"Like a bird watching guide...only for monsters."

“Last week I was in Virginia. Grayson County. I interviewed a sixteen-year-old girl who’d been assaulted by a bar hade.”

“A what?”

“A bear head. The severed head of a bear. This bar hade, see, was floating around on its own little flying saucer, looked kind of like the hubcaps on cousin Wayne’s vintage Caddy. Had red, glowing eyes like two cigar stubs and telescoping chrome antennas poking up behind its ears.” He burped.

“It assaulted her? How?”

“You don’t want to know; you’re obviously impressionable. ‘It was cold’”—he lapsed into his bad Southern accent—“‘and metallic.’ It made electronic noises. Now that is the real thing, the straight goods from the mass unconscious, friend; that little girl is a witch. There’s no place for her to function in this society. She’d have seen the devil if she hadn’t been brought up on The Bionic Woman’ and all those ‘Star Trek’ reruns. She is clued into the main vein. And she knows that it happened to her. I got out ten minutes before the heavy UFO boys showed up with the polygraph.”

William Gibson, The Gernsback Continuum

Every now and then my sister Dorothy sends me a book.  Now, as I've already said, my sister could probably write this blog (albeit a bit differently than I do) so as you might guess, she tends to send me things that relate to science fiction or fantasy.

However, she's also aware that I already have a fairly substantial stack of books, and although it's certainly not impossible to give me something that isn't there, you're certainly taking a chance if you decide to give me a book in hopes that it's something that I don't already own.

Dorothy has cleverly addressed this problem by sending me things that are a bit odd even by my liberal standards.  As an example, the most current entry in the sweepstakes is The Monster Spotter's Guide to North America, by Scott Francis.

I'll admit that I opened this book with a certain sense of sibling obligation, a sort of "Oh, well, I should give it a look" feeling.  To my surprise, I found it to be an interesting and somewhat authoritative guide to the various "hairy monsters, flying monsters, lake monsters and other unexplained phenomena" that inhabit the continent.

And it's a good solid book, 248 pages of information on creatures ranging from the obviously fictional, like the Sidehill Wampus, a hill-dwelling cat-like creature which has longer legs on one side to keep itself level, to the less explicable Lake Worth Monster, an aquatic man-beast that terrorized an entire beachful of people in Texas in 1969.  There's a plethora of serpentine lake monsters, all sorts of variations on Bigfoot, and any number of frog men*, gator men, lizard men, mud men and even skunk men.

The group term for these creatures is "cryptids" and although I'm a sceptic about these things, you do have to wonder what lies behind the innumerable cryptid sightings, encounters and in some cases attacks that are listed in The Monster Spotter's Guide.  As in the opening quote, are all of these things just semiotic phantoms of some sort, the modern equivalent of being spoken to by the Virgin Mary?  Or are some of them real, things that fall squarely into the Shakespearian "more things on Heaven and Earth than are dreamt of in your philosophy" category?

Personally, I stand my ground as per previous comments:  show me one.  There has to be some reason that all the entries in The Monster Spotter's Guide to North America are illustrated with line drawings instead of photographs.

 - Sid

* Sorry again, Laurie, still not Nazi frog men, these are the anuran variety.

Okay, 59.9 years, really.

 I don't know what the rest of you think about while doing cardio, but my mind goes off in all sorts of directions.  Today's session on the recumbent bicycle led me to the following train of thought.

(There's a bit of a spoiler here, but bear with me.)

In Tron: Legacy, part of the plot is a plan by Clu, Kevin Flynn's digital doppelganger, to take over the physical world.  In order to accomplish this, he has assembled an army of "repurposed" inhabitants of Tron's computer world that he plans to transfer into the real world, presumably by reversing the process that brought Flynn, and later his son, in.

Okay, so far so good.  Now, as we all know, the great debate regarding Star Trek's transporter is exactly how the damn thing would work in practise.  After all, if it converts the people on the transporter pads into energy, e equals mc squared tells us that you end up with the equivalent of a pretty good sized atomic bomb going off down there in the heart of the Enterprise, which has to be a bad idea.

In this case, we're looking at the opposite problem.  Would it not take all of the energy in the Los Angeles power grid to create the mass of a person?    Let's see...Los Angeles uses about 3.9 million KW a year...that's about 10700 KW a day...1 KW equals 3,600,000 joules, so that's 38,465,753,424 joules a day...one pound of mass is about a 10 megaton atomic explosion*...one megaton is 4,184,000,000,000,000 joules...a two hundred pound man would be about 836,800,000,000,000 joules...divide by joules per day in LA...divide by 365 to convert days to years...no, I'm out of my depth here, that can't be right.  I end up with 60 years of the entire electrical usage of Los Angeles to create just one person from scratch, let alone an entire army.

Remember the cascade failure that shut down electricity for the entire North East area from New York to James Bay in 2003?  Imagine Clu's digital forces making their way up the datastream to the basement of Flynn's arcade, as breakers across the state - and the country -  flare white hot and explode under the stress of attempting to feed the creation of physical forms for the invasion force...

But, let's be honest here.  Higher math isn't my strong suit - in fact, after a couple of pints, I sometimes have trouble figuring out the tip for dinner.  If any mathematically inclined readers of this posting would like to take a shot at calculating the energy involved, I will be happy to correct my figures.

- Sid

* There's some fuzz factor there, I found different kiloton yields for a pound of mass online, but ten made the math easier.

Virtuality 1: Tron 2

Wi-fi?  What's that?

Kevin Flynn, Tron: Legacy

I went to see Tron: Legacy last week, and I was surprised by my reaction:  I thought that it was a bit old-fashioned. 

This is an odd reaction to a cutting-edge 3-D CGI extravaganza, and so I came home and watched the original Tron, a comparison which I was certain would establish Legacy as the visual masterpiece that it must be.

Surprisingly, even with its 28 year handicap, I found Tron to be a better movie in many ways, especially when viewed in context.  In 1982, Tron was a groundbreaking state of the art special effects movie, although obviously state of the art has moved on since then, as it always does. But at the time it presented a unique and original view of a digital world, a view which in many ways offered the first metaphor for a visual representation of the world of bits and bytes.

But let's give some perspective to this picture.  In 1982 we were sitting in front of monochrome green CRTs and 8-bit colour displays, listening to the click and whir of single-sided 5 1/4 inch floppy drives. There were only primitive graphical user interfaces:  the first Mac had not yet been released, and the first version of Windows was three long years away.  Tron's special effects were created using systems with 2 MB of RAM and 330 MB hard drives - you can get a smart phone with more processing power now.

In spite of the limitations of hardware - in the end, only a very small percentage of the movie was actual computer graphics -  Tron showed us a world that none of us had ever imagined, or perhaps the world that we'd all imagined.  It represented an important landmark in our first fumbling attempts to establish a metaphor for the digital universe that was beginning to develop. 

So why doesn't Legacy represent an extension of that metaphor?  What's changed?

We have, or rather society has. People grow up in cyberspace these days.  Millions of people spend most of their free time on the game grid, people who operate digital avatars for hours every day.  Most of us neither know nor care what the physical location of anything on the internet might be - for example, I haven't the least clue where this blog is actually stored, nor do I need to.*  We work online, we shop online, we talk online, we date online - let's face it, we live online.

On that basis, Legacy left me with a bit of a "Yes, and...?" feeling.  It's a bit like one of those movies where explorers find a long-lost plateau in Africa which is teeming with dinosaurs.  Technically speaking, Legacy takes place in a closed single-portal system which has been churning away in isolation for over 20 years, 20 years of technological development in the outside world.  The prospect of the denizens of that system attempting to take over the real world is almost comical, like the idea of being attacked by a basketball-sized 8-bit Pacman while walking down the street.

Now, I don't want to make any claims that Tron is the virtual equivalent of Gone With The Wind in terms of moviemaking.  Even at the time, I doubt that anyone considered it as a nominee for Best Movie at the Oscars.  But visually, conceptually, it did what science fiction is supposed to do:  it showed us a "what if" world, a world that didn't exist, but which could exist, which might exist.

Legacy?  I don't mean to suggest in any way that the effects in Legacy aren't well done (or that it's any more deserving of a Best Movie nomination), but their representation of cyber-reality certainly didn't offer a unique view of a digital universe, just a more expensive view of the universe that Tron had already shown us. In fact, the combination of lighting, sets and costumes made it look like nothing more than an extended commercial for the next really big male body wash of your choice.

- Sid

*  Have you ever wondered where Google™, Facebook™ or eBay™ actually are, in the real world?