Today was the day that they announced the Academy Awards nominations for motion pictures and, as usual, science fiction films didn't get much attention apart from the obligatory effects and sound awards. It's probably just as well since last year's crop of sci-fi films wasn't particularly great.

Not that genre fans care that much about their favourites always being snubbed for the Oscars. We do have our own awards, after all, especially for books.

For example, there are the Hugo Awards for which nominations are now being accepted. I don't know which books will ultimately end up on the ballot, but other award short lists are often good indicators.

One such list is from the British Science Fiction Association Awards. Their list of nominees was recently released. I have a strong suspicion that China Miéville's Embassytown will make it to this year's Hugos list.

The other big book award, of course, is the Nebula. During that ceremony, the Science Fiction Writers of America also honour one of their own as a grandmaster, which is a sort of honorary title that recognizes an author's distinguished career. This year's grandmaster is none other than Connie Willis who is no stranger to awards, having pretty much set the record for most wins.

Recently, I encountered yet another award designed to celebrate excellence in genre fiction. These prizes are known as The Kitschies and are sponsored by a rum company. I'm not sure where they fit on the spectrum of honours, but it's always nice for authors to be recognized.

Is there any lesser-known award that guides you in your selection of reading material, movie or TV watching?

One of the most amazing things about the internet is its ability to bring to light forgotten movies, TV shows and other cultural works.

For example, I encountered a link to this BBC adaptation of Aldous Huxley's brilliant book Brave New World. I haven't yet dedicated the three hours necessary to actually watch it, but it pleases me to know it is there when I want to.

On the radio side of things, the BBC also did a dramatic adaptation of Isaac Asimov's Foundation Trilogy.

I'm sure with a bit more digging, I'd be able to find all sorts of other BBC productions of classic science fiction works.

Another radio adaptation  I unearthed recently was Samuel Delany's The Star-Pit. There are even some notes by Delany himself on how the adaptation came to be.

Got any hidden radio or TV gems out there that you want to share?

I've always had a fascination with forgotten authors. Given the huge amount of books and stories that have written in different languages over the years and the exploding number of new material being added to that vast library, it's no wonder that books and writers fall out of fashion then fade into obscurity.

The most recent writer to come to my attention is the intriguing Homer Eon Flint who wrote pulp fiction, some of it science fiction. He died young in what might have been an attempted robbery, not of him, but by him.

Some of his books are available on Project Gutenberg for free, but a small publishing house is working on releasing some of his other works.

The ever-reliable Science Fiction Encylopedia has an entry about him. (As an aside, check out this good interview with Peter Nicholls, one of the founders of the SFE.)

The pulp era had more than its fair share of forgotten authors, but what is interesting is that you could argue that the rise of the ebook is creating a similar market for short, disposable fiction by obscure writers, most of whom will be long forgotten in 50 years.

Enough time has passed that we can stop looking back at 2011 and focus on the year ahead.

IO9 recently compiled a comprehensive list of genre movies to look out for in the coming months. There are some interesting looking titles in the pipeline. The one that I am most looking forward to won't be out until December and that is Peter Jackson's movie adaptation of The Hobbit. I don't even want to know how long I have to wait to see part 2 of that film.

Speaking of Jackson and all Tolkien, have you ever wondered why he omitted so much of the source work in his film adaptation? This article gives some reasons why.

If you really want to see something that omits a lot of the original material, try this animated version of The Hobbit. No, it's not the Rankin-Bass version that you know. It's another, more obscure, version.

I seem to have gotten off the topic of movies for the year ahead. In that case, how about going back to the 70s for a moment and checking out this list of dystopian science fiction from that decade. I'm kind of surprised that Soylent Green is not on the list and you could make a case to include Sleeper, even if it is a comedy.

While I'm linking to dystopic science-fiction movie items, I would be remiss to omit this link to the Blade Runner sketchbook that collects the production art that was instrumental in delivering that film's distinctive look and feel.

OK, back to future films before I sign off. I saw this interesting tidbit about director . Now that is something I'd like to see.

Let's get one thing straight, Neal Stephenson's newest book Reamde is not a work of science fiction. If that doesn't turn you off and you still want to know more about it then read on.

If you were going to classify the book then it would probably qualify as a techno-thriller with geek appeal.  Computer hacking figures prominently in the story, but not as prominently as good, old-fashioned gunplay.

The book gets its title from a typo in a readme file in a computer virus which is the maguffin that sets the entire story into motion. A fictional multiplayer online fantasy game called T'Rain which resembles World of Warcraft is targetted by Chinese hackers who infect players with their Reamde virus. The malware locks the victims' computers and in order to rid themselves of the virus, players must pay ransom to the hackers within the game's economic system. The hackers can later convert the fantasy money to real cash.

Richard Forthrast is the founder of the game and he had recently hired a niece named Zula to work for the company. She is a bit of an oddity in his straight-laced Iowan family in that she's adopted and originally an orphan from Eritrea.

She also has a bit of a douche-bag boyfriend who's a small-time hacker that has stolen some credit card numbers and ends up selling them to a man with links to the Russian mafia. It turns out the guy is also a big-time T'Rain player. That is when the troubles begin.

The guy who has just bought the credit card numbers is infected by the virus and can't extract the data for the impatient Russian mobsters. Zula and her boyfriend are forced by the Russians to help them track down the hackers .

Their adventures take them to China, the Philippines, Taiwan, remote parts of British Columbia and the American Northwest as the layers of the plot start to pile up. Not only do they have to contend with hackers, but Islamic terrorists also become involved, including a charismatic leader who is a killer, but is still a character for which the reader is partially sympathetic partially because he is fairly clever and somewhat compassionate towards Zula.

The cast of characters expands as the story progresses to include a Bulgarian and a Chinese hacker, a Russian former special forces operative, a pair of British spies, more Islamic terrorists, American survivalists and a Chinese woman from some remote tribe. What is surprising is the amount of romantic entaglements that this creates.

The characters combine, split and recombine as their actions carry them around the world until they all ultimately converge in a too-convenient series of coincidences which make sense in the internal logic of the story, but are pretty hard to believe would ever happen in real life. Of course, that's not unusual in most works of fiction, but I occasionally found myself rolling my eyes as my read the story.

If you've read Stephenson's Cryptonomicon then this book is somewhat reminiscent of that work except it doesn't jump back and forth in time and spares a lot of the obsessive detail of the geekier aspects of the story, although he does seem to show off a lot of the research he did on weapons throughout the tale.

In the end, the story is well told, the plotting is imaginative and the characters are diverse and brought to life, but it all seems very conventional compared to the kind of books that Stephenson is famous for. That will probably make him more attractive to the average book buyer and I can see how the story might attract the attention of Hollywood as they look for books to adapt to the big screen, but the hard-core Stephenson fan might feel a bit let-down.

While I enjoyed the book, I felt it was a bit too long which is pretty normal for a Stephenson book, but I felt that given the conventional nature of the book it seemed to only prolong the inevitable outcome of the story.

Despite some criticisms I might have about the story, I think that it is a solid tale and a memorable one so I'd certainly recommend it to anyone who enjoys thrillers, geekery or is just a Stephenson completist who needs to consume his entire output.

To usher in the new year, here is the latest in our long line of pulp-themed science fiction calendars. 2012 marks the ninth time we've offered a calendar and judging from the thousands of downloadsthey get each year, they remain as popular as ever.

Space babes in distress is a theme that never gets old so each month of the calendar displays a classic example of another harried female space explorer as depicted on the cover of pulp magazines from years gone by.

Download your copy for free from http://www.theendoftheuniverse.ca/calendar2012/calendar2012.pdf. If you print it out, be sure to scale it to fit your paper size. It's designed for letter-size paper, but if you use A4, or some other size, you will have to adjust your printer settings accordingly.

If you want to check out previous editions, click on the following links to get the 2004, 2005, 2006, 2007, 2008, 2009,  2010  and 2011 installments.

If you're new to TEOTU, don't just leech the calendar and run. Take a second to add our newsfeed to your reader or follow us on Twitter so you can get a regular injection of irregular science fiction links throughout the year.

We hope your 2012 is a happy and prosperous one and that all of your science fiction dreams come true.

This is the time of year that critics start publishing their year's best lists and science fiction critics are no different. Paul Di Filipo takes a different approach by listing the most overlooked books of the year. I'm always a fan of the underdog so I dig those kind of lists.

For a more traditional list, NPR offers its top 5 science fiction and fantasy books for 2011. I was disappointed that they could only come up with 2 science fiction books in a list of 5. Couldn't they have a list of top 5 science fiction and top 5 fantasy? I'm getting tired of the two genres always being lumped together. You don't ever see critics citing the top Romance and Mystery novels of the year.

If you are taking the long view and want to know what are the best science fiction books of any year, Reddit had an interesting thread with lots of suggestions from its readers. The usual suspects are there, but you'll find some other unknown gems. It's not the first time they've tried to compile such a list. Heck, it's not even the second time.

Instead of looking at the genre as a whole, how about narrowing it down to the best book in a specific sub-genre, like this article on the best generation-ship story. Personally, I prefer that approach because you will get more obscure titles than a general list.

Doctor Who has been around so long that it is a rare fan who has watched every available episode, especially those who only came onboard after the show's most recent revival. In reality, no one has seen every episode since more than 100 were intentionally erased by the BBC decades ago to free space in their tape library.

Over the years, some episodes have been recovered, but the amount of newly discovered material has slowed down enough that fans feared none of the remaining lost shows would ever be recovered. The good news is that some new episodes were recently found. Huzzah!

Who fans who can't get enough of the good doctor are also excited about an impending video game, but I have my doubts. It's not very often that any kind of video-game tie-in is very good and considering how good the show is, the game is going to have to be pretty special in order to measure up.

How good is the show? Well, it's one of the titles in this conversation that ponders the question of what is the best science fiction show on TV today. I can't think of anything better, although I'll be honest and say that I haven't seen much of the competition so I'm not the best judge.

The recent news that has some fans alarmed is talk of making a Doctor Who feature film. Most worrying is the quote from the would-be director that "it needs quite a radical transformation to take it into the bigger arena." Yikes.

The BBC has since tried to quash the rumour, saying that there is no Doctor Who movie in the works. I sure hope not.

Hollywood's obsession with remakes has always annoyed me. Author and critic John Scalzi explains the economics behind the ongoing trend which is seeing movies getting remade even more quickly than before.

For example, Paul Verhoeven's science fiction ouevre is getting remade. That includes new versions of Robocop, Starship Troopers and Total Recall.

Speaking of Total Recall, did you ever listen to Arnold Schwarzenegger's commentary track for that movie? It's the reason why I don't ever bother listening to them. It consists of Arnie describing what he's doing on the screen which is fine if you are blind, but useless for anyone watching the movie.

Have you ever considered that the Lord of the Rings movie is a remake? No, I'm not talking about the Ralph Bakshi animated version from the 70s, I mean the 1944 version that starred Humphrey Bogart as Frodo. What do you mean, you've never heard of it?

As much as I enjoy books, I have far too many of them and am at a stage in my life that I know that I have more than I can ever read.  This gives me the urge to get rid of a good amount of them.

With the advent of electronic readers, its tempting to simply opt for digital versions of books. They don't take up any space and I can acquire even more of them than I could ever shelve in my house.

This has me thinking about how to replace a paper version of a book for an electronic one. In many cases, legitimate digital versions don't even exist, especially for older, out-of-print books which are too obscure to ever be digitized by their original publishers. Amazingly enough, though, there are plenty of pirated scans of these books.

Is it ethical to use the pirated version if there is no other way to obtain one? What if I were to make scans of my own books to digitize them for personal use? Is that different than making a backup copy of any other medium that I already own?

Of course, digitizing a book on my own is not a trivial task, but it's not an impossible one. There are DIY book scanners that can be cobbled together with a pair of digital cameras and some scrap wood. Once you have one of these devices, you can digitize a book in less than half an hour.

It is tempting to simply grab a digital file that someone's already created in order to replace the physical book I already own. The end result is the same, but is it legal, or even ethical?

To complicate the picture, when I actually look at the number of books I own, an overwhelming majority of them were purchased second-hand, which means that not a penny of the money I spent on them ever went to the original authors. My spending has mostly benefitted used-book sellers.

What would you do?