The novel, with its probing of the line between reality and games, has long been eyed by video game fans as a rich source of material for the medium. Chair plans to make several titles based on the book, with the first one slated to be a downloadable game that should be available in 2009. Card said he decided to move ahead with an "Ender's Game" video game after years of wrangling to make a feature film bore no fruit. "There is going to be a universe of 'Ender's Game' games, hopefully. But that's like someone starting a restaurant and thinking about opening 100 franchises all over the country," Card told Reuters. "Let's make this one work first," Card said.

The first game will focus on the Battle Room, the elite military academy where Ender hones his strategic and tactical skills and that provided some of the most memorable scenes in the book. Based in Provo, Utah, privately held Chair enjoyed success with "Undertow", a downloadable game for Microsoft Corp's Xbox 360 console that pits teams of players against each other in a fast-paced underwater battle.

"The really cool thing about 'Ender's Game' is that there's lots of potential for lots of types of gameplay. We wanted to initially create the Battle Room, that's really what jumped out to me as a gamer that I really wanted to play," said Chair's creative director Donald Mustard. "We have not fully designed the game yet. I think that the game will play very much what we've all imagined the Battle School is, a cross between 'Call of Duty' with zero-g with hardcore strategy elements more like a sports game," Mustard said, referring to a popular military shooting game.

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Stephen King Talks Duma Key

Stephen King discusses his new book Duma Key, which is the first book he has set in Florida.

In "Duma Key," which hits bookstores Tuesday, Minneapolis building contractor Edgar Freemantle moves to Florida and takes up art after being injured in a construction accident. His new life takes another turn when the supernatural intrudes.

King drew on his experiences after he was struck by a van while walking near his summer home in North Lovell in 1999.

"I'd heard how creativity, how make-believe, can help the body heal from physical injuries," he said. "I also got interested in psychic phenomena connected to phantom limbs. The writer's dictum is to write what you know, so I started from there. But Edgar shouldn't be thought of as me."

Duma Key is now available in bookstores everywhere and at Amazon.com at a nice discount.

Posted on January 25, 2008
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2008 Philip K. Dick Award Finalists

The finalists for the 2008 Philip K. Dick awards have been announced. The winner will be announced on Friday, March 21, 2008 at Norwescon 31 in Seattle, Washington. Here are this year's finalists.

According to London-based science-fiction scholar Lavie Tidhar, China has experienced a rise in the production of, and interest in, science fiction since the late 1980s. Mao Zedong and his supporters encouraged science fiction as a "literature of development" in the 1950s as China embarked on a program of industrialization. However, the idiom went into decline during the Cultural Revolution (1966-1976), only to undergo a revival with the rise of Chairman Deng Xiaoping. Before his death in 1997, Deng proclaimed "science and technology is the number one productive force" and science fiction as a way to spark the scientific imagination.

This practical aesthetic continues to this day, according to Sawyer. "Chinese readers prefer hard science-fiction, with real science rigorously extrapolated," he observed, and "and they're partial to optimistic views of the future." In fact, "the domestic science-fiction is very much at the stage science-fiction was in the 1950s in the United States - lots of spaceships, robots and aliens." Moreover, when it comes to foreign authors, whatever courses taught on science-fiction in Chinese universities tend to focus on "old-guard" authors such as Arthur C. Clarke, Isaac Asimov and Robert Heinlein, instead of Philip K. Dick, Roger Zelazny and Harlan Ellison. Perhaps unsurprisingly, homosexuality, AIDS, drugs, religious practices and positive references to Taiwan are avoided as topics or, if addressed at all, are presented as "a foreign problem," according to Tidhar.

Still, the situation is ripe for change, Sawyer noted. William Gibson's pioneering cyberpunk novel Neuromancer was authorized for official publication in China in 1999 - 15 years after its debut in North America - and it's spawned a host of Chinese emulators. Moreover, "with its tools of disguise and metaphor - setting stories in the future or with alien civilizations - the genre allows discussion of issues that might not be otherwise openly broached," Sawyer said.