Weekend Roundup!

First of all, there's a new Star Trek: Into Darkness poster up.  You know the drill: Let's get excited!  There's not a lot to go on; I've heard speculation that it's the Borg (please, God, no!), and if you zoom in on the poster you can see the devastated city is clearly London.  How that ties in is anyone's guess, but after they destroyed San Francisco in the last one anything goes. 

It also seems pretty clear that the central figure isn't Kirk.  Chris Pine is many things, but brunette he certainly is not.  So that leads me to suspect Cummerbatch; if that's the case, and we know he's set to play the villain, that makes me pretty sure the devastation has been wrought by Gary Mitchell, the rumored bad guy in this go-round.  From the Original Series, we know that Gary Mitchell gained near-Q powers and would certainly make sense to see someone unsettled by the sudden acquisition of power go berserk on a major Earth city.  So that's my speculation, what do you think?

This is pretty cool: Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell is set to be made into a BBC mini-series.  The book, written by Susanna Clarke, still ranks in my Top 10 Fantasy Books List.  It's up there with Name of the Wind, and The Farseer Trilogy (I know, trilogies shouldn't count as one entry, but in the genre of fantasy if I didn't include series as single entries there'd only be two [maybe three] on there.)  That being said, I'm really excited about the mini-series.  Tor.com has an interesting article on who should play each character; even though he's been just about everywhere, Benedict Cummerbatch would make a great Jonathan Strange, and Ian Holm would excel as Mr. Norrell. 

The interwebs have been abuzz recently with an ongoing controversy surrounding sexism in the comic industry and nerdom in general.  The basic argument is that women are under-represented and that rampant sexism denies their agency and objectifies them.  Over at The Hawkeye Initiative, artists have recast Hawkeye in many of the provocative poses of female superheroes.  io9 has a great article detailing some of the better entries.

Meanwhile, in movie news, Terminator is being remade, that creepy kid from Chronicle is playing Harry Osborn in the new Spiderman movie, and NASA is building a warp drive (okay, not really movie news, but hella awesome anyway.)

In book news, Dean Koontz signed onto a six-book deal with Random House, the self-publishing phenomenon Wool by Hugh Howey was picked up by 20th Century Fox, and Kenneth Calhoun's novel Black Moon was scooped from William Morris Endeavor by Crown's Hogarth imprint. 

And here's the trailer for the forthcoming Les Miserables, this Christmas, which I'm really excited for: