Book News

• Looking for a place where you can explore all aspects of the weird?  Well, look no further.  Weirdfictionreview.com, a site devoted to all things weird, launched this past week.  The brainchild of Ann and Jeff VanderMeer, the website was created by Luis Rodrigues with Angela Slatter acting as managing editor and promises to be "your non-denominational source for The Weird".  The first week kicks off with interviews with Neil Gaiman and Kelly Link along with some other tasty weird bits

• The Roddenberry Foundation has provided a 5 million dollar gift to Gladstone Institutes, a biomedical research organization dedicated to scientific discovery and innovation in preventing and curing cardiovascular and neurological diseases and viral infections.

• In more STAR TREK news, IDW Publishing and the Comic Book Defense League are co-sponsoring a "Be A Redshirt" contest.  The winner, along with their favorite comic-book retailer, will be featured on a limited edition cover of an upcoming STAR TREK comic.  AND in the tradition of redshirts, the winner will get to die while saving the retailer from a phaser blast.  You can read more about the contest here.  The contest began last Wednesday.  I can't find an end date so if your thinking of entering better do it quick.  The winner will get to keep the original art plus receive 100 copies of the comic.

• The estate of the late Philip K. Dick has filed suit against Media Rights Capital and others involved with the Matt Damon movie THE ADJUSTMENT BUREAU.   The suit says that MRC tried to avoid bonus payments to the estate by declaring that ADJUSTMENT TEAM, Dick's original story, was already in the public domain, having been published in Orbit magazine in 1954.  BUT the Dick estate says that Orbit published the story without authorization and the author had no knowledge of the publication.

• The final edition of online magazine THE GATEHOUSE GAZETTE has been published.  Focused on the speculative genres of steampunk and dieselpunk, the magazine has been in existence since 2008.  You can read more about it here and check out the link to the final issue.

• This is cool.  For the month of November, SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN is offering complimentary access to more than 75,000 articles from the SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN 1845-1909 archive collection.  We're talking 65 years of scientific history here, folks!