Category Archives: SF

Spooky Season but With Terrible Writing: Space Probe: Taurus

.

So, time was running late, and I wanted something I hadn’t seen before that ran for under an hour and a half. Scrolling through the options on Amazon Prime I stumbled across Space Probe: Taurus, clearly a cheesy, low-budget, bit of fare. I went in with low expectations which the film failed to meet by lightyears.

Space Probe: Taurus (SPT) has a script that appears to have been written by a terrible pantser. That is someone who doesn’t outline first but discovers their characters and plot as they write and usually then has several ‘clean-up’ passe to sculp everything into a coherent story. SPT never achieves anything approaching coherence in its plotting. The movie is a series of events that bear little to no relation to each other or any sort of overall plot or theme.

We start with a failed space expedition, Faith One, (This script has made me feel so much better about my poor naming talents.) which has ended in disaster and to prevent the spread of infection at the sole survivor’s begging is self-destructed by remote. We never mention that incident nor return to or even attempt to return to that location again.

After stock footage of various Atlas launches, we join with the new mission, going to a new place, Hope One (Hope for what? I don’t know it’s never explored.) on route to Taurus. The crew would have been cliched a decade earlier, the gruff, tough as nail, male Commander, the flippant, womanizing second, the older, wiser, and more levelheaded senior scientist, and the very attract female scientist there to ‘do science’ and get everyone their meals.

Shortly after launch, because the writer/director has literally no conception of the size of space, they encounter an alien ship floating free in space. Hard as nails commander and flippant guy board, meet an alien who attacks them and, after killing the alien then flee back to their ship. Before departing they plant a friggin’ bomb on the alien ship and destroy it. This incident will never again be referenced or have any effect on the continuing adventure.

There follows some terrible interpersonal interaction scenes with only Francine York playing the pretty woman scientist showing any acting talent at all.

Next, the ship encounters the bog standard ‘meteor swarm’ Their shields protects, mostly, but what damage their receive causes the computer to malfunction and they go very far very fast. (Shades of Lost in Space) They are not lost but must land to make repairs. Attempting to land on a planet with a surface that is only 60% water, they miss dry land, coming to rest on the seafloor. They make repairs, Hard as Nail and Pretty Scientist now decided to have a love story but are interrupted by giant crabs. The giant crabs present no danger to ship and just kind of scuttle around the tiny model.

Making to completely logical decision that while the rest repair the ship Flippant Guy should go ashore and collect a tiny, tiny box of samples. He’s stalked by a monster and attacked on his return, dying of his wounds. With the ship repaired and having learned that this planet can support life, they name it after Flippant Guy and go home.

I have seen my fair share of bad 50s and 60s SF movies. I can forgive cheap. I can forgive stock characters. But come on, you have no excuse for a script this friggin’ terrible. Paper is really cheap, and you can keep drafting until, even if you can’t get it right, you can get it better than this.

Space Probe: Taurus Do not watch. Trust me, I’ve made thsi seem far mnore interesting that it is.

Share

Happy Star Trek Day

Paramount Studios/CBS Home Video

.

September 8th, 1966, Star Trek aired its first episode Mantrap, and the world has never been the same.

I was born in 1961 and as I mentioned in my post My Tangled History with Star Trek this series has always been a part of my life, re-runs of the original cast in the 70s and 80s, the one season of Star Trek: The Animate Series, and to limited amounts the various takes on the Universe and its characters since the show’s inception.

Beyond fandom Star Trek has left its imprint on the world and its events. In 2020 when a deadly pandemic swept the globe and the United States launched as massive drive to find a vaccine, and find it fast, the effort was named Operation: Warp Speed and no one had to have that moniker explained to them. Therapists speak of the need for people to ‘lower their shields’ and they are not referring to metaphorical iron and steel but force-walls of defensiveness. Perhaps the cultural impact that will live the longest beyond this beloved series is the concept that your evil twin sports a Spock style goatee.

Star Trek can be brilliant, such as combining the themes of Moby Dick and the madness of Mutually Assure Destruction in the unforgettable episode The Doomsday Machine. It could be profoundly silly with comedic episodes such as The Trouble with Tribbles, question the nature of identity with episodes like What are Little Girls Made Of, or The Serene Squall (Star Trek: Strange New Worlds), proving the versatility of the premise and science-fiction in general.

Of the show could be stupid too, taking swing that should never been attempted, Spock’s Brain, Turnabout Intruder, or Patterns of Force where I contend Spock uttered his most idiotic line in any film or episode when he named Nazi Germany as a model of efficient government. (Hell, man, The Fascists of Italy ruled longer than the ones of Germany. I have always envisioned someone off camera forcing Leonard Nimoy to speak such drivel.)

Star Trek has seen many series, movies, and even timelines. Fans can argue endlessly and to great amusement and entertainment which series or captain was best, which episodes were best or worst, which run had the best writing, which timeline which show is in, but what cannot be argued and must simply be accepted is that Star Trek made reality its own ‘strange new world.’

Share

In the 70s Psychic Abilities Were Everywhere

.

The other night I began a rewatch of The Exorcist II: The Heretic. It has been 40 years of so since I last watched this sequel to the fantastically successful The Exorcist and most of the film had slipped into the forgotten realms. (Not surprising even 40 years I was unimpressed, and this is often considered the weakest film in the series.) Release in 1977 this movie has many of the hallmarks of cinema of the 70s, particularly genre films and their fascination with psychic powers or it was nearly always referred to then, ESP.

Now Science-Fiction’s love affair with ESP well predates the 70s, Star Trek’s original pilot The Cage fixates on it and it is the foundation for all of the weird and fantastic stuff in Herbert’s Dune. It is in the 70s that this shit exploded across television, film, and books.

ESP and its associated ‘powers’ seemed to erupt in all sorts of fiction even when it was terribly mismatched to the genre. The Devil’s Rain a supernatural horror film about a coven of satanist and the struggle to possess a vital artifact utilizes, in addition to magical powers granted by the lords of hell, ESP in it plot. In the novel The Exorcist Father Karris must exclude by proof that the objects moving about in Regan’s room are not being manipulated by telekinesis. Psychic powers are so assumed to exist as part of the natural world that they have to be eliminated before he can move on to demonic possession. (This bit was wisely dropped from the film’s script.)

ESP showed up in SF films, soap operas, and horror films with amazing regularity. This fascination vanished fairly quickly in the 80s with the study of psychic ability being coded for ‘con man; in Ghostbusters. The 70s were a wild ride.

Share

My Tangled History With Star Trek

CBS Studios

Credit: Paramount Pictures

.

When Star Trek first hit the air in 1966, I was a wee lad of five. I have some memories of watching the series then, being confused as to how the Enterprise blasted-off from Earth, (I was an avid watcher of the American space launches) until the concepts ‘built in space’ and ‘never landing’ was explained to me. It was the 70s that cemented by love for Trek, with the afternoon ‘stripping’ of the series where episodes were shown in random order each weekday afternoon usually alongside other classics such as Gilligan’s Island or Green Acers.

When Star Trek: The Motion Picture hit the silvered screens in 1979 I was there for multiple screens in my local theater. Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan remains one of my favorite films. Of course, in 1988 Star Trek: The Next Generation was released into syndication, and I was pleased to have new Trek in my life.

However, I never loved Next Gen the way I loved the original series. I watched it weekly for most of its run, but by season six found that the storylines and writing simply didn’t command my attention. I went to the theater for some of this cast’s feature films but was so repelled by Star Trek: Insurrection that even that stopped being one of my activities.

Star Trek: Deep Space Nine came along and it was (shoulder shrug) alright. I watched a few seasons, but not as much as I had Next Gen and dropped out of regular viewership before they progressed to their ‘war’ storyline.

Star Trek: Voyager I managed to choke down three episodes before I fled from it. I found too much of that series either poorly thought out or simply stupid to continue watching save for an episode here and there written by a friend.

Star Trek: Enterprise held promise that enticed me. The idea of going back to a less tech advanced Federation I found fascinating, but I managed only the pilot episode and walked away. It was not for me, and I had absolutely no interest in a ‘temporal cold war.’

Star Trek: Discovery held my attention for several episodes, but I have a clear memory of switching off an episode when they mentioned a ‘space sonar’ and I never returned.

Star Trek: Lower Decks I watched several episodes and generally found I liked it on the same level as The Next Generation but ultimately the characters grated on my nerves. Farce is fine on limited doses, but I have a low tolerance for it as a running series.

Which brings us to Star Trek: Strange New Worlds.

I adore this show.

It is difficult to understand why this series is working for me when so many of the others repel me. I do think part of the reason is that it has embraced an episodic format. While not as episodic as television of the 1960s where the episodes were intended to be ‘stripped’ and shown out of order,Strange New Worlds has enough continuing storylines that the order of the shows is vitally important, but it also has the freedom to do episodes with standalone stories much like the original series. Not every episode is a banger and some certainly engage me more than others, but the series overall has grabbed.

This set of characters are far more interesting than the fairly bland set from Next Generationwho were presented as far too perfect for my tastes. Chapel has become one of my personal favorites instead of the one-note cardboard cutout as presented in the original run. After all, did anyone really notice her absence in Wrath of Khan?

For those people who love the various variations that didn’t work for me I am happy for you. What a boring world it would be if we only loved the same things. Strange New Worlds hasn’t worked for everyone and their big swings like the cross-over with Lower Decks and the musical episodes have sparked strong emotions but that is so far better than a bland meh. Take swings in your art, try something outrageous, most of all create what you want to see.

Share

Not a Proper Review: Ahsoka

.

Last week on Disney+ the latest series et in the Star Wars universe, Ahsoka released the two episodes.

Disney Studios

Ahsoka Tano (Rosario Dawson) is a character from the animated Star Wars Series Rebels and has been briefly depicted by Dawson in the companion series The Mandalorian. The series Ahsoka centers on the chaos and rebuilding following the fall of the Galactic Empire including threats from still loyal Imperials along with the return of a much-feared Grand Admiral Thrawn (Lars Mikkelsen.)

This is not a proper review because I feel that to fully analyze the success or failure of a piece you must continue to the conclusion. It is in the ending that films and stories ‘come together’ and a botched ending can undermine and ruin an otherwise strong piece. I will not be following Ahsoka to its conclusion as the series in the first two episodes failed to give me any sort of emotional connection that compelled anymore of my time.

I have seen on social media that a number of fans are quite pleased with the series and thrilled to watch more. I am happy for them. It is good to find the art that speaks to you and thrills you and makes you happy. Happiness is a resource all too scarce in these days and years and I will not gainsay anyone for the art that gives it to them.

For me, however, Ahsoka, came across as flat in its characterizations. Not one the major characters presented in the first two episodes seemed to have any real interior life, speaking and acting solely in service of the plot. The plot itself felt like a retread, a McGuffin hunt with a device already employed in the sequel trilogy, a map to lost character. While the visual effects, particularly the ‘Volume’ set are impressive and make locations unavailable to television budgets a reality, and the fights are well-choregraphed there is not enough on the screen to hold my interest.

I hope the fans are happy and I hope for them that the series delivers the excitement and drama that it promises but for me this is a miss.

Share

Streaming Review: They Cloned Tyrone

.

Written by Juel Taylor & Tony Rettenmaier and directed by Juel Taylor They Cloned Tyronecaptures the spirit of 70’s Blaxploitation with a 21st century approach to cinema, storytelling, and metaphor.

Fontaine (John Boyega) is a low-level street drug dealer in the community of the Glenn. Haunted

Netflix

by past tragedy and absent any support systems of people his life is one of ruin, repetition, and violence. While attempting to recover cash owed to him from pimp Slick Charles (Jamie Foxx) and sex worker Yo-yo (Teyonah Parris) Fontaine is ambushed by rival drug dealer Isaac but the fallout from the attack leads Fontaine, Slick Charles, and Yo-yo to discover a vast racist conspiracy at work on the people of the Glenn.

With a supporting cast that includes Kiefer Sutherland and David Alan Grier They Cloned Tyrone is a sharp social satire dealing with the African American community’s twin issues of assimilation or annihilation. In the best tradition of Blaxploitation, the ultimate conflict is between the marginalized community and ‘the man’, ‘the system’ and everything that those terms represent. Stark in its violence, unflinching in the community’s despair, and cutting with both its humor and its satire the film is an excellent outing for its first-time feature film director. Boyega delivers a naturalistic and compelling performance filled with a subtlety that reveals an inner life for Fontaine that he cannot bring himself to speak. Parris is unrecognizable here from her more well-known role as Monica Rambeau from the Marvel Cinematic Universe fully immersing herself into Yo-yo a woman of hidden talents. Foxx of course delivers another talented performance, giving this film’s trio the star power to sell it to both studios and audiences.

If there is a fault in this film, it lies with cinematographer Ken Seng.

Photographic dark-skinned performers can be a challenging task for cinematographers, and this is magnified with scenes that are primarily in darkened room or at night. It is possible that in a properly calibrated auditorium the entire film would present in a dark clarity but They Cloned Tyronewas produced for Netflix, intended for streaming on home screen that vary greatly in their quality and settings. The truth of the matter is that in several scenes I found it impossible to actually see the performances. These are all very talented actors and depriving the audience of the expression is a crime against such a cast.

Aside from the cinematography I found the entire film quite interesting, engaging, and compelling. I would favorably compare this Boyega’s pre–Star Wars film Attack the Block.

They Cloned Tyrone is streaming on Netflix.

 

A gentle reminder that I have my own SF novel available from any bookseller. Vulcan’s Forge is about the final human colony, one that attempt to live by the social standard of 1950s America and the sole surviving outpost following Earth’s destruction. Jason Kessler doesn’t fit into the repressive 50s social constraints, and he desire for a more libertine lifestyle leads him into conspiracies and crime.

Share

Are You The Same Person in the Morning?

.

Amid the myriad hypothetical discussions and debate in science-fiction is the transporter problem.

In Star Trek the transporters work by converting the person to energy, let’s ignore just how freaking much energy would be created by turning tens of kilograms of mass directly to energy, transmitting it to a distant locale and reconverting the energy to mass that precisely recreates the original down to every quantum state of every sub-atomic particle.

There are those that feel a precisely exact duplicate that is indistinguishable from the original is for all practical purposed the original. Conversely there are those that hold the original, destroyed in the conversion process, no longer exists and only a copy now survives. A copy that is perfect in every manner but still a copy.

When it comes to the person transported the debate continues with those that feel even with a continuity of memories and experiences what arrives is a copy. There those that feel that the continuity is the person and any debate about the body being a copy is akin to angels dancing on the head of a pin.

There’s no doubt that a person transported suffers a break in continuity. One moment they are standing on the transporter pad and the next they are on the wind swept plain of an alien planet without any memory or experience connecting the two places. I would imagine it is functionally identical to a person with Dissociative Identity Disorder (D.I.D.) returning from one of their alters to find themselves somewhere they had no memory of.

In the example of a person with D.I.D. we consider the break in consciousness to be a break in the continuity of the personality and person.

The transporter question can even be applied to everyday events and persons without the need for Sci-Fi environments. Each and every night, or day if you live a flipped schedule, you lose all consciousness when you sleep. That portion of you that is aware, creating continuity of memory and events, ceases for hours and when it returns you have no recollection of the intervening time.

Yes, you might remember dreams, if you awoke during them, otherwise they are inaccessible. People dream several times during a long slumber but only recall the last one because it is the longest in duration and the one that they awoke during.

If you, like me, have occasions of ‘sleep walking’ this break in continuity can be even more pronounced. You went to sleep in your bed but awoke in a different place with the same awareness of the experience in between as that hypothetical person on the transporter pad.

Are you the same person in the morning when you awake as you were when you fell asleep? Dos that break in continuity sever the continuum of your self? If all of your memories are the complex interconnections of your synapses, which remained unchanged during the night, but your consciousness is a property possessed only by a fully active brain, are you a new you every morning?

Share

Of Parallel And Duplicate Earths

.

For its season Finale Star Trek: Strange New Worlds revisited one of classic Trek’s most used budget cutting tropes, a world that looks exactly like out real world. This time instead of a parallel Earth that somehow evolved the exact same continents the justification was a settler colony obsessed with 20th century Earth cultures. (hmm, sound like my book. Same idea deployed for different reasons.) As ‘parallel’ Earths go this was a pretty decent justification and really just there to allow for backlot and location shooting instead of expansive and expensive set construction.

It did get me thinking about those old episodes where the Enterprise discovered a planet exactly like Earth but lightyears distant. It was while watching an old episode of classic Trek that I had one had the idea of writing my own parallel Earth short story.

The possibility of a star system evolving in a doppelganger version of out own is absurdly improbable and the answer to that ‘why is it there?’ question formed the central conceit of the story A Canvas Dark and Deep. Which sold to the fine internet magazine NewMyths.com. You can read it here in their archives.

A gentle reminder that I have my own SF novel available from any bookseller. Vulcan’s Forge is about the final human colony, one that attempt to live by the social standard of 1950s America and the sole surviving outpost following Earth’s destruction. Jason Kessler doesn’t fit into the repressive 50s social constraints, and he desire for a more libertine lifestyle leads him into conspiracies and crime.

Share

From Soulless Monstrosity to Nerd Rapture

.

Star Trek: Strange New Worlds‘ reinterpretation of legacy characters from the original series has certainly intrigued me. I find I am most fascinated by the new version of Nurse Christine Chapel. Jess Bush’s portray of this Christine, along with a more detailed and varied backstory and motivation has placed her as one of my favorites in this new series. No slight to Mrs. Barrett-Roddenberry, she was given precious little to work with in the original series. Beyond pining for Spock her role possessed no character.

Except of course for episode eight, or seven depending on how you count them, season one What Are Little Girls Made Of?

CBS StudiosFirst aired in October of 1966 the episode centers of the Enterprise searching for the lost humanitarian scientist Dr. Roger Korby, coincidentally the fiancé to Christine Chapel. It is revealed that Korby has discovered the ruins of an ancient and now vanished civilization and from their remaining technology can produce android nearly indistinguishable from humans. He has a nefarious plot and by the end of the episode is defeated and revealed to be an android himself. Fatally injured he had used the technology to transfer himself into a mechanical body a process with which he expected to create practically immortal humans. Kirk and Christine are horrified by the revelation that Korby had been a machine the entire time. When Spock arrives with a rescuing security team Kirk informs him that ‘Dr. Korby was never here.’

It is an interesting question when did our attitude toward ‘uploading’ ourselves into machines change?

What Little Girls are Made Of spends no time debating if Korby is in fact still Roger Korby. Once it is shown that he is a machine his pleas that he has remained himself fall on the deaf ears of Kirk and Chapel. The premise of the episode is that his actions, plotting to replace people until his android society is too advanced to resist, are accepted as proof that he was never Korby ignoring the simple fact that people change. Or that five years of isolation can unhinge even the strongest of minds. Only the fact that he is a mechanical machine instead of a biological one is enough to ‘prove’ he was never Korby. A machine person will always, at that time, be regarded as a soulless monstrosity.

Today the concept of ‘uploading’ yourself into a tireless and immortal machine housing is pretty much a technological rapture, a promise of eternal, blissful life for the those with faith in the Disney Studioslimitless capability of the computational sciences. In Captain America: The Winter Soldier neither Rogers nor Romanov, or the audience for that matter, question if it really is Dr. Zola addressing them from the vast computer banks at the end of the film’s second act. It is simply accepted that with advanced enough super-science of course a person, the entirety of them transferred into another receptacle. Zola’s monstrosity was a product of who Zola was and not from the mechanical nature of his afterlife.

I wonder when did that state change occur in out collective thinking? When did we accept that it is our memories and sense of continuity that defines the ‘real’ us?

Share

B Movie Review: The 27th Day

.

The 27th Day adapted from the name of the same name by John Mantley is a mostly forgotten Sci-Fi B Feature that presents an alien threat is a quite unique manner.

Five people are abducted from the Earth and given each a container with three capsules that when armed and fired have the capability to annihilate every person on the planet while leaving all other life untouched. The unnamed alien presenting these devices explains that his own Columbia Picturesworld is doomed and will soon be destroyed by a natural event. His culture’s ethical standards will not permit them to kill humanity and take the Earth as a replacement, but should humanity kill itself, then the Earth would be free for his people to use to save themselves. The five abductees, a newspaper reporting, an English woman, a Soviet solider, a Chinese Peasant woman, and a brilliant German Scientist, are under no compulsions or influence. Once returned to the Earth they may do as they will, free and unencumbered. The containers given to each of them can only be opened by its assigned person but once opened the weapons are usable by anyone. After 27 days the weapons will become inert. The abductees are then returned to the location from which they were taken. Shortly thereafter the alien hijacks all global electromagnetic communications to announce that the five have been given each a powerful weapon, naming each of the abductees and their city of residence, sending the planet into chaos, panic, and paranoia.

I stumbled upon this movie by accident and after watching it was intrigued enough to track down a copy of the novel and give that a read.

For the most part the film is a fairly faithful adaptation of the novel, except for the ending. To discuss this and way I think in the end the movie was a disservice to the novel I will go into spoilers for the ending and the alien’s motivation.

BEGIN SPOILER SECTION

The German scientist, convinced that there is something more than just death in the capsules, persuades the newspaper man to give him his package and deciphering the mathematical notation etched on their surfaces works out the capsules true potential and, without anyone’s approval or pre-knowledge, fires them, blanketing the globe.

In the movie everyone who was an ‘enemy of freedom’ is killed but all other people are left untouched.

In the novel, no one is killed, but rather each person altruism is heightened. Selfishness vanishes from the human race and people who hoarded resources, be they gangster or corporate overlord, surrender their excess for the betterment of all.

In both version the Earth then invites the alien race to come a share the planet with humanity.

In the film’s version this is nice but ultimately doomed. The concept ‘an enemy to freedom’ is far too slippery to come even close to establishing the sort of human nature that would not fear alien and treat them with the hatred we launch at each other over things as inconsequential as skin tones.

The novel’s notion that a more empathic and altruistic humanity is a more open and accepting one is far more interesting and poses far more challenging ethical questions. With the film’s conclusion there’s only a debate over what does it mean to be ‘an enemy of freedom’ but with the novel’s there’s the argument is it right to fundamentally change a person or a species without their consent even if the results is a universal good?

In 2008 a remake of the classic SF film The Day the Earth Stood Still was released and attempted to change the message of the film from one fearing nuclear annihilation to one of environmental disaster and the result was a disastrous movie. Hollywood would have been better served remaking The 27th Day with its themes of greed and hoarding over attempting to hijack a classic.

Share