Emmy Awards Given

If you check out the
official Emmy website
, you’ll find a Word
document that lists the winners at this year’s Emmy
awards. Enterprise went home with two
technical awards, while Angels In America
cleaned house as the big winner, with four technical
awards and seven awards in the main ceremony. Next
year’s ceremony is certain to look much different;
four of the biggest winners won’t be on the air next
year. (Sex and the City, Frasier,
and The Sopranos have all wrapped their
final seasons, while Angels in America was a
miniseries, now out on DVD, that was never intended
to run more than a few weeks.) The West
Wing
is already down to being a single award
winner. So, what do we see on the horizon that might
make an impact? What do you predict for the next big
winner?

You and Lucas

So. You have your time machine. You could try to change major world history, prevent terrible disasters, and so forth, but let’s face it: you’d probably just futz it up. I, for one, do not want to suddenly find myself speaking Japanese and wearing a beret and kilt whilst typing on my Underwood Pentium just because you stepped on the wrong butterfly when you stopped the assassination of Archduke Ferdinand. No, you’re heading for 1990, where you will advise George Lucas on the future of Star Wars.

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Iron Council

Its headlamps were eyes now, predictably, bristling with thick wire lashes, its cowcatcher a jawful of protruding teeth. The hug tusks of wilderness animals were strapped and bolted to them. The front nub of its chimney wore a huge welded nose, the smokestack ajut from it in nonsense anatomy. Sharpened girders gave it horns. And behind that enormous unwieldy face the engine was crowded with trophies and totems. The skulls and chitin headcases of a menagerie glared dead ferocity from its flanks: toothy and agape, flat, eyeless, horned, lamprey-mouthed with cilia-teeth, bone-ridged, shockingly human, intricate. Where they had them the trophies’ skins were tanned, drabbed by preservation, bones and teeth mazed with cracks and discoloured by smoke. The befaced engine wore dead like a raucous hunter god.
(339)

Imagine science and technology came to Middle-Earth. Now imagine that in place of hobbits, orcs, elves, and ents, you have steam-cyborgs, amphibious vodyanoi, insect-headed khepri, vegetable cactacae, ab-dead vampires, and a hundred other races. In place of epic heroism, imagine people so morally murky that Sauron would walk away from the worst of them in disgust. Mix SF, fantasy, steampunk, and maritime epic, people the result with psychologically complex (and complexed) characters, and have a gifted writer tell the tale. The world is Bas-Lag, created by China Mieville. He introduced it in Perdido Street Station and revisited it in The Scar, both extraordinary books by an extraordinary literary talent.

In 2004 he published his third and most political Bas-Lag novel, Iron Council.

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Trekkies 2

Trekkies 2, the sequel to the hilarious 90s documentary Trekkies won’t likely be playing a theatre near you, but it can be purchased. The second film tours the Trek Cons of the world, and we see more people and more places. Unfortunately, we experience less of what made the original both compelling and hilarious. Members of the original crew also make themselves conspicuous with their absence.

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