A few weeks ago we had a ball discussing the Top Ten Evil Queens of fantasy. But something occurred to me as I was doing my research: While I had no trouble finding evil queens, the only ones I could find that were depicted as being "good" were physically compromised in some way. (And I'm not talking about princesses here -- I mean women in real seats of power.) The question this raises for me is, does power corrupt or are powerful women seen as dangerous in fantasy? Let's take a look at the way good queens are hobbled to find out.

Small Queens
I've lumped two types together here: Child queens and little people. By the latter, I mean queens like Cherlindrea in Willow. Granted she's the same size as the people she rules, but she's also small enough to be physically dominated. That ability to control a queen physically might explain why lots of good queens are kids: Lucy and Susan in The Chronicles of Narnia are 8 and 12 in the first movie. By the second, when Susan is old enough to be considered a woman, she's sent back to our world and no longer allowed to be a queen. At least Susan's in good company: Many of the older good queens I could find were teens like Empress Savina in Dungeons and Dragons. After that, they all turned evil. Heck, even when you move over to space fantasy like Star Wars: Episode I, Padmé is only 14 when she's in charge.

Continue reading "Mary Robinette Kowal - Off With Her Head? Why Fantasy Hates Good Queens" »

• Rumor has it David Tennant just might announce his participation in a Doctor Who movie.

• Star Wars: The Old Republic -- Lucasarts and Bioware's upcoming MMO -- the low-down on Boba Fett's ancestors, the fearsome Mandalorians.

• Michael Bay could make over $150 million on Transformers 2 merchandising alone. Now that's Bayhem.

• Cameron Diaz is looking set to be the leading lady of Seth Rogen and Michel Gondry's Green Hornet.

• SF Signal continues its three part Mind Meld with their guide to International Science Fiction.

Continue reading "Daily Scan for 07.10.09 - Tennant May Join Who Movie; Superman Cameo in Green Lantern? " »

Hey, you know what? Today looks like a fine day to go through the mailbag and answer some reader questions. It's also a fine day for pie. But let's do this one thing at a time, right?

First question:

It's entirely possible that Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen will bring in over $400 million at the box office. In the interest of keeping me from killing myself over this fact, please assure me that we're in no danger of it becoming the most successful science fiction film of all time.

Well, if we're talking about domestic box office, in order for the new Transformers flick to become the number one science fiction movie of all time it would have to gross $461 million, which would squeak it past Star Wars (this is assuming that you don't count The Dark Knight as science fiction). I don't think the Transformers are going to manage that, frankly. But even if they did, you could take solace in the fact that when adjusted for inflation, a whole bunch of other science fiction movies have done better than $461 million, including Independence Day, Spider-Man, Jurassic Park, four Star Wars movies and E.T.

Continue reading "Transformers and Tentpoles - John Scalzi Dives Once More Into the Mailbag" »

• ABC asks viewers to make the slammin' rock theme Lost always needed. I think it should be Enterprise style.

• Randall Wallace, the scribe behind Braveheart, will rewrite McG's Captain Nemo: 20,000 Leagues Under the Seas script. That doesn't surprise me, given Terminator Salvation's worrying numbers and even more worrying quality.

• Barbara Walters interviews The Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles.

• Mental_floss lists some of the longest running novel series, with a not so surprising number of scifi series at the top of the list.

Continue reading "Daily Scan for 07.09.09 - Braveheart Scribe to Tackle Nemo; Day One Teases With Tentacled Alien" »

Scifi characters are fairly adept at re-growing their limbs: Wolverine constantly recovers from amputations; Jeebs in Men in Black can get his head blasted off  and have a new one in place in a few seconds with only a mild headache; and Terminator 2's T-1000 can take repeated blows to the head and body like pebbles being dropped into a pond (provided he's not himself dropped into molten metal). In real life, we're not so lucky. A human being can re-grow a fingertip if its amputated above the first joint, but that's about it... unless of course the Center for Regenerative Therapies in Dresden, Germany has their way.

Scientists abroad are studying a rare breed of Mexican lizard, the axolotl salamander, which may hold the key to human limb regeneration. Salamanders are well known for their ability to re-grow limbs after amputation, but the axolotl has the ability to regenerate jaws, skin, organs and parts of its brain and spinal chord, and do so at a much faster rate than normal salamanders. When an axlotl is injured, its wound is quickly covered with a stem-cell like growth, out of which sprouts the replacement body part.

Continue reading "Human Limb Regeneration Is No Longer Just a Job for the Men in Black" »

• Star Wars.com celebrates the women of Star Wars. As well they should, and the more tentacles the better.

• When I was a child, robots transformed into cassette tapes. Now, Transformers come in USB stick form.

• A new trailer for The Rock's CGI scifi comedy Planet 51 has landed. Apparently on his planet aliens barbeque all day long.

• Eerie Books lists 42 Frankenstein films to see before you die. Who knew there were 42?

• The patron saint of scifi novelizations, Alan Dean Foster, is writing a sequel to J.J. Abrams's Star Trek independent of the movie franchise. I guess that means Trekkies have something to hope for before 2011.

Continue reading "Daily Scan for 07.08.09 - The Rock Goes to Planet 51, Foster Writes Trek Sequel " »

The 'Nets were aflutter last week when news leaked about Marvel icon Stan Lee's upcoming cameo in Iron Man 2. The creator of properties like Spider-Man, Iron Man and X-Men, Stan Lee's grizzled visage has become as obligatory in Marvel movies as a Danny Elfman theme song. But not all Stan "The Man" pop-ins are created equal. Let's take a look at the highs and lows of Marvel's resident Hitchcock.

Hot Dog Vendor, X-Men (2000)
Prior to Marvel's movie renaissance, Stan's Hollywood dalliances mostly involved providing peppy narration to cartoons like Spider-Man and His Amazing Friends. But his appearance on the beach right after a water-logged Senator Kelly emerges from the ocean kicked off a whole new acting career for the comic czar. Stan's appearance here is pretty subtle, but it's a nice nod to fans and director Bryan Singer's way of saying, "Don't worry, we care about these characters and their creator." And if you didn't know who he was, he blends in as just another shocked old dude on the beach.

Continue reading "Excelsior! Stan Lee's Best and Worst Marvel Movie Cameos" »

• Another entry in everyone's favorite cheap rate zombie apocalypse series, Resident Evil, will be hitting theaters in 2010.

• Pop Matters has a rundown of all the scifi series coming to television next year. Verdict: Lots of scifi, not so much space opera.

• G4 will be airing a Star Wars Expanded Universe panel at this year's San Diego Comic Con.

• Over at Tor.com, Irene Gallo posts some impressively surreal concept art for Tim Burton's upcoming take on Alice in Wonderland.

Continue reading "Daily Scan for 07.07.09 - Resident Evil Returns, G4 Airs Star Wars Panel" »

Animator-turned-director Carlos Saldanha describes taking the Ice Age franchise into genre territory, infusing a Moby Dick love story into his latest picture and turning his attention to humans for the upcoming movie Rio.

Q: In Ice Age 3 you were tasked with bringing dinosaurs into a time period they didn't belong. How did you approach this?

A: We did a brainstorm and this idea came, "What if the dinosaurs came to the Ice Age?" I was very excited about that because I'm a huge fan of dinosaurs, but then I was like, "But the dinosaurs didn't exist in the Ice Age, so how are we going to do that?" And that's when the concept of the fantasy genre came -- when you think about movies like King Kong or Journey to the Center of the Earth. What if they discovered this lost underworld of dinosaurs? Then you don't have to explain the logic that dinosaurs actually lived in that world. And then we had a lot of fun with it. We created a completely new world within the world that we had already created.

Q: Was it freeing to be able to introduce a strong fantasy element to the series?

Continue reading "Ice Age's Director Describes His Prehistoric Journey to the Center of the Earth" »

• Just in time for San Diego Comic Con, some of the aliens of James Cameron's Avatar have been revealed in their ink-skinned glory.

• Speaking of Comic Con, SciFi Wire has a good round-up of eleven not-to-be-missed events for scifi geeks.

• There was no doubt that Zack Snyder wanted to inject some more comic book content into the DVD release of Watchmen, and so he has. Here's what you'll see in the director's cut.

• Another implausible video game has been optioned for the big screen: Asteroids, the classic vector graphics meteor blasting game.

Continue reading "Daily Scan for 07.06.09 - Snyder Reveals Watchmen DVD Details, Asteroids Is Optioned" »