"Good news, everybody!"

One of the inevitable problems with writing science fiction is that it's actually quite easy to predict the future and be wrong.  Science fiction is full of errors and anachronisms:  breathable air on Mars, dinosaurs on Venus, space ships crossing the gulf between stars based on calculations made with a slide rule, or as per my posting on a moon ship whose computer is filled with vacuum tubes.

However, every once in a great while the balance falls in the other direction.  I'm currently reading Crashing Suns, a collection of Edmond Hamilton science fiction stories that were originally published in the late 1920s.  My version, published in 1965, contains the following apologetic note from editor Donald A. Wollheim regarding the various references to our solar system being governed by The League of Eight Worlds:

...the astute reader will also note that in those year the Solar System had only eight planets, Pluto not yet having been discovered.

Ha, well, good news. Thanks to the idiosyncratic 2006 decision by the International Astronomical Union to strip Pluto of its planetary qualifications, if they decide to do another edition they can leave that part out.

- Sid

The place you never want to look.

The Doctor: And she left you all alone?
Amelia: I'm not scared.
The Doctor:  Of course you're not scared, you're not scared of anything.  Box falls out of the sky, man falls out of the box, man eats fish custard, and look at you...just sitting there.  So you know what I think?
Amelia: What…
The Doctor:  Must be a hell of a scary crack in your bedroom wall.

Doctor Who, The Eleventh Hour

The awful truth about Doctor Who has finally been revealed, and by no less a personage than the eminence grise of British fantasy, Sir Terry Pratchett.  In his recent stint as guest editor of British science fiction magazine SFX, Pratchett announces in his editorial that, although entertaining, light-hearted, and capable of wonderful moments, Doctor Who is not science fiction.

He goes on to make an acceptable case for his announcement, based on "pixel-thin" science and the Doctor as a deus ex machina figure, but he commits an odd oversight, especially for someone as sharp as Pratchett.  If it's not science fiction, what is it?

Fortunately, chief writer and executive producer Stephen Moffat had already addressed this question for the first post-episode Doctor Who Confidential of the new season, when he commented:

Fairy tales are the way we tell our children that there are people out there who might want to eat them.  They are warnings, in fantasy form, of the reality and the dangers of the world.

When I say Doctor Who is a fairy tale, I don't mean it's like a fairy tale, I mean it literally is -  far more than it's a science fiction show, far more than it's an adventure show, it's a fairy tale.

Due to the unfortunate influence of the Walt Disney Corporation, fairy tales have become light-hearted musical experiences that last about two hours and are available on DVD by the end of the year.  However, the traditional fairy tale is a far darker experience, where Hansel and Gretel kill the witch by pushing her into her own oven, and the queen eats the heart brought to her by the huntsman, thinking that it belongs to Snow White.

Viewed as cautionary tales for children, the new season of Doctor Who has, for the most part, fulfilled its role admirably.  We first meet Amy, the new companion, as a child who has asked in her nightly prayers for help with the frightening crack in her bedroom wall, and later in the episode, the adult Amy experiences that awful moment of wondering (and discovering) what's hiding behind her back, just in the corner of her eye.

The second episode starts with a child failing a test and being cast into a monstrous pit by the frowning robots who run the classes, and in a later episode Amy has to walk through a horde of deadly statues with her eyes closed.  The most recent episodes featured a boy whose father is taken from him, and then he himself is captured by the same monsters. All very simple things, horrifyingly simple - cracks in the wall, the places you don't want to look, the fear of failing adult expectations, walking blindly through nightmares, or the loss of a parent. 

When I was a child, I was terrified of the basement in our house.  It was a dank, dark, moldy hole, an unfinished repository for junk and bit of lumber. Only part of it was full height - the portion underneath the front of the house was an unlit crawlspace, and I did not spend a moment in the cellar without being aware of the horrible potential of the square black entrance to that area.

Some of my childhood chores required me to go down into the cellar, and my mother always seemed to think that I was trying to shirk my duties when I delayed those chores as long as possible.  However, it was fear rather than laziness that was behind my reluctance, something that I could never have explained.

I think that adults too easily lose track of that part of childhood: the fear of dark openings, the certain knowledge that there are monsters under the bed and boogeymen in the closet, and that things going bump in the night is not a cliché but an awful precursor of approaching horror.  And that adult blindness is a huge part of childhood fears, the inexplicable lack of understanding on the part of the grownups who turn out lights, close doors, and dismiss nightmares as "only a dream".

On that basis, Doctor Who doesn't need to be science fiction if it can be a good fairy tale.  I congratulate the scriptwriters for successfully attempting to evoke the basic fears of childhood - the elemental fear of so simple a thing as a crack in a bedroom wall.

- Sid

Atque in perpetuum, frater, ave atque vale. *

My apologies for going off topic today, but I've just come back from the veterinarian, and I came back alone.  After almost 23 years, Nigel the Cat, a true and faithful companion, has left the stage.

My wife Joy and I purchased Nigel from the Humane Society branch in Bracebridge, Ontario a few months after we'd bought a house there.  For those of you who have never visited the Humane Society, I don't recommend it at all if you're even the slightest bit tender of heart, it's heart-rending to have to chose one cat from all the cages and leave the others behind.

We'd narrowed it down to two choices.  One of the cats was just a charmer, friendly and outgoing, but afflicted with a stomach problem that would have required a special diet.  The other cat had been equally charming and friendly, but surprisingly quiet in a room filled with meowing cats.  I turned to the attendant and, pointing at the quiet cat, said, "You know, this one hasn't meowed at all."  The cat looked me in the eye and pointedly said, "MEOW."

And so Nigel entered my life.

His nickname at the Society was CB, or Cathy's Boyfriend - he apparently had a thing for one of the staff.  During the signout process, he sat on the desk and attempted to play with the pens that we were using to sign the documents, the first indication of an affection for writing implements that would last for almost his entire life.  On the way home, my wife decided to name him Nigel - I have no idea why - and somehow it turned out to be the perfect name for him, and a strong element in his notoriety.

He was a big solid cat, at least up until his last couple of years, tall enough to reach a doorknob and smart enough to know that was how to get out - but his lack of thumbs kept him from ever taking advantage of this arcane knowledge (arcane among cats, anyway).  He had a little nick out of each ear, as if someone had just snipped into them a bit when he was younger, rather than the scars of feline combat, but that was just part of his mysterious history.

When Joy and I split up, I got custody of the cat - she got custody of the car, and I guarantee that car didn't last as long as Nigel did - and Nigel and I moved to Toronto.  (For those of you who have never heard the cat-pissing-on-the-ex-wife-in-the-car story, ask me later.)  This was only the first move for Nigel, but the transfer to Vancouver six years ago was much more of an epic journey for the little fellow.

I thought that everything was going well when I got him to the airport without undue incident, but I hadn't realized that I'd have to take him out of his carrier.  However, Security wanted to x-ray it without a cat inside, so I took him out and held onto him as he tried not to panic, surrounded by the din and unfamiliarity of Pearson International Airport at its summertime busiest.  I could feel his little heart going bangbangbang, and did my best to comfort him until he was able to go back into his carrier.

I don't know what the rest of the trip was like, but when Laurie and I picked Nigel up at the Vancouver Airport he appeared completely calm in his little case.  I used to joke that it was his way of saying that it was now impossible to frighten him, that all of his capacity for fear had been used up someplace around Winnipeg.

The first time I took him out on the lawn in front of the building here, he looked around as if to say, "My god, what have you done?  This was completely different last week!"  But after he got used to things I think that he found the local scenery to be a lot more interesting than the view on Roseheath Avenue in Toronto.

I could write pages of Nigel the Cat anecdotes: the time he apparently vanished from inside the house under curious circumstances, the mole that backed him up across 20 feet of lawn and then escaped, the mouse that didn't escape, the Christmas cards, his unbelievable acrobatic escape to the back yard at 41 Schell in Toronto, the time he attacked my head and bit through my upper lip (ever have a 14 pound cat hang off your face by his teeth and claws?), the fact that he had Facebook friends that I didn't know - the fact that he was on Facebook, for that matter - and on and on.

But Time ticks on, and Nigel wasn't a kitten when I first met him.  Over 20 years after that first meeting, the time finally came, and, as always, he was calm and collected during the entire process.  I left his body with the vet - I know that a lot of people like to take care of that themselves, but I'm pretty sure that Nigel wouldn't hold it against me given the limitations of apartment and city living.

I'm going to miss Nigel more than words could possibly express, and the apartment seems empty and cold without him here.  Farewell, little warrior, best friend.  If there is a place that deserving souls go to after death, I'm sure that's where you are - and I hope that the doors are always open.

- Sid

* One last cat joke, Nige - the title is a quote from a poem by Catullus.