Travel Posters for Loch Ness and Other Homes of Mythical Beasts

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Despite his aversion to writing, Lucas began painstakingly composing his own science-fiction story: It centered on the adventures of two bickering robots (the future R2-D2 and C-3PO), inspired by the comedy duo Laurel and Hardy as well as the clownish hobo peasants of Akira Kurosawa’s Hidden Fortress.

George Lucas’s Force

Loving this 

doctormonocle:

Steampunk Supergirl Print by Mahmud Asrar

Crocheted Cthulhu

[via]

The Force is The Force, Of Course

via Neatorama

Presenting the Cultural Imperialism Bingo Card

If you think colonialism is dead… think again. Globalisation has indeed made the world smaller–furthering the dominance of the West over the developing world, shrinking and devaluing local cultures, and uniformising everything to Western values and Western ways of life. This is a pernicious, omnipresent state of things that leads to the same unfounded things being said, over and over, to people from developing countries and/or on developing countries.

via Aliette de Bodard’s website

[Card designed by Aliette de Bodard, Joyce Chng, Kate Elliott, Rochita Loenen-Ruiz, @requireshate, Charles Tan, @automathic and @mizHalle. Launch orchestrated with the help of Zen Cho]

Here’s a roundup of news surrounding the New Yorker’s science fiction issue

• Easy Writers: Guilty pleasures without guilt (subscription only)
• Literary Revolution in the Supermarket Aisle: Genre Fiction Is Disruptive Technology (Lev Grossman’s response at TIME)
• The New Yorker speaks with four writers featured in the issue
• Weekend Edition interviews Jennifer Egan about tweeting her story from the issue   
• Ryan Britt at Tor reviews the issue for his “Genre in the Mainstream” column 
• Wired also reviews the issue  
• io9 talks about what it means that the New Yorker and Tin House both have a scifi issue 
• The Slate Culture Gabfest discusses literary fiction vs. genre fiction in reference to the New Yorker article and Lev Grossman’s response

Why I Write “Strong Female Characters”

What Airplane Cockpits Look Like To The Rest Of Us

Today’s links

Science Fiction Gets Social (Part 1) Kirkus Science Fiction Blog

One of the characteristics of great literature is that it says something meaningful about life. Science fiction does that, too, except that the perspective is usually seen from an outsider’s viewpoint and is often focused on society in general.

Being fond of subcategorizing as we are, science fiction fans call such fiction “social science fiction,” and it’s concerned less with the tropes usually associated with sf (like spaceships and technology) and more concerned with human activities and how people interact in groups. Or, to tie it back to the “science” label, it’s concerned with “soft” sciences like sociology, anthropology, psychology, political science, theology, linguistics, cultural studies and more.

Writing in the Dark: Confessions of a literary night owl New York Magazine

The moon is maybe one sixteenth full—or empty, really, thin as the rim of a shot glass, clear and high in a very black sky. The stars are out in layers, not like the desert or the mountains but unusual for the northeast, millions of distant acquaintances amassed behind the more familiar constellations; Orion in his swaggery stance, Cassiopeia watching sideways from her chair in the sky.

Not that I am seeing any of that, now. I keep my eyes on the ground. I’m moving fast, and it’s dark, and I don’t want to fall. There’s a hill in front of me: up, and steep. I hear my feet and my breath. They should disrupt the nighttime quiet but instead they amplify it. Up, up, up, up, and then a sharp turn, then rocks and gravel, louder underfoot; then a downhill dip, the black hulks of two familiar trees, a flagstone patio, a door. I stop in front of it, lean against it for a moment, let my breath slow, look up. It is one-fifteen in the morning. I have just come home from a run.

How Cartoon Network Became a Haven for Some of the Best Independent Comic Book Creators Working Today Publishers Weekly

The Cartoon Network’s flagship show, Adventure Time has quickly gained a loyal fan base since its premiere in early 2010. Produced by Frederator Studios and created by Pendleton Ward, the feel-good, silly but smart show about Jake the Dog and Finn the Human’s fun-filled exploits in the candy-colored, post-apocalyptic Land of Ooo is that rare cartoon offering that appeals equally to both kids and adults. The Adventure Time licensed comic, published by Boom! Studios’ kids’ comics imprint, Kaboom!, has also been hugely successful. Since the comic’s release in early February of this year, the first two issues have already sold out of multiple print runs.

Illustration