...In A Galaxy Far, Far Away.

Although I write screenplays, I don't think I'm a very good writer.

- George Lucas

Let's face it, eventually someone will remake the Star Wars movies. Some latter-day Peter Jackson - sigh, or J. J. Abrams - will take upon themselves the monumental task of applying a different vision to George Lucas' epic but admittedly imperfect magnum opus.

This as yet unborn revisionist will obviously make changes, large and small. They'll rewrite the dialogue (please God), make Jar Jar Binks less of an annoying stereotype, fix the gaffe about parsecs, and lose all of that midi-chlorian nonsense.

Larger decisions will alter the entire direction of the series. The simple choice as to whether Han shoots first is just the first step in establishing a different moral or psychological direction for the saga. Emphasize the incestuous romance between Luke and Leia, and you suddenly have a subplot right out of Greek tragedy à la Oedipus, or a reference to Arthurian legend.

But all of these questions pale beside the really big one: in what order do you tell the story?

The existing IV - V - VI - I - II - III sequence is a matter of circumstances more than planning. However elaborate the existing combination of movies, comics, novels and animation may be, at the time of the release of the first movie George Lucas was completely unaware that he was initiating a franchise.

Our future auteur has an open field, though. Personally, my vote is for starting the series with The Phantom Menace. In fact, in my version, the Anakin Skywalker that Qui-gon Jinn discovers is a dark child more reminiscent of Damian than Beaver Cleaver, an object of fear and suspicion in the slums of Mos Espa, perhaps winning the pod race through an unseen act of cruelty in the wastes of Tatooine.

In this version, we would actually see some of the anger and fear that dissuaded Yoda from wanting to accept Anakin. He would be like a caged demon at the Jedi Academy, wounding or even slaying his fellow padawans in training, but like a demon in power and skill, as well, towering over even the members of the Jedi Council in his abilities with the Force. But of course he would - Anakin is after all the Chosen One - or is he? The Council would be in a constant state of turmoil over the saviour/savage in their midst.

And then...love. The possibility of redemption, a time of peace and happiness with Padme. But eventually Anakin succumbs to destiny and turns to the Dark Side - part Jesus, part Judas, he contains the seeds of his own betrayal, but still manages to topple the Jedi knighthood before falling to Obi-Wan in battle.

From that point, Luke's role becomes that of the true Chosen One - the irony being that the Chosen One is in fact a child on a faraway desert planet, but it's Anakin's son, not Anakin himself. The odd thing about Luke as he is portrayed in the original movie is that there's not even a hint of his eventual mastery of the Force. Surely there should be some clue in his childhood, some sign of buried talent other than a knack for being able to bullseye womp rats. Since we already know that Ben Kenobi is on Tatooine to watch over Luke, my version allows him to become involved in Luke's early fumbling attempts to tap into his abilities.

With Anakin's story already established, we see Obi-Wan's lie about the death of Luke's father for exactly that, a lie, and in the attack on the Death Star Luke's initial survival is caused by a moment of hesitation on the part of Darth Vader, unwilling to kill his son. Unlike his father, Luke is able to deny the temptation of the Dark Side, and his time with Yoda allows the agèd master to redeem his failure with Anakin.

And in the final reel, we would see the culmination of the struggle between saviour and betrayer, Christ and Antichrist, as the Emperor watches, gloating and smirking, a figure of Satanic temptation for the younger Skywalker as to his father. And, as with Satan, we see him cast into the abyss at the climax of the battle. Finally, rather than a teddy bear picnic, the closing scenes would show Luke welcoming the first class of younglings to the reborn Jedi Temple, as the greenscreen figures of Yoda, Obi-Wan and his father look on with approval.

Or you could just do it as a comedy. More Jar Jar Binks, more R2-D2 noises, more cute romantic arguments between Leia and Han, and something falls on Chewbacca's head every ten minutes. The elements that allow for my altered view of the plotline are certainly in the existing story but then so are the ones that would allow for something as ridiculous as, oh, having Ewoks win the war.

- Sid

Post 100: blogging - it doesn't look like this.

Several studies indicate that most blogs are abandoned soon after creation (with 60% to 80% abandoned within one month, depending on whose figures you choose to believe) and that few are regularly updated.

The 'average blog' thus has the lifespan of a fruitfly. One cruel reader of this page commented that the average blog also has the intelligence of a fly.

The Perseus report noted above indicates that 66.0% of surveyed blogs had not been updated in two months, "representing 2.72 million blogs that have been either permanently or temporarily abandoned".

Jeffrey Henning of Perseus sniffed that "Apparently the blog-hosting services have made it so easy to create a blog that many tire-kickers feel no commitment to continuing the blog they initiate. In fact, 1.09 million blogs were one-day wonders, with no postings on subsequent days."

Perseus claimed that the average duration of the remaining 1.63 million abandoned blogs was 126 days, with some 132,000 blogs being abandoned after a year or more. The oldest abandoned blog surveyed had been maintained for 923 days.

- Caslon Analytics, an Australian research, analysis and strategies consultancy

Wow, 1.09 million blogs that only lasted for one day. And here I am, 33 months and 100 posts in, and I feel guilty if I don't post for a couple of weeks.

Please take a look at the full-size version of the photocomp image that starts off this posting. It was a fun little project - as usual when I do this sort of thing, the result isn't exactly what I hoped for, but it's not too bad. Thanks go out to my friends Alan and Colin for comments on the early drafts, your input was greatly appreciated, gentlemen.

And I'd also like to thank my small but (apparently) dedicated group of followers for actually taking the time to read any of this. Hopefully a few of the posts demonstrate an intelligence level somewhat above that of a fruitfly.

- Sid

P.S. And still waiting for any guest postings...

Well I dreamt I went away on a Steam Powered Aeroplane.
I went and stayed and damn near didn't come back again.
Didn't go very fast on a Steam Powered Aeroplane,
Oh the wheel went around, up and down, and inside and then back again.

Sittin' in a 747 just watching them clouds roll by,
Can't tell if it's sunshine or if it's rain.
Rather be sittin' in a deck chair high above Kansas City,
On a genuine old fashioned Steam Powered Aeroplane.

- John Hartford, Steam Powered Aeroplane*

For those of you unfamiliar with steampunk, it's an interesting phenomenon, a sort of bastard child of history and imagination that is difficult to categorize - is it a movement, a philosophy, an art, a science? Perhaps a bit of each, really.

For a long time, Fantasy was basically a medieval homage, with occasional forays into the Renaissance. Tolkien's Lord of the Rings is a useful case study for this approach, because so much is taken on faith. In a society containing beer, barrels, boots and bread, there have to be brewers, tanners, cobblers, bakers, farmers, millers, coopers, and a plethora of other trades, but Tolkien rarely touches on the mechanics of Middle-Earth society, that's not what he's interested in. The near-fate of the Shire as a smoke-belching wasteland would seem to clearly demonstrate Tolkien's general position on technology and progress, a position shared by some of his fellow fantasy authors.

The other side of the coin is, of course, Science Fiction, with the emphasis on Science. In its purest form, SF worships at the altar of technology, but technology at a remove, technology inaccessible to the man on the street. Star Trek in its various incarnations is the perfect example of this approach, an almost clinical future without moving parts, grease or grit.

Steampunk stands between these two options. As the name suggests, the steampunk aesthetic dates from the era of the steam engine, but it's really a sort of retro-futurism, in which technological developments like robots, computers, and time machines are created using the technologies of the past: steam, rivets, gears and dials as opposed to electricity or electronics. It is heavily influenced by the work of its patron saints, H. G. Wells and Jules Verne, and steampunk fiction is often set in an idealized Victorian milieu.

The term "steampunk" was coined by science fiction author K. W. Jeter in a 1987 letter to Locus Magazine. Looking for a term to describe the work being written by himself and his friends Tim Powers and James Blaylock, he jokingly suggested "steampunks", a play on words regarding the cyberpunk genre of science fiction:

Personally, I think Victorian fantasies are going to be the next big thing, as long as we can come up with a fitting collective term... Something based on the appropriate technology of the era; like "steampunks," perhaps.

In addition to Jeter, Powers, and Blaylock, authors such as Paul di Filippi and Jay Lake have contributed to the steampunk library, and cyberpunk authors William Gibson and Bruce Sterling paid tribute to the genre in their 1990 collaboration The Difference Engine. Jay Lake and S. M. Peters have presented an alternative approach to steampunk in their writing, which they refer to as "clockpunk", revolving (no pun intended) more around clockwork and spring-powered technology than steam.

Another related style is that of the gaslamp romance, which is less involved with technology but which takes a mash-up approach to the Victorian era, combined historical and fictional characters to create alternative histories. A perfect example would be British author Kim Newman's 1992 novel Anno Dracula, wherein Count Dracula marries the widowed Queen Victoria, and Jack the Ripper stalks vampire prostitutes through the foggy streets of Whitechapel.

Surprisingly, steampunk has developed a role beyond that of just a literary sub-genre, and has established itself as both a fashion trend and an artistic movement, and for some people a philosophy and a lifestyle. Followers of steampunk fashion sport top hats, goggles, and muttonchop whiskers, and accessorize their frock coats and corsets with brass ray guns and complicated ocular mechanisms.

Steampunk artists embrace an aesthetic based around copper, glass, wood and leather, and build both fantasy creations and reconstructions or modifications of modern technology such as laptops, iPods, electric guitars, and even vibrators. (N.B. there are certain devices which do not successfully combine extreme heat and metal. Apparently the steam-powered vibrator is one of them.) In addition, a wide variety of characters and stories have been re-imagined into the steampunk milieu: Star Wars, Star Trek, Marvel and DC comics characters, and so on.

Steampunk has inspired or influenced a number of movies and television programs, such as The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen or the movie version of Wild Wild West, and is the milieu of Katsuhiro Otomo's 2004 animated film Steamboy. Last year's Doctor Who Christmas special featured a marvellous steampunk robot, a gigantic smoke-belching automaton that stalked across Victorian London, leaving the traditional path of destruction in its wake. However, in spite of these attempts to move steampunk from the fringe into the mainstream, to date steampunk has yet to have its Star Wars, as it were.

But there's still hope - a quick Google search resulted in over 500,000 hits for the phrase "steampunk star wars", so obviously someone is working on it.

- Sid

* With this set of lyrics, we once again pay homage to the infamous Colin Campbell. Colin sometimes bemoans the cleansing process of a few years back when he divested himself of his vinyl collection (records, that is, he didn't collect 60's tablecloths or fetish clothing or anything like that). I seem to have a certain knack for finding what we might charitably describe as "unlicensed" music online, and when he wistfully mentioned John Hartford and his album Steam Powered Aeroplane as among the deceased, I had the great good fortune of finding eleven digitized John Hartford albums online for him within minutes, including the one in question.

(The Star Trek Steampunk wallpapers are from the Rabbittooth web site, credit where credit is due.)