Latest rumours emerging suggest that a deal with Benico Del Toro to appear in the upcoming Star Trek film is now dead in the water.

Previously, rumours claimed that Del Toro had been approached to be cast as the next villain – speculated to be Khan.

However, news has now surfaced that although Khan is going to be the next villain, Del Toro will not be the man for the job.

The plot thickens. For more details, head over to FilmSchoolRejects.

CSI creator Anthony Zuiker is launching the second part of his book trilogy. The novel is titled Dark Prophecy. Released on October 14th, we’ve attached a rather spiffy looking trailer for it.

The guys over at the SGU trailer editing department really do deserve an Oscar. Another top quality promo.

Very psyched for the new season, now.

Ask me a year ago, and I’d have argued that the chances of Rhydian appearing in the War of the Worlds live musical were a million to one.

Okay, excuse the pun, but it appears that Justin Hayward and Jeff Wayne will be being joined at the O2 in London on the 12th December by a rather unusual bunch of co-stars.
Jeff Wayne’s Musical Version of The War of The Worlds – Alive on Stage! stars Jason Donovan, Atomic Kitten’s Liz McClarnon and X Factor’s Rhydian.

Quite how strong a vocal performance that’ll be, we’ll have to wait and see.

Viral marketing has begun, however, as you can see below.

I did have the pleasure of seeing this show in Belfast a few years ago, and it is rather excellent – if only for the spectacle.

Making Future Magic: iPad light painting from Dentsu London on Vimeo.

Well worth a watch. Fantastic, intriguing and downright clever.

Admittedly, it’s not brand spanking new. But hadn’t seen it before, and I thought it looked pretty cool!

I instantly expected this to be in Nevada, for some reason, but no! It’s coming from the Netherlands.

The opera is written entirely in Klingon, and features an array of very suspect looking plastic forehead extensions.

For further details and video, click here to access the BBC!

Yep, you read that right. Texans have invented the fastest way of growing obese known to mankind: deep fried Coca Cola.

According to StudentBeans.org, “The calorific treat involves deep-frying Coca-Cola flavoured batter, before drizzling it with Coke fountain syrup. Add whipped cream, cinnamon and a cherry and there you have it – the most effective artery-clogging system the world has ever seen.”

We despair.

Sci-Fi has a long and proud history of cancellation. Perfectly good shows (and plenty of plain awful shows) have seen the axe for a multitude of different reasons. Let’s take a look at five sure-fire ways to ruin a decent show.

1) Air your show on FOX
As Firefly, The Sarah Connor Chronicles and Dollhouse has shown, quality has no impact on the lifetime of your show if you choose to air it on FOX. In fact, it would seem that longevity in FOX is inversely proportional to quality. Firefly was absolute quality. Just Google “firefly cancelled” to see the outcry. Dollhouse, although still a good show, wasn’t near Firefly’s calibre, and therefore lasted for slightly longer before reaching the same grisly demise. And let’s not even get started on Sliders! That’s it, Fox: create some of the finest science fiction of the last decade before callously shooting it down. Good call!

2) Kill off the lead character (or at least get rid of them unceremoniously)
Once they’re gone, the show can’t be far behind. Although Earth: Final Conflict lasted for some time after the death of William Boone, played by Kevin Kilner. However, when you base your show so firmly around the lead character’s personality and moral conflicts, you have a huge amount of creative rebuilding and restructuring that is not easy to successfully achieve. Even Ben Browder’s introduction to Stargate SG-1 to replace Richard Dean Anderson, although relatively well managed, signalled the beginning of the end for the show (even if it did provide enough energy to delay the inevitable for a year or two)

3) Go on for too long
Star Trek is probably the finest example. You can’t keep producing top quality stories week-in, week-out for fifteen years. Voyager and Enterprise probably didn’t need to happen. Deep Space Nine was tremendous, and after that the franchise should probably have taken three or four years out to refresh and re-energise. Voyager’s premise was strong, but it’s implementation was poor. As soon as the writer’s think creating an incredibly inaccurate Irish village in the holodeck is a good idea, it’s time to panic. Being from Ireland, the whole thing was laughable. And it was never going to be good sci-fi.

4) Sex it up!
Ratings are falling, reviews are mediocre, what do you do? Get your most attractive female cast member to take her clothes off, regardless of the plot making sense. Nudity is always a winner, right? Sadly, it’s not. Enterprise’s attempts to “sex it up” in season three were, frankly, ludicrous. Star Trek, according to Gene Roddenberry, was never adverse to lascivious female aliens: Orion slave girls, anyone? But quite frankly, making Jolene Blalock little more than eye-candy was a poor call. It didn’t fit the character, and was blatantly an attempt to attract an audience of hormonal college boys. Are the same men interested in Jolene Blalock’s “assets” going to care about the ramifications of a temporal anomaly? I doubt. Voyager and Enterprise’s writers made the other cast act like giggling school girls around Jeri Ryan’s Seven of Nine and Blalock’s T’Pol respectively. It wasn’t clever, nor effective.

5) When all else fails, add zombies

Take this:

Note the stirring music, high production values, moral conflict and powerful premise.

Now, take five years later:

Note the alien vampires, poor acting, poor dialogue and little or no moral/emotional conflict whatsoever? Just gunshots and explosions.

The decline still brings a tear to my eye.

According to The Economist (and NASA), two asteroids are due to pass closer to Earth than the moon today.

Neither object is big enough to pose any threat to the planet, and neither object has any chance of actually hitting the planet. The larger of the two asteroids is only about 10-20 metres wide, and apparently a 10-metre rock is expected to pass within lunar distanceevery day, on average.

No need to panic just yet.