The audio science fiction magazine StarShipSofa #217 is now available, contents as follows:

Main Fiction: Til Human Voices Take Us by Lewis Shiner

Fact: Hugo Review – Spin by Andy Thomaswick

Main Fiction: Fortitude by David Brin

Narrators: Ted Delorme and Josh Roseman

Laini Taylor‘s fantasy novel Daughter of Smoke and Bone (Hodder) is to be made into a film. Universal Pictures have acquired the worldwide rights. The title is the first of a YA trilogy, with the second book to be published in September 2012.

Read the story HERE

Doctor Who fans are rejoicing at the discovery of two of the “missing” episodes from the show’s early days. The re-discovered episodes are the third of the four-part story, Galaxy Four, transmitted in the autumn of 1965, and the second part of The Underwater Menace, from early 1967.

Read the full story on the BBC website HERE

Picture (c) BBC

StarShipSofa #215 is now available for download, including:

Short Fiction: In Search Of  by Will Ludwigsen
Fact: Movie Soundtracks by David Raiklen
Main Fiction: Faithful Servants by James L. Sutter
Fact: Everything by Morgan Saletta
Music: Rocket To Earth by No One Zero

Narrator: Jonathan Danz

Innovative British film director Nicholas Roeg is to be awarded with the London Film Critics’ Circle’s highest accolade for his contribution to film-making. The director will receive the Dilys Powell Award for Excellence at a ceremony in London in January. He is best known for films such as Don’t Look Now, The Man Who Fell to Earth and The Witches.

Full story on the BBC’s website HERE

‘Angry Robot are pleased to announce that a deal has been concluded for Film/TV Rights in Lauren Beukes‘ Arthur C. Clarke Award winning novel, Zoo City.

Helena Spring, widely regarded as one of South Africa’s most accomplished motion picture producers, has just been awarded the highly sought after film rights to Zoo City, the SF/cyberpunk thriller penned by South African author Lauren Beukes – who garnered the 2011 Arthur C. Clarke award for Best Science Fiction Novel. In the wake of whopping sales figures, multiple awards and critical acclaim Beukes’ book generated fierce interest from numerous bidders in the entertainment industry, putting Spring alongside major US and UK producers eager to tell Beukes’ unique tale.

Zoo City was published first in South Africa by Jacana Media and, thereafter internationally by Angry Robot. The urban fantasy is set in a futuristic, gritty and hard-core Johannesburg where the eponymous ghetto has been colonised by society’s outcasts – like criminals, drug-dealers and psychopaths – and their animal companions. Like the other residents of the Zoo City slum, Zinzi, the anti-heroine, is animalled, but she is also a shrewd, street-smart girl with the gift (or burden) of finding lost things. Zinzi wears her power animal, a sloth, on her back. When she is hired to find a missing teenybopper star, she hopes that it will be her ticket out of Hell’s waiting room.

Lauren Beukes’ meteoric rise seems unstoppable and last week a new megabucks book deal was announced. The working titles of the two novels – due in 2013 and 2014 – are The Shining Girls and Broken Monsters. They were picked up by publishers in the US, UK, South Africa, Italy, the Netherlands and Germany.’

Celebrated film director, Ken Russell, has died at the age of 84 following a series of strokes. Although clearly much more than a genre director, his prolific output included such films as Altered States, Gothic and The Devils.

Read the full BBC report HERE and an obituary HERE

According to the BBC a Doctor Who feature film is in development. David Yates, who directed the last four Harry Potter films, is working on the project with BBC Worldwide Productions in Los Angeles.

Read the full BBC story HERE

Horror/exploitation film producer Richard Gordon died on 1 November 2011 in New York. He produced some remarkable cult films including Devil Doll (1965), Horror Hospital (1973), The Cat and the Canary (1978) and Inseminoid (1981).

You can read The Independent’s obituary HERE

StarShipSofa #211 podcast is now available.

CONTENTS:

Interview: Dee Cunniffe

Fact: Looking Back At Genre History by Amy H Sturgis

Main Fiction: In the Harsh Glow of its Incandescent Beauty by Mercurio D. Rivera

Fact: Hugo Reviews by Andy Thomaswick

Narrated by J.J. Campanella
Artwork: Brian Mutschler