You can stop now.

Usually when you have a black man or a woman president, a meteor is about to hit the Statue of Liberty.

Jon Stewart, 80th Academy Awards

As I type this, Barack Obama's inauguration is well under way in Washington, and it is impossible to ignore the historic nature of this event. And I mean literally impossible, in that if I had a dollar for every time someone has used the defining phrase "historic" to describe the situation, I'd be heading off to Fiji this afternoon instead of a job interview.

However, this event should have some kind of impact (no pun relating to the introductory quote intended) on the science fiction community. Sorry, it will now be necessary to create a different cliché to indicate a future or near future setting. Personally, I think that having a native American president would have a nice feel of irony to it, let's use that for our fallback position for now. However, I'm a fair minded man: I think that we can continue to cast Morgan Freeman as God.

- Sid

I know, "willful suspension of disbelief."

So, Sunday evening, back from the gym, perched on the couch with some dinner, fighting off Nigel the Cat's attempts to participate in said dinner and watching Stargate: Atlantis. In this evening's rerun, Colonel Sheppard, McKay, and the usual suspects go through the gate in order to ascertain the status of an exploratory team that's missed their contact deadline. Apparently the planet is uninhabited but McKay had gotten some unusual energy readings or some similar piece of plot advancement.

So, pop - or maybe whoosh - through the gate they go:


Gosh, guys, that's quite a clear piece of ground for an uninhabited planet, but maybe that's from the Gate bubble or whatever they call it. Oh well, moving on - the team heads off in search of their missing predecessors:

Hmmm....I grew up in deer country, and I have to say that's a pretty impressive game trail you have there, people.

And then they find some corpses, far too old to be the missing team, but obviously victims of foul play, right there beside that big flat stump.

I'm sorry, but forget the bodies, you need to find out what in hell is running around this planet that leaves a fifteen foot wide trail and can bite off a tree with a four-foot diameter leaving a completely flat stump!!!!

Okay, I realize full well that in actual terms, they bundled the crew onto a couple of trucks, drove over to Stanley Park, and set up some cameras, probably happier than hell that it wasn't raining. But really, what were they thinking? Their audience is made up of science fiction fans, the most detail-oriented nitpickers on the planet - could they not have driven someplace up the Fraser Valley and found a piece of ground that didn't look quite so lived in?

- Sid

P.S. What's really unbelievable about this is that there's a web site that has 992 screen grabs from this episode. In fact, it looks like they have about a thousand screen grabs per episode, or 20,000 images per season. Wow - see above re: detail oriented fans.

It's Matt Smith, it's Matt Smith!!!!

Today the BBC announced that 26-year-old Matt Smith would be replacing David Tennant as the Doctor on Doctor Who in 2010. My reaction, and I suspect the reaction of almost everyone, seems fitting.

Who?

- Sid

And everyone seems to complain about the lack of flying cars.

Prediction is very difficult, especially about the future.

Niels Bohr, Nobel-prize winning physicist

Here we are, New Year's Day once again, all of us time travellers zooming along at the frightening speed of one second per second (faster than it sounds), and you know, I have to say that I have mixed feelings about the future so far. I don't mean the future as in a hundred years from now, I mean now - you know, the future.

Because let's face it, that's where we're living, the future. It's 2009 now, and by the standards I grew up by, I'm sorry, 2009 is the future. It must be, I've read hundreds, if not thousands, of science fiction stories that took place in our past.

2001? Well, I think we all know what that was like: space stations, moon bases, artificial intelligences, interplanetary exploration, all that stuff. No, wait, the moon base went away with the moon in 1999, didn't it? Remember 1984? It wasn't all that much like 1984, was it?

The first Isaac Asimov robot story, Robbie, is a touching tale of a mute robotic nursemaid set in 1998 - you remember, five years before all the governments banned the use of robots on Earth. It's also one year after the opening scenes of Joe Haldeman's The Forever War, wherein an elite group of soldiers is trained to combat aliens in 1997, then hurled through a collapsar to Epsilon Aurigae, 2000 light years away. Philip K. Dick's Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep - better known to most people by the title of its movie adaptation, Blade Runner - was originally set in 1992.

This sort of thing is unfair, of course. As I discussed in my initial post, the role of science fiction is not intended to be predictive. Science fiction's role is one of "what if", not "when".

But I have to say that if I was going to pick someone to have written this particular future, it would have to be the late Mr. Dick. It's difficult for me to think of anyone else whose imagination would have created a future where there's a computer in almost every home in the Western world, incredibly powerful devices which require constant protection from offers of penis enlargement; where space exploration has been all but abandoned, apparently due to lack of interest; where the United States is involved in a war that costs them $720,000,000 a day - wow, do you think we'd be able to sell this to a publisher in 1955?

Oh well - the future is like a bed, I suppose. Having made it, we are forced to lie in it. Happy New Year, everyone - one more step into the future.

- Sid