Happy New Year, but.

And on far-off Earth, Dr. Carlisle Perera had as yet told no one of how he had awakened from a restless sleep with the message from his subconscious echoing in his brain:

The Ramans do everything in threes.

Arthur C. Clarke, Rendezvous with Rama

Here we sit, poised on the edge of another new year.  Horrifyingly, the coming year may mark the last new year that our parochial little planet is allowed to celebrate. Astrophysicist Craig Kasnov, who is part of the SETI* group, has announced the discovery of three large "objects" that are headed for Earth at a high rate of speed, with an estimated arrival date of December 2012.  Now, to be fair to Mr. Kasnov, he's not quoted as actually saying that these are spaceships, but when you identify something as an unidentified flying object....

The prospect of an invasion involving a trio of gigantic starships rings all sorts of bells in the science fiction community.  Arthur C. Clarke's Rendezvous With Rama deals with an oddly similar situation to the one described above:  the discovery of a mysterious object approaching at high speed, the revelation that said object is artificial, and the ensuing reaction by humanity.  In the case of Rama, the enigmatic worldlet described by Clarke, an expedition is dispatched to explore this 50 kilometer long visitor to our solar system.

Rama is discovered to be hollow, a silent, uninhabited cylindrical world, but as it nears the Sun Rama comes to life in a limited manner, quite literally turning on the lights, and producing a variety of  biological robots.  And then, strangely, Rama activates its engines and leaves the solar system after apparently refueling from the Sun. 

Rendezvous With Rama is a very typical Clarke novel in its portrayal of humans interacting with mysterious alien artifacts - the Monolith in 2001 is a similar example.  I suspect that Clarke didn't originally plan a sequel, but as with more than one aging science fiction author, several followup novels were written "with" a younger writer.  These frankly inferior sequels reveal that the builders of Rama do, in fact, do everything in threes - which includes building massive intersolar spacecraft.

For fans of pop culture rather than science fiction, the current discovery ties in all too conveniently with the oft-referenced end-of-the-world-in-2012 as per the Mayan calendar, and as such it's bound to get a certain amount of press.  However, that same press seems to offer contradictory accounts regarding the alien spaceships: for example, in one version they're approaching the southern hemisphere and won't be visible from the northern hemisphere, but in another version they were discovered by an Alaska-based search system.  Size seems to vary as well, with one reference to the objects as being in the "tens of kilometers" and another article confidently saying that they are in excess of 240 kilometers in length.

Presumably SETI is making every possible effort to contact the alien fleet in an attempt to establish peaceful communications - after all, if their mandate is to search for extra-terrestrial intelligence, they must have some idea of what to do after finding it.  On the other hand, we only have two years. Should we not be dedicating every second of the next 23 months to stocking Earth's arsenals in preparation for a possible invasion?  Come on, fellow Terrans, let's not forget the lesson taught by Independence Day.

But when it comes right down to it, I have to side with geek goddess Felicia Day on this one, as per her Twitter account:

I saw the pix; those are smudges/reflections/image defects on the pix. We're being invaded by bad emulsion!

Happy New Year, everyone.  One more step into the future...

 - Sid

* Search for ExtraTerrestrial Intelligence.

Fairytale endings.

 Sorry, Christmas Eve, on a rooftop, saw a chimney, and my whole brain went, "What the hell..."

The Doctor, A Christmas Carol

My last post dealt briefly with Christmas traditions, and as such, well, of course I downloaded the Doctor Who Christmas special today, what would Christmas be without that?

As its title would suggest, A Christmas Carol deals with a hateful, bitter, old miser on Christmas Eve, a man lost to love and compassion, and the process by which he is changed through views of the past, the present and the future.  And, of course, who better to provide those views than a man with a time machine?

The writers provide a useful incentive for the change.  After all, when you think about it, the character of Scrooge is being saved for his own sake.  In this case, there is a far more concrete necessity for this character's redemption:  he is the only person with the means to save 4,003 people on a starship which is plunging to its doom.  

The joke is that as the story evolves and the mechanics of time travel unfold, we watch the miser go from being blighted by his father's influence to being saved by love, and then back to being bitter and cynical, but now due to the very events that were created by the Doctor in order to save him.  He returns to being a miser, but now a miser of time, a miser for the sake of love.  The final twist is the inevitable revelation by the Ghost of Christmas Yet To Come - I won't give away the plot, but let's not forget, an old man's present is also a boy's distant unsuspected future. 

This year's seasonal special admirably continues the concept of Doctor Who as a fairy tale,  with elements from Sleeping Beauty, the additional mythic touch of a yearly awakening from slumber, and its own unique keynotes such as fish who live in the clouds, fish that can be enchanted by songs.  The singing love interest is played by Welsh mezzo-soprano Katherine Jenkins in her acting debut, who presumably also performs the songs featured in the episode. 

For those of us in the audience who are hopeless romantics, the story has a particular resonance which far outweighs any seasonal theme.  If you could only spend one more day with the one you love, which day would you choose?

- Sid

Aggravated Subarborial Giftery.

Last week at work I was discussing Christmas traditions with one of my co-workers, and I innocently mentioned that my family had always fallen back on its British roots for the holiday season.  

"Oh, that's nice," she commented.

"Yeah, I have wonderful memories of putting up the big holiday menhir, listening to the local druid invoking the tree spirits, putting someone inside the big wicker man and then setting it on fire...ah, nothing like a good old-fashioned holiday..."

All joking aside, the whole Santa Claus/birthday of Christ thing is just a thin overlay over a tradition that must go back as far as the roots of civilization, if not intelligence.  What we're really celebrating is the winter solstice, the shortest day of the year, the deepest point of our descent into cold and dark - but also the end of that descent.  From here on it gets brighter and warmer, and every day there's a little more sunlight, and a little less night.

It's interesting that virtually every society and religion in the northern hemisphere has acknowledged this dividing line between dark and light, between cold and warmth, between the end and the beginning, and chosen to commemorate it in some fashion.  The current Christian holiday is the end of a millennium-long process of amalgamation and consolidation which combined the birth of the Saviour with the Slavic Karachun, the Sarmation festival of Kaleda, the Welsh Lá an Dreoilín, the pagan Yule, the Norse Jól, and a score of other celebrations that marked the turning of the year. 

The sad part is that, as often tends to be the case, it's left to science fiction to point out the inevitable "what if" of the situation.  It took a thousand years for the celebration of Christ's Mass to gain ascendancy; less than a hundred years for the religious aspects of the holiday to be lost under the commercial ones; what does logic suggest will happen next?

Well, obviously, as with any unregulated profit centre, someone will want to take complete control...

...it was a peach of a prize.  An invitation to a special, licensed Christmas™ party in the centre of London, run by YuleCo itself.

When I read the letter I was shaking.  This was YuleCo, so it would be the real deal.  There'd be Santa™, and Rudolph™, and Mistletoe™, and Mince Pies™, and a Christmas Tree™, with presents underneath it.

That last was what I couldn't get over.  It felt so forlorn, putting my newspaper-wrapped presents next to the aspidistra, but ever since YuleCo bought the rights to coloured paper and under-tree storage, the inspectors had clamped down on Aggravated Subarborial Giftery.

China Miéville, 'Tis The Season

And a happy Meán Geimhridh to all - half way out of the dark, my friends.

- Sid