Dan O'Bannon, the man who gave the world Alien and Total Recall, has died aged 63, the New York Times reports. O'Bannon passed away at his home in Santa Monica, California, last Thursday, as a result of the gastrointestinal disorder Crohn's disease, which he'd suffered for 30 years. O'Bannon's sci-fi screenwriting career began when he and fellow University of Southern California film school student John Carpenter hooked up to write the low-budget Dark Star, which made its way to the big screen in 1974.
Dan O'Bannon, the man who gave the world Alien and Total Recall, has died aged 63, the New York Times reports.
O'Bannon passed away at his home in Santa Monica, California, last Thursday, as a result of the gastrointestinal disorder Crohn's disease, which he'd suffered for 30 years.
O'Bannon's sci-fi screenwriting career began when he and fellow University of Southern California film school student John Carpenter hooked up to write the low-budget Dark Star, which made its way to the big screen in 1974.
As many of you will know, John Brunner, one of the finest SF writers the UK has produced, died during the 1995 Worldcon in Glasgow. I was only just getting back into fandom at the time, and didn't know anyone much, so I wasn't really aware of Brunner's family. Imagine my surprise, therefore, to get an email last week from his widow. Mrs. Brunner, it turns out, is still living in the same house she shared with John, which is in a part of Darkest Somerset that is even more remote, if rather prettier, than where I live. For a Chinese lady who has lost her English husband, this must be rather hard.
A 14-year-old Dutch sailor with a thwarted dream to circumnavigate the globe was due to fly back home tomorrow to a blizzard of questions after being found on Sunday in the Dutch island territory of St Martin, off Venezuela's coast.Laura Dekker's eight-metre yacht Guppy remained moored in the Netherlands and it was unclear whether the teenager, who was in good health, had hoped to make a round-the-world voyage in another vessel or had another reason to run away.
A 14-year-old Dutch sailor with a thwarted dream to circumnavigate the globe was due to fly back home tomorrow to a blizzard of questions after being found on Sunday in the Dutch island territory of St Martin, off Venezuela's coast.
Laura Dekker's eight-metre yacht Guppy remained moored in the Netherlands and it was unclear whether the teenager, who was in good health, had hoped to make a round-the-world voyage in another vessel or had another reason to run away.
On 21 September 2004, Michelle Weinberger woke up on the 79ft powerboat that she and her husband, Mark, owned as it rocked gently in the waters of a marina on the Greek island of Mykonos."I put my hand on his side of the bed, and I remember feeling it empty," she later told the US television channel NBC. Weinberger leapt from bed in alarm to find that her husband had vanished, taking with him his passport and money he had stashed secretly on board.It was the beginning of a five-year flight from justice that ended this week even more strangely than it began, almost 6,000 feet up in the Italian Alps. Two officers of the paramilitary Carabinieri, led by a mountain guide, trudged up to the southern slopes of Mont Blanc to find one of America's most wanted fugitives living in a tent. He was surviving in temperatures as low as -18C on dried and tinned food and snow he melted on a portable stove.
On 21 September 2004, Michelle Weinberger woke up on the 79ft powerboat that she and her husband, Mark, owned as it rocked gently in the waters of a marina on the Greek island of Mykonos.
"I put my hand on his side of the bed, and I remember feeling it empty," she later told the US television channel NBC. Weinberger leapt from bed in alarm to find that her husband had vanished, taking with him his passport and money he had stashed secretly on board.
It was the beginning of a five-year flight from justice that ended this week even more strangely than it began, almost 6,000 feet up in the Italian Alps. Two officers of the paramilitary Carabinieri, led by a mountain guide, trudged up to the southern slopes of Mont Blanc to find one of America's most wanted fugitives living in a tent. He was surviving in temperatures as low as -18C on dried and tinned food and snow he melted on a portable stove.
