Strange Shapes » Interview with Bolaji Badejo, 1979 »

A lot of behind-the-scenes goodness in here. Some tidbits:

That infamous chestburster scene was actually a total surprise to the actors, but it wasn’t the only genuinely frightening moment:

Most of the footage shot of the Alien didn’t work, but there is one brief cut of Bolaji going through one of his miming routines in the suit, in the sequence where he attacks Veronica Cartwright. ”The idea,” says Bolaji, “was that the creature was supposed to be graceful as well as vicious, requiring slow, deliberate movements. But there was some action I had to do pretty quick. I remember having to kick Yaphet Kotto, throw him against the wall, and rush up to him. Veronica Cartwright was really terrified. After I fling Yaphet Kotto back with my tail, I turn to go after her, there’s blood in my mouth, and she was incredible. It wasn’t acting. She was scared.”

On that incredible costume:

HR Giger made the Alien suits worn by Bolaji and the stuntman out of latex, at a cost of more than $250,000. The suit consisted of some ten to fifteen separate pieces, worn over a one-piece black body suit, needed underneath to disguise the fact that the Alien fitted together in sections […] Bolaji likened wearing [the head] to having your head stuck up the middle of a huge banana.

“They must have had about 2000 tubes of K-Y Jelly […] just to get the effect of that slime coming out of his mouth.”

On that final scene where the Alien has stowed away in the shuttle:

“Bursting out of that compartment wasn’t easy,” exclaims Bolaji. “I must’ve ripped the suit two or three times coming out, and each time I’d climb down, the tail would rip off! But it wasn’t much of a problem for them, because they had more suits. I remember I had to repeat that action for about fifteen takes. Finally, I said, ‘No more!’ There was a lot of smoke, it was hard to breathe, and it was terribly hot.”

Via Shadow and Act (an African diaspora film blog, this is the second time today I’ve come across it, probably a good one to follow if you’re a movie buff).

In Search of Indian Science Fiction: A Conversation with Anil Menon by Vandana Singh »

When I was a kid growing up in India, my first exposure to things science-fictional (sort of) was through a series of fat little books in Hindi that could fit comfortably in my hand. The stories were an indiscriminate mix of earth-bound fairy tales and cosmic voyages, and their flashy covers and melodramatic dialog immediately caught my imagination. I’d already heard the great epics from my mother and grandmother and these little books seemed to be in the same vein. By the time I was eleven, however, I’d discovered Asimov, Clarke and Bradbury, and there seemed to be no real SF written by Indians. In my teens I came across the occasional story published by cosmologist and SF writer Jayant Narlikar, but that was it.

Now, many years later, I know that science fiction in India has had quite a history. But in a country where there are eighteen distinct languages apart from English, and thousands of dialects, it is quite easy to be unaware of traditions in other tongues.

I only read in Hindi and English, so it is not surprising I missed, for instance, the rich tradition of SF in Bengali. Good translations from non-English Indian languages to English are a recent phenomenon, as is academic work — see for instance an essay on Bengali SF, the grandmother of Indian SF, referenced here. (I can’t seem to find the original essay on the web any more).

Thus I’ve discovered that the first Indian SF story (as far as we know currently) was published in 1879, in Bengali. This was followed closely by a work published in 1876 by the brilliant scientist and polymath Jagdish Chandra Bose. Later there were Rokeya Sukhawat Hussain publishing the feminist utopian story “Sultana’s Dream” in 1905, and Premendra Mitra penning his inimitable Ghanada tales in the 1940s. There are traditions in Marathi (cosmologist Jayant Narlikar writes in both Marathi and English) and in Tamil, but I know very little about them. The eminent filmmaker Satyajit Ray wrote science fiction for children. There is also some early science fiction in Hindi but I haven’t gotten my hands on it as yet. I know there’s modern Hindi SF being written as we speak and I expect to be reading it in the not too distant future. SF related activities are becoming more common in India, including regular conferences from the Indian Association of Science Fiction Studies and an upcoming conference in Varanasi announced here.

There are also many Indian writers writing SF in English. Apart from myself and Anil Menon, who write from distant shores, there are plenty of writers within India turning to the genre. Manjula Padmanabhan, Kalpana Swaminathan, Samit Basu, Payal Dhar, Priya Sarukkai Chabria, are among the names that immediately come to mind.

But what are the things that drive Indian SF? What are its themes and concerns? Where does it resemble or differ from the SF tradition in the West? How did it come to be, in the first place? 

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Eric Choi, on how to get to Mars »

Over at Amazon, Jeff VanderMeer interviews Haruki Murakami »

Amazon.com: Some reviewers are calling 1Q84 a dystopian novel, no doubt because of the title. Is this the correct entry point for the reader, in your opinion? You don’t strike me as an overtly political writer.

Murakami: I don’t think of this novel as a “utopia” or a “dystopia.” Since you brought that up, this world itself in which we live is a “dystopia.” Right now I’m writing this in the lounge of an airport in Hawaii, and the airport’s security check is definitely an Orwellian world, an extreme dystopia. If you don’t take off your belt, remove your shoes, put your chewing gum through the scanner, raise both arms and turn around, you can’t board the plane. In response to this, none of the airport personnel give you a word of thanks. And we have to pay such high air fares… When the real world operates this way, why would you have to write a “dystopian novel” that goes even farther?

Whatever I write is nothing more than a personal retelling of my personal history. The world that comes from having rewritten history in this way is a world that isn’t particularly happy or unhappy. You could say it’s real, you could say it’s me. That’s how I interpret it.

The World SF Blog » Original Content: Interview with Sayuri Ueda, author of The Cage of Zeus (Haikasoru) »

In The Cage of Zeus (out now from Haikasoru), a terrorist group targets a society of genetically engineered intersex people, the Rounds, aboard a space station orbiting Jupiter. Charles Tan interviews the author, Sayuri Ueda.

One recurring theme in Japanese fiction is perceiving space as the future of humanity. Do you share in this belief?

Space is such an alluring world. I doubt we’ll ever give up the journey toward space and will continue to set its sights on faraway planets, no matter what the challenge.

But the future of humanity doesn’t lie in space alone.　It’s hard for me to believe that a people that haven’t been able to find a future on Earth could ever forge a future in space. In fact, those two missions are one and the same. You could say that our readiness to embark into space is being tested in our daily lives and in the values of contemporary society.

In the excerpt you can see that the translator uses Spivak pronouns. Interesting.

Salon » If Tolkien were black »

An interview with N. K. Jemisin and David Anthony Durham, two prominent black authors writing epic fantasy, a subgenre dominated by medieval Europe-inspired settings.