"Response: like iPhones, but without the touch screen."

I’ve been casually re-reading ’Salem’s Lot on my iPhone as a fill-in text until I upload some new books, and, as always, it’s a pleasure to watch a professional at work.  In the follow-up to Carrie, his first published novel, Stephen King clearly demonstrates that his great strength is not necessarily his ability to create horror, but the manner with which he evokes the minutiae of day-to-day existence.  Much of his work combines these skills, contrasting sometimes brutally frank depictions of everyday life with the horrors under the bed to make the latter all the more chilling.*

However, as I read through King's gripping story of vampires in small-town Maine, I began to have a sort of subconscious discomfort that had nothing to do with things that go bump in the night.  Finally I realized that, at some undefined point in time, books like ’Salem’s Lot that I had originally read in the 70s had become historical fiction.

The majority of the characters in Salem’s Lot were born in the 1940s and 50s.  The story makes reference to all kinds of anachronistic concepts:  party lines**, peace marches, typewriters, storm windows, and the option of owning a television set without a colour screen. There are no cell phones.  There are no computers.

The joke is that in a less focused narrative, the story wouldn’t seem as outdated – it’s the extreme degree of detail with which King sets his scenes that makes the dated timeline so obvious.

It's interesting to think that contemporary mainstream fiction will eventually suffer a similar fate.  Imagine 50 years from now, when some youthful reader looks up from his virtual holo-text and says, "Weblink, inquiry - what is a 'blackberry'?"

- Sid

* When you think about it, some of Stephen King's most popular work isn't part of the horror genre at all.  Look at the success of his non-horror stories such as The Body or Rita Hayworth and Shawshank Redemption (which you may be more familiar with under their titles of their movie adaptations: Stand By Me and The Shawshank Redemption).  

** For the younger readers in the audience, party lines have nothing to do with queuing up for nightclubs - a party line is a shared phone system where different combinations of long and short rings indicate who should pick up their phone to take a call.

Actually, I do feel a little desolated.

Gandalf looked at him. "My dear Bilbo!" he said. "Something is the matter with you! You are not the hobbit that you were."

J.R.R. Tolkien, The Hobbit

The Desolation of Smaug, the second installment in Peter Jackson's adaptation of The Hobbit, offers a good solid hour of entertainment to the moviegoing public – unfortunately, it’s 161 minutes long.  Apparently it was decided mid-production to go from two movies to three, and this film clearly shows the penalty that they had to pay to achieve that goal.

I'm more than willing to accept that for people unfamiliar with the original story, The Desolation of Smaug may be a wonderful movie.  Peter Jackson certainly knows how to frame a story visually, the special effects are impeccable, Smaug the Dragon is very well done, and Martin Freeman continues to perfectly personify Bilbo Baggins, the diffidently brave hobbit hero.  In the original Tolkien story, Thorin Oakenshield is the only dwarf that really stood out to me as a character, but in the movie adaptation each of Thorin's companions has been given a distinctive look and personality.

However, to my critical eye, there were just too many scenes in the movie that felt stretched out longer than they should have been, like the dwarves’ escape from the elves of Mirkwood via barrel. Rather like the escape from the goblins in the first movie, it went on just a little bit too long - in fact, it was strongly reminiscent of that scene in terms of pacing, direction, and improbable physics, and like that scene, could have been cut in half after it had made its point in terms of plot and visual impact.

On top of that, there are a lot of elements in the script that were created out of whole cloth for the film.  Okay, fine, let's add Legolas to the movie - he's not in the original book, but he could have been, he is quite correctly identified as the son of Thranduil, king of the elves of Mirkwood, so it's not out of the question as retroactive continuity goes.

The addition of Tauriel, the female head of the Mirkwood guard?  The forbidden relationship between her and Legolas, and her flirtation with Kili the dwarf?  (And his near-fatal leg wound?)  The whole raft (no pun intended) of confusing subplots involving Bard of Laketown?  The marauding orcs? The lengthy hide-and-seek with Smaug in the halls of Erebor?* There were just too many things that extended the running time of the movie without really doing anything to advance the story.

There may be worse ahead of us. I checked the page count for the section of The Hobbit which makes up the script for The Desolation of Smaug, and although it took care of an acceptable 118 pages of action, it still felt padded out.  The bad news is that it leaves about 52 pages for the final film in the trilogy.  If it felt like the story was spread too thin in this film, that final 52 pages is going to go on for a long, long time in the final segment of The Hobbit.

However, Hollywood has done worse things – after all, Total Recall is based on a short story by Philip K. Dick that’s only 17 pages in length.  Compared to that, 52 pages looks like plenty of raw material for two and a half hours of potential popcorn sales.

- Sid

* I know what you're thinking, Dorothy, but these are NOT spoilers, the revised plot line is common knowledge on the Internet.

  

Time Debt II: Repeat As Necessary.

There's a lot of cheating in science fiction.  Warp drive (or any form of faster-than-light space travel) is cheating, but it's cheating that allows planets in different solar systems to exist in some kind of simultaneous time frame, and as a result to have a Federation of Planets or some similar polity. The alternative would not be a society as we have now, but more like a chess game played by mail - not impossible, but requiring a lot of patience on both sides.

To illustrate the realities of the problem, let us perform an experiment in alternative history.  Let's pretend that the United States government, flushed with hubris thanks to the success of the moon missions, decides to send a mission to Alpha Centauri in 1970.  Alpha Centauri is 4.3 light years away, but let's say that state of the art technology will require a full decade to complete the trip.

Exactly what's involved in getting the colonists there in one piece is irrelevant - really good suspended animation, or a big ship loaded with all the Tang™ and TV dinners that anyone could want, along with an awfully efficient recycling system.  Whatever it takes, NASA loads the ship up with a thousand of the best and the brightest of both sexes, along with a full quota of axes and fish hooks - well, chainsaws and drilling rigs, more likely - wishes them Godspeed, and sends them on their way. (Hopefully they'd actually send two or three ships - one ship seems like an awfully isolated basket for all those eggs, let's get a little redundancy going.)

Against all expectations from movies and television, everything goes flawlessly, and a thousand colonists land on Alpha Centauri Prime, cleverly name it New Earth*, and set up camp. They wait a few years to make sure that their beachhead on alien soil is going to thrive, then send the ships back to earth with the good news, along with a few tons of whatever resources seem appropriate for the purposes of trade (or debt reduction, depending on how the paperwork is set up), and a few people who have inevitably changed their minds about the whole colonial thing.

The ships make their triumphant return, and another thousand people jump on board. Well...maybe not right away.  After all, science has had 25 years to march forward, and this is where things get interesting.

Going from 1970 to 1995 represents a huge leap in technology. Just look at the lifestyle of the average consumer: the jump from record albums to CDs, VHS to DVD, the introduction of microwave ovens, cell phones, and so on - not to mention computing technology!

So we sensibly take a few years to retrofit the spaceships with computers and DVD players, fill the freezers with people or Hungry Man Dinners™, based on whichever approach you picked originally, then send the ships on their way again.  Ten years later the little fleet arrives and drops what is essentially a technology bomb on the nascent colony.

Repeat the process, and the next round trip provides the colony with MP3s**, iPads, LED screens, 64 bit computing, the Internet, and the complete Harry Potter series, both in book and movie form - or more accurately, as e-books and MP4 files. 

This is just a 20 year round trip. In my previous post on this topic, the colonies had a 150 year circuit - what possible continuity of technology or culture could survive that kind of barrier?  The same problem applies to whatever raw resources the colony is dutifully returning to the mother world.

"Hi, here's a spaceship full of crude oil, right on time." 
"Of what?  Gosh, no, ever since we switched to molecular valence fields, we don't use oil anymore."
"But what about gas?"
"About what - oh, GASOLINE! HAHAHAHAHAHA!!!"

However, there is a partial solution to this problem. If you start building more ships until you can launch one every six months or three months, you can create a continuum of communication, and start to get something that looks more like a unified society, with raw supplies going one way, and technology going in the other.  I don't think the two groups ever end up at the same level, but when it comes right down to it, it probably doesn't matter.

And then, if you want to turn this into the plot for a book, one day the ships stop coming...

- Sid

* SF author Larry Niven has one group of interplanetary colonists name their new home We Made It.  I think I prefer that approach over the whole "New Whatever" thing.

** Admittedly, this is based on the assumption that the colony isn't making its own new inventions, but somehow I think that if you were busy carving cities out of an alien wilderness, you probably wouldn't be wondering about how to convert your Beatles albums into some kind of digital format.