Virtuality now available on DVD

With no warning whatsoever, Virtuality hit store shelves today. Well, Best Buy’s shelves, anyway. You can order it right here, and at $9.99, it’s a steal!

I’mma let you finish!

You can’t stop it.

From Sci Fi Wire.

Peter Berg talks Virtuality

Today, at NBC’s Television Critics Association presentation, Virtuality director Peter Berg spoke out a little bit about the show (via The Futon Critic).

“I was just a piece of that. I wanted to work with Ron Moore,” director Peter Berg says about his experience on the FOX pilot “Virtuality.” “I’m a big fan of his. Those guys were trying to do something very dense and original and complicated and if they have more time [it] would be completely terrific.”

Berg was in attendance at the TCA summer press tour to promote his new NBC drama “Trauma.” I had the chance to speak with him for a few minutes about the project, which aired on June 26.

“I just read that there’s a European thing, a deal going on in Europe to finance it as a European, co-finance it as a European series,” he said. “I don’t know, you should try to talk to Ron Moore about that but I think that would be fascinating, with the same cast and [everything]. It’s all talk at this point but I think the response to ‘Virtuality,’ the critical response surprised FOX.”

He adds that he’s hopeful it will happen.

Virtuality listing up on Netflix

This is just like the Amazon listing. You can save Virtuality and it’ll be added to your list once it’s available. Check it out here.

Comic-Con rumblings *UPDATE*

Herc from Ain’t It Cool News tweetered this just a little while ago…

“Just spoke to VIRTUALITY co,creator Michael Taylor he says VIRTUALITY is almost certainly dead at Fox but Taylor says VIRTUALITY producers are trying to get a VIRTUALITY series going as an int’l co_production, a la Meteor & Defying Graity.”

File this under, “Things That Make You Go Hmmm.” Stay tuned.

UPDATE: Herc goes a little more in-depth with his chat with Taylor over at AICN.

Under the Hood

This is cool. Kevin Grazier, JPL scientist and science adviser on Virtuality has penned the latest installment of Codex Futurius, Discover Magazine’s look at the real science behind science fiction. In this edition, Kevin gives the lowdown on the Phaeton’s Orion antimatter drive. It’s a pretty good read, and goes very in depth. You can check it out here.

The Most Badass Female Space Pilots of All Time

The title says it all. io9’s got the list, and Virtuality’s Sue Parsons has made the cut. She joins other hallmarks of female badassery such as BSG’s Starbuck and Serenity’s River. Check out the full list right here.

EXTRA! EXTRA! Grey’s Anatomy in Space!

ITEM: Ronald D. Moore and Michael Taylor, the creative talent behind Battlestar Galactica, create Virtuality, a science fiction pilot for FOX which centers around 12 astronauts on a long-term deep space assignment.

ITEM: FOX entertainment President Kevin O’Reilly calls Virtuality, “dense.” Not stupid, but the show has got a lot going on.

ITEM: Sex sells.

ITEM: America likes sex.

ITEM: ABC orders 13 episodes of Defying Gravity, a new show focusing on “eight astronauts from five countries on a mysterious journey through the solar system.” Ron Livingston will play Captain Maddux Donner, while Laura Harris will play a fellow astronaut Chloe, who’s also… Maddux’s old flame.

Virtuality fans may be asking themselves, FTW? But it only gets better, everything the astronauts do is being recorded and sent back to Earth. The show premieres later this month, so it’ll be interesting to see how it all plays out. But listen, the minute Jimmi Simpson starts showing up in people’s dreams, I’m going to kill someone.

More at IGN.

VR, from Brave New World to Virtuality

For those of you wondering how all of this nutty virtual reality stuff got started, Sci Fi Wire is running a pretty good piece on its history, from Virtuality all the way back to Aldous Huxley in the 1930s.

1932
Aldous Huxley, in his novel Brave New World, parodies that screwy ballyhoo-y Hollywood, and especially the advent of the talkies, with “the feelies,” multisensory movies you watch by gripping two prongs that zap you with the neural sensations of the characters.

1968
Philip K. Dick’s Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? is published, in which people use “empathy boxes” to relate to and feel the plight of Mercer, a messianic figure who is pelted with stones as he climbs a mountain.

1987
The great ABC TV show Max Headroom airs, building upon the also-great BBC made-for-TV movie Max Headroom: 20 Minutes Into the Future, about an artificial intelligence auto-generated from the noggin of an injured TV newscaster … a show that was better SF than a lot of the Gibson knockoffs published around the same time.

In 1987, I said that mankind’s need for virtual environments would never evolve beyond Max Headroom, and Dennis Miller’s jokes about virtual Claudia Schiffers be damned, I’m sticking to it. Read the full article here.

Michael Taylor talks Virtuality

I’ve had this video for a while, but somehow it fell through the cracks. Enjoy.