“When he woke in the woods in the dark and the cold of night he’d reach out to touch the child sleeping beside him. Nights dark beyond darkness and the days more gray than each one that had gone before. Like the onset of some cold glaucoma dimming away the world. His hand rose and fell softly with each precious breath…He knew only that the child was his warrant. He said: If he is not the word of God God never spoke.”

The Road is the ultimate survival story, with a father living solely to protect his son after the world has essentially ended and there is little life, hope, or sanity left in the world. After an unspecified disaster destroys all the plant and animal life, along with most of the human population, they must travel south in order to survive the elements. The two travel through the desolate landscape, scavenging food when they can and taking everything worth keeping in an old shopping cart. Their goal is to make it to the coast and follow it south from there, where they hope there are more people and some food left. But they aren’t the only ones on the Road, and the others pose an unimaginable threat.

Besides the actual story of survival, both the book and the movie touch on what it means to survive in a world beyond hope. What keeps someone going in a world like that? Can you struggle to survive day to day and watch horrors take place all around you and still be a good person? The book and the movie touch on these is slightly different ways (because of the various limitations of each mediums) but both get the same message across: just surviving isn’t enough, you need that something more or you lose your humanity.

This is one of the most accurate Book to Movie transitions I’ve seen. I think it helps that the book is just over 200 pages, and the average screenplay is about as long. It’s so good, in fact, that with one exception when two scenes are switched around, you could follow along with the book.

The book takes place in post-apocalyptic America; and the entire movie was shot outside (something pretty rare nowadays) and entirely in the US: Oregon, Pennsylvania, and Louisiana. Some shots were made more gray to appear more desolate, but locations were chosen for their severity, to appear as accurately as possible.

I was incredibly impressed by the casting. Charlize Theron plays the mother, and the actor playing The Boy (Kodi Smit-McPhee) looks just like her; he’s perfect for this part. Viggo Mortensen is excellent (as always), and the movie is studded with famous actors. Viggo Mortensen and author Cormac McCarthy spoke on the phone while Mortensen was preparing for the movie. The two talked about their sons, and after hanging up Mortensen realized he hadn’t asked a single question about the book. But the book is actually dedicated to McCarthy’s son, and was the inspiration for it. Cormac McCarthy and his son were present on set, and their dynamic was clearly influential. Director John Hillcoat said he was shocked to see them having some of the same conversations in the same tone as The Man and The Boy in the book.

Similarities

• Very true to the book; some foraging for food scenes were cut for time
• All of the dialogue from the book is in the movie, word for word.
• The tone was exactly the same as the book: bleak, bitter, and the smallest light of hope that very nearly died.

Differences

• Two scenes that weren’t in the book were added to the movie, but made up for the few that were cut
• The most gruesome scene (in my opinion) was cut; but for completely understandable reasons
• The Man swore and got angry with The Boy much more in the movie; The Boy was also much more argumentative in the movie-to the point of fighting and hitting his father. They were both much more patient with each other in the book, more like equals.

Accuracy Rating: 4.5 out of 5. The patience of The Man in the book was one of my favorite parts, and that was changed enough to bug me in the movie.

Can I get some Science with my Fiction?

By Matthew S. Dent

I’ve been thinking about what precisely science-fiction is. It covers a great deal of subgenres, some of which I’ve written in. But the fundamental idea behind it is in the name, I think. Science-fiction. Equal measures of each. Fiction about science. Or fiction involving science.

And I think that lies at the core of a lot of matters. Given that science is under a daily assault… it seems all the more important that sci-fi represents science in the most honest way possible. To me, sci-fi has always been about dreaming, about what could be in the future, but I know that a lot of people think of sci-fi as impenetrable nerd-gruel, but it really doesn’t have to be.

Reflecting on it, I think a lot of the bad sci-fi is the scientifically inaccurate stuff. To compensate for frankly impossible plot developments and holes that the writer has dug themselves into, they throw impenetrable technobabble and deus ex machinas into the mix, despite having little to no understanding of how the universe actually works. And then we’re using science as the plot crutch that magic so often is in fantasy.

The science in sci-fi doesn’t have to be so bold. It should be the lifeblood running through the veins of the story (and now I’m waxing all lyrical).

Read More here

The Vampire Diaries – From Book to Screen

via Movie Matics

First of all I have to say that I’ve read most of the books and I kind of liked it. Okay, I’ll admit. The first time hearing about this series I thought…no not another vampire show…but I tuned in anyways. Just to see what the hype was about. The show started off with a stumble, like any new show, but as the story progressed, I’m so addicted. I never missed an episode, if I did I’d try to find it online.I wasn’t a big fan though so I wasn’t so freaked out to watch the series.

When I did watch the show I liked it much more than the books. OH YES I DID. Why? Because of Elena. I didn’t like that character in the book at all! A blond haired, blue eyed cheerleader who is the most popular girl of the school and every boy wants to go out with her? Not for me. So far that was better than the book. For me, anyway. I do understand though, those who didn’t like the series for not being a good adaption of the books, I’ve been there. But don’t forget it is supposed to be BASED on the novel. I didn’t care about older actors playing younger roles, or that most of them are pretty.

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The Handmaid’s Tale, The Time-Traveler’s Wife: Why Real Book Lovers Read Science Fiction

by Amanda467 at BlogHer

In this post, I’m going to argue that if you’re a serious book lover, you should be reading sci-fi. I’m going to identify some compelling reasons why you should be reading the genre. Familiar, comfy titles that are literary bestsellers from the past 20 or so years: The Handmaid’s Tale, The Road, Never Let Me Go, Oryx and Crake,The Time Traveler’s Wife.

These are ALL works of science fiction.

Yep. That’s right. Somehow, those sneaky little aliens, robots and mad scientists all crawled under your radar and made you read a sci-fi novel without you even knowing it. Some of the book on the list above were even short-listed for the Booker Prize. Many of them are now classics of contemporary literature.

Margaret Atwood argues here that what she writes is “speculative fiction.” I disagree. She writes dystopic science fiction, but markets it to the masses. Why? Because of the inane and incorrect stereotypes about sci-fi that persist even now. If it’s got someone as well known and well respected as Margaret Atwood cringing over associations with tight lycra suits, little green men and bad B-grade movies, then is it any wonder the genre attracts only six percent of the U.S. reading public?

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I have to agree about science in some sci fi books. It’s just terrible. Sometimes all it takes to disprove a plot is a 30 second google search, and that’s just shoddy writing.  The really good Science fiction makes people want to learn more. And there are some tv shows out there that are more accurate than the books. If TV writers can do research for a show that appears weekly, then why are novelist being so lazy?

Do you think Vampire Diaries was adapted for TV well? Do you prefer the books or the TV show? What do you think of books that are marketed as literature, but are really Sci Fi?

Source: io9

A MARTIAN IN TIBET

What happens when a Martian woman discovers scientific anomalies in a Tibetan lamasery? Find out in our exclusive story from the recently-releasedApex Book of World SF, edited by Lavie Tidhar.

The anthology is packed with terrific stories from science fiction writers all over the world, including S.P. Somtow and Zoran Zivkovic, many of them translated for the first time.

Read more here…

Source: dreadcentral

BBC BOOKS PUBLISHING A THREE-NOVEL TIE IN TO ‘BEING HUMAN’

The second season of Toby Whithouse’s stellar Being Human premieres in the UK this Sunday, and if you’re anything like me, you can’t get enough of this show about three twenty-something housemates trying to live normal lives, despite the fact that one is a werewolf, one is a vampire, and the other is a ghost. If so, you’re in luck because on February 4th three novels that tie in to Being Human are being released by BBC Books. 

They’re entitled Being Human: The Road, Being Human: Chasers, and Being Human: Bad Blood; and above the images showing the cover artwork.

Read more here…

Will you be reading ‘Apex World of SF’, ‘The Road, ‘Chasers’ or “Bad Blood?

New Evernight Book: Hourglass preview

Love the Evernight series? The third book, Hourglass, comes out March 9th, but you can read the first 15 pages right now.

Here’s the summary from Claudia Gray’s site: “After escaping from Evernight Academy, the vampire boarding school where they met, Bianca and Lucas seek refuge with Black Cross, an elite group of vampire hunters. Bianca must hide her supernatural heritage or risk certain death at their hands. But when Black Cross captures her friend–the vampire Balthazar–all her secrets threaten to come out.

Soon, Bianca and Lucas have orchestrated Balthazar’s escape and are on the run, pursued not only by Black Cross, but by the powerful leaders of Evernight. Yet no matter how far they run, Bianca can’t escape her destiny.”

Get the Preview here

via David Hayles at Times Online: Spotlight: Doomed Earth book adaptations

In John Hillcoat’s The Road, based on the Pulitzer prize-winning novel by Cormac McCarthy, a man (played by Viggo Mortensen) and his son wander an America ravaged by an unknown disaster. It’s not the first time that a sci-fi novel has been used as a basis for a bleak movie meditation on Man’s possible fate.

No Blade of Grass (1970) A disappointing adaptation of John Christopher’s superb novel The Death of Grass, a story in which the world is in ruin after a virus wipes out all vegetation. Like John Wyndham’s The Day of the Triffids, it takes place in a beleaguered Great Britain. The film starred Nigel Davenport as a man hoping to find a safe haven in Scotland.

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from Uncle Creepy at Dread Central: More Pride and Prejudice and Zombies Coming in March

Are you a fan of the really unique undead spin put on the Jane Austen literary masterpiece via Pride and Prejudice and Zombies? If so, then get ready for some really good news to kick off the new year!

Quirk Books, the publisher of the recent cult classic tale of 19th Century living dead, is getting set to release another installment in the series entitled Pride and Prejudice and Zombies: Dawn of the Dreadfuls.

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By Ella Saltmarshe at Treehugger

When we think about the future of the world, it’s mostly bad. I’m not sure when this dawned on me. It could have been while watching Dune or Children of Men or The Road or perhaps while reading Margaret Atwood’s brilliant new Armageddon novel, The Year of the Flood. The cherry on the cake was the trailer for 2012, Hollywood’s latest offering of disaster porn. In the space of 2 mins 48, the Vatican crashes to the ground, Rio’s iconic statue of Christ crumbles, Mecca/ Tibet/ London/ India are engulfed by chaos, firebombs fall from the sky onto American forests and countless skyscrapers collapse. Our response to uncertainty is to create negative futures.

Doomsaying is our default position
As environmental activists, doomsaying has long been our default campaigning position. As visions of rising seas, expanding deserts and mass extinctions move from sci-fi books to peer reviewed scientific articles, the logic is that when people realise how dark the outlook is, they’ll change. If we can just communicate this grim future graphically enough, politicians will legislate for clean energy, couples will stop flying to Prague for romantic getaways, teenagers will turn off their TVs at the plug… and so on…

Except that in the last decade of communicating sustainability in the West, we’ve learnt that fear only works with small demographics. Study after study has shown that Armageddon scenarios do not motivate most people to change their behaviour.

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Personally, I like dystopian novels. Seeing that it could be worse is kind of cathartic. I also believe that books reflect the times, and we’re at a point that seems  bleak; between the environment and the economy we are having a rough decade.

What do you think of dystopian stories?

From The List UK: Best of a decade: Books

The top ten books of the decade are led by a sci-fi book: The Road by Cormac McCarthy.

1. Cormac McCarthy – The Road (2006): Already considered one of the finest novels of the modern era, Cormac McCarthy’s compelling and relentless story of a man and his son struggling to survive in a blasted, ashen post-apocalyptic landscape set a new benchmark for future fiction on its publication in 2006, and combined high literary ideas with an unforgiving, gripping narrative. As the father and son head south to avoid another bitter winter, their lives are constantly threatened by the bleak, dead environment around them as well as by other travellers. Marauding tribes have resorted to murder and cannibalism to survive, while the pair also discover a human farm in a plot which subverts and transcends horror and thriller genres to create something akin to a modern fable.

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fromPatrick Nielsen Hayden at Tor:  H. P. Lovecraft, Founding Father of SF Fandom

Before the internet, before BBSes and Fidonet and Usenet and LiveJournal and blogs and Facebook and Twitter, before the World Wide Web and hot-and-cold-online-everything, science fiction fandom had a long-lived, robust, well-debugged technology of social networking and virtual community. That technology, which flourished in fandom from the 1940s through the 1980s, was the amateur press association, commonly abbreviated APA. And they got it from H. P. Lovecraft.

A typical APA has thirty or forty members, each of whom self-publishes a small periodical for the others to read. Rather than everyone mailing their zines to everyone else, each member prints enough copies for the whole group and ships them to a designated officer of the group, who then, at periodic intervals, collates and redistributes identical collections of all the latest publications to every member of the group.

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By Geoff Boucher at the Los Angeles Times: Jack Bauer with fangs? Meet the vampire spy of ‘Blood Oath’

Now here’s a political-thriller concept with bite: Next May, Putnam will release ”Blood Oath,” which tells the tale of Nathaniel Cade, a vampire who has secretly served and protected every U.S. president for the past 140 years.

Putnam is planning a series devoted to the adventures of Cade. In the first book, the duty-bound bloodsucker is paired with a new Oval Office liaison, the cocky and calculating Zach Barrows. The two uneasy partners then uncover a grisly plot to use the battlefield corpses of American soldiers as biological weapons. The mastermind behind the plot? An ageless scientist who inspired Mary Shelley’s “Frankenstein.”

“I asked myself, ‘What could the president of the United States offer a vampire?’ and ‘What could a vampire offer the president?’ The answer to both is, well, quite a lot…. It was an idea that just wouldn’t let go of me, I had to exorcise it, to phrase it as dramatically as possible.”

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via Sabrina Rojas Weiss at MTV News: Meet The World’s Most Relatable Vampire In The ‘House Of Night’: The Book Report
Gone into vampire withdrawal yet? We’ve seen “New Moon” a hundred times, “Vampire Diaries” is in reruns, and “True Blood” is on hiatus. Take that Jasper grimace off your face and relax; we’re here to help. Peruse through past Book Report recommendations for your supernatural YA fix, and get sucked into yet another vampire series this week: P.C. Cast and daughter Kristin Cast’s “House of Night” books, which have also been optioned for a movie adaptation.

In this world, when select teenagers begin to change into vampyres — because of a combination of hormones and genetic predisposition — they’re tracked down, “marked” with a magical tattoo and then sent off to special nocturnal boarding schools, called Houses of Night. These vampyres seem a lot more like witches than the undead: They worship the goddess Nyx and practice magic with the five elements (air, fire, water, earth and spirit). But they’re constantly haunted by the fact that not all fledglings survive the change; many die suddenly, in the middle of class.

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from Ryan Van Cleave at California Literary Review: Flesh and Fire: Book One of the Vineart War by Laura Anne Gilman

If you like magic rings and cryptic, bearded wizards, Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings is probably up your fantasy alley. If you dig dark elves and +5 broadswords, odds are you’ve dungeon-delved a time or two in the world of R.A. Salvatore. But if you prefer a fine glass of Chablis as you stroll through a Tuscany vineyard, you’d be out of luck to enjoy such elements in a fantasy book—until now. Laura Anne Gilman, author of the best-selling Retrievers novels, has a new oenophile-based fantasy trilogy that’s a welcome surprise to the fantasy genre which has seemed bereft of any real innovation for far too long.

Admittedly, the premise is intriguing. All magic comes from spellwines created by Vinearts, former slaves who are forbidden to engage in politics or government thanks to a decree by the Sin Washer, a deity who sacrificed himself fourteen centuries earlier to stop the madness that the power-craving prince-mages created through their reckless use of magic. Now the power of wine magic is much more limited in order to keep its power from corrupting users. This is simply the way the world works in the Vin Lands. No one has questioned it . . . until now.

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By Diane Roback at Publisher’s Weekly: ‘Hunger Games 3’ to Publish Next August

Hunger Games fans have just eight more months to wait: the as yet untitled third and final book in Suzanne Collins’s dystopian fantasy trilogy will be released in English worldwide on August 24, 2010. An audio version from Scholastic Audio will be released simultaneously.

In other news, the trade paperback edition of the first book in the trilogy, The Hunger Games, will be released on July 6, 2010.

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By Charlie Jane Anders at io9: Is Fantasy The New Literature Of The Future?

Whenever people remark on the fact that fantasy books are slowly eclipsing science fiction, it’s viewed as a fear of the future, because fantasy is all about the past, right? Not necessarily, says one blogger.

Writer Mark Charan Newton (Nights Of Viijamur) cites some reasons why “science fiction is dying and fantasy is the future,” including the movie popularity of Harry Potter and Lord Of The Rings, the predominance of female readers, and fact that real-life science is now as full of “sensawunda” as science fiction.

Read More here

I love that a Sci Fi book has been picked as the best book of the decade. And I don’t normally like crime books, but Blood Oath sounds really interesting. And I loved hearing about the way Sci Fi writer’s got their work out, it’s hard to imagine life without internet now.

What do you think of the list? Have you read Marked? Are you looking forward to the next Hunger Games book?