Six Billion Worlds

National Geographic's 3-minute kinetic typography video on the approach of a planet with 7 billion people, possibly sometime later this year.

Watch on YouTube

It seems the location used to indicate how much space we would take up standing shoulder to shoulder has shifted again – it was once the Isle of Wight, then the Isle of Man, later John Brunner used Zanzibar for the predicted 7b in 2010, but here NG has gone for Los Angeles.

1990s SF film

Teenage Space Vampires, 1999, Romania/Canada   DIRECTED BY MARTIN WOOD
A few American college kids discover a large capsule from space that's landed in their town, and from the local people who are turning into vampires this clearly indicates, duh, an alien invasion. Vampires and Romania aren't always a good combination, creatively speaking. I already knew this would be nothing like the respectable Teenagers from Outer Space and approached it with low expectations, which were met head on. Filmed in Romania with Canadian actors, it's just plain forgettable while being neither camp, self-knowing or even funny, aimed at teenagers who have too few active brain cells to stay in college. Is it a homage to ’50s B-movies, then? Almost certainly not although it'd be very hard to discern that if it were intended, but if 'high school kids fighting off an alien invasion' is ever a sub-genre worth exploring, skip this and go straight to something like The Faculty which did that kind of thing a hundred times better. Even pulp and gonzo fans needn't waste their time – this isn't the worst film ever made, it's simply an hour and a half too long.

2011 books

5) Fa Poonvoralak, The Most Silent School in the World, 2009
This came highly recommended from Marcel Barang, who also wrote the introduction to last year's English edition, describing it as "a literary UFO". Thailand isn't really on the map for wildly imaginative fiction, let alone science fiction and fantasy, so discovering something so unusual and category-defying was rather unexpected, particularly considering that this was also short-listed for the 2009 SEA Write Award. It's the story of eight schoolchildren of mixed ages at a riverside school in rural Thailand. They turn up when they want, night or day, there are no teachers, they play games with each other, not a great deal happens that's different from one day to the next, and they're not being groomed for a life in society. That's because in our plane of existence they're not really children at all: they're the eight Trigrams of Taoist cosmology, given English/Thai names like Water Nam, Mountain Pukao and Sky Fa. Then they are visited by eight more 'echo children' from the Moon who are all subtly different, then more children arrive from the rings of Saturn, the Oort Cloud, the Sun and various other places around the solar system. They speculate if their school may in fact be some kind of spaceship. They've finally multiplied to sixty-four – the same number of pairings that make up the Hexagrams of the I Ching – and the physical dimensions of their school keeps on growing, instantly adding more rooms as new children arrive. How they all interact may be meant to reflect the inherent subtleties of the I Ching's Hexagrams; although this seems to be the intent it was often difficult to figure out beyond the characters of the children/Trigrams themselves.

All the above is not actually a spoiler as it would have helped to know something of the structure of the book before beginning it. It's also rather inconclusive, but then this story was written more along ancient Eastern lines than that of a linear, modern Western text, with the analogy of the 'Silent School' probably meaning the life situations contained in the I Ching itself, and the physical school representing an expansion of an octagonal ba gua arrangement of Trigrams. This book is both perplexing and entertaining, and for someone who's long been interested in both creative fiction and the inner working of the I Ching it's also a rare and valuable find, regrettably one that I doubt will be showing up at many bookstores outside of Thailand.