Category Archives: SF

More Thoughts on Star Trek Strange New Worlds

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As I write this, we are one episode away from the conclusion of Season 2 of Star Tre: Strange New Worlds. This season has brought more episodes that swung at new things and new styles than season one, a crossover episode with an animated Trek Series, and the franchise’s first foray into musical territory, while also exploring the deep dark of some of their characters.

The series remains straddling the two worlds of television, being both episodic with each episode pretty much a self-contained story but also with one foot in the saga format as events

CBS Studios

Credit: Paramount Pictures

from previous episodes reverberate both in plot and emotion for the characters.

The series is Canon breaking. The events and experiences of the characters cannot be reconciled with the depictions first aired more than 50 years ago. I am fine with that. The nature of televised story telling has changed dramatically over the last half century and what was acceptable writing and plotting in the middle of the 1960s would never fly for today’s audiences. I would rather the series creatives break Canon and continuity in the furtherance of good character development and story revelations that commit to slavish devotion to a Canon that wasn’t adhered to even during the original broadcasts. There are of course limits. A story that requires that James Kirk joined Starfleet because he was on the run as a serial killer would be a Canon breaking event far too great to accept but having original series characters meeting people that in the first broadcasts that they had no knowledge of. No big deal if the final effect is to tell a good story.

The entire cast continues to deliver stellar performances. (Pun intended, fully and without regret.) The storylines give most of them more to do than any series airing in the 60s would have dared. This season’s treatment of Jim Kirk has felt more in keeping with the original character than his guest appearance in season one. It is quite pleasant to see some of the more supporting characters from the original series getting a deeper backstory and more emotional exploration than they received originally. Spock’s stories seem to create the greatest conflict with ‘Canon,’ but I remind you that even the original series couldn’t make-up its mind on what exactly was the truth. In the episode Where No Man Has Gone Before he refers to an ‘ancestor’ that one married an Earth woman and later this is simply ignored to make his mother human. Having Spock explore and experiment with allowing his human side to be expressed more freely may be a Canon violation, but I find it fascinating.

The characters I am most interested in and have the greatest emotional attachment to are Dr M’Benga, La’an Noonian Singh, and most of all Christine Chapel.

La’an, torn between her nature, button-downed and controlled, and her desire to be more open, expressed in her solo in the musical episode but contained within Christina Chong’s performance well before that is emotionally powerful.

M’Benga and Chapel’s traumatic war wounds are touching and heart rending giving each of them far deep characterizations that the original series ever allowed. While the war itself was explored in the series Star Trek: Discovery, which didn’t quite work for me, I am thoroughly enjoying the exploration of war’s lasting effect on the people forced to endure it. Like Frodo they carry wounds that will never fully heal.

One more episode to go but since this is a not a season long story but a series of interconnected ones, I do not feel that the finale is as critical to the whole season as it would be for another series. So, I can render a judgement without episode 10 and I am enjoying the series even more than I had during season one. In my opinion the best Trek since the original.

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.

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“Magical” Effects in ‘Soft’ Science Fiction

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‘Hard Science Fiction is the sub-genre where no detail contradicts the know laws of physics.  in this there is no faster than Light travel or communication or any form of telepathic psychic ability. It is a rigorous artform practiced by only a few. Once you diverge away from ‘Hard’ SF and into less rigorous applications of scientific fact and theory the art because far wider, encompassing everything from Star Trek the Marvel Cinematic Universe. Often at some point a piece will require some extraordinary effect that upends expectations, introducing new and often unreproducible effects. What is interesting is that in various historical periods there has often been a consensus on what can produce these transformative events.

In the first few decades of the 20th century ‘Rays’, light beyond the visible spectrum, were a common fantastical effect. In 1931’s Frankenstein, Victor boasts of discovering a ray beyond the violet and ultraviolet, a ray that first brought life and one which he harnesses to give life to his creation. In Captain America: The First Avenger is the writers tip their hat to Frankenstein and use a period appropriate ‘Vita Rays’ as per of the process that created Captain America.

By the post-war era ‘rays’ had become a tired trope and in the new atomic age ‘Radiation,’ which really were rays all along, because the empowering effect that grew insects and people to impossible proportions, created powerful mutant abilities, reanimated the dead to cannibalize the living, and endowed several comic book superheroes with the flashier abilities.

Radiation, like the rays before them, eventually passed out of favor as the magic system of less than demanding science fiction stories.

What replaced ‘radiation’ as our go to we need something fantastic to happen here effect?

Quantum Mechanics.

Quantum Mechanics, and in particular the many worlds interpretation of wave form collapse, had been used the furious wave hands and craft stories are in effect blatantly impossible. You want a ‘rational’ reason why the devil is in a jar of goo in the basement of a Los Angeles Catholic Church? Quantum Mechanics. You need a method of time travel to collect some shiny stones and reverse the villain’s victory? Quantum Mechanics. You want a musical episode where the characters react to diegetic musical and sing their truths? Quantum Mechanics.

Quantum Mechanics is no more likely to induce a ‘musical universe’ than gamma radiation is to transform a normal man into an eight-foot tall several hundred-pound monster. These are artifacts of very soft science-fiction employed to wave hands past the impossibility of it all in order to deploy the story the writers want to tell. As long as we remember that these stories are not reality, not a possible future, but the modern equivalent of ‘Once Upon A Time…’ then we can enjoy them for the myths that they are and remember that truth that matters in these stories is not the science but the emotions of the human condition.

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Where Barbie and Star Trek Intersect

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This post will contain spoilers for both Barbie (2023) and Star Trek: Insurrection (1998).

Paramount StudiosThe movie Star Trek: Insurrection centers on a conflict between the Ba’ku a species of alien luddites rejecting all technology and the Son’a a specie that hates and despises the Ba’ku and who have allied with Federation elements to steal the Ba’ku’s planet which bestows eternal youth and immortality. During the unfolding of the plot it is revealed that the two species are in
fact the same and that the Ba’ku faction exiled the Son’a for not sharing their luddite philosophy condemning that faction to death. The Ba’ku created their own mortal enemy and at no point in the movie is this concept acknowledged in any fashion. The filmmakers elide past the concept that it is morally acceptable to effectually sentence to death a people for the crime of not believing as you do. The Son’a campaign of revenge who not justified is understandable.

Barbie interrogates the power dynamic between men and women contrasting Barbieland a Warner Brothers Studiosfantasy domain of unquestioned matriarchy with the ‘real’ world. It should be noted that even the film’s depiction of the real world is strewn with elements that reveal it is as fantastic as Barbieland such as the view from the Mattel offices.

Ken, who has been dismissed and whose feelings have disregarded by Barbie, after visiting the ‘real’ world returns to Barbieland and transforms it into a fantastic and exaggerated version of patriarchy. In the film’s third act Barbie frees the other Barbies from the influence of the corrupted Ken but also comes to understands that her apathy towards Ken’s hurt and pain contributed to his own fall. It is important to note that Ken does not get what he wants, Barbie’s feelings towards him remain aromantic but his feelings are acknowledged he is no longer ‘just Ken.’

The writers and filmmakers of Barbie have a firmer grasp on causality and how pain transforms into anger than the people who crafted Star Trek: Insurrection. With Barbie there is understanding and even eventually empathy for how one becomes a villain where with Insurrection there is only the unrealistic view that good and evil are simplistic ideologies. What a world we live in where a film based on a toy presents a more nuanced and complex take on morality that a leading SciFi feature film.

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Series Review: Secret Invasion

Marvel Studios.

Thirty years after the events of Captain Marvel Nick Fury and Carol Danvers, now aware that the
shapeshifting Skrulls had been the oppressed and not the oppressors and had promised to find
the aliens a world to be their new home, it is revealed that the search for a home has failed and some Skrulls are intent on removing humanity from the Earth and taking it as their own. Secret Invasionfollows Nick Fury as he attempts to save the Earth and humanity from the rebel Skrulls and their genocidal plot.

While Secret Invasion did not actively repulse me as did some non-MCU series such as The Rigand Silo, it failed to engage or enthrall my attention and failed as an example of its subgenre the MCU rendition of a spy story.

Spy fiction exists along a spectrum with Ian Fleming’s super-spy James Bond, filled with gadgets, glamor, and megalomaniacal villains at one end and John le Carré’s George Smiley’s world of disloyalty, moral compromises, and cynicism at the other. Secret Invasion however seems to exist outside of the spectrum, playing closer to the superhero nature of its universe and ignoring the spy element of its central protagonist, Nick Fury. The series is neither the clear good vs evil romp that many Bond plots are nor does it delve beyond the surface concerning the moral costs and corruption of intelligence work. Without either element the series floats from set piece to set piece, each other its own escalating stakes but missing the essential tones that creates genre. This is not a failing due to due to the story being placed within the MCU, WandaVision embraced, exploited, and satirized the American sitcom genre while still exploring grief, destiny, and superpowers. Captain American: The Winter Soldier, while remaining an extension of Steve Rodgers’s MCU journey, captured the paranoia and feel of a 70s political thriller. Secret Invasion’s failure at genre leaves it lackluster and pointless, serving only to setup other franchise entries and having no essential reason for its own existence.

In addition to its failing as a spy genre Secret Invasion also presented plot inconsistencies that undermine the show’s suspension of disbelief. For 30 years Captain Marvel and Fury has searched for a new home for the Skrull population and failed to find a single planet for them. Really? In a universe as teaming with life among the star, see all the aliens represented in Guardians of the Galaxyfranchise, which also posits that there are abandoned habitable worlds, the failure to discover a place for the Skrulls becomes a leap of logic too great for a setting that includes magic and talking trees.

For a story about shapeshifting aliens and a secret world-wide threat, Secret Invasion does so little with this element that it is utterly lacking in paranoia. The story doesn’t utilize the concept that everyone is suspect because anyone might be the worst person to interact with. Bond usually had the ‘bad Bond girl,’ le Carré is rife with ‘who can you trust?’ issues but Secret Invasion rarely employs such a rich plot point and when it does it lacks any real weight.

Secret Invasion is not bad, but neither it is good. Of the newest television series, I have added to my recent watching it is the least interesting. I do not regret the time I spent with the series, but I shall not be looking to experience it again as I did with Loki or WandaVision.

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.

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The Deep Background of Vulcan’s Forge

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My SF/Noir novel Vulcan’s Forge, published March 2020 by Flametree Press, is set on the distant

Flame Tree Publishing

and isolated human colony of Nocturnia, but the events of the story takes place centuries and centuries after the destruction of the Earth.

In the early 22nd century, after fusion power plants had become common, Artificial intelligences practical, and humanity has settlements, some quite large, throughout the inner solar system, a rouge brown dwarf is discovered with an orbit that will take through the solar system, disrupting and destroying the rocky inner planets.

Face with extinction humanity designs, constructs, and launches hundreds of automated solar sail arks. These arks do not carry crew or people but rather the egg and sperm of animals and people along with sophisticated A.I.s and the equipment to construct human colonies. Once an ark has reached its target system, should it have survived the centuries long voyage still functional, and provided there is a planet suitable for terrestrial life, the A.I. build the colony and its required infrastructure, and then utilizing artificial wombs, birth the first generation of human born on alien worlds, preserving humanity and numerous other Earth species.

Surprisingly cheap, due to plentiful fusion power, the resources of the solar system, and artificial intelligence each ark cost in today’s dollars about half a billion to build, equip, and launch. With the arks so affordable they are not the sole domain of governments and numerous cultures, religions, sub-cultures, and even a few individuals commission arks in a bid to save and ensure to continuity of their ways of life. There is even a couple of arks dedicated to making sure that out there among the star Texas continues to survive and thrive.

The colony of Nocturnia was settled by an ark commission by a group who fetishized Urban Americana of the 1950s. Believing that mid-twentieth century America represented some sort of ideal culture they programed the A.I.s of the ark to disseminate this as the colony’s sole culture. Naturally their ideas of what comprised an ‘ideal’ culture from one which more than a century and a half separated them were based more of myth and misunderstanding.

The novel picks up on Nocturnia as the third generation has come into its own and Jason Kessler, a man ill-suited to the social conformity of the 50s discovers that the colony harbors a deep and deadly secret.

As a traditionally published novel Vulcan’s Forge can be ordered from wherever books are sold. I am including links to San Diego premier specialty bookstore Mysterious Galaxy along with links to Amazon.

Mysterious Galaxy Paperback

Mysterious Galaxy eBook

Amazon Paperback

Amazon eBook

 

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Silo: Season One, Final Thoughts

Apple TV.

Here’s my thoughts on Silo in a single sentence; I will not be back for season two.

I will go into more detailed thoughts about this series, but it will be spoiler filled, so if all you want to know is if I liked or not, I direct you back to the opening sentence.

Silo is centered on Jules Nichols (Rebecca Fergusson) as she uncovers a vast and hidden conspiracy within the close-ecology world of ‘the silo’ where some 10,000 people live hundreds of years following a global undefined ecological catastrophe. The outside world, viewed only through wall sized screen is devoid of life. Individuals exiled from the silo, though given precious resources in the form of a sealed contamination suit, die within a few dozen meters. Investigating the murder of her lover Jules discovers hints and elements of the secret powers that controls and monitors every aspect of the Silo’s life and in the end is exiled. But because her friends make sure she has working sealant tape on her contamination suit she doesn’t die and discovers amid the devastated world dozens of ‘silos’ dotting the landscape.

Stories and settings like Silo require a solid foundation of world building so everything that follows is credible. Once the world building cracks the suspension of disbelief is shattered and everything else unravels. Illogical element after illogical element are compounded throughout the season that reveal shoddy and ill-thought-out world building. The Silo has only one generator to power the vast structure and it is never taken offline for maintenance. Imagine starting your car and running it for years, decades, only added gasoline as needed. It won’t work, that can’t happen. People eat bacon and eggs in a setting where the only rational choice is vegetarianism. With such tight, limited space and resources, it makes no sense and would not be sustainable to grow calories to feed to animals so you can get fewer calories. For a place that has been utterly isolated and with such shoddy recycling as what is shown the silo is amazingly well stocked with new, clean, and pristine plastics. Nothing about how this environment is set up actually works if you give it a moment’s thought.

Even if you wave away all the illogical and irrational world building, Silo is still in my tastes fatally flawed within its own rule set.

At one point late in the season Jules is escaping the dreaded ‘judicial’, the people behind the conspiracy, and is forced to climb between levels in a garbage chute. It is stated in the dialog that she disappeared on ‘level 20’ and she and her compatriots emerge on ‘level 122’. One hundred levels climbing a vertical ladder. If a level is just 8 feet, and they look much taller than that in the sets, they just climbed 800 feet! Yet they emerge not exhausted, tired, cramped, or even sweaty. The writers simply are not thinking at all about what they have just put onto the page.

As part of the conspiracy, we seen the surveillance room where a staff of seven or eight watch many monitors visually scanning the entire silo. Let’s say its seven people, three eight-hour shifts, that 21 people. Add in another shift so you can rotate days off and we have 28 people. However, you need people who aren’t watching to maintain the equipment, so let’s say they brings you up to 35 or 40 people. But you need still more people in this conspiracy. All that equipment draws power from the electric grid, and someone would notice that the ‘janitor’s closet’ is using kilowatts upon kilowatts of juice. So, you have to have people in engineering who are covering up all that missing electricity. A conspiracy so vast simply cannot go on unknown. People talk, it’s a fact of human existence.

Silo excepts too much to be simply waved away for what at its heart is not that compelling of a story nor that interesting collection of characters.

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Bits and Pieces

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Here are my thoughts on a few scattered subjects.

The Titan Tragedy

The loss of the vessel with the five people aboard was a tragedy. Albeit an avoidable tragedy and one that is wholly unsurprising given the history of the company and its attitude towards safety. The only grace in the terrible affair is that the people aboard almost certainly had no awareness of their demise. A catastrophic failure of the pressure hull at depth is an event that would be measure in milliseconds involving energies comparable to several sticks of dynamite.

Star Trek: Strange New Worlds Season 2

Quite happy to see this series return. I am an old fart and much of the recent Star Trekofferings have not worked particularly well for me. Granted episode one gave us yet another massive court-martial event that will be swept under the rug further supporting the jest to advance in Star Fleet an officer must at some time commit mutiny, the series remains enjoyed with interesting characters and a fine cast.

Marvel’s Secret Invasion

Off to a good start. Fun paranoia dealing with shape shifters and the eternal question of ‘who can you trust?’ A definite ‘gut punch’ of an ending at the first episode as stakes rose considerably. Of course, it won’t be until the story is concluded that I can render a final judgement. Endings are critical and a bad one can ruin an experience. e.g., Game of Thrones

Adventures in ‘Pantsing’ a novel

My experiment continues along. My first novel length attempt at horror combined with an attempt to craft the novel without an outline has now reached about 25000 words of an expected 80,000 to 100,000 word target. I suspect that the current act, Act 2 of 5, will be the most challenging and if I can get through this bit the rest should fall into place.

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Quatermass The Conclusion (1979)

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Bernard Quatermass the brilliant rocket scientist of Nigel Kneale’s writing embarked on numerous adventures, starting with 1953 The Quatermass Experiment a television serial adapted later into a film The Quatermass Xperiment, through my favorite version Quatermass and the Pit (Released in the USA as 5 Million Years to Earth) and then finally concluding in 1979 with another television series Quatermass also known as Quatermass the Conclusion.

Aired in 1979 Quatermass sees the famed scientist aged, and distraught as he searches for his lost granddaughter, a young woman seemingly taken by the same madness infecting the young adults of the world, as society on both sides of the Iron Curtain crumbles. Set in the waning years of the 20th century, the world of Quatermass is a world of decay, societal, governmental, and institutional. Gang battle in the streets of London without police intervention, mass executions are held in sports stadiums, and the cult like ‘Planet People’ disillusioned youth around the world await the aliens that will take them to another world of peace and love.

When a crowd of ‘Planet People’ are vaporized by an unknown energy from space it is clear that some ancient alien force is at work, an alien force that may have visited the Earth some 5000 years earlier. Working with a radio astronomer and a collection of aged scientists, who by their advanced years are immune to the alien’s call, Quatermass feverishly attempts to discover the truth of the attacks, devise a counter, and find his missing granddaughter.

Quatermass is a dark dystopic tale of a world that has quite possibly crumbled beyond restoration. Where the earlier stories had elements of darkness and ancient powers none presented the nature of humanity, even with Martian heritage, a cynical as this limited series. While Kneale was merely 57 when the series aired it has the feeling of an old man grumbling about the disrespectful youth and that the world he had known has fallen into decadence and filth. No one in this series is protected by ‘plot armor’ and Kneale deals death as indiscriminately as reality sadness does. It is surprising that in a post Star Wars environment the BBC produced something are dire and doom filled as this program. Quatermass might very well be the final gasp of the cynical seventies before the coming of the endless mindless adventure stories of the 80s.

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It is Getting Tougher to Watch Silo

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While the series continues to give us good actors, kudos to Rebecca Ferguson for her non-glamorous appearance not something all model quality actors are willing to do, and decent production the continuing failures of world building are making it hard for me to suspend my disbelief in the fictional setting.

This week we learn that things that can’t be recycled or repaired are sent to the incinerators. Really? You have a close ecology, effectively a generation spaceship and you are throwing material over the side? Material that can never ever be replaced.

And where is all this plastic coming from? We see constant used of plastics, and we know it’s been more than 140 years because that was when the ‘rebellion’ occurred. I want to see the plastic oxygen mask that remained clear, perfect, and usable for 140 years.

Eggs? Really, eggs? I am not a vegan or a vegetarian, but I do know that consuming animal products is less efficient that eating the vegetable material directly. In a close ecology with very limited space, it makes no sense whatsoever to spend energy, lights, water pump, cultivation, to grow calories that you then feed to something else and consume the reduced calories from the animal. In the Silo everyone would be vegan or vegetarian.

We also had a reference to ‘burial’ in this episode. Just as with anything else the elements in human bodies are elements you can’t get back if you throw them away. In the Silo everything you eat and breathe would have been at one time a person. You can’t escape the fact that in a closed ecology everything gets recycled or the ecology collapses.

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Quick Thoughts on Silo

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Premiering on May 5th, 2023, Silo is a limited series adapted from novels by Hugh Howey
concerning a community of 10,000 people surviving a devastated ecology by living underground in a massive silo.

Rebecca Ferguson plays Juliette an engineer from the structures lower levels suddenly pulled into a conspiracy that entangles the silo’s highest citizens, the sheriff, the mayor, and the judge.

Only three episodes have streamed, and it would be unfair and unjust to judge the series’ quality without having seen the final turns and revelations, but I do have a few thoughts.

First off, the production values are first rate. The environment and the setting feel real. There is a palatable sense that this place, with its undetermined age, has seen countless generations of survivors.

Second, the cast is fantastic. Led by Ferguson, who is also a producer for the show, everyone is real and complicated. The actors and their characters are engaging enough to endear attachment from the viewer helping to audience to flow past some of the less that ideal world building.

The less-than-ideal world building comes down to a few key issues.

For dramatic reasons in the 3rd episode Machines Juliette leads a dangerous but unavoidable repair procedure to correct the colony’s single massive generator before it fails and dooms everyone. The idea that the colony was constructed with a single generator, upon which everyone’s survival depended, without even the ability to shut it down for regular maintenance is absurd and a sin against rational engineering. (Not to mention the lack of a relief valve for the geothermal steam that powers the generator.)

Much is made of the vast distance from the top of the silo to its lowest inhabited level with such trips effectively taking an entire day even for the silo’s political leadership. Apparently, the structure has no elevators, which again is absurd considering the large amount of material that would be required to move between levels to sustain a large population.

A close ecology system such as the silo where no new material comes in from the outside would be very fixated on recycling and not wasting a single gram of material. Yet, the colony maintains a tradition that anyone who proclaims that they ‘want to go out,’ is allowed to go outside of the silo to their certain death taking with them kilos of fabric, plastic, and irreplaceable mass. Madness.

All that said I am still intrigues by the series and have some hope it might stick the landing. With conspiracy stories the revelation of the conspiracy is a major element that either contributes to success of failure and only when we reach that final turn can a valid judgement be rendered.

Silo streams on Apple TV+.

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