Wider perspectives - or not.

As already established, I've been reading science fiction for what has effectively been my entire life. And, as a result, I think that I have an enhanced inner life, a broader imagination.

After all, I've seen Mankind skip through time like a child crossing a stream from rock to rock. I've watched post-human societies grapple with profound philosophical crises, and I've witnessed the death of the universe we know, and the start of universes unknown to us. Time itself has ended in front of my eyes, planets have been moved like pieces on a chessboard, galaxy-spanning wars for survival have been fought, and won, and lost.

And yet, and yet...half the goddamn science fiction movies that get made seem to involve nothing more thought-provoking than seemingly endless variations on hungry alien monstrosities dripping KY jelly. Sigh...

- Sid

"Just then, a horde of Nazi frogmen burst into the room."

"We should have gone to the beach like I told you!"

After a couple of long posts, a quick little tribute to a long-running gag: sorry, Laurie, the movie's just about Nazi zombies, not zombie Nazi frogmen, but I'll keep looking...

- Sid

Cities in Space

Why Asten?

Asten is an alternate name for the Egyptian god Thoth, who was tasked with maintaining the balance between Good and Evil, and was the master of divine and physical law. He is said to have directed the motion of the heavenly bodies, and the Egyptians credited him with as the author of all works science, philosophy and magic.

Similar to Thoth, the space station Asten seemingly directs the heavenly bodies in its location orbiting Earth, and opens up multiple possibilities in extending our knowledge and application of science. And who knows, perhaps there is some magic involved too.

Eric Yam, Asten Space Station Proposal

Today's rant finds its roots in a visit to Jeff Russell's Starship Dimensions. Ever wonder what the size relationship is between all of the various aliens, monsters and spaceships that you've ever seen? Jeff Russell has invested what has to have been a frightening amount of time and effort in assembling a fairly comprehensive collection of all the bits and pieces, ranging from Yoda (.66 metres) to Larry Niven's Ringworld (299,300,000 kilometres in diameter).

I happened to notice that Mr. Russell had just added the winning entry from NASA's annual Space Settlement Design Contest, which I'm pleased to say was a Canadian creation, entered by Eric Yam from Northern Secondary School in Toronto. If you visit the competition web site, you can download the 93 page entry and have a look at Mr. Yam's vision for what is essentially a city in space.

Okay, a small town, more accurately. By the standards of Jeff's site, Eric's Asten space station isn't huge - 1700 metres tall, and a thousand metres in diameter, with a planned population of 22,400 people. That doesn't sound like a lot, but given that the current International Space Station measures in at 80 metres and is maxed out with six people on board, it would represent a quantum leap forward.

I won't claim that I read the entire contest entry, but a quick overview suggests that Eric's proposal is comprehensive and realistic. However, here's the detail that jumped out at me:

As with any megaproject, finding the money to pay for the construction of the space station will be extremely difficult. Due to the magnitude of the project, costs could run upwards of over 2-3 trillion dollars. With this staggering cost, financing could take decades, maybe even centuries.

Now, I won't argue - two trillion dollars is a lot of money to build a small town, and there are a lot of factors in play that contribute to the cost of the process. The difficulties of construction in a vacuum have yet to be fully explored, and of course all the materials either have to come up the gravity well or be brought in from the Moon or the asteroids (and yes, Eric discusses that, along with the fact that all the labour has to have access to a shirt-sleeve living environment).

My first thought about the price tag was that it represented the sort of investment that has to be made in order to explore space - go big or go home, and we have to be prepared to deal with that.

My second thought was to wonder what a city actually costs. What do you think New York "cost"?

Third? A funding timeframe of a hundred years would result in a project which would be obsolete before it was fully started, as technology moved forward and the underlying strategies became outmoded. Italian architect Paolo Soleri started construction of Arcosanti, an attempt to build the first arcology, as he calls his architecturally and ecologically integrated urban environment, in 1970. Although arcologies have become a mainstay of the science fiction urban landscape, the actual project itself, chronically underfunded, has been limping along for nearly 40 years with no sign of completion.

Last - ha, only two to three trillion? The only thing that stands in the way of something like the Asten space station is our desire to create it. The United States has spent almost $700 billion dollars on the war in Iraq, and nearly $200 billion on fighting terrorism in Afghanistan. Guess what, stand on tiptoe and you can see a trillion dollars just over the horizon.

- Sid

Don't give away the surprise beginning.

"It's a poor memory sort of memory that only works backwards."
The White Queen, Alice in Wonderland.

It's surprising that this summer's first three big action movie releases are all prequels. (For me, it's even more surprising that two of them feature Anton Yelchin in prominent roles.) Well, perhaps not that surprising, Hollywood has an unfortunate but understandable tendency to farm ground which has already proven fertile.

The big three here are, of course, Wolverine, Star Trek and Terminator Salvation. All three are franchise films, and logically, as prequels, all three are faced with the responsibility of not violating the established plotlines - of not changing the future, if you will.

Or are they?

Wolverine is the most workmanlike in this area. As with any comic book movie, it occupies that difficult middle ground between fans of the original material, and people who have only seen the X-Men movies, and as such it has to try to make everyone happy. Wolverine has received indifferent reviews - I myself didn't find it too bad, as I say, it's a workmanlike film. You can almost see the checklist: Wolverine's childhood revelation, check...falling to his knees and screaming at the sky, check...walking away from an explosion like it's not happening, check... I'm being a bit unfair, perhaps, but there aren't a lot of places in this movie where anything unexpected takes place. (I wish they'd quit killing off supporting mutant characters, though, there seem to be a lot of mutant villains and heroes who only make it through one movie.)

That aside, Hugh Jackman and Liev Schreiber work quite well together on screen, and the movie does fulfill its prequel obligations by establishing Wolverine's origins and by managing to explain his memory loss regarding those origins. Again, the whole thing has a sort of methodical, working-off-the-list feeling.

For me, the joke was that the little stub after the credits, set in Japan, is the setup for a Japanese/ninja/yakuza sequel from the comic story arc that we comic book fans wanted in the first place.

Now, let's get serious: Star Trek. As per the fertile ground analogy in the introduction, the Star Trek franchise has been left fallow for a few years due to poor returns on the crop, as it were. The new film is part of the trend toward the concept reboot, but with the difference of exploring an aspect of the Star Trek history that's never been dealt with: the early days of the original crew of the NCC-1701.

I had mixed feelings about this movie going in, to be honest. I was never one of those foaming-at-the-mouth Star Trek fans, but I've always liked the various iterations of the show (okay, Enterprise didn't ring the bell for me) and I viewed any attempt to redo the original characters as being a bit of a mine field.

As it turned out, that was the least of my concerns. The various actors, called upon to re-interpret what may well be the most iconic TV characters of all time, all do admirable jobs. Chris Pine's Kirk may be a bit cockier than his TV predecessor, but he's younger, it's understandable. Spock, as played by Zachary Quinto, had just the right feel, and so on down the line. Anton Yelchin is perhaps over the top as Chekov, and Karl Urban gets a bit too close to doing a parody of DeForest Kelley, but generally all the actors make the roles their own.

Now, as to the movie itself. As in the joke about the man having sex with a running ostrich, the first few minutes were fabulous, but then I got out of step. The opening scenes of the film showed a vivid, kinetic view of a doomed starship fighting a losing battle, with a touching and emotional communicator exchange between George Kirk and his wife as their son James is being born.

After that? It all sort of went downhill for me. The aggressors in the opening conflict turn out to be Romulans who have come back in time to wreak their vengeance on the Federation for failing to save Romulus from a supernova. In traditional eye-for-an-eye fashion, they plan to destroy the planets of the Federation, starting with Vulcan - apparently the future Spock is guilty of dropping the ball in his attempt to use a black hole to eliminate the supernova.

Now, I realize that the time travel element allows them to rewrite the rules, but even so, there were just too many things that violated canon. Not that canon exists anymore, online Star Trek databases are already having to distinguish between the previous information and the Abramsverse.

And outside of all that, Kirk spends the whole movie getting beaten up by everyone else, the engineering section of the Enterprise looks more like a brewery than a starship, and my god, isn't Nero's ship sort of over-armed for a mining vessel? And hey, Nero, here's some advice on vengeance and physics. If you want to torment someone with the death of their homeworld, KEEP THEM WITH YOU TO WATCH. Dumping them on a planet that's apparently in another solar system is NOT going to be as effective - in fact, I'm willing to bet that I could drop Mars into a black hole without the man on the street noticing a thing, and Mars is just next door by stellar standards. For that matter, the whole supernova thing doesn't work as a plot point for the same reason. Unless it's Romulus' actual sun blowing up, which didn't seem to be the case, the effects of a supernova would take years to travel from one solar system to another, and even then the resulting gamma radiation would mostly have a negative effect on the ozone layer, rather than destroying the planet.*

And goddamn it, is the view screen of the Enterprise a window now?

Sorry, got a little carried away there...

I saw the movie with my friend Laurie, and I was trying to find a way to explain my disappointment to her. She's never been a fan of the whole Star Trek thing, but considers life in general to be pretty close to the Star Wars alien bar scenes. On that basis, I said to her, "Imagine this - as an old man, Luke Skywalker masters the most difficult aspects of the Force, uses it to travel back in time, and kills Darth Sideous decades before he becomes Emperor."

She thought for a moment, and said, "But that would mean that none of the movies ever happened..."

Yep.

I feel a bit as though I've lost a bunch of old friends. Not the characters themselves, but the episodes and plots that can't exist in the Abramsverse. The Conscience of the King - great little episode based in Kirk's survival of the purge by Kodos, governor of Tarsus IV. Not gonna happen, Kirk's gone straight from the Academy to being captain of the Enterprise, no other service. Amok Time? Vulcan's gone, and T'pring is probably dead. And so on....

Terminator Salvation occupies unique territory as prequels go, in that it takes place in the future rather than before the other films. However, thanks to the time travel element, it has the same responsibilities as a prequel: things need to happen in order to set up the stories we've already seen. John Connor has to send father-to-be Kyle Reese into the past, along with a couple of T-800s with thick Bavarian accents.

Frankly, I had high hopes for this one. There have been all sorts of comic book continuations from the original movies that attempt to deal with the complexities of a war waged through time.** Sadly, Salvation never even attempts to take this route, relying instead on a subplot involving a condemned killer and an improbable heart transplant. I did however like the suggestion of messiah complex on the part of John Connor - let's face it, the man has spent his whole life KNOWING that he was going to save humanity, how hard would it be for him to be humble about it?

Oh, and Mr. Yelchin was surprisingly effective as the young Kyle Reese - although, like everyone else in this gritty, post-apocalyptic future, he has the nicest white teeth. It's good to see that cosmetic dentistry is thriving in the face of cybernetic destruction.

- Sid

* There's a Larry Niven short story called At the Core which involves the discovery that the core of the galaxy is exploding - one supernova cascading into another, a phenomenon made possible by the closeness of the systems. Now that's more like it...

** Two movies that have dealt well with the uncertain nature of causality in time travel are Frequency, with Dennis Quaid and James Caviezel, where they show changes rippling across the face of the future as events in the past take place, and of course Bill and Ted's Bogus Journey. There's a great little sequence at the end where Bill and Ted discuss how they'll have to use their time machine to go back in time and set up all of the factors that will allow them to win - after they've won.

...and Cathy is suffering from status block.

I've described Facebook to a few people as really just being an excuse to use the Internet - let's face it, if Facebook disappeared at this exact moment, no lives would be lost as a result. Well, there might be one or two suicides, among them my niece Jody, who spends so much time posting on Facebook that I've started to suspect that she either owns stock in the company or is hoping to gain ownership by squatter's rights.

Recently, one of her posts announced that she had taken the "Which Star Trek Next Generation Character Are You?" quiz, and that she was Counselor Deanna Troi. Mildly curious (and hoping to find out that I'm really Jean-Luc Picard, paragon of Starfleet) I clicked on the link for the quiz, only to discover ten questions later that apparently I'm Lieutenant Commander Data, the android. People have reassured me that this is a good thing, but I was only able to overcome my disappointment by coming to the realization that it could have been worse: I could have been Barclay.

Lieutenant Reginald Endicott Barclay III made his first appearance in the third season of Star Trek: The Next Generation, and returned to provide comic relief in several episodes, as well as showing up now and then on Voyager. Socially inept but sometimes technically inspired, Barclay's bumbling adventures provided a mirror image to the perfection of the rest of the crew.

The aspect of Barclay's character that leaps out at me is that he's one of the few Starfleet officers that seems to be, well, normal. Offered a chance at using the holodeck, wouldn't we all be tempted to run a programme that let us be a hero in our own lives, worshipped by all the women, admired and in some cases feared by the men? Would it be that unusual to have a hidden phobia of being transported? (Lord knows what the damn thing is actually doing to you when you step onto that platform.) Wouldn't anyone be mortified to be called an embarrassing nickname by their boss? (In this case, Captain Picard, who accidentally calls him "Mr. Broccoli".) And finally, who wouldn't be nervous and intimidated by an assignment to the flag ship of the fleet, and screw up a few times as a result?

Unfortunately, when Barclay began to show up as part of the Starfleet support team for Voyager's return to the Alpha Quadrant, he'd become more confident and reliable - just like everyone else. Presumably this made him a better support for Voyager's efforts, and there were occasional glimpses of the old Reg, but frankly I missed the original character. Shouldn't every starship have someone with the good sense to be scared?

- Sid

Happy Towel Day, froods.

May 25th, and Towel Day is once again upon us. For the unfortunate few who are reading this without knowing what Towel Day commemorates (sorry to single you out again, Laurie), today is dedicated to The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy and its author, Douglas Adams. (Who passed away on May 11, 2001 at the age of 49 - Towel Day comes two weeks later, for no good reason that I'm aware of.) In honour of Mr. Adams and his creations, fans around the world* carry a towel throughout the course of the day.

A towel, it says, is about the most massively useful thing an interstellar hitchhiker can have. Partly it has great practical value - you can wrap it around you for warmth as you bound across the cold moons of Jaglan Beta; you can lie on it on the brilliant marble-sanded beaches of Santraginus V, inhaling the heady sea vapors; you can sleep under it beneath the stars which shine so redly on the desert world of Kakrafoon; use it to sail a miniraft down the slow heavy River Moth; wet it for use in hand-to-hand-combat; wrap it round your head to ward off noxious fumes or avoid the gaze of the Ravenous Bugblatter Beast of Traal (such a mind-boggingly stupid animal, it assumes that if you can't see it, it can't see you); you can wave your towel in emergencies as a distress signal, and of course dry yourself off with it if it still seems to be clean enough.

A more intelligent planet would probably declare this a work holiday, but sadly we can't claim to be intelligent, just harmless - sorry, mostly harmless.

- Sid

* Towelday.org, the official web site of Towel Day, says "fans around the universe", but they don't seem to have any posts that originate from off-planet.

Life After People

Something there is that does not love a wall.
- Robert Frost

I recently saw a History Channel special called Life After People which dealt with what would happen if every person on the planet vanished - after a day, a year, five years, ten years and so on. This is the "what if" aspect of science fiction at its purest form, unhampered by plot or characters - rather like a science fiction story from the 1930's* - and it beautifully illustrated the impermanent nature of our civilization.

I was impressed by the fact that the show never attempted to come up with any sort of reason why humanity would vanish, because really, that's not what they wanted to talk about. Instead, it was simply treated as a given: no more people.

It was astonishing to see just how temporary our society is, and to how great an extent our current technology contains the seeds of its own destruction. Fuel runs out, and power stops flowing; pumps fail, and subways become underground rivers; iron falls prey to the slow fire of rust, and cities collapse; concrete cracks, and bridges and dams crumble.

Interestingly, our technology is actually more fragile than that of two thousand years ago. For example, Roman concrete from before the birth of Christ is more durable than the modern equivalent, which is less solid, and constructed around a grid of iron rebar, which expands as it rusts and will eventually break apart even the largest structure.

And what would be left of modern civilization ten thousand years after people? Almost nothing - science fiction author David Brin speculates that the only remnant would be Mount Rushmore, carved from solid stone.

The show was originally broadcast in early 2008, and I suspect that the rerun that I saw was intended as an introduction to the new ten episode series of the same name that has just started. If it's as good as the original program, it will make for good viewing - if you spot it while you're channel hopping, give it a look for a few minutes, you may find that you keep watching it.

- Sid

* The non-fans in the crowd will have to trust me - this is a funny joke. And if you don't believe that it has a basis in reality, I can recommend a few things for really dedicated readers.

"Have you tried NOT being a mutant?"

"Over 20 years after the Chernobyl accident, and am I the only one that’s disappointed? Still no superheroes."

British comedian Jimmy Carr

In fact, today marks the 23rd year since the faulty reactor at Chernobyl dumped 400 times the fallout from Hiroshima into the environment. And, as Mr. Carr quite accurately points out, that should be lots of time for a mutant or two to have been born, grown up, ostracized by the rest of humanity, and forced to take refuge at some sort of "school" for gifted youngsters run by a bald guy in a wheelchair. And yet, here we are without even a single mutant superhero, let alone dueling armies of heroes and villains. What went wrong?

Let's start with mutation. A little research reveals that mutation is a "base-pair sequence change" in DNA that results in a new characteristic or trait. (Base pairs are all those combinations of the four nucleotides represented by the letters G, A, T and C which provided the source material for the movie title GATTACA.) A change in certain base pairs might result in a butterfly that's a different colour than its siblings, for example. The human genome contains 3 billion base pairs, and I'm willing to accept that the laws of chance allow for all kinds of things to happen when you're dealing with numbers on that scale. After all, if you were flipping 3 billion quarters, it's not impossible for all of them to come up heads.

To extend the analogy, even if they do all come up heads, we're still flipping only quarters, not pennies or nickels. Some of the X-men have abilities that make no sense in terms of mutation* - how in the world would the necessary genetic information for wings get into someone's DNA? It's one thing to get a butterfly that's a funny colour (or even a person with blue skin), but it seems pretty unlikely that you could get a butterfly with lobster claws or porcupine quills.

But I'm not entirely against the concept of the mutant superhero. How could we possibly predict whether or not some combination of genes might allow for telepathy, telekinesis, or any of the other unproven psionic abilities? And I'm happy to give Wolverine the full seal of mutant approval. There's a tendency to forget that his actual mutant abilities are rapid healing and animal-like senses - sensitive smell, hearing and so on - which although a bit extreme are logical extensions of existing human capabilities. People tend to focus more on the adamantium skeleton and claws, which after all are custom add-ons rather than factory stock.


However, the adamantium skeleton implanted by Stryker's Weapon X programme must lead to problems. The human skeleton isn't just a support system for the muscles. Bone marrow produces blood cells, a crucial part of the body's ability to transfer oxygen and fight disease. Logically, if Logan's skeleton is made out of metal, his rapid healing factor must be in a constant battle to prevent something very much like a combination of anemia and leukemia. I wonder if they're going to talk about that in the new movie?

- Sid

*And even less in terms of physics. The ability to shoot intense powerful beams of energy from your eyes? You've got to think that it would take Mother Nature thousands of generations to build the necessary structures for that. (And I can't imagine that you'd be able to see with the same organs that were able to blast a hole through concrete.) How do you fuel something like that? What possible natural energy source could the human body contain that would allow for that kind of power? For that matter, what are the back of Cyclops' eye sockets made out of in order to make sure that the energy doesn't blast out through the back of his head when his eyes are closed? My god, on that basis what are his eyelids made out of?

And why do Bruce Banner's pants never rip the same way the rest of his clothing does when he turns into the Hulk? I know, I know, they're just comic books.

And of course a movie is being planned.

Scenes dealing with, or instruments associated with walking dead, torture, vampires and vampirism, ghouls, cannibalism, and werewolfism are prohibited.

Comics Code Authority, 1954

Recently my friend Laurie was complaining about being cursed by her own success at work. She's currently booking fitness training sessions at about twice her quota, and has been forced to request that her overtime limit be raised so that she can do all of her administrative tasks as well.

The impressive part is that she's not even trying to sell her services. As she commented, "It's like I can't escape these people, they seem to come out of nowhere!"

My reply was that I could easily imagine what it must be like: closing time at the gym, and she's just turned out the lights (as demanded by dramatic tradition in this area). Then, out of the shadows come the shambling, decaying figures of gym zombies, draped in tattered Lululemon outfits, with the moaning cry of "Traaaainnnnnn.....traaaaaainnn...."*

How is it that zombies have become part of the cultural landscape?

Zombies would seem to be a particularly 20th century conceit. The concept of the revenant, someone who has returned from the dead, exists as far back as the Middle Ages, but unlike the vampire or the werewolf, the current version of the zombie seems to owe very little to its historical antecedents.

EC Comics planted the seed for the modern zombie in its 1950's titles such as Vault of Horror and Tales from the Crypt, which featured the vengeful return from the grave by murder victims as a staple of its content. The whys and hows of such a return were secondary: the important part was the visual impact of these rotting horrors from the graveyard as they lurched into the homes of their killers to exact a grisly revenge.

Sadly, it was exactly this sort of over-the-top approach to storytelling which led to the downfall of EC Comics and their brethren. A psychiatrist named Fredric Wertham undertook a crusade against the adverse effects of EC's horrific tales and their negative impact on the children who read them, publishing his results in his infamous book The Seduction of the Innocent. In 1954, Congress undertook an investigation of juvenile delinquency, with Wertham as a prominent witness. The congressional committee concluded that comics were not directly responsible for delinquency among youth, but strongly recommended that some sort of control be instituted over the content of comics.

In response, the comics industry created the Comics Code Authority and its list of forbidden content. Since the list was more or less derived directly from the EC Comics material, EC soon found itself out of business.

However, EC left its mark by inserting the whole idea of zombies into the psyche of a generation of comic readers - and eventual movie makers. (The principals of EC also went on to develop MAD Magazine, which left a completely different mark, but I digress.)

The real front man for zombie promotion is of course George Romero, whose 1968 movie Night of the Living Dead might be considered the crop from the seeds planted by EC. In the years since Romero's black and white magnum opus, there have been innumerable zombie movies that have firmly established walking cannibal corpses as part of the horror canon. Interestingly, there's a common thread in these films that blames government experiments gone wrong for the rise of zombies, rather than any sort of supernatural process.

And now, the shelves of bookstores are graced by another attempt by zombies to earn acceptance in the mainstream: Seth Grahame-Smith's Pride and Prejudice and Zombies, which is actually credited to Jane Austen and Mr. Grahame-Smith. This dual credit strikes me as a marketing ploy - obviously the publishers are hoping that Ms. Austen will rise from the grave to avenge herself. (Perhaps some cameras should be set up near her gravesite in preparation.)

But really, when you think about it, Wertham and the Comics Code Authority people should have known better. After all, everyone knows that zombies eventually find a way in, no matter what.

- Sid

* Sadly, Laurie didn't get the "braaains" reference, but I thought it was funny.

"Wouldn't you rather see the whole movie?"

Imagine if you will: you and a couple of friends decide to head over to the Alamo Drafthouse Cinema, down there in Austin, Texas - they're going to show The Wrath of Khan, the best of the original series Star Trek movies, as part of this year's Fantastic Fest, and then there's supposed to be a ten minute preview from the new Star Trek prequel movie. There's a bit of chat from the guests from the production team of the new movie about the preview, then Wrath of Khan starts.

Ah, come on - two minutes in and the film jams? Damn analog technology.... Hold on, who's that on stage? Leonard Nimoy? Spock? What? And he's just asked if we wouldn't rather see the WHOLE new Star Trek movie?!

The surprise premiere of the new Star Trek movie at this year's Fantastic Fest in Austin, Texas, an annual film festival dedicated to fantasy, horror, action and science fiction, has to be the best thank-you to the fan community of all time. It's also an extraordinarily brave thing to do, especially considering that the recent Wolverine work print leak is still echoing around the Internet. But even without that, I have to give Paramount full credit for boldly combining a brilliant guerilla marketing move with an acknowledgement of the importance of the fans to the Star Trek franchise.

It's also going to make those people in the audience into legends in the fan community: "We few, we happy few, we band of brothers", as Shakespeare puts it. Of course, the hard core being what it is, you can guarantee that at least one person in the audience was angry about not seeing Wrath of Khan for the 215th time.

- Sid

Some things defy description.

"...to boldly go where no...man....has gone before."

Sky, Ninja Babes from Space

I make no judgements, I state no opinions: Ninja Babes from Space.

- Sid

Achievable Technology.

"But iron!"
"Hell, we're not savages, Devan, are we? When we came to this place we didn't revert back. We still have our minds. All we need is a blast furnace, some iron ore and a fire, isn't it?"

Jerry Sohl, Costigan's Needle

I've just finished re-reading my battered copy of Jerry Sohl's 1953 novel Costigan's Needle - I own the 1968 edition, so it's not as battered as it might be if I owned one of the original paperbacks.* I suspect I first read my mother's copy in my early teens, but I can't remember if I found the concept as unlikely then as I find it to be now.

For those of you unfamiliar with what Mr. Sohl considered to be his best novel**, the titular Dr. Costigan invents a device which creates an opening into another place, an opening which only allows the transmission of living matter. The device is damaged by angry Christian fundamentalists, and the resulting overload sends every living cell within a two-block radius into another world, sans clothing, shoes, glasses, fillings, pacemakers, and all of the other crutches for everyday life that technology has provided.

Naked and shivering, their first decision is to rebuild the device and return. Ten years later, they turn on the power to the new Needle and prepare to send everyone back through its Eye, only to discover that no one wants to leave.

Impressively, after ten years the inhabitants of Sohl's New Chicago have all the conveniences of life: steel for hammers, nails, and wire; glass for bottles, windows, glasses and light bulbs; plastics for dishes and insulation; tobacco and paper for cigarettes - and phosphorus for matches with which to light them. Their dentist fills teeth with gold and their doctors use ether as an anaesthetic, and their power plant provides the electricity for the new Needle.

I'm sorry, but I'm skeptical. Quick pop quiz: how many people reading this know how to make iron? We all know that glass is made out of sand - but how? It's got to be more complicated than just heating up some sand, or else there would be little glassy pits every time someone lit a fire on a beach. For that matter, if you were dropped naked into the woods, would you even be able to start a fire? How about building a cell phone and calling for help?

Now, I realize that Sohl has loaded the dice, in that the inventor of the Needle and a room full of scientists and technicians get transported, but even then I have to question the ability of 395 people to recreate enough of our civilization to be able to build log cabins that don't leak when it rains, let alone to the point of constructing complicated electronic devices. I strongly suspect that in reality all 395 of them would be involved in a constant struggle to get enough food on the table,with very little time left over to start figuring out the right impedance for a capacitor.

However, I must be the only person who feels this way. The something-from-nothing technological meme is fairly common in science fiction, with Mark Twain's A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court getting the ball rolling. All sorts of people seem to get transported or displaced into other dimensions or other times where their knowledge allows them to either revolutionize society or to build a new one from scratch, and a surprising percentage of these people know how to make gunpowder.

One of the more plausible amateur chemists is Calvin Morrison, the protagonist of H. Beam Piper's Lord Kalvan of Otherwhen. However, Calvin - or Kalvan - realizes immediately that he's not going to be able to convert the late-medieval society in which he finds himself into the equivalent of the industrial revolution in order to help them win a war. What he can do is to help them move about a hundred years further ahead: better gunpowder, rifled barrels, trunnions on cannon, and so on, which I find far more believable than having them build Sherman tanks.

Similarly, William R. Forstchen's "Lost Regiment" series presents one of the few "rebuild society from nothing" scenarios that worked for me. His characters are a shipload of Civil War soldiers whose ship gets swept out to sea and ends up going through a dimensional portal in the Bermuda Triangle. Forstchen loads his dice by having the ship loaded with a variety of useful military and engineering supplies, but even without that I'd accept the idea of a group of Civil War soldiers being able to start with almost nothing and recreate their society.

Why is that? I think that there's some kind of break point around the end of the 19th century after which the number of steps between phases of technology grows larger and larger. A miner in 1865 might well have known how to smelt down the ore, after he'd extracted it from the mine with pick and shovel. Or a blacksmith might have similar knowledge of what was involved with the ore before he began hammering the iron into nails. In current technology, the people who make the parts that are used to make the machines that make the parts for the machines that make the nails are unlikely to have ever seen the process of nailmaking, let alone have any idea of what iron looks like in its natural state.

The final joke for me is that if you sent 395 science fiction fans into another dimension, they might well do better than the average, just from having read so many variations on the theme. Oh, and the formula for gunpowder is 75% saltpeter, 15% sulphur and 10% charcoal. You might want to memorize that, just in case.

- Sid

*I have the impression that my sister Dorothy owns a copy as well, although I suspect hers may be in worse shape.

**Presumably everyone but Dorothy.

Look on my works, ye mighty...

I met a traveller from an antique land,
Who said: Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert. Near them, on the sand,
Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown
And wrinkled lip and sneer of cold command,
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read,
Which yet survive stamped on these lifeless things,
The hand that mocked them, and the heart that fed;
And on the pedestal these words appear:
'My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings;
Look on my works. Ye Mighty, and despair!'
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away.

Percy Bysshe Shelley, Ozymandias

I talked to Terry Gilliam in the '80s, and he asked me how I would make Watchmen into a film. I said, ''Well actually, Terry, if anybody asked me, I would have said, 'I wouldn't.'''

Alan Moore

Who watches the Watchmen? Well, last week it was me. Equipped with a bag of dry popcorn (damn you Laurie, for having ruined buttered popcorn for me) I settled in for the almost three hour marathon of Zack Snyder's take on what has arguably been called "the best comic book story of all time". However, it's also been referred to as arguably being unadaptable, and Alan Moore, who wrote the comic book, has refused to allow his name to be associated with the project.

The terrible thing about having read the original series in the late 80's is that when watching the adaptation there was always a hint of checklist in the background. This constant little voice compared the film to the comic: "Right ... yes .... no ... yes ... no ... yes ... yes ... what? ... perfect ... nonono!!". As with The Lord of the Rings movies, I'm going to have to wait for a non-believer to see The Watchmen in order to find out if it makes any sense on its own. *

That being said, I have to admit that the movie completely captured my attention, to the point that, when it ended, my first thought was, "Wait, I thought it was supposed to be almost three hours long?". The odd thing is that I'm not sure it deserved that sort of immersion - as above, I'll have to ask someone who doesn't know the original material.

The Watchmen wavers between moments of complete imitation of the comic book and points of complete departure. Some plot elements are diminished or removed entirely, others are magnified from their original significance. For example, the character of the Comedian holds a larger part of the stage than he did in the comic, whereas Rorschach seems reduced, and a subplot revolving around the original Night Owl has vanished completely. The Ozymandias portrayed in the original series came across as a perfect man, a physical and intellectual paragon who sincerely believes that his actions are in the best interests of humanity and that the end will justify his means, but I found the movie character to be much colder, almost repellent - it's interesting that they made his costume black rather than the comic book character's golden outfit.

There were a number of visual elements of that nature that bothered me on an almost subliminal level, little changes from the comics that weren't vital but which were a bit distracting in combination with the elements that were faithfully duplicated. Rorschach, the Comedian, and Dr. Manhattan are portrayed exactly as in the comic, whereas Ozymandias, Night Owl and Silk Spectre have their costumes changed to a greater or lesser extent.

But I have to say that I was astonished by how much some of the people resembled the characters as drawn by Dave Gibbons. Jackie Earle Haley perfectly evokes Rorschach in the scenes where he appears without his mask, and the Night Owl's alter ego of Dan Dreiburg as portrayed by Patrick Wilson is flawless. There were some minor flaws in the Comedian's progression in age, but Jeffrey Dean Morgan gives the role exactly the right kind of cynical, brutal amusement.

Overall, I found The Watchmen to be a good attempt to adapt something so widely considered to be unadaptable. I say "attempt" because I'm not sure that it succeeds as a whole, but the sum of the parts involved compensates for the places where it fails. Oh, and as per my previous posting on the topic, yes, the ending is radically different in its direction if not in its result. I can understand why they would make the changes they made, and I admit that the ending of the comic book version has been subjected to a certain amount of criticism as having elements of absurdity, but I don't agree with the spin that the new ending forces onto the reactions of the other characters.

One of the elements that made The Watchmen a difficult work for adaptation is the episodic nature of the original story. The logical breaks at the end of each issue allowed for a chapter-based rhythm to the plot structure and for the inclusion of a wide variety of supporting textual material - excerpts from the original Night Owl's biography, Rorschach's psychiatric profile, interviews with Jon Veidt/Ozymandias, and so on - that would be impossible to include in a movie. However, I look forward to seeing if the Watchmen DVD will re-introduce any of those elements once the story has been removed from the exigencies of commercial release. Who knows, if they put some work into that, Alan Moore may even allow them to put his name on it.

- Sid

* Fortunately my friend Alan in Toronto, who hasn't read the comic - and who doesn't read this blog, as far as I know - will likely be able to act as a neutral observer. (He performed a similar role for the Lord of the Rings movies, with which he was also unfamiliar in their written form. Sadly, young Alan is not a big fan of reading.)

The Lake of the Sun, the Bay of the Dawn.

Rather than true channels in a form familiar to us, we must imagine depressions in the soil that are not very deep, extended in a straight direction for thousands of miles, over a width of 100, 200 kilometers and maybe more. I have already pointed out that, in the absence of rain on Mars, these channels are probably the main mechanism by which the water (and with it organic life) can spread on the dry surface of the planet.

Giovanni Schiaparelli, Life on Mars

The Google home page kindly informed me this morning that today was the birth date of Giovanni Virginio Schiaparelli (1835-1910). This 19th-century astronomer's name may not be known to everyone, but generations of science fiction fans owe an enormous debt to Signore Schiaparelli - or, to be more accurate, to the mistranslation of his work.

In 1877, Mars was in a particularly favourable position for observation, and Shiaparelli, at that point director of the Brera Observatory near Milan, took advantage of this opportunity to make detailed observations of the planet's surface. Using these observations and additional data from the next decade, he produced maps of Mars which remained the standard until space probes allowed for more accurate images.

But when Schiaparelli's work was translated into English, the Italian phrase "canali", intended to refer to the channels that he had observed, was translated as "canals" - creations of intelligence rather than environment. The debate regarding life on Mars that was started by this minor alteration was to continue for almost one hundred years, until Mariner 4 sent closeup pictures of Mars back to NASA in 1965.

Regardless of the position of the scientific community, the idea of vast canals spanning a desert planet resonated with the science fiction community. That was the Mars that I first read about when I started reading science fiction, a dying planet inhabited by the descendants of a fallen civilization older than our own, desperately fighting a losing battle against the ever advancing sands. This is the Mars of Planet Stories, the Mars of Ray Bradbury's Martian Chronicles, the Mars of H.G. Wells' War of the Worlds, the Mars known as Barsoom to its inhabitants in Edgar Rice Burroughs' John Carter novels.

However, Schiaparelli is more deserving of praise than the common translation error about canals would suggest. As he made his initial observations of the Martian surface, he began to name the various geographic features that he saw, and those names have left Schiaparelli with a lasting heritage.

Just as the broad flat plains of the Moon were commonly referred to as "seas", Schiaparelli used a similar convention for Martian names, giving us The Sea of Sirens, the Bay of the Dawn, and the Lake of the Sun. Other names came from mythology, the Bible, or history. But regardless of its origins, the geography of Mars has a sort of lyrical poetry to it: Tharsis, Chryse, Ophyr, Thyle, Cydonia, Elysium - they almost seem to have been chosen as locations for adventure and fantasy.


Current scientific theory has it that there may be no life at all on Mars, and science fiction authors have sadly and reluctantly moved on from tales of dying civilizations and fallen empires on our sister world. Now science fiction tends to look ahead to life on Mars as it would be lived by colonists from Earth, and, more ambitiously, to the prospect of terraforming Mars. Who knows, if technology can some day match imagination, a future generation of Mars-born humans may be able to stand on the shore of the Bay of the Dawn and see the sun glinting off the waves.

- Sid

P.S. In addition to reminding the world about Schiaparelli's birthday, Google has added a Mars option to Google Earth. (Thereby calling for a new name for the product, if you think about it.)

As if World of Warcraft armour wasn't silly enough.

There I am, stalking through the post-apocalyptic ruins of the Suez Canal in my captured L-5 Bogatyr battlewalker, searching for PAC infantry and other soft targets, when I notice that there's a familiar billboard ahead. Hmmm...given that I'm playing Battlefield 2142, it would appear that things fell apart about 133 years ago. Either that, or some radiation-crazed mutant has a fondness for putting up vintage movie ads.

A little online investigation reveals the following information from a 2006 Electronic Arts press release:

Today's announcement from Electronic Arts describes an agreement with New York-based in-game advertising firm IGA Worldwide, which will see an unspecified number of EA franchises implement in-game advertising. The first game that will see ads from IGA is Digital Illusions CE's Battlefield 2142, which will be receiving dynamic ads tailored to players' physical locations. Interestingly, the press release also states that ads will be customized by platform, though the game has been announced only for PC, suggesting that the game may eventually be coming to other systems. "Consumers are increasingly gaming in deep, virtual worlds and advertisers need adapted ways to reach these audiences," said European VP for Online and Strategic Relationships Frank Sagnier. "The agreement with IGA is a first step in a detailed strategy to deliver advertising in a seamless format." It was not specified what type of real world brands will be used to seamlessly and realistically integrate modern advertising into the fictional setting of a war-themed game set in 2142.

Sigh...yes, consumers are spending more time in "deep" virtual worlds, but obviously they're not deep enough. I can just see the next step in the process: some desperate, battered human raiders making their stand in World of Warcraft as the Orcs begin their charge: their Nikon spears ready, their Coca-Cola shields braced, heads defiantly held high in their Nike helms...

- Sid

"I have been faithful to thee, o Watchmen! in my fashion."

 Many years ago, there was a Jesus comic book.

Written and drawn by Frank Stack under the pseudonym of Foolbert Sturgeon, the concept for this early 70's underground creation was that Jesus had come back to Earth, as had been long awaited, but unfortunately no one cared. And, sadly, Jesus had the same problems with modern life that any long-haired sandal-wearing peace-loving hippy would have, albeit with the ability to turn abusive police officers into actual pigs.

In one issue of The New Adventures of Jesus, Christ goes to the movies to see a film adaptation of the New Testament. He sits enthralled as a muscular, almost Hulk-like screen Jesus fights an equally buff John the Baptist in the early stages of the movie, in the traditional Marvel Comics style hero-meets-hero combat. And, at the end of the movie, when the celluloid Christ uses his cross as a massive weapon to fight the legions, then rallies the Jews and defeats the Roman invaders, Jesus applauds wildly with the rest of the audience.

As the theatre empties, two people behind Jesus are discussing the film. One of them says, "The end's not like the book..."

And so, to the upcoming screen adaptation of The Watchmen.

For readers unfamiliar with The Watchmen in its original comic book form, it was a 12 issue limited series originally published by DC in 1986. Written by Alan Moore and illustrated by Dave Gibbons, it took place in an alternate universe, one where Batman-like vigilantes have been fighting crime for decades, until they are finally declared to be as illegal as their criminal adversaries. In addition, another hero has appeared on the scene, one whose powers are literally godlike. The plot starts with the death of one of the retired heroes (who may not have been that retired) and follows the various characters of the disbanded Watchmen group as they attempt to solve the mystery behind the death, only to uncover a massive conspiracy.

However, that quick summary does an enormous injustice to the series. The Watchmen is considered to be a seminal work, "a comic about comics". Alan Moore's script was intended to turn the myth of the masked avenger on its head, to "show a reality that was very different to the general public image of the super-hero", as Moore himself explained. Every element of the story was planned and considered, from the creation of the archetypal heroes to the development of the style of colouring through the twelve issues, and down to the 9-panel layout and the type of line used to draw the illustrations.

More interestingly, it was also planned to be a demonstration of the unique nature of the comic medium. In fact, it could be said that The Watchmen was deliberately created in opposition to movies, which might explain why a movie adaptation was considered impossible for many years, in spite of the popularity of the series.

But time marches on, and comic books have now become a gold mine for the movie industry. As such, it was inevitable that someone would take up the challenge of The Watchmen. The question, of course, was how they would undertake that challenge.

There are three major points on the curve of comic book adaptation. At one end, you have complete, slavish obedience to the source material - Sin City, 300 - wherein the movie is as close to a one-to-one reproduction of the comic as possible. The middle position involves some compromise, but does its best to be true to the spirit of the original material - the Spiderman and X-Men movies, Hellboy, Iron Man. And at the far end of the curve? Presumably with the best intentions, liberty after liberty is taken, and you end up with Elektra, V, The Hulk, The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen - and maybe Constantine.


Early evidence is that the Watchmen movie falls between slavishness and compromise, with critical scenes being extracted with complete faithfulness to the look of the comic panels. Initial reactions to trailers have been quite positive because of that, with fans of the comic applauding the accuracy with which they see the comic transferred to the screen. There are some differences - some of the costumes have been altered, some of the faces aren't perfect matches for their four-colour counterparts - but so far, people are seeing what they want to see.

However, I recently learned that director Zack Snyder had changed the ending of the film from the apocalyptic conclusion of the comic. I gather that there's still some form of deus ex machina to pull the scattered threads of the conspiracy plot together, but not the one written by Alan Moore.

Personally, I find it to be an odd decision for Snyder to have made, and, to be honest, learning that the ending has been changed casts the whole project into doubt for me. The Watchmen comics present an intensely detailed and layered story, with a wealth of supporting material. Why be careful in ensuring that all the details are accurate if you're not using those details to reach the same conclusion? It's like doing a completely historically accurate presentation of Romeo and Juliet, at the end of which the lovers elope to Mantua.

However, I have to be fair. It could be argued that the plot of the comic series was almost irrelevant, more an excuse for the interaction and development of the characters than an attempt at brilliance. As Dave Gibbons himself commented regarding the plot, "...it just really isn't the most interesting thing about Watchmen. As we actually came to tell the tale, that's where the real creativity came in."

On that basis, any ending that allows for the same degree of depth and creativity in the telling of the tale and the exploration of the characters might turn out to be just as acceptable. And who knows, it may be an improvement on the original. After all, Jesus seemed quite pleased with the Rambo version of His story.

- Sid

And they're close to an Irish pub, too.

"You do realize," said Zanna, "that you're stroking a milk carton."
"You're just jealous."

China Miéville, Un Lun Dun

I spent part of the weekend on Vancouver Island helping my niece and her boyfriend move, but I also managed to find some free time to do some shopping in Victoria. If you're visiting British Columbia's capital, I strongly recommend Munro's Books on Government Street to anyone whose interests lie in the literary world.

During a previous visit, I had wandered into Munro's without any particular expectations, since very few non-genre bookstores have anything unique to offer to the science fiction and fantasy shopper*. However, to my surprise and pleasure, I found a paperback copy of Terry Pratchett's first novel, The Carpet People, which I'd never even heard of, let alone seen on a store shelf.

As a result, I went in this time with more of a sense of optimism, and was rewarded by a trade paperback copy of China Miéville's Un Lun Dun for a mere $11.00, which is not all that much more than I would have expected to pay for a regular paperback. Even more surprising, the price was actually $11.00, rather than $10.99 or some similar insult to my mathematical intelligence.

Now if they can only overcome their identity problem - do they really need to have their name in that many places on their storefront?

- Sid

* In fact, there are some genre stores that don't have a lot to offer, either. White Dwarf, Vancouver's science fiction and fantasy specialty store, has done nothing to impress me, between their hard-to-browse shelving and the fact that they never have called me about the book that I ordered three years ago. Their dog is a pleasant sort, though.

As a change from captions on cat photos.

In a Beautiful Mind moment of schizophrenic clarity I saw the book for what it was: not a gentle introduction to life's most profound curiosity, but a primer for the parasitic offspring of an invisible invasion!

Jason Yungbluth, Deep Fried Comics

The Internet has spawned a legion of webcomics, blogs, commentaries and forums, and I'm sure that there are people out there who fill every waking moment by subjecting other people to a barrage of links to their favourite net memes. I've done my best to avoid that here, although now and then a link to something will sneak in.

In this case, however, I couldn't resist. There's just something about the Zogg invasion manual ...

- Sid

You can stop now.

Usually when you have a black man or a woman president, a meteor is about to hit the Statue of Liberty.

Jon Stewart, 80th Academy Awards

As I type this, Barack Obama's inauguration is well under way in Washington, and it is impossible to ignore the historic nature of this event. And I mean literally impossible, in that if I had a dollar for every time someone has used the defining phrase "historic" to describe the situation, I'd be heading off to Fiji this afternoon instead of a job interview.

However, this event should have some kind of impact (no pun relating to the introductory quote intended) on the science fiction community. Sorry, it will now be necessary to create a different cliché to indicate a future or near future setting. Personally, I think that having a native American president would have a nice feel of irony to it, let's use that for our fallback position for now. However, I'm a fair minded man: I think that we can continue to cast Morgan Freeman as God.

- Sid

I know, "willful suspension of disbelief."

So, Sunday evening, back from the gym, perched on the couch with some dinner, fighting off Nigel the Cat's attempts to participate in said dinner and watching Stargate: Atlantis. In this evening's rerun, Colonel Sheppard, McKay, and the usual suspects go through the gate in order to ascertain the status of an exploratory team that's missed their contact deadline. Apparently the planet is uninhabited but McKay had gotten some unusual energy readings or some similar piece of plot advancement.

So, pop - or maybe whoosh - through the gate they go:


Gosh, guys, that's quite a clear piece of ground for an uninhabited planet, but maybe that's from the Gate bubble or whatever they call it. Oh well, moving on - the team heads off in search of their missing predecessors:

Hmmm....I grew up in deer country, and I have to say that's a pretty impressive game trail you have there, people.

And then they find some corpses, far too old to be the missing team, but obviously victims of foul play, right there beside that big flat stump.

I'm sorry, but forget the bodies, you need to find out what in hell is running around this planet that leaves a fifteen foot wide trail and can bite off a tree with a four-foot diameter leaving a completely flat stump!!!!

Okay, I realize full well that in actual terms, they bundled the crew onto a couple of trucks, drove over to Stanley Park, and set up some cameras, probably happier than hell that it wasn't raining. But really, what were they thinking? Their audience is made up of science fiction fans, the most detail-oriented nitpickers on the planet - could they not have driven someplace up the Fraser Valley and found a piece of ground that didn't look quite so lived in?

- Sid

P.S. What's really unbelievable about this is that there's a web site that has 992 screen grabs from this episode. In fact, it looks like they have about a thousand screen grabs per episode, or 20,000 images per season. Wow - see above re: detail oriented fans.

It's Matt Smith, it's Matt Smith!!!!

Today the BBC announced that 26-year-old Matt Smith would be replacing David Tennant as the Doctor on Doctor Who in 2010. My reaction, and I suspect the reaction of almost everyone, seems fitting.

Who?

- Sid

And everyone seems to complain about the lack of flying cars.

Prediction is very difficult, especially about the future.

Niels Bohr, Nobel-prize winning physicist

Here we are, New Year's Day once again, all of us time travellers zooming along at the frightening speed of one second per second (faster than it sounds), and you know, I have to say that I have mixed feelings about the future so far. I don't mean the future as in a hundred years from now, I mean now - you know, the future.

Because let's face it, that's where we're living, the future. It's 2009 now, and by the standards I grew up by, I'm sorry, 2009 is the future. It must be, I've read hundreds, if not thousands, of science fiction stories that took place in our past.

2001? Well, I think we all know what that was like: space stations, moon bases, artificial intelligences, interplanetary exploration, all that stuff. No, wait, the moon base went away with the moon in 1999, didn't it? Remember 1984? It wasn't all that much like 1984, was it?

The first Isaac Asimov robot story, Robbie, is a touching tale of a mute robotic nursemaid set in 1998 - you remember, five years before all the governments banned the use of robots on Earth. It's also one year after the opening scenes of Joe Haldeman's The Forever War, wherein an elite group of soldiers is trained to combat aliens in 1997, then hurled through a collapsar to Epsilon Aurigae, 2000 light years away. Philip K. Dick's Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep - better known to most people by the title of its movie adaptation, Blade Runner - was originally set in 1992.

This sort of thing is unfair, of course. As I discussed in my initial post, the role of science fiction is not intended to be predictive. Science fiction's role is one of "what if", not "when".

But I have to say that if I was going to pick someone to have written this particular future, it would have to be the late Mr. Dick. It's difficult for me to think of anyone else whose imagination would have created a future where there's a computer in almost every home in the Western world, incredibly powerful devices which require constant protection from offers of penis enlargement; where space exploration has been all but abandoned, apparently due to lack of interest; where the United States is involved in a war that costs them $720,000,000 a day - wow, do you think we'd be able to sell this to a publisher in 1955?

Oh well - the future is like a bed, I suppose. Having made it, we are forced to lie in it. Happy New Year, everyone - one more step into the future.

- Sid