Canny, explicable, and believable - is that so much to ask?

 

My previous post featured a picture of a sign in front of a local coffee shop, blaming extraterrestrial influences for their lack of drip coffee.  Now, before we go any further, I feel that I should clear up something about my opinion regarding the possibilities of alien intervention and its effects on coffee.

I don't believe a word of it.  Not a word.

Yes, when it comes to the entire category of what we will perhaps unfairly call "pseudo science", I'm a complete skeptic.  Sadly, in spite of a lifetime of science fiction and fantasy intake, some solid internal layer of disbelief has remained impenetrable, and as a result I don't believe in UFOs, ghosts, Chupacabra, crop circles, or any of the other X-Files entries that continue to resist rude and unseemly demands for documentation and evidence.

Truth to tell, that's my problem with all of it, the lack of hard evidence.  If once, just once, something would happen that left clear and irrefutable proof, that's all I ask. I don't want to hear about mysterious events that have no rational explanation - screw that, I want mysterious events with a clear and obvious explanation: alien visitors, psychic ability, pyramid power, whatever, doesn't matter, provided that there's proof.  In the real world, all we seem to have is this massive archive of blurry, out of focus, grainy and otherwise deficient images of fringe phenomena such as Bigfoot, the Loch Ness Monster, and large headed Greys from Arcturus, an archive that no one really takes seriously. It may well be that the truth is out there, but that's a sword that cuts in both directions: maybe the truth is that it's all false.

One of the great changes to the paradigm for the new Doctor Who episodes is that Earth-based plot lines don't just deal with three people in an isolated castle, but rather take place on a global scale and are witnessed by all of humanity.  A spaceship like an inverted mountain hovers over London and makes countless people stand on ledges and prepare to jump, they evacuate the city at Christmas due to several years of alien incidents, everyone on the planet looks like the Master for a few days, Earth gets shifted to another location, and everyone knows*, it's part of history. Now that's what I'm talking about!

Now, this is not to say that I don't think that there's life on other planets, I doubt very much that in the infinity of space we're the only planet that's managed to produce what we will charitably call intelligent life.  I just think that if extraterrestrials managed to cross the great gulf of interstellar space, they wouldn't waste their time with the sort of silliness that's been attributed to them.  In fact, if there are any aliens reading this (sit down, Laurie…) hey, it's time. Enough with the crop circles and anal probes, drop a shuttle craft down in front of the White House and send someone in to talk to Obama, okay? Seize the moment - after all, the next guy could be another George W. Bush.

- Sid

* Except Donna Noble.

Well now they've gone too far.

Damn aliens - I don't even drink coffee, and I think this is over the line.

- Sid

But did they find Nigel the Cat's Facebook page?

What was the name of your friend again, the one you met at Ryerson, the guy in front of the big tire?

- Brenda Allen, BCMEA

 I've just come back from a job interview, and to my surprise (and initial horror) I discovered that at least one of the three interviewers had read a goodly portion of this blog, and asked me questions about some of the postings. 

Now, to be honest, I haven't given a lot of thought to the fact that this blog is a public document.  About a year or so in, I put it under my full name because I wanted to point a prospective employer at it for writing samples (and didn't get the job, either because of or in spite of the blog) and never bothered to delete my last name.  I've actually derived a certain satisfaction from finding the blog when I google my name, but it's never occurred to me that someone else might do a search for my name and end up here.

Having recovered from the experience, I think that I'm going to leave my full name on the site regardless.  I can think of worse introductions to my personal life, and I take pride in some of the postings that I've done, there are three or four of them that are not bad at all. 

The final joke, as I save this as a draft, is that because I obviously need to treat the blog as being accessible to everyone, this posting will never see the light of day unless I get the job.  Terrible thing if my current manager stumbled across this and read that I'd been at a job interview.

- Sid

P.S. Are we all doing the math on this?

This Sleeping Satellite.

 

Did we fly to the moon too soon?

Did we squander the chance?
In the rush of the race
the reason we chase is lost in romance
and still we try
to justify the waste
for a taste of Man's greatest adventure.
Tasmin Archer, Sleeping Satellite

I found myself feeling a slightly bitter sense of irony while watching this evening's rerun of the Mythbusters Moon Hoax episode, given the changes to NASA's direction under Obama's new budget. "Hey, look, we really did go to the Moon before!" has become "Hey look, we really can't afford to go back!"

Now, this is not an entirely fair analysis of the new budget, and there are parts of it that make a lot of sense.  I've previously commented on the shortcomings of NASA's plans for future trips to the Moon and Mars, and the new plan does address some of those issues.*

The cumbersome "Apollo on steroids" Constellation program would be scrapped, essentially throwing away four years of work and nine billion dollars and leading to an indefinite delay in further plans to travel to the Moon or Mars, but perhaps allowing for a new direction in how the future of space exploration will develop.  The proposed new focus would be on funding for private sector development, and a shift toward more international collaboration on future exploration programs.  A portion of the budget would be aimed at developing new technologies to support that future exploration, although exactly when future missions would actually take place is still up in the air, so to speak.

This could either mark the beginning of a rational move toward the sort of global involvement in space exploration which has long been a staple of science fiction, or the beginning of the end as the private sector turns its back on extraterrestrial development for opportunities closer to home and the rest of the world turns it back on joint missions due to political conflicts.

Either way, I feel a bit like a child who has been told that there's no trip to Disneyland this year, what with Dad's recent unemployment and all - the family is just going to work on things around the house, and maybe when I'm a teenager we'll go to Europe with the neighbours. 

Is this sensible? Oh, quite probably it is. But would we remember how great it was the year we didn't go to Disneyland?  And will future generations look back with awe and respect at the year when we decided not to go to the Moon by 2020?

- Sid

* Although probably not because of my blog posting from 2007.

"One Ring to rule them all."

But I cordially dislike allegory in all its manifestations, and have always done so since I grew old and wary enough to detect its presence.

J.R.R. Tolkien, Foreword to the Second Edition, The Lord of the Rings

I first read J. R. R. Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings so long ago that I can't easily pin the date down in my head. I'm fairly certain it was in my first year high of school, when I would have been 13 or 14*. Oddly enough, my mother didn't own a copy, and I remember that for my first reading I signed the books out of the school library. I recall being mesmerized as I read it on the bus home, but fortunately the bus stopped to let people off without being prompted, so I wasn't in peril of missing my stop.

Apparently some people find it a daunting read, but I don't remember any difficulty getting into it. The irony is that I find it hard to read now due to sheer familiarity - I'm on my third set of copies, an honour which is shared only with Dune and Ringworld out of my library.**  I do sometimes advise less seasoned readers to take the same approach that the travellers do in the first book - when they stop for the night, so should you. (Even favourable critics admit that there's an awful lot of just walking in the first book.)

For the fantasy community at large, The Lord of the Rings is the elephant in the living room: you can't ignore it, and sooner or later you're going to have to talk about it. Tolkien's Ring has "ruled them all" for over 55 years. It has had an enormous influence, both good and bad, on authors in the genre; it's been subjected to intense analysis in a search for allegorical significance and original sources; it's been criticized for ruining the genre of Fantasy; and it has polarized its readership: people seem to either love it unreservedly or just can't stand it.

The discussion isn't helped by the fact that in some ways, discussing The Lord of the Rings is a bit like discussing the Bible. There's a certain gravitas associated with the text that demands respect whether you agree with it or not, although in this case The Silmarillion is probably closer to being the Old Testament for Middle Earth, complete with creation myth and the expulsion of a defeated "angel".

By comparison, The Hobbit reads more like a children's book in terms of tone and environment, as it was certainly intended to be. Many of the elements of Middle Earth that we see in The Lord of the Rings aren't mentioned at all, but as with its successor, the sense of monumental events observed through the eyes of humble participants is strong. And all the seeds for The Lord of the Rings are planted: the races of Dwarves, Elves, Orcs and Men; Gandalf the enigmatic and powerful wizard; Gollum and the Ring; and the threat of a distant evil. And hobbits, of course, who proceed to steal the scene from "the great and the wise" for the next three volumes.

The Lord of the Rings would be a very different story without the hobbits and the humanizing - so to speak - role that they play. The hobbits provide the emotional content of the story - is Gandalf ever hungry? Does Legolas become frightened? There are certainly cases where the more heroic characters fall prey to fear or despair, or feel pleasure or excitement, but for the most part the hobbits are the touchstones of basic feelings and sensations for the reader. It's not an accident that at least one hobbit ends up in each of the major plotlines as the tale unfolds: Merry with the Rohirrim, Pippin at Minas Tirith, and of course Sam and Frodo with the Ring.

Tolkien’s final master touch in this (and the only omission in the movie that I regret) is the Scouring of the Shire. This final capstone on Tokien’s intricate edifice allows us to see the hobbits in perspective, in their own environment and amongst their peers. This is Tolkien's chance to shows us how the four companions have been changed by their experiences: Merry and Pippin, now warriors and leaders; Sam, matured and his own man; and of course, Frodo, whose trials have left him with nothing but compassion for Sharkey/Saruman and his servants.

 

Frodo’s acceptance of a burden which will mean his doom, coupled with his transcendent end, his trip to the Western Lands with Gandalf and the last of the elves, may be what leads some people toward comparisons to Christ when discussing his character. For myself, I can’t see Frodo as Jesus because I find that Frodo’s tragedy is of a completely different nature than that of Christ. Frodo’s unspoken sin is that in the final trial, he fails: he succumbs to the Ring. (One has to wonder if this gnaws at him as he is publicly celebrated and showered with honours.)  Frodo never recovers from his journey - for the rest of the book Frodo is almost a spectator, no longer really involved in the events that take place.

Tolkien claims that his intent in the story is not allegorical, but people persist in attempting to uncover the "meaning" behind The Lord of the Rings. The situation isn't helped by the historical milieu in which the books originate - it is difficult to ignore the potential associations for a book written during WWII that deals with an epic struggle between good and evil.  Tolkien directly rebuts this view in the foreword to the second edition by describing how the story would have unfolded if it were based on the events of the war, and chillingly concludes, "In that conflict both sides would have held hobbits in hatred and contempt:  they would not long have survived even as slaves."

If you only have the movies by which to judge Tolkien's magnum opus, I think it's fair to say that Peter Jackson does a good job of conveying the feel and tone of the books, regardless of minor alterations and omissions in the plot. It couldn't have been an easy task - for example, the Balrog, the creature that pulls Gandalf into the abyss, is described only in flashes of detail:  a sword and flaming whip, darkness and shadows, and a streaming mane that kindles into flame.

Did Mr. Jackson get it completely right? Perhaps not, but if I had to summarize my reaction to the entire trilogy of movies, I would say that they accurate portray the scale of the books, the feeling of witnessing events taking place on a stage of epic proportions, balanced out by the involvement of the hobbits and their humble viewpoint. He was obviously hampered by his reliance on humans for casting purposes, although, as the character of Gollum demonstrates, it's only a matter of time...

- Sid

* My birthday is at the end of September, so it could be either one.

** Although probably not for long, there are a lot of potential candidates that are on their second copies. Sad how a paperback just doesn't hold up after 30 years or so.

Ten Plot Twists Looking for a Movie.

It appears that I'm not the only person who has found the plot line and character development of Avatar to be lacking - innumerable critics have praised the movie for its visual brilliance while decrying its elementary plotline and character development, and many have commented on the resemblance of its storyline to that of Dances With Wolves.

Personally, I have always felt that non-participant criticism is inappropriate, so I decided that it was unfair to take cheap shots at Avatar's shortcomings in the areas of plot and character without at least offering a few ideas of my own. So, in the great tradition of science-fiction in Hollywood, I present the following sequel to my original posting:

10 Things That James Cameron Could Have Done in Avatar.

1. "The thing about aliens is, they're alien."

Wouldn’t it be more interesting if in some way (any way!) the Na’vi are not as closely based on Terran tribal cultures – or possibly based on less mainstream cultural concepts?   Let’s see...what if they eat each other? Cannibalism is certainly a known factor in a variety of tribal cultures here, why not there? This was one of the key elements in Robert A. Heinlein’s Stranger in a Strange Land, the idea of a human adopted by aliens (Martians in this case) and ending up with a completely different set of morals and beliefs, including a full acceptance of the idea of eating the dead as a form of reverence.

For that matter, what if they eat humans? After all, at that point it’s not cannibalism, although I’m not sure what it would be called - so far we haven’t had to define a term that dealt with eating aliens – but it would have that “gain-the-manna-of-your-enemy-by-eating-them” flavour*.

Perhaps they practise ritualized incest? Or ritualized sex with their horses? What if eating fresh dragon guano was part of their digestive cycle?  Suppose they’d demanded that Sully chop off his extra fingers to match their cultural norm?  Would it be as tempting for him if the Na'vi reproductive process involved him fertilizing the eggs that Neytiri left in the mating pond two days previously?

The idea that I’m chasing with all of these examples is something that would distance the Na’vi from humanity. As it is, other than some gung-ho graduation ceremonies involving dragon wrestling, and things like getting down from two hundred foot tall trees by jumping off the nearest branch and bouncing off leaves on the way down, there’s nothing in the Na’vi cultural matrix that comes across as unappealing. I would have been more impressed if Sully had been forced to overcome any kind of personal taboo - if there had been anything, well, alien about the aliens.


2. Rule 34, anyone? 
"I thought Jim did a really good job of putting Neytiri together. I thanked him for making her look hot. I mean, Neytiri is very sexy and lean with a really cute bod. I'm in pretty good shape, but I don't look that buff."

- Zoe Saldana

And while we're at it, let's make them a lot less physically attractive, shall we?  No one ever questions Sully's desire to join the Na'vi, and based on the quote from Ms. Saldana, why would they?  But what if the Na'vi look like toads, or praying mantises, or the spawn of Great C'thulhu?  The scene where Sully and his alien love actually meet in person and prove that their love transcends their physical bodies would have been far more impressive if Neytiri looked like a cross between road kill and a lobster.


3. Sully is a junky - discuss.
If you had a friend or co-worker who stopped shaving, bathing and eating regular meals, you'd wonder about his urine test results. In this case, Sully is an avatar addict - and what do his fellow humans do?  Urge him on in the interests of science!  What if they'd pulled the plug instead, on the basis that Sully is slowly killing himself by spending all of his time hooked up to his blue alter ego?

4. Avatars:  twelve for ten cents, or a dime a dozen.
After Colonel Quaritch's comment about the Na'vi being hard to kill, it's sort of surprising that they are so willing to adopt Sully, isn't it?  But if avatars were cheap and easy to produce, Sully could have had his throat slit a few times (with accompanying trauma) before managing to figure out a way to make an impression on the natives.  Think of it as a sort of weird homage to Groundhog Day.


5. Zombies are very popular these days.
Or, let's not have the avatars be clones at all.  Let's just say that's what they are, for PR purposes.  But instead, heck, why not just grab a few natives, dig out their brains, and put in an interface system?  That would have to be cheaper than building the goddamn things from scratch, wouldn't it?  But imagine the horror at finding out that small pink aliens have taken over the body of your brother, or your sister, or your friend, or your lover...

No, wait, that's already been done for Invasion of the Body Snatchers, never mind.  Except this time, we'd be the hideous body snatching invaders.


6. "Nobody goes home." **
For that matter, why put in an interface system?  If we can posit a technology that allows for a one-to-one experiential and sensory interface with another brain, why not just pull the human brains and drop them into the Na'vi?  Make all the controllers crippled volunteers like Sully, who are willing to give up their humanity for a chance to dig their toes in the dirt.

Or maybe don't tell the controllers that it's a one way trip...after all, the corporation running things is apparently unconcerned by issues of ethics.


7. The Ghost in the Machine.
What if Sully's avatar starts acting on its own? The avatars appear to be comatose when not linked to the human operator, but what if Sully logs in to find that he's already running down a jungle trail? What if his repeated addict-level usage creates a ghost mind in the avatar? This way Sully ends up on both sides, and the final mano-a-mano battle can be between Sully the committed gung ho marine with his new legs, and Sully the newest member of the Omaticaya tribe. 


8. Picture if you will...
Okay, I'm sorry, this is really a Twilight Zone plot, but what if one of the Na'vi is actually an avatar being controlled by ANOTHER alien species?  Or what if one of the humans is an avatar controlled by aliens studying us?
 

9. "I'm not bad, I'm just drawn that way."
There's a very brief scene in the movie that shows Parker Selfridge, the base administrator, as played with scenery-chewing gusto by Giovanni Ribisi, sitting in his office staring at a piece of the ore that's responsible for everything.  Behind him, there on the shelf, is a model of the lunar lander, and there's a Na'vi bow hanging over his head and hunting spears in the case behind him.

Selfridge is portrayed as a complete corporate profit whore, without concern for the ecology or the people of Pandora.  But is this the office of such a man?  This could be the office of a man who has idealized the concept of space exploration for his entire life, who sees himself following in the footsteps of pioneers like Armstrong, a man who is fascinated by the idea of an alien race and an alien planet - but who is also forced to brutalize that race and that planet with strip mining, bulldozers, and explosives.  Wouldn't it have been interesting to find out that he hates everything that he's been forced to do in the name of Earth? 


10. "I wish I knew how to quit you."
Finally, let's break completely with tradition.  Let's have Neytiri the love interest get killed saving Sully, and let's have Sully seek physical comfort from her original fiance, Tsu'tey the warrior. Or perhaps not - after all, if people don't like the resemblance that Avatar has to Dances With Wolves, they're probably not interested in borrowing from Brokeback Mountain, either.

- Sid

* Sorry, "flavour" may be in bad taste here. In fact, "bad taste" may be in bad taste here.

** The astute fan will recognize this line from another James Cameron movie - there's a lot more of that sort of reference in these postings than most of you realize. 

Everybody put your hands in the air...

In the coming months, the likes of Microsoft, Hitachi and major PC makers will begin selling devices that will allow people to flip channels on the TV or move documents on a computer monitor with simple hand gestures. 

Manipulating the screen with the flick of the wrist will remind many people of the 2002 film “Minority Report” in which Tom Cruise moves images and documents around on futuristic computer screens with a few sweeping gestures. The real-life technology will call for similar flair and some subtlety. Stand in front of a TV armed with a gesture technology camera, and you can turn on the set with a soft punch into the air. Flipping through channels requires a twist of the hand, and raising the volume occurs with an upward pat. If there is a photo on the screen, you can enlarge it by holding your hands in the air and spreading them apart and shrink it by bringing your hands back together as you would do with your fingers on a cellphone touch screen.

- The New York Times, January 11, 2010

In response, we present the following cautionary quote from The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy:

For years radios had been operated by means of pressing buttons and turning dials; then as the technology became more sophisticated the controls were made touch sensitive - you merely had to brush the panels with your fingers; now all you had to do was wave your hand in the general direction of the component and hope.  It saved a lot of muscular expenditure of course, but you had to sit infuriatingly still if you wanted to keep listening to the same programme.

And is it just me or is there something contradictory about the phrase "soft punch"?

- Sid

I know, I say "decaying flesh" like it's a bad thing.

Here's a snapshot of my niece Jody without vampire teeth or zombie makeup - I just wanted to establish that she's a perfectly normal looking and quite attractive young woman when not smeared with blood and/or decaying flesh.

- Sid

Dimensionality - and lack thereof.

On Thursday afternoon I went to see Avatar, the must-see movie of the moment, and I strongly recommend that anyone planning to see it should take advantage of the 3-D option if it's available in your area.  (I'm sorry, Dorothy, neither Trail nor Castlegar seem to be offering anything other than plain old vanilla 2-D.)

Avatar deals with the discovery of valuable mineral resources on Pandora, a distant moon which is inhabited by a native race called the Na'vi.  In order to more easily negotiate with the Na'vi in Pandora's unbreathable atmosphere, artificial life forms - the "avatars" of the title - are created from a combination of human and native DNA. The incredibly expensive avatars can only be linked with the contributors of their human DNA, so when one of the controllers dies in an accident, his twin brother, paraplegic ex-Marine Jake Sully, is invited to take his place.

After his avatar becomes lost in the jungle, Sully is reluctantly rescued by one of the ten-foot-tall blue natives, a female hunter named Neytiri.  Her father, the chief of the Omaticaya tribe, decides that Neytiri will train Sully to see if one of the "sky people" can be made to understand their ways.

During his apprenticeship with the tribe, Sully provides information about them to the military presence on the moon, but also falls in love with both Pandora and Neytiri.  When the military decides to forcibly remove the tribe from their home above a prime deposit of minerals, Sully is forced to choose between his divided loyalties, and goes to war for Pandora.

As well he should - after all, Pandora is the real star of Avatar.  Writer/director James Cameron hired botanists, physicists, linguists and archeologists to make his world a fully rounded and detailed creation. The resulting multicoloured, bioluminescent computer-generated biosphere with its neurally linked flora and fauna, its flying dragons and floating mountains, is a visual feast that has to be seen to be fully appreciated.  No written description would do it justice.  The 3-D element certainly adds to the experience of Pandora, but even without that bit of icing on the cake, the cake is very tasty. 

However, I have to be honest - don't go to Avatar looking for similar innovation in plot or character.  I was disappointed to see that no cliché was left unturned in the writing of the screenplay, and the inhabitants of Cameron's world don't benefit from the same creativity and brilliance used in the development of that world.

The soldier who goes from spying on the Na'vi to fighting for them; the heartless, profit-oriented corporate manager; the chieftain's daughter who goes from disdain for the alien interloper to love; the brutal military leader who views the deaths of women and children as just part of a good day's work - I kept waiting for one character, any character to do something unexpected!

The movie is utterly and completely predictable: no ambiguity, no subtext, no surprises.  Everything happens exactly as you expect it to - as an example, the second we were introduced to Tsu'Tey, the suspicious and unfriendly Na'vi hunter who is supposed to marry Neytiri, I knew he was as dead as if he had put on a red shirt and beamed down with Captain Kirk.

I don't want to suggest that Avatar is a bad movie, it's certainly very watchable and enjoyable, but I was disappointed to find it to be such a simple movie.  I admire James Cameron's exploration of the 3-D effect in Avatar - now if only he'd used a similar technique to keep the plot and characters from being quite so one-dimensional.

- Sid

Dramatis Personae.

The holiday season is traditionally a time of family and friends, and as we come to the end of 2009, I felt that it was appropriate to introduce the various people to whom I refer in these postings, and thank them for their contributions. The list is in alphabetical order to avoid any complaints of favouritism - although, come to think of it, Chris Plested IS my favourite nephew.

Colin Campbell

I met my good friend Colin on my first day of classes at Ryerson. Ironically, our initial rapport was based on mutual distaste for a raving hard-core comic book fan, if memory serves. Fortunately, over the intervening 26 years we've found other things to talk about.

I think of Colin as being an old-school science fiction and fantasy fan like myself, although his first love is music - come to think of it, he should start a music blog.  He and my sister are the only other people I know who have been members of the Science Fiction Book of the Month Club, and in fact I believe that they're both still current, whereas I'm lapsed. (After you pay to have your book collection moved from Toronto to Vancouver, you too may have second thoughts about purchasing hardcovers, no matter how good the price is.)

Colin has prompted many of these postings, and occupies a unique position by being one of the few people who has managed to consistently give me books that I didn't own and actually wanted to. And just for the record, he's larger than he looks in the above picture.

Dorothy Hatto (née Plested)

My older sister Dorothy could probably have written this entire blog - no, not this posting, I mean the whole thing. I don't think that she would want to, and she'd certainly have some different observations to make, but I'm confident that her level of knowledge is equal to mine. She's the person I call when I can't come up with an obscure piece of genre knowledge on my own - I know the rest of the world uses Google, but you can't go to Google and say, "What was the title of that book that Mother owned, the old fantasy one about the vacationing English children and the Sidhe?"

Like myself, Dorothy is the owner of a substantial stack of science fiction and fantasy books. I have high hopes of eventually putting up something from her on the site - there have been rumours of work on a guest posting about Ace Doubles.

Jody Hatto

Long-time readers have already been introduced to my niece Jody in my Demon Child posting, but you may not have made the connection to her mother being the Dorothy who makes a comment now and then. Jody is my source for what you might call real-world manifestations: zombie walks, vampire pictures, and undead centerfolds. This isn't something we've planned, I just read her Facebook updates and I have all the inspiration I need.

Alan Murrell

I have to be honest, my good friend Alan is sort of an honourable mention on this list - I'm fairly certain that he's never read the blog, and in fact he's not much of a fan of reading generally. However, he gets full credit for continuing to give me the very welcome Amazon.ca gift certificates which have prompted a couple of postings - not to mention the ongoing suspicion that somewhere, there's a well-hidden painting of Alan which is looking older and older every year...

Chris Plested

My nephew Chris, aka Brakard the Warrior, Brakard the Druid, Brakard the Cleric (you get the idea), is not a frequent flyer here, but he's been an excellent source of information for things like MMORPGs*, and we've had a lot of great discussions about how they SHOULD be doing things for all these online gaming worlds. He's also been good enough as to provide me with what you might call walking tours of a number of games, just so that I could get a feeling for how they worked.

Chris first earned his status as my favourite nephew by giving me a copy of Starcraft as a birthday gift. For those of you unfamiliar with Starcraft, it's a real-time story-oriented science fiction strategy game.** I tried to invent something very similar when I was about 13, but was held back by the lack of home computers in 1974. Fortunately, the game developers at Blizzard did a much better job than I ever could have.

Laurie Smith

Laurie Smith - fitness guru, personal trainer, and part-time pyromaniac - is pretty much a complete non-fan, and as such provides a useful yardstick for deciding which topics require further explanation. (Also know as the "Should I Explain This For Laurie?" or SIETFL test.)

However, she does have other credentials in the field. She claimed to be a visiting space alien for a couple of years, as far as I know her spacesuit helmet still has a broken visor, she considers most gatherings of more than two people to strongly resemble the Star Wars cantina scene, and due to a fortuitous typo has once claimed be the owner and operator of Sith Training, thereby answering the question of where Darth Maul picked up his skills.

I myself have the unique honour of having very briefly been Mr. Smith when we were checking into a hotel together, but that's another story. And really, there are far too many stories that start with a couple claiming to be Mr. and Mrs. Smith checking into a hotel, so we'll stop there.

Chris Sumner

It's surprising how many of these posts have started out as conversations with Chris at the Frog and Firkin on Friday night! In addition to being a good Friday night conversation-and-drinks friend, Laurie's brother Chris is also a fan of fantasy and science fiction - maybe more fantasy than SF - and has provided me with useful input on a lot of genre-related topics that I'm not interested in myself, like Harry Potter or World of Warcraft. Now if I could only persuade him to stop ordering drinks with silly names...


And, bringing up the rear - probably for a very good reason - the gentlemen (and I use the term very loosely) who were the inspiration for the whole idea, the Campbell Brothers:

Thanks for your input, everyone, and I hope you all have a happy 2010. Just think, we'll finally be able to send that mission out to Jupiter to find out what happened to Dave and HAL.

One more step into the future...

- Sid

* I'm never sure how far some of these acronyms have penetrated into the real world - does everyone know about Massively Multiplayer Online Role Playing Games? I remember when their name was MUD...Multi-User Dungeons, that is.

** Sorry, but this does not make it a RTSOSFSG, just a RTSG.

No wonder no one wants to buy hardcovers.

My good friend Alan in Toronto was once again kind enough to send me an Amazon.ca gift certificate as a seasonal gift, and as a result I've spent some time on their web site looking at potential purchases. Now, for those of you unfamiliar with Amazon's approach to these things, the site keeps track of what you've purchased or looked at and suggests other things that you might like.

Since my last purchase on the site was a collection of DC's Sandman comics as a gift for my other friend Colin, the suggestions were loaded heavily toward British author Neil Gaiman. Gaiman's brilliant scripts made Sandman a critical success, making it the only comic to both win the World Fantasy Award and appear on the New York Times Best Seller list.

Gaiman may well be the premier fantasy author of our time. His writing defines the modern face of the genre - his legendary work on Sandman, his gritty urban fantasies such as Neverwhere, his lighter, more traditional works like Stardust and less easily categorized pieces such as American Gods or Coraline - everything Gaiman creates seems to be spun from moonbeams and silver.


Now, fond though I am of Mr. Gaiman, when I saw that the "preferred" version of Neverwhere - presumably the equivalent of the director's cut - was selling for a staggering $151.20, I had to wonder if success was starting to go to his head. I mean really - a hundred and fifty bucks? Well, actually two hundred and forty bucks, $151.20 is the reduced price. (How kind of Amazon to reduce the cost so that it's not out of reach to the man or woman on the street.)

I love books, but come on, let's be rational about this, Neil! Could you look me in the eye and convince me that whatever the extra material is in Neverwhere Ltd., it really makes it worth $142.21 more than my $8.99 paperback edition? Really? If so, I expect that book stores will have display copies chained shut - after all, you wouldn't want people like me sneaking in and getting in forty or fifty dollars worth of reading during lunch break.

- Sid

From the sublime to the ridiculous.

If I had the time and a hammer, I would track down every copy of that program and smash it.

- George Lucas

My neighbour across the hall, whose name I still don't know after six years here, has a piano in her apartment. Normally she plays classical pieces, but today, since it is Christmas Day, she is playing Christmas carols - quietly, pensively, almost sadly. Perhaps she too is spending the day on her own.

However, it's important to make the best of these situations - the silver lining in today's cloud is that I have ample time for the research required for this year's seasonally appropriate posting. I spotted my opportunity for this posting several months ago on another blog: a download link for a VHS-to-digital transfer of the infamous Star Wars Holiday Special.

"Infamous" is really the only appropriate adjective. It's generally accepted that this 1978 spinoff program (read "attempt to cash in" for spinoff if you want to be completely accurate) is one of the worst pieces of entertainment in the history of the television, or perhaps just in history, period.

The plot - perhaps "excuse" is the word I'm looking for here - for the show is simple: Chewbacca is attempting to return to his family on Kashyyyk in order to celebrate Life Day with them, Life Day being a celebration of love and family which coincidentally involves a decorated tree. In practice, the plot is only a shaky framework for what's really just a one-hour variety special stretched out to two hours with the addition of clumsily over-dubbed stock footage from the movie, far too much unintelligible roared dialogue between the members of Chewbacca's family, and Art Carney acting as the improbable hero of the hour.

The program features unforgettable* moments such as Harvey Korman in alien drag as the four-armed female host of a cooking program, explaining how to cook bantha rump; Diahann Carroll as a singing interactive holographic soft-core sex symbol; Jefferson Starship as holographic musicians; Bea Arthur as the singing proprietor of the cantina on Tatooine (thankfully without any sexual connotations); and, of course, Princess Leia singing the Life Day hymn, which coincidentally has exactly the same tune as the Star Wars theme music.

(Just for the record, it looks as if Carrie Fisher is actually singing the hymn - I had no idea that she'd inherited her parents' pipes.)


The only part of the show which was well received was the short animated segment, created by Toronto's Nelvana animation studio, which marked the first appearance of bounty hunter Boba Fett. Fans of animation, Star Wars, or both will recognize in this eleven minute piece an early version of the artistic style used for the Droids animated series featuring C-3PO and R2D2, which ran for a single season in 1985.

The most horrifying thing that I discovered in the process of researching the various details of the special is that it was ranked at #3 in "The Five Goofiest Moments Of The Star Wars Mythos" by Star Wars Magazine. #3? I have to admit that I didn't look up the reference - I think that I will sleep better tonight not knowing the two things that were considered to be worse.

Merry Christmas, everyone.

- Sid

* It's generally accepted that all parties involved have tried to forget but failed miserably.

Postscript:  I'm adding this on February 25th, 2010 - for no good reason that I can figure out, this post and this post alone has become a magnet for spam comments!  Apparently Blogger is a little draconic when it comes to blogs with a heavy concentration of spam, so I've been trying to delete them as fast as they appear, but I have to wonder:  why this post? Is it because it uses the phrase "Star Wars" four times?

Damn...five, now.

Post-postscript:  okay, I give up, this is becoming disconcerting.  According to my e-mail, someone put a spam comment on here, but it's invisible.  The comment count has gone up by one, but I can't find the comment.  So I've disabled commenting for this post out of self-defense.

Extremely guilty pleasures.

It all started out innocently, honest it did. I was disposing of extra images in the Picasa picture album for the blog, and there they were, the pictures from last year's Major Matt Mason posting. Really, I was just curious to see just how ridiculously expensive the figures were now when I logged onto eBay and did a search.

And trust me, when I put a bid down on one of the figures, I never thought I'd win the damn auction! Good grief, it's for an original 1966 blue stripe version of the Major complete with original helmet and Cat Trac, it's got to be worth more than, oh, let's put a $50 cap on the bid, ha, that should be the top bid for about ten minutes.

Imagine my surprise (and mild embarrassment) when 6 days and $43.02 later, I found myself the proud owner of six ounces of rubber and wire from the 1960's, accessorized with 15 cents worth of molded plastic.

But it seemed that my unexpected opportunity to reclaim childhood memories was doomed - four long weeks went by without a sign of the parcel: no notes from the post office, nothing. The seller reassured me that the items had been shipped within three days, but someone could have walked here with the package in a month for heaven's sake, obviously something had gone amiss.

On Monday night I trotted down to the building laundry room to drop in a load of darks (having missed my usual Saturday morning laundry due to a weekend trip to Toronto) and to my mingled relief, curiousity and anger, there the Major was, dumped on a shelf beside the laundry sorting table. He and his helmet were in a Ziploc™ bag, his Cat Trac was loose but undamaged, and everything was exactly in the condition described in the eBay listing,

What happened, I wonder? Obviously the [expletive deleted] postie just left the package at my door rather than returning it to the post office to wait for my signature, and just as obviously someone nicked the package and opened it. And then...had an attack of conscience? Decided they didn’t really need a 6 inch rubber man? Got caught by their mother? But why leave it in the laundry room instead of returning it to my door?

Regardless, I’m pleased by the positive conclusion to the story, if somewhat baffled by the circumstances that led up to it.

The Major Matt Mason dolls were painted rubber moldings over wire armatures – think Gumby in a spacesuit, if that helps. The down side of this style of construction is that the wire involved has a relatively short life span in the hands of an imaginative and playful child, who will probably subject the joints to the kind of stress and extension normally associated with the Spanish Inquisition.

Once the wire is broken, the rubber expansion joints are left with nothing else for support and can easily tear. As a result, eBay listings for Major Matt Mason figures tend to cite number of broken joints, and in a few cases one-armed or one-legged astronauts are offered for sale.* As you can see in the photos, my Major is a little bit on the grimy side, and his paint has peeled off in a couple of spots. However, all of his limbs are there, his wire joints are good, and he still has his original helmet, which I gather is unusual.

I don’t remember to what extent my original Matt Mason figures had lost their paint – I did see one for sale on eBay with no paint at all on the black rubber, and to be honest I thought that the all-black spacesuit looked somewhat cool, sort of a ninja astronaut look. Not practical, though – NASA's spacesuits are white in order to reflect heat. I think that the multi-coloured space suits of the original line of figures were based around the idea of visibility on the Moon in case of accidents, an idea which shows up semi-regularly in science fiction.

I can see why the various collectors' websites advise soaking the figures in a dilute solution of cleanser for 20 minutes before attempting a gentle cleaning (very gentle - everyone agrees that the paint is a bit fragile). My first attempt at wiping away the stains with a dampened soft cloth was almost pointless: imagine almost 45 years of grimy little juvenile fingers rubbing filth into the rubber and acrylic. (Or don't if you have a weak stomach.)

I find myself wondering as to the exact circumstances that led to the Major ending up in the laundry room. I picture this sort of Toy Story scenario, wherein he finds himself held captive but plans a desperate escape. Choosing his moment, he grimly snaps down his visor and climbs onto his scarlet Cat Trac to make a courageous dash for freedom, but finally succumbs to lack of oxygen and tumbles unconscious from his seat...

You know it's a good toy when it can still inspire your imagination 43 years after it was made.

- Sid

 

* There's a 1949 short story by Ray Bradbury titled Kaleidoscope where an orbiting spaceship blows up and the spacesuited crew survives, but is scattered in all directions by the force of the explosion. Some fall into the atmosphere and burn up, and some are hurled into the depths of space. One unfortunate finds his vector to be opposite that of a meteor cloud, and as jagged hunks of iron amputate his extremities, a rather brutal safety feature in his spacesuit allows him to close an iris that stops the bleeding and seals the joint. First his left hand...SNICK...then his right foot...SNICK... Perhaps this is how damaged Major Matt Mason figures explain their, ah, shortcomings in bar conversations.

Adumbration, solecism, plangent, phthisic.

From: Sid
To: Chris
Subject: MIA
Received: Thursday, December 17, 2009, 7:45 PM
Just in case, I thought I should warn you that I won’t be at the Frog and Firkin tomorrow night, your sister has evinced a desire to purchase Chinese food for two.

From: Chris
To: Sid
Subject: Re: MIA
Received: Thursday, December 17, 2009 9:04 pm
Evinced - a word not commonly used.

How often are you able to cite the exact source from which you learned a word?

In this case, it's Jack Vance's Hugo and Nebula* award-winning 1966 short novel The Last Castle, which contains the following bit of narrative:

"After the council meeting I descended immediately to the storeroom where the Mek was confined. It lacked nutriment; I gave it syrup and a pail of water, which it sipped sparingly, then evinced a desire for minced clams. I summoned kitchen help and sent them for this commodity and the Mek ingested several pints."

I probably read The Last Castle for the first time in the early 70's (my copy certainly looks like I've owned it for that long, and I mentally associate it with about that point in my life) and I have no idea why the picture of a corduroy-faced alien worker expressing his longing for shredded shellfish stuck in my mind. But it did, and thus we increase our word power, as Reader's Digest used to say.

By the way, if you're looking for something a bit different in the fantasy and science fiction reading department, Jack Vance is a fabulous choice. As demonstrated above, his vocabulary is both recondite and pedantic - his writing style is formal and slightly archaic, and his sense of humour can be described in exactly the same terms.

Some science fiction authors invent bizarre and improbable technologies, some create strange and unusual aliens, others are planet builders. Vance's books tend to have a backdrop of convoluted and elaborate social structures: societies based around odd practises, peculiar rituals, and the observation of unique traditions. As an example, here's a description of the tribal group called Khors from Vance's The Dirdir, the third novel of the Tschai, Planet of Adventure series:

"Remember," Anacho warned, "the Khors are a sensitive people. Do not speak to them; pay them no heed except from necessity, in which case you must use the fewest possible words. They consider garrulity a crime against nature. Do not stand upwind of a Khor, nor if possible downwind; such acts are symbolic of antagonism. Never acknowledge the presence of a woman; do not look toward their children – they will suspect you of laying a curse; and above all ignore the sacred grove."

Sadly, sometimes Vance's fascination with the oddities of language and society take precedence over plot, and I have to admit that for me, some of his work falls a bit flat because of that problem. But nothing can diminish the brilliance with which Vance builds his dream palaces, and that brilliance has garnered him respect and praise from fans, critics and fellow authors for over 60 years.

In addition to The Last Castle and the Tschai series, Vance's best known works would be the Dying Earth stories, The Dragon Masters, and the Demon Princes series. I suspect a lot of it is out of print, Vance was born in 1916 and hasn't been very productive recently, but if you're willing to spend a little time in used book stores I have no doubt that you'll be able to find a suitable selection. I'll warn you in advance, though: you may find yourself evincing a desire for a copy of the Oxford Concise Dictionary in order to fully appreciate Jack Vance.

- Sid

* This is the equivalent of winning an Oscar and a Golden Globe in the real world.

Digital Reading Part Two: Virtually Free

I find that there's an odd fragility to the concept of the digital book. Short of a big fire, my physical library is almost immortal. Parts of it are more worn around the edges than others, but there's a good chance that even with wear and tear a lot of those books will be around after I'm dead.

The digital library? Back up often - one drive crash and you're wiped out. Even more of an issue is obsolescence. If you hitch your literary wagon to a particular proprietary format, you may find that it's unreadable in a few years as support for the technology vanishes. As an example, I have graphics files from ten years ago that I would have trouble opening right now due to changes in format, version, and in some cases because the software developer went out of business and their product was never updated to the current operating system. Now imagine the same problems with your ebook version of The Lord of the Rings.

However, many of the same comments would apply to digital music, and it hasn't stopped most of the world from switching over to iPods. And it would seem that ebooks are going to be the next big thing in the marketplace, as demonstrated by the plethora of overly-expensive (in my opinion) digital readers that are popping up in the stores. But high-priced hardware is only part of the problem. After all, buying a reader is just the first step - you'll probably want some books too...

Logic - a sadly flawed device for analyzing these situations - would suggest that ebooks would be cheaper than their physical cousins. To my astonishment, nothing could be further from the truth. Amazon's Kindle bookstore lists digital bestsellers ranging from $7.00 to $12.00 and claims this as a saving because the hardcover editions sell for about $26. Unfortunately, not quite as much of a saving when compared to the paperback that most of us would buy anyway.

Surprisingly, there's actually an acceptable number of options online for those of us in search of less expensive virtual reading, some of which are aimed directly at the science fiction and fantasy audience.

Topping the list is the venerable (by internet standards) institution of Project Gutenberg, which actually dates back to 1971 and got its start on the University of Illinois mainframe. Gutenberg is based on a very simple idea: free text files of books that have passed into the public domain.

For a genre reader with a taste for the classics, Gutenberg is a bonanza: the Oz books; the complete Edgar Rice Burroughs, including the Tarzan and Mars books; the text of Karel Čapek's play Rossum's Universal Robots, which introduced the term "robot" to the world; Skylark and Lensman books by E. E. "Doc" Smith (staples of my early experience with SF); classic fantasy by Lord Dunsany and Robert E. Howard; stories by H. Beam Piper; novels by Andre Norton - the list goes on and on, and it's all free.

For the reader whose preferences are a bit more modern, Baen Books offers a surprising selection of free books at the Baen Free Library, a basic web site that offers over a hundred different novels for download: mostly SF with a leavening of fantasy. Updates are irregular, but the books listed would make up a pretty good foundation for anyone's ebookshelf. There's also a site called The Fifth Imperium that offers downloads of Baen's free promo CDs, which include ancillary material such as cover artwork or interviews as well as the stories.

The Manybooks site falls between Baen and Gutenberg, with its base offering coming from Gutenberg but in a wider selection of formats, and more current additional material. Free Speculative Fiction Online has a reasonable selection as well, although perhaps with a bias toward short stories over novel-length works.

A Google search reveals dozens of other sites, albeit some that may offer texts of dubious provenance. There used to be a thriving newsgroup community dedicated to bootleg books, and although I have to admit to downloading some of these samizdata files, quality tended to be uneven.

The free solutions that I've listed would certainly give you a good starter library, but I think that there's a better answer to the digital reading question than relying on giveaways. In order for the whole ebook concept to really get a foothold in the marketplace, it needs to have a solution like the iTunes store, a solution which will offer a simple method of purchasing and managing digital literature without charging the same prices demanded by the dead tree publishers.

It’s a shame that Apple has already released a product called the iBook, but I have a lot of faith in Steve Jobs. If or when he decides it's time to reform the digital book marketplace, I’m sure he’ll come up with something equally in line with the rest of the iProduct list.

- Sid