Credit to Tom Scott. H/T to Michael O’Connor Clarke.
May 15, 2012
May 5, 2012
Why most SF (and SF-ish) movies suck
In a long post about the death of genre, Charles Stross explains why most science fiction movies are awful:
Well, the process has already begun (indeed, is well under way) in some other media: in film, for example, around 30% of the big budget movies to come out of Hollywood each year are recognizably science fiction. I mean, aliens: that’s a pretty obvious signifier, isn’t it? And Hollywood feels no need to market these movies as SF; they just are, big budget glossy special-effects beanfests featuring aliens. They’re grown-up, quite capable of finding their own audiences. But something is missing upstairs. They’re the sixty-foot-tall armoured cyborg idiot children of our genre. All fire and tantrums and no cerebral context whatsoever. There’s no internal genre dialog going on, and precious little introspection. (Yes, you can name exceptions like “GATACA”; the fact that you have to note the exceptions is itself a warning sign.)
I am not sure it is possible to write introspective, complex SF as a screen medium. The natural length of a feature movie is around 120 minutes; the traditional movie script runs at one page per minute, with 250 words per page — that buys you, in literary terms, a novella. Add in the expectations of studio executives and the dumbing-down effects of editing by committee you end up with huge pressure to make the script commercial rather than complex. Some director/scriptwriters have the clout to get what they want: but then you end up, as often as now, with George Lucas. Nor is there much scope for a dialog in which directors build on someone else’s ideas. So a large chunk of cinematic SF is stuck, spinning its wheels, mistaking ever better special effects and ever bigger first weekend box-office draws for progress.
Comments Off on Why most SF (and SF-ish) movies suck
April 24, 2012
An excerpt from John Scalzi’s latest novel, Redshirts
John Scalzi felt some sympathy for the poor lads and lasses who wear the Redshirt … the ones who only show up for the first few minutes of the show and die gruesomely, leaving the heroes to carry on. His latest novel is a bit of payback for all the members of the “away teams” who never came back.
Click the image to see the first five chapters at the Tor.com website
Comments Off on An excerpt from John Scalzi’s latest novel, Redshirts
March 25, 2012
Time Capsule: Red Mike’s review of Starship Troopers
Robert A. Heinlein’s Starship Troopers is still one of my all-time favourite science fiction books. For that reason alone, I avoided going to see Verhoeven’s film “adaptation”. To more than make up for that, here’s a great review of the film … by that, I mean the review is great, not the film:
We start off with a news report from the surface of the planet Klendathu, the bugs’ home world, where you will instantaneously flash on that Korean-war era song,
“Hear the sound of runnin’ feet
It’s the old First Cav in full retreat
They’re haulin’ ass,
Not savin’ gas,
They’ll soon be gone.”Things are bad and getting worse, as a mob of Mobile Infantry types mill about, getting in each others’ lines of fire, screaming things like “Run for your life!” or words to that effect. It isn’t until later in the film that you discover that milling about is the only formation they practice regularly, and aimless running is their chief tactical mode.
[. . .]
Our heroes head to the surface, where they mill about some more. The concepts of formation, organization, and command and control appear to have been lost. They top a rise and stand in dumb amazement, one thumb in their mouth and one in their ass playing switch, as they see giant bugs expand with gas, then lift tail toward the sky and blast a blue-white fart of anti-spaceship gas up to where the fleet is in orbit.
Our guys stand shoulder to shoulder, firing at the mass of bugs, using a set of tactics that hasn’t worked well since Gettysburg. Actually, the guys at Gettysburg were a bit better better equipped for what they were doing, since they had artillery (a concept that has been lost, apparently) and weapons with an accurate range of over eight feet. Other lost concepts that would have proved Really Helpful here include close air support, mortars, air-dropped mines, barbed wire, fire, maneuver, cover, concealment, objectives, and useful orders. (I mean, “Kill everything that has more than two legs” is really neat, but “Go to coordinates XXYY, and set up a perimeter. Your covered arc runs from AA through CC. You’ll be linking up with Unit Name on your left and Other Unit Name on your right. Hold the position until you’re relieved by Unit Name. At that time go to YYZZ and await further orders” would have actually been helpful.) Nor, for that matter, do we have armored fighting vehicles, heavy machineguns, shoulder-launched missiles, or other stuff (a spray can of Raid?) that might have come in handy.
[. . .]
We go bug hunting again. And after an engagement that proves that a British Square from Waterloo would have done better than the MI at fighting bugs, we win anyway. We have a party! Dizzy and Johnny finally get it on. (I have to comment that I really liked the Special Effects in this film. Especially Dizzy’s left special effect and her right special effect. Carmen has even bigger special effects, but she never whips her shirt off so it’s hard to be sure.)
March 17, 2012
Schiaparelli’s ambiguous word choice and the lasting obsession with Mars
Scott Van Wynsberghe reviews the hold that fictitious Mars has held on the imagination since “canals” were observed:
Mars, the most obsessed-about extraterrestrial body in the universe, has come our way again. On March 9, Hollywood unveiled John Carter, the first film adaptation of a famous series of Martian adventures written by Edgar Rice Burroughs, better known as the creator of the jungle hero Tarzan. Burroughs’s Martian yarns act as a portal to 135 years of cultural history that really is out of this world.
The bizarre story of humanity’s modern entanglement with the Red Planet began in 1877, when Italian astronomer Giovanni Schiaparelli reported the existence of “canali” on the Martian surface. In Italian, that word can mean both “channels,” which are natural formations, and “canals,” which are not. According to science writer John Noble Wilford, that ambiguity was never cleared up.
[. . .]
Caught between science fiction and the supernatural, actual scientists were in trouble. French astronomer Camille Flammarion, for example, alternately wrote about Mars and reincarnation (1889) and Mars and science (1892). In 1900, the inventor Nikola Tesla announced that he had monitored transmissions from either Mars or Venus, but he was jeered (biographer Margaret Cheney thinks he was just detecting natural electromagnetic patterns in space). In 1921, radio pioneer Guglielmo Marconi thought he had received a signal from Mars, but that, too, went nowhere. The biggest offender, however, was American astronomer Percival Lowell.
In 1895, Lowell released the first of a series of books proclaiming that Mars was inhabited. The canali, he said, really were canals, supporting a civilization struggling to survive on a dying globe. Although rightly scorned by other astronomers, Lowell was a superb writer and a frequent lecturer — Robert Goddard, the father of American rocketry, heard him speak — so his message spread. (And, in a way, it is still spreading: Think of that recent, much-debunked conspiracy theory about a giant, sculpted face on the Martian surface.)
Comments Off on Schiaparelli’s ambiguous word choice and the lasting obsession with Mars
March 11, 2012
Conflicting reviews of John Carter
First up, Tim O’Reilly (of O’Reilly Books), who wasn’t impressed with the new movie:
Well, I was disappointed. Here are a few reasons:
1. The character of John Carter was all wrong — brutish and stupid, far from the chivalrous Virginia gentleman of the books. They abandoned the unabashed romanticism of Burroughs in favor of a modern anti-hero whose tortured path to falling in love with Dejah Thoris, a Princess of Mars, was completely unconvincing.
I wonder at this failure to grasp the simplicity of emotion that suffused the golden age of science-fiction. George Lucas nailed it perfectly in the first Star Wars trilogy. Nobility of purpose, idealism, the pure romance of a boy (or girl) who hasn’t yet experienced the complications of the real thing, adventure and the chance to make a big difference against impossible odds: these are the motivations of the genre.
2. Too much spectacle, not enough attention to character and story. And what spectacle there was was undistinguished. There was a certain steampunk grandiosity to the way they did the flying ships of Barsoom that I liked, and there were some stretches of Lake Powell as the River Iss that I found visually compelling.
On the other hand, ESR went in expecting to be disappointed and instead quite enjoyed the movie:
I’ve read all of the Barsoom novels the movie was based on, but they’re not important in the furniture of my imagination in the way that (say) Robert Heinlein’s books are. They’re very primitive pulp fiction which I sought out mainly because of their historical importance as precursors of later and more interesting work. Still, they are not without a certain rude, innocent charm. The heroes are heroic, the villains villainous, the women are beautiful, dying Mars is a backdrop suffused with barbaric splendor, and the prose is muscular and vigorous.
This translation to movie form retains those virtues quite a bit more faithfully than one might have expected. In doing so it reminded me very much of the 2009 Sherlock Holmes movie with Robert Downey Junior (see my review, A no-shit Sherlock). I didn’t get the powerful sense Sherlock Holmes gave me of the lead actors caring passionately about the source material, but the writers of John Carter certainly cared as much. A surprising amount of Burrough’s Barsoomian mythology and language made it into the movie. The barbarian Green Martians are rendered with gratifying unsentimentality, and the sense of Barsoom as an ancient planet with time-deep history and ancient mysteries is well conveyed.
If you’re me, reading the Barsoom novels is also an entertaining exercise in in origin-spotting tropes that would recur in later planetary romances and space operas clear down to the present day. The designers and writers of John Carter are alive to this; there are a number of points at which the movie visually quotes the Star Wars franchise in a funny, underlined way that reminds us that Barsoom was actually the ur-source for many of the cliches that Star Wars mined so successfully.
Comments Off on Conflicting reviews of John Carter
February 21, 2012
UK Catholic sex-ed includes materials plagiarized from John Norman’s Gor series
Really, it’s another of those stories that are “so weird that it’s too good to verify“:
As The Guardian reports today, Catholic faith schools in Lancashire have been handing out copies of a booklet called “Pure Manhood: How to become the man God wants you to be”, written by an American fundamentalist preacher. The booklet includes statements like this: “the homosexual act is disordered, much like contraceptive sex between heterosexuals. Both acts are directed against God’s natural purpose for sex — babies and bonding.” It also insists that, “scientifically speaking, safe sex is a joke”.
[. . .]
Weird ideas about sex, however, are not the only strange things in the booklet. All sorts of aspects of macho-ness are explored, including the need for real men to kill animals to prove their virility. There is a particularly bizarre passage about how to kill a wolf by sacrificing a goat. I won’t go into the gory details. The important point is that, as this blog post reveals, that piece of text was lifted from the book Beasts of Gor by John Norman.
Comments Off on UK Catholic sex-ed includes materials plagiarized from John Norman’s Gor series
February 12, 2012
Interested in early SF pulps?
You can now read the full text, including pictures and ads, of the first six issues of Amazing Stories online:
The Pulp Magazines Project has just posted the first several issues of Amazing Stories. Read the classic pulp magazine edited by Hugo Gernsback in all its scanned-in glory, with stories by H.G. Wells, Jules Verne, Edgar Allan Poe, Murray Leinster and more.
Comments Off on Interested in early SF pulps?
January 13, 2012
Continuators: heroes or villains?
“What’s a continuator?” I pretend to hear you ask. Those are the folks who pick up the fallen pen of other (almost always greater) authors to write endings for unfinished works:
There’s a long list of great authors who have left work unfinished, often because of illness or death. Jane Austen, the Bronte sisters, Albert Camus, Franz Kafka, to name but a few. An industry has grown up around them, of so-called “continuators” — writers eager to finish the stories that they began.
There have been a number of continuations of Austen’s Sanditon, including efforts by Juliette Shapiro and Reginald Hill, author of the Dalziel and Pascoe series. Austen had only got 11 chapters in when she stopped, enough to establish the characters, but leaving the continuators plenty of room for manoeuvre.
But why would a writer choose to finish the work of another author, rather than create original work? Surely that leads to pastiche?
It’s dangerous territory, suggests Prof John Mullan, who is currently writing a book on Austen. “What we expect when we read the work of Austen, or Dickens, or Laurence Sterne, is a particular voice, and that’s terribly difficult to bring off.”
It’s a risky strategy for an author, but perhaps it speaks to a profound need in all of us. The literary critic Frank Kermode wrote in his book Sense of an Ending about our deep-rooted need to be rewarded with conclusions.
John Sutherland, emeritus professor at University College London, agrees. “Kermode famously observed that when we hear a clock go tick tick tick, what we hear is tick tock tick tock, because we like beginnings and endings. We’re hardwired, like lemmings going over a cliff.”
My experiences with continuators has been quite mixed. I’ve never been able to read anything by Spider Robinson since he “finished” a novel from Robert A. Heinlein’s very early period. I hated it so much that it actually diminished my admiration for Heinlein’s entire body of work (I eventually recovered). On the other hand, I quite enjoyed Great King’s War which was a sequel to H. Beam Piper’s Kalvan of Otherwhen. John F. Carr and Roland J. Green did an excellent job of writing in the same voice as Piper and took his characters in believable directions.
Comments Off on Continuators: heroes or villains?
January 12, 2012
New $10m X Prize for a “medical tricorder”
Get your Vulcan ears out for the next X Prize:
The Qualcomm Tricorder X Prize has challenged researchers to build a tool capable of capturing “key health metrics and diagnosing a set of 15 diseases”.
It needs to be light enough for would-be Dr McCoys to carry — a maximum weight of 5lb (2.2kg).
The prize was launched at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas.
[. . .]
The award organisers hope the huge prize may inspire a present-day engineer to figure out the sci-fi gadget’s secret, and “make 23rd Century science fiction a 21st Century medical reality”.
“I’m probably the first guy who’s here in Vegas who would be happy to lose $10m,” said X Prize Foundation chairman Peter Diamandis.
While the tricorder is obviously the stuff of science fiction, other X Prizes have become science fact.
In 2004, the Ansari X Prize for a privately funded reusable spacecraft was awarded to the team behind SpaceShipOne.
Update, 3 February: I’d forgotten about ESR’s post from a while back that — in many ways — we already have tricorders:
But in an entertaining inversion, one device of the future actually works on smartphones now. Because I thought it would be funny, I searched for “tricorder” in the Android market. For those of you who have been living in a hole since 1965, a tricorder is a fictional gadget from the Star Trek universe, an all-purpose sensor package carried by planetary survey parties. I expected a geek joke, a fancy mock-up with mildly impressive visuals and no actual function. I was utterly gobsmacked to discover instead that I had an arguably real tricorder in my hand.
Consider. My Nexus One includes a GPS, an accelerometer, a microphone, and a magnetometer. That is, sensors for location, magnetic field, gravitational fields, and acoustic energy. Hook a bit of visualization and spectral analysis to these sensors, and bugger me with a chainsaw if you don’t have a tricorder. A quad- or quintcorder, actually.
And these sensors are already completely stock on smartphones because sensor electronics is like any other kind; amortized over a large enough production run, their incremental cost approaches epsilon because most of their content is actually design information (cue the shade of Bucky Fuller talking about ephemeralization). Which in turn points at the fundamental reason the smartphone is Eater-of-Gadgets; because, as the tricorder app deftly illustrates, the sum of a computer and a bunch of sensors costing epsilon is so synergistically powerful that it can emulate not just real single-purpose gadgets but gadgets that previously existed only as science fiction!
January 5, 2012
Firefly MMO may rise from the dead
There’s still hope, Browncoat gamers:
While Multiverse, the development platform that was supposed to be the driving force for possible Buffy and Firefly MMOs, suffered a studio shutdown, the source code lives — and has been snatched up by the newly formed Multiverse Foundation. Fortunately for those who were holding out hope for an online version of Joss Whedon’s scifi western, it looks as though this new company wants to pick up where the previous team left off.
Don’t let your hopes soar too high: this is still very far from being a complete product (and the organization’s website is still in deep lorem ipsum marination). It is, however, a sign that there’s still enough life in the fan community for the Joss Whedon properties that it appears viable for someone to take this on.
Comments Off on Firefly MMO may rise from the dead
December 31, 2011
Don’t mess with Firefly (or the right to free speech)
Comments Off on Don’t mess with Firefly (or the right to free speech)
December 26, 2011
The Tough Guide to Fantasy Cities
Charles Stross linked to this guide, suggesting that it is worth reading:
Introduction
If you are not attracted by the promise of an extended trek over rough terrain, with little access to hot showers or decent restaurants, the classic Tour of Fantasyland is probably not for you.That is why the Management now offers separate Fantasy City Tours, available to tour groups as well as single individuals. The cities on offer have been carefully selected: they are relatively modern, if not downright futuristic, and offer seasoned travellers the comforts they have come to expect. You will not encounter any rustic taverns, bards, or bowls of stew on these tours! Instead, expect nightclubs, rock singers, and lots of gourmet coffee.
In the Toughpick section, you will find details on the people, places and things you are likely to encounter in your chosen Fantasy City. Please note that while you will not encounter all of them, you will inevitably encounter some of them before the conclusion of your Tour, and it is best to be prepared.
As always, we have carefully marked certain words as Official Management Terms. You are advised to commit these to memory, as you will certainly encounter them everywhere in your Tour.
[. . .]
Civic Pride
When you visit a Tainted City, you will likely encounter a large variety of refugees, wanderers, outlaws, and criminals. Occasionally, if you are very lucky, you may even meet some honest Workers.Given the nightmarish and unhealthy environment, you may be tempted to ask a few of these people why they choose to stay in a city that is chock-full of Zombies or Mysterious Blight. Do not bother. They will not be able to produce a reason, at least not one that makes sense to you; you may recall the ancient anecdote about the man who cleaned up after the elephants in the circus.
Demons
Demons are often almost indistinguishable from mere humans. This goes especially for male demons, who for some reason greatly outnumber female demons in Undead Cities.Watch out for strange eyes (ebony OMT, fathomless OMT, unearthly blue OMT), a cruel mouth, and a general tendency towards boorish sarcasm. Admittedly nine tenths of the men you are likely to meet in Undead Cities will fit this description, so it does not really narrow things down much.
[. . .]
Goggles
They do nothing. However, they look cool. In a Steam-driven City, you will find these indispensable if you wish to look like a native.
Comments Off on The Tough Guide to Fantasy Cities
November 28, 2011
Charles Stross on worldbuilding for SF stories
This is the sort of thing that more science fiction authors should take into account before they write, but not enough seem to do:
So here are some rules of thumb I use, tending towards an increasingly narrow focus. (Sorry if you were expecting me to address the broader uses of confabulation as a fictional tool; this is very much a set of practical guidelines rather than an examination of the theory behind the activity.)
1. Humans are interested in reading fiction about humans.
Constraint #1 on any work of fiction is that it needs to provide an environment in which recognizable human protagonists can exist. If they’re not human (e.g. “Diaspora”, by Greg Egan; “Saturn’s Children”, by me) you need to provide some sort of continuity with the human and give the reader reasons to feel concerned for them. Or you can go for the “they’re not human, don’t look human, and they have no connection with us”, but what you get is either borderline-unreadable at best, or suffers from human-mind-in-a-giant-land-snail-body syndrome (which risks demolishing the reader’s willing suspension of disbelief).
So I’m going to focus on providing a human environment …
2. In general, High Fantasy steals its dress from pre-modern history; Urban Fantasy buys off-the-shelf in TK-Maxx: and Science Fiction goes for that bold futurist look.
Which is to say, if you’re going to write a trilogy with a young soldier on the rise and a throne and an evil emperor, you can do a lot worse than plunder the decline and fall of the Roman Empire for your social background. Note, however, that you’ll do a lot better if you read some social history texts rather than believing what you see in the movies.
That last bit is especially good advice, as the more you know about cultures other than the one you were raised in, the better you can understand why things are different. Ancient Babylonians were not just Englishmen with funny clothes. Classic Greece, for all that it provided a lot of the underpinnings of our western culture, was functionally very different from life as we know it now.
Comments Off on Charles Stross on worldbuilding for SF stories
October 10, 2011
Cory Doctorow reviews Terry Pratchett’s Snuff
For my taste, any Terry Pratchett book is an automatic “buy”, but in case you are not in that category, Cory Doctorow has a short review of the upcoming release:
Snuff, Terry Pratchett’s latest Discworld novel is an absolute treat, as per usual. It’s a Sam Vimes book (there are many recurring characters in the Discworld series, whose life stories intermingle, braid and diverge — Sam Vimes is an ex-alcoholic police chief who has married into nobility) and that means that it’s going to be a story about class, about law, and about justice, and the fact that Pratchett can make a serious discourse on these subjects both funny and gripping and never trivial is as neat a summary of why we love him as much as we do.
In Snuff, Sam Vimes finds himself dragged off to the countryside for a first-in-his-life holiday, and of course, the holiday only lasts about ten seconds before Vimes is embroiled in local politics, which means local crime. The genteel countryside may be sleepy and backwards, but it is also seething with secrets, with privilege for the gentry, with class resentments, and with racism.
Comments Off on Cory Doctorow reviews Terry Pratchett’s Snuff
