Eagerly awaited by fans for almost a year now, Star Trek: Legacy is about to bring the Trek franchise to the new round of next-gen consoles. Already released for PC gamers, Legacy is coming to Xbox 360 on December 5th, with a story co-written by D.C. Fontana and featuring the voices of all five of Trek’s TV captains – William Shatner, Patrick Stewart, Avery Brooks, Kate Mulgrew and Scott Bakula – in a story that spans all five TV series. The glimpses we’ve gotten to see of the game’s graphics on the 360 are very impressive. Take command of your own copy – you can order Star Trek: Legacy now in theLogBook.com Store.

Launched in January of this year on Britain’s ITV network, Eleventh Hour was mooted by the press to be ITV’s answer to Doctor Who, when in fact it was an attempt at a British take on shows such as CSI. Created by acclaimed SF novelist and screenwriter Stephen Gallagher (who bolted from the series mere weeks before its broadcast premiere over major creative differences with the show’s producers) and starring Patrick Stewart, Eleventh Hour lasted only four intense episodes, and now those episodes are seeing their only DVD release thus far in North America. We’ll be wrapping up our complete guide to Eleventh Hour in the next couple of weeks, and you can pick it up for yourself in theLogBook.com Store.

The Nine deep-sixed? Not, strictly speaking, SF, but since it does star John “Phlox” Billingsley of Enterprise fame, it’s worth noting that ABC has yanked The Nine from its schedule, with this week’s airing replaced by an installment of 20/20. The Nine was already suffering from slowly sinking ratings, but with Lost removed from the schedule as its lead-in, the series’ ratings plummeted. (The heavily promoted, slightly-SF series Day Break, starring Taye Diggs, is itself already in ratings trouble, with a significantly smaller audience returning to sample the second episode.) There’s no word on whether or not ABC is considering moving Lost’s return up in the schedule, especially since the show’s return has already been heavily promoted as a February sweeps event. ABC says only that The Nine “will return later this season.”

Who box set covers revealed. The BBC has unveiled the box cover and individual disc artwork for January 2007′s three-DVD Doctor Who New Beginnings box set. Chronicling both the return of the Master and the high-profile regeneration of the fourth Doctor (Tom Baker) into the fifth (Peter Davison), the set is bursting with extras, including a commentary for The Keeper Of Traken recorded with the late Anthony “The Master” Ainley prior to his death. As soon as pre-order information (or any news of a North American release) is available, we’ll let you know here.

Sci-Fi Enterprise schedule announced. As reported earlier, Sci-Fi Channel picked up the exclusive cable repeat rights to Star Trek: Enterprise, and now the show’s cable premiere date is set. Enterprise will be flying into the Monday night marathon slot previously occupied by Stargate SG-1 repeats, with four-hour selections of Enterprise episodes kicking off at 7pm eastern on January 8th. Sci-Fi Fridays will cease to be the previous week, with January 5th seeing the premiere of a four-hour block of Jake 2.0 repeats on Fridays beginning at 7pm eastern. Trek fans might also want to check out the January 13th Sci-Fi original movie Grendel, which stars Next Generation alumnus Marina Sirtis. There’s no word yet on which night the Stargate series will be airing when they return to the schedule.

Dr. Fraiser makes the news. No, literally – former recurring SG-1 guest star Teryl Rothery has been cast as the new ISN anchor for the upcoming direct-to-DVD series Babylon 5: The Lost Tales. (She also frequently featured in flashbacks on a previous JMS project, Jeremiah.) Filming on the first segments is reportedly ahead of schedule, with plenty of new sets, new characters, and Bruce Boxleitner back in the hotseat of a Starfury (admit it, you’d be demanding your money back if we didn’t get that out of the deal). The first volume of The Lost Tales is set to hit stores next year.

Even after its transition from a print magazine to a strictly online publication, Film Score Monthly is still continuing to drop great morsels of film and TV music on CD for hungry soundtrack fans everywhere, and their next release is no exception. Quite a few of us at theLogBook.com are guilty of being classic animation fans, so this one is a big deal: it’s the first in a promised series of Scott Bradley’s music from Tex Avery’s classic Tom & Jerry cartoons. The two-disc collection covers the music Bradley composed for the largely dialogue-free cartoons created in the 1950s, boasting nearly 25 complete scores for the Tom & Jerry shorts, nine of them recovered in stereo. We’ll have ordering info for Tom & Jerry & Tex Avery Too! Volume 1 as soon as possible to help you get some ‘toon tunes under your tree.
Source: Film Score Monthly

Despite several efforts to regain communications with the 10-year-old Mars Global Surveyor, NASA now says that the unmanned probe, which fell silent on November 2, “has likely finished its operating career.” Launched in November 1996, Mars Global Surveyor made orbit around the red planet on September 11, 1997, and relayed back a steady stream of observations, mapping much of the planet’s surface in unprecedented detail. Originally designed for a two-year mission – equivalent to one Martian year – Mars Global Surveyor was given four mission extensions, though some components were already showing signs of failure. Attempts to photograph it from the vantage point of a nearby NASA probe, Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter proved unsuccessful earlier this week; a final attempt to order Global Surveyor to send a signal to either of the Mars Rovers on the surface will made next week before the mission is declared over.
Source: NASA/JPL

Today is the 43rd anniversary of Doctor Who’s first broadcast, so this news seems only fitting. As we reported in September, BBC Radio 7 will be launching a new series of adventures for the eighth Doctor on New Years’ Eve, this time not culled from stories already released by Big Finish Productions (though they are producing the new radio adventures for the BBC). Set later in the eighth Doctor’s lifespan, and pairing him with new companion Lucie Miller (played by Sheridan Smith), the new stories will be released on CD with additional scenes not heard on radio; the CDs will appear monthly throughout 2007. Steve Lyons’ two-parter Blood Of The Daleks kicks off this new series of adventures for the Doctor (and its cover artwork, seemingly inspired by Virgin Publishing’s Doctor Who Missing Adventures novels of the 90s, may well be the new design that had been hinted at for next year’s releases as Nicholas Briggs takes over as the producer of the Doctor Who audios). You can pre-order almost all of the new BBC7 Eighth Doctor adventures now from theLogBook.com Store; we’ve even started a special subsection so you can find them right away.

Now here’s some interesting casting news. Christopher Eccleston‘s one-season stint on Doctor Who must’ve gotten some attention on this side of the Atlantic, because TV Guide reports that Eccleston is joining the cast of NBC’s Heroes full-time in January. And if that’s not enough iconic SF casting for you, also appearing in upcoming episodes will be Star Trek‘s George Takei, playing the father of series regular Hiro. In unrelated news, it’s also being reported that Cheech Marin will show up as Hugo’s dad in a February episode of Lost.
Source: TV Guide

Though details are still sketchy at the moment, Stargate SG-1 star Amanda Tapping revealed at a recent convention appearance that her character, Lt. Col. Samantha Carter, will survive the cancellation of SG-1 and appear in the fourth season of Stargate Atlantis. Tapping was contractually tied to SG-1 for another two years, but that contract also applies to Atlantis. It’s unknown if she’ll become a new regular on the show, or be a recurring guest star, and no official announcement has been made by MGM or Sony Pictures Television (MGM’s parent company) to offer more details. Atlantis is still in its third season, which is expected to resume in March, along with the final episodes of SG-1, on Sci-Fi Channel.
Source: Gateworld.net

When Sci-Fi resumes the third season of Battlestar Galactica in 2007, the show will also see its first new time slot since its premiere. After a break for the holidays, Galactica returns to Sci-Fi on Sunday, January 21st at 10pm ET, airing after the series premiere of the network’s heavily promoted new series, The Dresden Files. Galactica will air in its present Friday night slot through December 15th.
Source: Sci-Fi Channel

Big Finish Productions has announced a new four-part spinoff series from their main Doctor Who audio range, titled the Companion Chronicles. Until now, Big Finish has avoided setting stories during the eras of the first four Doctors, since it would require recasting the Doctor himself. But the Companion Chronicles neatly sidesteps the casting problem and allows them to delve into Doctor Who’s distant past at last. More akin to audiobooks than the full-cast audio dramas that the company has specialized so far, each Companion Chronicles CD will feature an adventure with a past Doctor recounted by one of his companions, played by the original actors. The first release returns to the first Doctor’s era, with Maureen O’Brien returning to the role of Vicki to retell a previously unseen adventure in Frostfire, written by Marc Platt. Wendy Padbury – with an appearance by Nicholas Briggs as the voice of everyone’s favorite Who adversaries – reprises the role of Zoe and reads Fear Of The Daleks, written by Patrick Chapman. The Pertwee era is represented by The Blue Tooth, written by Nigel Fairs and read by Caroline “Liz Shaw” John, and featuring an encounter between the third Doctor and the Cybermen (a match-up which never got to happen on TV). Lalla Ward, who has appeared as Romana in numerous Doctor Who audios, rewinds that character to the days when she was traveling with the fourth Doctor, an adventure retold in The Beautiful People, written by Jonathan Morris. Maybe we misread the press release, but Big Finish seems to incidate that all four Companion Chronicles will be available in January 2007.
Source: Big Finish Productions

We haven’t been trying to talk about Doctor Who music every other day here, it’s just kinda happened that way. BBC Radio Wales will be broadcasting this Sunday night’s concert of Murray Gold’s soundtrack music live from Cardiff, and it’ll be available in streaming form on the BBC Radio Wales web site for seven days afterward at this link. The concert is also being filmed for a special Christmas edition of Doctor Who Confidential (which may show up on a future DVD set, most like season 3), and it’ll also be available in its entirety on Christmas on BBC-TV’s digital channels. The concert will feature live performances of many of the selections from the upcoming soundtrack CD, which you can find in theLogBook.com Store.
Source: BBC

This may be one of the most interesting Star Trek books to come out in years. Most of the TV series have been covered in great depth (though we’re still waiting on a tell-all volume about Enterprise), and there’s even been a book on the series’ music. Now, Jeff Ayers is plumbing the depths of professionally printed Star Trek fiction. “Voyages Of Imagination: The Star Trek Fiction Companion” covers everything from the James Blish “Star Trek Logs” through the last novels from Pocket Books, and everything in between, featuring interviews with over 300 authors and editors who have contributed to Star Trek in print. There’s even a full index of titles and authors for the over 600 Star Trek books printed to date. “Voyages Of Imagination” is now available in theLogBook.com Store.

When NASA lost contact with its Mars Global Surveyor probe on November 2nd, it may not have meant the end of the mission. This Friday, the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (seen at right) will pass within 93 miles of its older cousin, close enough for it to aim at the Global Surveyor and take pictures with a resolution showing detail as small as ten centimeters across. NASA engineers are hoping that this rare convergence will allow them to diagnose the problem and get the older unmanned probe up and running again. There is also a plan in the works to have Global Surveyor try to signal Spirit and Opportunity, the two still-roaming Mars Rovers on the red planet’s surface. It can’t pass its observations back to ground controllers via the Rovers, but a successful signal would let them know that it has power. Mars Global Surveyor has been orbiting Mars for ten years, and has outlived its original design lifetime.
Sources: NASA, Reuters

It turns out there’s no reason for the Daleks to have plunged into the Void to retrieve the Genesis Ark – they could’ve just gone to eBay for it. The BBC is auctioning off several Doctor Who props and costume pieces as part of its annual Children In Need appeal, the biggest of which has to be the huge Genesis Ark that the Daleks pinned their entire battle strategy on in the most recent episodes of the BBC’s new series. (Any non-UK-based Dalek sympathizers had better have a wallet that’s bigger on the inside than out: the bidding has already reached well over $2,000.) Other items include a Sycorax helmet, the tenth Doctor’s tennis shoes, and one of Rose’s tops from season two (why there’s more action on that than on David Tennant’s sneakers, we don’t care to speculate). Other items will be auctioned off at the BBC’s Doctor Who Celebration event, which will also feature a live concert of music from the series by Murray Gold and the BBC National Orchestra of Wales. The live auction items include more props, the season finale shooting script autographed by Tennant, Billie Piper and Russell T. Davies, and a signed, leather-bound collection of the show’s musical score in sheet music form. If you don’t happen to have plans to be in Cardiff next weekend, you can still get in on the eBay action here.
Source: BBC

After several years of publishing the fan favorite Star Trek Ships Of The Line calendars, with new artwork depicting some of Starfleet’s finest vessels, Pocket Books is collecting that artwork in book form. “Ships Of The Line” gathers that artwork in its full-size, wide-format glory, complete with new text by Michael Okuda tracing the fictional and non-fictional evolution of Federation starships, from the original Enterprise and other original series creations through recent designs such as the NX-01 Enterprise and the enigmatic Enterprise-J seen in a glimpse into the future. You can order “Star Trek: Ships Of The Line” now from theLogBook.com Store.

Actor Jack Palance, whose career spanned decades from the golden age of television through modern-day voice work for animation, died of natural causes on Friday. Possibly best-known for his Oscar-winning performance in City Slickers and its sequel, and a villainous role in the classic western Shane, he had a career as a professional heavyweight boxer before he took to the screen. After serving in World War II (and earning a Purple Heart), he understudied Marlon Brando in A Streetcar Named Desire (and later took up Brando’s role on Broadway). His career had many genre connections, from a role in the legendary live Playhouse 90 broadcast of Rod Serling’s Requiem For A Heavyweight, to hosting the original TV version of Ripley’s Believe It Or Not, to TV guest shots (the Buck Rogers episode Planet Of The Slave Girls) and movies (H.G. Wells’ The Shape Of Things To Come, Cyborg 2, Outlaw Of Gor, to name just a few). He was offered the role of General Chang in Star Trek VI, only to turn it down in favor of City Slickers, which finally brought him his first Academy Award; he had also been briefly considered for the non-speaking role of Gort the Robot in The Day The Earth Stood Still. Mr. Palance was 87.
Source: IMDb