The folks at Orbit Books have gone over Fantasy art covers and made a series of fantastic charts out of them.

1. Trends in Fantasy Cover Art shows the differences between art between 2008 and 2009.
2. Changing Fashion in Urban Fantasy Heroines shows how the female protagonists are dressed and posed this year, again in comparison to last year.

Received from the web:

Hi, there.

When I was about 12 years old, I bought a hardbound book with my own money for the first time. That book was Ray Bradbury's Something Wicked This Way Comes, a dark fantasy about youth and coming of age, about yearning for the impossible, and about good versus evil and how the latter could seize and destroy you if you yearned for too much. After finishing that book 47 years ago, I was hooked on reading (and dark fantasy) for the rest of my life.

Quite Astonishing to see:

http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/badastronomy/2010/06/20/the-green-fire...

John Scalzi has been teasing his readers of his blog, Whatever, with 'That Super Secret Thing that I Can't Tell You About' for a while now, and on Wednesday he revealed it: He's written a relaunch/reboot of H. Beam Piper's Little Fuzzy books - or at least, of the first book.

His Announcement (which is in question and answer format) reads in part:

Copied from AussieCon 4's site

864 Total Ballots Cast

BEST NOVEL (699 nominating ballots)

Boneshaker by Cherie Priest (Tor)
The City & The City by China Miéville (Del Rey; Macmillan UK)
Julian Comstock: A Story of 22nd-Century America by Robert Charles Wilson (Tor)
Palimpsest by Catherynne M. Valente (Bantam Spectra)
Wake by Robert J. Sawyer (Ace; Penguin; Gollancz; Analog)
The Windup Girl by Paolo Bacigalupi (Night Shade)

BEST NOVELLA (375 nominating ballots)

Check out the details at http://www.thelocal.de/society/20100121-24721.html:

"The Complete Metropolis" will be held at the Deutsche Kinemathek museum for film and television at Potsdamer Platz, where many of the Berlinale red carpet events take place.

"It will be sort of a Making Of," said curator Kristina Jaspers.

Picked up a post from Charles Stross at http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2010/01/2009-hugo-nomination..., which discusses the fact that Hugo Nominations are now open for the 2009 Hugo awards.

Dan O'Bannon, author of the scripts for Alien, Total Recall, and director of Return of the Living Dead and The Resurrected, has died at 63.

Ah, and check out this lovely rememberance of Dan O'Bannon's work and life.

A bit of news reported on Tor.com:

On December 11, 1929, the world’s first club devoted to science fiction met for the first time. They called themselves the Scienceers. Years later, in 1961, one of their original number recalled those days in a fanzine article which, through the magic of the World Wide Web, can be read here.

Happy Birthday Everyone!

The Colorado Springs Fine Arts Center will present NASA | ART: 50 Years of Exploration, Dec. 19 – March 7, 2010, organized by the Smithsonian Institution Traveling Exhibition Service and the National Aeronautics and Space Administration in cooperation with the Smithsonian’s National Air and Space Museum.