Tag: Science-Fiction

Northern Voice 2013, epilogue: You Are Very Star

Friday June 14th was the premiere of the experimental play You Are Very Star. It took place at the HR MacMillan Space Centre, and they offered Northern Voice Attendees half off on their tickets. Deal!

It’s an odd mindfuck of a play, with themes of change and progress, religion, faith and the desire for transcendance. It wasn’t perfect (the interactive elements needed some work) but made for an enjoyable and mind-expanding evening.

Friday June 14th was the premiere of the experimental play You Are Very Star, created by Kevin Kerr and Craig Erickson, and directed by David Hudgins. It took place at the HR MacMillan Space Centre, and they offered Northern Voice Attendees half off on their tickets. Deal!

It’s an odd mindfuck of a play, with themes of change, progress, faith and transcendance. It wasn’t perfect (the interactive elements needed some work) but made for an enjoyable and mind-expanding evening. This review is going to be a little incomplete because it’s been two weeks and I can’t find the program anymore, so I can’t actually name the characters. I’m sure I’ve forgotten some other details.

The play is divided in 3 loosely connected acts, taking place in 1968, 2013 and 2048.

The first act, “Orbiting the Cusp of Greatness,” begins/ends in the Space Centre (yes, where we physically are) on December 21st, 1968, the night Apollo 8 went up. It was a time of turmoil and change, a time when people questioned everything. It follows backwards (interesting choice there!) a UBC Literature professor as he loses his mind, reinvents himself as a cult leader and attempts to achieve apotheosis with his small group of ex-student followers. And fails, because an ex-colleague pulls the plug on the TV so they miss the Apollo launch.

The second act does not take place on stage with actors; the audience are the actors. To prime us for the future and transcendence, we have to go through ten stations scattered around the Space Centre and participate in specific activities. One of the stations is a laptop running a Skype conversation with a sweet older lady. You sit down in front of it, tell her your age, and she gives you a brief story about what her life was like at that age. It invited us to look back and look forward: what kind of changes will we see when we’re her age?

Unfortunately, with a couple of exceptions this second act didn’t work so well. There were just too many people and even though everybody got a map with a different order for the stations, in practice there were usually long lines at every one. Too bad: it was a bold experiment in immersive theatre.

In the third act, “Transcendance,” a small group of Augmented humans—mentally connected through an advanced network, able to multitask like you wouldn’t believe and interface directly with technology—are anxiously waiting for “Neil”, their creator (played by Michael Rinaldi, who played the cult leader professor in the first act) to wake up and take them all to the next level, a perfect transcendental machine state that will usher in a brand new age for them. Too bad for the rest of the Earth, which is suffering from terrible climate change and widespread extinction. The story is partly narrated through one Augment, a young woman who’s decided to dictate a journal the old-fashioned way, with words one after the other.

Things heat up when Neil’s ex-lover (a baseline human) decides to visit him after many, many years. Wacky intercultural hijinks ensue with the young woman narrator—though they both speak in English words, they live in totally different worlds and can’t really relate to each other. She meets Neil, speaks to him briefly, and leaves. He wakes up, and in doing so disconnects himself from the worldwide Augment network, crashing it and bringing all his creatures down to normal.

The action eventually moves to the Space Centre again where… things happen. Sorry, I can’t be any more specific than that. My memories are a too hazy, and I don’t think I could do the scenes justice. Suffice to say, I think the Augments achieve transcendance, though not quite in the way they expect. And the audience gets to leave with their minds nicely scrambled.

So… my first thought was, this is the first time I’ve ever seen the Singularity and transhumanism explored on the stage! These are big sci-fi topics about the future of humankind and what it means to be human, and boy was it a trip!

The neatest twist about these Augments is that they’re not really that evolved. They’re mostly portrayed as scattered time-wasters, using their vast fractured minds to play games and live in mental simulations. For all their powers, they’re still immature and weird and creepy and idolise their creator, desiring transcendance though they don’t even understand what it means. They’re still human, and I don’t know if that’s depressing or hilarious. I guess it all depends on how you look at it. The Augments’ lives are determined by their choices, as ours are, after all.

The choice to have the 1968 segment unroll backwards is an intriguing one. Here’s how I read it: the past and future are symmetrical, both centered on the present, which just moves forward moment by moment. It’s in the present that we remember the past and create the future. And it’s up to us to be present, to learn the right lessons and create the right things.

Lastly, it’s a given that transcendental events are by definition impossible to explain or even show. I’ve complained about that before but this time it didn’t feel like a copout. I feel like I’ve been touched by something weird and wonderful. Kudos to The Electric Company for putting together a unique and brilliant experience!

Thoughts on Star Trek Continues, Episode 1

This video is beautifully done: very true to the 60’s show both in tone and content. The dialogue is expository, the action is slow, the physics are loose and kinda mystical, the men are real men, the women are real women, the costumes are beautifully retro, the sets are authentic down to every detail. How did they even manage that? Did they get access to Paramount Studios or something? Did some enterprising (pardon the pun) geek recreate them from scratch?

So much fun.

Star Trek Continues E01 “Pilgrim of Eternity” from Star Trek Continues on Vimeo.

This video is beautifully done: very true to the 60’s show both in tone and content. The dialogue is expository, the action is slow, the physics are loose and kinda mystical, the men are real men, the women are real women, the costumes are beautifully retro, the sets are authentic down to every detail. How did they even manage that? Did they get access to Paramount Studios or something? Did some enterprising (pardon the pun) geek recreate them from scratch?

The actors are quite good too. Vic Mignogna as Kirk has the steely gaze down, and is way more built than Shatner ever was (hello, gratuitous shirtless scene!) Todd Haberkorn is kinda bland as Spock, and Larry Nemececk is quite good as a somewhat-less-curmudgeonly McCoy. Chris Doohan (son of James Doohan) was excellent as Scotty, and I found myself thinking it made perfect sense to have an actor with a natural Scottish accent—until I remembered Doohan wasn’t Scottish. Huh.

The biggest surprise was Grant Imahara as Sulu. I didn’t even know it was him. Sure, Sulu kind of looked like Imahara… and he sounded like Imahara doing Sulu… but it wasn’t until the closing credits that I saw it was actually him! Wow.

The plot was an interesting revisit of “Who Mourns For Adonais?”, with the Enterprise stumbling upon a crippled and dying Apollo (played by the same actor, even) who claims to no longer desire worship, and merely wants to live out his remaining days with mortals, in peace. Kirk sympathises but doesn’t really trust him, Spock is neutral, Bones is more sympathetic, and Scotty flat out doesn’t trust Apollo at all. At first I thought he was just being contrary to drive the plot, but he’s got good reasons: I’d forgotten that in Mourns, Apollo made the moves on Scotty’s girlfriend, and also attacked him with his divine lightning. But more than that, it’s revealed that said girlfriend, Lt. Palomas, was still infatuated by Apollo, and so distraught by the experience that she transfered away from the Enterprise, which later led to her death. So Scotty blames him for that too.

It makes for some good continuity, but also sadly continues the TOS tradition of women going gaga over charismatic alpha males, whether physical gods or genetically enhanced supermen. And I got to thinking: do we need a continuation of the original series? Okay, maybe that’s the wrong question: it’s art, of course we don’t need it. And granted, NCC-1701 is the ship that started it all, and the series does have a special charm all its own. But I’m torn about seeing it recreated so faithfully, with all its flaws intact. The slightly improved special effects and different actors highlight to me how problematic some of the tropes TOS ran on were, and how maybe they shouldn’t be given new life in the 21st century. The franchise has moved on. The world has moved on.

Overanalysing? Maybe. And to be honest, it didn’t keep me from enjoying this episode, or looking forward to any future episodes. Because seriously: getting Michael Forrest to reprise his role? Jamie Bamber as a redshirt? Marina Sirtis as the computer’s voice? You gotta respect that.

You Can’t Take The Sky From Me

Hey, who’d have thought I’d be back at the planetarium so soon?

This Saturday I went to Can’t Stop The Serenity, a fundraiser by the BC Browncoats to benefit Equality Now and the BC Women’s Hospital & Health Centre.

Hey, who’d have thought I’d be back at the planetarium so soon?

This Saturday I went to Can’t Stop The Serenity, a fundraiser by the BC Browncoats to benefit Equality Now and the BC Women’s Hospital & Health Centre. There was a silent auction, an evil laughs contest, and a whole lot of Whedon- and Firefly-related things to watch. Including a few costumes, though not as many as I expected. There was a fair number of Jayne hats, a group of three people (including at least one girl) dressed as cowboys (i.e.: Bad Horse’s chorus), and one woman dressed like a Vulcan in a blue TOS uniform. Huh. Didn’t see that coming. But I’ll say this for the Firefly/Serenity crowd, they’re pretty ecumenical. The auction items ranged all over the sci-fi spectrum, from an awesome foot-high plush Dalek to signed Stargate: Atlantis posters.

First up was Dr. Horrible’s Sing-Along Blog. I actually hadn’t watched it in its entirety in a long time, which is a shame because it’s a damn good story with damn good songs. (Usually I just watch “Brand New Day” because it’s catchy and evil Neil Patrick Harris is fucking sexy. Well, sexier.)

Browncoats: Redemption is a fan-made film set shortly after the events of Serenity, and starring the crew of yet another freelance transport. It’s got a neat plot, so-so acting, and crappy special effects, but hey, I’m not going to make a big deal about that.

We also watched Whedon’s acceptance speech, from when he received an award from Equality Now (“Honoring Men on the Front Line”) back in 2006. And… okay, I’m going to be contrary here, but this is what I think:

Whedon isn’t all that. There, I said it.

Oh, don’t get me wrong, he’s done some good TV. I love Buffy (well, mostly the first 3 seasons, though it only started sucking in seasons 6 and 7) and quite liked Angel though I kind of lost interest about halfway through. Firefly is hella fun, though there’s a lot more style than substance. And I fucking adore Dr. Horrible. (Never watched Dollhouse.)

But his Equality Now acceptance speech really got my dander up. The way he went on and on about creating strong female characters seemed incredibly smug and self-congratulatory. Buffy is strong, yes, in that she can beat up any living creature and most nonliving ones. But when you get right down to it I don’t see how that makes her really special, or even especially feminist. It certainly doesn’t make her revolutionary, because William Moulton Marston has Whedon beat by 50 years.

Not to mention that whatever character development Buffy had was absolutely demolished in the later seasons, what with her creepily abusive relationship with Spike, turning into a one-dimensional cold bitch to the Potential Slayers, Brother Caleb’s over-the-top (and not in a good way) misogyny, and here’s the kicker: discovering that Slayer power really came from primordial male wizards, who created the original Slayer in a weird act of magical borderline rape. Wow, way to crap on seven years’ worth of female-centered mythos there, Joss.

The only comparable characters (that I know of) in his other shows are the badass warrior Zoe, and—here’s a better match—River, who rather like Buffy is a small, harmless-looking girl that had her powers thrust upon her against her will (in this case, nasty medical experiments). Huh. Never saw that pattern before.

No, I don’t think Whedon was trying to make any kind of statement with Buffy, or any of his later characters. I think he just lucked into a character that (with great writing and a fine supporting cast) got picked up as a feminist icon. That said, I’ll give him props for:

  • Being a feminist man, and using his fame to campaign for women’s equality. It is a big deal, in real life as well as fiction.
  • Being brutally honest. In his speech, one of his many answers to “Why do you always write these strong women characters?” was “because it’s hot”. (Incidentally, Marston’s bondage fetish formed a big part of the early Wonder Woman mythos).
  • Writing at least one series with something close to gender parity. Of Firefly’s 9 main characters, 4 are women. Actually, since the two who died in Serenity were men, that brings us to a female majority. A nice variety of characters, too, from the hardened warrior to the sweet wrench-wielding nerd to the crazy psychic dancing timebomb, to the—oh, let’s be honest, Inara is 100% fetish fuel.

Well, enough contrariness. Sorry, had to get that off my chest. I really did have a great time Saturday, and I’ll be sure to go next year.

Movie Review: Star Trek

That was awesome. And not quite what I expected, which was even more awesome.

That was awesome. And not quite what I expected, which was even more awesome.

See, I expected a straight-up prequel: the story of how all the old familiar characters met, their first adventure together, that sort of thing. But without going into spoilery details, the story we got is not the one that will lead to the events of the original series. I kept waiting for the reset button to be pressed, for the writers to pull a time-travel eraser whatsit out of their asses and make everyone live logically every after, but they never did.

And that was a brilliant move. The problem with prequels is that you know how the story’s going to end. But here? This story is something totally new. If there are any sequels to this, writers will be free to go wherever the hell they want. Will there be any? I have no idea. The word “reboot” has been bandied about on the intenetz, though I’m not sure how I feel about that. Part of me still feels the franchise has exhausted itself. But damned if this movie didn’t make me fall in love with Trek again, if only for one night.

Judged as a standalone movie, Star Trek delivered on all counts: stunning visuals and FX (thank gawd they didn’t try to duplicate 1960’s future tech!), great action, and very nice character development. The focus was on Kirk and Spock, but everybody else got a chance to shine: Sulu the swordsman and rookie pilot, Chekov the enthusiastic math geek, Uhura the laser-sharp linguist, Scotty the genius tinkerer, McCoy the no-nonsense doctor—in an eerily dead-on performance by Karl Urban, last seen by me riding on the plains of Rohan with flowing blond locks. DeForest Kelley should have lived to see this.

It wasn’t perfect—there were a few silly plot holes, and some of the interpersonal drama came out of nowhere—but it came pretty damn close. This is Trek for the 21st century, fresh and fun, both shinier and grittier, mindful of its heritage but not bound by it, boldly going where no Trek has gone before.

Book Review: Mortal Engines, Predator’s Gold, Infernal Devices

One of my new year’s resolutions is to read more literature, and then to blog about it. This post is more of a prologue to that, because the books it reviews don’t really count as literature.

So a month or two ago I was browsing TVTropes, and came upon this entry right here. A post-apocalyptic future with mobile cities that eat each other? This was way too intriguing to pass up. I decided to only order the first three books since the last, A Darkling Plain, is only out in hardback.

One of my new year’s resolutions is to read more literature, and then to blog about it. This post is more of a prologue to that, because the books it reviews don’t really count as literature.

So a month or two ago I was browsing TVTropes, and came upon this entry right here. A post-apocalyptic future with mobile cities that eat each other? This was way too intriguing to pass up. I decided to only order the first three books since the last, A Darkling Plain, is only out in hardback.

All in all, the series was pretty good. Not great, mind you, and I don’t think I would have given it all those awards, but a pleasant little adventure story. There are a lot of clever bits, including the basic premise of Traction Cities, and various shout outs. The plot and characters, though… they were less impressive. The author’s presence was too visible, I think, moving the players around on his board, and I just couldn’t suspend my disbelief. Likewise, Hester Shaw’s evolution from Action Girl to full-on murderous sociopath felt arbitrary and forced.

Incidentally, though the series does pretty consistently depict a savagely town-eat-town world, it falls prey to the Apocalypse Not trope. In Mortal Engines the Hunting Ground was in bad shape and getting worse, with slim pickings for London. Yet in Infernal Devices, we see many cities of varied sizes coexisting, with something of a common culture. Not to mention the lands of the Anti-Traction League.

Writing-wise, the first book needed some polish. The plot seemed even more forced (honestly, it was pretty clear this was Philip Reeve’s first stab at novel writing), and there were a couple of odd bits—like passages switching to the present tense for no clear reason—that should have been caught by an editor.

Still, I was entertained, and that’s what counts, right? I’ll be sure to pick up A Darkling Plain when it comes out in paperback.

Next up: Karen X. Tulchinksy’s The Five Books of Moses Lapinsky

Movie Review: WALL•E

The trailers never really grabbed me, so I skipped Cars and Ratatouille. Still haven’t seen them on DVD. This movie, though? This movie had promise.

And boy, did it deliver.

The trailers never really grabbed me, so I skipped Cars and Ratatouille. Still haven’t seen them on DVD. This movie, though? This movie had promise.

And boy, did it deliver. First, it’s visually breathtaking, even more so than Finding Nemo. From the dingy, polluted Earth to the ultra-shiny Axiom full of bright primary colours and neon holograms, with marvelous starscapes in between, those incredible Pixar animators have surpassed themselves yet again. It bears repeating: this movie looks absolutely fracking awesome.

The story leans towards the kids’ end of the spectrum, I found: no bad guys with guns like The Incredibles has, or the nasty predators of Finding Nemo. Just some cute robots (and a couple of humans). There is a plot besides the (so cute) love story between WALL•E and EVE, and it’s an interesting one, but it doesn’t distract from the cuteness. There’s a Big Message, too, just like in other Pixar movies, which goes beyond “We have to take care of our planet.” I like it, and the delivery is a lot more subtle than Finding Nemo‘s borderline-sledgehammer approach.

In short: two thumbs way up. WALL•E has it all: it’s sweet, funny, engaging, exciting, occasionally tear-jerking. I’ve seen it once, I’ll see it again at least a couple more times, and you can bet I’ll buy the DVD so I can watch it over and over.

Arthur C. Clarke: 1917–2008

Well, damn.

I guess part of me thought he’d live forever, or at least long enough to see all the marvels he imagined or predicted. Hell, he saw geostationary satellites and global telecommunications become reality, why not space elevators or Martian colonies or deep-space travel as well?

Well, damn.

I guess part of me thought he’d live forever, or at least long enough to see all the marvels he imagined or predicted. Hell, he saw geostationary satellites and global telecommunications become reality, why not space elevators or Martian colonies or deep-space travel as well?

As a young nerd I read a number of his books: Dolphin Island was first, I think, way back in high school English class, though I haven’t picked it up since. There were also some of the classics, like 2001, Childhood’s End, The Sands of Mars, Rendezvous With Rama (never got into the sequels), The Fountains of Paradise. I loved them all, but my favourite was and still is The Songs of Distant Earth. Almost every page is gold, from the arrival of the Magellans to Thalassa to Moses Kaldor’s discussion of God (a theme Clarke picks up every now and then in his fiction), the conflicts, the heartbreaks, the dramas big and small, as well as the scorps’ evolution to semi-sentience. Like much of his work before and since, Songs shows us a very optimistic future. It’s a future where humanity has grown up, and mostly left aggression and bigotry behind; where we can find peace without sacrificing progress, and without losing our essential nature. A future where race, religion, gender and sexuality are just not that big a deal, and the boundaries of love and family are wider and more flexible.

Lieutenant Horton was an amusing companion, but Loren was glad to get rid of him as soon as the electrofusion currents had welded his broken bones. As Loren discovered in somewhat wearisome detail, the young engineer had fallen in with a gang of hairy hunks whose second main interest in life appeared to be riding microjet surfboards up vertical waves. Horton had found, the hard way, that it was even more dangerous than it looked.

“I’m quite surprised,” Loren had interjected at one point in a rather seamy narrative. “I’d have sworn you were ninety percent hetero.”

“Ninety-two, according to my profile,” Horton said cheerfully. “But I like to check my calibration from time to time.”

The lieutenant was only half joking. Somewhere he had heard that hundred percenters were so rare that they were classed as pathological.

Heh. Yes, it’s completely gratuitous, but Clarke pulls it off, and I can’t tell you what that kind of writing meant to my still-closeted teen self. I like to think it eventually helped me come out to myself, or at least made the way smoother by defusing any internalised homophobia I may have had.

More recently I bought his Collected Stories, a massive sampling of his short stories from 1937 to 1997. Though it’s hard to pick a favourite amongst all these gems, I’m very fond of the “White Hart” stories. Written in the 40’s and 50’s, these take place in the (probably partly real) London pub “White Hart,” a hangout of writers and engineering geeks. These loosely connected tales of university life and improbable inventions, full of dry, low-key British humour, remind me of P.G. Wodehouse’s stories—though with nutty professors and eccentric inventors instead of useless upper-class twits.

I also have to give a special nod to The Wire Continuum, the last one in the collection. Co-written with Stephen Baxter (another fave author of mine), this is a sequel to the very first story in the book, entitled Travel by Wire! A cute but unremarkable story of matter transmission through power lines is re-explored sixty years later as these two stupendously smart and talented minds play at finding applications to this technology. We’re treated to surgical teleportation, faster-than-light communication, instantaneous extrasolar travel and finally, the direct linking of minds leading to an evolutionary quantum leap for humankind. Some of these ideas are further fleshed out in The Light of Other Days, another Baxter/Clarke collaboration.

Finally, there’s an essay of his I reread regularly: “Arthur C. Clarke’s ‘Credo'”, appearing in the September/October 2001 issue of Skeptical Inquirer (one of several specials they did on science and religion). I found it a bit rambling and unfocussed, which I guess is understandable when you’re trying to talk about God and what others have said about God. But the grand vision, gentle humour and warm optimism are pure Clarke.

I began this essay by saying that men have debated the problems of existence for thousands of years—and that is precisely why I am skeptical about most of the answers. One of the great lessons of modern science is that millennia are only moments. It is not likely that ultimate questions will be settled in such short periods of time, or that we will really know much about the universe while we are still crawling around in the playpen of the Solar System.

He concludes by quoting form his earlier book Profiles of the Future: An Inquiry into the Limits of the Possible. I get chills every time I read this passage.

Our galaxy is now in the brief springtime of its life—a springtime made glorious by such brilliant blue-white stars as Vega and Sirius, and, on a more humble scale, our own Sun. Not until all these have flamed through their incandescent youth, in a few fleeting billions of years, will the real history of the universe begin.

It will be a history illuminated only by the reds and infrareds of dully glowing stars that would be almost invisible to our eyes; yet the somber hues of that all-but-eternal universe may be full of color and beauty to whatever strange beings have adapted to it. They will know that before them lie, not the millions of years in which we measure eras of geology, nor the billions of years which span the past lives of the stars, but years to be counted literally in trillions.

They will have time enough, in those endless aeons, to attempt all things, and to gather all knowledge. They will be like gods, because no gods imagined by our minds have ever possessed the powers they will command. But for all that, they may envy us, basking in the bright afterglow of Creation; for we knew the universe when it was young.

The Star Wars Holiday Special

I’d only heard about it, in hushed and disbelieving whispers over the Net. I knew it had aired exactly once around Thanksgiving of 1978 and was apparently made with minimal input from George Lucas—who some say hated it so much he tried to destroy every existing copy, although that seems to be an urban legend. It sounded so horrifyingly bad that I figured I was safer not looking for it.

I’d only heard about it, in hushed and disbelieving whispers over the Net. I knew it had aired exactly once around Thanksgiving of 1978 and was apparently made with minimal input from George Lucas—who some say hated it so much he tried to destroy every existing copy, although that seems to be an urban legend. It sounded so horrifyingly bad that I figured I was safer not looking for it. But then, I discovered it was immortalized on YouTube and my curiosity finally got the better of me. Here it is, split in ten parts of about 10 minutes each:

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10

My mind is still blown. I think the question to ask here is, “What the fuck?” No, seriously. What the fucking fuck? Why am I watching a dumbass variety show? Why are the Star Wars characters reduced to cameos in their own universe? Did the producers not get what Star Wars was all about, or did they just not care? (I honestly wouldn’t be surprised if the people involved really didn’t know what to do with the genre. Legends of the Superheroes—also done in the late 70’s, maybe coincidentally—is another fine example of a geeky concept fucked up all to hell.) We’re stuck with is this cheesy “Life Day” story where the Empire is reduced to a lame plot device, stupid and unscary Stormtroopers, Wookiees howling at each other for an entire scene that went on forever, nauseating schmaltz, and Princess Leia singing. Bleagh.

So, okay, it fails as a Star Wars adventure. What about as a variety show? Well, the extent of my experience in that area is from watching The Muppet Show, so maybe I’m not the best person to judge. But it seems to me the acts should be… oh, what’s the word?… entertaining. Those little holographic acrobats? Meh. Harvey Korman as a 4-armed TV cook, then as a robot who keeps powering down? Not even funny for a second. Diahann Carroll in a virtual reality softcore porno? Well, she’s pretty and all, and a good singer, but the song was kind of boring and the whole scene was frankly creepy as hell. Nobody needs to see Chewie’s father Itchy getting off to Carroll being all sexy and seductive before she starts singing. Jefferson Starship in another holographic show? An unexceptional song with silly special effects. Pass. Bea Arthur? Actually, her bit was the best. She’s got a nice voice; the song was quiet and low-key, with no distracting special effects, horny Wookiees or attempts at cheap laughs.

The most horrifying moment came near the end when Chewie was reunited with his family, and he and his wife… almost kissed. I froze like a deer in headlights, only one thought screaming through my brain: EW EW EW EW WOOKIEE SEX EW! But then they just hugged. Thank God.

In conclusion: Wow, this was really very bad. And not even entertainingly bad (like, e.g., those old Gerry Anderson marionation shows, the Super-Friends, or all the movies on MST3K), but just confusingly, irritatingly, boringly bad. I can’t even laugh at it; part of me thinks I should, but I’m enough of a geek to be offended at the watering down of a sci-fi epic by people who just used the sci-fi elements (alien names, guys in funny rubber masks, advanced tech) as props for dumb jokes. Still, I don’t regret watching it, even if it’s just to understand what all the hype was about, and to appreciate just how wrong things can go. I could say that this abysmal TV special should never have seen the light of day, but then my life (and that of many Star Wars fans) would have been much poorer as a result.

Happy Life Day, everyone!

In Praise of Stargate SG-1‘s 200th Episode

Oh my Lord, that was just about the funniest hour of sci-fi I’ve ever seen. I may get the Season 10 set just for this one episode. The in-jokes were flying, the actors seemed to have a great time, it was all meta and silly and over-the-top and I just couldn’t stop laughing.

Oh my Lord, that was just about the funniest hour of sci-fi I’ve ever seen. I may get the Season 10 set just for this one episode. The in-jokes were flying, the actors seemed to have a great time, it was all meta and silly and over-the-top and I just couldn’t stop laughing.

The plot is that Wormhole X-Treme!, a campy sci-fi show inspired by the real Stargate program, is inexplicably being picked up for a movie. (What studio does that, when only 3 episodes were ever made? asks Jackson. “It allegedly performed well on DVD,” replies Teal’c. Tee hee. Are Joss Whedon’s ears burning?) So SG-1 has to sit through a brainstorming session, shoot down Martin Lloyd’s goofy lowest-common-denominator ideas (Teal’c: “I do not understand why everything in this script must inevitably explode.”) while pitching their own.

Mitchell fighting zombies! Lloyd in love with Carter’s technobabble! A younger, “edgier” SG-1! (“Dude, that hot chick was so totally a Goa’uld.”) O’Neill and Carter getting married! By Thor! (Uh, I think. All Asgard kind of look alike, don’t they?) Cheyenne Mountain exploding! Teal’c P.I.! Completely ridiculous cliffhangers!

SCENE:

SG-1 is on an alien planet, running from about a zillion Replicators. “We’ve got ten seconds before the time dilation field is activated. If we don’t make it through the Gate we’ll be stuck here forever!” yells Carter, just as they come upon the Stargate surrounded by Jaffa, with loads of bombers and gliders. “Okay, this could be a problem,” says Mitchell.

CUT TO:

Stargate Command. SG-1 is emerging from the Gate, safe and sound. “That was close, huh?” asks Mitchell.

I laughed so freaking hard at that. It’s right up there with Princess Bunhead’s “I escaped somehow!” from Thumb Wars for sheer unapologetic silliness.

And the homages: The Wizard of Oz, with Vala as Dorothy, and Gen. Landry as the big floating head of the Wizard Ascended Being. Her wish was first to go home, “But now I’ve decided I’d quite like to be a part of something. A regular part, if you catch my drift.” Farscape, with the characters rattling off that show’s made-up swear words (and props to Amanda Tapping for doing a kickass Chiana, complete with the weird posture and head twitches). Star Trek, with Mitchell as the intrepid commander of the Daedalus battlecruiser, facing an exploding singularity with weapons at maximum. And marionation… although that bit dragged a little, and most of the good jokes were already done in Team America. But really, everything else was gold.

Props to the SG-1 people for poking fun at themselves, and letting us laugh along.

Around The World In Eight Minutes

I just finished reading Jules Verne’s 1886 novel Robur-le-Conquérant. Quite an enjoyable little book, though not really Verne’s best. I did appreciate all his exploration of the science behind the Albatross, Robur’s wondrous flying craft—Verne’s work is meant to educate as well as entertain, and I’m a sucker for a good science history lesson.

I just finished reading Jules Verne’s 1886 novel Robur-le-Conquérant. Quite an enjoyable little book, though not really Verne’s best. I did appreciate all his exploration of the science behind the Albatross, Robur’s wondrous flying craft—Verne’s work is meant to educate as well as entertain, and I’m a sucker for a good science history lesson. And I’m no engineer, so I can’t say how far-fetched it really is, with the seventy-four counter-rotating propellors to provide lift and the two large propellors at fore and aft for horizontal movement, but it’s clear Verne’s done his homework: he spends a couple of pages describing in great detail past research into heavier-than-air flight. There wasn’t any practical success by 1886 (and wouldn’t be for quite a few years), though certainly not for lack of trying.

I won’t nitpick the Albatross’ fantastically sturdy materials, nigh-indestructible parts and impossibly efficient batteries; that’s just hand-waved away by reason of Robur being a brilliant engineer. Which is okay: this was a time when scientific knowledge and engineering moxie were basically super-powers in their own right. Likewise, I’ll just sigh and try to ignore Verne’s chauvinism and racism: non-Europeans are almost all depicted as savage brutes or, at best, ignorant bumpkins: Prudent’s Black servant, Frycollins, is a stereotypical Coon character, contributing nothing to the story except a bit of tiresome comic relief. Again, sign of the times. I guess that stuff was funnier a hundred years ago.

The plot is nothing to write home about, and has a few gaping holes. We never find out what makes Robur (you know, the title character) tick, or why on Earth he’d kidnap Prudent and Evans—revenge? pride? to increase the numbers on his island hideaway?—and take them on a trip around the world. But whatever the reason we’re glad he did, because we the readers get to go along for the ride.

And what a ride it is. Here we have a flying machine that can go up to 200 km/h, more than twice as fast as the fastest trains of the day and, as Verne notes, fast enough to go around the world in just eight days, cross oceans and wilderness with the greatest of ease, and carry a small crew in perfect comfort. It’s hard to imagine now just how mind-blowing that must have been: back then there were no flying machines except balloons, which weren’t much good for long-distance transportation. Trains were pretty fast but not always terribly safe, and of course were limited by rails.

I think this is what science-fiction is all about: to see how technology and science can make possible whole new kinds of stories. Forget the plot: stories like this helped make the world a lot smaller to Victorian readers. And it’s hard to imagine just how big the world was back then. In those days it would have taken me days instead of hours to travel from, let’s say, Vancouver to Ottawa, and that’s if I could afford a train ticket. To communicate with my family in Ottawa I could have sent a telegram, or used one of those newfangled telephone machines—assuming the infrastructure reached to the West Coast, which is doubtful. If I was curious about some faraway place, I could go to the library or bookstore (or, if I were rich enough, my own books). If I were really lucky, there’d be photographs. Nowadays I have at my fingertips a vast information network undreamed of by even the most delirious futurologists of the 19th century. I can easily look up any information on the places the Albatross visits and follow its path on Google Earth™.

The journey begins in Philadelphia. On to Quebec City (which Verne calls «la capitale du Canada»—though that was only true for a few years), then Montreal with the Victoria Bridge, and Ottawa with its Parliament. Next is Niagara Falls, then Chicago and Omaha, Nebraska—just a few decades old then, and rightly called “The Gateway to the West,” being the point of origin of the developing railway system linking the eastern States with California.

We see Yellowstone Park, whose mountains, lakes, wildlife and famous geysers Verne describes in loving detail—despite never having seen them. He also notes (remember, educate as well as entertain!) that it was the first U.S. national park. On to Salt Lake City with the brand-new Mormon Tabernacle. We then cut straight across Nevada and northern California into the Pacific.

At this point Robur takes us straight north to Alaska (with a bit of gruesome and gratuitous whale-hunting in the North Pacific), across to Kamchatka in far eastern Siberia, south to Tokyo—formerly called “Edo”—followed by a quick hop over Korea and the Yellow Sea to Beijing. Then, southwest over the Himalayas, passing by Srinagar before heading west into «Caboulistan»—probably referring to Afghanistan, whose capital is Kabul. Herat (now an Afghan province, but then an independent kingdom) is also mentioned. Verne calls it «la clef de l’Asie centrale,» and alludes to the struggles between Great Britain and Russia for control of the region. I thought it was an interesting look at long-ago politics, until I remembered that region is still being fought over. The USSR invaded in 1979, then the US in 2001. Plus ça change…

Tehran comes and goes, followed by a jaunt north across the length of the Caspian Sea, passing by Astrakhan, then north to Moscow and St-Petersburg. We cut straight across the Baltic Sea and Scandinavia in a line joining Stockholm and Oslo (then called “Christiania” after its founder King Christian IV). South to Paris, further south to Provence, Rome and Naples, and then we leave Europe.

Tunisia (a French protectorate at the time) is the first stop on the North African coast. We travel west to Philippeville (founded in 1838 and probably named after the reigning French monarch of the time, Louis-Philippe; it’s now called “Skikda” since Algeria gained its independence in 1962). Algiers follows, then Oran.

Southeast into the Sahara, with notable milestones the towns of Laghouat and Ouargla, and south to Timbuktu. The novel mentions «le Soudan;» this doesn’t refer to present-day Sudan, but to a French colony which formed present-day Mali in 1960. Our exploration of the African continent ends in Dahomey where Robur and his crew kill a lot of evil Africans. That part reminded me of the scene in Verne’s earlier novel Five Weeks in a Balloon, where Dr. Fergusson’s team witness a battle between two cannibal tribes. One of the explorers, revolted by the goriness of the fight and the gratuitous snacking on still-warm flesh, shoots one of the cannibals dead before the balloon flies out of range. Both of these scenes, in two novels a quarter-century apart, similarly exaggerate the evilness of “Darkest Africa” and implicitly assert the rights of Westerners to swoop in (literally, in both cases) and act as judge, jury and executioner to people or kingdoms they don’t like. Plus ça change…

After leaving Africa, the Albatross heads straight to Tierra del Fuego, passing between the islands of St-Helena (where Napoleon I died in exile) and Ascension; it flies along the Strait of Magellan to Puerto Hambre (French: «Port-Famine») in Chile, then briefly turns south towards Antarctica, which was then mostly unexplored. Verne repeats various hypotheses about what’s really at the South Pole: is it a continent, an archipelago, or a sea of ice like the Arctic? Nobody knew, back then. Since it’s July and therefore winter in the southern hemisphere, the Albatross turns back up the coast of Chile until the Chonos Archipelago. They are then driven south again by a hurricane, pass over the south magnetic pole near the 78th parallel, almost get killed by an erupting Mount Erebus, but eventually regain control and end up in the Chatham Islands where the kidnappees manage to blow up the airship. And then they go home, assuming Robur to be dead.

There. Wasn’t that fun? Personally, I had a hell of a time looking up all these interesting factoids—and finding out Verne may have been wrong or out of date in a couple of spots: Ottawa, not Quebec City, was Canada’s capital in 1886—but maybe Verne was being patriotic, since Québec is French and Ottawa isn’t. Edo was renamed Tokyo in 1868—but maybe he used its old name to heighten the drama. I do suspect he made up the location of the south magnetic pole. As far as I know it was never measured directly in his lifetime, though the north magnetic pole was pinpointed in 1831 (around 70º N 97º W). Then again, I don’t know what theories were floating about regarding Earth’s poles and their movement. And to be fair, most of his other facts, calculations and trivia are very precise and up to date. Even if Verne didn’t add to the store of human knowledge, at least he fed the fires of imagination in many hearts and minds. Though I take the internet and rapid travel for granted, and have flown back and forth across Canada many times, there’s still so much of the world I haven’t seen.

Robur may have given me a few ideas.