SFcrowsnest Monthly Science Fiction and Fantasy Magazine

Scientist. "Now if this thing of mine works and we can get close - real close - and bombard that bird's antimatter energy shield with a stream of mesic atoms. I think we can destroy that shield. The bird would be defenseless then except for beaks, claws and wings. You could hit it with everything but the kitchen sink."

General: "We've got the kitchen sinks to spare, son."
Planning to destroy the monster in The Giant Claw, 1957.

Brian Aldiss: the Master of Glacial Helliconia
Brian Aldiss, one of Britain's greatest authors, interviewed. He holds forth on why he was glad Michael Moorcock appeared in the sixties, why his Helliconia trilogy is just about a change in the weather, and the terrible unwisdom of terraforming Mars.
(AUTHOR INTERVIEWS)

Hunt vs Hunt
SFF author Walter Hunt interviewed by SFF author Stephen Hunt. Crikes, that's a whole lot of Hunt-ing going on for Christmas. The author of the crackingly good military SF epic The Dark Wing tells us how the idea of an implacable alien enemy that won't make peace with us, with a religion that teaches that humanity shouldn't exist, comes disturbingly close to home given the events of the past year.
(AUTHOR INTERVIEWS)

Offworld report: December 2003
This month's offworld roundup features the shock cyber-hack of David Langford's Ansible magazine, an interview with author David Zindell, the sudden death of the TV series Firefly, while Roger MacBride Allen remembers author Charles Sheffield.
(NEWS)

The Two Towers Inferno
The latest big screen installment of the Lord of the Rings trilogy could be your last movie of 2002, or your first of 2003; but you're going to see it. Right?
(FILM REVIEWS)

Solaris
An alien planet gives George Clooney a perfect facsimile of the wife he lost on earth in Solaris. The philosophical film has some engaging ideas, but viewers expecting romantic SF will probably be disappointed and perhaps even bored. This is dense, introspective, and intelligent science fiction as distinguished from entertainment.
(FILM REVIEWS)

Star Trek: Nemesis
As the "Star Trek" series seems slowly to lose steam, Mark finds the movie contains one late - uncharacteristic - burst of life and energy, a science-fictional examination of the nature-nurture question. Picard and Data each meet physically identical copies of their former selves and each must deal with the similarities and differences. The question faced is, what makes a person who he is?
(FILM REVIEWS)

James Bond Is An Alien
It's true, Uncle Geoff, our esteemed editor has definitive proof. The British secret service's most deadly human weapon turns out not to be so human after all.
(ARTICLES)

Peanut Butter & Magic
Just in time for Christmas, a short fantasy story from the oft-enchanted pen of Elizabeth Burton.
(FICTION)

Here comes the 'Egg' man
With four Hugos and a Chesley, Bob Eggleton is one of the most renowned SF and fantasy artists in the world. And he has a really amazing haircut too!
(ARTIST INTERVIEWS)

Star Trek Enterprise: The Seventh
T'Pol asks Archer along on a classified mission which threatens to reveal an incident she has long hidden from herself.
(TV REVIEWS)

Star Trek Enterprise: The Communicator
When Lieutenant Reed loses his communicator on a landing mission, he and Archer return to retrieve it before it contaminates that planet's culture.
(TV REVIEWS)

Star Trek Enterprise: Singularity
Radiation from a nearby black hole affects the Trek crew's behaviour in some unexpected ways.
(TV REVIEWS)

The Two Towers movie has launched with a big marketing splash and features epic sieges, sweeping romance (hmmm, the elf or the blonde ... choices, choices, don't quite remember that from the book), as well as Oscar-winning schizophrenic tendencies from a CGI Gollum. But is the Two Towers a better movie than the slower paced Fellowship of the Ring? Is the film version of the trilogy getting better with each new installment, or diving towards mawkish mediocrity.

LAST MONTH'S RESULT
In December's issue, we pointed out that NASA recently announced plans to release a book proving that the moon landings weren't faked ... until they strangely announced they wouldn't be publishing the book after all. They had, err, changed their minds. So did you think NASA landed on the moon - or was the whole thing filmed Capricorn One-style in some hangar around Area 51?

Well, 77% of you threw out the X-Files explanation and loudly protested the arrant nonsense of the remaining 23% who agreed that the moon landings were, indeed, faked. So the majority of you stood up for the common sense view. Hurrah. We always knew you 'Nest readers were solid, sensible types.

Will the world end in the fire of a comet impact, or the slow heat death of global warming, or will it be a new ice age that sends our towering concrete cities the way of Atlantis? Here's a site that takes a trip on the pessimistic side of mankind's future!

Uncle Geoff reflects on the success of science fiction in predicting the future as it has actually turned out, and discovers, as with plotting a science fiction story, it doesn’t always pay to consider the first solution as the only solution ...

http://www.SFcrowsnest.com/Holotales/edit.htm

The snow isn't falling quite yet, but it sure feels like the right time for an end of year summary ... the real alternative to the Queen's Christmas Day broadcast (or mayhaps the President, if you live out in the colonies).

On the debit side of the ledger, our editor Geoff was fairly seriously ill in hospital for a month, and gave us all quite a fright; while some of our writers have also been fighting the good fight against rude health (Happy Xmas, Rod).

On the credit side of the ledger, the 'Nest has been wavering between being Google PageRanked as the second or third most popular science fiction site on the Internet ... the first being the mighty SF Channel of course. A mixed blessing, as this normally means site costs rise without any hope of being matched by the jokingly low sliver of online advertising revenues that accompany the extra bums on our virtual seats.

I owe a personal thanks to all the fans who still write in asking about sequels to For The Crown and The Dragon ... I'm afraid that between my very demanding real job, an ever expanding family and helping out on SFcrowsnest, my authoring time sadly remains at nano-scale levels. I'm still working on a collaboration with the Liverpool-based artist Andrew Tulley to turn out a comic-strip based on one of my Triple Realm short stories, though (The Ruffler and the Highwayman). A special thanks also due to Andrew for illustrating my darling wife's anniversary present to me ... a picture of one of the Triple Realm's steam carriages, a kettle-black.

The novel is now - gasp - eight years old, but thankfully the money from its Amazon sales are still feeding the unquenchable thirst of the 'Nest's appetite for bandwidth (refer to advertising revenues, jokingly low, above).

Large debts are also owed to the 'Nest's many readers who have stepped forward and become contributors and reviewers - almost too numerous to mention now (lucky for us too, with the flood of new review material still coming in).

The old year was something of a mixed bag for science fiction. The glut of cloned television series predictably started to hemorrhage its first casualties ... some old stalwarts, sadly, like Farscape, and some hello-goodbye johnny-come-latelies like Firefly.

On the literary side of the genre, I finally caught up with China Miéville's Perdido Street Station, quickly followed by the magnificent The Scar. It almost restored my faith in the fact that publishers can still find and publish original voices, although these kind of works do swim mighty lonely in an ocean full of Star Trek and Dungeon & Dragon sharecrops.

It still seems more than a little sad to me that the best new outlets for new talent is co-authoring (read 'writing') stories in other people's universes. Not only TV, game and movie franchises, but many writers whose work I deeply admire are also falling prey to this trend. David Weber's 'Worlds of Honor' being a case in point ... a novel of which Kirkus Reviews said "five new, long stories are featured here, but what you won't find mentioned on the cover, or on the title page, or even in the table of contents, is that Weber wrote only two of them."

It may be giving a much needed break to the jobbing 'co-authors' Roland Green, Linda Evans, and Jane Lindskold, but even an old marketing hack like me cringes when a brilliant fictional series starts being packaged, shaped and sold like a brand of washing powder.

Let's hope that 2003 sees a few more science fiction publishers like Big Engine swimming against the tide.

One of the nice things about being online is that we can publish slightly off-the-wall material that would never find a home in a highly targeted advertising-ruled print magazine world. An article we always trot out as an example of this, is Uncle Geoff's piece about what the heck fuel & engine combination the Thunderbirds craft used in the classic 1960s TV series of the same name.

Let's face it, you're not going to read the likes of that in SFX, Starlog, Starburst, Interzone or the rest of the print mafia's publications! If there's an article inside you - could be continuity errors in Andromeda, your latest work of short fiction, or just why you think Iain Banks' novels are the greatest SF since a little man called Verne put pen to paper - do drop Geoff a line below.

We still fund this puppy's bandwidth and other miscellaneous expenses out of our own pocket, so the spirit of volunteerism is about the only thing that keeps our happy ship in hyperspace. Any time, articles, stories or reviews you can submit are always appreciated.

BTW, if you're interested in becoming a book or DVD reviewer, we'd really, really (no, really) appreciate it if you were UK-based. Posting out the hundred of goodies we get every week is an expensive business, and extra airmail costs could lead to Geoff and Steve eating dog food in some mad economy-drive of death. Of course, if you're based in the US or Australia and you fancy reviewing your own stash of goodies resulting from your science fiction and fantasy addiction, then that okay by us ... but we can't supply you ourselves! Sorry.

Thanks to our nifty new syndication engine, you can now add SFcrowsnest.com's monthly news to your own web site for free. It's a lot of work creating dynamic, fresh content to attract visitors back to your science fiction/fantasy web site. Now - with a one-minute cut & paste of two lines of code - you can take some of the effort out of the process ... and give your users another reason to visit your own fab online offering.

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