Christopher Mackay's Blog

I’ve read Wake, the first of Sawyer’s WWW (Wake, Watch, Wonder) trilogy, and am nearly finished Watch. They are, as always with Sawyer, excellent.

In the WWW trilogy Sawyer’s exploring the meaning and consequences of several varieties of consciousness — human, primate and artificial. Throw in BlackBerrys, EyePods [not a typo], a LiveJournaling blind-from-birth teenage math-wiz protagonist transplanted from Texas to Kitchener-Waterloo and artistically-inclined webcam-chatting primates, and you’re getting the idea.

It’s a little weird seeing a trailer for a novel that isn’t also the trailer for a movie, but Sawyer’s work is such a natural fit for the screen, that it only makes sense:

Plus it makes it look like the web’s made of electic jellyfish, so how cool is that?

Visit Sawyer’s website: sfwriter.com.

“Failure is an option, but fear is not.” A great talk by James Cameron at TED, February, 2010; touches on his early love of science fiction, his love of diving, working with Stan Winston at Digital Domain, and his work on The Abyss, Titanic and Avatar.

WALL•E (2008) review:

The idea that a company in the business of mainstream entertainment would make something as creative, substantial and cautionary as WALL-E has to raise your hopes for humanity.

—John Anderson, Washington Post

That’s a lot to pin on a movie. Can’t wait to see it. Hopefully Thomas Newman’s score is up to his usual standards.

(Via metacritic.com.)

Stan Winston has died.

Even if you’re not a special-effects/make-up nerd, you know his work. Some highlights:

• Iron Man (2008)
• Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines (2003)
• Jurassic Park III (2001)
• Artificial Intelligence: AI (2001)
• Pearl Harbor (2001)
• The Lost World: Jurassic Park (1997)
• Interview with the Vampire: The Vampire Chronicles (1994)
• Jurassic Park (1993)
• Terminator 2: Judgment Day (1991)
• Edward Scissorhands (1990)
• Predator (1987)
• Aliens (1986)
• The Terminator (1984)
• The Wiz (1978)
• Roots (1977)

I can say that if you liked the other Indiana Jones movies, you will like this one, and that if you did not, there is no talking to you.

That’s good enough for me.

CBC News | “Science fiction writer Arthur C. Clarke dies at 90″

Clarke will be best-remembered for 2001: A Space Odyssey, based on his short-story The Sentinel, but he wasn’t just a writer of science fiction; he also wrote many science articles and invented something called the satellite. Yes, the geo-stationary orbiting kind that makes television and modern meteorology possible. Not too shabby. He was also an early adopter of technology, using something called electronic mail to correspond from Sri Lanka with 2010: Odyssey Two director Peter Hyams in the early 1980s.

CBC News | “English Patient director Anthony Minghella dies after surgery”

Minghella, director of Cold Mountain, Jim Henson’s The Storyteller and, of course, The English Patient, was 54.

Two eras come to a close.