SuperMegaMonkey: Boooooks: March 2009 Archives

Boooooks

I think everyone is well aware of my love for Jane Austen's Pride & Prejudice. I even want the P&P comic Marvel's putting out. But this....this is going too far.

According to the Sunday Times, Hollywood studios (I quote) are already fighting for the rights to Pride and Prejudice and Zombies, a Jane Austen rewrite that injects a little undead action and is due to hit bookstores in April.
Seth Grahame-Smith's novel apparently makes liberal use of Austen's original text, so far out of copyright that anybody could do anything they want to it with only the hordes of rampant Austenites to worry about. "About 85% is the original" says the author.
Grahame-Smith provides a sterling explanation of why the novel works in this brain-eating rerendering. "Why else in the original should a regiment arrive on Lizzie Bennet's doorstep when they should have been off fighting Napoleon? It was to protect the family from an invasion of brain-eaters, obviously."

As wnkr says: "That's...horrendous..."

H/T to slyn.

By min | March 31, 2009, 9:19 AM | Boooooks & Comics & Movies | Comments (1)| Link

A Better Expenditure of Resources Than Learning to Kill Goats With the Mind

Science fiction always teaches us the way.

In Ridley Scott's 1982 sci-fi classic, Bladerunner, the police have a problem. The wayward androids they are pursuing behave so much like humans, they have a tough time telling them apart.
They turn to the Voight-Kampff test, a futuristic version of the age-old polygraph, to help them out. During the test, subjects are grilled with a list of questions, while their physiology is monitored. In particular, the test looks for abnormal eye responses that might indicate the subject isn't human.
The test is far from perfect, and no doubt there will be teething troubles that beset the development of a similar test the US department of homeland security is looking for help in making.
Under the Small Business Innovation Research programme, the department has asked tech companies to bid for contracts to kick-start research in the area. Such a system, if it works, would undoubtedly be useful at airports and other high-security points.

I take issue with this being credited to Ridley Scott's Bladerunner as the movie and the Voight-Kampff test are based on Philip K. Dick's book Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?. So nyahh!

By min | March 20, 2009, 3:43 PM | Boooooks & Movies & Science | Link

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