And after all the terrible things I said about them.

The issue isn't whether you're paranoid, but whether you're paranoid enough.

Strange Days

Lord knows that I've had some issues with Space, but I have to give them full points for picking Strange Days for their New Year's Eve lineup, especially since the climactic action of the film takes place on December 31st just before midnight.

Admittedly a flawed masterpiece, Strange Days has to be acknowledged as a complete departure from the usual space opera/alien monster big screen science fiction film. James Cameron's script is a bit uneven, but the base premise of memory as a saleable commodity is an interesting one - although it's unfortunate that the plot moves away from that premise into a sort of cyberpunk whodunnit. And surprisingly (at least to me) it's such a compact, almost intimate script, considering that I associate Cameron with so many large and elaborate projects.

That sort of "yes, but, although" analysis is characteristic of the ambiguity of the film, which garnered good responses from critics but didn't do well at the box office. In spite of its flaws, I've always found it very watchable: Kathryn Bigelow's direction is perfectly suited to the material, the cast (a fairly impressive lineup featuring Ralph Fiennes, Angela Bassett, Juliette Lewis and Tom Sizemore) all do a great job in their respective roles, and it's great to see a science fiction movie that really doesn't need any special effects other than a few elaborate fades. But I have to say that for me, the biggest flaw in Strange Days is the idea that anyone would pick Juliette Lewis over Angela Bassett.

- Sid

P.S. Oh, and happy New Year, everyone, all the best for 2008. One more step into the future...

"I ATE'NT DEAD."

"Luck is my middle name," said Rincewind, indistinctly. "Mind you, my first name is Bad."

Terry Pratchett, Interesting Times

When I learned that Terry Pratchett had been diagnosed with a rare form of early onset Alzheimer's, I was horrified. Out of all the things that could happen to such a brilliant and subtle mind, there's an awful irony to Pratchett getting Alzheimer's, like finding out that a tightrope walker was going to lose their sense of balance. Following is his full statement, as originally posted on illustrator Paul Kidby's web site:

AN EMBUGGERANCE

Folks,

I would have liked to keep this one quiet for a little while, but because of upcoming conventions and of course the need to keep my publishers informed, it seems to me unfair to withhold the news. I have been diagnosed with a very rare form of early onset Alzheimer's, which lay behind this year's phantom "stroke".

We are taking it fairly philosophically down here and possibly with a mild optimism. For now work is continuing on the completion of Nation and the basic notes are already being laid down for Unseen Academicals. All other things being equal, I expect to meet most current and, as far as possible, future commitments but will discuss things with the various organisers. Frankly, I would prefer it if people kept things cheerful, because I think there's time for at least a few more books yet :o)

Terry Pratchett

PS I would just like to draw attention to everyone reading the above that this should be interpreted as 'I am not dead'. I will, of course, be dead at some future point, as will everybody else. For me, this maybe further off than you think - it's too soon to tell. I know it's a very human thing to say "Is there anything I can do", but in this case I would only entertain offers from very high-end experts in brain chemistry.

I'm not sure if I was more astonished or impressed when I read that Pratchett is handling the situation with "mild optimism" - this explains a lot about the origins of Carrot's personality, if you ask me. I then watched a video of Pratchett doing an appearance at Barnes & Noble in New York, and I'm sorry to say that his comments on the situation struck me as having a slight air of denial about them.

However things should turn out in the short run (I say the short run because, as Pratchett points out, we'll all be dead at some future point) at least Pratchett has created, and hopefully will continue to create, a marvelous legacy for future generations of appreciative readers.

- Sid

P.S. I looked at hundreds of quotes from Pratchett in search of something appropriate for this posting, an experience not unlike eating two pounds of chocolate at once - it's great to start, but after a while you feel overwhelmed somehow. Regardless, I was pleased to stumble across a statement very similar to Zamyatin's:

Revolutions always come around again. That's why they're called revolutions.

Terry Pratchett, Night Watch

Antici.....(say it).....pation.

Boxing Day in Vancouver - well, everywhere, I suppose, although I'm not certain of the internationality of the concept - and I'm sitting here at the computer watching BitTorrent struggle with three different downloads of the 2007 Doctor Who Christmas Special, guest starring Kylie Minogue. In theory, at least one of them will be finished by lunch...perhaps leftover turkey and David Tennant? 

- Sid

Postscript: Lunch was in fact spent watching the Christmas Special. Not a great episode when compared to some previous scripts, although Kylie did a reasonably good job and was an acceptable romantic interest for the episode. Considering that the entire episode took place on a ship called the Titanic, it was really more of an homage to The Poseidon Adventure.

"Twas the night before Christmas."

In spite of its religious origins, Christmas has ended up as the ultimate fantasy holiday, an odd blend of wish fulfillment, time travel and good will. Santa Claus somehow fills innumerable stockings overnight - but how? Tachyon reindeer? Teleportation technology? Cloning? Sorry, no, none of those options are ever mentioned, which indicates that the tradition of Saint Nick defies scientific explanation. NORAD's annual announcements about Santa's progress around the globe just seem wrong, somehow - one would expect that Kris Kringle's exploits are taking place on a plane removed from that of radar and tracking satellites.

The holiday season occupies an interesting role in the SF/fantasy canon, with several prominent examples to demonstrate the extremes. An often overlooked (or miscategorized) example is Dicken's A Christmas Carol, a ghost story mixed with time travel that sets the standard for the concept, as witnessed by the countless adaptations and reworkings of the character of Scrooge and his Christmas Eve experience. Doctor Who pays tribute to Dickens' contribution in the episode "The Unquiet Dead", which coincidentally takes place on Christmas Eve, 1869. And, given C. S. Lewis' almost militant Christianity, it's always surprised me a little that Father Christmas makes an appearance in The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe, although to be fair the history of the original Saint Nicholas is a deeply Christian one.

The oddest entry in the canon would have to be Harlan Ellison's short story, "Santa Claus versus S.P.I.D.E.R", which portrays Santa Claus as a James Bond-influenced superspy whose red suit makes him into a walking armoury. The second oddest may be Clive Barker's "The Yattering and Jack", wherein a demon reanimates the Christmas turkey as it sizzles in the oven. (Anyone planning to cook a turkey tomorrow, imagine if the damn thing battered its way out of the oven and attacked you.) H. P. Lovecraft's "The Festival", a quietly horrifying description of "traditional" holiday celebrations, runs a close third.

Terry Pratchett gives us one of the best long-form tributes to the season in Hogfather, which deals with the Discworld version of Santa Claus. It's easy to take Pratchett's pork-dispensing character as a simple parody, but, as with all of Pratchett's creations, the underlying elements that he references provide a fascinating perspective on the evolution of mythic figures.

However, when I started this posting, one work came immediately to mind as the most memorable seasonal piece: Arthur C. Clarke's short story, "The Star", an uncharacteristically somber piece for Clarke. A Jesuit scientist, part of an expedition to the Phoenix Nebula, discovers that the supernova which produced the nebula destroyed a civilization not unlike our own. His other discovery shakes his faith:

There can be no reasonal doubt: the ancient mystery is solved at last. Yet, oh God, there were so many stars you could have used. What was the need to give these people to the fire, that the symbol of their passing might shine above Bethlehem?

- Sid

Three thousand tubes of what?

I'm currently reading Arthur C. Clarke's Prelude to Space, written in 1947 and set in 1978, which describes a first mission to the Moon. Clarke points out in his introduction to the 1977 reprinting of the novel that, "On July 20, 1969, all the countless science-fiction stories of the first landing on the Moon become frozen in time, like flies in amber. We can look back on them now with a new perspective...for we know how it was really done and can judge the accuracy of the prediction."

Clarke's description of the mission varies considerably from the final result, but not so much that the novel has the anachronistic feel of Jules Verne or H.G. Wells. (Actually, I find that Wells holds up much better than Verne over time, but that's another topic.) However, the part that really jumped out at me, sixty years in Clarke's future, was the following conversation after a tour of the ship's cockpit:

"It's a bit overwhelming, but not so very much worse than a transcontinental jet's cockpit."

"It is if you know what goes on behind all those panels," said Matthews grimly. "Arnold Clinton - that's the electronics king - once told me that there are three thousand tubes in the computing and control circuits alone. And there must be a good many hundreds on the communications side."

Three thousand vacuum tubes? I almost laughed out loud - relying on a system like that to go to the Moon would be like having someone say that a battleship would only be able to sail if none of the light bulbs on board burned out. Now, admittedly, when Clarke was writing the book, state-of-the-art computing was represented by ENIAC, which had close to 18,000 vacuum tubes and weighed 27 tons. The next time that you have a problem with your computer, remember the gentleman in the image at the left of this paragraph, who is troubleshooting a problem in ENIAC by looking for a dead tube - see, Vista's not that bad after all, is it.

Coincidentally, the needs of the Apollo program for a more reliable system for use in the Apollo Guidance Computer led to concentrated research into the development of the integrated circuitry that replaced the vacuum tube and which is now used in virtually every piece of electronics in existence. Sadly, the AGC crashed five times - only in the computer sense, fortunately - during the landing approach to the Moon by the Eagle module.

- Sid

"I suppose I'd rather die as a hero than as a meal."

Torrell: Well, I could kill you. But you strike me as the type of man who, despite being weak and cowardly on the outside, harbours a strength of character he doesn't even know he has.

Dr. Rodney McKay: I'm sorry - was there a compliment in there?

Living in Vancouver is a bit of an SF geek's dream, because so many science fiction series have been shot in and around the area. X-Files, Highlander, Andromeda, Smallville, Battlestar Galactica, Stargate SG-1, Stargate Atlantis, Flash Gordon - one could probably create one of those strange drinking games that would have people take a drink every time they identify a piece of local scenery in an episode.

If someone is playing that game, then the Stargate franchise has probably led to a few advanced cases of alcoholism, given the amount of location shooting that they've done here. Stargate Atlantis pays tribute to its real location by the inclusion of a unique character, that of Rodney McKay, the ascerbic Canadian scientist, brilliantly performed by Canadian actor David Hewlett.

McKay was originally introduced as a foil for Samantha Carter in Stargate SG-1, acting as someone who was (in theory) as smart as her and as such was able to suggest alternatives, or more often to shoot holes in her solutions. Sadly, he was usually proven wrong. In addition, he had a sort of smarmy sexual interest in Carter, which was completely unreciprocated.

However, as the resident genius on the Atlantis mission, the character of McKay has developed in a fashion unique to television science fiction characters of his stamp: he has, however slowly and reluctantly, become a hero. It is as if Lost in Space's Dr. Smith had developed into the saviour of the Robinson expedition instead of regressing from the cold saboteur of the first episode into a mincing, shrieking coward that seemed to be the cause of every problem that the crew faced.

I admire the writers' decision to develop McKay's character in the fashion that they have. TV science fiction is packed with heroic figures, but their heroics are a given: really, how much of a surprise is it to have the starship captain of your choice save the day? As a group, they're accomplished figures: scientists and diplomats, lovers and warriors, blessed with audacity, brilliance, cunning and determination.

McKay, on the other hand, is frightened and horrified by the situations in which he finds himself, without the training or the inclination to seize the moment and save the day. Nonetheless, he does just that on more than one occasion, and his reluctant heroics are accompanied by the sort of reactions that any ordinary person would likely have under those circumstances: he sweats, he hyperventilates, he stammers, and even passes out in one episode.

The only criticism I have of the manner in which McKay has been developed is that, after all that he's been through, you'd expect that he'd be getting a little bit more used to it by now! That aside, full points to the Atlantis writers, and I look forward to seeing how the new Rodney's relationship with Samantha Carter will develop now that she's been put in command of the Atlantis mission.

- Sid

"A normal, routine flight".

It is difficult to think of a science fiction author who has had more of an impact on the real world than Sir Arthur C. Clarke. His early work with radar during WWII, his proposal of the geosynchronous communications satellite, his television appearances as a commentator, the movie adaptations of his work, and of course his countless stories, essays, novels and books, all combine to make him a cultural icon. 

 A large portion of Clarke's work occupies a sort of near-future niche: the Space Odyssey books, A Fall of Moondust, The Fountains of Paradise, The Hammer Of God, the Rama novels, and, to a lesser extent, Imperial Earth. Clarke has never attempted to create a unified history of the future, as have authors like Larry Niven, Robert A. Heinlein, or a host of other. However, the future as Clarke portrays it in those books demonstrates a logical, consistent, considered evaluation of how life in space might actually be lived.  

2001 is a perfect example of this: Heywood Floyd's trip to the Moon is, as it says in the narrative, "a normal, routine flight". That being said, let's look at Mr. Floyd's trip. 

He boards a booster-assisted spaceplane that takes him to Space Station One, where he transfers to a zero-g shuttle that takes him to the Moon. The boosters for the spaceplane are independent craft that fly back to Florida to be refueled and used again. 

Interestingly enough, in the course of the trip Floyd logs on with his Newspad and downloads a selection of current papers to read, clicking on thumbnail-sized images to select the pages he wants. Because Clarke is English, it is of course unlikely that Heywood would be looking at porn, but other than that it's pretty close to what most people do now with their laptops when they travel - not a bad guess for 1968. But I digress...

The craft used in 2001 are designed to occupy specific niches, and as such are completely different in their designs. The spaceplane is essentially the current Space Shuttle, but with better seating, stewardesses, and apparently less of a re-entry problem. The suggestion is that it's like an orbital 747, designed to operate for the most part within the atmosphere, but capable of limited vacuum operation. 

The zero-g shuttle is completely different. Other than the fact that it's laterally symmetrical (presumably for convenience of accelerating along its centre of gravity) it has all the aerodynamic qualities of a brick, because it will never feel the touch of air - it's purely a vacuum craft. And, like the spaceplane, it's a multi-use craft designed to perform the Earth-Moon circuit over and over again. 

The space station itself is a much more developed entity than the current ISS, although, like the ISS, it's a work in progress, as demonstrated by the bare skeleton that's visible. The station is rotating in order to use centrifugal force to create the illusion of gravity, cited in the novel as equal to the Moon's (1/6 of Earth's). As a sidebar, Clarke describes the lounge area of the station as having "a restaurant, post office...barber shop, drug store, movie theater, and a souvenir shop", making it sound pretty much like an airport concourse, as opposed to the movie version:

Any further comment would be superfluous. 

 In my previous posting, I cited some of the advantages of space stations, and I find it odd that the American space program has never made a serious effort to establish and maintain a permanent facility in orbit. I'm aware of the various difficulties involved in getting things up there, but on that basis shouldn't they be trying to make sure that everything that goes into near-Earth space stays there? 

 My younger readers - if there are any (readers, that is) - will not remember the Chicken Little experience of waiting to see where Skylab was going to impact when it lost orbital stability. Shouldn't it still be up there as part of the current Space Station, like building a home around the original log cabin? 

If I were in a position of authority at NASA, I'd be tempted to ignore the issues involved in manned missions to the Moon or Mars for some time, and just concentrate on developing an infrastructure based around three space stations: Earth, Moon, and Mars. I'd then establish a repeatable, reusable and reliable system of travel between the stations - in other words, a normal, routine flight.

- Sid

Space Station One (NASA, zero.)

A few minutes later, he caught his first glimpse of Space Station One, only a few miles away. The sunlight glinted and sparkled from the polished metal surfaces of the slowly revolving, three-hundred-yard diameter disk. Not far away, drifting in the same orbit, was a swept-back Titov-V spaceplane, and close to that an almost spherical Aries-1B, the workhorse of space, with the four stubby legs of its lunar-landing shock absorbers jutting from one side.

- Arthur C. Clarke, 2001: A Space Odyssey

Having finished ranting about the exchange rate as it applies to the book publishing community, back to the topic at hand: efficient strategies for the exploration of space.

In the process of researching this post, I read what I can only describe as "misguided" position statements from NASA and the US Government. ("Damn fool" is probably a better modifier than "misguided", but let's be polite.) NASA's long term plan sounds positive on the face of things: more missions to the Moon, and an eventual mission to Mars - all well and good. Sadly, the manner in which they plan to achieve these goals is, by their own admission, "Apollo on steroids".

Credit where credit is due: the Apollo missions were successful, albeit, as Terry Pratchett would say, for a given value of "successful". Yes, they successfully put a man on the Moon. If their goal had been to kill a mosquito, their equivalent response would have been to put said mosquito on a concrete wall and ram it with a car: true, the mosquito is dead, but the method relies heavily upon brute force and is not repeatable, at least not with the same car. (And after a few mosquitos, the bill for cars starts to add up, and people start asking why you're killing the mosquito in the first place, but let's not overwork the metaphor.)

Now, let's look at space exploration not from the point of view of counting coup over other countries, which was the real bottom line of the Apollo missions, but as a logical process.

The flaw in the NASA approach as used in the Apollo missions is that it was an approach designed to win a race, and as such was structured to achieve its goal quickly - which was sensible, that's how races are won. What it was not structured for was efficiency or repeatability: every time a group of astronauts did the round trip, when they were finished there was nothing usable left of their rocket, shuttle or lander - to make another trip it was necessary to build another complete spaceship.

In designing an efficient space program, the first step has to be the creation of a logical division based on functionality. The requirements for a ship that needs to get from ground level to vacuum and zero gravity are entirely different than the requirements for a ship that needs to travel from point to point in vacuum and zero or near-zero gravity. And, logically, the requirements for a ship to make extended exploratory trips are different from both of those.

Ah, but if you posit three different types of ships, how do you go about making the transition from one to another? At this point, the fourth "need" takes us to the key to an efficient space program: the space station.

A space station (or several space stations) makes the whole process of space exploration so much simpler. It provides a convenient environment for transferring from one type of ship to another, as well as providing a work platform to build and repair the ships that only operate in vacuum. An orbital platform becomes a fuel depot, an emergency shelter, a repair garage, a ship hangar, a communications relay, a research lab, an observatory, and a just plain shirtsleeve refuge in the midst of a hostile environment. Science fiction is full of space stations, which perform all of those functions and more, because they're just so damn handy for so many reasons.

Looking at my library, I'm spoiled for choices of fictional examples of achievable space travel, but in the next post we'll see how things are viewed by the man whom I think of as the real authority in this area, the man who has arguably spent more time thinking about how space travel would really work than anyone else: Sir Arthur C. Clarke.

- Sid

But first this important (non) commercial message.

My next post was going to be about efficient space travel, but first I'd like to complain. Here we are, the Canadian dollar is at $1.07 US (apparently a high in "modern times" according to the CBC - how odd that records on the exchange rate in 1066 are unavailable), and a wide variety of stores are announcing price cuts in order to reflect this state of affairs. And yet, AND YET, trot into the book store of your choice and you will be offered the opportunity to pay 30% more than the American price on paperbacks and hardcovers of all descriptions.

The odd thing is that this is a problem unique to the publishing industry. What other product has the price printed on the item? DVD's, music CD's, software, even computers, there's a myriad of products that could have the price printed on the package, but no one else has elected to do so.

I've been waiting to see if cover prices would start to reflect the declining US dollar, but no, new books arriving on the shelves continue to show the same enormous gap in pricing. So, screw 'em - no new book purchases for a while, unless I happen to make a trip down to Seattle.

- Sid

Postscript: I went into Chapters this afternoon to kill some time and noticed that there was a polite little sign at the bottom of the escalator commenting on the above situation. This explanatory missive pointed out that there were other factors in play other than just the exchange rate, that customers offering to pay in US dollars would still be charged the Canadian price (ha, someone must have had fun with that idea, I'll admit that the thought had occurred to me already) and that the six month lead time on book publishing makes it impossible for the prices printed on books to reflect the current exchange rate.

"Thanks for shopping Canadian!"

Fair enough...let's do a little research, then.

My copy of Wasteland of Flint, printed in 2004, cost $7.99 US, $10.99 Canadian. Exchange rate: $1.37 C to the US dollar in May. If you do the math, these relative prices are almost exactly the same - the exact conversion of the US price is $10.9463 Canadian.

2005: Illium, $7.99 US, $10.99 Canadian, exchange rate $1.24 C/US$.

2006: Olympos, $7.99 US, $10.99 Canadian, exchange rate $1.13 C/US$.

2007: Meeting at Corvallis, $7.99 US, $10.99 Canadian, exchange rate $1.10 in May.
At that rate, the converted price would be exactly $8.789 Canadian.

(May is the magic month because that's the six month lead time for printing to which Chapters refers, as we sit here in November.)

In other words, Chapters would like me to believe that in spite of a 27 cent difference in the dollar's exchange rate over a four year period, the Canadian price relative to the US price hasn't changed by a cent? And we're not even looking at the rate today, which has the US dollar worth $0.92 Canadian, for a converted price per book of $7.35 Canadian.

Somebody's making money at this - and at the expense (literally) - of the consumer. I'm not sure who it is, though! Let's be fair, Chapters isn't putting the prices on the books, the American publishers are. The question becomes one of whether the wholesale price that Chapters pays for the books is based on the US price or the Canadian price. If Chapters get the US price, they're laughing all the way to the bank. If they're paying a Canadian dollar price, they're getting shafted as badly as we are. I wonder which it is...

- Sid

Have Space Suit Will Travel.

"Not too late. No, suh! I goin' to Mars, yes I am, and I beat the Chinese, too. Even if I hafta make my own spaceship, me."

- Jubal Broussard, Red Thunder

Having just finished reading Red Thunder by John Varley, a guardedly acceptable little read in the home-made spaceship genre, my mind turns to the portrayal in SF of space exploration by individuals. (I describe Red Thunder as "guardedly acceptable" because it was a very light read, and other than the sex* would be an ideal read for a bright twelve-year old. But, to be fair, it's reasonably entertaining, well written and so forth.) 

The plot of Red Thunder is strongly reminiscent of one of those Judy Garland/Mickey Rooney movies, the ones where someone says, "Hey, gang, let's put on a show!", except in this case it's "Hey, gang, let's go to Mars!" Instead of an uncle with a big barn, these plucky teens meet an alcoholic ex-astronaut whose idiot savant cousin has invented a sort of Rube Goldberg power source that will allow them to beat those nasty Chinese to Mars and to save some of the crew from a failed NASA mission. 

Similar (although perhaps more cynical) entries into the do-it-yourself spaceship category can be found in The Daleth Effect by Harry Harrison and The Mouse on the Moon, by Leonard Wibberley, both of which deal with small countries that trump the great world powers by discovering miraculous means of propulsion that they utilize in makeshift spaceships. 

As a sign of changing times, the Danish astronauts rescue stranded Russian astronauts in The Daleth Effect, written in 1970 - apparently the Chinese have replaced the Soviets as the people to beat, if Red Thunder is an accurate barometer. 

In science fiction from the 40's and 50's, the concept of the individually owned spaceship is a commonplace one, with oceangoing vessels providing the analogy. Obviously, the man on the street won't own the Queen Mary, but if he's in a high enough tax bracket, he might well have some kind of little sailboat that he can use for weekend trips. (If he's sufficiently foolhardy, he can even try to cross the Atlantic - or go to Mars - in his little ship.) 

Cargo haulers, passenger liners, luxury yachts and warships commonly ply the spaceways in the writing from this period, along with the occasional tramp freighter that will barely hold air, and even a few pirates now and then. And, to continue the analogy, private explorers seeking literal "new worlds" might obtain funding from corporations or governments, as did Columbus, but still maintain their independent status. 

The 60's introduced the world to a different paradigm: space travel is so expensive and difficult that it's impossible for anyone but a major global power. It's difficult to think of any other activity so completely elitist in its financial demands, as witnessed by the fact that the Space Race only had two competitors. (Full credit to the X Prize winners, but in the nautical analogy above, compared to NASA they're like people going over Niagara Falls in a barrel.)  

Red Thunder provides an interesting comment on this phenomenon, one which I hadn't really given a lot of thought: the approach taken by the Soviets and the Americans was the least efficient way of doing things. In the course of the story, the ex-astronaut describes the method used by the USA to reach the Moon as being like Columbus sinking all three of his ships on the way to America, making the trip back to Europe in a lifeboat, and sinking that in the Straits of Gibraltar and swimming the rest of the way back to Spain with a life preserver. 

The spendthrift approach used by the Apollo missions is explained as being a side effect of American hubris: any expense or wastage was justified in order to win the race first, rather than winning the race efficiently. That distinction now in place, we'll take a look at efficient space travel in the next posting.

- Sid

*Come to think of it, I was a bright twelve year old and I would have thought that a book with sex was a fabulous find.

Childhood's End.

"We knew the world would not be the same. A few people laughed, a few people cried, most people were silent. I remembered the line from the Hindu scripture, the Bhagavad-Gita. Vishnu is trying to persuade the Prince that he should do his duty and to impress him takes on his multi-armed form and says, 'Now, I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds.' I suppose we all thought that one way or another."

-J. Robert Oppenheimer

"The lethal possibilities of atomic warfare in the future are frightening. My own feeling was that in being the first to use it, we had adopted an ethical standard common to the barbarians of the Dark Ages. I was not taught to make war in that fashion, and wars cannot be won by destroying women and children."

- Admiral William Leahy, Chief of Staff to President Harry Truman

The destruction of Hiroshima on the morning of August 6th, 1945 took science fiction from playful adolescence into a frightening, frightened adulthood. 

Suddenly the question of what the future might hold, the question of "what if", gained a horrible new importance. Suddenly, instead of looking a thousand years ahead, Mankind was looking at the hands of the Doomsday Clock edging closer to midnight. 

Until that morning, the word "atomic" had been nothing more than a convenient gimmick in science fiction, a buzzword that provided power for everything from cars to robots, from pistols to spaceships. Although Cleve Cartmill had mentioned a chain reaction-type atomic bomb in his 1944 science fiction story Deadline, which led to the FBI investigating him due to concern over a potential breach of security on the Manhattan Project, he and co-researcher John W. Campbell were in no way aware of what was to come. 

Once the Bomb had been used, Campbell's editorial response in Astounding was actually one of near-glee in having apparently anticipated this scientific leap forward. However, in the years that followed, the greater number of authors treated the situation more in the manner of Leahy's comment. 

Science fiction authors are almost unanimous in denying any role in predicting the future - as in my first post, the science fiction author begins with "What if..." rather than "When..." In the post-Hiroshima age, the spectres of the atomic "What if" in science fiction are innumerable, and rarely positive. 

 Robert A. Heinlein's Starship Troopers has power-suited infantry blithely launching "pee-wee" atomic rockets as tactical weapons, but novels such as Nevil Shute's bleak masterpiece On the Beach with its inevitable creeping death by fallout is far more typical of the response to the atomic bomb and the Cold War which it created. 

Science fiction had gained an awful new authority as prophets of the end of the world. Hand in hand with the immediate perils of thermonuclear Death, science fiction introduced the public to the other horsemen of the new Apocalypse: Fallout, Nuclear Winter, and Mutation. 

The latter provided heady fare for the film makers of the 1950's, with screens filled with shambling monstrosities of every shape, size and species. Literary SF concentrated for the most part on the horrifying effects of radiation on human beings and the twisted parodies of humanity that might result. (Not all writers painted with such a large brush: Ray Bradbury's story "There Will Come Soft Rains" quietly describes the exquisitely detailed silhouettes of a family etched into the side of their home by the flare of a nuclear explosion.) 

Over sixty years after the Enola Gay opened its bomb bay doors over Hiroshima, the thought of impending nuclear apocalypse no longer weighs as heavily. We live in a time of more subtle fears: terrorism, global warming, and AIDS. It would be ridiculous to claim that science fiction played any sort of real role in reducing the threat of death by "The Bomb", but the reality of that threat gave science fiction a relevance as a genre that it would never have achieved otherwise.

- Sid

(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

Wouldn't that defeat the whole purpose?

A student at MIT is hosting a Time Traveler Party this week with the hope that people from the future will show up...too bad people from the future already know the party sucked!

- Tina Fey, Saturday Night Live

More on time travel - in the past couple of years there have been a couple of unsuccessful time travel experiments, one in Australia and one at MIT in the States, both of which were done in the simplest and cheapest way possible: advertise that you would like time travellers to show up at a specific place at a specific time. (As experiments go, this is pretty cost effective, since all you need is a little advertising and an empty piece of ground.)

Sadly, in neither case did the experiment result in a flash of light and the appearance of a modified Delorean, a blue police box, or a Victorian steampunk time chair. However, organizers were oddly unconcerned by this, since it was their contention that time travellers could easily be attending incognito. Sigh...guys, if the purpose of the experiment was to prove that time travel existed, what kind of cruel and unusual punishment would it be for a time traveller to show up and hide in the crowd? And even then, it would be surprising to have a small group of people attend. My god, if time travel were possible and even the smallest fraction of a nearly infinite future population of time travellers hears about one of the parties...actually, come to think of it they're lucky that some comedian didn't make an appearance disguised as a giant mutant ant or something similar.

However, all of this silliness addresses the one of the basic questions of time travel: if it were going to become possible, why aren't we knee-deep in visitors from the future? Isaac Asimov's Science Fiction Magazine ran a story in 1979 entitled The Merchant of Stratford by Frank Ramirez, wherein the first time traveller goes back to visit Shakespeare, only to discover that time travellers have been visiting Shakespeare for his entire life:

"I've been getting visitors from the future as far back as I can remember. My mother, being a good Christian woman, had the hardest time giving me suck, because the documentary team from the thirty-third century wanted to film it all. I barely survived childhood."

The punchline is that the first time traveller begins to receive a similar treatment from other time travellers because he's the FIRST time traveller, and as such an historical figure.

Presumably, if time travel were possible, then history would be full of visits from time travellers. (In Robert Silverberg's The Time Hoppers, a future police department is charged with ensuring that time travellers leave on schedule in order to conform with historical records.) Does this take us to the conclusion that time travel is not going to happen? Ah, this takes us to the Doctor Who quote that starts the last entry - only from the linear viewpoint is that the case. If time is in fact "a big ball of wibbly-wobbly, timey-wimey stuff", then it's equally possible that once time travel is invented, then historical documents will obligingly change themselves in order to conform to the new state of affairs, and that will be the way that things have always been...and this post will never have existed.

- Sid

"Wibbly-wobbly, timey-wimey stuff."

People assume that time is a strict progression of cause to effect, but actually, from a non-linear, non-subjective viewpoint, it's more like a big ball of wibbly-wobbly, timey-wimey stuff.

The Doctor, Blink

Time travel stories, I love a good time travel story. Obviously this would make me a strong candidate to be a Doctor Who fan, although I freely admit to having been in and out over the years. Recently I've been downloading episodes of the current season that have been posted by English fans, and in spite of a couple of shaky concepts they're doing some quite nice stories. (Hopefully this blatant confession won't result in a lightning raid by BBC copyright commandos. Given that I'm in Vancouver, British Columbia, which is damn near the other side of the planet from England, I should be safe unless they have some kind of agreement with the CBC black ops teams. But I digress...)

The most recent Doctor Who episode is entitled Blink, and deals with the sort of time travel opportunities that are parodied in Bill and Ted's Bogus Journey - decide to use your time machine to go into the past to set up things so that you win a fight in the present, then go back to set things up after you win the fight. In this case the Doctor gets sent back in time without the TARDIS, but sends messages to someone in our time to get it back - and then gets the information he needs to set things up after everything is resolved, but before it takes place in his personal timeline.

This directly addresses the real question of time travel: can you change the course of events? The two basic philosophies here are that you can't change things in the past because you didn't - commonly known as the Grandfather Paradox - or that it's an open field, in which future events exist in an indeterminate state. (For those unfamiliar with the concept, the Grandfather Paradox is as follows: build a time machine, go back to the past, kill your grandfather at the age of ten. As a result, your father is never born, you're never born, and you don't build a time machine. So you DON'T go into the past, you DON'T kill your grandfather, your father IS born, you're born, you build a time machine... It's easier to assume that the gun must have jammed when you tried to shoot the little bugger, or, in the big picture viewpoint, if you went back in time to kill Hitler before he starts the Nazi party, you'd fail, because history records that he did start it.)

Both of these philosophies have given rise to some interesting stories, although the approaches required are wildly different. The landmark story for the open field approach is Ray Bradbury's A Sound of Thunder. All you need to do is to step on a butterfly while trying to shoot a dinosaur that's going to die anyway, and the result is a slightly but significantly changed future. (This begs a bigger question, which is why anyone with a time machine would waste their, ah, time running tours into the past so that people can shoot T. Rex. If things were at the point where it was that popularized, I would think that flattened butterflies would be the least of your worries.)

The cast-in-stone position is less obviously interesting, simply because it's less exciting. Going back in time with an anthill and coming back to find out that the ants have evolved into the dominant species and destroyed humanity is a bit more of a climactic ending than coming back and finding out that they haven't. The predestination stories tend to read a bit like inverted detective stories, with the characters running around like mad making sure that all the clues are in place to ensure that the crime happens. There's often a loose thread that miraculously weaves back in at the end, just to ensure that all's well historically. A good example of this would be Connie Willis' To Say Nothing of the Dog, which is rather like the time travel version of The Importance of Being Earnest.

- Sid

From the ridiculous to the sublime.

To follow up from my previous post, some covers that have it all: bubble helmets, see through spacesuits, impractical metal bras, bug eyed monsters, and the Galaxy cover as sort of an honourable mention. And yes, the woman on the Planet Stories cover is wearing spiffy red high heels.

And now, the reality of fashionable spacewear, as modelled by Canada's own female astronaut, Roberta Bondar. (Photo courtesy of the NASA web site.) I've had the pleasure of very briefly meeting Dr. Bondar, and frankly, if something goes wrong in orbit, this is the person you want with you, rather than the helplessly screaming woman in the yellow miniskirt from the Captain Future cover - I think of Roberta Bondar as being Canada's answer to Ellen Ripley.

- Sid

 

P.S. A friend of mine read this post and expressed her surprise that I knew Ripley's first name was Ellen. What, did you miss the part where I said I'd been an SF/fantasy fan since birth, Laurie? 

 

"We're interested in the movie rights to your book title - but not your book."

Ah, the great traditions of science fiction cover art! This forty-nine year old publication doesn't cover all the bases, since it lacks a both a bug-eyed monster and a woman in either a brass bikini or see-through space suit, but it's still pretty good as clichéd covers go - the needle-pointed red-finned space ship, the bubble helmet, and the accordioned spacesuit. 

If only this poor fellow had gloves, it seems a bit much to be out there bare-handed. 

Sadly, I was unable to find a credit for the cover art, not so much as to assign blame but to attribute credit for copyright purposes. Of course, copyright for the novel resides with Alan E. Nourse, or more probably his estate (since his death in 1992). 

Nourse was born in 1928, and was a strong member of the Golden Age group of SF authors - Robert A. Heinlein dedicated his 1964 novel Farnham's Freehold to Nourse. There's often a bit of confusion about Nourse, because Andre Norton was writing as Andrew North at about the same time, and he is sometimes assumed to be another of her pseudonyms. (I admit to having fallen prey to this belief at one point.) 

Nourse has the dubious honour of having a movie named after one of his books without the movie itself having anything to do with the book in question: for some odd reason, the title of his 1974 novel The Bladerunner was borrowed for the 1982 movie adaptation of Philip K. Dick's Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?. This has to be one of the strangest decisions ever made when adapting a book to the big screen, like deciding that War and Peace would be a better sounding title for a movie version of Anna Karenina. 

As an footnote to the above, an uncopyrighted Nourse novel, Star Surgeon, is available at the Project Gutenberg web site.

- Sid

Okay, it's self-interest.

To my mild pleasure, this month I made my way into print for the first time. A locally published magazine of children's fiction saw fit to accept a submission from me, and I received my two author's copies in the mail on Friday. The magazine is Crow Toes Quarterly, and although only two issues in, is making a strong attempt to position itself as a source of unconventional fiction for children.

This is all well and good, but why did I find it appropriate to mention here? Well, of course, it's a science fiction children's story, what else would I write? The story is titled The End with a Big E and although I doubt that anyone will figure it out, the end with a big E is entropy - the story deals with the entropic decay of the universe, although it's really more of a fantasy, there's no scientific validity to the damn thing at all. Nonetheless, it was a fun little thing to write, and I have to confess that when I read it I cry a little at the end. Half of my two-child test audience (thanks to Les, my ex-supervisor) had the same reaction, so it can't be entirely bad. To be honest, I have no idea where it would be for sale, but feel free to visit the Crow Toes web site and ask them about distribution.

- Sid

How can I describe it?

My family didn't have much money when I was a kid, and as a result we didn't do a lot of the things that most families did. We never went anywhere on vacation (in fact, I don't recall my father ever taking a week off), I wore a lot of hand-me-down clothing from my three older brothers, and so forth. We lived about 23 miles from the nearest real town, and that, combined with our lack of spare cash, meant that going to the movies certainly wasn't on the list of family activities. 

However, time went on, and as I got older, went into high school and got a part time job, the combination of a little extra money and the guaranteed ride into town on the school bus meant that a slightly larger world opened up to me. However, not having had access to a lot of the finer things in life as a child left me a little cautious, if not nervous, about taking advantage of some of the new options available to me. 

When I was 15, I decided that I would take the proverbial bull by the horns and go to a movie, the very first movie that I would ever see on a big screen. We did have a battered old TV at home, and our makeshift antenna allowed us to get two TV stations, so I had seen movies, albeit marred by poor reception and static, but never at the theatre. As luck would have it, that summer there was a lot of buzz about this new science fiction film that was being released - unhampered by worries of spoilers I had already purchased the novelization and was eager to see the real thing. 

Because it was the summer, the option of using the school bus to cover that 23 mile gap wasn't available, but even at the age of fifteen I was a fairly accomplished hitchhiker. (I figured out once that I hitchhiked something over 20,000 miles altogether before I gave it up, including a trip from Ontario to British Columbia.) So I hitched into town, had a banquet burger at Rombo's, and made my way to the theatre. Paid my money (I have no memory of what the movie cost) but didn't get popcorn, you have to go into these things one step at a time. Found a seat, and waited. 

The lights went down... ...and another new world opened up, as a desperate little spacecraft fled across the screen in a hail of laser bolts, followed by a gigantic pursuer - what seemed like miles of its underside ponderously filling the view. 

It is impossible to describe what it was like to see Star Wars that very first time. I have no idea what other people thought of it, people who had the experience cushioned by years of moviegoing - for me, it was as if the entire movie had been made expressly for my 15-year old science-fiction fan wishes, like some benevolent genie had chosen that moment to fulfill a need that I didn't even know existed. It was an epiphany of teenage experience, and I left that theatre feeling like a different person. 

In the thirty years since, a lot has changed: my view of the world is a little less limited, and to a certain extent I've become jaded by repeated exposure to the media's visions of the future. My honest opinion is that as George Lucas has made his way through the series, each movie has been a little worse than the one before. 

I stand in awe of the breadth of the vision behind the entire story, but it's not a perfect vision - much has been written about the flaws in the various Star Wars movies that I won't bother repeating here.  Star Wars is now an entire industry of action figures, toys, movies, games, TV shows, comics, novels and web sites, far removed from the beginnings of the phenomenon. 

And all that means nothing to that memory from thirty years ago. Nothing will ever change the magic of that first viewing in the dark of the Parkview Cinema, that first view of a galaxy far, far away. Thank you, Mr. Lucas - nothing else has ever been better.

- Sid