“At the King’s board sat Éomer and the four guests, and there also waiting upon the king was the lady Éowyn. They ate and drank swiftly.”
This month we visit the Golden Hall of Meduseld in Rohan. Our food reflects the northern roots of Tolkien’s Rohirrim, drawing on Scandinavian and Anglo-Saxon traditions.
We start with a hearty rye porridge, followed by braised beef and roasted vegetables. For dessert, a rich saffron and cream pancake served with apple compote.
The table setting is built with multiple colors, layers, and lush textiles. The colors refer to the expansive grasslands of Rohan, and gold-colored or metallic-sheen details add opulence. The dishware turns showier as the meal progresses, moving from a plain white bowl to a plate with brown and green glazing, and ends with a pale teal handblown glass plate on a gold-rimmed white charger.
I’m most interested in Arrival (based on a story by Ted Chiang and out very soon now!), Altered Carbon by Richard K. Morgan, and Lilith’s Brood by Octavia E. Butler. It would also be great to see Ann Leckie’s Ancillary series, Red Mars by Kim Stanley Robinson, and Daniel José Older’s Bone Street books on screen.
It was also intriguing to see Roadside Picnic by Arkady and Boris Strugatsky on the list, for I’m not used to seeing Eastern bloc SFF authors in the Anglo-American market. According to the all-knowing Internets, Roadside Picnic was turned into a Russian SFF art film Stalker in 1979. I never saw that, but did read the Finnish translation (Stalker: huviretki tienpientarelle) when I was too young to really understand it, so it would be nice to refresh my memory.
Besides works in progress mentioned in Zutter’s list, I’m looking forward to OtherLife. It’s adapted from Kelley Eskridge’s Solitaire (2002), which I read only this year and loved. Unfortunately, OtherLife seems currently to have paused in post-production. We live in hope, though! (I’ve been following the story of its development on Eskridge’s blog; do visit for a glimpse of indie movie projects from a writer’s perspective.)
Anything on your radar that especially tickles your fancy? Do share!
Google tells me with a lovely doodle that it’s the 37th anniversary of the first printing of The Neverending Story by Michael Ende.
Originally published in German on September 01, 1979, Die unendliche Geschichte was translated into Finnish in 1982 (and apparently English in 1983, with the film adaptation in 1984). I can’t quite remember if I ever read it. At the same time, I want to recall a gorgeous tome with both green and red print, so I guess I must at least have been handling the Finnish translation at one point.
(No, I did not imagine the green and red print!)
While the movie version isn’t terribly well-made nor the first I saw in a theater, it is one of the first screen adaptations that made me realize I was a geek even if I didn’t have a word for it at the time. It’s purely for nostalgia that I own and occasionally rewatch it. I’m now wondering whether I should’ve bought the book instead.
ICBIHRTB—pronounced ICK-bert-bee—is short for ‘I Can’t Believe I Haven’t Read This Before’. It’s an occasional feature for book classics that have for some reason escaped our notice thus far.
Have you heard of Arrival? It’s a forthcoming science fiction movie about a first contact situation on earth, and the more I read about it the more curious I get.
The story is based on Ted Chiang’s 1998 novella “Story of Your Life,” adapted to screen by Eric Heisserer and directed by Denis Villeneuve. Chiang won both the Nebula and Sturgeon Awards with it.
The main interest for me is that Dr. Louise Banks, the character played by Amy Adams, is a linguist. Since we don’t generally get much screen time, it’s exciting, as is having languages / linguistics as a story focus. There’s also a little bit of Nordic involvement: the score is by Icelandic composer Jóhann Jóhannsson.
I love the fact that for a change the UFO that lands in the U.S. touches down in Montana, not New Frigging York City. That horse is thoroughly, properly dead, ladies and gentlemen of Hollywood. Thank you for not going there.
Judging by the trailer, the movie also avoids one of my pet peeves. It looks like finding a way to communicate with the aliens is going to take a lot of effort and a good, long while. We get glimpses of various graphics on computer screens, but it’s clear that the bulk of the work consists of human effort assisted by computers. In other words, people are doing the actual analyzing while computers number-crunch. Compare it, for instance, with the mothership scene in Close Encounters of the Third Kind (a clip of the scene here). As fascinating as the tonal-color language is, I’m so disappointed with the perfunctory and hand-wavy treatment the linguistic mystery got. I do hope that the Arrival trailer is accurate in acknowledging the effort that not only communication but of all kinds of intellectual work require.
And it may indeed be: The USA Today sneak peek quotes the male lead Jeremy Renner: “It’s big and there are thriller elements and tension, but it’s going to lean much more into a thinking person’s film.” There are also hints that Adams’ character will begin dreaming in the aliens’ language, which is a phenomenon I find fascinating. (I sometimes dream in multiple languages. The highest count I can remember is four.)
I discovered one interesting factoid. In the U.S. trailer, Dr. Banks can be heard commenting on the emerging common language like this: “We need to make sure that they [aliens] understand the difference between a weapon and a tool. Language is messy, and sometimes one can be both.”
The international trailer suggests a different story angle, however. Have a look:
In it, instead of “[w]e need to make sure that they understand,” Dr. Banks says: “We don’t know if they understand the difference between a weapon and a tool [my emphasis].”
I don’t know what to make of the decision, and I can’t wait to see which one the movie actually goes with. Fortunately I don’t have that long to wait: the U.S. release date is November 11, 2016.
Assembled from a number of different sources, none of which have any sort of connection to author Ann Leckie’s writing, we now have an amazing book trailer for her Imperial Radch trilogy:
It was made by bironic, the creator of the goosebump-inducingly glorious video Starships! On the creation process, bironic has this to say:
“A labor of love, nine months in the making. I watched or scanned through about 50 movies and TV shows (plus endless YouTube videos) in the hunt for clips that looked like my headcanon of critical moments, places and characters from the books, while trying not to use hugely recognizable actors and actresses. Not that you’d know it from the final source list, but the research process involved reading and learning a lot about the history of black characters in Western science fiction film and television as well as a crash course in modern African SF/F independent filmmaking, both of which were fascinating.”
“After so long journeying and camping, and days spent in the lonely wild, the evening meal seemed a feast to the hobbits; to drink pale yellow wine, cool and fragrant, and eat bread and butter, and salted meats, and dried fruits, and good red cheese, with clean hands and clean knives and plates. Neither Frodo nor Sam refused anything that was offered, nor a second, nor indeed a third helping. The wine coursed in the veins and tired limbs, and they felt glad and easy of heart as they had not done since they left the land of Lórien.”
The rangers of Gondor in Ithilien offer a simple but satisfying dinner for two hungry Hobbits. For this month’s meal, we have a version following Tolkien’s description (with the addition of a salad, just to have a vegetable on the table). We served up ham with dried fruit sauce, a cucumber salad, bread, butter, and cheese, and a cup of wine to go with it.
A makeshift narrow trestle table holds brown glazed pottery as well as plain wooden bowls and serving plates, closely resembling the rangers’ base. Butter is served from its own little green ceramic bowl and bread is accessible from a fabric-covered basket. Hunks of cheese can be cut on the same small wooden cutting board that it’s served on.
Browsing Tumblr the other day, I ran into what looked like stills from a scifi series. My immediate reaction was “What is this? Who’s she? I wanna see it!!”
Turns out they were indeed scifi show stills. The pictures come from an article by Dalton Ross on Entertainment Weekly. He talked with The Expanse showrunner Naren Shankar about a new character introduced in season 2, and shared these photos.
The commanding presence that drew my eye is marine Roberta “Bobbie” Draper from Mars, played by New Zealand actress, model, and boxer Frankie Adams.
Mr. Shankar talked about casting Ms. Adams for the role:
“When you ask a casting director to find a 6-foot half-Polynesian, the response is usually one of stunned silence, like, ‘Really?’ And we were like, ‘Yeah, really.’ We’ve been very conscious about maintaining the ethnic identity of the characters in the book as much as humanly possible. And we were really intent on doing that with Bobbie.
“We actually looked in the U.K., Los Angeles, New York, Toronto, Hawaii, and New Zealand. And when [co-author] Ty Franck saw the first casting tape on her, he said, ‘That’s her, that’s her,’ right away. She’s a professional boxer, as well as being a model and so she had the physicality and a very interesting, unusual kind of face you rarely see on television. She’s awesome and we couldn’t be more delighted to have her on the show.”
I have to say that the third shot (above) reminds me a lot of the 2004 Galactica reboot. I’ve only seen the pilot for The Expanse, though, and that streamed over a very hiccupy connection. It looked interesting, but for some reason or another I never got back to it.
I seriously hope that Bobbie won’t just be another case of Strong Female Character syndrome. Kick-ass female characters can be awesome, and they are definitely an improvement over women as mothers or love interests. But I’m done with women written as one-dimensional beings, be it demure damsels in distress or forceful fighters.
I want the people in my entertainment to be complex and three-dimensional regardless of their gender. Whether The Expanse delivers or not will remain to be seen, though. (Haven’t read the books that it’s based on, so I’ve nothing to go on there.) Apparently I now must check out season 1 in order to see season 2 when it comes out. 🙂
MARVEL || Glitter & Gold (collab w/ djcprod) by Grable424
They’ve skillfully intercut clips from Iron Man and Captain America movies, Guardians of the Galaxy, and Ant-Man, among others; the Doctor Strange trailer also features, even if the movie wasn’t out yet. The song is “Glitter & Gold” by new-to-me artist Barns Courtney, and very catchy. Love it!
Hey, look! We found a thing on the internet! We thought it was cool, and wanted to share it with you.
Co-Geeking 