The Final Frontier.

“I wanted to do a Western. Everybody said, ‘You can’t do a Western; Westerns are dead; nobody will do a Western’. I remember thinking it was weird that this genre that had endured for so long was just gone. But then I woke up and came to the conclusion – obviously after other people – that it was actually alive and well, but in outer space. I wanted to make a film about the frontier. Not the wonder of it or the glamour of it: I wanted to do something about Dodge City and how hard life was." 

Peter Hyams on Outland

Every now and then, the Space Channel loses sight of its mandate.  I just can't get it to make sense - in my mind, if you're a science fiction and fantasy specialty channel, you show science fiction and fantasy content.

In spite of this obvious corollary, they have a well-established habit of showing movies that have NOTHING to do with science fiction or fantasy: Jaws, The A Team, Dead Calm, Treasure Island, and so on.  This actually puzzles me quite a bit - is it because of budgetary reasons or some kind of unfortunate contract for package purchasing of programming?  It's certainly not lack of more appropriate content existing.

The most recent example of this odd predilection is their showing of The Magnificent Seven, in the form of the 2016 remake of the classic 1960 western, which was in turn based on the 1954 Japanese film Seven Samurai.  The 2016 version has a good cast and does an acceptable job of reworking the original, but with the best will in the world, it's certainly not science fiction.

 

What makes this an even stranger programming decision is the fact that there actually is a science fiction remake of the 1960s version:  the 1980 cult classic Battle Beyond the Stars, produced by Roger Corman, the king of B-movies.  Admittedly, calling Battle Beyond the Stars a B-movie is generous, it's probably a C+ at best, or maybe even a D, but it has the minor cachet of featuring Robert Vaughn, one of the actors from the original western version, playing essentially the same role as 20 years earlier.

The idea of remaking westerns as science fiction films is not as odd as it sounds.  It's easy to see the parallels between the Wild West and the colonization of outer space:  an unexplored frontier full of unknown dangers and potential riches, plagued by extended travel times, limited communications, enforced isolation and, in some situations, the perils of an indifference to civilized laws and strictures in the interests of money.

One of the best examples of this comparison would have to be Outland, a deliberate reimagining of High Noon, the classic 1952 Gary Cooper film.*  Outland, a 1981 release from writer/director Peter Hyams, features Sean Connery as Federal District Marshal William T. O'Niel**, who is charged with keeping the peace on an isolated mining colony on Io, Jupiter's fifth moon.  As in High Noon, O'Niel is abandoned by friends, family and colleagues and left to fight on his own when a corrupt mining administrator sends for hired killers to eliminate him.

Joss Whedon's space opera series Firefly owes a similar debt to the past - part of his inspiration for the concept came from John Ford's 1939 movie Stagecoach and its ensemble cast, as well as the situation facing Confederate soldiers following their loss in the United States Civil War.

All that aside, if they just had to show something with a Western feel to it for some reason, Space could have shown Westworld, this doesn't have to be complicated. Or Cowboys versus Aliens. Or, if they were really desperate, Wild Wild West.

Okay, I was bluffing - if Wild Wild West is my only other choice, Magnificent Seven it is. After all, have you ever noticed how much the exploration of the West is like the colonization of outer space...?

- Sid

* And the film's gritty art direction is heavily influenced by Alien, to the point where people sometimes think that the two movies are somehow in the same timeline.

** Or O'Neil, the name tag on his uniform actually changes from shot to shot. 

Two by two.

As a bit of a collector, the prospect of owning a piece of original comic artwork is certainly an attractive one, but I've never quite been able to justify the cost to myself.  (Although I've been very tempted by some Jack Kirby pages.)

This is apparently not a problem for everyone. The recent sale by online auction house Heritage Auctions of Egyptian Queen, an original 1969 painting by fantasy artist Frank Frazetta, set a new record for comic book artwork* with a final price of 5.4 million dollars.

Yes - 5.4 MILLION.**  Now, to give this some perspective, we're talking about a painting that was produced for the cover of a comics magazine that featured black and white stories about zombies, monsters and vampires, and sold for 50 cents a copy.

 

In saying that, I don't mean to denigrate Frazetta's talent as an artist, but you have to admit that it does sound like a lot of money, even in the world of artificially inflated comic book art pricing

On the other hand, maybe this is history starting to make its decision about this kind of artwork.

After all, what is the role of realistic figurative illustration in the modern era?  Given that it doesn't seem to have a place in the altermodern art world of conceptual abstraction and surrealism, it may well be that if Da Vinci or Michelangelo were alive today, they might have ended up following their interest in light and the human anatomy into the comic book industry, and could easily have followed the same path as Frank Frazetta.

Frazetta, who passed away in 2010, is a legendary figure in the world of fantasy artwork.  Born in 1928, he began formal art training at the Brooklyn Academy of Fine Arts at the age of 8, where he was taught by Italian artist Michele Falanga.

Following his time at the Academy, Frazetta worked on a variety of comic books and daily strips, and after doing some movie poster work in the early 1960s, came to sudden notoriety for the epic covers that he created for the Lancer editions of the Conan the Barbarian stories published in the late 1960s and early 70s.  His cover painting for the 1966 edition of Conan the Adventurer put an unforgettable face on the Robert E. Howard's grim barbarian hero, and firmly established his career as a leading fantasy artist.  His subsequent work for posters, book covers and album artwork was equally well received - apparently so well received that someone decided that his original painting of Egyptian Queen was worth $5.4 million.

When I mentioned this to Karli, she pointed out that this was an auction, so really, there were actually TWO bidders who decided that this painting was worth that much money.  Who knows, this may just be the way that popular culture makes the transition to fine art - two people at a time.

- Sid

* Frazetta's work also held the previous record of $1.79 million for the sale of his original painting of Death Dealer 6 in May of last year.

** This is a little deceptive.  The actual sale price was $4.5 million, but winning bidders also pay an premium to the auction house, which in this case brought the payment up to $5.4 million.

Exploration: Part Two

(This posting is the second of two on Chris Hadfield's Exploration talk at the Orpheum Theatre - Part One can be read here.)

After a brief intermission, Chris Hadfield returns to the stage to continue his look at the future of space exploration.

What does he see as the most important factor in the exploration of our solar system? Water. It's the key element of life on Earth, and an equally key element of space exploration. "With enough water, we can survive anywhere."

He then asks the question, "Where should we explore in our own solar system if water is the key to survival?"

One place to start is Mars. The Martian polar ice caps are an obvious resource for extended stays on Mars, and satellite images have shown sublimating water, places where water ice* has evaporated and recondensed. The Opportunity probe discovered examples of sedimentary rock, evidence that Mars used to have oceans and lakes.

"InSight is a rectal probe for Mars."

NASA's current mission, the Martian InSight lander, is drilling into the surface of Mars in order to taking temperature readings to determine how deep the ground is frozen and where liquid water might be found.

The Commander points out that there is water all through our solar system. Comets are primarily water, a building block for water in the solar system. "We're trying to understand what are asteroids made of - the Japanese Space Agency recently sent a little probe to an asteroid called Ryugu." The Hayabusa 2 probe successfully landed on the surface of Ryugu and conducted experiments to examine the asteroid's interior.

Jupiter's moon Europa was examined by the Galileo probe, which discovered that the surface of Europa is covered with cracks that appear to be healing over time, a process consistent with ice and liquid water.

"Europa is a water world - in fact, there's more water under the ice cover than there is water on Earth."

The combination of heat and liquid water leads to the possibility of life - "the same processes that produced life on Earth four billion years ago could be happening on Europa." Hadfield mentions the Europa Clipper probe under construction by NASA, with a planned launch date sometime in the 2020s, which will take a closer look at the moon.

Saturn is also a hotbed of possibilities. NASA's Cassini probe revealed in 2017 that the moon Enceladus is covered with deep crevices, and is spewing plumes of water into space, water which ends up becoming part of Saturn's ring structure. As Cassini neared the end of its lifespan, NASA flew the probe through the plumes to confirm their content.

As with Europa, the combination of heat and liquid water creates the possibility of life on Enceladus.

"These are all definite destinations for exploration."

However, to reach these destinations, Hadfield sees the need for innovation and invention.

"Who is Henry the Navigator now? Who is the inventor of the wheel? Who is trying to come up with better ideas so that we can explore further?"

Hadfield cites the three billionaire tech entrepreneurs Jeff Bezos, Richard Branson and Elon Musk as frontrunners in innovative and creative thinking in the area of space travel.

"All three of them think that this is the time in history to design a new ship...maybe this is the time in history when we're able to leave the earth like we've never done it before."

He focuses on Elon Musk's SpaceX company and its innovative plan to reuse the first stage boosters from its Falcon 9 rockets by landing them on floating platforms, thereby creating a more economically sustainable model for orbital launches.

SpaceX conducted its first test launch in in April of 2015, making an unsuccessful attempt to land on a barge near Florida, which, interestingly, Hadfield doesn't view as a negative outcome.

"They learned a lot - it's really good to fail early - if they'd gotten away with it the first time, they wouldn't have learned anything. Through failure comes rapid learning."

One year later, SpaceX successfully completed a booster landing on a floating drone ship. SpaceX has flown 70 missions using this system, and "now owns the world's launch market".

Musk has upped the ante by taking three of SpaceX's used Falcon 9 boosters - "...that didn't used to be a thing, used rockets" - and combining them to create "the biggest rocket that exists", the Falcon Heavy launch vehicle, which Musk views as a potential platform for a mission to Mars. Hadfield sees this as "opening up opportunities in exploration that we've never seen before, taking the next level in invention."

However, at this point in time he sees the Moon as the next immediate destination - "not just to visit, not to just go camping, to permanently live there."

He points out that as part of the Chinese moon landing at the start of this year, one experiment grew cotton, the first time any sort of cultivation has taken place anywhere other than Earth. "It's just a first step, but it's a pretty interesting step."

"Everywhere you see light blue, those are glaciers."

The discovery last year of underground glaciers on the Moon "almost changes the game completely" in Hadfield's opinion.

"By our best estimation, there are 600 billion liters of water on the Moon, a huge amount of water. A natural place for us to go next. Water to drink, oxygen to breathe, and hydrogen and oxygen for fuel.

"So now, everyone's thinking about going to the Moon."

NASA, in cooperation with Canada and its other international partners, has already announced its plans to construct a permanent orbiting space station around the Moon. "And of course, Elon is thinking of going there as well. He's building this great big rocket, the BFR: the Big...ah...Flying...Rocket - and then just landing it on the Moon.

"We'd have a whole new place that humans can go."

Hadfield considers the International Space Station to have been a pivotal element in advancements in space exploration. "The Space Station has taught us so much about our planet - living there continuously for nineteen and a half years. The ISS is the great exploration vessel of our generation," helping us to understand our planet and develop the technologies to go further, as well as learn what happens to the human body during extended periods of time in space.

This knowledge is a crucial element as we move forward in the exploration of our solar system.

"It's not far away that our technology will be good enough to live on Mars. The amount of water trapped in the polar ice caps of mars is immense. If you could somehow melt all the water on Mars, it would cover the planet ten meters deep."

In summarizing, he takes a philosophical look at what exploration means to us as a species:

"These things are possible. We only think they're impossible because we haven't done them yet. To be able to harness the energy, to be able to go further out, with higher speeds, to make it easier to explore, to be able to live in other places, to get our eggs out of one basket - we're on that edge of exploration right now, just limited by our own imaginations.

"We need to solve the problems on Earth first, we need to think about who we are, but it really comes first circle. What we can do in one lifetime is just amazing, to push ourselves, where we learn to walk, and we learn to walk in places we've never been.

"The human brain is the greatest exploration engine, to be able to imagine things that don't exist, and to be able to understand the problems we're facing. We are an incredibly clever species, we just have to see the world as one place, and see our place in it.

"We have to solve these problems, for the next generation. What is going to be normal for them that wasn't for us? We need to put examples in front of our kids of opportunities that exist. You limit most of your choices in life because of the example of the people around you."

"We need people like Joshua, and Jenni, and David, and Jeremy."

For Hadfield, the positive results of putting the right examples in front of the next generation is typified by Jenni Sidey-Gibbons, one of the new astronauts selected in 2017. "She saw Roberta Bondar fly in 1992, and thought, 'Wow, that's something I can do? I want to do that.'

"It's very close to a Canadian flying in space and going to the Moon, and there's a very good chance that it will be Jenni."

He ends with a quick version of his well-known cover version of David Bowie's Space Oddity, then actually looks a bit embarrassed as we give him another standing ovation, waving goodbye and bowing repeatedly as he makes his way off stage.

Thanks for your commitment and your passion, Commander - and thanks for being so Canadian. You make us proud.

- Sid

* This is not a casual distinction. The Martian polar ice caps are covered with a layer of frozen carbon dioxide - more commonly known as dry ice. The northern ice cap has a layer of approximately one meter, and the south pole is covered with a permanent layer eight meters in thickness.

Exploration: Part One

A spotlight illuminates a spare, unadorned stage, empty except for a guitar and its case, a microphone, and a black-draped table with a bottle of water and a glass.  Then an exuberant Chris Hadfield makes his entrance, greeted with an enthusiastic standing ovation from the audience.

He responds with equal enthusiasm: "I'm excited too! We've got so much to talk about," and proceeds to deliver a passionate, dynamic and inspirational three hour talk* on his topic of choice: exploration.

He starts with the analogy of the single step that is at the beginning of all exploration, comparing it to the first uncertain steps of a baby, then progressing to learning to ride a bicycle, the first machine that we use to increase our speed and distance, culminating in the Eagle Moon Lander, "one of the best bicycles we have ever built."

"Michael Collins took this picture of the Eagle in 1969.  Every human being that has ever lived in in that picture - except for Mike."

Looking at the background of the Apollo program that produced the Eagle, Hadfield quotes the famous 1962 speech by John F. Kennedy in which he announced, "We choose to go to the Moon" commenting that “JFK was challenging us to do something we had never done before, to use this new technology and have it take us somewhere we'd never been before. Seven years later, we took our first step onto the Moon."

"Our imprint, our visible exploration of someplace other than our own planet."

He goes on to speak about the effect that watching the first moon landing had on him, on how it changed the course of his entire life: "The moon landing did something for me - it gave me permission to imagine myself as someone completely different. What might I be able to do? What are the limits in my world? Where can we go in a lifetime?"

Some people would ask why would you explore?  For the Commander, exploration puts the world in perspective - "It's so tiny by the standards of the universe. The better our machines get the better we can understand the perspective of where we are."

"That bright dot at the lower right is Earth from 1.5 billion kilometers, shot by the Cassini probe in 2013."

"The best exploration machine we've come up with is Voyager, which left in 1977.  There's actually two of them, Voyager I and II.  They went beyond Pluto and now out beyond the influence of our sun, the Voyager probes are 22 billion kilometers away.

”Through Voyager, we have left our solar system. If you stuck your hand out the window of Voyager - which would be a bad idea - you would no longer be able to feel the solar wind from our sun.

"How did we do that? How did we explore that far away?"

To look at how we’ve reached so far, the Commander first takes a look at where we started, detailing the history of exploration and technology here on Earth. To Hadfield, it's all about speed, starting with the six kilometer per hour walking speed of homo sapiens that spread humanity around the planet, and working up through the domestication of the camel and the horse, the invention of the wheel in the Ukraine, then the development of boats and sailing and early exploratory trips by the Vikings around the year 1000.

500 years after that, humanity needed “a better spaceship”, leading to the development of the caravel in Portugal, “the great exploration vehicle of its time”, capable of 15 kilometers an hour.  The Cape of Good Hope was transitioned in 1487, and Columbus travels across the Atlantic to North America five years later. These voyages needed more than just improved ships, they required improved mathematical and navigational tools, technology like the sextant and astrolabe: “…the computers of the time for navigation, a tremendous technical achievement.“

The steam engine catapults humanity into the Industrial Revolution in the 1700s, followed fast by the airplane, the jet, the Saturn V rocket, which reaches a speed of 9,920 kilometers per hour, the 60,000 kilometer an hour speed of the Voyager I and II probes as they passed Pluto on their way out of our solar system, and the planned Solar Probe, which will need to reach a speed of 700,000 km per hour to successfully pass within 6 million kilometers of the Sun.

He also looks at some of the people who helped to explore our world and increase our understanding of it, early explorers like Jeanne Baret, the first woman to circumnavigate the world in the 1760s – “tough and self-reliant”, and the Montgolfier brothers and the first manned balloon flight by Étienne Montgolfier in 1783.  He also notes Charles Darwin’s voyage of exploration, circumnavigating the world in the Beagle in the 1830s, visiting the Galapagos Islands, and eventually publishing The Origin of the Species in 1859, his groundbreaking work about the fundamental nature of life.

1911 sees the first real exploration of Antarctica by Roald Amundsen, American test pilot Chuck Yeager breaks the sound barrier in 1947, and 14 years later, five foot two Yuri Gargarin is the first man in space, “opening the door”. Eight years later, Apollo 11 puts the first man on the Moon.

Hadfield then speaks to the immensity of space, and the challenges of finding a way to cross the vast distances involved in the exploration of space, illustrating the point by comparing our solar system to the recently discovered M87 black hole.

From XKCD

"Our galaxy is vast. Our best telescopes show us that the Milky Way*** is 200,000 light years across - it's huge. If you start counting stars, there are about 400 billion stars just in our galaxy, and we've discovered in the last ten years that each of those stars has, on average, has one planet, and one in ten is like Earth.  So about 40 billion potential earthlike worlds in our galaxy."

He pauses for a moment then makes a deadpan observation: "That's pretty intriguing..."

"Then there are other galaxies, the scale is incredible, the number of stars, the number of things that exist - all the possibilities that exist, the unimagineably huge number of possibilities!

"How can we understand it?"

He takes a moment to look at the work of Vera Rubin, the first woman astronomer to work at the famous Palomar Observatory in California, who looked at the Andromeda Galaxy and realized that there were too many stars.

"There isn't enough gravity to hold all those stars in the Andromeda Galaxy, and from that she theorized the existence of dark matter - she could have called it Ralph - everything we know about only accounts for six percent of the universe.  The other 94 percent is unknown."

"Can we even explore these places - what is the fastest ship we can imagine?  There's the Enterprise - Kirk was always calling on Scotty for more speed, faster, Scotty."

Using Star Trek's USS Enterprise and its faster than light warp drive as an example, he first explains that the warp drive system is based on the cube of the warp number****, which makes Warp 9 equal to 729 times the speed of light.

At that speed, he calculates that it would take Starfleet's proudest ship 274 years to cross the Milky Way Galaxy, adding, "They were only on a five year mission!! They didn't go anywhere! They were just driving around the neighbourhood!!"

More seriously, he looks at the practicalities of how we are going to explore the universe.

"Maybe we're going to have to get into the very essence of not huge but small, maybe that's the only way that we'll be able to do it - to accelerate very small particles to speeds that will push us to unimaginable velocities."

As an example, he cites Costa Rican ex-astronaut Franklin Chang Díaz, a PhD in applied plasma physics who visited space seven times.  After leaving NASA in 2005, Chang Díaz started the Ad Astra rocket company, which is researching plasma-based propulsion systems for space exploration.

But propulsion is not the only issue - Hadfield contends that new sources of power will also be a crucial aspect of future exploration.

"We need the power of the atom to make it work. We need not just fission, but fusion, to understand how the atom works In order to break the bounds of our own solar system let alone our galaxy."   He points out that many people are working on fusion reactor research, with General Fusion, one of the key players, located nearby in the Fraser Valley.

“They hope to create enough pressure inside this device to fuse two light atoms into one heavier atom which would release an enormous amount of energy - maybe that's the right idea. That's how the sun does it."

Other crucial research is underway at CERN, the Conseil Européen pour la Recherche Nucléaire.   "The underground CERN particle accelerator accelerates individual bits of matter and slams them into each other not only to understand what an atom is, but what makes up neutrons:  subatomic particles, quarks, muons, bosons, trying to understand the very nature of matter itself.  

"If we truly want to explore, we can't just rely on horse power or cannon power or steam power. Being relentless inventors is the only way to travel even further and to understand even more.  We need a better power source, better than burning oil and coal and wood, and maybe the answer will come from deep underground."

At this point, the Commander took a break - and, based on the length of this post, we're going to do the same thing. In the second half of his talk, Hadfield looks at the crucial role played by water in exploration, and where we may go next.

- Sid

* I have to give the Commander** full points - unless there's a really well concealed teleprompter somewhere in the theatre, he speaks unaided for the entire three hours.

** I know that he's actually a Colonel, but really, I think he'll always be Commander Hadfield to the general population. And it's also his Twitter hashtag - @Cmdr_Hadfield - although it's colchrishadfield on Instagram.

*** I'm never sure about things like this - does everyone know that our solar system is in the Milky Way Galaxy? I've known for as long as I can remember, but not everyone has the advantage of being a science fiction fan.

**** Again, you all knew that already, right?

Reading Week: Keeping Score.

Installation, East Jesus Art Garden, Slab City

And so, in the fullness of time Palm Springs Reading Week came to an end.  The final list of books read was as follows:

The Brain Stealers, by Murray Leinster;
Fahrenheit 451, by Ray Bradbury;
Ringworld, by Larry Niven;
Cowl, by Neil Asher;
The Road, by Cormac McCarthy;

And last but not least, Terry Pratchett's Going Postal, not to mention the purchase of $150 CAD worth of used books.

All that and the Cheesecake Factory, too - what more could you want from a vacation?

- Sid

Reading Week: "Them! THEM!"

Robert Graham: And I thought today was the end of them.
Dr. Harold Medford: No. We haven't seen the end of them. We've only had a close view of the beginning of what may be the end of us.

Them!

Following our book store visits (and a quick lunch break in a crowded biker bar) Karli and I do a driving tour through the northern half of Joshua Tree National Park.

Looking out at the arid landscape, it takes me a minute to realize why it feels unexpectedly familiar:  it's the same desert backdrop featured in the classic 1954 science fiction film Them!  The movie is set near Almogordo, New Mexico, site of the first atomic bomb test in 1945, but was actually shot near Palmdale, about 120 miles from where we are.

Them! isn't the first atomic radiation monster movie - the preceding year's Monster from 20000 Fathoms takes first place - but it's certainly the first to introduce the possibility of giant radioactive mutant insects.  Released in the same year that Japanese movie makers first unleashed Godzilla on the world, Them!, like Godzilla, is a cautionary tale about the dangers released from the new Pandora's Box of atomic energy, and sets the standard for these films, in which science is both the villain and the hero.

Considering its subject matter, Them! is oddly plausible in its slow build from two police officers finding a traumatized little girl wandering alone in the New Mexico desert, through to the final battle with a nest of giant ants in the storm drains beneath Los Angeles.  The movie creates an air of suspenseful menace by delaying the reveal of the giant ants themselves, relying instead on the shrill keening noise made by the gigantic insects to suggest their presence.

The giant ants themselves are a bit of a weak point, at least by modern special effects standards - I can only guess how the original audience reacted to the giant ant models. The practical effects look somewhat clumsy and obvious now, but the scene where we first see the giant head and mandibles of an enormous ant appearing out of a sandstorm behind an unsuspecting victim is still an effective piece of filmmaking.  Later there's an equally effective moment where the scientists, having found the ants' nest, see one of the giant creatures carelessly tossing away a human ribcage.

The cast features a grim James Whitmore as police sergeant Ben Peterson, and James Arness as the FBI agent assigned to the mystery, with Edmund Gwenn as Formicidae expert Dr. Harold Medford and Joan Weldon as his daughter, Dr. Patricia Medford, originating in this movie the part of the female scientist who also occupies the role of chief screamer when necessary.*

 

The movie also showcases Fess Parker as a bewildered small plane pilot who thinks that he has seen UFOs shaped like huge flying insects**, and a startlingly young Leonard Nimoy makes an uncredited appearance as an air force sergeant.

One of the great strengths of this movie is the absolute seriousness with which the premise is handled, with the exception of a few quips in the dialogue that actually feel a bit misplaced due to the earnest nature of the rest of the script. Them! is actually plotted more as a mystery than a horror movie, with the first half aimed at solving the enigma of missing and murdered people and stolen sugar, and the second half dedicated to discovering the whereabouts of two queen ants who have left the original nest before it was destroyed. 

In spite of the numerous films dealing with the horrifying possibilities of the atomic bomb, none of these monstrous nightmares appeared in the real world over the succeeding 74 years.  In some ways, it's a shame - the appearance of a few giant insects or a giant lizard breathing radioactive fire might have had a salutary effect on early arms limitation treaties.

- Sid

* Monsters Versus Aliens does an excellent little sendup of this particular trope.

** It says a great deal about the mindset of 1950s America that he doesn't think he's seen huge flying insects, but rather UFOs that look like insects.

Reading Week: "See you, Space Cowboy."

Today's plan is to do a day trip to Joshua Tree National Park, located just north of Palm Springs.  As always when I travel, I've done a search for used bookstores, and to my happy surprise there are not one but two science-fiction intensive shops located close to the northern entrance to the park: Raven's Book Shop and Space Cowboy. 

Raven's Book Shop, located on Highway 62 near the small community of 29 Palms, is a collector's dream, and a bit of a cautionary tale in terms of curating a used bookstore.

Inventory management is a key element of operating any kind of store.  However, unlike most retail outlets, used book stores depend on the kindness of strangers to replenish their stock, picking and choosing from the books that cross their threshold rather than picking things out of a catalogue.*

The key part of that sentence was "picking and choosing".  There are two traditional traps that await the owners of used book stores:  the wrong kind of inventory, or too much.  I can look at the science fiction shelf in a used bookstore and tell you instantly whether or not they know anything about science fiction - basically, the more Dragonlance and Star Wars novels, the lower their knowledge level.

 

The other problem is overstocking, and as the owner of a substantial library, I'm sympathetic with the people who fall prey to this particular sin.  After all, there are so many books of interest, and it must be very hard to say no to someone who walks through the door with a particularly noteworthy volume for sale.  The trick is to make sure that you sell as many of these books as you buy, or else you run out of room and your store begins to look a bit like the bookshelves in my spare bedroom.

The second we walk into Raven's, it's obvious that they've lost the battle in terms of saying no, but they've lost another kind of battle as well. A lot of the shelves are double stacked, and there's a pile of books at least three feet tall behind the front desk. (You can see the edge of the mound in the photo above.)  But not all the shelves are full, and it looks a bit like new acquisitions have been dropped anywhere convenient rather than appropriately sorted and shelved.

Working my way through the stacks, I'm a bit puzzled by the pricing structure.  Prices seem to be all over the map, with some books priced quite affordably, but other similar books a bit at the high end of current used book pricing.  Regardless of pricing, the selection is impressive - there are a lot of books here, but they've certainly been well chosen.  Karli has generously told me that she's prepared to wait for as long as I want to stay there, but it's obvious that I could spend the entire day if not a full week going through the shelves, and we still have another store - and a national park - to visit today.

As such, I'm not too choosy in my selections, and fairly quickly put together an acceptable handful of books: Adam Link - Robot, a collection of Golden Age SF Eando Binder stories published by the Paperback Library in 1965; one of the excellent New Writings in SF collections, edited by John Carnell; a first edition 1966 paperback copy of Starswarm, a short story collection by Brian Aldiss; and a trio of Ace Doubles for my collection.

As I'm preparing to make my way to the front and settle up, Karli glances up and notes a large fuzzy ball on the shelf over our heads. "Probably a tribble," I comment, which turns out to be prescient.  As I look up at the shelf, I see that there's also a tall stack of the Bantam Books paperback editions of the Star Trek original series script adaptations written by award-winning science fiction author James Blish.

 

They're a bit of a collector's item, and although they're not in mint condition, I'd expect them to cost somewhat more than their $3.50 cover price, even if it is in US dollars. Numbers 2 and 12 are missing**, and might even be buried somewhere in the stacks, but we're on the clock, so I just pick up the visible copies and head to the cash register.

Significantly, when the owner is adding up my purchases, she comments that the Star Trek books have probably not been looked at or repriced for 20 years, which pretty much says everything that I need to hear regarding the uneven pricing, but leaves me wondering what the story is behind the store. Inherited, perhaps, and kept open as a labour of love?  Regardless, it's a bit of a "start the car" moment for me - Karli is more than a little amused by the happy noise with which I celebrated my purchases once we were safely back in our vehicle.

Comparatively, Space Cowboy, located in the town of Joshua Tree, is the epitome of a well-curated used bookstore. The shop has a modest footprint, but it's well laid out, and has an impressive selection of classic novels, which have been conveniently pulled off the shelves, bagged and hung on the walls, much like particularly collectable issues in a comic book store.

 

I leave Space Cowboy with a smaller stack of books - not due to lack of attractive options, but purely out of restraint:  having already spent over a hundred dollars on used books at our last stop, it seemed practical to keep the rest of my purchases under control - not to mention the looming threat of overweight baggage charges.

For sale at Space Cowboy: a triptych of Beverly the Madonna and the Blessèd Wesley, worshipped by the twin angels
of Emotion and Science. Originally I thought Data was wearing a yarmulke, which would have been a bit odd
for a devotional painting of this type, but then I realized it was a glimpse of his positronic brain.

Several of them are replacement volumes - their copy of The Wizard of Senchuria/Cradle of the Sun, another Ace Double, is in much better shape than mine, as are paperback copies of The Metal Monster and The Ship of Ishtar, two classic novels by American fantasy author A. Merritt.  Originally written in the 1920s, they were reprinted by Avon in the 1960s and early 70s as part of the Tolkien-influenced fantasy boom that saw the revival of a wide variety of vintage material at around that time.  I also pick up a pair of classic Robert A. Heinlein books: Assignment in Eternity and Waldo: Genius in Orbit, an odd variant edition of Waldo and Magic Inc. from 1958.

Overall, it's been an excellent day for book purchasing, if not for my already crowded shelves at home.  Next, Joshua Tree National Park...and Them!

- Sid

* Well, presumably not ordering from a catalogue.  I've always been a bit curious as to how a used bookstore gets started - it seems to me that buying enough used books to stock a new store would be a net loss approach to the process, although ultimately, as with any store, logic would suggest that the idea is to mark up your stock.  I certainly have enough books in my spare bedroom to start a small shop, compared to, say, the inventory at Space Cowboy, but that feels a bit like starting a clothing store by raiding your own closet.

** I've owned a slightly worn copy of Number 6 in the series since grade school, but to my intense happiness, when we got back to Vancouver I discovered that I'd picked up a copy of Number 2 at some point over time, nicely filling the gap in my new acquisitions. And Number 12s of any series are always easier to find than Number 2s.

Reading Week: "It was a pleasure to burn."

As I mentioned in an earlier posting, Karli and I are taking a break in Palm Springs this week - well, Palm Desert, to be accurate, at a rental condo in a gated community, with easy access to a shared pool and hot tub. Generally my vacations tend to be migratory, to the point that I've gone on trips where I didn't sleep in the same bed twice, but this trip is intended to be more about relaxation than exploration. As such, I'm looking forward to spending some time with the written word over the course of the week.

After picking up our rental car, we've stopped off at Target to do some casual shopping and pick up some supplies.  As we wander through the store, we stop at the book section, where Karli selects a Jodi Picoult book for poolside reading.  To my surprise,  there's a trade paperback copy of Ray Bradbury's 1953 classic Fahrenheit 451 on the Sale shelf, which I instantly add to our basket.*  There’s a kind of casual irony in purchasing this book here - one feels that in Bradbury’s future of outlawed books, Target would be the last place you would find any work of fiction, let alone this one.

Reading the book over the course of the day (it's a quick read at 158 pages, the bulk of this particular printing is made up of commentary) I'm impressed by the poetic brilliance of Bradbury's style, as always.  I'd also forgotten the tragic feel of the novel.  As per Thoreau, Fireman Guy Montag leads a life of quiet desperation, flat and colourless: isolated from his wife, apparently without friends, doubtful of the rightness of his vocation as a fireman who starts fires rather than stopping them, almost indifferent to the ongoing state of war that stands as a constant background.

Fahrenheit 451 is a conflict between two philosophies: thought and complacency.  To Bradbury, the elimination of books is the elimination of thinking, and with the loss of thought, the end of dissent and freedom.  All that is left is the shallow and trivial televised world that obsesses Montag's wife Mildred and her friends, and insulates them from anything that might make them question the status quo.

Regardless of whether or not this is a future that we might ever actually see, this book strikes very close to home for me.

Why?  Because I would undoubtedly be one of the criminals caught with a hoard of illegal books, one of the people who ends up in jail after their library is reduced to charred ashes, swirling in the wind around the skeletal remains of their home.  Or would I refuse to surrender, like the nameless woman who contemptuously stands her ground and dies with her books?

More likely, I might well be one of the quiet rebels who abandons society to live in the woods, becoming a sort of living edition of a memorized book.  Imagine being the last copy of The Lord of the Rings...

- Sid

* Considering that I own between five and six thousand books, you might be surprised that I don't already own a copy of Fahrenheit 451, but there are a few classic science fiction novels that I read early in my fandom and never added to my library.  For example, I don't own a copy of Brave New World, although it's probably time for a reread.  In this case, when we returned to Vancouver, I ruefully discovered that I actually did own a copy of Fahrenheit 451, the 50th anniversary paperback.  Now that I have that and the commemorative 60th edition, hopefully I can skip buying the 70th anniversary issue in 2023.

Reading Week: "All of time and space..."

 

SARAH: It wasn't Croydon. Where you dropped me off, that wasn't Croydon.
DOCTOR: Where was it?
SARAH: Aberdeen.
DOCTOR: Right. That's next to Croydon, isn't it?*

Doctor Who, School Reunion

CLARA: This isn't my home, by the way.
DOCTOR: Sorry. I'm sorry about that. I missed.
CLARA: Where are we?
DOCTOR: Glasgow, I think.

Doctor Who, Deep Breath

As someone who is generally a bit cautious about public displays of fandom, I have a certain admiration for the Palm Springs Uber driver in front of us, although I'm not sure that the Doctor is the best example to follow in that line of work.  True, he does frequently give people rides, but I think that most Uber clients have a sort of general expectation that they'll be dropped off at the right destination, not to mention the right century.

- Sid

* For those of you unfamiliar with Croydon - or Aberdeen - they're about 600 miles apart. By intergalactic standards, this is actually unbelievably accurate.

Reading Week: "Please put all electronic devices on airplane mode."

Saturday morning in Vancouver, and Karli and I are sitting on the tarmac at YVR, waiting to start a one-week getaway in sunny Palm Springs, a welcome break from the uncertain weather of British Columbia in the spring.

Although I do a lot of casual travel reading on my iPhone, I like to have a paper book for planes - flight attendants seem to be happier if you're not using your phone at takeoff, airplane mode or not, and it's also a good opportunity to catch up on some reading.

My seatmate on the aisle side is perusing The Untethered Soul, a New York Times best seller from 2007 -  not exactly current, but a far cry from my 1960 vintage Badger Books paperback copy of The Brain Stealers*, by Murray Leinster, which I pulled out of my tsundoku stack for the trip, along with a couple of other selections that caught my eye.  By some standards, this might be a valued antique, although it's hardly in mint condition, and only cost me a pound or thereabouts last year at a used book store in London's Portobello Market.

As is common with books from this era, the cover has absolutely no relationship to the story:** I have no idea who the glowing woman is supposed to be, and the villains are globular pink bloodsucking alien mind parasites (think Wilson with little fangs).  The hero of the story protects himself from their mind control powers with a cap made out of coiled iron wire while he builds a brain jamming machine to defeat them - tin foil has been available for hat creation since 1910, but you can't always depend on being in the kitchen when crunch time hits.

Looking casually around the plane, it occurs to me that you rarely see anyone reading a notably old book in public.  I can't be the only person with a nostalgic affection for classic novels, but even being a bit of a collector aside, I don't think I've recently seen anyone on a plane flipping through The Godfather, Jonathan Livingston Seagull, The Hotel New Hampshire, or any of a hundred different best sellers from the past.  It may just be that fame is fleeting, and that the general public will read a book once on vacation and then donate it to Goodwill or a book donation bin for hospital libraries, or maybe drop it off at a used bookstore, where someone like me brings it home to complete the circle twenty years later - or, in this case, 59.

- Sid

* Which, oddly, contains four pages of advertising, including a fascinating opportunity to purchase Joan the Wad, "Queen of the Lucky Cornish Pixies", and offers to both increase and reduce your bust using a "harmless vegetable cream" - well, two different creams, to be clear, it would be asking a lot for one product to provide both of those services.

**  There's actually a sound economic reason for this.  Pulp magazine and book publishers would often contact an artist and order generic paintings in bulk, then somewhat randomly assign them to covers.

"Gentlemen, we're history."

"I believe our adventure through time has taken a most serious turn."

Ted, Bill and Ted's Excellent Adventure

There is nothing worse than an incomplete trilogy.  Imagine if The Matrix had been a stand-alone film, Tobey Maguire hadn't made Spider-man 3, they'd skipped the third Terminator installment, or The Hobbit had only been long enough to make two films rather than three.

Hmmm...

Okay, maybe not the best examples, but still, it's important to have closure, and as such it was both a pleasure and a relief to learn that Keanu Reeves and Alex Winter are finally re-uniting to complete the Bill and Ted Trilogy, as per the world's least pretentious YouTube™ movie announcement a couple of weeks ago.  Production on Bill and Ted Face The Music is slated to begin production this summer, with a tentative release date of summer of 2020.

The events of the second film don't really leave any room for a follow-up, but as we all know, time isn't a strict progression of cause to effect, it's more like a big ball of wibbly-wobbly, timey-wimey stuff.  As such, Bill and Ted's future is not set, and there is no fate but what they make for themselves*.   In other words, anything can happen, which is a pretty bodacious position to be in when writing a movie.  If reunited creators and writers Chris Matheson and Ed Solomon can match the unexpected depth and quality - dare I say excellence - of the first two movies, the results could be just as much fun.

However, "fun" may not be a given, and the story could easily take a most serious turn, as per the opening quote. There's a bittersweet aspect to the whole idea of revisiting the Wyld Stallyns:  in the real world, it's been 28 years since William S. Preston Esq. and Theodore Logan had their Bogus Journey, and in spite of the running Internet gag about Keanu Reeves not aging, both he and Winter are obviously not teenagers any more. Given that the plot precis says that they still haven't written the song that will unite the world in peaceful harmony, how depressed and frustrated must Bill and Ted be at this point in their lives?  Not to mention the fact that at the end of Bogus Journey, they both have children -  given their own parental experiences, have they remained true to themselves, or have they unknowingly become their own fathers?  (Hopefully not to the extent that Bill is now married to Missy - although, when you think about it, that's actually not a bad plot hook.**)

Similarly, there's been a lot of water over the dam since Winters and Reeves made their debut as Bill and Ted - will they be able to summon up the same light-hearted exuberance that they effortlessly brought to their characters in the first two films?   Alex Winters has spent more time behind the camera than in front of it since Bogus Journey, and Keanu Reeves hasn't exactly been noted for his fun-loving movie roles recently - it's a big jump from John Wick to Theodore Logan.

Really, though, it should be simple - all they need to do is remember to be excellent to each another and party on.  If they've forgotten that, well, that would be a pretty good place to start the script right there.

- Sid

* Terminator reference, but oddly enough I don't have a posting to link to.

** It's even more of a twist if Ted is married to Missy.  But really, they should still be with Joanna and Elizabeth, the princess babes.

Geek chic.

Ah, and what does the well-dressed geek wear for a late Saturday lunch at the Storm Crow?

NASA cap - check.

Forbidden Planet t-shirt - check.

Academie Duello longsword apprentice green cord - check.

Book Nerd pin - check.

Table for two, please...

- Sid

The Book of the Sword, Part Five: Green Cord.

Fortified by some homework with the Duello TV longsword channel, and a solid re-read of some classic Robert E. Howard Conan the Barbarian stories, I headed off to my final Academie Duello longsword class on Thursday night.

The reason behind my prep work?  Very simple: although there's no test to establish competency at the end of the course, we were scheduled to spend the final class proving our skills in a practical fashion by dueling with each other and the students from the companion Introduction to Rapier course which has been running at the same time as our class for the last four weeks.  When our instructor Miguel had mentioned at our previous class that we'd be doing this, I was a bit apprehensive: my impression of the relative strengths of the two weapons led me to expect that rapier users would butcher us with speed and reach.

To my surprise, this turned out not to be the case.  The leverage provided by the two-handed longsword grip repeatedly allowed me to push aside the rapier and go inside the reach of the blade for a cut or an oblique thrust.  It also turned out that I may in fact have some minor skill in the area of swordplay, to the point where one of my fellow longsword classmates actually said, "Wow, you're good at this!"  I found that I was repeatedly outscoring my opponents by two or three to one, whether it was against longsword or rapier.*

At the end of the evening, there was a brief graduation ceremony,where we were presented with our Green apprenticeship cord by our instructors.  The head of the school, Devon Boorman, was in attendance, and cheerfully informed us that we now knew more about swordplay than 99.9 percent of the rest of the world - although they're doing their best to change that percentage, one student at a time.

Although Academie Duello offers a comprehensive list of options for people wishing to move forward in their study of the sword and achieve further mastery, I don't plan to continue - I'm happy to have received my green cord and become part of that .1% of the global population.

That being said, if you have any interest in trying something a little bit different, or have some curiousity about swordplay after seven seasons of Game of Thrones, I would unhesitatingly recommend an Academie Duello class.  The instructors and staff are uniformly friendly, knowledgeable and helpful, I found both the historical and practical information to be interesting, and hey, you get to fight with swords.

Arte, Ardore, Onore!

- Sid

* To be honest, I can't attach too much significance to this.  It's a bit like being the best walker out of a group of one-year olds.  It's an achievement of sorts, but Usain Bolt certainly isn't going to view me as a threat.

The Book of the Sword, Part Four: Lost in Translation

 

To end our third week of longsword training at Academie Duello, we spent a class working with sidesword and buckler. The sidesword was a successor to the medieval arming sword, which was a relatively short one-handed weapon worn by knights when out of armour, and marked the introduction of a more elaborate knuckle guard than the simple crossbar of the arming sword, following the Germanic habit of hooking one finger over the crossguard for additional control.  The knuckle guard provides protection for the exposed finger, and presages the development of the more elaborate guards that characterize the rapier.

The sidesword was also more of an everyday weapon than longsword or poleaxe.  Its shorter length allowed it to be a literal side weapon that could be worn during everyday activities.  Similarly, the buckler is a shield that's small enough to be hooked onto your scabbard beside the sword, rather than the full sized shield that would be used in actual warfare. (The term "swashbuckler"comes from bravos rattling their bucklers against their swords in order to announce themselves as they swaggered through the streets.)  Held at arm's length, the buckler is both a defensive and offensive weapon, used to block attacks as well as deliver blows when corps-à-corps.

My expectation for sword and buckler was that the buckler would be held in front as a defensive lead, with the sword extended beside it to allow for the two to be used together or independently, much as shown in the illustration below - although from perhaps a bit further away than these two gentlemen.  To my astonishment, we are instructed to hold the sword straight up over our heads as our starting position.  It seems a ridiculous stance for fighting, especially with a weapon that can thrust as well as cut, but Miguel reassures us that this is the approved technique as taken from historical documents.

 

Regardless, I'm sceptical.  Miguel pointed out in one of the earlier sessions that one of the challenges in reviving the art of swordplay is that there's no continuity of practise - swordplay becomes less and less common over time, finally falling entirely out of use as gunpowder takes over the battlefield.  Because of this historical break, modern scholars are forced to rely on a relatively small library of instructional texts in order to rediscover the techniques.*

Most of what we've been taught for longsword is taken from the Flos Duellatorum (Flower of Battle) a 14th century text by Fiore die Liberi, an Italian fencing master.  Other salles d'armes follow equivalent German texts, and there's enough similarity - and variation - to indicate a continuum of technique, albeit with a slightly different vocabulary and bias.

To my mind, the things that we've learned for longsword make sense.  There are standard defensive stances that involve short and long guards (posta breve and posta longa) in which the sword is extended directly in front of the body with the point aimed at your opponent's face, as opposed to the posta di donna or di fenestra, which positions the sword behind either shoulder for cutting or thrusting attacks - these positions are not unlike the way you'd stand if you were at bat in baseball, which seems a logical starting position for a longsword cut.

The hand-over-head sidesword starting guard seems to be a long way - literally - from a good place to attack or defend, and I was a little tempted to take a completely different stance during practice, although that would seem to defeat the purpose of taking instruction. Based on my own experience with instructional material and training, a small part of me wonders if the person who wrote the description that we're following just didn't have had a lot of experience actually fighting people - the old "those who can, do" problem.

- Sid

* If you've seen The Princess Bride, you're familiar with some of the authorities of classic swordplay.  During the duel between Inigo Montoya and the Dread Pirate Roberts, they discuss the various techniques for fighting under those conditions as per Bonetti, Capo Ferro, Agrippa, and Thibault - actual fencing masters from the Renaissance.