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

Prediction is very difficult, especially about the future.

Niels Bohr, Nobel-prize winning physicist

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

- Sid

One dead parent trauma per customer, please.

I always think it adds resonance to a hero's mission to have some defining element of tragedy in his background, don't you?

The Joker, Batman Beyond: The Return of the Joker

To lose one parent, Mr Worthing, may be regarded as a misfortune; to lose both looks like carelessness.

Oscar Wilde, The Importance of Being Earnest

When I was a kid, living out in the country, we didn't have access to a wide range of TV stations. We had the CBC and CTV, CKVR out of Barrie, and sometimes if the weather was right we'd get a fuzzy view of a North Bay station. Because of this, my childhood was devoid of very much in the way of animated entertainment, and by way of compensation I probably watch more Saturday morning cartoons than someone in their late 40's should, an attribute I apparently share with my older sister Dorothy.

As a result, I recently had the opportunity to witness the debut of a new animated series: Iron Man: Armored Adventures, wherein we meet a teenaged Tony Stark, whose father dies under mysterious circumstances after refusing a request to turn a standard industrial product into a weapon of mass destruction. The young Tony, who was wounded in the accident and now has a power unit implanted in his chest to keep his heart functioning, is apparently going to use his experimental armor to investigate his father's death, fight crime, do good deeds, and so forth, all while going to high school.

Now, I agree with the Joker in that it does add resonance for a hero to have an element of personal tragedy in their backstory. And, of course, Batman, the Joker's nemesis, is the ideal example. His entire life has been sacrificed on the altar of revenge, revenge on the entire criminal world for the death of his parents. This is why Robin is the perfect sidekick - Batman sees in Dick Grayson the young Bruce, once again deprived of his parents by criminals. But Robin adds additional depth: does Batman have the right to force a child into the same mold that has left him emotionally crippled?

However, having one or both parents die at the hands of criminals doesn't have to be the only tragedy that adds resonance to a hero's mission! It's tempting to categorize Superman as having the same issues as Batman, but it's not his status as an orphan that gives the character of Kal-el its depth, it's his difficulty reconciling his life as Clark Kent with his secret identity as Superman. Bruce Banner's tragedy lies in the irony of an intellectual who transforms into a huge green hulk, a creature of impulse and force rather than thought, when he's overcome by emotion. In his early days, Spiderman was constantly trying to combine his responsibility to fight crime with his need to pay the rent for himself and Aunt May, and still get his homework done. In addition to their individual issues, the X-Men offer a collective tragedy, the tragedy of a group that is considered to be not fully human - in fact, there used to be a Marvel comic called The Inhumans, that dealt with a hidden city inhabited by a race of experimental subjects, possessed of a variety of superhuman abilities but marred by genetic damage.

And Iron Man? Well, it depends which version you want to look at. In the recent movie version, Tony Stark suddenly discovers - forcibly - that his professional life as a weapons manufacturer has consequences in the real world. People, innocent people, die because of what he does for a living, and after experiencing this first-hand, he decides that he needs to take a stand against that sort of abuse.

The comic book character originates in a different time, although, interestingly, he was created in opposition to the prevailing philosophic outlook of the period. When Stan Lee of Marvel Comics created Tony Stark in the 60's, he was intended to be the poster boy for capitalism and conservatism, sort of an anti-hippy, and many of his early opponents were his Soviet equivalents. However, over time Stark became the victim of a variety of personal weaknesses, with a long story arc dealing with his alcoholism.

I can understand the desire to re-introduce the character of Tony Stark to Saturday mornings in a more youth-accessible format. As my friend Chris pointed out when discussing this at the pub, everyone's father dies, and that makes it a particularly accessible plot point for a younger audience, more so than alcoholism and commitment issues. For me, it somehow diffuses the character. However, I can't help but think that if you take this approach too far, it will get out of hand. Imagine: Bambi, shattered by the death of his mother at the hands of mysterious assassins, is transformed by his loss into a dark avenger...

- Sid

"Major Matt Mason: Mattel's Man in Space!"

Carter: "You don't have to worry, Major. I played with dolls when I was a kid."
Kawalsky: "G.I. Joe?"
Carter: "No, Major Matt Mason."
Kawalsky: "Oh. Who?"
Ferretti: "Major Matt Mason. Astronaut doll. Did you have that cool little backpack that made him fly?"

- Children of the Gods, Stargate SG-1

Q: What was your favorite toy as a kid?
A: Major Matt Mason. He was a great astronaut: a full-on, lifelike astronaut, made with rubber and wire, kind of like Gumby. He was bendable and poseable, and I went through a few of them because after a while the wires get all twisted.

- Tom Hanks, Disney Adventures magazine interview

Christmas Day, once again. The lessons of charity and goodwill that are associated with Christmas can very often be lost in a flurry of merchandising and money, but even so it's difficult to be too judgemental about the simple pleasures of children and toys. It's a magical time of year for kids, and as such this posting is dedicated to Christmas Past and wonderful gifts.

As I've mentioned in my introduction to the site, I've been a fan of science fiction and fantasy since before I can remember. I was an advanced reader, and as such started reading selections out of my mother's library of fantasy and SF before I'd gotten to double digits in age. However, man does not live by bread alone, and I had all the usual childhood interests in toys, with an understandable influence from my reading choices.

However, keep in mind that I was born in 1961, and when I turned ten in 1971, there was nothing like the selection of science fiction toys that there is on the market today. We were well before the late 70's science fiction marketing boom from Star Wars*, and even then, the marketplace was quite different. Now there's an "action figure" for everything - if you think I'm kidding, go into a specialty comics shop and look around - but in the early 70's, it was either TV merchandising or GI Joe dolls, and sadly, TV had very little to offer the young science fiction afficionado at that point in time.

Ah, but there were certain unexpected advantages to growing up without much money in a rural environment. There was a store called Economy Fair in the nearest town, which, as its name suggested, dealt in lower-end merchandise. In retrospect, I suspect that a lot of their stock probably came from remainders and liquidations, and as such their toy section was a bit out of date and somewhat idiosyncratic, but certainly more affordable than ordering from the Eatons catalogue** would have been.

Regardless, it was out of this uncertain and weedy garden that my mother plucked the rose of my childhood Christmas gifts: Major Matt Mason, "Mattel's Man in Space".

As Tom Hanks says, these were great astronauts. Originally introduced in 1966, they were about six inches tall, and molded out of rubber over a wire and plastic armature, with accordion joints at knees, hips, shoulders and elbows which worked well with the spacesuit look of the figures. The wire frame combined with the accordion joints made the figures very flexible and posable, although over time the wires inside the rubber eventually broke, as might be expected of any piece of wire that a child bends several thousand times.

The basic figures came with a removable spacesuit helmet with a movable yellow visor, but as with any toy like this, there was a whole catalogue of separate accessories, vehicles and buildings available. I had some of them - there was a sort of yellow exo-skeletal power suit, with extendable arms and legs, and I seem to recall some kind of exploration outfit that had tools that you could operate with a combination of tubes and a little plastic bellows system. I also had a space glider, which was a thin plastic shell with a molded pocket at the front for the pilot. I think the only reason I had that particular toy was because the transparent cockpit cover was missing, and it had been marked down as a result, but an elastic band would hold the astronaut in just fine and the damn thing was a pretty good glider if memory serves.

I loved those things, they were the perfect toy as far as I was concerned. I remember that I owned the Major himself, and his alien companion Callisto from Jupiter. I may have had one other figure, maybe Sergeant Storm or possibly another Major, but the accordion joint for his right arm had given up the struggle and torn through, and my childhood imagination couldn't come to terms with a one-armed astronaut. (Although I did recycle one of his feet for Callisto, in spite of the fact that they didn't match at all.)

I made my own accessories, guns and swords (the Major Matt Mason line was surprisingly free of that sort of militaristic baggage) and even produced my own alien race, using tennis balls as bodies and salvaged lengths of wire for arms and legs, with two-prong plugs from dead appliances as heads. Frankly, mine lasted a hell of a lot longer than the Mattel toys, I was certainly using a better grade of wire.

Of course, as children do, I moved on. Eventually the figures fell apart completely, or were consigned to a box somewhere, and I abandoned that part of my childhood. I was saddened to discover that a figure in good shape from the Major Matt Mason line costs hundreds of dollars now, as you might expect from a collectable 40-year old line of science fiction toys. How unfortunate - it's too much money to spend on something like that, even if it would be great to have the Major up on the shelf over my computer, beside my Starcraft Terran Marine, my Japanese VOTOMS battle armour, and the Dalek toy that my friend Alan gave me...okay, maybe I haven't moved on all that far.

- Sid

* Although, coincidentally this is the year that George Lucas' THX 1138 was released.

** The Eatons catalogue was an enormous source of angst in my childhood, the equivalent of supplying someone on a bread and water diet with well-illustrated menus from four star restaurants. The Winter edition with the Christmas offerings used to arrive in September, a few weeks before my birthday, and I would slowly go through the toy section and covet the unattainable therein.