Category Archives: SF

Series Review: Light & Magic

Disney+ unveiled a new documentary recently Light & Magic a series exploring the history of the groundbreaking special effects house Industrial Light & Magic (ILM.)

Founded because no studio effects department was capable of meeting Lucas’s vision for his upcoming space opera Star Wars, ILM quickly became the industry’s premier special effects

Disney Studios

company, producing the special and visual effects not only for Lucasfilm’s productions, Star Wars, Indian Jones, but also the company others turned to when they needed outstanding effects for their films.

While it is important to remember that this documentary series is produced by a studio closely tied to ILM and its products and therefore cannot be considered unbiased there is at least some dirty laundry and less that admirable moments shared in the show. The episode steps us through ILM’s life chronologically from its founding as a rag tag group of artists who dared not dream of real cinematic heights to the creation of the defining effects of our time, CGI.

Light & Magic streams on Disney+.

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A Space Opera Advantage

There is no doubt in my in mind that FGU’s role playing game Space Opera has one of the worst edited rulebooks from a major game company. Typos, contradictory rules, vital rules dispersed in various sections, and the lack of any index at all produce a set of rules that without ‘search’ when using the PDFs would make running the game quite challenging.

That said I do adore the game, its bold attempt to sweep in rule for nearly every conceivable SF setting, and its sheer naked ambition.

Recently, in the campaign I have been running since May 2019, I have come to appreciate another advantage to Space Opera, the lack of an experience point system for character abilities.

In Dungeons and Dragons players begin the game as low-level adventurers, dealing limited damage, easily killed, and marginally skilled. With each adventure the Dungeon Master awards Experience Points to the characters that advance their skills and capabilities, no adventure, no experience points, no advancement.

Space Opera using skill learning. Characters devote themselves to study and practice to become better at their skills and advance in capabilities from piloting to the sciences. As long as the character can continue their studies they can continue to advance.

This is an advantage when the real world collides with the role-playing world. Is a player in a D&D game misses one or more adventures, their character fails to gain experience points alongside their compatriots, falling behind in skills and toughness that may be fundamentally unfair. Real world responsibilities should always outweigh play. It is a mark of adulthood.

With Space Opera the missing player’s character, while not investigating the slave clone trade can continue to study and practice the skills they have committed themselves to advancing. When the player returns to the table, they suffer no in game penalty for attending to pressing real world duties. As long as the gamemaster is keeping careful track of the time passed, for which I have spreadsheets that have proven invaluable, and when the player is eligible to advance their skills, the system is fair to all players.

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Movie Review: NOPE

This weekend Jordan Peele, writer/director of get Out, and US, released his third feature film again playing in the fields of horror with Nope.

The film centers on brother and sister Otis Jr (Daniela Kaluuya) and Emerald (Kiki Palmer) as they struggle to save their ranch and film horse training business following the sudden, tragic, and bizarre death of their father Otis Sr (Keith David.) Between encroaching visual effects

Universal Pictures

wizards rendering live horses almost inconsequential and a local western themes amusement park seeking to expand by buying up the failing property the survival of Haywood Hollywood Horses is in grave doubt. It is in this dire situation when a threat descends from the clouds that both threatens the inhabitants of the ranch and simultaneously offer the possibility of financial salvation.

If you saw the previews for Nope you might be tempted to think that Peele was moving into the alien invasion sub-genre of horror and science-fiction and to enter the theater with that fixed as an expectation is to invite disappointment. Nope is closer akin to The Creature from the Black Lagoon, individuals isolated and under threat than the grand global menace of War of the Worlds. Modifying your priors and you are far more likely to enjoy Nope than if you expect the film to be something it is not.

That said Nope doesn’t entirely gel. It has ideas, characters, and settings, the backstory and subplot of Steven Yuen’s Ricky Park, a former child star and now owner and proprietor of the western-themed amusement park, is tragic and horrifying but only symbolically belongs in the same film as the threat hanging over the ranch. It was the sequences where we see the source of his trauma and its repercussions that truly unnerved me and produced the most tension. Uts failure to fully integrate into the main plotline left me unsatisfied.

However, there is a lot to praise Nope. Kaluuya continued to demonstrate that he is a terrifically talented actor able to inhabit with utter authenticity his characters. Palmer is more manic in her performance which is an excellent choice for Emerald and her willingness to push and chase a dream beyond the bounds of reasonableness. The visuals of the film can be spare in a manner that accentuates the isolation and vastness of a distant and secluded California Ranch. Perhaps once of the greats slight of hands in the film’s cinematography is the way Peele, Director of Photography Hoyte Van Hoytema, and VFX artists capture fleeting glimpses of something in the skies that is enough for the audience and the characters to know that something was there but not enough to describe the thing.

Nope was an enjoyable if somewhat scattershot movie with enough character and threat to carry most audiences through the rougher patches but not achieving the heights of his debut film Get Outwhile avoiding the too fantastical ‘rationalist’ explanation of Us.

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What I Hate Most About Trad Publishing

Now, don’t get me wrong. I like traditional publishing, I have no real skills in marketing, layout, or cover design so it is a good thing to have paid professionals preforming those vital functions. My goal is and remains for the traditional publishing route. (And that’s no slight on those who take the hybrid or solely independent paths. In fact, it’s mad respect for managing all those skills.)

I have gotten all manner of rejections going to trad route, form cars, form emails, personalized rejections, and feedback on why didn’t work for the editors reviewing the manuscript. All of these I can take. Strangely I am rarely devastated by a rejection but move on to the next market. So, rejections cold and impersonal or detailed and inviting of further submissions I do not hate.

It is the lengthy time it takes that drives me bananas.

Yesterday was the one-year anniversary for my submission to a major SF publisher of my SF murder mystery novel. Six months since I was contacted by the acquisitions editor that it has been pulled for closer consideration. It’s waiting more than year that I find so hard to endure. (But I do for I have no real other options.)

My previous traditionally published novel, Vulcan’s Forge (A SF novel that evokes film noir) sat on my former agents desk a year unread but gloriously but sold to the first editor I sent it to. Had I not lost that year the novel would not have released the week the world went into lock down at the start of the pandemic.

Like Inigo ‘I hate waiting.’

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It’s Not ‘Mary Sue’ It’s J.J. Abrams

I was recently wandering through some YouTube comments on a reaction video to someone wh0 had just watched for the first time the original trilogy. Naturally there were comments from those who dislike the sequel trilogy complete with ‘woke’ as a pejorative and declarations of ‘Mary Sue.’

Now, I am not going to wade into the Rey debates, people can make up their own minds on the character and frankly heated debates over imaginary characters are dull and boring.

What I think is worthy of observation is the idea that it’s not a ‘Mary Sue’ problem but rather a J.J. Abrams has no concept how the world works problem. Abrams seems to think that skill acquisition and mastery is something that ‘heroes’ do quickly, easily, and magically. It is what happens with Rey in The Force Awakes progressing from utterly obliviousness of the Force to influencing weak minds with ease but it’s not Abrams first display of this sort of ‘easy to be the best’ mentality.

in the 2009 reboot Star Trek James Kirk enters Starfleet Academy as a cadet proclaiming he will be a captain in four years. And then doing so by the end of the movie. Ensign, Lieutenant Junior Grade, Lieutenant, Lieutenant Commander, Commander, these are just words to Abrams and not the ladder of ranks once must climb to reach Captain. All that doesn’t matter because Kirk is the hero and an Abram’s story that cloak of heroism confers all abilities required of the plot regardless of training, work, and history.

Abrams is a competent filmmaker and director, albeit with a habit of copying others’ styles, but he is a terrible crafter of story and character.

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Review: Star Trek: Strange New Worlds, Season 1

When someone says Star Trek because I am an older fart my mind immediately flies to The Original Series with Kirk, Spock, McCoy, and its ropey effects. When Next Generation arrived, I watched and enjoyed the series through about season five and after that I just sort of dropped off. Deep Space 9 I watched the first two seasons, Voyage I managed 3 episodes before switching it off in disgust and Enterprise lost me at the pilot, and with Discovery I managed 8 episodes before ‘space sonar’ drove me away. I had really liked Discovery but the hard drift away from the series history made it difficult to integrate with my existing fandom and eventually the rupture was too much ignore. Still, I had hope for Strange New Worlds despite having dropped out of Discovery before these actors had stepped into the series playing these iconic cannon characters.

Strange New Worlds has justified that hope.

Anson Mount brings his own spin, quite different while still honoring Jeffrey Hunter’s, to the character of Christopher Pike. The same can be said for Rebecca Romijn as Number One and Ethan Peck as Spock. There are echoes and resonances of the original portrayals enough to

Credit: Paramount Pictures

respect the prior actors but fresh enough for current styles and trends. The actor most divergent from the original portrayal is Jess Bush as Nurse Christine Chapel but it is an unfair comparison as Majel Barret-Roddenberry was given very little to do with the character beyond pining for Spock. The cast is large, and I am not going to cover them all, not even the pair of legacy characters with Uhura and M’Benga other than to say the entire cast is a delight and I do not think a single wrong has been miscast.

The ten episodes run of season one has finished airing. (A strange phrase as the series is only available via networked streaming.) The approach the show’s creators have used is not the sprawling tightly interconnected chapters of a ten-hour movie that has become so common with television of late, but rather a more episodic nature with each episode a self-contained story with continuing plot threads woven throughout the season. This comes close to the original series format allowing the show’s writers to have episodes that explore different styles that would likely clash in a more tightly plotted season, such as having comedic episodes, space battle episodes, and stories turning about a single moral question. Not all of these episodes land on target, I found the humor of Spock Amokforced but the beauty of a truly episodic series is that the next episode can turn things around.

Overall, I have thoroughly enjoyed Strange New Worlds, both the legacy characters and the new ones have a sharp chemistry that make watching a pleasurable and engaging experience. I look forward to season 2.

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Disney+’s Obi-Wan Kenobi

The six episodes of Disney+’s latest Star Wars derived series Obi-Wan Kenobi had now released and with the finale watched I can give me impression of the show.

meh

Obi-wan Kenobi lacked the flair and novelty of The Mandalorian but also presented more heart and characterization that The Book of Boba Fett landing squarely between the two shows.

Set ten years after the rise of the galactic empire, the fall of Anakin Skywalker to the dark side of the force, and the slaughter of the Jedis, the series follows Obi-Wan Kenobi, on hiding from Disney StudiosImperial Inquisitors hunting the few remaining surviving Jedi his force-powers atrophied to near non-existence. Kenobi’s seclusion is shattered when as part of a plot to draw him out of hiding ten-year Lea Organa is kidnapped and her adopted parents call upon him to find and rescue her. Leaving the safety of his desert cave Kenobi brings him in the sights of an obsessed young Inquisitor and exposes him to a vengeful Darth Vader.

The problem with Star Wars in its most recent iterations is that development-wise it has grown quite incestuous.

The original film released in 1977 drew inspiration from Japanese Samurai movies, American adventure serials, and Campbell’s theory of the monomyth. (Along with literary SF traditions such as John Carter and it even angered Frank Herbert who felt it had lifted significant elements from his work Dune.) The point is that Star Wars 77 engaged in that rich artistic tradition of being in conversation with the culture and its artistic history.

The new millennium’s Star Wars is only in conversation with itself. It’s references are to other Star Wars stories and properties. With the exception of The Mandalorian which borrows heavily from American Westerns and Samurai films each new film and television series is an act of self-cannibalism as plot and story are derived almost exclusively from the pre-existing cannon.

While Disney’s other property the Marvel Cinematic Universe has been critiqued for an overreliance on 3rd act CGI heavy battles the MCU has shown that superheroes can be used to tell a variety of stories. Political Thrillers (Captain American: the Winter Solider) Dysfunctional Family Comedies (Guardians of the Galaxy) and even Horror (Dr. Strange in The Multiverse of Madness) but Star Wars remains telling the same sort of story over and over with few exceptions. The Mandalorian and Rouge One are the rare examples of the franchise taking risks and going in new direction with new characters with little use of the tired Skywalker drama.

Obi-Wan Kenobi was not bad, but it was tired and gave me very little that was truly emotional engaging, I have hopes, but they are fading, that the franchise will find new territory to explore and leave the Skywalkers to history.

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I’m Back

So, I have been busy these last two weeks looking after my sweetie-wife following her surgery. Everything went very well and today I am returning to my day job. I am also returning to, hopefully, regular updates to this blog and back to my writing.

Here are a few thoughts on recent shows but not full deep dives.

Star Trek: Strange New Worlds

Following the adventures of Captain Christopher Pike, commanding officer of the Enterprisebefore Kirk, this series seems to have found the right balance between honoring the past and original series while striking out for new territory with new characters and fresh takes on old ones. I am particularly enamored with Jess Bush and her take on the underutilized character Nurse Christine Chapel. There are breaks with canon but so far these have created new and compelling storylines that justify the rupture.

Ms. Marvel

The latest MCU series to debut on Disney+ Ms., Marvel follows the life of Kamala Khan a Pakistani-American highschooler and devoted Captain Marvel fan as she navigates life in the MCU, her Muslim family and neighborhood, with varying levels of devoutness, and her sudden and inexplicable acquisition of superpowers. The show’s style is vibrant, energetic, and exploding with energy, much like the life of a teenage while neatly balancing the fantastic with the reality of modern life for a character caught between tradition and the wider American culture.

I have very little actual knowledge of Muslim-American culture, and less that would apply to the specifics of being Pakistani-American teenage girl, but the show feels honest and respectful giving me an insight I have not before possessed. Well worth the watch.

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A Response to Jordan S Carroll’s Article Misunderstanding a Classic 60s SF Novel

 

On May 29th Jacobin.com published the ironically titled article To Understand Elon Musk, You Have to Understand This ’60s Sci-Fi Novel by Jordan S. Carroll in which the good professor misread or misrepresented the novel The Moon is a Harsh Mistress (1966) by Robert A. Heinlein as a guide to understanding Elon Musk.

I come here not to defend Heinlein’s novel, its philosophies, or its meaning but rather in protest the professor’s inaccuracies and omissions that create a strawman for his argument.

Here from the article is Carroll’s description of the novel core conflict.

It’s about a lunar colony that frees itself, via advanced and cleverly applied technology, from the resource-sucking parasitism of Earth and its welfare dependents.

 

The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress depicts a moon colony forced by the centralized Lunar Authority to ship food to Earth where it goes to feed starving people in places like India. The lunar citizens, or Loonies, revolt against the state monopoly and establish a society characterized by free markets and minimal government.

 

Absent from this recounting and the entire article is the quite essential element that in the novel the moon is a penal colony. It is a prison removed from courts, laws, and governance. Exile to the moon is a one-way life sentence and even the guards and the despotic warden are, due to physiological changes wrought by prolonged life in 1/6 gravity, unable to return to Earth. People born on the moon are not technically prisoners but have no rights save whatever is granted by the warden’s generosity and can never live upon the Earth. It is a despotic, authoritarian dictatorship without any form of oversight. By omitting this element of the narrative Carroll is free to portray the people, for they are not citizens anywhere, of the moon as greedy libertarians indifferent to their fellow man.

The novel takes solutionism to the extreme when Mannie enlists the help of a sentient supercomputer named Mike to lead the overthrow of Earth’s colonial government on Luna

 

Here Professor Carroll has reversed the cause and effect of the novel’s progression. Mannie is not a revolutionary who enlisted the secret sentient computer into the revolution but rather it was the curious computer, Mike, that sent the apolitical Mannie into the revolutionary meeting because he had no way to listen in on the meeting. It is only after Mannie is won over by the revolutionaries and reveals to the pair that recruited him that the lunar colony’s central computer is aware that they decide to utilize this unique resource. Mike leads nothing, he is a tool and in many ways a child treating the revolt as a game.

When it comes to the revolution itself Carroll is no more careful in his representation that he was in depicting the conditions on the moon.

Mannie the computer technician, designs their clandestine cell system like a “computer diagram” or “neural network,” mapping out how information will flow between revolutionists. They determine the best way of organizing a cadre not through democratic deliberation or practical experience but through cybernetic principles.

 

Either Professor Carrol is ignorant or has chosen to ignore the history of Clandestine Cell Structure that has been used in resistance and revolutionary movements decades before the novel’s publications. In his haste to prove that everything from the novel that has apparently influenced Musk is tied to modern tech bro culture is has ignored or misrepresented actual history.

And here is another distortion of the novel’s events.

Even when it comes time to establish a constitution for the Luna Free State, the conspirators use clever procedural tricks to do an end run around everyone in the congress who is not a member of their clique. Smart individuals always win out over mass democracy in Heinlein’s fiction — and that’s a good thing.

 

First off, they did not ‘do an end run around’ the congress they established the congress with their command cell member occupying all the key positions. They attempted to create the impression of a representative government while retaining full control and that’s what happened — for a while.

The Lunar Congress, unaware that they were supposed to be rubber stamps and nothing more, formed a new government and with a stroke undid all of the revolutionaries careful plotting. Because this was not a revolution that shot the most capable revolutionaries after the victory, as so many in history has done, an actual representative government replaced the despotic tyranny of the penal colony. Not quite what Professor Carroll told people in his article.

And that brings me to the final and most critical blindness in the article and in people who hail the novel as a tale of a successful libertarian revolution.

In the novel the revolution failed.

Yes, the penal colony was freed, and a representative government replaced a dictatorship, but that government very quickly transitioned away from anything approaching pure libertarianism into a more conventional form. The novel opens with the Mannie bemoaning the coming of new taxes, and then once the flashback to the revolution is over, it ends with him contemplating immigration to some less populated area. The Libertarians lost the government. The moon did not become an outpost of pure unfettered capitalism and unregulated markets. It became Earth. If Musk thinks the novel points to an unregulated future, he has misread it as badly as Carroll.

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Science and Science Fictional Thoughts

Recently, I’ve been thinking about star and star system formation a lot.

The basics, I understand it, runs something like this.

1) A large cloud of gas, the remnants from previous stellar explosions, begins collapsing under its gravitational attraction.

2) Angular momentum spins faster compressing it into an accretion disk. In the disk denser clumps begin gathering and forming the seeds of planets.

3) Most of the cloud is pulled to the center forming a massive body whose center becomes more and more compressed raising the temperature.

4) When the temperature and pressure get high enough the star ignites and blows out the last vestiges of the cloud. Leaving a star and forming planets.

I have questions.

As the cloud compresses into a star but before fusion starts hoe dense does that gas get? Do we get atmospheres of pressure reaching from the core out to the orbital distances of the future planets? Would it be dense enough for aerodynamic forces? Do we potentially have dense enough gas that there is effectively an atmosphere between the soon to be star and it’s forming planets? Could electric charges build up in this massive cloud producing planet-sized or large lightning bolts?

When the fusion starts how fast is that process? Is it thousands or millions of years between ignition and having a star or is much shorter and explosive? What sort of pressure is generating in the remaining cloud as a blast wave that sweeps through the emerging star system?

Welcome to the late-night thoughts of a science fiction writer.

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