"As you command."

Every now and then I let myself reference my fandom at work - sometimes you just have to represent.

- Sid

And so it begins.

Spock: V'Ger must evolve. Its knowledge has reached the limits of this universe and it must evolve. What it requires of its god, doctor, is the answer to its question, "Is there nothing more"?

Star Trek: The Motion Picture

Welp, I guess all the serious Star Trek fans in the audience know where THIS is going to end up...

- Sid

 

Doctor Who: Time Passages.

As part of the celebration for the 60th anniversary of Doctor Who, the Radio Times magazine interviewed Tom Baker, who played the Fourth Doctor from 1974 to 1981.

When I saw the accompanying photos, I was so surprised by how changed he was from his appearance in the 50th Anniversary Special that I actually spent some time trying to confirm that the shots were legitimate, rather than some kind of AI generated extrapolation of how he would look.

I know that time has its way with us all, and after all, he is a 90 year old man. Regardless, there's a kind of sad irony that an actor made famous by playing a near-immortal time traveller would so obviously fall victim to the effects of days and years gone past.

- Sid

Éire 2023: Gnomic Statement XXI

"Klaatu barada nikto."

- Sid

Éire 2023: Sidebar.

While we're doing Game of Thrones quotes, this is one is a favourite - and so TRUE.

- Sid

"I'd buy that for a dollar!"

Heritage Auctions just notified me that my remote auction bid of one dollar made me the winner of a Star Trek: Generations movie poster in their weekly Sunday Movie Poster Auction.

The dollar price quickly becomes an illusion, as the house tacks on a $29 USD auction fee, but I have no regrets, it still feels like a score.

- Sid

(UPDATE:  And as of six months later, they have yet to charge me a shipping fee, which I feel DEFINITELY makes it a score.)

 

It's only a paper moon - or is it?

With just over a month to go until the release of the new Barbie film starring Margot Robbie in the titular role - the role that she was so obviously born to play* - it occurs to me that if Barbie Land exists, that posits the existence of a larger shared universe of Mattel toys - the Mattelverse**, as it were.

With that on the table, if there's a moon in the skies of Barbie Land - and we know that there is - then what would we find there?  Obviously, there would be a thriving lunar colony commanded by none other than the Mattel's Man in Space himself, Major Matt Mason.

Tom Hanks has mentioned his eagerness to star in a movie version of the Major's adventures, but given what we've seen in terms of how Barbie will address the dichotomy between the perfection of Barbie Land and feminism in the real world, how would a Major Matt Mason movie define itself in comparison to character studies like Disney's Lightyear?  Hopefully in the same way that Barbie will, by showing that imaginary characters can have their own worth in terms of the values that they offer to real people - and vice versa.

- Sid

* She does a pretty good job as Harley Quinn as well, actually - and if you want to discuss whether or not someone has range as an actor, these are the roles that you want to use as a yardstick.

** As opposed to, say, the Hasbroverse - Transformers and GI Joe - which already has a motion picture presence.

My girl Lydia.

If you know, you know.

- Sid

I, robot.

Yesterday I failed the I'm not a robot test on my iPad.

No matter what I did, it refused to accept my tapping finger to check the box in the window, but, inexplicably, Karli was able to complete for me without any problems.  And then she gave me a long, thoughtful look...

- Sid

 

AKA "Exploded".

"Rapid unscheduled disassembly" - if they weren't talking about the destruction of a $90M USD rocket, that would actually be a pretty funny way of saying that it blew up.

(Which looked like this:)

The SpaceX team considers the launch to be a success, and I can understand their position.  These are unmanned test flights, and as such having the launch vehicle explode (or rapidly disassemble, if you prefer) provides them with crucial information about their design and how it operates in practice - that's what testing is all about.

However, at $100M+ for the combination of rocket and launch, it's a bit of an expensive hobby.  Let's hope that Elon Musk is prepared to stay the course in order to ensure that future rockets don't disassemble when there's a crew on board.

- Sid

Putting the "fun" in Dysfunctional?

 

I am pleased to announce that, following a return visit to the innergeek.com Geek Test, I have leveled up.

My new score took me from being a Major Geek (with a score of greater than or equal to 35%)  to a Super Geek - greater than or equal to 45%.*

These may not seem like high scores, but given that the top score that can be achieved on the test is Dysfunctional Geek, with a score of  ≥75% I can only imagine what a full 100% score would look like - Sheldon Cooper from The Big Bang Theory, perhaps.  And, let's be honest, as well crafted a character as he is, Sheldon would probably have a very short career in the real world.

- Sid

* If you're curious as to how I had increased my score, upgraded responses including naming a pet after a literary character - don't forget, Jack the Cat's full name is Jaqen H'ghar - and indexing a personal collection, among others.

Reading Week 2023: Toyoda.

I met him in a swamp down in Dagobah
Where it bubbles all the time like a giant carbonated soda
S-O-D-A, soda
I saw the little runt sitting there on a log
I asked him his name and in a raspy voice he said, "Yoda"
Y-O-D-A, Yoda
Yo-Yo-Yo-Yo-Yoda

“Weird Al” Yankovic, Yoda

I appreciate the degree to which fans in Palm Springs wear their hearts on their sleeves.

- Sid

"Blame it all on Larry Niven."

In other news, the state of Massachusetts has put forward a bill that would give convicts the opportunity to reduce their sentences by donating organs - essentially, trading body parts for time.  

As often happens, science fiction, in the person of author Larry Niven, has already anticipated this macabre concept and its long term implications. Larry Niven's 1967 story The Jigsaw Man, originally published in Harlan Ellison's revolutionary anthology Dangerous Visions*, posits a future in which the organ banks are always hungry, and as such, the slippery slope that starts with prisoners donating bone marrow ends up with even the most trivial legal offenses  - in this case, parking tickets - leading to the guilty party being broken down for parts. 

Niven uses this concept in a number of stories, including one from The Long ARM of Gil Hamilton in which people who have been cryogenically preserved in hopes of a future cure for their ailments are harvested for their organs - "waking up in pieces", as one character describes it.

In his postscript to the story, Niven makes the following comment: 

The organ bank problem used to scare me.  The internal logic seems so rigid. But if it were that obvious, the Red Cross would have been finding its blood donors on Death Row, five quarts to a donor, since 1940 A.D. That has not been happening.  Perhaps I'm making a big deal out of nothing.

Maybe it only took someone to point out the advantages.  In which case, blame it all on Larry Niven.

Well, Larry, it's good of you to take the blame, but I suspect that Massachusetts came up with this idea all on their own - as might have been expected from a science fiction story, all you had to do was to wait for the future to catch up. 

- Sid

* Although, to be honest, if I were Ellison, I wouldn't have put The Jigsaw Man in Dangerous Visions, given the collection's New Wave mandate - it's such a standard Niven story

I feel you, girlfriend.

 

- Sid

The Lost Posts: a guide to post-hiatus posting.

In November of 2022 I decided to stop blogging after sixteen years.

However, in some ways I never stopped.  Sixteen years is a long time to do something, and as such I'd gotten into the habit of treating my life as a source of blog content, to the point where sometimes I'd make plans solely because of their potential as fodder for postings. (I realize that this would be commonplace if I was a seasoned influencer, but at the time it was a new concept to me.)  As a result, out of habit I kept making notes, saving links, doing screen captures, and taking pictures just as if I was going to post the results  - ghost posting, if you will.

And then, a recent conversation about ukulele lessons made me think that maybe I should start blogging again, that my ongoing phantom content creation was me sending myself a message. 

So, as of March 24th, 2024, I revived The Infinite Revolution.

However, I still had all of those notes and photos and so on, and it seemed a waste not to use them. (After all, no one wants to have to explain a big gap in their blogging resume.)  So, without further ado, I present The Lost Posts, a fragmentary catalogue of my life as a geek between November of 2022 and March 2024 - this post and my "I'm back" posting act as bookends for The Lost Posts - it seemed appropriate to come back with a book metaphor.  I'll apologize in advance for any anachronisms, twonkies or similar Coke-bottle-in-the-midden artifacts caused by travelling into the past. 

Just to be clear, I'm not going to add the missing posts all at once, but posting them as opportunity and impulse allow.  And who knows, at some point I may just remove all three of the posts about the hiatus and my return, and retcon the whole thing.

- Sid

It may stop, but it never ends.

The Infinite Revolution is on indefinite hiatus.

Almost 16 years and 1,127 posts, not including this one - not a bad run, but it's getting to be like work.

Peace out.  (Drops mike.)

- Sid

Let the marketing tie-ins begin...

The Avatar sequel drops December 16th.

- Sid

"Crying out for help."

The Doctor : This whole world is swimming in Wi-Fi. We're living in a Wi-Fi soup! Suppose something got inside it. Suppose there was something living in the Wi-Fi, harvesting human minds, extracting them. Imagine that. Human souls trapped like flies in the World Wide Web, stuck forever, crying out for help.

Clara Oswin : Isn't that basically Twitter? 

The Bells of Saint John, Doctor Who

Well, it certainly is right now.  Do you think Elon Musk watches Doctor Who?

- Sid

Chekov's Fire Axe.

The concept of Chekov's Gun is fairly well known: it's a philosophy of narrative economy based on the idea that if you have a gun hanging on the wall in a play, it should be fired at some point, or else don't put it there.

I've just finished reading Peter F. Hamilton's 2019 novel Salvation, the first in his Salvation Sequence, and now I think that there needs to be an opposite to Chekov's Gun - Chekov's Fire Axe, if you will.  Chekov's Fire Axe needs to say that you can't have a crucial prop appear from nowhere.

Without rehashing the entire plot of Salvation, there's a scene where the main characters are gathered together in the spartan lounge of a research station which has been constructed to investigate a crashed alien spaceship.  At a pivotal moment, one of the characters kills another character with a fire axe, thereby revealing that their brain has been replaced with an alien organism.

Okay, wait wait wait.  A fire axe?

Fire axes are a pretty specific tool.  Their functionality is based around the need for firefighters (or people fighting fires) to chop through doors or other barriers, smash windows, or cut holes in walls or ceilings for ventilation. Why is there a fire axe on a futuristic research station - which is in a vacuum - without a piece of wood in sight, or any possible benefit to chopping through the station walls?

So, Chekov's Fire Axe:  IF YOU NEED A SPECIFIC PROP TO ACHIEVE A PLOT POINT, IT SHOULD ALREADY EXIST OR LOGICALLY EXIST IN THE SETTING.

I'm sure that Chekov would approve.

- Sid

If there is such a thing...

And now, the lighter side of Soylent Green.

- Sid

Soylent Green: Change my mind.

"Soylent Green is made of people!"*

Detective Robert Thorn, Soylent Green

As part of my birthday trip to Victoria in September, I made a shopping trip to the Cavity Curiosity Shop, which I've found to be an excellent spot for vintage science fiction shopping.  I've been trying to restrict myself to the purchase of replacement books, but sometimes it can be hard not to colour outside the lines, and unfortunately (or fortunately) Cavity offers a wide range of temptations.

On this occasion, one of those temptations was a copy of the classic SF novel Make Room Make Room! by Harry Harrison, which I've somehow managed to go without reading up until now.

Harry Harrison is quite a good writer, and has an excellent bibliography.  He’s one of the large group of workmanlike and perhaps lesser-known SF authors from the 60s and 70s, authors like Colin Kapp, Keith Laumer, Robert Sheckley, A. Bertram Chandler, and Brian W. Aldiss.

Originally serialized in three parts in the United Kingdom science fiction magazine Impulse and then published in novel form in 1966,  Make Room! Make Room is a low-key near-future eco-disaster drama set in 1996 New York, population 35 million.

It's a sad little dystopian story of overpopulation, deprivation, overcrowding and misery, with none of the excessive drama that you find in other Malthusian** not-with-a-bang-but-a-whimper novels like John Christopher's 1956 novel The Death of Grass, or Stand on Zanzibar and The Sheep Look Up, both by John Brunner.

It's also the relatively unknown inspiration for the 1973 movie Soylent Green, starring Charlton Heston and featuring veteran actor Edward G. Robinson in his last movie role.   

Soylent Green, which, slightly ironically, is set in 2022, received mixed reviews generally but was more favourably received by the science fiction community, winning both a Nebula award and a Saturn Award, and receiving a Hugo nomination.***

To be honest, I don’t think I would have chosen Make Room! Make Room! for a Harry Harrision movie adaptation - his 1970 political SF novel The Daleth Effect strikes me as a far better choice.  Make Room! Make Room! is an understated cautionary tale: subtle, nuanced, and without a definitive resolution to its rendition of life in 1996 New York, and as such it seems an odd choice for Hollywood to option.  It's equally odd that, having chosen to adapt Harrison's slice-of-life story, the producers decided to change it into an action-filled conspiracy thriller.

It's a heavy-handed change to the original plot, but it does succeed in terms of creating something that probably felt more like a science fiction movie script to the producers.  (There was probably a similar process involved in the transition from Philip K. Dick's Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? to the script for Bladerunner.)

Now, just to make this clear, I'm not saying that Soylent Green is a better story than Make Room! Make Room!, but the concept of recycling humans as food* is certainly a bold science fiction concept that falls firmly into the "My god, what if" approach to SF.  

The re-written storyline gives the plot a specific direction by changing the accidental murder of a mob boss by a frightened teenage thief into the assassination of a Soylent Corporation executive to prevent him from going public with the truth about Soylent Green.

In Harrison's original text, the term "soylent" refers to a mix of soy beans and lentils used to create food patties - the original Impossible burger, come to think of it.  In the movie, it's a more abstract concept, partially because it's supposed to be made from plankton, which turns the name Soylent into a futuristic sounding buzzword.

As is very often the case with science fiction set in a specific time, both Make Room!  Make Room! and Soylent Green have passed their best before date in terms of predictive accuracy, although that in no way diminishes their value in terms of social commentary and cautionary warnings.

However, the good news is that none of the current vegetarian meat substitutes on the market are made out of people - at least, not that I know of.   Our version of 2022 certainly has some issues, but I'm reasonably certain that's not one of them.

- Sid

*My apologies to anyone who was unaware of this climactic plot twist and has now had the movie spoiled forever, but let's be fair, Soylent Green came out almost 50 years ago and I feel that it's somewhat in the public domain in terms of surprise endings.

** This is the sort of thing you learn by reading science fiction.  In his 1798 publication, An Essay on the Principle of Population, British clergyman and scholar Thomas Malthus suggested that it was inevitable that population growth would exceed food production, an idea which the science fiction community has referenced again and again over the years.

*** Nebula Awards are in some ways the science fiction equivalent of the Golden Globes in the same way that the Hugo Awards are the Oscars of SF. The Saturn Awards are movie-specific and were originally developed by the Academy of Science Fiction, Fantasy and Horror Films to address the lack of genre recognition by the Oscars.