No writing tonight. I’m congested, dizzy and fuzzy-headed. So I will not be writing at all tonight.
here’s an awesome pic though
see more Very Demotivational
Feeling sick
Tag Archives: SF
Quick thoughts on Escape From Hell
Back in 1976 Science-fiction authors Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle published their fantasy novel Inferno, about an SF writer who dies and goes to hell as described by Dante in if classic work, Inferno. I have read this novel two ro three times and it is very enjoyable and quite an interesting take Dante’s vision through a modern perspective.
Two years they published a sequel novel, Escape From Hell, which I purchased a few months back and now that I have time, I have finally read. I do not think this book is as good as the original and in part I think politics marred this novel, which just as easily be titled Liberals In Hell. Jerry Pournelle maintains a blog — he hates that words but that is what the world calls such things — and so as a frequent reader I have a taste for what the author thinks versus what his characters are saying. (Larry Niven does not maintain such on line presence and so his thoughts are more mysterious.)
This book in many ways feels like the authors having fun putting their political rivals in Hell and torturing them. There is a decided lack of conservative figures in hell, while prominent liberal such as President Lyndon Johnson, are named and figure as characters. Now I am not insisting that author must maintain an quota system for such works, that’s silly, but the complete absence of namable conservatives betrays the heavy bias and that undercuts any arguments and persuasive powers the text might have.
This major flaw made the book far less enjoyable than the original, even with that novel’s flaws. (Such as maintaining homosexuality as a sin, something that was seriously modified by the sequel. Apparently hell is subject to retconning.)
Wortha read, but with a large amount of salt nearby.
I have sinned
I must publicly confess my sin and make proper atonement.
For the past two days I have sought out and deliberately watched two episodes of Star Trek: Enterprise. I do not have the excuse that these episodes, a two parter, were written by a friends as I did when I watch episodes of Star Trek: Voyager, and as such this is a sin against taste.
I watched the Season 3 episodes, Through A Mirror, Darkly parts 1 & 2 via the Netflix instant view. This story arc takes place entirely in the producers views of the Mirror Mirror universe first seen in the original series episode of the same name. ( a truly great Episode.) Howevere the producers did not pay attention to that episode and were wildly off the mark on how that universe worked. In Mirror Mirror counter-Spock warns Counter-Sulu that should he, Spock, go missing, his asscoicates would come looking for revenge. Counter-Sulu blanches when counter-Spock that some of his associates are Vulcans. In that one moment we get so much about what has changed. The Vulcan are bad asses, more like Romulans than the pacifists we know. In this Enterprise story the Vulcan are enslaved to the humans, but basicly the same. In fact they are leading a revolt against the empire instead of being a terror within it.
There are numerous other faults in these two episodes. Production design managed to copy known sets from the original series, (The Starship Defiant, lost in the episode The Tholian Web, has appeared in the Mirror Mirror universe, bring the empire tech from about a hundred years down the road.) However they try to create sets that are meant to be aboard Defiant but are not copies of original sets, and the design fails. These new sets do not look like the belong on the same ship. There is also a CGI Gorn in the second part. they smartly kept the effect mainly to the shadows, but it did not look like a Gorn. The body looked pretty good, but the head was entirely different. Also they portrayed the Gorn as quick and nimble, guess the original wasn’t good enough for them.
During the second episode counter-Archer (the lead and Captain in the series) is repeatedly advised and taunted my visions of regular Archer. I kept waiting for the explanation for what this was. It never came. None at all. Nothing that happened in the story impacted on the regular universe and the whole story arc was pointless.
A waste of time. How shall I atone?
Friday Fun
I must admit…I really dig this theme.
In a state of flux
My novel that is, not me. Last night was another meeting of the Mysterious Galaxy Writers’ Group and I read the first half of chapter 3 of Love and Loyalty to the group. I think I can fairly state it was well received with an interesting bit of feedback. There seems to be a consensus that this is really my chapter 1.
I really can’t say that they are wrong either. The precipitating event that drives the entire plot of the novel occurred in the section I read and everyone seemed to pick-up on its importance. I myself knew that the story didn’t really roll until chapter 3, but I had no idea how to fix it. I know I need what’s in Chapters 1 & 2 to set up the characters and some of the troubles that lay ahead for them. Luckily the group had some fine ideas there and I think I see a way forward. It will not mean tearing the novel apart as much as shuffling a few scenes and a bit of minor re-writing. (which I was doing anyway.)
Wowser
So here is a hand drawn pictorial representation of the history of Science-Fiction.
h/t to Andrew Sullivan,
Not the best of days
I awoke with a headache and it has been with me all day long. It’s skimmed the edge of migraine several times, but always stayed on the just painful side of it. I stayed at work the whole day and I will finish my edits on chapter 1 tonight but I will not get much more done.
I did find a movie that I added to my Nextflix instant queue, A genre film from 1965 starring John Saxon, and with Basil Rathbone and Dennis Hopper. Gods, with a cast like that how can I NOT check it out.
a moderately large re-write
So it started with just a line edit to Love and Loyalty. I spotted a few sentences that were a bit on the clumsy side and decided to fix them, leading to the discovery that my sentence construction skills had advanced in the last two years and that the entire book needed a line edit. Fine, I’ve been buckling down and working my chapter by chapter on this line edit.
That lead me to discover that some chapter were incomplete, missing vital scenes I had not bothered to write, nor even think of, when I originally composed them. So I started a file listing the newt scenes to write, along with the plans for an entirely new chapter 2. The job had grown, but just a bit.
Now my list of new scenes is more than 13 scenes long, no counting the entirely new chapter 2, and while washing my hands an epiphany exploded behind my eyeballs. (Truly, it feels better than it sounds.)
Now I am going to have to move chapters around. A fairly critical even in the novel, which happened more by chance than any other agency, will now be the direct result of actions taken by Seth Jackson the protagonist of the plot. The novel is growing deeper with more points of view now required to fully explain the plot. That said, I still think this will about at most 10,000 word in total, but I could wrong. Only time and pages will tell.
Not much of a post tonight
I am suffering from a headache. Nasty enough to put me off my editing and posting tonight.
I was going to post a length essay on 2001: A Space Odyssey , but instead I will leave you with this challenge. IN that famous SF film, before thing start going wrong aboard Discovery, how many scenes can you find that have a dramatic nature and not a purely expository nature?
For a scene to have a dramatic nature it must posses a character, that character must have a goal, and there must be an obstruction to that goal. An Expository scene conveys information about the setting or character or plot that the viewer needs to understand the events of the film. (I would also posit that the expository scenes in 2001: A Space Odyssey do a particularly poor job of exposition.)
Personally I cannot think of any scenes before we are on the Discovery that were not of a purely expository nature. Drama simple did not exist in that film until HAL went nuts.
**shudder**
Sunday Night Movie: Soylent Green
So this week over at Star Trek Re-watch we reviewed the third season episode, The Mark Of Gideon and that put me in the mood for an overpopulation story done correctly. The best overpopulation film is the 1973 classic Soylent Green. Even if you disagree withe presumptions and politics of this film it is still one of the best Sf films out of Hollywood.
As I stated when I made Rollerball my Sunday Night Movie a while back, the 1970’s were a time for thoughtful and intelligent SF movies. Soylent Green is special beyond that because it is part of the Charlton Heston trifecta of SF movies, Planet Of The Apes, Soylent Green, and The Omega Man. These were A-list films not cheap sci-fi tossed off for the teenager drive-in market.
Soylent Green is set in the year 2022 (hey, only 11 years away!) in a New York City with a population of 40 million and 50% unemployment. It is very loosely based upon the 1966 novel by noted SF author Harry Harrison ‘Make Room, Make Room.’
Heston plays Detective Thorn, an overworked and pettily corrupt police office. When a rich and power man is murdered during a thuggish robbery, Thorn draws the case to add to the other three murderers he is chasing down. The world in 2022 is vastly overpopulated with resources nearly exhausted. To discover any information Detective Thorn relies in his ‘book,’ Salomon Roth (Edward G. Robinson.) A live-in friend who has ‘a hand full of twenty year old reference materials.’ When the facts of the murder start to point to assassination and conspiracy Thorn knows he can’t sweep this case under the rug or it might mean his job. Without his job he’d be sleeping on the street, scrounging for survival. Amid political pressure and dwinliing time Thorn has to uncover a secret so terrible not only are some wiling to murder for it, but it makes the victim welcomes his assassin.