It's only a paper moon - or is it?

With just over a month to go until the release of the new Barbie film starring Margot Robbie in the titular role - the role that she was so obviously born to play* - it occurs to me that if Barbie Land exists, that posits the existence of a larger shared universe of Mattel toys - the Mattelverse**, as it were.

With that on the table, if there's a moon in the skies of Barbie Land - and we know that there is - then what would we find there?  Obviously, there would be a thriving lunar colony commanded by none other than the Mattel's Man in Space himself, Major Matt Mason.

Tom Hanks has mentioned his eagerness to star in a movie version of the Major's adventures, but given what we've seen in terms of how Barbie will address the dichotomy between the perfection of Barbie Land and feminism in the real world, how would a Major Matt Mason movie define itself in comparison to character studies like Disney's Lightyear?  Hopefully in the same way that Barbie will, by showing that imaginary characters can have their own worth in terms of the values that they offer to real people - and vice versa.

- Sid

* She does a pretty good job as Harley Quinn as well, actually - and if you want to discuss whether or not someone has range as an actor, these are the roles that you want to use as a yardstick.

** As opposed to, say, the Hasbroverse - Transformers and GI Joe - which already has a motion picture presence.

My girl Lydia.

If you know, you know.

- Sid

I, robot.

Yesterday I failed the I'm not a robot test on my iPad.

No matter what I did, it refused to accept my tapping finger to check the box in the window, but, inexplicably, Karli was able to complete for me without any problems.  And then she gave me a long, thoughtful look...

- Sid

 

AKA "Exploded".

"Rapid unscheduled disassembly" - if they weren't talking about the destruction of a $90M USD rocket, that would actually be a pretty funny way of saying that it blew up.

(Which looked like this:)

The SpaceX team considers the launch to be a success, and I can understand their position.  These are unmanned test flights, and as such having the launch vehicle explode (or rapidly disassemble, if you prefer) provides them with crucial information about their design and how it operates in practice - that's what testing is all about.

However, at $100M+ for the combination of rocket and launch, it's a bit of an expensive hobby.  Let's hope that Elon Musk is prepared to stay the course in order to ensure that future rockets don't disassemble when there's a crew on board.

- Sid

Putting the "fun" in Dysfunctional?

 

I am pleased to announce that, following a return visit to the innergeek.com Geek Test, I have leveled up.

My new score took me from being a Major Geek (with a score of greater than or equal to 35%)  to a Super Geek - greater than or equal to 45%.*

These may not seem like high scores, but given that the top score that can be achieved on the test is Dysfunctional Geek, with a score of  ≥75% I can only imagine what a full 100% score would look like - Sheldon Cooper from The Big Bang Theory, perhaps.  And, let's be honest, as well crafted a character as he is, Sheldon would probably have a very short career in the real world.

- Sid

* If you're curious as to how I had increased my score, upgraded responses including naming a pet after a literary character - don't forget, Jack the Cat's full name is Jaqen H'ghar - and indexing a personal collection, among others.

Reading Week 2023: Toyoda.

I met him in a swamp down in Dagobah
Where it bubbles all the time like a giant carbonated soda
S-O-D-A, soda
I saw the little runt sitting there on a log
I asked him his name and in a raspy voice he said, "Yoda"
Y-O-D-A, Yoda
Yo-Yo-Yo-Yo-Yoda

“Weird Al” Yankovic, Yoda

I appreciate the degree to which fans in Palm Springs wear their hearts on their sleeves.

- Sid

"Blame it all on Larry Niven."

In other news, the state of Massachusetts has put forward a bill that would give convicts the opportunity to reduce their sentences by donating organs - essentially, trading body parts for time.  

As often happens, science fiction, in the person of author Larry Niven, has already anticipated this macabre concept and its long term implications. Larry Niven's 1967 story The Jigsaw Man, originally published in Harlan Ellison's revolutionary anthology Dangerous Visions*, posits a future in which the organ banks are always hungry, and as such, the slippery slope that starts with prisoners donating bone marrow ends up with even the most trivial legal offenses  - in this case, parking tickets - leading to the guilty party being broken down for parts. 

Niven uses this concept in a number of stories, including one from The Long ARM of Gil Hamilton in which people who have been cryogenically preserved in hopes of a future cure for their ailments are harvested for their organs - "waking up in pieces", as one character describes it.

In his postscript to the story, Niven makes the following comment: 

The organ bank problem used to scare me.  The internal logic seems so rigid. But if it were that obvious, the Red Cross would have been finding its blood donors on Death Row, five quarts to a donor, since 1940 A.D. That has not been happening.  Perhaps I'm making a big deal out of nothing.

Maybe it only took someone to point out the advantages.  In which case, blame it all on Larry Niven.

Well, Larry, it's good of you to take the blame, but I suspect that Massachusetts came up with this idea all on their own - as might have been expected from a science fiction story, all you had to do was to wait for the future to catch up. 

- Sid

* Although, to be honest, if I were Ellison, I wouldn't have put The Jigsaw Man in Dangerous Visions, given the collection's New Wave mandate - it's such a standard Niven story

I feel you, girlfriend.

 

- Sid

The Lost Posts: a guide to post-hiatus posting.

In November of 2022 I decided to stop blogging after sixteen years.

However, in some ways I never stopped.  Sixteen years is a long time to do something, and as such I'd gotten into the habit of treating my life as a source of blog content, to the point where sometimes I'd make plans solely because of their potential as fodder for postings. (I realize that this would be commonplace if I was a seasoned influencer, but at the time it was a new concept to me.)  As a result, out of habit I kept making notes, saving links, doing screen captures, and taking pictures just as if I was going to post the results  - ghost posting, if you will.

And then, a recent conversation about ukulele lessons made me think that maybe I should start blogging again, that my ongoing phantom content creation was me sending myself a message. 

So, as of March 24th, 2024, I revived The Infinite Revolution.

However, I still had all of those notes and photos and so on, and it seemed a waste not to use them. (After all, no one wants to have to explain a big gap in their blogging resume.)  So, without further ado, I present The Lost Posts, a fragmentary catalogue of my life as a geek between November of 2022 and March 2024 - this post and my "I'm back" posting act as bookends for The Lost Posts - it seemed appropriate to come back with a book metaphor.  I'll apologize in advance for any anachronisms, twonkies or similar Coke-bottle-in-the-midden artifacts caused by travelling into the past. 

Just to be clear, I'm not going to add the missing posts all at once, but posting them as opportunity and impulse allow.  And who knows, at some point I may just remove all three of the posts about the hiatus and my return, and retcon the whole thing.

- Sid

It may stop, but it never ends.

The Infinite Revolution is on indefinite hiatus.

Almost 16 years and 1,127 posts, not including this one - not a bad run, but it's getting to be like work.

Peace out.  (Drops mike.)

- Sid

Let the marketing tie-ins begin...

The Avatar sequel drops December 16th.

- Sid

"Crying out for help."

The Doctor : This whole world is swimming in Wi-Fi. We're living in a Wi-Fi soup! Suppose something got inside it. Suppose there was something living in the Wi-Fi, harvesting human minds, extracting them. Imagine that. Human souls trapped like flies in the World Wide Web, stuck forever, crying out for help.

Clara Oswin : Isn't that basically Twitter? 

The Bells of Saint John, Doctor Who

Well, it certainly is right now.  Do you think Elon Musk watches Doctor Who?

- Sid

Chekov's Fire Axe.

The concept of Chekov's Gun is fairly well known: it's a philosophy of narrative economy based on the idea that if you have a gun hanging on the wall in a play, it should be fired at some point, or else don't put it there.

I've just finished reading Peter F. Hamilton's 2019 novel Salvation, the first in his Salvation Sequence, and now I think that there needs to be an opposite to Chekov's Gun - Chekov's Fire Axe, if you will.  Chekov's Fire Axe needs to say that you can't have a crucial prop appear from nowhere.

Without rehashing the entire plot of Salvation, there's a scene where the main characters are gathered together in the spartan lounge of a research station which has been constructed to investigate a crashed alien spaceship.  At a pivotal moment, one of the characters kills another character with a fire axe, thereby revealing that their brain has been replaced with an alien organism.

Okay, wait wait wait.  A fire axe?

Fire axes are a pretty specific tool.  Their functionality is based around the need for firefighters (or people fighting fires) to chop through doors or other barriers, smash windows, or cut holes in walls or ceilings for ventilation. Why is there a fire axe on a futuristic research station - which is in a vacuum - without a piece of wood in sight, or any possible benefit to chopping through the station walls?

So, Chekov's Fire Axe:  IF YOU NEED A SPECIFIC PROP TO ACHIEVE A PLOT POINT, IT SHOULD ALREADY EXIST OR LOGICALLY EXIST IN THE SETTING.

I'm sure that Chekov would approve.

- Sid

If there is such a thing...

And now, the lighter side of Soylent Green.

- Sid

Soylent Green: Change my mind.

"Soylent Green is made of people!"*

Detective Robert Thorn, Soylent Green

As part of my birthday trip to Victoria in September, I made a shopping trip to the Cavity Curiosity Shop, which I've found to be an excellent spot for vintage science fiction shopping.  I've been trying to restrict myself to the purchase of replacement books, but sometimes it can be hard not to colour outside the lines, and unfortunately (or fortunately) Cavity offers a wide range of temptations.

On this occasion, one of those temptations was a copy of the classic SF novel Make Room Make Room! by Harry Harrison, which I've somehow managed to go without reading up until now.

Harry Harrison is quite a good writer, and has an excellent bibliography.  He’s one of the large group of workmanlike and perhaps lesser-known SF authors from the 60s and 70s, authors like Colin Kapp, Keith Laumer, Robert Sheckley, A. Bertram Chandler, and Brian W. Aldiss.

Originally serialized in three parts in the United Kingdom science fiction magazine Impulse and then published in novel form in 1966,  Make Room! Make Room is a low-key near-future eco-disaster drama set in 1996 New York, population 35 million.

It's a sad little dystopian story of overpopulation, deprivation, overcrowding and misery, with none of the excessive drama that you find in other Malthusian** not-with-a-bang-but-a-whimper novels like John Christopher's 1956 novel The Death of Grass, or Stand on Zanzibar and The Sheep Look Up, both by John Brunner.

It's also the relatively unknown inspiration for the 1973 movie Soylent Green, starring Charlton Heston and featuring veteran actor Edward G. Robinson in his last movie role.   

Soylent Green, which, slightly ironically, is set in 2022, received mixed reviews generally but was more favourably received by the science fiction community, winning both a Nebula award and a Saturn Award, and receiving a Hugo nomination.***

To be honest, I don’t think I would have chosen Make Room! Make Room! for a Harry Harrision movie adaptation - his 1970 political SF novel The Daleth Effect strikes me as a far better choice.  Make Room! Make Room! is an understated cautionary tale: subtle, nuanced, and without a definitive resolution to its rendition of life in 1996 New York, and as such it seems an odd choice for Hollywood to option.  It's equally odd that, having chosen to adapt Harrison's slice-of-life story, the producers decided to change it into an action-filled conspiracy thriller.

It's a heavy-handed change to the original plot, but it does succeed in terms of creating something that probably felt more like a science fiction movie script to the producers.  (There was probably a similar process involved in the transition from Philip K. Dick's Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? to the script for Bladerunner.)

Now, just to make this clear, I'm not saying that Soylent Green is a better story than Make Room! Make Room!, but the concept of recycling humans as food* is certainly a bold science fiction concept that falls firmly into the "My god, what if" approach to SF.  

The re-written storyline gives the plot a specific direction by changing the accidental murder of a mob boss by a frightened teenage thief into the assassination of a Soylent Corporation executive to prevent him from going public with the truth about Soylent Green.

In Harrison's original text, the term "soylent" refers to a mix of soy beans and lentils used to create food patties - the original Impossible burger, come to think of it.  In the movie, it's a more abstract concept, partially because it's supposed to be made from plankton, which turns the name Soylent into a futuristic sounding buzzword.

As is very often the case with science fiction set in a specific time, both Make Room!  Make Room! and Soylent Green have passed their best before date in terms of predictive accuracy, although that in no way diminishes their value in terms of social commentary and cautionary warnings.

However, the good news is that none of the current vegetarian meat substitutes on the market are made out of people - at least, not that I know of.   Our version of 2022 certainly has some issues, but I'm reasonably certain that's not one of them.

- Sid

*My apologies to anyone who was unaware of this climactic plot twist and has now had the movie spoiled forever, but let's be fair, Soylent Green came out almost 50 years ago and I feel that it's somewhat in the public domain in terms of surprise endings.

** This is the sort of thing you learn by reading science fiction.  In his 1798 publication, An Essay on the Principle of Population, British clergyman and scholar Thomas Malthus suggested that it was inevitable that population growth would exceed food production, an idea which the science fiction community has referenced again and again over the years.

*** Nebula Awards are in some ways the science fiction equivalent of the Golden Globes in the same way that the Hugo Awards are the Oscars of SF. The Saturn Awards are movie-specific and were originally developed by the Academy of Science Fiction, Fantasy and Horror Films to address the lack of genre recognition by the Oscars.

"I want to know what happens next."

"Right, Doctor Who-ever I'm about to be - tag, you're it."

The 13th Doctor, The Power of the Doctor

No spoilers, but I laughed out loud in delighted surprise at the unexpected results of 13th Doctor's regeneration scene tonight.  A brilliant twist to end Jodie Whittaker's excellent run as the Doctor.

- Sid

"WARNING: Choking Hazard. Small parts, not for children under 3 years."

The pandemic isn’t really over, but now that it’s become more of an ongoing state of affairs rather than an emergency, I’m enjoying the opportunity to cautiously resume attendance at public events like the Capital City convention that we visited in Victoria or the historical fantasy discussion at the Vancouver Writers Fest.

Earlier in the week, my sister-in-law Stefanie kindly and considerately forwarded an ad for the Vancouver Comic and Toy Show for my consideration.  It's fortuitous timing:  my wife has a social event to attend that will occupy most of her day, leaving me at liberty to do a little comic and toy shopping, so here I am, standing in line at the PNE Forum at 11:00 AM on a seasonally cool and cloudy Saturday morning.  I don't really need to buy anything - to be honest, I feel that my recent Disneyland purchases have fulfilled my toy quota for 2022 - but I'm curious to see what the show has to offer.  I'm also a bit curious as to whether or not it would be a suitable venue for a future sale of the greater part of my book collection.

As a minor sidebar, I save about 10 or 15% off the ticket price by paying fifteen dollars cash as a walk-in.  The ticket's not actually cheaper that the online option, it's just that there are no fees associated with paying at the door, whereas the web site had a couple of mystery charges attached.  It's a shame it's not the other way round, I would have been happy to see that extra money go to the cheerful volunteer who stamps my wrist and wishes me a enjoyable visit to the show, but life is rarely that fair.

The Vancouver Comic and Toy Show is exactly what it says it is: comics and toys. There are a few outliers on display: a handful of t-shirts, one table of trading cards, a lunch box dealer, and some books, but really, people are here to buy comics and toys, and they're serious about it.  (It's also immediately obvious that this isn't the venue I want for selling my books.)

The crowd ranges from hard core collectors down to hopeful children with their parents, although a lot of the merchandise might appeal more to dad than junior in terms of when it originally hit the market.  The choice of dad over mom in that description is deliberate, it's very much a male crowd - not entirely, but female shoppers are definitely in the minority. There's a smattering of costumes, but only a few, again, it's not that kind of a show.

The dealers are equally serious.  There are a lot of professional retailers such as Langley-based Toy Traders, who have an extended multi-stall footprint, ranging down through smaller sellers to an individual with crossed arms and a grim poker face seated at an unlabeled table covered with with about 20 bagged comics. 

There's a certain freedom in attending a show like this without a mandate, it's like wandering around a grocery store when you don't need any food.  As such, I'm able to survey the booths without being captured by their contents, I don't need to stop and obsessively sort through a collection of Hot Wheels cars in hopes of finding the rare 1969 pink Volkswagen Beach Bomb for sale, complete with original surf boards.

If I had to choose one franchise that dominates the show, it would have to be Star Wars, both in terms of current products and various vintage toys from throughout the nearly 40 years of the franchise's existence.  But really, the broad range of toys from all eras that are laid out on the tables demonstrates that fame can be fleeting: yesterday's prized plaything quickly becomes today's abandoned interest - and tomorrow's collectable. 

The toys on display are broken down into little clusters of pop culture: Transformers, Star Wars, Star Trek, The World Wrestling Federation, He-Man and The Masters of the Universe, The Simpsons, Hot Wheels, and so on. There's even a display of the classic 12 inch GI Joe dolls from the 1960s, which probably don't even have prices on them:  as the saying goes, if you need to ask, you can't afford them.  Or, perhaps more accurately in the collecting environment, if you want them, you don't care how much they cost.  And there are countless Funko Pop! figures for sale - as their website says, everyone's a fan of something, and the range of choices on display reflects that fact.

It probably shouldn't be a surprise, but a lot of the toys for sale are loose or in plastic baggies rather than in any kind of of original packaging, let alone MOC or MIP (Mint On Card or Mint In Package).  I suppose this speaks favourably to the number of toys that children actually take out of the box to play with.  

There are any kinds of one-offs to balance out the mass market selections:  what appears to be a fully functional Pip-Boy from the Fallout gaming franchise; some quite expensive robots from 1970s Japanese animated series; an equally expensive Elvira statuette; what I think is a Mega Man arm cannon; Gumby and Pokey together in their original packages;  a small herd of Furbys; and a lonely copy of Beatrix Potter's Rabbit Nutkin, that I can't help but feel has just wandered into the wrong neighbourhood by accident. 

I'm a bit saddened to see that there are bins of comic books on sale for a dollar, it's a telling comment on the uncertain nature of the comic book collecting marketplace.  It's a bit tempting to take a look, I suspect that everything in those boxes is selling well below cover price, but fortunately my subscriptions to Marvel Unlimited and DC Infinite eliminate any need for physical copies.  And really, there's no need to add to my current burden of storage challenges if I can help it. 

In spite of the abundance of options, there actually isn't very much on display that speaks to me.  I stop briefly to look at a half dozen or so ranked Macross Valkyrie VF-1 Veritech fighters from the 1985 Robotech animated series, but they look a bit the worse for wear, they don't seem to have their gun pods, and as such I don't really need to spend $80 on one of them. 

I do find one table that catches my eye: it's a selection of art books and comic portfolios, with a massive limited edition copy of The Incal, a graphic novel series written by famed filmmaker Alejandro Jodorowsky and illustrated by French fantasy artist Jean Giraud, better known as Moebius.  However, my interest is quickly extinguished by the $995 price tag, that's quite a long way over my budget for this sort of purchase.

Just over an hour into the show, and the relatively narrow aisles between booths are virtually impassable.  At this point, I decide that I'm done and make my escape, without having made a single purchase. It's partially because I still haven't seen a lot of toys that match my specific range of interests - apparently I mine a narrow vein of fandom, in my own way* - but the real reason is that I'm just overwhelmed by the massive range of choices.  

Even so, I’m actually a bit pleased with myself for leaving empty handed.  Even if you put yourself on a diet, it’s not easy to go into a candy factory and come out without a single chocolate bar.

- Sid

* Admittedly, it's impossible to make a complete survey of what's for sale, but in my casual walk through of the show I don't see a single toy from my own little collection on display, although my Pop! Tron was probably in there someplace.
 

Fabulous Fantasy.

The fantastic, for me, is this beautiful straight road to wonder.

Steven Price (J. M. Miro)

It's not our usual date night routine, but tonight Karli and I attended an event at this year's Vancouver Writer's Fest, a conversation regarding historical fantasy featuring Canadian authors Guy Gavriel Kay and Steven Price (writing as J. M. Miro) and moderated by critic and and fellow author Rob Wiersema.   

If you're a reader, I strongly recommend that you try an event like this, regardless of your genre of interest.  It's a unique opportunity to hear authors talk about their work in their own voices, to speak to their inspirations and how their lives have informed their writing.

Guy Gavriel Kay has impeccable credentials in the world of fantasy writing.  At the age of 20, a family connection gained him an invitation from the J. R. R. Tolkien estate to travel to England and assist Christopher Tolkien in editing his father's unpublished writings in the world of The Lord of the Rings trilogy, with the results published as The Silmarillion.  His high fantasy trilogy, The Fionavar Tapestry, was published ten years later to universal acclaim.

Kay has a thoughtful, artistic style which has stood the test of time over his nearly 40 year writing career.  All the Seas of the World, his latest novel, continues his exploration of fantasy set in slightly altered historical settings, in which magic and the supernatural are part of the story.

Ordinary Monsters, set in Victorian England at the turn of the century, is Steven Price's first fantasy novel, and the first in what will be the Talents series.  He is better known for his poetry and his mainstream historical novels, By Gaslight and Lampedusa.

The two authors were well paired.  Kay's speaking style is almost professorial, measured and deliberate in the presentation of ideas based on almost four decades of writing.  By contrast, Price offered a more frank and immediate commentary on his first foray into the world of fantasy after a life-long love for the genre. 

Over the course of the evening, they shared a fascinating dialogue on the topic of writing and their personal approaches to it - albeit, in Guy Gavriel Kay's case, accompanied by the observations that "The research phase is by far my favourite part of writing. Actual writing is hell. Those who tell you they love it shouldn't be allowed to live, I feel very strongly about this."

When asked about his shift from the classic high fantasy of his first trilogy to historical settings, Kay explained that there were specific personal reasons that he wanted to make a statement in that style, after his experience with the Silmarillion. He had strong thoughts about "what was wrong, what was missing in fantasy at the time", specifically in North America, and The Fionavar Tapestry was his response.

After finishing his statement, he was ready to move on.  He acknowledged that there was pressure to repeat his previous success - “If something is successful, people want you to do it again," - but he was unwilling to repeat himself, or, as he succinctly put it, “I don’t believe in four volume trilogies.”

In his writing since then, he's found that his core interest in history and the past has provided him with a different tool, a different weapon in the arsenal to “keep you reading until three in the morning.”

“And it's worked!”

The fantasy elements that he weaves into his novels offer an alternative perspective on history, one which helps him to avoid what he refers to as the smugness of most historical fiction, the tendency to look down on the less advanced beliefs of the past.

Whereas for Steven Price, it’s not so much a question of genre, he sits down to tell the story he wants to tell, which may require a fantasy element as easily as a historical setting.  As he simply put it, "The fantastic, for me, is this beautiful straight road to wonder."

To end the evening, Wiersema asked the two authors for reading recommendations. Guy Gavriel Kay recommended Mary Renault's novels set in classical Greece, such as The King Must Die, or The Mask of Apollo, which he considered to be "beautifully written, transgressively written", and which he had first read when he was 12.

Steven Price suggested the book which had changed his life when he was 12, the fantasy classic The Wizard of Earthsea, by Ursula K. Leguin, which he described as "profound, timeless and beautiful".  For a more contemporary choice, he recommended Spear, a queer retelling of the Arthurian legend by Nicola Griffith.

For me, the most significant part of the evening came near the beginning, when Wiersema asked Price why, given the success of his more traditional fiction, he had turned to fantasy:

"I grew up reading fantasy novels - they're my home, it's where I come from.

I was a very lonely boy, I did not fit in - like so many writers and readers who have that experience – I didn’t fit in, I didn’t have a lot of friends, and I found my refuge in books.

This was in the 1980s before there was an internet, where you could find like minded kids – find your tribe, find your people.

And I took refuge in the fantasy novels of the 80s that I could find at the mall bookstore - Robert Jordan, Anne McCaffrey, Guy Gavriel Kay books, the blockbuster fantasy novels that were available at the time.

I was 12 years old - I decided a lot of things when I was 12 years old - most of them have never come to pass, but one of the things that I stuck with was that I wanted to write fantasy novels. That dream stayed with me all through my adolescence and I never told anybody."

He registered for a writing course in university, switched to poetry, and stopped reading fiction for a few years. Following the publication of his first collection of poems, he was exhausted, and needed something to read that was different from what he had been working on.

I went to the bookstore, went to the Fantasy section, and pulled down a book, I remember clearly that it was a Brandon Sanderson novel. 

I found this refuge again, this refuge that I had found as a boy.

At this point, he seemed to become self-conscious, muttered, "This is a really long answer", and quickly explained how reading fantasy stories to his children at night had provided the impetus for his novel before falling silent.

I wanted to stand up and shout, "Steven, it's okay, it's safe, you've found us! We're the tribe you couldn't find when you were 12, and that's why we're here tonight!"

So, Mr. Price, my warm congratulations to you, both on fulfilling the dream of a twelve-year old, and on finding your people. Here's hoping that your book will provide the same refuge that you found to a 12 year old who needs one, and that it helps them to find their home.

- Sid