Or it could say "timey wimey".

Thanks to my good friend Colin for the perfect birthday greeting* for a science fiction fan...

- Sid

* For any non-Doctor Who fans reading this, trust me, this is brilliantly funny.

Is Birthday Eve a thing now?

Unlike the shrewd fisherman of Gont, this old man, for fear and wonder of his wizardry, would have given the boat to Ged. But Ged paid him for it in sorcerers’ kind, healing his eyes of the cataracts that were in the way of blinding him. Then the old man, rejoicing, said to him, “We called the boat Sanderling, but do you call her Lookfar, and paint eyes aside her prow, and my thanks will look out of that blind wood for you and keep you from rock and reef. For I had forgotten how much light there is in the world, till you gave it back to me.”

Ursula K. LeGuin, The Wizard of Earthsea

It's my birthday tomorrow, but Karli surprised me this evening with a pre-birthday card on my pillow. It was actually a thank-you card, which isn't very surprising if you know anything about our relationship, about the gratitude that we feel for finding each other, and Karli also managed to find a card with a quote from one of my favourite authors, science fiction and fantasy author Ursula K. LeGuin.

The quote in question is from the 1968 novel A Wizard of Earthsea, the first in her five-book* Earthsea Cycle.  I strongly recommend the Earthsea Cycle - the books are ostensibly young adult fiction, but they deal with classical themes of darkness and light, the shadows that represent our darker sides, vanity, egotism, selflessness, sacrifice, good, evil, love, sexuality, aging, and the final journey which is death. The books are quite short by the current standards of epic fantasy, but not a word is wasted - LeGuin's writing is simple, elegant, and eloquent.

Thank you for the card, my love - and you're welcome.

- Sid

* There are also a few short stories.

The 50th anniversary of Star Trek - more or less.

Today is the 50th anniversary of the broadcast of the very first episode of Star Trek – the famous NBC showing of The Man Trap on September 8th, 1966, a date etched in the annals of science fiction geekery.

Or not.

The ACTUAL first broadcast was Canadian: September 6th on CTV.  Take that, 'Murica.*

- Sid

* And if we’re going to do a bit of flag waving here, let’s not forget William Shatner, a nice boy from Montreal who got his start doing Shakespeare at the Stratford Festival in Ontario.

Revelation 6:8.

It's Labour Day, and with Labour Day comes the start of the school year.*  Every now and then I look around for courses dealing with my area of interest - I've often thought it might be interesting to study science fiction or fantasy on a scholarly basis.  Over the years I've looked at a wide variety of courses, but it just never seems to work out for me in terms of time and scheduling.

One of the more intriguing options available in the current year comes from the Langara College English Department:  Apocalypse Now: Literary Narratives of Pandemic.  It's an interesting choice for a topic: unlike the more speculative disasters such as global warfare or the destruction of fossil fuels, humanity has actually experienced at least one pandemic event. In the middle of the 14th century, the Black Death swept across Europe like a dark curtain, killing uncounted millions of people - some estimates place the death toll as high as 60% of the population, if not higher.

I'm quite curious as to how this course approaches pandemics in a literary framework, but sadly, the Langara web site provide no more specific information other than the following:

Students in this course will study prose fiction in a variety of forms with the goal of improving their strategies for reading and writing about 20th and 21st century prose. Course themes and content, as determined by the English Department, may vary each semester. Check the Registration Guide for details.

As a result, we have to extrapolate - how does one approach pandemic writing from a literary perspective?

Depending on how you define your terms, there would certainly be plenty of grist for the mill. The earliest fictional (as opposed to Biblical) take on a global apocalypse is Mary Shelley's 1826 novel The Last Man, which tells the tale of an end to the world very much like the near miss of the Black Death. The late 20th Century is thick with novels where a disease of some sort wipes out 99% of the population**: The Stand, Oryx and Crake, I Am Legend, Earth Abides, The Last Canadian, and so on. If you broaden your definition of pandemic to include the walking dead (caused by a contagious medical condition transmitted by biting, rather like rabies) the list grows exponentially.

Most of this fiction deals with the immediate aftermath of disaster: finding food and shelter, seeking allies or companions, defending against cannibals and raiders, etc.  It almost goes without saying that this is a pessimistic literature, a literature of life lived in the present. It's rare that these stories look very much further down the road than the immediate crisis.***

A rare longer term view of the challenges - and consequences - of attempting to rebuild a broken world can be found in Some Will Not Die, a 1961 novel by Algis Budrys, which paints a brief multi-generational picture of the years following the fall of civilization in terms of ends and its justification of the means used to achieve them.

The White Plague, by Dune author Frank Herbert, presents a very different view of justification. This 1982 novel is the story of a microbiologist deprived of his family by a bombing in Northern Ireland, and his decision to punish all of the participants in the conflict with a similar loss, now and forever: the eponymous White Plague is fatal only to women. The book concludes with a brilliant description of a journey through the tortured remnants of Ireland by the biologist and the bomber as the plague escapes the bounds of the United Kingdom and begins to infect the entire world.

As it turns out, this display of erudition in the area of apocalypse is fruitless - I don't have the prerequisites which would allow me to take the Langara course.  Although, to be honest, I might find it more interesting to take a shot at teaching a class or two than attending them...

- Sid

* Those of you involved in multi-semester education, just work with me here.

** I'd love to add The Andromeda Strain to this list - I grant you that it's more of a failed pandemic, a pandemic manqué if you will, but the scenes set in the Arizona town which finds the crashed probe so clearly show the horror of an alien disease set loose on Earth.

*** It would be interesting to see an episode of The Walking Dead set in a future time when Carl is his father's age or older.

Doctor Why?

While we were lying in bed last night, Karli looked up from her iPhone and said, "Oh look, Doctor Who is going to be filming in Vancouver!"

I glanced at her suspiciously over my glasses and said, "Well now you're just toying with me..."

After recovering from my fanboy reaction to confirmation of this exciting bit of news, my first thought was, "But why?"  The new Doctor Who - okay, it's been eleven years, perhaps we can stop calling it "new" - has a fairly impressive record in terms of location shooting for a TV series:  Arizona, Venice, New York, Croatia, Istanbul and so on.  However, those locations were selected due to their unique nature - there aren't many spots near Cardiff that you can make look like the Sonoran Desert or Venetian canals.

Vancouver is normally used as a stand-in for American locations by production companies looking to take advantage of tax breaks and an advantageous exchange rate. If you're starting in Los Angeles, you can actually drive here in 20 hours if you have a lot of props that you need to bring along.  In the case of Doctor Who and the BBC, what does Vancouver bring to the table that couldn't be matched with a short European flight that didn't involve a seven hour jet lag debt?

Perhaps this will be another one of the rare cases where Vancouver plays itself.  I don't think that the Doctor has ever addressed the mystery of Bigfoot, which would very much require a Pacific Northwest location.  Let's hope it's something like that, and we'll have the opportunity to see the Doctor and his new companion Bill doing the Grouse Grind, running across Lions Gate Bridge, or enjoying the night life in Whistler. (I think it less likely that he'll show up at Number Five Orange, although that would certainly bring a whole new direction to the character.)

The bad news?  I'm going to be out of town for a week at the start of October...you just wait, they'll arrive the day after I leave, have some kind of huge fan event while they're here, and be gone before we're back.  Sigh...and I made all those reservations...

- Sid

P.S.  Astute fans of the Doctor's production history will be aware that this is not the first time that the last Time Lord has visited Vancouver, at least as a shooting location. Vancouver stood in for San Francisco in the 1996 made-for-TV movie that featured Paul McGann as the Doctor, and Eric Roberts as the Master - the second-to-last Time Lord.

Beyond or behind?

 On Saturday afternoon, Karli and I saw Star Trek: Beyond. The new cast continues to do brilliant imitations of the original characters, the special effects were impeccable*, the villain is suitably villainous, and the day, as always, is saved in an epic fashion. It’s got some issues in terms of exposition, there are a lot of holes in the bad guy’s back story, but generally the movie builds very well on the foundations erected by the first two offerings from the rebooted voyages of the starship Enterprise. 

Coincidentally, I’ve also been watching episodes from the original series on Netflix during my stationary bike cardio workouts at the gym.  Here's the thing: why do I find myself preferring the old shows?

It’s an unexpected question.  In spite of the lasting popularity of the original series, no one denies that it had its problems, and I'd like to think that lessons were learned. (Although you'd never know it from the Qpid episode from The Next Generation.)  Star Trek: Beyond would have been a perfectly acceptable original series episode, but that's the problem: acceptable, rather than excellent or challenging or thought-provoking. And there's a very logical explanation for that - no Spock joke intended.

A movie, even one that’s part of a franchise with a 50-year legacy, is unlikely to make the same creative decisions as a series - especially one that’s as episodic as the original Star Trek. Some critics point at the show’s lack of serialization as a flaw, but really, it’s one of the great strengths of the original series.

The stand-alone nature of the episodes allowed for a huge creative variety in stories:  the taut, tense conflict of Balance of Terror versus the cheerful comedy of The Trouble with Tribbles; The Doomsday Machine, with its echoes of Moby Dick and references to the Mutually Assured Destruction standoff of the Cold War, or Ricardo Montalban’s suave villainy as Khan in Space Seed.  Amok Time, The City on the Edge of Forever, Mirror, Mirror, A Taste of Armageddon - there’s a substantial list of episodes that are considered to be excellent stand-alone examples of science fiction storytelling.

I acknowledge that there's also a substantial list of failures – The Omega Glory, Spock's Brain, The Way to Eden – but even the bad episodes of Star Trek were still attempting to do something original and interesting. 

Contemporary movie makers are faced with the challenge of trying to maintain that flavour of creativity and variety without being able to vary too widely from the formula.  It’s hard to imagine a two-hour Star Trek movie that would be as deliberately comedic as The Trouble With Tribbles – instead, the movie scripts have to strike a balance, mixing elements of humour, conflict, suspense and romance in an action movie framework.

It's one thing to roll the dice on an unusual idea when you're doing 26 episodes - it's a completely different thing to take a chance when you're releasing one movie every three or four years.

Regardless, if I could send a message to the creative team for the next Star Trek film, I would tell them to do exactly that: to play the long game with the movie franchise and treat it like a really extended version of the series. Take some risks, people! Challenge us, impress us, startle us! Come on - let's boldly go someplace we’ve never gone before.

- Sid

*  Karli might not agree with this statement - she noticed a couple of things that didn’t quite work.

At least the triffid part is off the table.

 

Make plans now to stay up late or set the alarm early next week to see a cosmic display of “shooting stars” light up the night sky. Known for its fast and bright meteors, the annual Perseid meteor shower is anticipated to be one of the best potential meteor viewing opportunities this year.

The Perseids show up every year in August when Earth ventures through trails of debris left behind by an ancient comet. This year, Earth may be in for a closer encounter than usual with the comet trails that result in meteor shower, setting the stage for a spectacular display.

- nasa.gov

The Day of the Triffids is a combination post-apocalyptic/monster menace novel, written in 1951 by British author John Wyndham. The story starts with Bill Masen, who awakes in a London hospital on the day that the bandages will be removed from his eyes following treatment for a workplace accident.* 

However, even without sight Masen can tell that something is wrong.  The usual roar of City traffic is absent, the nurse fails to respond to the buzzer, and the hospital is full of moans and complaints.

Stripping the bandages from his eyes, Masen leaves his room, only to discover that the world has literally changed overnight.  Radiation from a worldwide meteor shower has blinded everyone who watched it, leaving the vast majority of humanity without sight.  The impact of the disaster is worsened by the presence of the triffids, ambulatory carnivorous plants which are cultivated for a variety of purposes.  Without human supervision, the triffids have gotten loose from their pens and are stalking the helpless humans.

Last night was the second night of the annual Perseid meteor shower, which was predicted to be far brighter and more impressive than usual. Through an odd coincidence, I had a bad headache last night, and when I reached home I simply collapsed fully clothed into bed, and slept through until about 5:00 this morning, without any thought at all of watching the fall of the meteors.

It's pretty quiet at five in the morning ... but is it too quiet?

- Sid

* If the idea of someone awakening in a hospital to find out that a mysterious catastrophe has taken place sounds familiar, that's because it is.  Both 28 Days Later and The Walking Dead use exactly the same narrative device.

And the award goes to...

"I've had it with them, I've had it with you, I've had it with ALL THIS - I want ROOM SERVICE! I want the club sandwich, I want the cold Mexican beer, I want a $10,000-a-night hooker! I want my shirts laundered... like they do... at the Imperial Hotel... in Tokyo."

Johnny, Johnny Mnemonic

We recently had dinner with Karli's friend Tara and her new boyfriend Gary.  As sometimes happens in the ebb and flow of first meetings and the associated who-when-where-what-why process, it came out that I was a science fiction fan. Gary, who works in the film industry, immediately asked, "Ah - what's your favourite science fiction movie?"

I realize that this is a standard conversational gambit, but whenever someone asks me about my favourite anything, I always feels a bit challenged, as if I'm going to be judged on my response* - it's not always a comfortable experience.

I was thinking about it afterwards, and I have an alternative that I'd like to propose to the general population.  Going forward, let's no longer ask people about their favourite book, movie, TV show or YouTube™ channel - science fiction or not. Let's ask people about their least favourite.

It's a thought provoking question, if perhaps a bit negative, and I think that in some odd way people are more likely to commiserate than disagree (as can be the case with favourites). There may well be a story as well, because generally people don't go out of their way to watch or read something that they won't enjoy.

I've done this a couple of times on a trial basis, and it's been quite interesting, perhaps more so than the question of favourites. For example, Karli cited Cool World, a movie I haven't thought about for literally decades.  Her sister Stefanie said, "The Wicker Man!" without a moment's hesitation. (Which she instantly followed with Mad Max - apparently Stefanie has already given this question some thought.)

My least favourite science fiction film?  Hmmmm...a little part of me wants to list classically bad SF movies that I haven't seen, like Battlefield Earth or the Sharknado series** (or any one of a legion of terrible low-budget SF movies from the 70s and 80s), but that's not the purpose of the exercise.

A slightly larger part wonders if Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back*** would count as SF - there's certainly a fanboy element to the film, and that movie represents two incredibly tedious hours of my life that are gone, gone forever.

In terms of bad SF that I have seen, Johnny Mnemonic is the first thing that comes to mind, mostly due to its wasted potential.  The source material was an excellent short story by William Gibson that contained the DNA for his breakout 1984 cyberpunk novel Neuromancer, but the brevity and style that made it so good was completely lost in translation.

There are a few others that required a little more thought.  Prometheus disappointed me: I felt that it was an ambitious failure, but a failure none the less.  Ridley Scott did all the things he's good at, lighting, composition and set design, but the script lets him down.  The Planet of the Apes reboot with Mark Wahlberg - the original was an extraordinary concept for the 1960s, and the re-reboots have cast a whole new light on the concept, but the 2001 version never made sense right from the very start.  I suspect I could come up with more, but as with Karli's sister, I feel that the initial instinctive responses are the ones that really count.

Oh, my favourite SF movie?  As previously discussed and explained, Star Wars, the original one.  Gary's choice was 2001: A Space Odyssey, which I found a bit surprising - sadly, it appears that this judgement thing is a two-way street.

- Sid

* And let's face it, I probably will be.

** Sorry, Laurie.

***  For the trivia fans in the audience, as far as I know this is the only movie other than the Star Wars series that features both Mark Hamill and Carrie Fisher - albeit not in shared screen time.

Friendship.

“Good friends, good books, and a sleepy conscience: this is the ideal life.”

Mark Twain

I consider myself to have been blessed in my friendships. One of the things that I have always been grateful for in those friendships is an appreciation (and tolerance) of my various interests by otherwise sensible people who cannot for a moment understand why I would care about such nonsense.

On that basis, I'd like to thank my good friend Joe for picking up a brilliant TARDIS t-shirt for me while looking for a replacement shirt for himself (following a mishap involving french fries).  Thank you, Joe - it takes a very special person to think of others when they're wearing ketchup.

- Sid

UPDATE:  Upon reading this post, Joe sent me the following e-mail:

Very nice.  Seeing as it’s a bit late to become an internet porn star, this will do nicely!
J

It seems very much in keeping with the spirit of this post to support Joe in HIS interests - should any porn producers be reading this, please leave a comment and I will be more than happy to put you in touch with him.

Pizza run.

Last Friday, I lived the dream:  I took the day off to have pizza.

Okay, let's not rush into this.  First, my sights for "the dream" are actually set a bit higher than pizza in lieu of work; and second,  it was a bit more complicated than dedicating a day off to eating pizza.

Karli and I had recently received our NEXUS cards, and as such we wanted to give them a test at the border under circumstances where we weren't on the clock for anything time-sensitive. Her sister had recommended that we try a Fairhaven restaurant called Fat Pie Pizza the next time we were in Washington state, so we decided to do a day trip down for lunch and shopping.  Work has been pleasantly normal recently, so we were able to combine some time from my lieu bank with one of Karli's regular Friday flex days.

However, it seemed a bit much to cross the border just for pizza, dream or no dream, so we did a little research to see what else we might do while visiting Fairhaven. Fortuitously, there turned out to be an independent book store called Village Books located in the same block as Fat Pie, so we added that to our agenda.

 

I liked Village Books - it's an excellent example of a well done - and well run - indie book store.  It's in a classic vintage building, with a wide selection of books spread over three floors. They follow the popular trend of having an associated coffee shop - the Colophon Cafe, which we did not visit - and share space with Paper Dreams, a home decor/gift shop.

The Village Books science fiction/fantasy section is fairly good, although I don't really approve of mixing new and used books - I've visited a few book stores that do this, and it's always a bit irritating to pick up a book expecting to see a used price and find out that it's full cost.

I bought three books on sale  - two hardcover and one trade paperback - for essentially the same price as standard paperbacks in Canada (even after conversion from USD).  My choices were Three Moments of an Explosion, a collection of China Miéville short stories (which I am long overdue to read); Paolo Bacigalupi's 2015 novel The Water Knife; and another short story collection, My Experiences in the Third World War, by Michael Moorcock. This was an unexpected treasure: Moorcock is a long time favourite of mine, and everything in this collection is new to me, I'm quite looking forward to it.

And just for fun, I also picked up a War of the Worlds* T-shirt from the Miles To Go literary T-shirt collection. 

Photo by KT

 Oh, and in case you were wondering, Fat Pie Pizza completely lived up to their positive reviews - and their name.

Photo also by KT

- Sid

* I wore my new T-shirt to a social gathering the next day, and I was surprised to learn that a lot of people are more aware of the 1938 Orson Welles radio hoax than the 1897 H.G. Wells novel.  Tom Cruise (or Gene Barry) didn't come up at all.