Neil Gaiman's American Gods from Harper/Collins is sure to be one of the best-selling hardcovers of the summer in pop culture stores.  It is certainly worthy of attention on its own merits, but it has also created some related news. One of the fascinating new ways to publicize books is the online author's journal, and Harpers' website for American Gods is especially interesting, since Gaiman can even make lists of bookstores and the minutia of book tours interesting.  But there is even more to the American Gods site.  Readers who have been paying attention to Gaiman's online musings know that over the past month he has been working furiously up against the deadline of a possible of writer's strike (which has fortunately been averted) to adapt Mamoru Oshii's Avalon for Miramax, the studio that owns the American rights to the film.  Oshii is the acclaimed director of Ghost in the Shell, but Avalon is not an animated film.  It was shot with live actors in Poland speaking Polish.  Gaiman's sensitive work on the English version of Miyazaki's Princess Mononoke is undoubtedly the reason that Miramax chose him for Avalon.

 

Avalon is a cerebral science fiction film about a group of people who are involved in a game so popular and addictive that they eventually disappear into the game (shades of Everquest, the online game that has earned the monicker 'Evercrack' for its addictive powers).  Certainly Gaiman is an excellent choice to adapt Avalon given his facility with both fantasy and science fiction.  It is probably too much to hope that Miramax will forgo dubbing and put the film out with its original Polish language track and subtitles, but at least they did make an excellent choice in deciding to have Gaiman do the adaptation.