What do you get when you mix classic science-fiction novels by Edgar Rice Burroughs with a Confederate solider and Mars?

Why, “John Carter,” of course.

Here is the trailer for the movie, which is chock-full of elaborate special effects:

Apple co-founder and Silicon Valley legend Steve Jobs lived a life that read like an epic novel, so it should be no surprise that his very last words on this temporal plane would be just as dramatic.

And they were: “OH WOW. OH WOW. OH WOW.”

That’s according to his sister, Mona Simpson, whose moving eulogy was published in the New York Times today. It’s well worth a read, given what a gifted writer Simpson is — she is a much-respected novelist — and the amazing subject.

Simpson opens the piece by writing about her desire for her estranged father to return to her life and become the be all and end all. Instead, it turned out to be Jobs.

“Even as a feminist, my whole life I’d been waiting for a man to love, who could love me,” she wrote. “For decades, I’d thought that man would be my father. When I was 25, I met that man and he was my brother.”

A fitting legacy, among many.

It’s a delightful piece, too, and here is my favorite part:

“For an innovator, Steve was remarkably loyal. If he loved a shirt, he’d order 10 or 100 of them. In the Palo Alto house, there are probably enough black cotton turtlenecks for everyone in this church.”

It’s lovely that his sister would be the one to give everyone that one more thing.

Most of us don’t get to stay goodbye quite so eloquently, if at all, as Simpson surmised about the message of her brother’s life. So, saying hello to life still remains our best option.

You can chillax, Mark Zuckerberg–it’s not “The Social Network 2: The Winklevii Stroke, Stroke, Strooooke Back.”

In fact, it’s more like: “You’ve Got Social Network Mail.”

That’s because Facebook and AOL will star together in a just signed movie, which will be made from a young adult novel that will not hit the shelves until November.

Titled “The Future of Us,” the book is set in 1996 and concerns two friends who sign onto AOL–the Facebook of its day–only to find their pages on the social networking giant from 15 years hence (as in now!).

Agonized agonizing presumably ensues, probably around how to erase all those drunken college photos.

“The Future of Us” has a Facebook page, of course, which noted its screen-rights sale to Warner Bros. The book itself will be published in November in a big printing by Penguin’s young adult imprint, Razorbill.

This week, influential blogger Lian Yue started publishing a novel on Twitter, believed to be the first time a Chinese-language novel is released on the popular service.

The novel, entitled “2020,” revolves around a character named Mao Zhiyong, described as a pale, overweight middle-aged man, and it will be written in regular installments through the year 2020. In Wednesday’s chapter, the protagonist Mao became a father to twin boys and was promoted to head of the Communist Party propaganda department in the city where he lives.

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