SFFWorld News - 01/29/09

   Genre News…. 29/01/09

Narnia Film News: From Digital Spy: Twentieth Century Fox has reportedly agreed to develop the third instalment in the Chronicles Of Narnia franchise alongside Walden Media.

Walt Disney Pictures, which produced the first two instalments, pulled out of The Chronicles Of Narnia: The Voyage Of The Dawn Treader last month, citing budgetary reasons.

According to Variety, Fox was entitled to the first crack at Dawn Treader because of the shared Fox Walden marketing and distributing label.

Fox 2000 will reportedly share the production costs, which are thought to be around $140 million (£100 million), with Walden Media.

Potter Film News: A stuntman working on the latest Harry Potter film has been seriously injured on set, according to UK newspaper, The Mirror.

The 25-year-old, who doubles for the film's star Daniel Radcliffe, was reportedly performing an aerial sequence when a planned explosion caused him to fall to the ground.

"It is thought he may have been caught by the explosion and hit the ground very hard," said a source.

"He told crew members who went to help him he couldn’t feel anything from the waist down. Everyone is just hoping he makes a good recovery. It has come as a terrible shock."

The accident happened at Leavesden Studios, near Watford, where Harry Potter And The Deathly Hallows is currently in pre-production.

Other film news: According to Variety, Universal Pictures is developing a prequel to the original Howard Hawks film of 1951 and John Carpenter's 1982 horror film The Thing. The film will be set in a Norwegian research camp and will follow the first discovery of the shape-shifting alien and how it overcame the camp's inhabitants.

Battlestar Galactica executive producer Ron Moore has been hired to write the re-imagining. It will reportedly be inspired by John W. Campbell Jr.'s original short story Who Goes There, which influenced Carpenter's film and Howard Hawks's original The Thing From Another World.

Matthijs Van Heijningen will direct the project, with Eric Newman and Marc Abraham producing and David Foster executive producing.

Award News: The Horror Writers Association has announced the winners of this year's Lifetime Achievement Award: Chelsea Quinn Yarbro and F. Paul Wilson.

From Locus: Congratulations to Neil Gaiman, whose Graveyard Book  (HarperCollins) won the 2009 Newbery Medal, given by the Association for Library Service to Children (a division of the American Library Association) for last year's outstanding American children's book. The award was announced at the ALA Midwinter Meeting in Denver CO.

Also from Locus, further congratulations to the winners of this year's Aurealis Awards, for Australian science fiction, fantasy and horror, include K.A. Bedford's novel Time Machines Repaired While-U-Wait, Jonathan Strahan's anthology The Starry Rift (Note: review pending from SFFWorld's Rob Bedford), Shaun Tan's illustrated book Tales from Outer Suburbia, and the Peter McNamara Convenors' Award for Excellence to Jack Dann.

From Niall Harrison on the Torque Control blog: The nominees for this year's BSFA Awards, presented by the British Science Fiction Association, have been announced. The awards will be presented in April at Eastercon LX.

The nominees are:

And whilst on the subject of awards, author Adam Roberts makes a provocative statement this week that All SF Awards are rubbish.  

Other Stuff that’s caught our attention:

At Suvudu, Shawn Speakman gives a nice summary of the anti-George RR Martin discussion on the Internet, In Defence of George RR Martin. Also useful is Adam Whitehead’s (Werthead) essay on the history of George R.R. Martin's Song of Ice and Fire series in his essay A Defence of Dragons, Part 1.

At the UK newspaper The Guardian, there’s been the publication (in three parts) of 1000 SF novels you should read: Science Fiction & Fantasy Novels Everyone Must Read.

From the same newspaper website, David Barnett summarises a dichotomy between literary writers and science fiction writers in his article Science fiction: the genre that dare not speak its name. There’s a great opening statement: “What do novels about a journey across post-apocalyptic America, a clone waitress rebelling against a future society, a world-girdling pipe of special gas keeping mutant creatures at bay, a plan to rid a colonisable new world of dinosaurs, and genetic engineering in a collapsed civilisation have in common?

They are all most definitely not science fiction.”