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Comics – Novels – Podio Books

I saw the nominees for the Bradbury Awards the other day and I realized that I had actually seen all of the nominees this year.  Then it hit me…we (the speculative fiction community) have really been treated to an excellent year on the big screen.  While we’ve had a few explosive duds (some that made quite a bit of money), we’ve seen some true gems and game changers too.

Here is the official list of nominees:

1) Avatar, 2) Coraline, 3) District 9, 4) Moon, 5) Star Trek, & 6) Up

Avatar, District 9, and Up were all nominated for Academy Awards too; however I think the only one of these three that truly has a chance of winning is Avatar.

With that said, and since this is an opinion/review blog here are the nominees ranked from worst to first.

6) Up – Now, I may have said worst to first, but in all actuality all of these films are great.  As a general rule, Pixar doesn’t make bad films; however this is a very typical Pixar film.  If you have a dog then this is a must see!!!  I was amazed to see the explosion of 3-D movies this year.  This is one of three 3-D movies that were nominated.

5) Star Trek – I’d bet that many readers are shouting, “BULL$#!T” when seeing that I ranked this movie this low (among these six films), but I felt that this Star Trek was only the third best in the franchise and that the villain wasn’t very well developed.  We reviewed Star Trek on the podcast and generally everybody liked/loved it.

4) Coraline – This movie exemplifies a typical Neil Gaiman story and he’s one of the best writers out there right now (period).  The movie is visually stunning with 3-D stop-motion animation.

3) Avatar – People either seemed to love or criticize Avatar, but mostly people loved it. Either way, an amazing number of people saw it and it was an amazing eco-political-anti-war-religulous-and-a-bunch-of-other-stuff-scifi-fantasy movie that took all of these big topics and successfully meshed them into a single (decently long) film.  I think this film has the best shot at winning an Oscar, but I still feel that two other 2009 movies were better.

2) District 9 – I can’t wait to see more from Neil Blomkamp (the director of D-9).  What a break out movie!  We reviewed District 9 on the podcast and all of us praised this movie the entire time.  I hope District 9 wins the Oscar, but I’m not holding my breath.

1) Moon – I finally got to see Moon when it was recently released on DVD.  What a performance by Sam Rockwell!  This movie really messes with your head in very subtle ways.  In my opinion this movie is what great Sci-Fi is all about.  The reason I picked Moon over D-9 is mostly the fact that you sort of saw where District 9 was going once you had reached the last quarter of the movie (although there are some moments when you’re not quite sure what the protagonist, Wikus, is going to do).  During Moon, it doesn’t even seem the protagonist, Sam Bell, knows what decisions he’ll make until the last seconds of the movie.

Therefore, if I had a vote I’d be voting for Moon as the best Science Fiction/Fantasy film of 2009.  What do you think?

There are several sci-fi podcast authors I have followed since 2006 when I first discovered the wonders of podcasting.  It’s been amazing watching them develop their craft into this new medium and explode in popularity over the years.  Among the writers I’ve closely followed there are two that stand out:  J.C. Hutchins and Scott Sigler.  During 2005, Sigler was one of the true pioneers in releasing novels via the podcast medium and he has since used it as a spring board to being published in print books.  Hutchins’s 7th Son trilogy came along soon after Sigler had demonstrated how quickly a fan base could grow while releasing not chapters, but episodes of a story. While these two were seeing their following rise into thousands upon thousands of listeners, there were dozens of other aspiring authors finding creative ways to release their novels also.  Eventually Podiobook.com was created and became a store in which podcast authors could release their audiobooks for free (or for donations if the reader felt that what they had heard was good).  Both Sigler and J.C. Hutchins finally hit it big in 2008 when they both announced that they had been signed to major publishing house deals.  Sigler had already published some of his podcasted novels through a smaller press in 2007, but it was awesome to see his novel Infected actually published as a hardbound book in late 2008.  During 2009, both authors released two novels each. It’s been great to see their novels on the same shelves as some of my favorite authors in bookstores across the U.S.

Scott Sigler has taken things one step further in the publishing game by releasing his podcast novel The Rookie on his own. Of course I had to order a copy when it came out and I was really amazed at the quality of this book.

More than likely if you’ve listened to podcasts for any appreciable amount of time then you knew just about everything I’ve written above. However, if you’re new to the podcast community then by all means right after you’ve checked out the latest Legion of Lethargic Super-Geeks podcast episode, then check out one of the following podcast authors:  Matt Wallace, Mur Lafferty, Matthew Wayne Selznick, Mark Jeffrey, or of course Scott Sigler or J.C. Hutchins.  I believe these are truly some of the authors of the future. And of course you can find their stories as both podiobooks and now as paper books too.

I know I said I’d be writing something about podcast authors in my last post, but life happens and I got busy.  I hope to get back to the blog next year.  In the meantime, have a happy holiday season.

-Brian and the rest of the Lethargic Super-Geeks

Over the past year I’ve read several military sci-fi novels including: Starship Troopers, The Forever War, Old Man’s War (my favorite among all of these listed), and A Hymn Before Battle. I also finished Dan Simmons’ Hyperion at the beginning of the year. Hyperion is an amazing novel has a lot of parts that are very military sci-fiesque. I know this may not be a large enough sampling of military sci-fi to come to any concrete conclusions, but across these five novels I’ve noted an essential element that appears in all of them: The Armor.

The armor was such an important part of Heinlein’s Starship Troopers that when they made the book into a movie and left out the armor it changed the story drastically. Later when they produced Starship Troopers 3 last year, they finally placed the battle armor into story, but it was truly just a minor player at the end of this movie.  Among the books I read the one that best developed the complete sense of a soldier’s dependence on the battle armor was A Hymn Before Battle. This was John Ringo’s first novel and the first in a series of books about human’s battling technologically superior alien races. Other “friendly” alien races help arm earth and prepare us for the greatest war we’ve ever fought. Yeah, I haven’t read any of the other books in this series yet. Still he does a damn fine job of describing the battle armor. Since this was the first full military science fiction novel I had read, I didn’t know that Ringo was only building upon some of the true titans of science fiction such as Joe Haldeman and Robert A Heinlein.  As a matter of fact I completely read the novels in the reverse order of how I should have read them. I started with the newer novels first. If anybody is just getting started with military science fiction, they should absolutely start with Starship Troopers first. If you’ve seen the movie then don’t worry, it will only ruin about a fourth of the novel (they’re very different stories).

But back to the armor.  If science fiction is an accurate predictor of our military’s future then a soldier’s battle armor will be the life blood of our military in the world to come. The armor will be able to house a soldier for weeks and weeks providing the soldier with fresh air and food in all sorts of hostel alien environments.  The armor will completely recycle the soldier’s waste (hey, now that’s what I call “green” battle armor). The armor will be the soldier’s drop ship onto a planet’s surface and then his or her mode of transportation around the planet. The armor will also be the soldier’s targeting computer that rarely misses and be the soldier’s personal medic when needed. I could go on and on, but I think you get the point by now.

This finally leads me to the next Legion of Lethargic Super-Geeks novel review that will occur in March of 2010.  We’re reading Armor by John Steakley.  This is another military sci-fi novel that probably isn’t going to change my conclusions about the importance of battle armor to our military in the far flung future.

Next week, I’m going to discuss podcast novelists who have hit the big time by taking their stories to the next level. Getting their novels published by major presses.

First, let me explain what the Legion I defined as “Science Fiction/Horror Films.” I think of Sci-Fi/Horror as those movies that are science fiction movies first, but find a way scare the $h!T out of you before it’s over.  Ever since we started this podcast I wanted to do a Top 5 list on this very topic.  We didn’t start the Top 5 lists on the podcast until after Halloween last year, so I was very patient and waited to do this Top 5 list until Halloween 2009.  It simply seemed like the most appropriate time to podcast it. I asked the gang to give me the best movies that they felt mixed science fiction with a horror twist.  This included space horror films like Alien, Pitch Black, and Saturn 3, but also films such as The Fly and Altered States. These last two movies really explore the horror of people changing in unnatural ways. I told the guys to pick whatever they wanted as long as they could justify their picks as being a true mix of science fiction and horror. As we discovered there is a real diversity of films that have successfully mixed these two genres and I think we did a good job of covering the best of the best. Here is the Top 5 list:

The Top 5 Picks

1. Alien
2. The Thing
3. Event Horizon
4. The Fly
5. Aliens

This list really isn’t very different from many lists that you might find if you Google the phrase, “Science Fiction Horror Movies.” However, I believe the movies we listed during our fairly long podcast discussion gave an extensive and comprehensive list of movies including such gems as 28 Days Later, Cloverfield, and The Mist. We listed several lesser known films like Tetsuo and Re-Animator too.  So, if you enjoy a good horror flix, then give this Legion of Lethargic Super-Geeks Top 5 podcast episode 65 a listen. Tell us if you think we left any really good films unmentioned (and Jason X doesn’t count as a good film…period).  And if there were any movies you haven’t seen or heard of before then check them out.

Next post, I’ll be reviewing a series of military sci-fi books I’ve been reading lately, including Robert A. Heinlein’s classic Starship Troopers.

Since I’ve been back to the Legion blog for a couple of week’s now I’ve

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been wanting to release my posts each Tuesday, but this Halloween week is completely about Sci-Fi Horror and the Legion Podcast’s Top 5 List about this topic, so I’m waiting until we’ve completed our Top 5 discussion to upload my next full post. We left #1 off the original Top 5 list so that we could discuss it during our Classic Movie Review on Thursday (sort of a cliff-hanger). See ya on Thursday!

I saw Pandorum a couple of weeks ago during its opening weekend.  There had been a lot of hype about this movie traveling around the web over the past several months, so I was excited to finally see it and I wasn’t disappointed.  While Pandorum is in no way a ground-breaking movie, it was still a lot of fun and felt like it had learned from prior flixs in the genre.  Beth Accomando, from KPBS, really nailed it when she said that Pandorum is Alien meets The Descent.

***Spoiler Alert***

The story opens like so many other space-horror flixs have in the past with the primary protagonist waking up out of some sort of hyper-sleep. Some examples of other movies that have used this exact opening are Alien and Pitch Black.  The kicker here is that Pandorum is psychological condition a person who has been in hyper-sleep can enter soon after waking up. The way I understood it, some individuals are driven into this homicidal state by the long-term sleep.

The short short version of the story is that Ben Foster’s character, Bower, wakes up and has no memory of where, who, or what he is doing (an effect of the hyper-sleep). His commanding officer, played by Dennis Quaid, wakes up after Bower and they quickly figure out they need to stabilize the ships power supply. As the movie moves along Bower discovered more and more about what has actually been going on over the past several months on board the ship by discovering large hoards of mutants, running into several human survivors, and having the occasional flashback.  The small band of survivors attempt to get the ship fixed, so they can eventually make it to their destination. Like I mentioned before it’s a pretty straight forward plot (and in no way original), but the execution was good. However, I thought that towards the end the plot got a little strange and felt a little forced. I can say that I didn’t see the final scene coming, so that was a big plus for me.

Unfortunately, the movie has not done well at the box office and has met some mixed reviews.  I think this is unfortunate because I really enjoy this type of movie and seeing a decent one fail this badly (so far it has lost about $30,000,000) means we probably won’t be seeing many more any time in the near future or they will not be given a large enough budget to make them visually exciting.

I’m giving Pandorum three and 1/2 out of five stars.  *** 1/2

Next post, I’ll be commenting on the Legion’s Top 5 list of science fiction/horror movies.  The actual Top 5 list will be podcast as Episode 65 of The Legion of Lethargic Super-Geeks later this week.

I finally got a chance to watch The Golden Compass tonight and all I can say is, “what a cluster f**k of a movie.”  There is a central storyline that could have been very good, but either the studio didn’t want to spend the money needed to film the extra scenes that would connect all of the various scenes together properly, the studio didn’t want to make another three hour marathon movie, or they had some of the crappiest editors of all-time working on this film.  I’d guess a combination of the first two. I don’t think I’ve ever seen a major Hollywood movie such as this that was this jerky from scene to scene and then simply seemed to go absolutely nowhere. Also there was too much piss poor CGI throughout the flix. I’m not going to go into a synopsis of the movie, because in some ways I’m not exactly sure what I saw (seriously), but just in case you’re interested, here is the Wikipedia entry for the movie.

There have been so many young adult and children’s novels made into movies over the past decade (such as the Harry Potter and Narnia films) that now every studio out there is jumping on the bandwagon.  They’re rushing them out to the theaters and because of this some of them (like the The Golden Compass and Inkheart) are falling flat.  Surprisingly, even though this movie didn’t do well in America, it did extremely well world-wide, so I guess we might be seeing a sequel to The Golden Compass in the next couple of years.  I doubt I’ll take the time to watch it.

I’m giving The Golden Compass only two out of five stars. **
I have seen worse films, but they were all really bad B-movies.

My next movie review will be Pandorum that just came out a few weeks ago.

Alan and the gang (including myself) have sort of let this blog die. Actually I’m not sure it was ever really alive to start with (we only wrote something like six entries over five or six months). Either way, I’m going to get back to posting on it again.  I’m going to attempt to post a short review once a week on novels, comics, TV shows, and movies I’ve read or seen recently.  And with that said, I’ll start back tomorrow and attempt to release an entry each Wednesday.  I’m not sure if Alan will be joining me here again or not, but at least this blog isn’t going to waste anymore. Well, I guess I can’t say, “not going to waste anymore”, until we see what comes out of that dense little packet of cells I call a brain.

-Brian