I’ve been enjoying io9, the relatively new science fiction blog from the Gawker blog empire. They have a nice mix of current science fiction news and SF nostalgia, and they have a particular eye for apocalyptic articles.

They recently wrote about “Dark America”, an unfinished novel by Junot Diaz, whose well-reviwed current book "The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao" is out in hardcover. While I’m unclear on what “Dark America” is actually about, the excerpt that io9 uses seems to have characters traveling in a robotic vehicle through post-apocalyptic America, always a plus in my opinion.
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We’re in Santiago, Chile for a few days, on our way home from a trip to see Easter Island - not a particularly apocalyptic thing although it might be a good place to ride out a zombie attack if you need to. I can’t remember if it was mentioned in “World War Z: An Oral History of the Zombie War” or not. The island is one of the most remote, and the ocean floor drops off sharply near it, possibly making it difficult for underwater zombies to reach land.

But I digress.

We took a break from sight-seeing and all the empanadas and ham-and-cheese sandwiches to see “Soy Leyenda” yesterday, which I’d been interested in seeing in the US but didn’t have time to catch before we left. The film was in English with Spanish subtitles… there are several places in the film where you can barely hear lines, and it’s odd to see them clearly (in Spanish) in the subtitles. Given how weak my Spanish is, I could barely understand the subtitles, too.

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I imagine that at this point you’re aware of the writer’s strike which is affecting television and eventually movie production. The first impact from the strike has been late night television and soap operas, but prime time TV will also be feeling it soon as shows run out of new episodes to air.

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The Apocalypse Blog welcomes a new word into the world: “Dioramageddon”, meaning “A scale model representation of the end of the world.”

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I’ve been hanging on to these for much too long… now I’m going to post an article with so many links out that Google will probably decide that the blog is a link farm and stop indexing it…

Today is the day before Richard Kelly’s “Southland Tales” goes into limited release in the US (on Wednesday, November 14th), and wide release this Friday, November 16th.

Richard Kelly, you may recall, wrote and directed “Donnie Darko”, the (dare I say) dark, funny, somewhat-science fiction film that I want to say launched Jake Gyllenhaal on the world, except that it wasn’t his first film and not many people saw it. The film involved time travel, possible hallucinations, a man in a rabbit suit talking about the end of the world, and disenfranchisement, and suffered from being released soon after September 11th, 2001 - a major plot point in the film involves falling aircraft pieces.

This is all very timely for me as I had the good fortune to see a stage adaptation of “Donnie Darko” by the American Repertory Theatre this weekend (held at the wonderfully named “Zero Arrow Theatre” - it’s at 0 Arrow St.). The production was surprisingly good.

Kelly’s new film - “Southland Tales” seems to follow on similar themes. Sarah Michelle Gellar is cast as a porn star trying to break into mainstream film (”Scientists are saying the future is going to be far more futuristic than they originally predicted”), pitching her script through an amnesiac action star played by “The Rock”, Dwayne Johnson. The film takes place in a Los Angeles in the near future, after nuclear attacks in Texas have propelled the USA into becoming more of an in-denial-police-state.

The film famously was booed at its premiere at Cannes in 2006. Sony Entertainment picked it up and Richard Kelly cut the film by 25 minutes.

Three graphic novels are available as a prequel to the film: “Southland Tales Book 1: Two Roads Diverge”, “Southland Tales Book 2: Fingerprints” and “Southland Tales Book 3: The Mechanicals”. The three are also collected together in a single volume: “Southland Tales: The Prequel Saga”. They follow the main characters and explore the setting, presumably leading up to the events of the film.
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Who says YouTube is only for pirated video?

Harkening back to an entire 9 days or so ago, the completed video of zombies doing yoga is now live. You can find it here on YouTube or watch it embedded after the cut.

The video is a trailer for the new book: “The Zen of Zombie: Better Living Through the Undead”

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“When a man eats your eye / like a big pizza-pie / that’s a zombie!”

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Steampunk: Steampunk is a subgenre of fantasy and speculative fiction which came into prominence in the 1980s and early 1990s. The term denotes works set in an era or world where steam power is still widely used—usually the 19th century, and often set in Victorian era England…

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Cormac McCarthy’s “The Road” has won many honors, including the Pulitzer Prize, and was boosted by being a selection for Oprah’s book club. McCarthy is notoriously publicity-shy, but Oprah was able to lure him out to do an interview as well.

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“Wastelands: Stories of the Apocalypse” is an anthology of post-apocalyptic stories due out on January 8th. It includes stories by Stephen King, Gene Wolfe, Jonathan Lethem, Orson Scott Card, Octavia Butler, Cory Doctorow and others… and while it’s post-apocalyptic it apparently is grounded well enough to not include zombies or aliens.

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