Happy New Year and welcome back to Xenagia! This week, just a few notes to help ease you back into the science-fiction, fantasy, and horror community, after the holidays away. Expect a more complete helping of news and pointers next week.
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ALL THINGS BOOK CLUB: Since it's the start of the month, we're cycling our Book Club discussions. First up, the discussion of _Peace_, by Gene Wolfe has begun. It was a tough book, so the talk may be a little light this time around, but nonetheless if you managed to finish it or not, stop by.
Peace TalkWe're also voting for our book for February. We've got a list of nominees from also-ran books suggested for the previous two months. Voting stays open until Friday afternoon.
February VoteAnd finally, thanks to everyone who participated in our December discussion of Singularity Sky. The thread's still there if you have any last thoughts, but also be sure to stop by the Xenagia Book Index and rate Singularity Sky itself.
Sky Talk Sky RateXENAGIA REVIEWS: With the New Year begun, we've kicked our reviews off again. This week, it's media reviews. Today featured a review of the World of Warcraft book, Cycle of Hatred, while Thursday will feature a review of Babylon 5: The Lost Tales. Take a look, and submit your own reviews for the future.
Reviews Page Cycle of Hatred Reviews SubmissionMedia News
No surprise, but there hasn't been much going on for the last couple of weeks. Nonetheless, the top media story of last year continues to make progress.
WRITER'S STRIKE UPDATE: The WGA has been faced with a tough problem: all of the studios are negotiating together, whether it's in their best interest or not. Because some of the studios are less directly impacted by a writer's strike, and because some have more successful reality shows on the air, there's been some real deadlock (with it now being 25 days since the studio negotiating body, the AMTMP, walked away from talks). The WGA has been trying to combat this by negotiating individually with studios.
Last week, a very small studio agreed to a deal: David Letterman's Worldwide Pants company accepted the WGA's standard requests in order to get Letterman's two late night talk shows back on the air with full writer support. This is probably a good thing for the writers and for the possibility of ending the strike in a reasonable amount of time, because if anyone else follows Letterman's lead, it'll be an avalanche.
Meanwhile, the other studios are really starting to notice their lost revenues, mainly thanks to their own talk shows, which went dark immediately. As a result all or almost all of the late night talk shows are being forced back on the air in the next week. Other than Letterman's two shows, they'll all be sans writers.
As a result, we're going to see something important play out this month. Does Letterman make a killing with his writer-backed show against the pale imitations that all the other networks will be offering, or will it end up not making much of a difference? I'm not convinced that there will be a big change on Jay Leno, which will just cut monologues and other minor parts of the program, but it's hard to imagine that The Daily Show won't be very boring without its writers. How this all plays out could impact the strike quite a bit too.
In the meantime, as January and February go by, more and more shows will go dark. Genre shows like _The Bionic Woman_, _Heroes_, _Journeyman_ and _Pushing Daisies_ are already dead for the year (or forever in the case of Journeyman). _Reaper_ and _Supernatural_ just have a couple of shows left. The problem will be disguised for a bit with the appearance of the short series of _Jericho_, _Lost_, and the new _Sarah Connor Chronicles_ in February, but as those run out, the TV season is going to be over forever ... until the strike comes to a close.
Unless other studios break like Worldwide Pants did, or unless the writer-backed Letterman wipes out the competition, that could be a long way away.
