Variety reports that the movie version of William Gibson's Neuromancer has been moved up to the front burner...not due to an inherent qualities of the novel or screenplay, but because the studio has a Big Skiffy Movie hole caused by a Paul Verhoeven project moving back. So adjust your expectations accordingly...

Also, William Gibson himself comments on the novel-into-movie process.

Cinematical has pictures from the set of The Dark Is Rising, the movie being made from the Susan Cooper novel.

The Times Online has a report on the Lord of the Rings musical, which is rearing its head again in London (after a disastrous run in Toronto last year). [via Deep Genre]

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Robert J. Sawyer announced that his novel Calculating God has been optioned for film rights.

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A quick round-up of news about books turning into other media...

Sci Fi Wire reports on the efforts of agent Merrillee Heifetz to get the works of Octavia E. Butler adapted into graphic novels.

Sci Fi Wire also reports that Neil Jordan will adapt and direct Joe Hill's Heart-Shaped Box.

Cormac McCarthy's The Road, the current Oprah's Book Club pick, is also on its way to the screen. [via Sci Fi Wire]

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Stardust, the heavily illustrated novel by Neil Gaiman and Charles Vess, has been made into a movie which will reach US screens this summer. There's now a trailer for that movie online...and it looks pretty good, actually.

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The Beat reports that Robert Venditti and Brett Welde's graphic novel The Surrogates has been bought for a movie by Disney, in a deal put together by the Terminator 3 team.

Aparrently, in the wake of the success of the movie of Frank Miller's 300, studios are scrambling to find "dark" SF/Fantasy comics properties of their own.

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The web site doesn't say much about it -- such as when or where it will be shown, if it's done yet, and even how real it is -- but I for one am looking forward to seeing Dreams With Sharp Teeth, a documentary of some sort about Harlan Ellison. Check out the trailer at that site, but only if Harlan-level obscenities bursting from your computer's speakers won't cause you trouble with the locals.

[via Keith R.A. DeCandido, who aparrently does know all and see all]

Update, 3/7: I still don't know anything more about this documentary, but Locus Online just linked to new Richard Thompson music that will appear in the movie. Richard Thompson is an Ellison fan? Is my entire life just one big circle of people who already know each other?

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According to The Hollywood Reporter, Oscar-winner Anna Paquin has signed up to play Sookie Stackhouse in the Alan (Six Feet Under) Ball-produced HBO pilot True Blood, which is based on the series of novels by Charlaine Harris (all of which are currently available from the SFBC, starting with our omnibus of the first three novels, Dead In Dixie).

There doesn't seem to be any guantee of a series at this point, but the pilot would have to be really lousy not to get picked up, and, with both Ball and Paquin invovled, that seems very unlikely.

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A play based on Kelly Link's story "The Girl Detective" opens today in New York City -- it's playing at the Connelly Theater at 220 East 4th Street.

The Small Beer Press Not a Journal has more information; that's where I found out about this myself.

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Sci Fi Wire reports that (but does not link to) an article in the Hollywood Reporter claims that Stephen King is in talks with Lost creator J.J. Abrams to bring King's "Dark Tower" series of novels (starting with The Gunslinger) to movie screens.

The SFBC Blog, though, is not satisfied with secondhand news, and delved deeper to find the original article at the Reporter's site. Sadly, there isn't actually any more solid news there -- this is not actually news yet, just the hint of possible future news on the wind.

(And, as long as we're talking about all things Dark Tower-ific, let's mention the just-started Marvel comic book series, the first issue of which was released last week.)

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Reuters has an article about the new family movie The Last Mimzy, which is based (pretty loosely, from all evidence) on the great "Lewis Padgett" story "Mimsy Were the Borogoves."

Padgett, for those who don't know, was a pseudonym for the married writing team of Henry Kuttner and C.L. Moore; sometimes used by one, sometimes the other, and sometimes by both together. (Untangling what was written by Moore and what by Kuttner is exceptionally difficult; there's a famous story that one of them would get up from a typewriter to go do something else, and the other would sit down and continue the story from that point.)

If you want to read the original story, it's been anthologized many times -- here's a list of its appearances, from the Internet Speculative Fiction Database -- but your best choice would be to read it in a large collection of the best work of Kuttner and Moore. As it happens, the SFBC has just such a book on hand -- it's called Two-Handed Engine, and the only other edition of it in existence costs several hundred dollars.

The SFBC edition, on the other hand, is only $14.99 for members. If you're not a member, you could get it for a dollar when you join the club -- and get four other books, also for a dollar each.

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Peter S. Beagle has been embroiled in legal issues with the owners of The Last Unicorn movie for some time now -- due to those famous Hollywood accounting tricks, as far as I can tell -- and says that he's never made anything from the movie version of his most famous book.

That finally can change, with a new DVD release of The Last Unicorn. Conlan Press is offering the movie in a special arrangement with Beagle that will send more than half of the purchase price to support Beagle and his projects.

Buying this edition of the DVD from anyone else will not benefit Beagle, says Conlan Press; only buying it from them will send the money directly to the author of the original novel.

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It's hard to tell from the review if the play itself has any SFnal content, but it is about scientists, and it's by a playwright (Carol Bugge) who has also written SF and Fantasy stories, and the play was directed by recent World Fantasy-winner Marvin Kaye, so...

here's a review from the Village Voice of a new play called Strings. They didn't much like it.

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I don't usually cover the Hollywood beat here at the SFBC, but Locus Online has posted reviews recently of several major SF/Fantasy movies, so I figured I might as well link to them:

• John Shirley on Pan's Labyrinth
• Gary Westfahl on Perfume: The Story of a Murderer
• and Gary Westfahl on Children of Men

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A movie version of Terry Pratchett's Discworld novel Hogfather is being filmed right now in the UK, for broadcast at the end of this year. It will be broadcast, as a four-hour mini-series, on Sky One in the UK and the Hallmark Channel in the USA.

Update, Dec 4 @ 11:00 -- The US broadcast of Hogfather seems to have fallen through for this year (though I have heard that it's likely it will show up in December of 2007), but those of us on the Pratchett-benighted side of the Atlantic can still check out Sky One's Hogfather website, which will start a "Twelve Days of Hogwatch" countdown tomorrow, December 5th.

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The first two episodes of a new SF web serial, The Dark, are now available for free. But the really interesting thing is the people behind this: it's written by Steven Erikson (the man behind the great Malazan Empire fantasy series), David Keck (author of In the Eye of Heaven, a very promising first novel) and Mark Paxton-MacRae (whom I know nothing about). 

[via Pat's Fantasy Hotlist]

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Cory Doctorow has one of his periodic essays at Locus Online today, about how high-definition TV is going to kill the SF movie, since such movies rely entirely on special effects to hold an audience. (I may be ridiculously over-simplifying his argument a bit.)

Oddly, for a writer, he makes no mention of the simplest way to maintain viewer interest in an age of ever-increasing visual sophistication: spend more time on the writing, to make sure you're telling a good story. Eye-pops may date, but story doesn't.

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It's been piling up these last few days, so let's knock 'em down:

• The Sci Fi Channel has announced that production on "The Dresden Files" TV show (based on the popular contemporary fantasy novels by Jim Butcher) has just begun in Toronto. The channel has ordered eleven more episodes (after the already-shot pilot), which are now in the works as we speak.
• Sci Fi Wire reports that Chris Palmer (who he?) will direct A Spell for Chameleon, the movie adapration of the first book in Piers Anthony's long and pun-filled Xanth series.
• Zack Snyder, the director, gave Sci Fi Wire an update on the progress of the Watchmen movie.
• Sci Fi Wire also reported on preview screenings of 300 given by director Zack Snyder (him again?) and original writer/artist Frank Miller in Hollywood on Wednesday.
• Casting news: Sam Elliott will play the role of "Lee Scoresby" in the film version of The Golden Compass, said the ubiquitious Sci Fi Wire.
• And, finishing out Sci Fi Wire's streak, we learn that Devil's Due Publishing has licensed fil, TV and merchandising rights to R.A. Salvatore's "DemonWars" series.

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Sci Fi Wire reports that Andy Serkis, Helen Mirren, Rafi Gavron and Sienna Guillory have been cast in the film version of Inkheart, based on the Cornelia Funke novel. They join the previously announced cast of Brendan Fraser, Paul Bettany and Jim Broadbent. The film begins production next month in Italy.

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Inspired by Ian McDonald's recent post on the role of entertainment in SF, John Scalzi takes a number of swings at Star Wars in general and George Lucas in particular.

I'll give you the short form: no, sir, he doesn't like it.

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The Hollywood Reporter reports that Peter Jackson has optioned Naomi Novik's "Temeraire" series for the proverbial Major Motion Picture. The article also mentions that Jackson has already optioned Alice Sebold's The Lovely Bones (and is working on a script for the latter), so dragons may not be the next thing on his agenda -- but we can hope that they're coming along soon...

[via Big Blog of Cheese]

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The 40th Anniversary celebrations have led to a lot of ink being spilled, so let me just quickly point out some highlights:

• The Seattle Post-Intelligencer does the usual "Gosh! Has it been forty years already?" approach.
• BBC News reports stiff-upper-liply that there is a celebration, of some sort, going on in the wilds of America.
• The Trades has an editorial on the consequences of Trekking.
• All Headline News rounds up the various press releases and makes them flow together into something resembling news.
• The Cleveland Plain Dealer's TV critic thinks Trek was just swell.
• The New York Daily News, home of the lazy but grabbing lede, starts off with a tired joke about "it was supposed to be a five-year mission."
• The Deadbolt doesn't really add anything new.
• SyFyPortal points out that the real 40th anniversary celebrations are in Pocket Books's tie-in novel program.
• The UPI Wire has the bare-bones story that most of these folks probably started from.
• There's a similar, but longer, AP story that can be found roughly a bazillion places, including here at the Albany Times-Union, the hometown paper of my original hometown.
  
• The Sunday Times -- Scotland has found an Episcopalian lay pastor who uses Trek for religious teachings.
• The Chicago Tribune discovers how J. Random Ensign and Doomed Love Interest #3,749 fare at Trek conventions.
• The Norwich (Connecticut) Bulletin is desperately looking for Trekkies to interview.
• TV Squad does the ol' reliable "What Trek taught me" thing.

That's more than enough for now; you folks who can't get enough Trek can continue through the other 450 Google hits...

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Long Island's own mighty Newsday lists and describes some of the activities going on this year to celebrate the 40th anniversary of Star Trek. (This list is oddly familiar; I may have linked to a very similar story from another paper recently.)

A Vanderbilt neuroscientist has sent out a press release talking about Trek's knowledge of and influence on real brain science. (To his credit, he does mention Star Trek on the Brain, a book from nearly a decade ago that explored this very subject in detail. However, he didn't mention an even more apt comparison, All I really Need To Know I Learned From Watching Star Trek, an even older book that was also an unrelated person's attempt to piggyback on a media event to gain attention for himself.)

And Sci Fi Wire holds up their end by having two Trek stories today: one speculating that Shatner and Nimoy will be involved in the upcoming 11th movie, and one covering the news that the original series will get upgraded special effects. (Because we all know how well that worked out with the Star Wars movies....)

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Publishers Weekly reported yesterday that Sam Raimi, director of the Spider-Man movies, has optioned Terry Goodkind's entire eleven-book "Sword of Truth" saga -- including the final book, which Goodkind is now writing for 2008 publication -- as a TV miniseries. PW reports that production should begin in 2007, but that there is no date set for delivery yet.

PW's report also says that the series was sold as "a" miniseries, but that the 2007 production would be specifically Wizard's First Rule. So the deal may perhaps be for a series of miniseries -- or that the first miniseries, if successful, may lead to the rest being made.

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There's a long, interesting review of the new movie version of A Scanner Darkly up at Locus Online today, by Gary Westfahl.

(Obligatory plug: you can get the "graphic novel" version of the movie from the SFBC.)

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Margaret Weis, co-author of Dragons of Autumn Twilight, the very first "DragonLance" novel, is interviewed about the current adaptation of that book into an animated movie by SciFi Wire.

Side note: the director of the movie is Will Meugniot. Is this the same Will Meugniot who used to draw the comics series DNAgents? If so, it's a very small world. (And if not, there are two people in the visual arts world with the same uncommon name.)

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It's a sad day for hobbits everywhere: the ballyhooed (but badly-reviewed) musical version of The Lord of the Rings will close in Toronto on September 3rd.

But never fear true loves of dancing and singing elves -- the London production will open as planned in June of 2007.

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Sci Fi Wire reports on the plans for a new movie version of Conan the Barbarian, this time promised to be "more faithful to the Howard story."

Of course, the $64,000 question is: which Howard story? There's nothing about which (if any) of Howard's original Conan tales are being adapted into this movie. (Not that anyone asked me, but "Red Nails" would make a great movie, and probably wouldn't be all that expensive to produce, either.)

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Another thing I saw on paper recently (in this case, yesterday in the big comic-shop Previews catalog) but only just discovered that information is also available in a handy online form:

Edgar Rice Burroughs's classic adventure novel A Princess of Mars (the first of the eleven-book "Barsoom" series) is being adapted into a comic-book series starting in August. This, of course, on top of the in-the-works movie adaptation of the same book. Are we seeing the beginnings of a full-fledged Burroughs revival?

(If we are, you'll want to catch up on it, starting with SFBC's Under The Moons of Mars omnibus, which contains A Princess of Mars and the next two novels in the series.)

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You probably already know that Neil Gaiman's excellent YA novella-as-a-book Coraline won the Hugo Award. You might even know that it's being made into a stop-motion animated movie by director Henry (The Nightmare Before Christmas) Selick.

If you're really plugged in, you'll have heard that Dakota Fanning will play Coraline. But have you heard that Teri Hatcher has joined up to play the dual role of Mother and...Other Mother? (Read the book -- you'll get it then.)

Also: Neil Gaiman posted a quite neat piece of early concept art for the movie on his blog yesterday.

I don't mind saying that this is one movie I'm really looking forward to.

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Sci Fi Wire reports that Anne McCaffrey's "Dragonriders of Pern" series will be turned into a movie by Copperheart Entertainment, a company which has not made a feature film to date. (And, when I say "a movie," I really mean "the first of what I think everyone assumes will be a long series of obscenely profitable movies.")

McCaffrey's Pern almost turned into a live-action TV show in 2001, but production shut down amid differing reports of the problems, and nothing ever emerged. I hope Copperheart has better luck this time.

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It's being reported today (for example, here from the BBC) that the tremendously expensive, and critically ravaged, musical Lestat, by Elton John based on Anne Rice's vampire novels, will close on Sunday after only 39 performances.

That, my friends, is what we call a mega-flop. And, being the third recent vampire Broadway mega-flop, I think it (snicker) nails the lid on the coffin for this particular genre of musical theater.

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One of my current guilty-favorite series, Jim Butcher's "Dresden Files," is going to be a TV series on the Sci-Fi Channel, reports Sci Fi Wire.

If you want to catch up on your reading before the pilot airs in January, the SFBC has the first three books in our Wizard for Hire omnibus, the next two in a book called Wizard by Trade, and the two after that coming up later this year in a book we'll be calling Wizard at Large. (And then there's one more book after that, if you're a particularly fast reader.)

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