The movie will introduce the cast and conflict and lead viewers right into the TV series. Hope will be playing Stephen Hope, the headmaster of the private school and the eventual leader of the resistance. It sounds sort of like a science fictional version of Red Dawn.

Hope told SF Crow's Nest:

“I was very pleased to be approached from a relatively early stage to be involved in Resistance. I’ve always had a bit of a yen for science fiction. There’s such a capacity for invention, intelligence, commentary and playfulness in the form. And Resistance has all that built in: it could go in so many different directions. On top of that, I always felt like the outsider at school. There’s a wonderful pay-back beauty in nerdy-heroes that’s very inviting. Resistance has that in its outline. So the project as a whole is quite enticing.”

Production on the teen drama/scifi adventure will begin later this year.

[SF Crow's Nest]

Both books come out in early September, just in time for the back-to-school blitz. And they share a similar theme: young people in the future discover that everything is frakked up and they're being lied to. But Resistance looks a good deal darker than Cyberia.

Malley's Resistance is a sequel to her first novel, The Declaration. In her first book, it's the 22nd century and children have been outlawed. Society has developed medical techniques to keep people young and healthy forever, so there's no room for new children. Everybody has to sign the "Declaration," agreeing not to have kids. The only way to opt out and reproduce is to agree to grow old and die. Anna's parents break the rules by having her without giving up their own immortality. So the state seizes Anna and sends her to a boarding school for "Surplus" kids, where she learns how to become a "Valuable Asset" doing shit work for "Legal" people. When Anna turns 15, a kid named Peter turns up at her prison/school with news of her outlaw parents, encouraging her to escape and join them. (And here's Malley's list of dystopian novels for teenagers, including some classics.)

In Resistance, Malley turns her first novel's premise on its head: the Pharma Corporation comes out with a new drug to let people live forever. Unlike the existing drugs, "Longevity+" will actually reverse the aging process altogether. But there's a catch, as Peter and Anna discover when they infiltrate Pharma Corp.: in order to create "the building blocks" of Longevity+, scientists will need to harvest them from young people. So it's sort of like that Maureen McHugh story I mentioned a while back: older people gain eternal youth, at the expense of the truly young.

Meanwhile, in Cyberia, Zane is a teenager living in a totally cyber future. His parents are hardwired into the Cybernets, and his bedroom is 100 percent cyber. Even his pet dog is cyber, thanks to an implanted microchip — in this world, all animals can speak. But then Zane finds a mole, a contraband animal, and takes it home. He hides it, and somehow discovers through it that the cyber translators are lying — the animals aren't really saying what the voice synthesizers are representing them as saying. Instead, they're saying something totally different, and they want Zane's help to fight for their freedom from the chips, which control their behavior. The animals want Zane to take them to a technology-free safety zone. I'm kind of intrigued by this concept, which sounds sort of like We3, except for the part about the animals "saying" stuff they're not really saying.

By the way, I found these titles by looking in Susan Fichtelberg's invaluable listing of new and forthcoming YA speculative fiction titles.

In the original game you're play Sgt. Nathan Hale who has been tasked with keeping an alien invasion out of Britain, but the sequel shifts things to the United States. Maybe he did such a good job that the aliens decided to say "screw it" and cross the pond — somehow they managed to cross the Pacific pond, though. We wonder if they'll be trashing any historical or religious landmarks like they did with the Manchester Cathedral in the first game, which actually became the center of controversy. Maybe the aliens could invade George W. Bush's ranch in Crawford, Texas? We're just saying.

Resistance 2 will be out sometime in the next couple of years, but in the meantime you can ogle the gorgeous artwork. Until someone releases Concept Art: The Game, it's about all you can do.

Resistance 2: Get your concept art here [Computer And Video Games]