Doctor Who's newest incarnation has been announced. Replacing Jodie Whittaker — and becoming the 14th Doctor Who — is 29-year-old Netflix star Ncuti Gatwa. (In 2020 the Scottish branch of the British Academy of Film and Television Arts awarded him the prestigious "Best Actor in Television" award for work on the Netflix series Sex Education.) Fun fact: he also voiced the lead driver in Electronic Arts' racing videogame Grid Legends, according to Wikipedia.

In a BBC press release, he described himself as "a mix of deeply honoured, beyond excited and of course a little bit scared" to take over the long-running part of the TARDIS-traveling Time Lord, according to CNN.

"This role and show means so much to so many around the world, including myself, and each one of my incredibly talented predecessors has handled that unique responsibility and privilege with the utmost care. I will endeavour my utmost to do the same." "Doctor Who" showrunner Russell T Davies said in the press release: "Sometimes talent walks through the door and it's so bright and bold and brilliant, I just stand back in awe and thank my lucky stars.

"Ncuti dazzled us, seized hold of the Doctor and owned those TARDIS keys in seconds."

Gatwa joins the long-running sci-fi series — which follows an alien Time Lord who travels across space and time — ahead of its 60th anniversary in 2023.

"Comic book nerd Christmas has arrived," quips Mashable, noting this is the big 20th anniversary of Free Comic Book Day. Basically if you walk into your local comic book store on the first Saturday in May: they'll hand you some free comic books. Bleeding Cool points out that several stores are even having free signings from famous comic book artists and writers.

Although in 2017 NPR had this advice for visiting comics fans. "While you're there, buy something... The comics shops still have to pay for the 'free' FCBD books they stock, and they're counting on the increased foot traffic to lift sales."

The official site includes a comic-shop locator — but many of the comics are also available online as free downloads. (For example, as free ebooks in Amazon's Kindle store.) This year's free offerings include a special issue of a new Sleepy Hollow comic and a unique "yearbook" commemorating the 25th anniversary of Buffy the Vampire Slayer.

Other geek-friendly choices include:

• Doctor Who
• Avatar: the Last Airbender
• Sonic the Hedgehog
• Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles
• The Three Stooges
• Stranger Things
• Spider-Man and Venom
• Avengers/X-Men/Eternals: Judgment Day
• DC League of Super-Pets and Dark Crisis: Special Edition
• Winchester Mystery House: The Hundred Year Curse
• A graphic novel called The Guardian of Fukushima
• Clementine ("the next big thing from Robert Kirkman's The Walking Dead")

And in addition — and perhaps inevitably.... "A new dawn of Archie is upon us!"

The Paramount+ streaming service already has five ongoing Star Trek series (including Discovery and Picard).

But they've just released a trailer for another one — and it's now derived directly from the original 1960s TV show, even including some of its original characters. The upcoming show's title?

Star Trek: Strange New Worlds.

Ars Technica reports: As we've reported previously, one of the highlights of Star Trek: Discovery's second season was the appearance of classic original series (TOS) characters Capt. Christopher Pike (Anson Mount), Number One (Rebecca Romijn), and Spock (Ethan Peck). All three reprise their roles for Strange New Worlds....

"If you want to seek out new life, go where the aliens are," Pike tells us. But that alien life might not be receptive to first contact, as Pike and the Enterprise find themselves under fire by aliens who consider their presence to be "blasphemy." And romance blooms for both Pike and Spock (separately, not with each other).

Star Trek: Strange New Worlds debuts on Paramount+ on May 5, 2022. The streaming platform has already greenlighted a second season, with Paul Wesley (Vampire Diaries ) joining the cast as future Enterprise Capt. James T. Kirk.
Ars Technica reports the cast as:

• Babs Olusanmokun playing Dr. M'Benga
• Celia Rose Gooding filling Nichelle Nichols' shoes as Cadet Nyota Uhura
• Jess Bush playing Nurse Christine Chapel
• Melissa Navai playing Lt. Erica Ortegas
• Bruce Orak playing an Aenar named Hemmer.
• Christina Chong playing La'An Noonien-Singh (a relation of the classic revenge-obsessed Star Trek villain Khan).

And on an unrelated note...

OneHundredAndTen writes: A recent paper proposes a new way to put together a message for alien intelligent beings. It comes up with an elaborate mechanism to convey information in notably constrained bitmaps, but one can't help but wonder whether it is too elaborate. For example, for 1+1 = 2, the article proposes something far more visually complex than 1+1 = 2, which could also be, with small adjustments, easily coerced to have a representation as a bitmap with the limitations in the article. It is not clear why the representation that the authors are proposing would be easier for aliens to decode and understand than something much closer to 1+1 = 2: either representation would be, well, alien to them. "Calculation of the optimal timing during a given calendar year is specified for potential future transmission from both the Five-hundred-meter Aperture Spherical radio Telescope in China and the SETI Institute's Allen Telescope Array in northern California to a selected region of the Milky Way which has been proposed as the most likely for life to have developed," reads the paper.

"These powerful new beacons, the successors to the Arecibo radio telescope which transmitted the 1974 message upon which this expanded communication is in part based, can carry forward Arecibo's legacy into the 21st century with this equally well-constructed communication from Earth's technological civilization."

Dune won six Academy Awards tonight — the most of any movie — at this year's Oscar's ceremony, taking home Oscars for its cinematography, visual effects, film editing, original score, production design, and "achievement in sound."

But the movie's Oscar-winning crew were surprised there was no Oscar nomination for the film's director, Denis Villeneuve, reports IndieWire: "I was very confused when Denis was not nominated for directing. It's as if the film directed itself and all of these craft categories magically did great work," sound designer/supervising sound editor Theo Green said. "Seeing the sweep that Dune is having tonight makes me very proud for Denis."

Green and other below-the-line winners painted a production picture where Villeneuve orchestrated a kind of cross-department collaboration that allowed each craftsperson's work to shine and work in concert with every other piece. Re-recording mixer Ron Bartlett said it all started with Villeneuve's deep study of the book. "It's better than the sum of its parts," Fraser said. "We are the culmination of Denis Villeneuve's combined group effort to make a movie, and that's what I'm most proud of." Several winners also called out editor Joe Walker as a key piece of the creation of Dune.
Besides the six Oscars it won, Dune had also been nominated for four other awards, including Best Picture.

Tonight's ceremony featured a tribute to 60 years of James Bond movies — and the franchise's most recent film also won the "Best Song" Oscar (for the song "No Time to Die" by Billie Eilish). This marks the third consecutive time that a James Bond movie's theme song has gone on to win the "Best Song" award.

And Apple TV+ became the first streaming service to ever win the prestigious Best Picture award for their movie CODA. NBC News calls this "a major moment for a film industry that has been dramatically transformed by the rise of direct-to-consumer streaming platforms and the growing popularity of at-home entertainment." (The film also won Oscars for best adapted screenplay and for best supporting actor.) In the days before the Oscars telecast, the best picture race came to be seen as a proxy battle between Apple and Netflix, the streaming giant that has been angling for Hollywood's marquee prize for at least the last half-decade, spending heavily on splashy promotional campaigns. Netflix was a double best picture contender this year, recognized for Jane Campion's haunting Western The Power of the Dog and Adam McKay's doomsday satire Don't Look Up.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Motherboard: Last June, the Department of Defense released a long-awaited and much-hyped document called "Preliminary Assessment: Unidentified Aerial Phenomena," detailing the government's knowledge of UFOs and its programs trying to detect and catalog them. Many UFOlogists hoped that the "UFO report" would be a watershed moment in the field, showing that the government was taking UFOs seriously and, perhaps, explaining what the government thought they were. Unfortunately, the nine-page report was pretty underwhelming; for the most part it revealed things we already knew, and read primarily like a plea from the DoD for more funding. Tantalizingly, we were told that members of Congress received a classified briefing with more information that would likely never be released to the public.

John Greenewald, the government transparency virtuoso behind the Black Vault, however, has a gift for us today: A redacted version of the classified report, obtained by filing a mandatory declassification review. This version of the report is longer and much more interesting -- detailing, for example, the most "common shapes" of UFOs spotted by the military. Certain sections of the classified report, such as one called "And a Handful of UAP Appear to Demonstrate Advanced Technology," have far more detail on specific incidents that the Department of Defense cannot explain and that are not mentioned in the public report, including seemingly two different incidents witnessed by multiple pilots and officers in the Navy. A section called "UAP Probably Lack a Single Explanation" seemingly attempts to go into greater depth exploring what those explanations could be, and also has an extra redacted paragraph about what the DoD believes could be attributed to "Foreign Adversary Systems."

Most interestingly, redacted figures, images, and diagrams in the classified reports explain what the DoD believes to be the most "common shapes" of UFOs, as well as "less common/irregular shapes." These sections are completely omitted in the public report and are unfortunately redacted in the version of the report obtained by Greenewald. The classified report also explains that the FBI has investigated and will continue to investigate UFOs in an attempt to ascertain the causes of the phenomena; a redacted section seems to explain which instances it has investigated. "Given the national security implications associated with potential threats posed by UAP operating in close proximity to sensitive military activities, installations, critical infrastructure, or other national security sites, the FBI is positioned to use its investigative capabilities and authorities to support deliberate DoD and interagency efforts to determine attribution," the report reads.

Slashdot reader Tangential shares what he describes as "an interesting article on Gizmodo discussing how we could easily contaminate other planets/moons as we explore them."

"Based on our recently demonstrated vulnerability to locally evolved bacteria and viruses, what will other worlds's pathogens do to us (and what will ours do to them?) What I also find interesting is what a small percentage of SciFi actually addresses this."

From Gizmodo's article: The year is 2034. Humans have sent a probe to Jupiter's moon Europa to drill through the icy surface and photograph the ocean beneath. In the few hours before it stops functioning, the probe returns images of shapes that could be some form of life. Scientists quickly organize a followup mission that will collect samples of that spot and bring them back to Earth. But, unknown to anyone, the first probe wasn't sterile — it carried a hardy bacteria that had survived even the mission's clean rooms. By the time the samples finally reach Earth years later, they're dominated by this bacteria, which has happily set up shop in Europa's dark, salty waters. Just like that, our first opportunity to study a truly alien ecosystem has been destroyed.

This is a nightmare scenario for NASA and other space agencies, and it's one they've worked intensely to avoid with every mission to another orb. But some researchers from a lesser-known branch of ecology argue that even the current strict standards aren't rigorous enough, and as more ambitious missions to other planets and moons get ready to launch, the risk of interplanetary contamination becomes more dire. They say we need to better plan for "forward contamination," in which our technology disseminates Earth microbes, as well as "back contamination," in which life from elsewhere hitches a ride to Earth.

In fact, we already have a playbook to lean on: the discipline of invasion science, the study of how species on our planet invade each other's ecosystems. "What I would say is that, given that there are now concrete plans in place to explore new areas that could have extant life — these pose a new set of risks that were not in play before," Anthony Ricciardi, a professor of invasion ecology and aquatic ecosystems at McGill University, told Gizmodo. "Invasion science has been applied to biosecurity at national and international levels. My colleagues and I believe that it could similarly guide biosecurity at the planetary or interplanetary scales."

Because of the groundbreaking technological advances of recent years, our ability to explore other worlds — from asteroids to planets to ocean moons — is expanding, and so are the risks that come with that. NASA plans to bring bits of Mars to Earth in the early 2030s, and missions to Titan and Europa, which could very well host life, are set to launch this decade.... Although the 2034 Europa tale is invented, there's plenty of precedent for it. We've likely accidentally brought drug-resistant bacteria into the Antarctic ecosystem already, infecting seabirds and seals.

Our lack of foresight and carelessness is driving mass extinctions on Earth — are we willing to do the same thing to the next inhabited world we touch?

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Bloomberg: The newest entrant in the fight for EV market share is going back to the future with an all-electric DeLorean. The infamous gull-winged car is being resurrected in Texas by a group of executives who most recently spent time at China-backed EV startup Karma Automotive. They're working with Stephen Wynne, who acquired the DeLorean branding rights in the 1990s and supplies parts for the 6,000 or so remaining vehicles. [...] The new company is called DeLorean Motors Reimagined LLC and its chief executive officer is Joost de Vries, Texas business records and LinkedIn postings show. The firm will set up a headquarters and an engineering outfit in San Antonio, with potential to bring 450 jobs, the city's development arm said in a statement.

It's not the first time the idea of a DeLorean redux has surfaced -- web searches turn up stories every few years about how Wynne has tried to revive the brand or produce low-volume models -- but using an electric powertrain is a new twist on the idea. The original car gained notoriety in the early 1980s both for its quality problems and for the legal woes of its creator, the late John DeLorean, before the "Back to the Future" film franchise turned it into a pop-culture icon.

The replicants are heading to the small-screen as Amazon Studios has put a live-action series set in the Blade Runner universe into development. Deadline reports: Ridley Scott, who directed the original 1982 Blade Runner movie, is executive producing the series, Blade Runner 2099, a follow-up to the feature film sequel Blade Runner 2049, which was released in 2017 and directed by Denis Villeneuve. Silka Luisa, showrunner of Apple TV+'s upcoming Elisabeth Moss-fronted drama series Shining Girls, is writing and exec producing Blade Runner 2099, which comes from Alcon Entertainment in association with Scott Free Productions and Amazon Studios. The project, which would mark the first Blade Runner live-action series, is in priority development at Amazon Studios, which is fast tracking scripts and eyeing potential production dates. Staffing is currently underway for writers to join a room. Scott may direct if the series moves forward, sources said.

As indicated by Blade Runner 2099's title, the latest installment of the neo-noir sci-fi franchise will be set 50 years after the film sequel. [...] Blade Runner 2099 is the latest extension in the Blade Runner franchise since Alcon Entertainment in 2011 acquired the film, television and ancillary franchise rights to produce prequels and sequels to the 1982 sci-fi classic. Kosove and his Alcon co-founder Broderick Johnson are exec producing the series along with Michael Green, who wrote Blade Runner 2049, Ben Roberts and Cynthia Yorkin as well as Scott Free Productions' David W. Zucker and Clayton Krueger. z

Douglas Trumbull, the visual effects mastermind behind Blade Runner, Close Encounter of the Third Kind, 2001: A Space Odyssey and numerous others, died on Monday at age 79. His daughter Amy Trumbull announced the news on Facebook, writing that her father's death followed a "two-year battle" with cancer, a brain tumor and stroke. Engadget reports: Trumbull was born on April 8, 1942 in Los Angeles, the son of a mechanical engineer and artist. His father worked on the special effects for films including The Wizard of Oz and Star Wars: A New Hope. The younger Trumbull worked as an illustrator and airbrush artist in Hollywood for many years. His career really took off after he cold-called Stanley Kubrick, a conversation which led to a job working on 2001: A Space Odyssey.

One of his most significant contributions to 2001 was creating the film's Star Gate, a ground-breaking scene where astronaut Dave Bowman hurtles through an illuminated tunnel transcending space and time. In order to meet Kubrick's high aesthetic standards for the shot, Trumbull essentially designed a way to turn the film camera inside-out. Trumbull's ad hoc technique "was completely breaking the concept of what a camera is supposed to do," he said during a lecture at TIFF. Trumbull earned visual effects Oscar nominations for his work on Close Encounters, Star Trek: The Motion Picture and Blade Runner. He also received the President's Award from the American Society of Cinematographers in 1996.

Later in his career, Trumbull voiced distaste over the impact of computers on visual effects, decrying the cheapening and flattening impact of the new era of CGI. [...] He spent the last years of his life working on a new super-immersive film format he dubbed MAGI, which he believed would improve the experience of watching a film in theaters. But Trumbull struggled to draw the interest of today's film industry.

Slashdot reader DevNull127 shares this transcript of James Cameron's new interview with the BBC — which they've titled "The Danger of Deepfakes."

"Almost everything we create seems to go wrong at some point," James Cameron says... James Cameron: Almost everything we create seems to go wrong at some point. I've worked at the cutting edge of visual effects, and our goal has been progressively to get more and more photo-real. And so every time we improve these tools, we're actually in a sense building a toolset to create fake media — and we're seeing it happening now. Right now the tools are — the people just playing around on apps aren't that great. But over time, those limitations will go away. Things that you see and fully believe you're seeing could be faked.

This is the great problem with us relying on video. The news cycles happen so fast, and people respond so quickly, you could have a major incident take place between the interval between when the deepfake drops and when it's exposed as a fake. We've seen situations — you know, Arab Spring being a classic example — where with social media, the uprising was practically overnight.

You have to really emphasize critical thinking. Where did you hear that? You know, we have all these search tools available, but people don't use them. Understand your source. Investigate your source. Is your source credible?

But we also shouldn't be prone to this ridiculous conspiracy paranoia. People in the science community don't just go, 'Oh that's great!' when some scientist, you know, publishes their results. No, you go in for this big period of peer review. It's got to be vetted and checked. And the more radical a finding, the more peer review there is. So good peer-reviewed science can't lie. But people's minds, for some reason, will go to the sexier, more thriller-movie interpretation of reality than the obvious one.

I always use Occam's razor — you know, Occam's razor's a great philosophical tool. It says the simplest explanation is the likeliest. And conspiracy theories are all too complicated. People aren't that good, human systems aren't that good, people can't keep a secret to save their lives, and most people in positions of power are bumbling stooges. The fact that we think that they could realistically pull off these — these complex plots? I don't buy any of that crap! Bill Gates is not really trying to microchip you with the flu vaccine! [Laughs]

You know, look, I'm always skeptical of new technology, and we all should be. Every single advancement in technology that's ever been created has been weaponized. I say this to AI scientists all the time, and they go, 'No, no, no, we've got this under control.' You know, 'We just give the AIs the right goals...' So who's deciding what those goals are? The people that put up the money for the research, right? Which are all either big business or defense. So you're going to teach these new sentient entities to be either greedy or murderous.

If Skynet wanted to take over and wipe us out, it would actually look a lot like what's going on right now. It's not going to have to — like, wipe out the entire, you know, biosphere and environment with nuclear weapons to do it. It's going to be so much easier and less energy required to just turn our minds against ourselves. All Skynet would have to do is just deepfake a bunch of people, pit them against each other, stir up a lot of foment, and just run this giant deepfake on humanity.

I mean, I could be a projection of an AI right now.

In 2021, there was an upsurge in peculiar sightings reported, thanks to people with smartphones or other video gear that captured these strange glimmers in the sky. In 2022, UAP will get more attention from both the scientific community and the federal government, experts told Space.com. From the report: One potential major development in 2022 will be UFO detection, according to Mark Rodeghier, scientific director of the Center for UFO Studies in Chicago. "The effort to detect, track and measure the UFO phenomenon in the field, in real time, has recently entered a new phase," Rodeghier told Space.com. "The technology has gotten better, software tools have improved and the current interest in UFOs has attracted new, qualified professionals. "While one can't predict how soon we will gain new, fundamental knowledge about UAP/UFOs, I believe that these efforts are very likely to succeed and set UFO research onto a new foundation of reliable, physical data," Rodeghier added. "And as a consequence, we will have even more evidence -- as if it was needed -- that the UFO phenomenon is real and can be studied scientifically."

One upcoming initiative, called the Galileo Project, will search for extraterrestrial equipment near Earth. It has two branches. The first aims to identify the nature of interstellar objects that do not resemble comets or asteroids -- like 'Oumuamua, the first known interstellar object to visit the solar system. The second branch targets UAP, similar to those of interest to the U.S. government. "The Galileo Project's data will be open to the public, and its scientific analysis will be transparent," said Harvard astronomer Avi Loeb, who is spearheading the project. "The related scientific findings would expand humanity's knowledge, with no attention to borders between nations." The Galileo research team includes more than 100 scientists who plan to assemble the project's first telescope system on the roof of the Harvard College Observatory in spring 2022. "The system will record continuous video and audio of the entire sky in the visible, infrared and radio bands, as well as track objects of interest," Loeb said. "Artificial intelligence algorithms will distinguish birds from drones, airplanes or something else. Once the first system will operate successfully, the Galileo Project will make copies of it and distribute them in many geographical locations."

Currently, there is a lack of coordination among organizations involved in UAP detection equipment, but that may change this year, said Robert Powell, an executive board member of the Scientific Coalition for UAP Studies (SCU) in Austin, Texas. "I believe that will improve as we go into 2022," he said. A number of SCU members are involved with the Galileo Project, and the organization has partnered with several groups, including UFODATA, the UFO Data Acquisition Project (UFODAP) and UAPx. "UFODAP already has a working model that has been sold into the marketplace and is reasonably priced in the $2,000 to $5,000 range, depending on the accessories desired," Powell told Space.com. "This system has already been used by a group known as UAPx to collect data. Our goal is to coordinate these activities in a way such that we use a system with standardized equipment set to collect data." But before that happens, Powell said, the groups need to plot out exactly what that equipment is trying to measure and verify that the system can achieve that goal.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Motherboard: Dr. Garry Nolan is a Professor of Pathology at Stanford University. His research ranges from cancer to systems immunology. Dr. Nolan has also spent the last ten years working with a number of individuals analyzing materials from alleged Unidentified Aerial Phenomenon. His robust resume -- 300 research articles, 40 US patents, founding of eight biotech companies, and honored as one of Stanford's top 25 inventors -- makes him, easily, one of the most accomplished scientists publicly studying UAPs. Motherboard sat down with Garry to discuss his work. It has been edited for length and clarity. Motherboard's Thobey Campion starts by asking Dr. Nolan how he first became interested in UAPs. I've always been an avid reader of science fiction, so it was natural at some point that when YouTube videos about UFOs began to make the rounds I might watch a few. I noticed that this guy at the time, Steven Greer, had claimed that a little skeleton might be an alien. I remember thinking, 'Oh, I can prove or disprove that.' And so I reached out to him. I eventually showed that it wasn't an alien, it was human. We explain a fair amount about why it looked the way it did. It had a number of mutations in skeletal genes that could potentially explain the biology. The UFO community didn't like me saying that. But you know, the truth is in the science. So, I had no problem just stating the facts. We published a paper and it ended up going worldwide. It was on the front page of just about every major newspaper. What's more appealing or clickbait than 'Stanford professor sequences alien baby'?

That ended up bringing me to the attention of some people associated with the CIA and some aeronautics corporations. At the time, they had been investigating a number of cases of pilots who'd gotten close to supposed UAPs and the fields generated by them, as was claimed by the people who showed up at my office unannounced one day. There was enough drama around the Atacama skeleton that I had basically decided to forswear all continued involvement in this area. Then these guys showed up and said, 'We need you to help us with this because we want to do blood analysis and everybody says that you've got the best blood analysis instrumentation on the planet.' Then they started showing the MRIs of some of these pilots and ground personnel and intelligence agents who had been damaged. The MRIs were clear. You didn't even have to be an MD to see that there was a problem. Some of their brains were horribly, horribly damaged. And so that's what kind of got me involved. Dr. Nolan expanded on the MRIs, saying they resemble the white matter disease, or scarring, that occurs with multiple sclerosis, with the symptomology that's basically identical to what's now called Havana syndrome. "That still left individuals who had seen UAPs. They didn't have Havana syndrome. They had a smorgasbord of other symptoms."

When asked if there's anything man-made that might have this impact on the brain, Dr. Nolan said: "The only thing I can imagine is you're standing next to an electric transformer that's emitting so much energy that you're basically getting burned inside your body."

As for the UAP fragments, Dr. Nolan said some of the objects are "nondescript," and just "lumps of metal" with nothing particularly unusual about them "except that everywhere you look in the metal, the composition is different, which is odd." He added: "The common thing about all the materials that I've looked at so far, and there's about a dozen, is that almost none of them are uniform. They're all these hodgepodge mixtures. Each individual case will be composed of a similar set of elements, but they will be inhomogeneous."

Of the 10 or 12 UAP fragments he's looked at, "two seem to be not playing by our rules," he says. "That doesn't mean that they're levitating, on my desk or anything, it just means that they have altered isotope ratios."

You can read the full Q&A here.

In an opinion piece for The Guardian, science fiction writer Kim Stanley Robinson shares which actions be believes need to be taken to address the climate crisis. An anonymous reader shares an excerpt from the report, written by Daniel Aldana Cohen, assistant professor of sociology at the University of California, Berkeley: To really grasp the present, we need to imagine the future -- then look back from it to better see the now. The angry climate kids do this naturally. The rest of us need to read good science fiction. A great place to start is Kim Stanley Robinson. Robinson is one of the most brilliant writers of the genre. During Covid quarantine, I read 11 of his books, culminating in his instant classic The Ministry for the Future, which imagines several decades of climate politics starting this decade. The first lesson of his books is obvious: climate is the story. [...] What Ministry and other Robinson books do is make us slow down the apocalyptic highlight reel, letting the story play in human time for years, decades, centuries. The screen doesn't fade to black; instead we watch people keep dying, and coping, and struggling to shape a future -- often gloriously.

I spoke to Robinson recently for an episode of the podcast The Dig. He told me that he wants leftists to set aside their differences, and put a "time stamp on [their] political view" that recognizes how urgent things are. Looking back from 2050 leaves little room for abstract idealism. Progressives need to form "a united front," he told me. "It's an all-hands-on-deck situation; species are going extinct and biomes are dying. The catastrophes are here and now, so we need to make political coalitions." The point of Robinson's decades of sci-fi isn't to simply counsel "vote blue no matter who." He told me he remains a proud and longtime member of the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA). But he does want leftists -- and everyone else -- to take the climate emergency more seriously. He thinks every big decision, every technological option, every political opportunity, warrants climate-oriented scientific scrutiny. Global justice demands nothing less.

Robinson's "all-hands" call is even more challenging on technology and economics than on electoral campaigns. He wants to legitimize geoengineering, even in forms as radical as blasting limestone dust into the atmosphere for a few years to temporarily dim the heat of the sun. As Ministry dramatizes, and as he reminded me, there's a good chance that a country being devastated by climate breakdown will try this, whether it's authorized by the international community or not. More broadly, Robinson seems to be urging all of us to treat every possible technological intervention -- from expanding nuclear energy, to pumping meltwater out from under glaciers, to dumping iron filings in the ocean -- from a strictly scientific perspective: reject dogma, evaluate the evidence, ignore the profit motive.

While making the press rounds for his upcoming film, House of Gucci, iconic director Sir Ridley Scott revealed that both Blade Runner and Alien live-action television series are in the early stages of development. From a report: Speaking to the BBC news radio series, Today, Scott explained that his team has already written an initial pilot script for the former show, which would most likely air as a 10-episode run. Although the Alien series was first announced nearly a year ago as an FX on Hulu exclusive from showrunner Noah Hawley (Fargo and Legion), little has been heard of the project since then. Scott didn't tell much, but confirmed that the Alien series is still "being written for pilot," adding that Hawley and his crew "have to also write out the history, if it's eight hours or 10 hours, the bible of what happens in those 10 hours." A CGI anime set in the world of Agent K and Deckard in the year 2032, Blade Runner: Black Lotus, is currently airing on Adult Swim.

Denis Villeneuve will get the chance to create the second film of his planned two-part adaptation of Frank Herbert's "Dune," Legendary Entertainment and Warner Bros. said Tuesday. From a report: The news comes after Villeneuve's "Dune" tallied $41 million at the domestic box office during its debut over the weekend, a solid haul considering the film also launched on HBO Max Friday. Globally, the film hauled in $220 million. While Warner Bros. seemed keen to greenlight a second film for Villeneuve, Legendary owns the cinematic rights to the novel and had to be onboard in order to continue the story on the big screen. The second film is expected to follow Paul Atreides (Timothee Chalamet) as he joins the Fremen and works to bring peace to the desert planet of Arrakis. "Dune: Part Two" will debut on Oct. 20, 2023.

Thelasko shares a report from Ars Technica, written by Peter Opaskar: Frank Herbert's 1965 sci-fi novel Dune gets a new film adaptation -- this one helmed by Denis Villeneuve (Arrival, Blade Runner 2049) -- later this month. But before Ars Technica reviews the movie, there's the matter of its predecessor: 1984's Dune, made by a then up-and-coming filmmaker named David Lynch. Detractors call Lynch's saga -- a tale of two noble space families 8,000 years in the future, fighting over the most valuable resource in the universe amidst sandworms the size of aircraft carriers -- incomprehensible, stilted, and ridiculous. It lost piles of money. Yet fans, especially in recent years, have reclaimed Lynch's film as a magnificent folly, a work of holy, glorious madness.

So which group am I in? Both. Am I about to describe Dune as "so bad it's good"? No, that's a loser take for cowards. I once half-heard a radio interview with someone speculating that the then-current artistic moment was not "so bad it's good," and it wasn't "ironic" either -- it was actually "awesome." (I didn't catch who he was, so if any of this sounds familiar, hit me up in the comments.) Art can speak to you while at the same time being absurd. The relatable can sometimes be reached only by going through the ridiculous. The two can be inseparable, like the gravitational pull between a gas giant and its moon -- or Riggs and Murtaugh.

The example the radio interviewee gave was of Evel Knievel, the '70s daredevil who wore a cape and jumped dirt bikes over rows of buses. Absurd? Heavens, yes. A feat of motorcycling and physicality? Absolutely. But beyond that, we can relate to Knievel's need to achieve transcendence at such a, shall we say, niche skill. We might also marvel at our own ability to be impressed by something that should be objectively useless but is instead actually awesome. A more contemporary example might be Tenet. It's a relentless international thriller about fate and climate change and the need for good people to hold evil at bay. But it's also a "dudes rock!" bromance between Two Cool Guys in Suits spouting sci-fi mumbo-jumbo. It can't be one without the other. "I have faith in Denis Villeneuve and his new version of Dune starring Timothee Chalamet," says Opaskar. "But it will probably be a normal movie for normal people, in which characters with recognizable emotions talk in a recognizable way and move through a plot we understand to achieve clearly defined goals. Which is all fine and good, but how likely is it to inspire sick beats for '90s kids doing ecstasy?"

Back in 2014 Babylon 5 creator J. Michael Straczynski answered questions from Slashdot's readers.

And now this week, long-time Slashdot reader Jaegs writes: According to many sources and the Babylon 5 creator/writer/director/producer himself, J. Michael Straczynski (JMS), the CW — partly owned by the original Babylon 5 producer and rights holder, WarnerMedia — will be rebooting the popular franchise. JMS will be writing and executive producing the series.

Per JMS:

"[W]e will not be retelling the same story in the same way... There would be no fun and no surprises. Better to go the way of Westworld or Battlestar Galactica where you take the original elements that are evergreens and put them in a blender with a ton of new, challenging ideas, to create something fresh yet familiar. To those asking why not just do a continuation, for a network series like this, it can't be done because over half our cast are still stubbornly on the other side of the Rim.

The last part refers to the recent passing of Mira Furlan (Delenn), as well as the untimely deaths of other primary cast members after the conclusion of the original run of the series: Richard Biggs (Dr. Franklin), Michael O'Hare (Jeffrey Sinclair), Jerry Doyle (Michael Garibaldi), Stephen Furst (Vir Cotto), Jeff Conway (Zack Allan), and Andreas Katsulas (G'Kar).
Straczynski points out on Twitter that "The original Babylon 5 was ridiculously innovative: the first to use CGI to create ships and characters, and among the very first to shoot widescreen with a vigorous 5.1 mix." But his tweets also seem excited about the questions that this new reboot will answer. "if I were creating Babylon 5 today, for the first time, knowing what I now know as a writer, what would it look like? How would it use all the storytelling tools and technological resources available in 2021 that were not on hand then?

"How can it be used to reflect the world in which we live, and the questions we are asking and confronting every day? Fans regularly point out how prescient the show was and is of our current world; it would be fun to take a shot at looking further down the road..."

Long-time Slashdot reader flogger shares Amazon Prime's first trailer for its upcoming Wheel of Time series. GameSpot reports: The first three episodes will arrive on Friday, November 19, with new episodes arriving every Friday afterward, leading to the Season 1 finale on December 24.

The Wheel of Time is based on the best-selling fantasy novels by Robert Jordan, which sold more than 90 million books... The original book series was made up of 15 novels published between 1990 and 2013. Jordan died in 2007 while working on the 12th book, and left behind notes intended to help someone else finish the series. Brandon Sanderson took up the role, and now serves as a consulting producer on the Amazon series...

The series is co-produced by Amazon Studios and Sony Pictures Television. The first three episodes of season one will premiere together on Friday, November 19, with new episodes available each Friday following. The season finale will air on December 24.
Here's how Variety summarizes the story. The power Aes Sedai organization and "a group of other adventurers head off on a journey across the world. However, one of the members of the group is the Dragon Reborn, who will save humanity or destroy it.

Apple TV+ has released a nearly three-minute long trailer for its upcoming series based on Isaac Asimov's Foundation books.

Ars Technica calls the trailer "stunning." A mathematical genius predicts the imminent collapse of a galactic empire, and he and his protegé set plans in motion to preserve the foundational knowledge of their civilization in Foundation, Apple TV+'s adaptation of Isaac Asimov's hugely influential series of science fiction novels. It's a story that takes place across multiple planets over 1,000 years, with a huge cast of characters. That makes adapting it extremely difficult, particularly to film. But the streaming platform is betting that the series format will be better suited to bring Asimov's futuristic vision to life...

The first teaser appeared in June 2020 at the Worldwide Developers Conference (WWDC). That included some behind-the-scenes images and brief commentary from showrunner David S. Goyer, who co-wrote Terminator: Dark Fate and Batman v. Superman. He noted all the past efforts to adapt Foundation over the last 50 years, as well as the enormous influence the series had on Star Wars... Asimov was strongly influenced by Edward Gibbons' The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, particularly while writing the earlier books. This trailer really brings out the theme of embracing inevitable change, even if it's frightening — and there's nothing more frightening to a ruler than the imminent collapse of his empire...

The first two episodes of Foundation will premiere on Apple TV+ on September 24, 2021. After that, new episodes will air weekly every Friday.