(Insert Star Trek cliché here.)

 

I was having a beer with a friend when his cell phone rang. After reassuring his wife that he was certain to forget to buy milk on the way home, he hung up, looked at his phone contemplatively and said, "Do you think that cell phones would look like this if it wasn't for Star Trek?" 

 

Well, actually, no, they wouldn't. Apparently Martin Cooper, the chief engineer at Motorola who developed the cell phone in 1973, is on record as stating that Star Trek was his inspiration.

- Sid

 

"Many are cold, few are frozen." - Bob Ettinger

When reading science fiction, it's difficult to avoid playing the "well, they got that wrong" game. 1984 was a popular year for the game, as was 2001. (Presumably there will be a resurgence in 2010.) 

However, most science fiction writers deny that they are attempting to predict the future, even if there have been a few cases where people have managed to hit the nail on the head with surprising accuracy. Prediction aside, there has been at least one case where science fiction was the direct causal element of a technological development.

In 1931, Amazing Stories featured a story entitled The Jameson Satellite, by Neil R. Jones. The titular character decides that he wants his body preserved until the end of time, and in order to achieve this odd desire (sadly, the story never looks at the underlying psychology behind this decision) he has his body sent into orbit so that the cold and vacuum of space will prevent decay. 

40,000,000 years later cyborg aliens from Zor find Dr. Jameson's body, extract his brain, put it into a spare robot body, and toss away the corpse, but that's another story - or another thirty-some stories, actually. 

Jump forward a comparatively brief 31 years to 1962, when a scientist named Bob Ettinger publishes the first version of The Prospect of Immortality. In his book, Ettinger advocates a system whereby people would be frozen immediately after death in hopes that they could be thawed out and cured when medical science had found a remedy for the cause of their death. In 1976 he starts the Cryonics Institute and begins offering cryopreservation as a service. 

Ettinger's admitted inspiration? A youthful reading of Neil R. Jones and Dr. Jameson. And no, Walt Disney was not a client.

- Sid

P.S. The cover illustration shown at the start of the post is for a later story in Jameson's saga - I decided that it made more sense to show a cover that featured one of the stories - and a reasonably accurate painting of one of the robots - rather than the 1931 issue where the first story appeared. In the interests of accuracy and thoroughness, on the left is the cover for that July 1931 issue. For anyone interested in reading the Professor Jameson stories without having to invest a small fortune in pre-war pulp magazines, Ace Books editor Donald A. Wollheim published the collected stories in book form in the late 60's. I own two of the five collections and they cost me a grand total of $2.75 used.

And it's not like I didn't tell them.

We're millions of miles from Earth inside a giant white face. What's impossible?

Gary Sinise, Mission to Mars

Showing science fiction movies on the Space channel, that's what. Yes, they did it again - another Sunday night of non-genre films! This time it was FX and FX II, which at best are action films and at worst are the inverse of fantasy in that they're about the false physical creation of an illusion. And the other, non-science fiction channels? Mission to Mars, An American Werewolf in London and Armageddon. Now I grant you that neither Mission to Mars nor Armageddon are GREAT science fiction films, although I seem to recall that American Werewolf was well received when it premiered, but, as with the joke about the dancing bear, it's not a question of quality. Sigh...they're just not getting it.

- Sid

There's one in every crowd.

As the loyal reader (there's just one, as far as I know) may or may not recall, my first post made some critical comments regarding Chapters' policy of splitting science fiction and fantasy into separate sections. 

I was chatting with Keith, the excruciatingly knowledgeable counter person at Pulp Fiction West, my local used book store here in Vancouver, and I mentioned my conversation at the Chapters checkout desk regarding the spaceships/dragons rule of thumb for dividing SF from fantasy. 

Instantly he darted off into the stacks and pulled out a slightly battered copy of The Elfin Ship, by James P. Blaylock. Well, in my defense, I did say that categorizing the ones with spaceships on the covers as science fiction was "not a hard distinction, but a useful filter for the uninitiated".

- Sid

The Triumph of the Big Three.

Woe unto the defeated,
whom history treads
into the dust.
-Arthur Koestler

I was born in 1961, and my mother's science fiction library provided my initiation into the genre. Her collection was heavily based in the early days of science fiction - the Golden Age if you're so inclined, the 1930's through the 50's, with bits and pieces from even earlier. As a fan of the field, I think of the authors of this period as the people who laid the foundations (no pun intended) of the genre as it exists today. Sadly, fame has proven fleeting, and few of the stars from the early days of science fiction have kept their place in the heavens.

As an example, I recently re-read Doomstar, by Edmond Hamilton, who is almost the poster boy of the Golden Age. With his first publication in Weird Tales in 1926, Hamilton's career spans half a century until his death in 1977, a career which combines classics of science fiction with authorship of the early Superman and Batman comics in the 1940's. Known as "World Saver" Hamilton because of his penchant for space-opera stories with a last-minute solution to menaces on a planetary scale, in his later work he displays a grasp of compassion and emotion that holds its own against anyone else in the field, then or now.

Thinking of running down to the local book store to pick up some Hamilton? Sorry, don't waste bus fare. A recent impromptu survey at Chapters revealed that almost no one from the Golden Age era has survived the test of time to remain accessible to the general public. Hamilton? Not on the shelf. His wife, Leigh Brackett, whose Martian settings have never failed to stir me - gone. E. E. "Doc" Smith, Theodore Sturgeon, R. A. Lafferty, Clifford D. Simak, Lester Del Rey, Lewis Padgett, C. L. Moore, Damon Knight, John W. Campbell - and I'm pretty sure that James Blish didn't make the cut, either. (My god, I have to go back - was Edgar Rice Burroughs gone?!)

Not surprisingly, the Big Three of the Golden Age are still represented: Asimov, Clarke and Heinlein. I was surprised to see that Andre Norton still has a meager foothold on the shelves, albeit in the form of collaborations rather than reprints of any of her early material. Robert Silverberg is still there, and to my complete astonishment there was a slim volume of Lord Dunsany holding a spot in the fantasy section.

To be honest I can't say that I'm terribly shocked by the dearth of early SF on the shelves of a non-genre bookstore - after all, HMV probably doesn't have that many of the contemporaries of the early Beatles on display, either - but it did sadden me a little. I realize that Doc Smith or John W. Campbell's approach to prose might not be to everyone's taste, but the same could easily be said about Henry Fielding, Thomas Hardy, or Jane Austen: classics are classics regardless of whether their milieu is English hedgerows or the asteroid belt.

- Sid

Photo credit: 1954 Worldcon, photo by Margaret Ford Kiefer.

Not that I have anything against Nicole Kidman.

I haven't purchased TV Guide for decades, so when I tuned into Space ("The Imagination Station") tonight it was purely on spec. Now, for a relatively small Canadian channel, Space generally does an acceptable job of keeping on top of things: both Battlestar Galacticas, SG1 and Atlantis, the inevitable Star Trek reruns and so forth, and generally they display a healthy respect for the science fiction and fantasy fan base. However, for no good reason that I can figure out, on a far too frequent basis they show movies that have NO science fiction or fantasy elements that I'm aware of. Tonight, it was Dead Calm, and I knocked off the following gently critical e-mail.

Date: Sun, 08 Jul 2007 21:12:43 -0700
To: space@spacecast.com
Subject: "Dead Calm"?

I realize that the mandate from the Space FAQ is a broad one (“Science Fiction, Science Fact, Speculation and Fantasy”, but I have to say that I don’t think that Dead Calm, currently showing on Space, really fits any of those categories.

Surprisingly, there’s a lot of other channels that are showing things that fit in perfectly with your mandate – CBC is showing Sliding Doors, a parallel universe story, YTV has Lost in Space, Innerspace showed up while I was channel hopping, and Spike is showing Kung Fu Hustle, which is arguably a fantasy film. One of the Seattle affiliates – I’m in Vancouver – is showing The Fisher King, which is only fantasy at the widest definition – but it’s certainly closer to the mandate than Dead Calm!!! I’ve also seen Daylight (with Sylvester Stallone) and Backdraft show up on the playlist, and I think it would require a spirited defense to fit either one of those into your mandate.

You know what I haven’t seen for years? The Quiet Earth. Marvellous odd little movie. Lessee...The Rocketeer - fine, it’s a Walt Disney movie, I’m not sure about distribution on those, but a fun little sort-of-superhero film. Time Bandits, The Abyss, Outland, Swamp Thing, The Terminal Man, Andromeda Strain, the original War of the Worlds movie, Day of the Triffids, either the movie or either of the BBC adaptations – hey, speaking of John Wyndham books, there was a 1960 movie adaptation of The Midwich Cuckoos called Village of the Damned that I’ve NEVER seen. (I’ve never seen the 1995 version either, not sure I’m desperate to, actually.) Logan’s Run, The Omega Man, currently remade with Will Smith, Silent Running - there’s a French film called Le Dernier Combat, Luc Besson’s first film, no need for subtitles because there’s only one word of dialogue (“Bonjour”, if I remember correctly) in the whole movie. Runaway, with Tom Selleck...okay, maybe I don’t need to see that one again.

Fantasy films are harder to come by, but I haven’t seen Willow anywhere for a while, Jason and the Argonauts is probably one of the best Ray Harryhausen films, The Beastmaster, Legend, The Sword and the Sorcerer, which couldn’t be funnier if they’d tried – ha, Michael, with John Travolta.

I realize that there are financial issues as well as issues of availability, and I don’t claim that the movies I’ve listed were all Academy Award nominees, but I think that it demonstrates that there’s a lot of lesser-known SF and fantasy movies that would be a better fit for Space than Dead Calm.

Sincerely yours,
Sid