fanboys.

"Oh, you saw it?" he smiled and I laughed, trying to suppress my dire need to tell him I'd never seen anyone look better in a Stormtrooper uniform. We chatted about The Sorcerer's Apprentice, and Baruchel confirmed that he'd be playing the apprentice in the new movie, set in modern day New York (all around it actually from the NYU campus as well as in Brooklyn).

It sounded like he was excited as I was to see it all come together. "I'm used to doing like, million dollar movies filmed in Vancouver, so this is really big for me, working with Nic Cage and everything. And the budget being, like, 100 times larger." Indeed, we noticed the muffins.

Sadly, my time with the modern day mouse was short, as he escorted back to the subway set. From between the subway bars, I watched Baruchel take on the role of the haphazard would-be wizard, running about on the platform and looking confused. All the extras were also donning modern streetwear, so no Dumbledorian robes and caps for this cast. But eventually the crew moved farther down away from eyesight but we'll keep a keen watch for more street magic from this crew.

The Sorcerer's Apprentice is set to come out on July, 16 2010.

Top image via Splash News.

Everything in Ghostbusters. This is the movie that perfected the magic-handling gadgets motif, from the "ghost sniffer" to the ghost detector, to the ecto-goggles, to the giga-meter... pretty much any kind of gizmo you might need to figure out the location of an evil spirit, Egon whips up at one point or another. And they all look awesome, as a bonus.

The BTRS detector in The Middleman. Our studly science hero uses a BTRS (Beyond The Realm Of Science) detector to scan for things that are, well... beyond the realm of science. As Wendy says: "Handy."

The Dragon Detector from Questors by Joan Lennon. In Lennon's fantasy novel, our hero Bryn has a gadget called a "dragon detector" which gives off an awful noise when the dragon Dagrod comes near it. As Bryn explains to Dagrod, "Apparently you give off a sort of radiation, and if I wanted to know if you were around, or coming closer, or something, this would tell me..."

The EMF detector, from Supernatural. Turns out that ghosts and other nasties give off electromagnetic fields, which you can detect with a handy gizmo. So in almost every episode of Supernatural, Dean Winchester whips out his flashing whizbang at some point. Which is very DIY, as Sam discovers in "Phantom Traveler":

Sam: What is that?
Dean: It's an EMF meter. It reads electromagnetic frequencies.
Sam: Yeah, I know what an EMF Meter is, but why does that one look like a busted up walkman?
Dean: Cause that's what I made it out of. It's homemade.
Sam: Yeah, I can see that.

People actually use these things in real life, and the guys on Ghost Hunters also use a similar rig to look for ghost signatures. And I love these gizmos.

Fairy detector in The Fairly Odd Parents. Mr. Crocker, the only adult who believes fairies exist, builds a fairy detector. And before his memories of his own godparents were taken away, he scrawled "Fairy Godparents Exist" on the back of a fairy detector.

Tricorder from Star Trek. The crew of the Enterprise frequently visits worlds where magic, of some sort, appears to work, including in the episode "Catspaw" and the animated episode "The Magicks Of Megas-Tu." Frequently, even if these magical mind-energies are not susceptible to human technology, they can be tracked to their source using Spock's tricorder, and some good old human ingenuity.

The "Ectoplex" Paranormal Energy Detector, from Sabrina The Teenage Witch. It zeroes in on paranormal energy fields and supernatural phenomena, as you can see in this clip (around the four-minute mark):


Dragon Radar from Dragonball. It's used to find the mystical dragon balls which summon the wish-granting dragon Shenron when you gather all seven of them together.

The Spook Detector in Caballistics, Inc., a comic that's been running in British anthology series 2000 A.D. since 2002. One of the paranormal investigators in the newly privatized Department Q is Hannah Chapter, who comes equipped with her own "spook detector."

Vampire Detector in Tales From The Crypt, "Fare Tonight." Two young girls, Mildred and Camille, decide to become amateur vampire hunters, and so they build their own homemade "vampire detector" gun, in this 1993 episode. And here's a picture of a cool Steampunk vampire detector that someone built as part of a costume.

The Emergency Detector in Ultraman. The Science Patrol all wear special tie-pins which blink and react when a monster gets too close. This is their "emergency detector."

So what did we miss?

Additional reporting by Alasdair Wilkins.

Potter's props and things will be traveling the United States, but they're starting in that Chicago science museum... which makes perfect sense what with all the science in Potter films. The props and costumes from the film are being dubbed "iconic artifacts." There's no doubt that Harry Potter has influenced our culture greatly and should have some place in museums, but this money-making scheme to pollute my favorite museum (home of the creepy hall of babies) with hordes of children is upsetting. More importantly, how is this teaching anyone about science? Has our world blurred the differences between science and magic so much that we'll display Harry's wand and call it technology?

Do I want to go? Sure. But I'm a little thrown off by the location. It's kind of amazing how magic is truly taking over society, what with vampires and wizards, just as real science literacy is on the wane. I'm going out on a limb here, but maybe it's only a matter of time before children stop being able to distinguish between magic and actual feasible tech.

You can buy tickets at the Museum Of Science And Industry for the Chicago opening on April 30 2009.

[Harry Potter Exhibit]

Time To Fight, Again!

But We Swear Its Not All Death Eaters And Dead Students

Who Is This Tom Riddle And Why Does He Hate Everything So Much?

Love At Hogwarts (I Will End You, Lavender Brown)

All About Professor Slughorn

In other Potter news, once Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows is released in 2010, WB will be out of wizard fodder to peddle to the kiddies. Never fear — J.K. Rowling's The Tales of Beedle The Bard is chock full of stories, perfect for turning into movies. According to the sources of at Cinema Blend, the WB is very interested in bringing the fable collection Beedle The Bard to life.

I'm okay with this — I want the Potter story to end naturally, but I wouldn't be opposed to a little more magic dust here and there. Just don't futz with the original Hallows ending, and you've got my vote.

Jeff VanderMeer, author of City of Saints and Madmen (and, with Ann VanderMeer, a columnist for io9):

The main difference is that science exists and magic doesn't. Even though everything in a novel is made up in a sense, this still matters—it creates different responsibilities. If, for example, the physical laws of a fantastical or SF world are different than our world, there has to be some explanation, no matter how off-the-cuff. And if that world contains magic, I think the writer has to be even more rigorous in thinking out how magical systems work, no matter how much of that appears in the text. This is because we are used to constraint. We are worlds of blood-and-water existing within a larger but finite network of people and settings, and all of that is constrained by the egg-yolk that is the Earth. If even something as arbitrary and recent as a sonnet suffers from constraint, then magic can be no different.

Of course, if you're a surrealist or absurdist, you often don't care about the difference between science and magic because the boundary between the two is going to be trampled and gleefully pissed on anyway. As well it should. Nothing is more annoying than allowing a little reality ruin your fun. If you have the imagination to get away with it.

Or, if you're Jack Vance, you just set your stories far enough in the future that the science seems like magic and you sit back in your golden throne, fold your arms, and cackle like either a mad scientist or a crazy sorcerer—take your pick.

One reason I have no magic in most of my fiction is that I cannot believe in it and thus cannot write about it in any convincing way. This is the same reason you do not find unicorns in my fiction. Or Smurfs. Or Republicans. I can and do, however, believe in huge intelligent squid ponderously pulling themselves through the alleys of a weird city, protecting themselves with helmets full of water. I can also believe in nefarious mushroom-based intelligent life forms living in bizarre underground caverns. However, since this is merely an audacious application of current theory on biology and biological systems it amounts to perfectly good science.

Elizabeth Bear, author of New Amsterdam and Dust:

That's a really interesting question, especially since for both SF and fantasy, I tend to lift my "rules"—whether that means the laws of physics or the laws of magic—from outside sources. Basically, in terms of writing—science fiction or fantasy—science and magic both serve (for me) to form a framework upon which I can hang the rest of the story. They're a structural element. So I try to find the coolest bits of either than I can.

Stephen Hunt, author of Court of the Air:

A fantasy author creates a monster by having a character in robes of any colour mumbling a spell, whereas the rules clearly state a science fiction writer has to put the character in white robes only, and have them mumbling something about genetic engineering and how at termination of protein synthesis, type I release factors promote hydrolysis of the peptidyl-transfer RNA connection in reaction to recognition of a stop codon. For the average reader, though, these both seem equally magic.

Ted Chiang, author of Stories of Your Life and Others:

Roughly speaking, if you can mass-produce it, it's science, and if you can't, it's magic. As an example, suppose someone says she can transform lead into gold. If we can use her technique to build factories that turn lead into gold by the ton, then she's made an incredible scientific discovery. If on the other hand it's something that only she can do, and only under special conditions, then she's a magician. And I don't mean that she's a charlatan; she might actually be able to transform lead into gold. But scientific phenomena are reproducible by other investigators; they aren't dependent on a specific person.

Electricity might have seemed magical at one time in history, but it works for everyone; you don't need to have an innate talent or be descended from someone special for a light bulb to turn on which you flip a switch. It took the work of very smart people to get us to the point that we can all use electricity, but none of them were magicians, precisely because they were able to make their discovery work for everyone.

To go on at slightly greater length, the reason magic can't be mass-produced is that it usually relies on some subjective quality of the practitioner: her intense concentration, her spiritual purity, something that can't be substituted with another person or with a machine. Magic is, in a sense, evidence that the universe knows you're a person. When people say that the scientific worldview implies a cold, impersonal universe, this is what they're talking about. Magic is when the universe responds to you in a personal way.

China Miéville, author of Perdido Street Station and Un Lun Dun:

What is the difference between science and magic? In real life, loads. In SF, I think the question's misleading, because I think that whatever SF may think and claim, and however much individual books may justly pride themselves on scientific accuracy, fundamentally the genre is not predicated on 'real' science at all. It's about apparently authoritative use of supposed scientific language, or, to put it another way, bullshitting. And that is not (necessarily) a dis.

There you have it, dear readers. What do you think?

Our inner tween loved the sci-fi touches in this darker, more violent Oz. Every holiday season The Wizard of Oz comes on television, and ding, dong the witch is dead and all that jazz. Sure it's charming to some degree, but by the fifteenth time you've seen the thing, you're ready to seek solace in something new. Which is where Tin Man comes in. You've got holographic projections, people getting shot left and right, an evil queen who can suck the life out of you, and an entire town full of robots where no humans are allowed.

But our inner adult had some quibbles. First of all, it's called Tin Man, but the Tin Man isn't central to the story. In fact the title will lead some people to think that this is a miniseries version of The Tin Woodman of Oz, which was the 12th book in the Oz series. Second, the main character D.G. simply accepts the fact that she's in an entirely new world right away, yet wanders through the rest of the story with a slack-jawed, wide-eyed face. By the time night three rolls around, you'll find yourself wondering if she might be missing a few marbles.

The new miniseries revolves around D.G. (Zooey Deshcanel), a restless young motorcycle-riding waitress living with her parents in Kansas. She begins having strange dreams and visions of a woman who is trying to tell her something. This enigmatically leads her parents to remark "it's time." Strange men in long black leather coats called "Longcoats" (hooray for clever names) show up via a tornado and attack the family. Mom and "Popsicle" (as D.G. calls her dad) take D.G. to the roof and toss her off into the cyclone. After a couple of seconds they hop off too. That's how D.G. gets to the OZ, where munchkins are resistance fighters.

Other changes: the Wicked Witch-esque villain has flying monkeys tattooed on her neck, which come to life and do her bidding. The titular Tin Man is a cop who's been imprisoned in a steampunk suit of armor, where he's been forced to watch a projected holographic time-loop of the day his family was taken away from him. Richard Dreyfuss plays The Mystic Man, a sideshow psychic who can see visions of the future when he takes "the vapors." When he performs his act, he appears as a giant green glowing head. Toto is now "Tutor," a man who can turn into a dog and was responsible for D.G.'s education when she was a child. And D.

It would be really fun to see someone turn The Wizard of Oz completely on its ear and set it fully in a science fiction realm without any magic at all. Of course, stories like Farscape and even Buck Rogers use that as a basic premise, but we want to see the Oz story used as a template for a sci fi reimagining. With this new Tin Man series coming out, and cool things like the Oz manga that came out last year, it'll probably only be a matter of time before someone gives it a whirl.