Geekmas 2015: Epilogue

With the belated arrival of my Secret Santa gift this week at work, I'm finally able to wrap up* the 2015 holiday season with a look at the geek-appropriate gifts that I received.

Topping the list of seasonal gifts would have to be the trio of custom art pieces created for me by Karli, my significant other.  Karli is a talented and creative artist in her spare time, and wanted to give me something unique for our first Christmas together.  Accordingly, she purchased a well-worn copy of a 50's young adult adventure-fantasy novel entitled The Sky Pirates, and used a few select pages as canvases for suitably whimsical illustrations. 

Karli also presented me with a 75th Anniversary edition of The Hobbit in hard cover.  It's a marvelous little treasure featuring Tolkien's illustrations, along with his original wraparound dustcover design, printed for the first time to match his artwork - originally the sun and the dragon were not reproduced in red due to printing costs.  All in all, a wonderful set of presents - thanks very much, my love!

There's been a cascade effect from my friend Colin's present: Fallout 4, the latest and greatest game from Bethesda.  In order to run this state-of-the-art open-world role-playing software, it was necessary to upgrade my copy of Windows 10 to a 64-bit version, and double the RAM on my PC platform.  Fortunately, I received almost exactly the right amount of Amazon** gift cards from Karli's relatives to cover the cost of the RAM, with the balance of the money going to one of the items from my Geekmas shopping list - Ann Leckie's Ancillary Justice in trade paperback.

As I've said before, I do love a good time travel story, and this Christmas my friend Chris added to my collection with The Time Traveller's Almanac, a collection of classic time travel stories. Some of them are well know favourites, like Ray Bradbury's A Sound of Thunder or Henry Kuttner and C. L. Moore's Vintage Season, whereas others break new ground for me.

And my belated Secret Santa gift?  A TARDIS teapot - certainly a great addition to my collection of Doctor Who items, and it goes very nicely with the mug that Santa gave me in 2013, but it did make it obvious that Santa didn't see my request for episodes over merchandise.  Hmmm...perhaps next year I'll just send him a letter, Santa is probably still using the old school approach to gift requests.

- Sid

* No pun intended.

** To my mild surprise, the Amazon.ca third party vendor that I found offered a very competitive price on memory chips.  That being said, I'm hoping that I didn't order the wrong ones, there are an awful lot of variables in terms of speed and configuration - we'll know for sure when they arrive early next week.  I also gather that there may be some issues in terms of configuration, based on various comments on the process that I've read.  Wish me luck.

Resolution.

  

The new year is traditionally a time for resolutions, mandates for change - and hopefully improvement.  Generally I haven't bothered with this sort of thing - admittedly, I'm using the new year as an excuse to lose a little weight, but it's more based on just waiting out the dietary excesses of the holidays than anything else.

However, I have become increasingly aware of an area where I do need to improve, and I've decided to address this in one of my rare New Year's resolutions.

My problem?  I've become a lazy geek.

In years gone by I was a far more dedicated fan, although perhaps a less discerning one - it can take some time to learn how to separate the wheat from the chaff.  But for the last few years, I've been slowing down - not going out to movies as much, watching less TV,  buying fewer books, and perhaps not revisiting my existing collection to the degree that I should.

Admittedly, 2015 saw a major change in my life in the form of a new relationship and a wonderful live-in partner, and I don't think that all of my decisions to miss movies were bad ones - I'm not certain that I need to particularly regret missing Chappie, Jupiter Ascending, Tomorrowland, The Fantastic Four or Pixels.  (Particularly the last two.)  And I did manage to see Ex Machina, Fury Road, Age of Ultron, Terminator Genisys*, Ant-Man, Jurassic World, The Martian and The Force Awakens.

 

However, there's been a lot of well-received TV** programming from the last couple of years that I've skipped entirely, such as Daredevil***, Orphan Black***, Agents of Shield, Agent Carter***, Arrow, The Flash, The Man in the High Castle and Gotham - not to mention almost entirely avoiding Game of Thrones and The Walking Dead. (In my defense for those last two, I'm fairly familiar with the source material, and I think that I felt that watching TV versions would just be redundant.)  In fact, if it weren't for Doctor Who and The Big Bang Theory, I really wouldn't be watching any TV at all.

Overall, I've been relying far too much on second-hand information and other people's reviews of things rather than forming my own opinions, and spending a little bit too much time looking at YouTube™ videos and funny cat pictures instead of reading.

So it's my hope that in 2016 I'll be able to catch up on some of the opportunities that I've let slide over the last couple of years - not to mention finding the time to report as appropriate via blog postings.  Wish me luck - and a happy New Year to all!  Once again, half way out of the dark...

- Sid

* Okay, on a flight to Japan rather than a theatre.

** For the sake of simplicity, we'll consider Netflix™ to be the moral equivalent of a television broadcasting network.

*** Okay, one episode.

Sigh-fy.

Judge not this race by empty remains
Do you judge God by his creatures when they are dead?
For now, the lizard's shed its tail
This is the end of man's long union with earth.

Genesis, Watcher Of The Skies

Thanks to the magic of PVR, I've just finished watching the three-part Syfy adaptation of Arthur C. Clarke's novel Childhood's End. Although I'm disappointed by their interpretation of this 1953 SF classic, I can appreciate what they were attempting to do with their changes to the story.  Unfortunately, I'm not convinced that they succeeded.

For the most part, Clarke's writing concentrates on carefully thought out and logical stories dealing with space exploration or science, such as The Fountains of Paradise, A Fall of Moondust, or Rendezvous with Rama.  Sometimes he combines this focus on hard science with an element of metaphysical mysticism - 2001: A Space Odyssey and its ambiguous conclusion would be a good example.

Childhood's End is a bit of a departure for Clarke, in that it deals less with science and more with spirituality.  The story begins with the arrival of gigantic menacing starships that take up strategic positions over all of Earth's major cities à la Independence Day.  However, these visitors are not invaders.  Calling themselves the Overlords, their spokesperson Karellen announces that they are there to take control over human affairs on a global basis, and to channel Mankind's energies into positive pursuits - no more wars, no more crime, no more violence against each other or the innocent creatures with whom humanity shares the planet.

The Overlords graphically demonstrate their ability to enforce their control through episodes like making everyone at a Spanish bullfight feel the picador's spear as it enters the body of the bull, or by blotting out all sunlight over South Africa.

Over time, resistance to their rule comes to an end as the world begins to realize how much better life has become.  However, in spite of all entreaties and demands, the Overlords refuse to reveal their physical appearances until after fifty years on Earth, at which time Karellen takes his first public steps onto the surface.  This first appearance clearly explains the reasons for their long concealment,* but the delay has allowed the people of Earth to become more enlightened and accepting, and the moment of crisis passes.

At this point, humanity has entered a golden age of enlightenment and leisure. But there are always those who are restless, who are unable to ignore the mysteries of the universe.  One of these people is Jan Rodricks, a young man who is fixated on the origins of the Overlords.  By concealing himself in a full-sized model of a whale, Rodricks is able to make his way to the homeworld of the Overlords, albeit by paying a time-debt of 80 years.

Upon his return, he finds humanity as he remembers it to be gone, its children having evolved into a new form of life shortly after his departure. The climax of the novel deals with the transition of this new version of humanity into its final state.*

Syfy's adaptation of this tale of evolutionary apotheosis seems to have lost an awful lot in translation. It's a bit like someone read the book while drunk, and then described the plot to the screenwriters a week later.  The sequence of events is altered, characters are added or removed, people keep their names but change drastically otherwise, or lose their names and sort of stay the same.**

It's possible that they were attempting to humanize the story - as a writer, Clarke is not always at his best when dealing with the subtleties of relationships - but to me, the changes added nothing to the original, although I was intrigued by the religious elements that they introduced into the plot.

However, when all was said and done, I was more confused than anything else, either in spite of or because of my knowledge of the book.  Although I think that the strength of the original concept helped to make the adaptation work, ultimately there were just too many holes and inconsistencies.

The next question is: do I want to see what Syfy is doing with - or to - the Expanse series? Perhaps - but I may well be happier just letting sleeping adaptations lie.

- Sid

* Dorothy, I know you already know the story, but I'm still doing my best to avoid spoilers for the rest of the world.

** Why on earth - no pun intended - would they feel the need to change Jan Rodricks to Milo Rodricks? Or change one of the final fathers of humanity from George to Jake, and from a set designer to a golf course architect?  Not to mention making an American farmer the sole direct contact with the Overlords rather than the secretary general of the United Nations - although they did at least keep his name the same.