Blackfish Publishing

Death Ray #19

Once again, we press a monstrous 180 pages of science fiction goodness into your eager hands, for the not-so-princely sum of £4.99. And if you're still on the fence, know this; Death Ray is not a magazine you can read in a single train journey. We tried it; it doesn't work. Issue 19 promises to linger on your coffee table for weeks. Weeks! And this is what's inside…

Vast epics of blockbusting drama!

Death Ray goes to Hollywood and catches up with the men responsible for two of the summer's most potentially enthralling entertainments: Star Trek and Terminator Salvation. We sit down and talk trekking with J.J. Abrams, Chris Pine, Zachary Quinto and Zoe Saldaña, while McG explains his approach to the all-conquering juggernaut that is the Terminator franchise. Production designer Martin Laing talks homicidal robots, Moon Bloodgood talks love and heavy weapons, and Death Ray undertakes one of its most arduous tasks ever: making sense of Terminator's timeline…

The best of the glass teat!

Television, it's widely accepted, is giving the movies a run for their money. We're basically addicts, and three shows stood out for us this season: the sadly defunct Pushing Daisies, the 'on the bubble' The Sarah Connor Chronicles, and Lost. Line up for Death Ray interviewage, then, we have: Lost bosses Carlton Cuse and David Lindelof, Michael Emerson (a.k.a. Ben Linus), Pushing Daisies mastermind Bryan Fuller and physical effects prodigy Robert Hall, who messes up Summer Glau's face full-time.

The world of words!

We attend to the real frontier of genre during an interview with erstwhile author of the New Weird, China Miéville, promoting his fantasy-meets-crime-fiction novel The City & The City. Death Ray also meets Joe Abercrombie (Best Seved Cold), Michelle Harrison (The 13 Treasures) and Adrian Tchaikovsky (Empire in Black and Gold), who contributes a previously unpublished short story, 'The Sun of the Morning' (incidentally the Death Ray fiction slot's first ever sample of heroic fantasy).

The horror, the horror!

They exist on the other side of good taste, spilling blood plasma and bowels all over the place, surely unafraid of making a bad movie in their fidelity to genre… This issue's emperors of horror are old master Wes Craven, the formidable Uwe Boll, and relative newcomer Chris Nahon (Blood: The Last Vampire). Be very afraid, yeah?

Secrets now not-so-secret!

How it's all done. We get lessons in making the magic happen from Kröd Mändoon costumier Alexandra Caulfield, Primeval monster maniac Tim Haines, Night at the Museum 2 helmsman Shawn Levy and – most venerable of all – creature designer Patrick Tatopoulos, who did all the good and memorable work on Stargate, Dark City, Independence Day and Pitch Black.

Pure, unbridled passion!

We indulge our hobby horses, again. Bob Fischer talks conventions, Guy Haley voyages to lost worlds, Matt Bielby swims with the Sub-Mariner, we get flustered by the new wave of Massive Multiplayer Online Roleplaying games, and we celebrate the wonders of the science fiction novella.