Len Wein has some advice for folks going to see Pirates 3. It sounds good to know.

Given that I haven’t even seen the first one yet, I will have to file that bit of knowledge away for future use.

Via the SciFi Wire: Card’s Empire Heads For Film.

Hmm. Unless it gets a massive re-write, I say you can plan to skip it.

My review of the book is here. Let’s just say that they won’t be quoting me for te book jacket.

Technorati Tags: Orson Scott Card, Empire

Via the AP: Sean Connery won’t be back for `Indy 4′

“I get asked the question so often, I thought it best to make an announcement,” Connery, 76, said in a statement posted Thursday on Lucasfilm’s “Indiana Jones” Web site. “I thought long and hard about it, and if anything could have pulled me out of retirement it would have been an `Indiana Jones’ film.”

“I love working with Steven and George, and it goes without saying that it is an honor to have Harrison as my son,” he said. “But in the end, retirement is just too damned much fun.”

Fair enough, but a shame nonetheless, as the Ford-Connery team-up in The Last Crusade was a true classic.

Via LA Weekly: Ray Bradbury: Fahrenheit 451 Misinterpreted

Bradbury still has a lot to say, especially about how people do not understand his most literary work, Fahrenheit 451, published in 1953. It is widely taught in junior high and high schools and is for many students the first time they learn the names Aristotle, Dickens and Tolstoy.

Now, Bradbury has decided to make news about the writing of his iconographic work and what he really meant. Fahrenheit 451 is not, he says firmly, a story about government censorship. Nor was it a response to Senator Joseph McCarthy, whose investigations had already instilled fear and stifled the creativity of thousands.

This, despite the fact that reviews, critiques and essays over the decades say that is precisely what it is all about. Even Bradbury’s authorized biographer, Sam Weller, in The Bradbury Chronicles, refers to Fahrenheit 451 as a book about censorship.

Bradbury, a man living in the creative and industrial center of reality TV and one-hour dramas, says it is, in fact, a story about how television destroys interest in reading literature.

“Television gives you the dates of Napoleon, but not who he was,” Bradbury says, summarizing TV’s content with a single word that he spits out as an epithet: “factoids.” He says this while sitting in a room dominated by a gigantic flat-panel television broadcasting the Fox News Channel, muted, factoids crawling across the bottom of the screen.

What?!? Ray Bradbury watched Fox News! Did the Pulitzer Committee know about this?

But, seriously…

In truth, I must confess that whenever I have read or seen an interview with Ray Bradbury he always comes off as something of a curmudgeon with a little bit of an anti-technology undercurrent. It is ironic that he staked out much of his own literary career writing for television.

And really, I don’t buy the notion that television, per se, leads people who would otherwise read to not do so. I suspect the vast majority of non-readers would be non-readers whether we had TV or not. I will allow, however, that I would read more if I didn’t have a TV, but I read quite a bit as it is.

Interestingly (in the context of this particular conversation) the last five books I had read have been from Jim Butcher’s Harry Dresden series which I discovered because of the television series (I have been meaning to review both the TV show and the books, but haven’t gotten around to it yet).

h/t: TAM (where Sean Hackbarth takes issue with Bradbury’s current views on the 451).

While I have my doubts about a live action Speed Racer (a beloved cartoon of my youth), I must confess to some optimism due to the fact the Wachowskis (of Matrix fame) are scripting and directing.

The Sci Fi Wire has some cast and plot details: Speed Racer Details Released.

Of course, one of the most important parts is the Mach 5, to which I say, sweet:

The official Babylon 5 site has a trailer for the upcoming direct-to-DVD Babylon 5: The Lost Tales.

It is hard to tell too much from it, although it is good to see Sheridan and Galen again. I will say that the few non-space shots do look like a greenscreen/CGI set, which is to say that it looks not real. Still, if the the writing and acting are good, I shan’t worry about that.

Via Reuters: “Battlestar” finale in works for a while.

May it be so:

Ronald D. Moore said he and David Eick started thinking about the show’s end midway through the second season but that the idea really gained traction somewhere in the middle of Season 3, when the characters reached the algae planet and got a clue to finding Earth.

“We thought, if we don’t start paying this off and really revealing those secrets, we’ll be moving in the wrong direction and get to a place where it felt like we were jerking off the audience,” Moore said during a conference call with reporters Friday, a day after they announced the hit show would end.

I am not entirely convinced that they know what all the answers are to all the questions, but I am hopeful that there will be a substantial payoff. There is an awful lot regarding the Six in Baltar’s head, for example, that needs explaining. The whole significance of the Cylon-human baby needs explanation as well.

Via AICN we have some interviews/video clips related to the pending direct-to-DVD B5 movie.

Technorati Tags: B5, Babylon 5, Babylon5: The Lost Tales, JMS

Via Reuters: “Battlestar” gets grounded by Sci Fi

The upcoming fourth season of Sci Fi Channel’s “Battlestar Galactica” will be its final one after all.

After months of speculation, the show’s producers are set to make the announcement at a press conference Friday.

Ending “Battlestar” with the upcoming 22-episode fourth season was a creative decision made by the hit show’s executive producers Ronald Moore and David Eick.

I can live with that. So long as they get to end the story, ending it isn’t necessarily a bad idea. Further, if this means stories that drive the arc each week instead of squeezing in stand alones just to make the network happy, then I am all for it.

And while one’s inclination is to always want “more” the truth of the matter is that one of the problems that often arises on American TV is that the focus is more on the “more” than on the story. As such, this makes sense:

“This show was always meant to have a beginning, a middle and, finally, an end,” Eick and Moore said in a statement Thursday. “Over the course of the last year, the story and the characters have been moving strongly toward that end, and we’ve decided to listen to those internal voices and conclude the show on our own terms. And while we know our fans will be saddened to know the end is coming, they should brace themselves for a wild ride getting there — we’re going out with a bang.”

More from
SyFy Portal and the Los Angeles Times