Fail.

I recently had the dubious pleasure of watching Lavalantula, a film which combines giant lava-spitting spiders with a partial reunion of the Police Academy cast.  Lavalantula, like Sharknado or Megashark versus Crocosaurus, is one of those Syfy™ movies that we're not intended to take seriously, which supposedly fall into the category of "so bad that they're good."

What a bizarre concept for the entertainment industry to have developed, and how sad that they've chosen to apply it to science fiction.* 

I own several thousand science fiction novels, and, to be brutally honest, they're not all perfect.  There are books from the early days of the genre** that are poorly written, books that are stilted and cumbersome, books that are light years (pun intended) away from the artistry and craft of more talented authors who would follow in their footsteps.

But those books were written in earnest - they represent an author's best attempt to express a concept or an idea that captured their imagination, something that they desperately wanted to show to the world.  None of them chose to do work that was deliberately shoddy, they did the best they could with the tools that they had, and the results, although flawed in some cases, introduced concepts and ideas that helped to build the foundations of the science fiction genre.

I admire these authors for their creativity, eagerness, and enthusiasm, and forgive them their clumsiness - their intentions were all for the best.

Lavalantula and its companion films, on the other hand, represent a decision that I can't admire.  People, if you're going to decide that deliberately cliche-ridden dialogue, stupid, shoddy plotlines and poor acting*** are your actual goal, you need to take a long look at what you're doing with your lives.  Maybe you should set your sights higher - why not aim for the stars?

- Sid

* It embarrasses me to call these travesties science fiction, but unfortunately, the shoe fits.

** And a few that are a lot more recent, to be fair.

*** Credit where credit is due:  there's a young actor named Noah Hunt in Lavalantula who really does do his best with what he's been given. 

Robinson Crusoe on Mars.

I'm going to have to science the shit out of this.

Mark Watney, The Martian

Until I saw the trailer for The Martian, I was completely unaware of the best-selling self-published 2011 novel by Andy Weir that provided the original story for the movie. Intrigued by the concept, I took the book with me as vacation reading on a long weekend getaway, and found myself completely caught up in the trials and tribulations of American astronaut Mark Watney, left for dead on Mars after a piece of debris knocks him out and disables his suit telemetry during the evacuation of his mission team due to a dangerous dust storm.

When Watney regains consciousness, he finds himself alone and stranded, faced with the very basic challenge of staying alive, followed by the longer term project of contacting Earth in hopes of being rescued before he runs out of food. Watney's first person mission logs detail his ingenious solutions to the obstacles that he needs to overcome in order to successfully meet these two challenges.

Weir stacks the deck in Watney's favour in a couple of ways.*  First, the marooned astronaut is an engineer/botanist, the perfect combination for the situation – there might well have been a completely different outcome if the stranded crew member had been a psychiatrist/pilot.  Second, NASA has conveniently provided a few raw potatoes for the crew’s Thanksgiving dinner, which gives Watney immediate access to something that he can cultivate in the mission's habitat in order to extend his food supplies.

I found it to be a fun, entertaining read, although not terribly deep (any book which relies heavily on jokes about 70s television shows is not going to challenge Crime and Punishment in terms of psychological depth) and completely enjoyed it.  Oddly enough, I'm not sure I’d recommend the book to everyone, although I suspect it’s going to work very well as a movie, especially with Matt Damon providing the voice - and face - for Watney's narrative.

Why wouldn’t I recommend the book to all and sundry?  The plot of The Martian is made up of an extended series of scientific solutions to the problems of survival, solutions that are heavily based in math, chemistry and physics.**  Weir does an excellent job of making the science comprehensible, but even so, there's an awful lot of discussion of caloric units, wattage, surface areas, molecular composition and so on.

I've always been more interested in the more scientific side of science fiction, and as such I found Watney's solutions to be ingenious and interesting, but I know a few people who would blink a few times and then abandon the book in favour of less technical narrative.

However, the real question that The Martian raises is one that we have yet to face in our limited exploration of space:  how far would we go to rescue an astronaut marooned in space?  Space travel relies on a limited supply of resources and hardware which are incredibly expensive and time-consuming to assemble and construct.  Would we spend millions of dollars and jeopardize other missions in order to stage a rescue effort which might not even succeed?

Regardless of the manner in which that question is answered in The Martian***, I'd like to think that we would.  In my mind, there's an unspoken covenant between humanity and the people that have chosen to be our pathfinders into the universe, a covenant that says that if they find themselves in peril, we will do everything in our power to rescue them - it would be a betrayal of their dedication and courage to do anything less. 

- Sid

* This is surprisingly common in castaway stories. The original Robinson Crusoe has an entire sailing ship full of supplies to draw upon:  guns, gunpowder, tools, wood, clothing, canvas, and so on. The astronaut in the 1964 movie Robinson Crusoe on Mars miraculously (and improbably) discovers open water, edible aquatic plants, rocks that release oxygen when heated, and an alien man Friday.  Tom Hanks gets the contents of random FedEx™ packages – including a volleyball.

** I spent about thirty minutes looking for an official name for the physics trick involving lateral pressure on a taut cable that Watney uses to get a flipped Mars rover upright again, without ever finding the right search terms to get the results I wanted. If anyone finds out what it's called, please leave a comment!

*** No spoilers here, Dorothy.

Planet Earth.

As an artist, I am inspired by the element of perspective within my paintings. I approached my earlier series “Sea Change” from a dramatic vantage point. The infusion of colour and texture expressed a wealth of emotions projected onto a landscape. While nature was the departure point, the series Sea Change (coined by Shakespeare in The Tempest) explored romantic illusions in life.

In the last couple of years, I have become more of a realist. I’ve seen great changes politically, economically and socially within our world. On an environmental level, we are seeing the impact of our civilization. There is a transition happening on every level of our society. It is because of this that I am compelled to paint my new series, Planet Earth.

Norah Borden

In 2010, my friend Norah Borden started to see the world in a different way - literally.

Norah is an accomplished artist, who, until that point in time, had been painting interpretive, ethereal landscapes and seascapes. But in 2010, she saw a world in a global crisis, a world that was being shaped and changed by political and economic forces that sharply emphasized the divisions between countries and cultures.  Norah's response to these changes was to begin seeing our planet from a higher perspective, looking at the world as an interconnected whole that ignores the lines between countries and ideologies.

Photographs don't do justice to Norah's work - the art is incredibly textural and conceptually developed, and the large canvases that she has chosen for Planet Earth emphasize the detail and artistry that has gone into the creation of her work.  The swirling colours combine with the thick layering of medium to create a perfect artistic interpretation of our world as seen from orbit, while at the same time evoking a microscopic view.

If you'd like to get a good look at Norah's art in person, her work is currently on display at Telus Science World here in Vancouver.  She's doing a show in cooperation with Urthecast, a Vancouver-based company that provides access to data from high definition cameras mounted on the International Space Station.  If you get a chance, I strongly recommend that you take a look at her show - everyone should have an opportunity to see the world the way that Norah does.

http://www.ourplanetearth.ca/ - on display until September 14th, 2015.

- Sid

*Norah, who is a tiny perfect blonde person, works on her large canvases in an equally tiny perfect studio space - I've never seen her painting, but I imagine it as the artistic equivalent of building a ship in a bottle.