bloginhood

Reading (SF) Novels Is Good for Business

2012-01-26T18:48:00.000-08:00

I read an article the other day that made an interesting point that you don't hear very often around most offices: that reading novels is good for business.

Anne Kreamer's "The Business Case for Reading Novels" (published in The Harvard Business Review, but which came to me via the professional news update feed that LinkedIn emails me on a regular basis) talks about research into the practical benefits of reading fiction indicating it helps develop the ability to understand and read emotion, thus improving "social skillfulness" and the ability to collaborate. Openness to new experience is benefitted. The brain's ability to set goals is stimulated. Kreamer noted all of these are key to success in dealing with colleagues and clients, and she also points to research indicating high emotional intelligence leads to raises and promotions, can reduce labour tensions, and increase productivity.

I hadn't run into the research Kreamer cites before (certainly my fault, not that of the studies' authors), but what she's saying certainly matches what I've picked up intuitively by watching other people in workplaces and how various different types of personalities (including readers and non-readers) operate.

And as a science fiction and fantasy fan, I'd take Kreamer's point a step further and make the claim that reading SF in particular is good for business.

Admittedly, I don't have years-long surveys of thousands of people to back my assertion, and admittedly, being an SF fan, I've got a fairly obvious bias, but based on observation of many people in many different types of workplaces over the years, I'd say that it's the case that the science fiction and fantasy readers tend to have a greater mental flexibility than their peers. After all, if you're consistently reading about places and situations ranging from the nearly normal to the completely strange, your brain has to be able to do a certain amount of acrobatics to be able to understand how the plot and characters will be affected - you learn to see things from a different point of view. This is especially true of the ability to understand different mindsets of other individuals. Some authors work very hard, and are successful at, portraying characters that are alien not only in their form, but in their use of language and imagery, and their thinking - maybe somewhat different, yet ultimately comprehensible like Simmons' AI Elder Ummon in Hyperion; kind of decipherable but not entirely, like the cast of Watts' Blindsight; or others that are just completely unfathomable (and here I'm thinking of any super-race that's so massively powerful and distant in its thoughts and agendas, like the Rama builders at the end of Clarke's series of the same name, or the gate builders in Wilson's Blind Lake). To deal with characters like that and not lose meaning so completely that the experience of the plot disintegrates and interest vanishes requires readers to really put forth an effort to understand. Not something that's demanded of readers of mainstream fiction to anywhere near the same degree.

From my professional background in communications, I'd also say the business advantage of reading science fiction and related genres/sub-genres is that there are some damn fine writers out there who can teach you a lot. Bradbury, first and foremost. I've gushed about old Ray on many previous occasions, but really, if you're in communications, hell, if you have to write anything at all, you can really get a lot out of paying attention to the old master's style. Bradbury knows how to write big, chunky, beautifully descriptive prose. But as large as his sentences and descriptions may sometimes get, they're still very much speakable. And that's the key to really good writing, something that broadcasters have figured out (again, my own bias is shining through here), but quite a few print-only journalists and communications pro's without broadcast experience haven't: that the best text is that which is written for the ear, not the eye. Human beings communicated verbally long before we started scratching our words on whatever surface would hold them. And so if you have to write for an audience, the best way to do it is to write as though you were speaking. And Bradbury's copy is just made to read out loud. Find a recording of him online and listen. Or better yet, grab one of his stories and try it yourself. You'll see. If more communications professionals bothered to read Bradbury, there'd be more compelling speeches and profile stories out there. Straczynski's good too sometimes - especially G'Kar's dialogue in seasons 3-5 of B5 (granted, the medium is television rather than a novel, and the point of this piece is the advantage of novel reading, but in general, JMS is a great writer). Science fiction authors also tend to be able to do a good job of making technical jargon easily understandable, or at least palatable enough to set the stage or introduce a plot device without detracting from the story (aside from the offerings of a few hard-SF authors who seem to wallow too much in the tech-talk). A few communications types I've known over the years could learn from that.

So the next time someone tells you to quit wasting your time with that sci-fi book, tell them it's not just entertainment, it's an investment in the success of your business.

Top 10 Moustaches of SF - A Salute to Movember

2011-12-02T18:41:00.000-08:00

Things got a little hairy around the world last month, as men grew moustaches for Movember. The month-long event every November sees thousands of men and their supporters involved in a superheroic effort to create awareness about men's health, specifically prostate cancer, and raise funds to fight the disease.

While I didn't take part directly because I already have a moustache and beard and have no desire to shear and regrow them, I did make sure to donate to the fundraising efforts of friends who were cultivating their facial hair for this great cause. If you don't know anyone who's fundraising, I highly recommend going to your national Movember site and making a donation on your own.

While things officially came to a close Wednesday night - and many moustaches were trimmed off shortly thereafter - I did have at least one friend who was still fundraising yesterday, so I decided to hold-off on this wrap-up salute to Movember until today.

Which leads me to the first list I've done in a while (don't ask me why; sheer laziness, I suspect): The Top 10 Moustaches of SF.

Now, I think I should be clear here about the characters who made the cut in this facial hair forum: only those sporting moustaches. Just moustaches. No beards, goatees, love brushes or any other chin-and-jaw accompaniment.

So without further ado, I present to you:

The Top 10 Moustaches of SF:

10) Tik-Tok - the Oz books by L. Frank Baum

This clockwork man makes the list not only for being one of, if not the first robots in English literature, but for being one that came with a moustache. In your face (plate), R2D2!

9) Father Squid - the Wildcards books edited by George R.R. Martin

The gentle spiritual leader of Jokertown in the Wildcards books, Father Squid never really plays more than a supporting role, and so can't rate higher on this list. He does qualify though, because the result of his joker draw from the Wildcard virus' deck is an unforgettable take on facial hair - a moustache of writhing tentacles.

8) Wash - Firefly "Out of Gas"

Ah, Wash. Great pilot, toy dinosaur aficionado, man with unparalleled taste in shirts. And, at one point, as we see in a flashback in the episode revealing how Serenity's crew came together, a dude who was proudly rockin' a 'stache. Not the best-looking upper-lip caterpillar in the 'Verse, but a good try none-the-less. I sometimes wonder if Wash would have survived the Reaver attack after his stunning landing at Mr. Universe's hideout if he'd still had his moustache. Probably. But, because he didn't, and he died, he doesn't warrant a higher position on this list.

7) Ranger Korman - The Clockwork Century series by Cherie Priest

What can you say? Any hombre who's tough enough to track the mystery of the cause of zombie outbreaks all across the Old West and still take pride in sporting a mighty big moustache is a man worthy of respect. 'Nuff said.

6) Harry Mudd - Star Trek

Memorable not only for being the only non-regular character to appear in more than one episode of the original series (3, if memory serves), but for his well-oiled handlebar moustache, Harry Mudd is one of those characters who's so slimy you just love to hate him. Harry's proof that you should never take your eye off of a conman like him, not only so you can avoid his schemes, but also so you can get grooming tips for your own facial hair.

5) Porco Rosso - Porco Rosso

He may be cursed to look like a pig, but that doesn't stop Marco "Porco Rosso" Pagot from being an ace fighter pilot, badass bare-knuckle brawler, dapper dresser, and the cultivator of a neat little moustache that would be the envy of any silver screen swashbuckling actor of yesteryear. The only downside: if you managed to beat him in a fight and make bacon out of him, you'd be spitting little hairs out of your mouth through the entire meal.

4) Captain Chaos - The Cannonball Run

Is he simply the alternate personality of a delusioned mild-mannered, overweight mechanic, or is he some sort of entity locked in a cape and cowl that takes benevolent possession of its wearer to fight for good? Either way, Captain Chaos is a superhero meant to inspire the people (even if he only tends to annoy most of them). Always jolly and boundlessly optimistic, his girth doesn't prevent him from displaying significant strength, superhuman durability and endurance, and an unnatural ability to coach speeds out of engines beyond what they should be capable of doing. And, best of all, Captain Chaos proudly displays a moustache, like a flag of justice across his lower lip. Go, Chaos!

3) Captain Henry Gloval - Robotech/Macross

A veteran of a world-war, Henry Gloval is thrust to the front lines once again as he's placed in command of a massive alien spacecraft that's crashed on Earth and been salvaged and rebuilt. Gloval then becomes shepherd to not only his crew, but a displaced city full of people as he tries to get the ship home in a running battle across the solar system, pursued by the fleets of the Zentraedi. Gloval manages to strike an alliance with some of the warlike aliens, then battle through to victory against overwhelming enemy forces. His last act: to save his second-in-command by thrusting her into an escape pod as their ship comes crashing down around them. Is there any doubt this hero of Space War I could have done all of this without the aid of his moustache?

2) Admiral William Adama - Battlestar Galactica

Admittedly, old Bill Adama only grows his moustache when he's in a down-and-out phase, or during periods where he's waiting between times of greatness. But I think there's a reason for that: growing his moustache allows the Colonial warrior to recharge his vital energies. Shaving it is the trigger that sets him in motion, and once he gets moving, there's no Cylon who's ass he can't kick. The Adamastache is frakking awesome. So say we all!

1) Lando Calrissian - the Star Wars movies

Long ago, he was the suavest under-the-radar-city administrator and freighter pilot in a galaxy far, far away. And he joined the Rebellion and blew up the Death Star 2. Blew. Up. A. Death Star. While wearing a moustache. It just doesn't get any cooler than that.

Remembering A Dragon Queen - RIP Anne McCaffrey

2011-11-23T18:17:00.000-08:00

The SF world has lost one of its giants - or, rather, a Dragon Queen. News has come that author Anne McCaffrey has died after suffering a stroke.

McCaffrey, who was a Hugo and Nebula award winner (the first woman to take both prizes) and was named a science fiction grand master in 2005, was a prolific author. Probably the most famous of her works were her Dragonriders of Pern books.

I remember picking up Dragonflight as a teen and just loving it. After all, for a science fiction and fantasy geek, it's got pretty much everything: huge, fire-breathing dragons, an alien world with a lost human colony that's reverted (more or less) to a medieval culture, a menace from space, teleportation, time travel, and a story that jogged along at a good pace while letting you get to know the characters.

But the series is also fixed in my mind as an example of how, over time, a once-beloved story can turn into something I don't really want to make time for anymore. Maybe it was because I O-D'd on McCaffrey stuff. After racing through the original trilogy, I went out and bought every Pern book I could get my hands on and wolfed them down. Too much of a good thing, and certainly too much of a series that was inconsistently written.

But there's something else at work here. As the years went by and I matured, I started thinking about what I'd read in different ways, and I became more dissatisfied with what I was seeing in the Pern novels. It started to dawn on me that the relationship between the dragonriders and their mounts - a telepathic bond that makes them closer than they ever could be to another person, was kind of childish. It was like a young girl's - or younger teenaged girl's - fantasy of being able to talk with her dog or horse and running off and having adventures together, except substitute a 40-foot dragon for the dog or horse. Yeah, yeah, I know it's supposed to be an example of a new type of relationship that's unique to the situation created by a telepathic bond between two entities that care for each other and are basically around each other all the time, working and living together, one that's perhaps symbiotic. And yet there's something unsettling about a relationship between a human and a non-human taking precedence over the bond between two humans who are mated and apparently love each other. Beyond unsettling, it is somewhat immature, like a little girl saying "Boys are okay sometimes, but the most important person in the world to me is my pony!" That sense was always there, kind of lurking in the background, in Dragonflight and its two sequels, but it was later prequel, Moretta's Ride, that really made the point crystal clear for me. At the end, Moretta's dragon goes winging off with some other rider and they get themselves killed. Moretta and the other rider's dragon, in a fit of grief, ignore whatever loved ones and responsibilities are still around them and take flight and teleport into nothingness/death. Really? Not quite an adult approach to life. In the 20 or so years since I came to that realization about the worldview of the dragonriders, I've probably re-read the books twice. Both times were equally unsatisfying. I'm not saying I'll never read them again (the trilogy still has a place of honour on my bookshelf), but the symbolism has certainly soured me on the story.

But back to the author...

I remember seeing McCaffrey at ConAdian, the 52nd World Science Fiction Convention, in Winnipeg, back in '94. Didn't get a chance to speak with her, but I came away with a mixed impression of her from some of the con events she was at. On the one hand, I was disappointed after seeing her on a panel discussing psychic powers. Granted, I was disappointed with the session from start to finish - I'd gone in thinking it would be a discussion about the use of paranormal abilities in stories and some of the best and worst examples of such. Nope. What followed was about an hour of panelists - including McCaffrey - and members of the audience merrily babbling about their own psychic abilities and experiences in a ridiculous wannabe cheese-fest. On the other hand though, I remember her being thoroughly charming and funny when she was presenting at the con's Hugo Awards ceremony. Standing there holding that year's version of the award, the usual metal rocket mounted this time on a large, laser-carved wooden maple leaf on top of some kind of base, McCaffrey had all of us in the audience in stitches as she reminisced about many years before when she'd won her first Hugo and felt somewhat odd as a woman standing in front of a crowd holding a statue that was basically a phallic symbol. She went on to say she approved of the '94 version of the award because it had provided a large leaf for modesty.

I may be of two minds about some of her writing, but my hat is off to Anne McCaffrey for a long and inventive career and for being a trail-blazer for women in SF.

Anne McCaffrey was 85.

Turning My Back on the Past - Well, TV Shows Set in the Ancient Past, Anyway

2011-11-03T22:21:00.000-07:00

As the fall TV season continues to lurch into gear in fits and starts (Seriously, pilots and premiers firing at occasional intervals over 2 months? Really?), I've decided to waste no time this year in cutting the fat. Normally I'd give new shows the better part of a season before putting them on probation or cutting them off outright, but this year's different. This year I'm terminating the boring and the unintentionally stupid from my viewing schedule with extreme prejudice. And that means starting by making a couple of shows rooted in the past into nothing but soon-to-be-forgotten memories.

First on the chopping block is Camelot. I'd heard some good buzz about this show before it started airing on the CBC and was cautiously optimistic. Sadly, like the dream of Camelot itself, that optimism came crashing down in ruins. The show is boring.

That's not to say that I expected a non-stop carnival of gory, dark ages battle scenes, but the plot is pretty glacial. Sure, there are occasional fights, but they're quick and half-hearted. The sex scenes seem forced, as though the writers and producers are trying to prove something ("See: we've got an Arthurian show for adults! We can show people having sex! Ha-ha! Look at how gritty and raw our show is!") Don't get me wrong, I'm not opposed to sex scenes, not remotely, but it almost feels like the producers of Camelot are putting them in just to show that they can try to keep up with series on HBO, when really, that shouldn't be the point. What passes for court intrigue is flat. And the show is humourless - these people are unredeemably dull. I don't care how bad things were in the dark ages, people must have had a laugh over something every now and again. But not on Camelot.

Then there are the characters who bug me, chief among them: Arthur, wannabe king of the Britons. Not only is he written as whining and unbelievably feeble, actor Jamie Campbell Bower seems to think the best way to play the young king is to shuffle around bug-eyed and slack-jawed all the time. Seriously, how many scenes are there where this guy doesn't look as though he's quietly saying to himself: "Whoa! I have no idea what's going on. I'm totally in over my head, man!" His affair with Guinevere feels more like a couple of highschoolers cheating on their respective squeezes and paying half-hearted lip service to the notion that maybe this was something they were told they shouldn't be doing, rather than a more mature portrayal of two people struggling with real, deep emotions and conflicting loyalties that could have severe consequences. Eva Green is a disappointment as Morgan as well. I enjoyed her in Kingdom of Heaven, but in Camelot she seems convinced that simply squinting a lot and pouting her lips will convey a sense of dangerous ambition and the simmering potential for violence. Again, she seems more like a spoiled teen having a tantrum than a serious rival for power. And Claire Forlani as Igraine is just bony and weird and unbelievable in the role of a woman who kings and dukes would tear apart a country over - never mind the fact that anytime I see her I immediately flash back to her looking pipecleaner-emaciated doing the Julie Dwyer-has-drowned scene from Mallrats. Of all the cast and characters, Joseph Fiennes playing a somewhat unnerving Merlin of great but restrained power who's making the myth up as he goes along is watchable. But one good character can't carry the dead weight of this show, and besides, he reminds me too much of Christopher Lambert. I'm always half-expecting him to mumble in a ridiculous French-attempt-at-a-Scottish accent: "There can be only one!"

If you feel the need to watch a show about King Arthur's court, better to turn your attentions to Merlin, which, though deliberately targeted at a younger audience and not remotely concerned with historical accuracy, has characters (likable and revilable) who are worth watching and an overall plot that doesn't take itself too seriously.

Next to be cut is Terra Nova. I was more cautious going in with this one, recognizing right away from the early buzz that it was basically rehashing his old Earth 2 series with a Jurassic Park makeover and more than a little influence from JJ Abrams' Lost. I remember watching Earth 2 as a curiosity but having no real loyalty to it (Although Clancy Brown - oooh! a second Highlander reference! - did a capable job in a non-badguy role). The first Jurassic Park was fun and cool to look at but should have been left as a one-off. And regardless of all the hype that Lost got and all the attempts of friends to convert me into a fan, I just didn't give a shit. Combining the three together does not result in the formula to make me a fan. The premise of sending colonists millions of years back in time to the final age of the dinosaurs is just dumb. I don't know enough about the environmental conditions to say whether humans would actually be able to survive there (comparative atmosphere composition, anyone?), but as a science panel at the recent VCon mentioned, there certainly might be big problems with disease: either in the form of extinct diseases that modern humans would have had no contact with and thus possibly no resistance to, or human-born illnesses wreaking havoc on ancient flora and fauna a-la Homer Simpson's time toaster. Let's not even get into why it doesn't make any sense to send people to colonize and reproduce in a time where a big-ass asteroid is going to come hurtling out of space and cause some serious real estate issues for either the colonists, their kids, or their grandkids, or... well, you get it, sooner or later the whole damn enterprise will prove to be a wasted investment. Sure there are plenty of science fiction shows with settings of questionable livability, but this one is so dumb it's distracting.

Then there are the characters: Hollywood cookie-cutter stock one and all and, as such, pretty uninteresting. Because it's hard to care about the characters, their little factions and intrigues and secrets and mysteries are equally forced and boring.

The only positive note to the show, aside from the special effects, which don't garner too many kudos because, hey, it's a big-budget Spielberg event and so we expect quality monsters and sets, was the line of dialogue from the pilot paying tribute to James Cameron's Aliens:

Girl: "They mostly hunt at night."

Boy: "Mostly."

Not enough to save this turkey. Bring in the asteroid/comet/cosmic spitball early, bring this thing to an end and free-up the air for something more entertaining.

Meanwhile, there's still plenty to watch that's worthwhile in genre TV. The Big Bang Theory is jogging along nicely, Chuck and Todd & the Book of Pure Evil have started again, Canada's finally seeing the 2010 season of Futurama, Southpark is up to its usual profane hilarity, and Grimm (I say this very cautiously) looks like it might have some potential. And even if these start to wear thin, that's okay, the overflowing inbox on my bookshelf is always calling.

Big Trouble In Little China for All Seasons

2011-10-03T18:20:00.000-07:00

It's a truly good day indeed when I have the chance to whip out some dialogue from Big Trouble In Little China. And that day was yesterday.

My wife and I were attending a friend's wedding (yes, the Cylon banner wedding mentioned a couple of posts ago) in Little China, er, here in Richmond. Among all of the giveaway items and nick-nacks and plates and centrepieces, etc scattered around our table at the reception were Jenga blocks. The newlyweds had left Jenga blocks for all of the guests, not to keep as souvenirs, but rather for the guests to write words of wisdom on and leave for the happy couple to read during Jenga games in the future.

Let's not even get into how many Jenga sets they'll probably have, given the number of blocks they needed for all the guests, or the rather tricky metaphors that might present themselves when the concept of a marriage is tied up with a block game that's designed to have only one winner and to fall apart more often than not.

I don't remember exactly what my wife wrote on her block... something on each side, I think, with advice for him to make her happy and advice for her not to make a doormat out of him.

But sitting there thinking about what words of wisdom I might have for the couple that were short enough to be scribbled onto a block, it didn't take long before I decided to draw from the ultimate well of inspiration. My choice:

"You were not put on this Earth to 'get it'." (paraphrasing Lo-Pan's line: "You were not brought upon this Earth to 'get it', Mr Burton." to fit into the limited space)

Words to live by in any situation, but applicable in the context of marriage in that, as all of you who are also married know, sometimes the motivations of one's spouse can be clear as mud, but you just have to go with it, 'cause that's the way it is. Also vaguely appropriate because Lo Pan uttered them himself on the day he intended to be married.

Now if you'll excuse me, I've got to go and eat a left-over wedding bun.

Vancouver Sun Photos from VCon 36

2011-10-03T18:00:00.000-07:00

The Vancouver Sun's website has a short article, some photos and a short video clip from this past weekend's VCon 36. Nice to see the con got some media attention, though, speaking as a communications professional, it would have been better if they'd been able to put out a stronger hook that would have attracted the local TV stations, or if they'd pitched the right angle to garner some coverage ahead of time, which would probably have increased attendance.

Incidentally, I sat near the girl in the manga cat outfit in one session the other day, and she looks that good in person and has clearly put a lot of hard work into making a costume that's fairly close to the original. That being said, my friend Nicole Yamanaka, a cosplay veteran, made a version of the same costume that was a lot more detailed and accurate, though fairly revealing and probably not something that would be comfortable on a cold October weekend. No, I'm not going to attach a pic.

And They Have A Wedding Plan

2011-10-03T02:34:00.001-07:00

Got a bit of an unexpected sci-fi surprise this afternoon when I went to a friend's wedding: a Cylon. Or, at least, a Cylon on a street banner in one of the wedding pictures.

After the ceremony a bunch of us were walking through the venue's foyer to the reception hall, and along the way we had to pass one of the wedding pictures (shot way ahead of time last winter, I believe) blown up, printed out to look like a painting, and mounted for everyone to look at as they went by. At first we murmured the usual "oh, that's nice" comments, and wondered which building and street were featured, etc. But on closer inspection, one of my friends said "Hey, there's a Cylon on that sign!" We couldn't believe it at first, but leaning in and peering at it for a second, we realized he was right.

Problem is that neither the bride nor groom are big SF fans, and there's no indication that they followed Battlestar Galactica when it was on. So what's a Cylon banner doing in one of their wedding pictures, and one that they liked enough to pay to have painting-ized to show off for generations to come? And what would a Cylon banner be doing up in Metro Vancouver (where the bride lives and the wedding was held), especially when it's been a couple of years since the series came to a close?

Well, to make a long story short, last winter when they'd arranged to bring in some hotshot celebrity photographer from Hong Kong he'd been denied entry to Canada and sent back to Seattle where his connecting flight had originated. Not wanting to lose him, they'd changed plans, packed up all the wedding garb and driven south of the 49th to do the shoot in the Emerald City. They went to a lot of locations downtown and around the market, so we figure this street must be in the vicinity of the Science Fiction Hall of Fame. Can't be entirely sure since I haven't made a pilgrimage there myself yet, but there wouldn't be any reason for the city to have a Cylon banner displayed anywhere else. Our bet is that they didn't even pay attention to what was on the banner when they took the shot - it was probably done for artsy-fartsy reasons like lighting and the shape of the building, etc. Our young newlyweds probably picked the photo for similar reasons, not even realizing they were inadvertently flying a pretty obvious freak flag.

No point in explaining it to them, since not being fans and not following Western culture much, they wouldn't really get it.

Still, as a science fiction fan - and a BSG fan in particular - I'm fairly pleased at this accidental geek-0ut. You just never know when SF will quietly insinuate itself into the every day activities of the mainstream.

VCon 36 - Day 3

2011-10-03T01:30:00.000-07:00

The end.

Okay, it was a short day for me at VCon today, but it wasn't that short!

I starting things off far too early in the morning (considering how late I was up last night reporting on the con and ranting about 'Yamato), stumbling in at 10 for the "World Building 101" panel, which featured a line-up of scientists from various disciplines talking about what science fiction writers need to consider (genetics, ecology, astronomical processes) in order to get their alien worlds right - or, at least believable enough from a scientific perspective not to sound dumb. They also discussed how the latest strange scientific discoveries and theories can also open up new creative frontiers for writers. One of the best lines of the morning - hell, one of the best lines I heard throughout the entire con - was from astronomer Dr. Jaymie Matthews (a venerable fixture at VCons, and also co-star of a Goodyear Tire commercial a couple of years ago) while he related a story about how James Cameron has been consulting with scientists about his Avatar sequel. According to Matthews, Cameron's thinking about combining his love of oceans with SF by setting the next movie on one of Pandora's neighbouring moons that's a giant water world. Matthews says that since astronomers have been able to tell Cameron that yes, aquatic super-Earths are possible, they have "given [Cameron] his wet dream."

After that I ducked out for a quick lunch, and when I came back I took in the last few minutes of the "Are Games Art?" session. Video game producer & designer Palle Hoffstein led the audience in a discussion about Roger Ebert's statement that video games are not art and never will be. From what I caught of the session, the audience consensus (not surprisingly) was that Ebert is wrong. Hoffstein noted that historically there's always a period of adjustment when new media are invented, with critics having been slow initially to accept photography, film and comics as art, and that video games are probably now waiting for their breakthrough moment to be accepted just as the other forms of media have. He also pointed out that one of the factors that's allowing this delay of acceptance to continue is a lack of evolution of written critiques of games beyond their value-for-money or quality of graphics and action - games are not yet being discussed for their artistic merit. Not being a gamer myself (or, at least, sitting down to video games only occasionally), I can't comment on the issue, but it was certainly fascinating to listen in.

From there, sadly, it became a chore to find something worthwhile to attend in the short time left before I had to leave the con. I'd really wanted to attend the "Podcasting" session to pick up some technical tips because I'm toying with the idea of occasionally melding my radio roots with the blog here with an occasional feature interview. More to come as - or if - it happens. Unfortunately, I hadn't bothered to look at the scheduling changes board earlier, and so hadn't seen that the podcasting session had been shifted to Saturday once the con got underway, and I'd unwittingly missed out.

As a backup, I'd wanted to go to the "How did that get on my book cover?" session featuring authors, artists and publishers talking about how cover art is chosen, but that too had been moved. Instead, that conference room had a panel talking about the benefits of exercise. Now, I've got a bunch of friends who are personal trainers, and despite my portly frame I do try to get a walk or workout in a semi-regular basis, so the last thing I need to listen to at the con is someone preaching about fitness. Rather than having a panel discussion sitting in a room talking about fitness, I think if the intent is to get nerds moving then the VCon organizers could have chosen a more creative and effective option: they could have taken the lead from the Montreal Worldcon in 2009, which, as part of programming, organized 1-hour walks each morning where fans could go out for a walk around the town with various authors in attendance, thereby combining exercise with the opportunity to chat with a favourite writer and see a little more of the host community beyond the confines of the convention centre/hotel/satellite ring of restaurants.

Bailing out on that panel fairly quickly, I wandered into the "Turkey Readings" for a little while. The Turkey Readings are a VCon tradition, where a panel of authors reads passages from a selection of painfully bad science fiction and fantasy novels (seriously, these rags are frequently the "literary" equivalent of Plan Nine from Outer Space or Robot Monster). Meanwhile, volunteers from the audience come up to the front to act out what's being read. The rest of the audience can then bid money to make the whole thing stop, or counter-bid to continue, with a fair amount of back-and-forth happening before someone finally bids enough to force an end. And then they start again with another selection from the trash pile. Money raised goes to the Canadian Unity Fan Fund which sends fans from one part of the country to attend cons in other provinces in an effort to bring us closer together.

But there's only so much of the Turkey Readings that I can tolerate before I feel my tenuous grip on sanity slipping away, so I fled that room after a while and spent a few minutes quietly reading from the new Tesseracts anthology in the hall.

The last session I attended was "Writing about Fighting", which is pretty self-explanatory. Didn't get to stay for the whole thing though because I had to get home to get changed and go to a friend's wedding later in the afternoon. The early departure meant I had to miss the infamous Elron Awards and the Closing Ceremonies, but I've been to enough of those over the years that, while they're entertaining, my con experience certainly won't be ruined by taking a miss.

So how was my VCon 36 experience? For the most part, pretty good. The programming selection may not always be full of "can't miss" sessions, but there's usually a panel worth attending, the movie room (with its constant bombardment of chocolate from Uncle Victor) is good to spend a couple of hours in, there are always great costumes to look at, and interesting and unexpected conversations with fellow fans. At the end of the day, I have to say the reason why I keep coming back year after year is that feeling I get when I walk in the door on the first day, look around at the other fans and the displays, and head for the registration desk: that feeling of coming home.

Thanks, VCon.

VCon 36 - Day 2

2011-10-02T01:35:00.000-07:00

Today I probably spent more time in Uncle Victor's movie room than going to panel discussions, but that's okay. You can't complain about a day at VCon when you come home with free toys and food.

The day's con-going started for me around noon; I arrived at the hotel and found the Ghostbusters of Alberta had parked their Ecto-1EH right across from the front entrance, so, as promised I grabbed a couple of snapshots. Typical cellphone cam, most of them aren't great, but this one is good enough to show the love the group's put into this old wagon.

Anyhow, the first session of the day for me was "Computer Science in Science Fiction - Ahead of or Behind Our Time?" I'd missed about half of it, but it was still pretty interesting, with speaker Tamara Munzner weighing some of the advances of the last couple of decades against areas that have lagged somewhat. Examples included the rapid increases seen in processing power over the years while video display capabilities haven't evolved anywhere near as quickly.

After that it was over to the "Author GOH Interview" to listen to VCon elder statesman Michael Walsh do a Q&A with Larry Niven. Pretty entertaining for the most part, with the old author sharing funny musings about his "Man of Steel, Woman of Kleenex" essay (if you enjoyed the conversation in Kevin Smith's Mallrats about the perils of Lois Lane's relationship with Superman, here's - directly or indirectly - the source material), or dropping lines like "Remember, I'm allowed to make up my facts." when talking about how rigorous to be with science in hard science fiction. It was also interesting to hear him talk about his membership in Sigma, a think tank of SF writers supplying advice to the US government and some NGO's. What I could have done without was the extended foray into his Libertarian views, but I blame Walsh for leading him down the path to spout that nonsense.

When that was over I headed over to the "Food in Science Fiction" panel (which, incidentally, Niven participated in) which talked about the role of food in SF and culture (human and alien), the impact of different biologies on the types of food consumed, various foods that have appeared in SF, etc. While they did touch on the issue of foods being unique to their home planets because alien species, having different biologies, wouldn't be able to digest or derive all their required nutrition from them (never mind if those food weren't downright poisonous to them), what they didn't discuss were the rare, but highly amusing instances of universal foods that pop up from time to time: Gin & Tonics (courtesy of Douglas Adams' The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy) and Swedish Meatballs (Babylon 5). Good food for thought, anyway.

I took a bit of a break after that, wandering through the Art Room and Dealers' Room again, and stopping to chat with a rep from the group putting in a bid to host Worldcon 2015 in Spokane, Washington. Apparently their competition at this point is Orlando, with a group there wanting to host the event in a section of the Disneyworld complex. Tough choice. Spokane's certainly a lot closer and it's nowhere near as hot, but if the con was in The Mouse's lair I wouldn't have to worry about how to convince my wife to okay the trip - she'd be booking the tickets so fast my head would spin, just so she could indulge in her love of Disney while I was getting my geek on. I have to confess I wouldn't mind going to Disneyworld for the con either, as it's been nearly 30 years since I was there last. Ah well, I don't follow the travelling Worldcon roadshow closely enough to keep an eye out for location voting opportunities or rules anyway. When I hear which way the vote goes, I'll make my decision whether to attend or not.

Then it was up to Uncle Victor's movie room to catch the screening of the 2010 live action version of Space Battleship Yamato (warning: heavy spoilage to ensue). My favourite TV show when I was a little kid was Starblazers (the North American name for the original animated SBY series), so I was itching to see this flick since the rumours and trailers started surfacing a couple of years ago. For the most part it was a lot of fun. The battleship itself has been brought to life in glorious photo-real CG, the battle scenes are fast-paced, and the robot (well, hand-held AI for most of the movie, but he gets a full body at the end with a head that's a nice nod to the old series), Analyzer in this version, though known as IQ-9 in Starblazers, gets a badass upgrade. And I didn't mind that the writers merged Iscandar and Gamilas/Gamilon into one planet, with their respective leaders made into seemingly individual faces representing the hive minds of their species, like non-corporeal versions of the Borg queen. Sure, some of the dialogue is corny from time to time, there are plot points that don't make sense (like Yamato not bothering to use its fighter squadron for defense while waiting for Kodai/Wildstar to rescue Yuki from her damaged Black Tiger), Captain Okita seems to have no facial expression whatsoever (seriously, the puppets in Disney's "It's a Small World" ride have more animation), the actor who plays Kodai looks like a younger version of the original Iron Chef's Chairman Kaga, and the embodiment of the Gamilas consciousness (at least in its subterranean lair) looked a lot like the MCP tower in Tron minus the face, but for the most part it was worth watching.

I say "for the most part" because of two major flaws. The first - and worst - was an immensely disturbing moment in Kodai's rousing speech before the attack on Iscandar/Gamilas where he refers to the original sea-going Yamato as a symbol of "hope" when it was launched in 1942. Hope? Really? I know, I know; this is a Japanese-made film made, primarily, for a Japanese audience. But don't tell me that the writers, producers and directors of this movie aren't aware that in the nearly 40 years since the animated series was created, the franchise has developed a major international audience (hell, they're probably well aware of it as a source for bonus revenue with overseas distribution or sales) that might catch this stinky little piece of dialogue and see it for what it is. And that's a shocking lack of awareness of and/or repentance for Japan's actions during World War II. Let's be very clear: Yamato was a dreadnought manufactured by a vicious regime hell-bent on taking over Asia to strip other nations of their resources and enslave and massacre the people of those nations. Yamato was one of the instruments they used to try to enforce that theft, enslavement, torture and despicable experimentation, and murder. Hope? Why not ask Chinese or Koreans or Filipinos or Allied servicemen or anyone else who got in Japan's gunsights during the war whether that's an appropriate word to use? Old warships are cool to look at, but let's not sugarcoat the very real horror that this thing represented. If the writers had put in something about redeeming the ship's past, that would have showed maturity and a full understanding of history. But they didn't. No, they quaff deeply of their koolaid of glory and airbrush the shit out of the past.

Second, and less offensive, was the unforgivably tedious arming of the ultimate weapon and sad farewell to the hero. When the Gamilas warship moves into orbit it takes forever to arm its final, huge, ultimate planet bomb - so long that it never gets around to firing. Remember how Star Trek: Nemesis dragged-out the Scimitar's reconfiguration and the arming of its mega deathbeam? That's got nothing on the pokiness of the Gamilas. Seriously, if the Yamato hadn't been there to make a pest of itself, the people of Earth would still have had enough time for a complete evacuation, terraforming another world, recolonization, and turkey dinner before that damn missile was ready to fire. As part of this act in the flick, the audience is forced to endure the endless, melodramatic goodbye between Kodai and Yuki. Really, the fight should have been over by the time she was hauled off the bridge. If it hadn't taken the Gamilas so long to prep their big missile, the movie really would have been over while those two were still clinging and gasping over one-another (really, the actress who played Yuki did not seem capable of actually crying in any of her crying scenes in the film, and appears to have settled on hyperventilation as an acceptable alternative) or the crew were still having another sad, last-minute bye-bye wave to Kodai. That farewell took so long - how long did it take?! - that farewell took so long that by the time it was over, the Earth could have naturally recovered on its own with rats having evolved into the next dominant form of life with their own technological civilization capable of taking on the fight with the Gamilas - like The Secret of NIMH, except with spaceships and not as creepy. That being said, despite its shortcomings, SBY is mostly worth watching. Mostly.

I then stepped out for a while for supper, coming back to take in the last few minutes of the "Justify the Science Flaw" panel, which was coming up with some pretty funny scientifically plausible explanations for everything from how ravenous zombies would be able to wait without food until the next batch of unwary living people blundered by, or how Spiderman would be able to climb walls using real spider attributes despite his human size.

Then it was back up to the movie room for a screening of Ghostbusters, with commentary and trivia by members of the Alberta and BC chapters of the Ghostbusters fan group. Prior to the film actually getting under way, movie room host Uncle Victor, in addition to handing out lots of chocolate to all in attendance, also gave out some prizes. One prize, in honour of Mr Staypuft, was a marshmallow gun and a bag of large marshmallows (perfect for campfires, but sadly incompatible with the gun, which only takes mini marshmallows). It was initially given to a woman in the audience, but she wasn't interested and ended up giving it to me, which was great because my wife and I will make use of the marshmallows for baking and the launcher will be a nice addition to whatever we get our nephew for Christmas. Anyhow, once the swag was dispensed, the fanboys treated the audience to a bunch of clips from classic Ghostbusters-like features (including one of my favourites: a very old Disney Hallowe'en short about Mickey, Donald and Goofy and their "Ajax Ghost Exterminator" company misadventures in a haunted house), TV shows from the 80's trying to capitalize on Ghostbusters' success, and, of course, Ray Parker Junior's music video. Eventually, the movie itself got underway. The commentary from the fan group members skirted between being the right amount of cool factoids and trivia overkill. Everyone laughed when they talked about researching acceptable dosages of Thorazine and how Venkman's administration of 300 cc's of the stuff to Dana/Zul was probably enough to kill an elephant, never mind the unsettling question of what he was doing bringing a syringe with that much of the drug with him on what he had initially assumed would be a date. But there were also moments, especially near the end, when the panel got gabbing about too much unimportant minutia and it was kind of annoying when this drowned-out some of the movie's really good dialogue. Ah well. It was a good evening and if I want to watch the movie without interruptions, I can pop it in the DVD player sometime (which I'll probably do this month anyway).

And that was it for today.

Must hit the sack now, as I want to take in a couple of sessions tomorrow morning and morning will be coming waaaaaaaay too early.

VCon 36 - Day 1 - supplemental

2011-10-01T03:37:00.001-07:00

Forgot to mention an odd conversation today in the previous post:

At the end of the closing of the Opening Ceremonies today, some guy came up to me as I was heading for the door and said: "Hey! Did you know you look exactly like Gordie Freeman?!"

I'm not really a gamer, so I didn't know about Dr. Gordon Freeman from "Half-Life".

He went on to talk about how I apparently resemble Freeman in this way or that way, and gave me a brief background of the character as scientist and badass.

Badass? Well, I look like a fatass, but certainly not a toughguy.

I did a quick web check a couple of minutes ago and I really don't think I look like Freeman, but I've decided to take it as a compliment.

Hey, beats being told you look like Q-Bert.

Sent from my iPhone

VCon 36 - Day 1

2011-10-01T01:56:00.000-07:00

Another year, another VCon. While nothing really wowed me about the programming schedule ahead of time, there's still something comforting and homey about the con (in a geeky sort of way) that makes me look forward to going back each year.

VCon 36 got off to a bit of a late start for me... I don't think I arrived until just before 4:00, which is okay because while registration and some of the displays and movies fire up at noon, most of the major sessions don't get under way until about 4, and there was nothing that was really standing out to me right away. I knew things were beginning well right after I finished at the registration desk when I was called over to a display table run by the Ghostbusters of Alberta fan group. Seems one of them had taken a liking to the "White & Nerdy" t-shirt I'd picked up at a Weird Al concert a few years ago and wanted to know if they could pick one up locally. Sadly, there's no local connection for Yankovic merchandise that I know of when he isn't coming through on tour. That being said, we had a nice chat and I had a good long look at some of their equipment. I don't know which was more awesome: their replica proton pack signed by Dan "Ray Stantz" Ackroyd, or the club's white stationwagon out in the parking log tricked out to look like the Ecto-1 (or, the Ecto-1EH as they call it, eh). Will try to grab some pix tomorrow to share. Lots of other great costumes out and about today as well, especially with the 501st Legion out in full force (pun intended).

From there I did the usual prowl around to get a feel for a layout of the convention hall's various session rooms, the dealers' room, the art room, Uncle Victor's movie room and the hotel in general. Bit of an unusual experience in the art room though... Larry Niven, who's the con's Author Guest of Honour this year, had been in there looking around and shooting the breeze with the room supervisor; after a while, round about the time I was looking at the cool Chinese steampunk prints by James Ng, I hear Niven walk over to the entrance to get his bag or whatever from the room supervisor on the way out the door, and while he was waiting he started singing "Some Enchanted Evening". Not big, loud, room-filling singing, mind you, just that sort of that light, only somewhat audible, half-unconcious singing that some people do where others might just hum or whistle. Didn't last too long though before he got his bag and was off about his business. Really not something I expected. And ya know, he may be a good writer, but that singing is really not something I'd want to hear again.

The Opening Ceremonies were thankfully light and pretty quick. Anyone who's been to cons knows that when the mic starts getting passed around the front table during introductions there's the serious potential for people to start talking and just not stop, but this year's VCon front table team didn't waste any time. Indeed, probably the longest spiel came from Niven, who rambled on for about 10 minutes on the subject of his 1971 book Lucifer's Hammer, the chances of a person getting killed by a meteorite, the risk of comets and asteroids to the Earth, his book Lucifer's Hammer, nuking said celestial bodies, other means of pushing in-bound threats away, an amusing anecdote about John W. Campbell and Analog in the 40's having to do with atomic weapons, oh, and did I mention Lucifer's Hammer and nuking space rocks? Still not entirely sure what all that had to do with "here we are at VCon", but it was kind of entertaining anyway.

From there it was on to physicist Rob Knop's "The Science Behind Larry Niven's Neutron Star", with Niven himself sitting in the audience. A good general lecture on neutron stars, gravity, tidal forces and basic physics.

Next I ambled over to the Book Launch for a couple of minutes to ask Niven to autograph my copy of Ringworld and the first page of his short story "Not Long Before the End" in The Oxford Book of Fantasy. Asking him to sign his contribution to TOBOF is something that's a couple of years overdue for me. I just happened to be reading not only that anthology, but that very story a couple of years ago when I was attending Worldcon in Montreal and ran into Niven at a session one morning. We were both sitting in the back row and I had the book in my bag and figured I'd ask for his autograph when the panelists were done. Problem was, a couple of minutes after the session got started, the old author nodded off. He was still asleep an hour later when the discussion came to an end and I didn't think it would be right to wake him to pester him for his signature. Luckily he was wide awake this evening.

After that it was down to the hotel bar for a leisurely supper watching the first quarter of the Lions-Eskimos game with fellow con-goers and other hotel guests. Hats off to the kitchen for doing a delightful scratch-made caramel bread pudding. Not only was it tasty, it was huge: as big as the Death Star and probably quite capable of destroying the blood sugar levels of an entire planet.

My next session after dinner was "Our Green Future Does Not Have to be Soylent". What was supposed to be a panel discussion about the possibility of a sustainable future given human population growth and activity degenerated after just a few minutes into a sustained diatribe about the general uselessness and evils of government and business. Now, I'm not going to chug koolaid and defend irresponsible political decision making or blind corporate self-interest, but on the other hand I would certainly have appreciated a more balanced discussion because not everything has gone to pot, and, call me a hopeless optimist, I don't think it's a foregone conclusion that as a species we've slotted ourselves and our planet into a straight line towards extinction. I suspect our remarkable ability to adapt may buy us at least a small chance of survival.

At any rate, the last panel I attended today was "Old School Vampires", where the folklore origins of these creatures of the night were explored, along with discussions of their evolution to the portrayal of vampires that we know today. It was pretty informative and moved along quickly, and while the panelists weren't able to completely avoid discussing the current Stephanie Meyer spin on the undead, they did make every effort to not dwell too much on sparkly vampires that suck.

Speaking of creatures that stay up all night, I've spend half it already and should probably turn in so I don't miss all of tomorrow's programming.

Stay tuned for the next VCon 36 update tomorrow night, and of course the odd Twitter update as things unfold.

Tearin' up the Town

2011-09-23T19:10:00.000-07:00

Forget about Zeus ordering the Kraken to "Destroy Argos!" in Clash of the Titans, a bunch of students at the Vancouver Film School issued the order to "Destroy Vancouver" for an assignment a couple of years ago, and they didn't pull any punches.

Though it was brought to my attention just a couple of days ago, it looks like the "Destroy Vancouver" project has been online for a couple of years. That being said, it's definitely worth watching for fans of science fictional mayhem - whether you're a Lower Mainlander or someone who's only visited the city, or even if you've never been in this neck of the woods at all. Clicking on the link takes to you to a standard Google map of Vancouver, with a number of neighbourhoods or landmark buildings flagged. Rather than giving you the standard photo and address of said building or neighbourhood, clicking on each flag gives a summary of a short visual effects reel put together by a particular student who's chosen that location as his or her target for annihilation. From there you can link to Youtube to watch the destruction in question.

Overall, the students' work is pretty awesome. There's a lot of creativity in the choices of means of devastation and a fantastic attention to detail in depicting it. The degree of SFX artwork varies from reel to reel - some are spot-on photorealistic, while others are good but still have the somewhat animated look of, say, the later additions to the Babylon 5 franchise. The length varies too, with some features running just a few seconds to show off post-apocalyptic cityscapes, while others go for more than a minute blasting out action-packed SF mini movies.

Of the 19 reels offered on the map, my top 5 favourites were:

5) Whale City by Taeyoung Kim - No actual destruction of the Downtown business district in this one, but it's just so pretty to watch that I had to include it in the top 5.

4) Experiment 8 by Juan Carlos Mendoza - Another reel featuring a gigantic sea animal, but this time, this beastie runs amok in and on the Vancouver Sun and Province building and the nearby plaza. While the lead actress could have done a better job playing the reporter, the berserk mega octopus was top notch.

3) The Levis HVC by Nicholas Markel - A well-animated and funny public service announcement about personally-owned flying cars versus public transit. That being said, I still want my own flying car!

2) The untitled robotic orb short from Ed Holdsworth felt cold and downright creepy. There's a price to pay for being a Yaletown yuppie I guess.

1) The Steam Tank by Chris Paul - A steampunk tank slugging it out with a sniper up in the old Sun Tower on the Downtown East Side - what's not to love?!

I don't know if this is a regular assignment at VFS, but if it is, it's certainly something the organizers of VCon should incorporate as a special feature in the movie room. I'd love to see a showcase of new SF shorts like this become a standard part of the con. Too late to forward the idea to the con organizers to consider for this year's event (VCon 36 kicks off Friday Sept. 30 for anyone still thinking of attending); I'll have to remember to include this in my suggestions for next year.

Thanks to Steve for passing along the "Destroy Vancouver" site.

Dead Air

2011-09-22T16:54:00.000-07:00

By strange coincidence, it's been a week for the undead as far as TV & online video watching around our house goes.

First up, this week's installment of Epic Mealtime featured Harley, Muscles Glasses and the rest of the gang of gluttons getting all zombied-up to cook - brraaaaaaaainssss! (what else?) Not sure whether it was calf or lamb brains on the menu, but as usual their concoctions looked pretty tasty.

Then last night's episode of CBC's The Debaters (episode 15, halfway through for anyone following the link) devoted its second round to grappling with the question of "Zombies vs. Vampires" - which is the superior undead? Comedians/pundits Kristeen Von Hagen (pro-vampire) and Pete Zedlacher (pro-zombie) traded barbs that were worth a chuckle. Best shots of the debate:

Von Hagen: "Zombies shuffle around slowly and mumble - so they're like an episode of The Golden Girls."

Zedlacher: "Vampires don't go into your house until they're invited - like Jehovah's Witnesses."

Throw in the occasional rewatch of an episode or two of the 90's reboot of Dark Shadows on Netflix and it seems my viewing habits are getting rather grave. Grave. Get it? Grave? Haha, haha, ha, huh, uh. Yeah, that joke died.

Come On, Geeks: Get Out There and Do Some Good

2011-09-12T02:03:00.000-07:00

Sunday started far too early for my liking, but it was a beautiful day for a walk in the park for a good cause. My wife and I got up early and drove into Vancouver to Stanley Park to participate in the annual Parkinson SuperWalk fundraiser, hosted in this neck of the woods by the Parkinson Society of British Columbia. My mom was diagnosed with Parkinson's several years ago when she was in her mid-late 50's, so this event's got a personal meaning to me. As a result, my wife and I have been taking part for the past few years.

Shortly after arriving we met our friend Jill Sanagan, co-owner of White Dwarf Books, who was there with her father who's fighting Parkinson Disease (the picture, from left to right: Jill, her father, and the tubby gent in the cap is me). It's always nice to chat with people at events like these, but even better when you run into friends, and most especially when they're fellow SF fans turning out to do some good.

Once things got under way we split up: Jill and her dad doing the shorter 2km walk around Lost Lagoon, and my wife and I heading off for the 7km walk along the Seawall and then through the heart of the park (I lumber along at a pretty quick march, but the wife likes to run and goes tearing off, waiting once in a while to take the odd photo as I catch up, then bolting to the finish line). I ended up finishing with a time of about 1:13, and I'm very grateful to the friends who so generously sponsored my efforts.

The point of this wandering little tale though is not to brag about my speed (or lack thereof) in taking a stroll by the sea on a sunny morning, or to teeter atop a moral high-horse, but to remind all of my fellow fanboys and fangirls out there that you can do good in your community. It isn't that hard and every little bit counts for a lot.

I say this because I know far too many geeks who don't really contribute much to the community. Oh, they're good friends and nice enough people. They work hard and are wonderful to geek-out with about this book or that movie or TV show, but they don't give much back. They don't do fundraisers or volunteer or support the efforts of others. And really, I have to ask, why not?

Sure, everybody's busy. Work takes up an obscene amount of time for most people these days. People have to, and should, make time for their families and friends. Then there's allotting time for reading or watching whatever or gaming or going online to endlessly rant about the afore-mentioned stuff. But that's not really enough. If you don't do anything, you don't make your community better in a general sense; you miss out on an opportunity to broaden your horizons, test your skills, meet new people and help turn a bad situation around; and let's face it, if you don't reach out to others, you're feeding into the stereotype of the socially-crippled nerd holed-up in his basement disconnected from the outside world. To be fair, it seems to be a social trend these days for a lot of people, not just geeks, to tune out their surrounding physical community and to just focus on themselves and their personal networks. But that's not something that will make us a better society or better individuals in the long run. And it's something we can change.

To make communities that work well, that are the places where we truly want to live, to better ourselves and create a better impression of who we are, we have to give something back. And the thing is, geeks are the perfect people to do that. We're smart, creative, hard-working, highly-motivated and highly-networked. We're the perfect people to draw attention to a good cause and to raise money to support an effort to make things better. We should be leading the charge!

There are lots of cases where fanboys and fangirls are making things better, at blood drives and community events and fundraisers for all kinds of special causes, and that's awesome. But there are plenty who don't. And they should.

So here's my challenge, fellow geeks: get out there and do some good! Find a good cause, any cause that helps other people or makes your community better and get behind it. Donate your time, maybe a little spare funding, or go out and be the fundraiser or contribute your special area of expertise. Round up your local Brown Coat chapter or Trek starship crew or Gilligan's Island Ginger vs Mary-Anne debate society or whatever and pitch in at a community event. Strike out on your own and join a volunteer group or raise funds for a charity. Put in an hour or two in a one-shot effort, or contribute on an ongoing basis. If you know someone who's holed-up in their basement not doing anything, give them a verbal kick in the ass and get them participating. And if your friends are involved in something and they ask for your support, back them to the hilt. The bottom line is that the old cliche is right: we're all in this together so you might as well make an effort to make things better. Find a good cause and get involved.

What Books Would You Recommend to a Former Fan Getting Back into SF?

2011-08-21T16:48:00.000-07:00

A while ago a friend came to town for a visit and asked to see the near-mythical White Dwarf I'm always on about. Once at the store, after a few minutes of poking around, she made a confession: she hasn't really read any fantasy or science fiction for the past two or three years.

I was pretty stunned. For years we'd been trading recommendations back and forth, and if that hadn't happened recently, I just hadn't noticed. Her excuse was a good one though: taking another degree over the past couple of years, along with working a couple of jobs to pay for it, has eaten up most of her spare time and disposable income. Now things have balanced out a little better and she wants to get back into the genre. Traditionally she'd been more of a fantasy fan, but in addition to picking that up again, she also wanted to start reading more science fiction. Not knowing who was worth reading these days, she asked for some recommendations.

I immediately began capering around the store, pulling out titles from authors and series that she'd liked before, as well as plenty of suggestions aimed at broadening her horizons. Looking back, I was kind of like Jack Black's character Barry in the movie version of High Fidelity, in the scene where he attempts to re-educate the Echo & The Bunneymen fan - except not quite as rude. Not quite.

She'd fallen away from Robert Jordon's The Wheel of Time books, so I started with Brandon Sanderson's additions to the series. Since you can't read epic fantasy these days without talking George RR Martin, A Game of Thrones was tossed onto the pile in the hopes that she'd read through to the newest installment, A Dance with Dragons, quickly. I continued my assault - er, recommendations - with Patrick Rothfuss' The Name of the Wind, Neil Gaiman's American Gods (not a new book, I know, but worth including in the re-education project) and Peter S. Beagle's Sleight of Hand. Then, injecting a dose of steampunk, I desperately tried to find a copy of Cherie Priest's Boneshaker (sadly, sold out). From there I pointed to Naomi Novik's His Majesty's Dragon. Then it was on to Kit Reed's Enclave, Cory Doctorow's Overclocked (though deliberately avoiding the much-lauded Little Brother because the narrator's frequent, lengthy explanations of whatever fascinates him drag the plot to a screeching halt far too often and ultimately kill the story and its very important message; and not makers, which shuffled along like a short story stretched far, far too thin to make the novel it was trying to be), Dan Simmons' Hyperion, Spider Robinson's Very Bad Deaths (yes, I know, two more old ones), Robert Charles Wilson's Spin and Neal Stephenson's Anathem.

And if I'd had more time, I would have added more. But the pile was already high and teetering by then. And that's also when my friend confessed she could only buy one book. She ended up choosing one that had ben recommended by the store's owner, Jill (and I can't remember the title for the life of me), which is fine, and added all the titles I was now reshelving to her "to buy" and "library" lists.

But it was a good exercise none-the-less, because it got me thinking about the important issue of SF books that can re-fire the imagination of a lapsed fan, which is a different challenge than choosing gateway books to create a new fan.

And so I put the question to you, fellow fans, what books would you recommend to a lapsed fan thinking about coming back to the genre?

Yes, I know, who the person is and what their past science fiction and/or fantasy preferences were (as well as current preferences for non-SF fiction) factor into the decision of what to recommend. But I think we can put the worry about subjectiveness aside because there must be some recent SF books (let's say released in the past 5 years or so - but that's not a hard and fast requirement) that are just so good that they're almost guaranteed to re-stoke the passion for the genre and really should be read by all existing fans and wayward former fans coming back to the fold. What are they?

Darth Fiddler Preyed upon by Thugs from the Dark Side

2011-06-15T13:54:00.000-07:00

Geeks and non-geeks alike are outraged after local news outlets have reported Victoria busker Darth Fiddler has been attacked by thugs.

The violin-playing Sith lord has been a fixture for years in the city's historic and touristy Inner Harbour area. His repertoire includes a mean rendition of the Imperial March.

Darth Fiddler as always been one of the highlights for us when my wife and I make the occasional trip across the Straight of Georgia to the capital. In fact, I remember a few years ago when I was working with an organization that was holding its annual convention in Victoria's Empress Hotel, and there were a couple of days that were just absolute hell in terms of putting up with undeserved crap from the boss (who could have been a Sith lord herself, except for her profound lack of intelligence and eerie resemblance to a Vogon in a blond wig), but at the end of the day, when I had a few hours to myself, I'd amble around the Inner Harbour, and seeing Darth Fiddler capering about sawing madly away on his black instrument always put a smile on my face.

I hope Darth Fiddler recovers soon and hits the streets again to share the Force of his musical talents.

Meanwhile, I hope the cops catch the nurf-herders who beat him and toss them into a trash compactor.

Top 5 SF Megaprojects that Would Have Had a Tough Time Getting Budget Approval

2011-03-25T01:28:00.000-07:00

Anyone who's followed the news when a megaproject is proposed, like a new hydro-electric dam, or a highway or railway, or the design, construction and purchase of a fleet of new ferries, knows that there are huge obstacles to getting budget approval for them. Politicians, bureaucrats, business interests, lobby groups and the public can all stonewall spending in one way or another, sometimes making it a miracle that anything large and expensive gets accomplished at all.

Speculative fiction is full of megaprojects. Everything from city-sized space stations to colonizing expeditions to super weapon development. Some of these expenses are understandable because there may have been cost-sharing (like the Babylon stations in Babylon 5) or long-term benefits or the unifying motivation of national pride or a rich guy's personal dream fulfillment (such as Sad King Billy's city of poets in Hyperion) or whatever. But others make me think they probably got a pretty rough ride in budgetary hearings before they got a grudging go-ahead to start cutting cheques and begin development.

Here are, to me anyway,

The Top 5 Megaprojects that Would Have Had a Tough Time Getting Budget Approval:

5) The Starfighter Legion - from The Last Starfighter

When the peaceful Star League is confronted with imminent invasion by the Ko-Dan Empire and its ally, the traitor Xur, its citizens begin allocating resources to the construction of a military base and a fleet of Gunstars, along with a program to recruit and train starfighters and navigators to man the heavy fighters. Problem is, the people of Rylos - and we're led to believe the citizens of the other League worlds as well - are pacifists. For thousands of years they've worked to weed-out violence in their culture until it is virtually non-existant. What's more, the mere thought of violence makes them physically ill (as evidenced by the look of distaste on the Rylan official's face when he talks about the "gift" to be starfighters, and the novelization where author Alan Dean Foster goes into greater detail about the level of discomfort brought about by thoughts of violence). Anyone in this society who is even remotely tetchy is treated for mental illness, hence the great challenge of finding those capable of not only working on the base, but actually piloting the spacecraft and firing their weapons. You'd think in a society so relentlessly pacifistic there would be serious political, bureaucratic and public opposition to paying for this project. It would be easy to believe that there would be a big push to instead use the funding to support the superior scientific minds of the League in a project to simply augment the defensive shielding of their Frontier drones to do a better job of keeping the warlike aliens out. There must've been some serious political wrangling to get the Legion's budget approved in the years and months before the actual Ko-Dan attack.

4) The repair/replacement bill for the ships lost fighting the Reavers over Mr Universe's moon - from Serenity

So many ships damaged or destroyed, so many lives lost, so many angry surviving families and insurance companies with so very many lawyers. There's no doubt that in the wake of the firefight over Mr Universe's moon at the end of Serenity that some hard questions were asked in Parliament. And not just about the release of classified information on the planetary pacification program or the Reavers. No, there would be some bureaucrats and politicians seriously cheezed about the titanic expenses resulting from when one Operative went wild and pushed an independent contractor freighter captain of marginal legality into severely escalating a custody dispute. The cost of the lawsuit settlements for benefits payouts alone would constitute a megaproject, never mind the money needed to repair whatever crippled Alliance ships that managed to limp away from the fiasco. Then there would be the parliamentary bill to build replacement ships for the ones destroyed in the fight - lots of new capital ships and support vessels with the latest technology from a whole assortment of design firms and contractors just waiting to cash-in. No, it wouldn't be cheap, and it sure wouldn't be easy to get that past the Alliance's naval budgetary appropriations committee. No bureaucrat would want to divert money from their pre-existing budgets, and no Member of Parliament would want to go back to their world and have to explain to taxpayers why their taxes were going to jump to pay for a massive military replacement.

3) The Ringworld - from Ringworld, by Larry Niven

The idea of the Ringworld, or any Dyson sphere or similar supermassive construction really, has always struck me as alternately ultra-cool and yet politically and economically ridiculous. Here's a culture that's decided (maybe because it likes the idea of maximizing the efficient use of energy from its parent star, maybe because it likes the idea of having a whole lotta land so everyone can have a really big back yard with a swimming pool, maybe because it likes the idea of staying close to home) to sink staggering resources (as in quite likely tearing apart all planets in the solar system) over huge amounts of time into building a ring or a shell around a star. Now, if your civilization had that level of knowledge and technology to build the ultimate mega project, wouldn't you also be able to figure out that it would probably just be quicker, easier and cheaper to colonize other habitable worlds in other star systems? Remember, in Niven's Known Space, faster-than-light travel is possible, so high-tailing off to colonize other planets isn't too big of a deal. And when you're talking about a civilization with the ability to tear apart whole planets to build massive constructions around a star, it's not like there's be much chance of serious opposition from native species on those prospective colony worlds. They colonizers could simply break out the mass-drivers, snag some local asteroids, and bomb them back into the stone age - with stones! - then move in and rebuild their society on the new world. You'd also think that a civilization with this capability would know that stars don't last forever, sooner or later they swell into red giants and die off. Any civilization that's building a ring or sphere is clearly in it for the long haul, and should realize its super-long-term chances of survival are best served by moving to other younger star systems, rather than hanging around the home system in a ring or sphere that's going to be torn apart, melted, or otherwise destroyed when the home star starts to expand in its grumpy old age. Because of this, I have to wonder if when the builders first proposed the Ringworld to others of their civilization, if they weren't met with opposition from more conservative elements who would refuse to spend the time, effort, and possibly money on a project that's doomed in the long term and certainly more costly than just packing up the kids and moving to the next system over.

2) The Encyclopedia Foundation - from Foundation, by Isaac Asimov

In the last years of the Galactic Empire, psychohistorian Hari Seldon has crunched the numbers and knows he has to set up a colony on the outskirts of civilization to preserve knowledge and shorten the dark age that lies ahead from tens of thousands of years to a single millennium. So he concocts a grand scheme of setting up this colony of great minds that will rebuild society and disguising it (because he wants to minimize the chances of war-like civilizations preying on it) as a project to compile an encyclopedia of the sum total of all humanity's knowledge. Really? A whole planet just to put together an encyclopedia? All the politicians of the imperial court and all the staff of the galaxy's bureaucracy are supposed to buy that? Let alone allocate the vast amounts of money necessary to set up a government-funded colony of several thousand people with all the latest technology, toys and trinkets? Not likely. My memory of Asimov's Forward the Foundation and the other prequel books written in the late 80's/early 90's is a bit dim, but I seem to recall that Seldon had taken the Emperor into his confidence and obtained his approval for the project. But I also seem to recall that the Emperor was not long on the throne before being assassinated or dying by some illness or accident. Which creates the very real problem of what his successors and ministers would do about the project. To get funding - more importantly, to sustain that funding through the various years-long construction, colonization, and supply-before-self-sufficiency stages, would require that the entire imperial government apparatus know what was going on; everyone would need to know that this was really an ark, not just a big book. And they didn't, because again, this was a secret. So here you have a line-up of new emperors in the next few years, not to mention a horde of politicians and bureaucrats, who think this whole expense (when they bother to give it any consideration at all) is about compiling a book, which, let's face it, a computer could do in a fairly short period of time, and which they'd reasonably expect had already been done at any of a number of universities around the galaxy, or could be done if the order was given. I was a reporter long enough to know that when politicians and bureaucrats don't know what a project is and what it's real goals are, they won't fund it. Hell, even when they do know what's going on, half the time they don't want to fund it either! When the Emperor died, Seldon would have lost his backer. His successor either wouldn't know about the project's true purpose, or wouldn't agree that it had value, and would could very well put the kybosh on it. Worse, the new emperors might not know about it at all, and the Foundation project could get stonewalled by a bureaucrat for red tape reasons, to save money, for political opportunism, or out of simple mean-spiritedness. It's amazing that Seldon's Foundation worked as long as it did, but more amazing still that it actually succeeded in getting the budgetary approval to get its start.

1) The Death Star - from Star Wars: Episode IV - A New Hope

One of the throw-away lines that's never really explained in the original Star Wars movie is why the Emperor decided to finally dissolve the Senate. Oh sure, we know he's a power-mad Sith lord asshole who can't tolerate the idea of anyone else having any real say in how the galaxy will be governed, but he could have told the politicians to go home at any time in the years after he assumed total control. There had to be something real or imagined that provoked him. In recent years, I've started to wonder if it was because the Senate was taking Palpatine to task over cost-overruns on the newly-operational Death Star. Oh sure, there's probably some Star Wars super fanboy out there who knows the everything about everything in Lucas' creation and is able to dig deep into the expanded universe to find the real explanation in the backstory of some minor character like that little hamster guy making gimme-gimme motions for his drink at the bar in the cantina in Mos Eisley to prove he was instrumental in bringing down the Senate by having sex with Palpatine's favourite pet Gungan disguised as the senator from the hammerhead planet or something. But I'm sticking with the budget theory. I think, shortly before Princess Leia was captured, a copy of the final bill for Death Star I was given to the Senate committee overseeing the Imperial Navy's budget. The cost of the station would have been hell to justify in the first place. After all, the civil war was over; the galaxy was at peace. Why, the senators might reasonably ask, would the Emperor need to build a war machine as big as a moon? Couldn't the current fleet of Star Destroyers, with the projected and budgeted-for replacements over the next few years, continue to do an adequate job of keeping the peace? The Death Star may have greater firepower than the fleet, but it isn't anywhere near as maneuverable as the ships, and can't be in as many places at once. In terms of suppressing the growing Rebellion, spending fewer credits adding more ships to the fleet makes more sense. "Ah yes," cackles Palpatine and his admirals, "But the Death Star can destroy an entire planet! That'll show them!" To which the Senators might narrow their eyes (or whatever they sense the environment with) and say "The Rebels, and even the planet's inhabitants, might have it coming, but what about all the valuable resources you're destroying in the process, never mind the tax revenues from those inhabitants - at least while you've got them in your tight grip?" That would have been enough to seriously piss the Emperor off, so the Senators, wanting to live a while longer, would probably have passed the initial Death Star budget. But as the years passed and the thing got closer to completion, costs were sure to soar. Supply lines might have been endangered by Rebel attacks, driving up the cost of materials. Add to that the cost of labour (and I can't comment any better than Kevin Smith did in Clerks), and other assorted incidentals, and costs were probably getting way beyond the initial estimates. When the station went operational and the final bill was presented to the Senate, there was probably an uproar. So much so that Palpatine probably told them to fuck off and go home and then threw one or two of their hover pods around with the Force for good measure. Sure, he rammed the cost through the budget process, but he couldn't do it without serious political opposition and without removing the last vestige of democracy that had probably prevented the Rebellion from further escalation. For that reason, because Palpatine had to push the Death Star funding through so much serious budgetary opposition that it contributed to the eventual downfall of his government, this megaproject tops the list.

So what megaprojects of SF do you think would have faced a tough time getting budget approval?

Review: Paul

2011-03-21T01:57:00.000-07:00

Think of Starman. Now, instead of having The Dude from The Big Lebowski having sex with Karen Allen, think of Zack from Zack & Miri Make a Porno in the body of one of Spielberg's Close Encounters of the Third Kind xenomorphs hitching a ride with a couple of English nerds and assorted others. Insert an asteroid belt's worth of SF in-jokes and you've mostly got the idea behind Paul. Mostly.

The latest gem from Simon Pegg and Nick Frost tells the tale of a pair of fanboys who've come from the UK on the ultimate geek's pilgrimage: to attend the San Diego Comicon, followed by a roadtrip to see various alleged alien landing sites and conspiracy locations around the American west. One night while driving their winnebago (which continually gave me flashbacks to Lonestar & Barf's ride in Spaceballs - and I'm not sure whether that was intended by Pegg & Frost or not) on a lonesome highway they witness a car crash. When they come to offer help, they're met by a stereotypical big-headed alien named Paul who asks for a ride. Turns out he's not just another extraterrestrial trying to get home, he's also a wisecracking, frequently rude, ganja-rocker who's got a pretty down-to-earth outlook on life. Along the way the boys pick up a trailer park worker and are relentlessly hunted by a trio of federal agents played by Jason Bateman, Bill Hader, and Joe Lo Trugilo (who are themselves hounded by their boss Sigourney Weaver), not to mention an angry dad and the occasional redneck.

And, as mentioned, there are enough science fiction references to satisfy a legion of nerds. Most are pretty obvious, enough so that non-geeks in the audience will get them and laugh, but none-the-less endearing to fanboys and fangirls. Then there are more scattered here and there that are more subtle. No spoilers, but pay attention to the name of one of the restaurants in the first half of the movie, and listen closely to the bluegrass band in the back half. And then there are the ones that will earn you your ultranerd badge if you can pick up on them. Again, no spoilers, but let's say I was the only one in my audience of 300 who laughed at Pegg's homage to Star Trek: Generations. There's no doubt that half the appeal of the movie will be rewatching it on DVD once or twice just to pick up on the allusions that are missed in the first viewing.

Is there anything truly profound about Paul? Does it examine the question of what an extraterrestrial's perceptions of life in general and Earth and American culture in particular would be? Does it probe (heh-heh, "probe") the depths of the human condition and our views on existence? Nope. But it's funny as hell. Paul isn't trying to be a deeply moving drama or existentialist art-house flick. It's a straight-forward roadtrip comedy and it works very well in this capacity. It's also a loveletter to SF (and here I'm borrowing very appropriate wording from the CBC's review) and is genuine and well-crafted in this respect too. And it benefits from a cast of likable characters. Do all of the jokes work? No. Some fall flat. But most are funny enough to elicit a chuckle and a lot are worth a full-on laugh.

For SF fans and non-fans alike, Paul is definitely worth paying full price to see at the theatre.

What I Didn't Expect to Hear in the Movie Line-up

2011-03-21T01:04:00.000-07:00

The last thing I expected to hear Saturday night when my wife and I were waiting in line to get to the ticket counter at our local bazillionplex theatre was a very serious discussion about temporal duplication.

Sure, if there were any science fiction or comic-based or fantasy movies currently running in the theatres featuring time travel as a plot device, I could understand people standing around waxing philosophical or busting out some physics about whether there could be multiple versions of a person coexisting in the same time frame as a result of time travel. But there aren't. So this was coming out of nowhere.

Since we had a few minutes before we'd be at the front of the line to get our tickets to see Paul, I couldn't help but eavesdrop a little.

I had to smile because it was an 8-year-old kid trying to convince his dad.

"Really, think about it," says the kid, "If a guy went through a time portal into his past, then lived forward to the point where he went through the portal, then followed himself through, there'd be three of him!"

The expression on the dad's face for the next few seconds shows that he's twisting this around in his mind like a Rubik's Cube, giving it serious thought.

"No," Dad says, "I don't think so. I think you'd only have the one guy."

"No, it'd be three." Insists the kid, running his hands through his hair like one pitmaster running up against an equally obstinate meat aficionado in a sauce vs no-sauce debate. "You're not considering the effect of the radiation-"

[Huh? Radiation? I thought, My knowledge of physics is admittedly pretty elemental, but time portals generating radiation that could contribute to duplicating a person? Not so sure about that, kiddo...]

"I don't think the radiation would have that effect." says the father.

And on they went, but I missed the rest as it was now time for us to get our tickets.

I loved this whole exchange. For the sheer, unabashed public nerdiness of it. But most importantly because this kid had a dad who would not only indulge his geeky chatter, but give it real consideration and participate in it.

That's an experience I would never have been able to have with my dad - not at that age, and not now. I love the old man, but he isn't a geek, doesn't understand that stuff, and doesn't care about it. If I'd have tried to engage him in a discussion like that when I was eight, I probably would have received a half-hearted "Oh?" for a response before he turned his attention elsewhere.

I can't say whether this dad in the theatre the other night was a fanboy or not, but he made the effort, and that's an achievement as great as constructing a time portal in my books.

Forget the Zombies & Aliens, Are You Ready for a Real Disaster?

2011-03-15T01:13:00.000-07:00

As science fiction and fantasy fans, we're well-versed in the subject of mind-blowing, world-altering disasters. We watch them and read about them over and over, and discuss them ad-nauseum online and at conventions. But in the wake of the recent tragedies in Japan and New Zealand, I thought I'd take a quick break from SF in this post and ask whether you're prepared for a real emergency.

Put aside the so remotely unlikely that they're for all intents and purposes impossible SF-relegated scenarios like an alien invasion or a zombie apocalypse. Then let's put aside the geologically occasional but in human terms by no means regular catastrophes like large meteorite/asteroid/comet impacts and supervolcano eruptions.

Let's focus on the sadly more common emergencies that you will likely have to deal with (one or more of them) at some point in your life. The house fires, highway pile-ups, train derailments, toxic spills, avalanches, blizzards, tornados, volcanic eruptions, disease quarantines, city-wide power outages, civil unrest, floods, hurricanes, ice storms, droughts, forest fires, and yes, earthquakes and tsunamis.

One thing I've noticed, both as a former news reporter/anchor and as a current volunteer emergency preparedness session presenter for the City of Vancouver, is that most people are aware of the possible disasters that could happen in their regions, but they're not actually prepared for them. They haven't thought through a plan to deal with disaster and they don't have supplies to help themselves or their loved ones and neighbours. Admittedly, in some cases the forces of nature are just too powerful, but generally, taking the time to make a plan and create emergency kits tends to make life a little easier for people dealing with emergencies.

If we, as geeks, are supposed to be the smart ones, the ones who discuss all these eventualities or possibilities that just don't occur to most people, shouldn't we be the ones who are prepared to face an emergency?

Have you made a home/work disaster plan?

Do you have an emergency kit ready if you need it at a moment's notice?

If the answer is "no", here are 10 tips for emergency planning that we teach people in Vancouver's Neighbourhood Emergency Preparedness Program. They're not just for people living on the West Coast of North America - they're helpful for people living anywhere to plan for most types of emergencies that you could face.

1) Identify the hazards in your area.

What's most likely to happen in the region where you live and work? Is it a blizzard, earthquake, train derailment, or something else? The type of emergency you might have to face can affect your planning and definitely what you'll include in your emergency kits.

2) Establish a family meeting place.

If something does happen (whether it's a house fire or a major natural disaster) and your family has to evacuate your house, or can't come back to your house, where will you meet up? This should be somewhere nearby that everyone in your family knows where it is and can reach easily on foot. Maybe the home of a trusted friend or family member? A local community centre or park?

3) Establish an out-of-area contact.

This is someone who does not live in your region who would not be effected by any natural disaster that you might have to deal with. If there is an emergency, your family might be split-up (maybe you're at work when it happens, your spouse/partner is at home, and your kids are at school) and unable to reach each other or communicate with each other. However, it might be possible that social services at a disaster shelter could get word out to a friend or family member outside of the affected area. This person, your out-of-area contact, can act as your family's communications link, letting everyone know as they check in how the rest of the family is doing and where they are waiting. Make sure everyone in your family knows who your out-of-area contact is and what that person's phone number is.

4) Emergency kits.

These are your emergency supplies. In most places, governments will quickly set up disaster shelters to get people out of the weather and offer food and medical care, but sometimes it takes a while for these services to get up and running, and you may have to travel a bit to reach them. It can make your life a lot easier if you have emergency kits ready with the essentials that you will need/want. Here are the different kinds of emergency kits you should have:

a) Grab-and-go kits. This is exactly what it sounds like - a duffle bag or backpack in your home that you can grab easily on the run and take with you as you get out of your house quickly. It should have essentials that you'll need for at least 3 days. A first-aid kit is a must. You should also include food and water, a flashlight (preferably crank-powered, or with extra batteries stored separately), a radio (crank-powered radio/flashlight combos are widely available), a blanket or plastic rain poncho, a knife, matches, an extra sweater, work gloves, toiletries, any medications you require, anything else you think you might need. Everyone in your home should have their own grab-and-go kit (that includes having a separate bag for each of your pets with items and food/water they will need).
b) Home kits. These are larger emergency kits with all of the essentials listed above and, again, anything else you think you might need (like candles, a tarp, rope, cooking apparatus, more batteries, more food/water, more first aid supplies, books or games to pass the time with, more clothing & blankets).
c) First aid kits. This is a no-brainer. Every type of emergency kit you have should include a first aid kit. Make sure all of your first aid kits are fully supplied, and ensure there is a first aid kit for every grab-and-go kit in the family.
d) School kits. If you've got school-aged children, think about putting a small version of a grab-and-go kit in their schoolbag with a first-aid kit, contact numbers for you and other trusted family and friends, water and food, etc. Ask your child's school what its emergency plan is... Does it have emergency supplies of its own? What is the school's policy about caring for children during a disaster, especially if parents aren't able to reach their children by the end of the school day?
e) Car kits. Another no-brainer. Keep an emergency kit in the trunk of your car with your jumper cables and other auto necessities. You don't want to be stranded on the highway without emergency supplies if you get stuck in a disaster.
f) Work kits. Keep a small grab-and-go kit in your desk drawer if you work in an office in case you need it. Ask your employer about their emergency plans. Does the office have emergency supplies ready if employees are stranded there? Ladies: consider keeping an extra pair of running or hiking shoes under your desk - high heels may look great, but it'll be hard if you have to walk in them through a couple of kilometres of rubble, snow or water.

5) Food & water

Store foods that require little to no preparation and will store safely for a long time. Try to get foods that are familiar to your family (less stress during an emergency if you don't have to worry whether your kids will eat that brand of canned soup or dried noodles). Try to get foods that are low in salt/sodium so that they will not increase your thirst. Keep enough food to last everyone in your home for at least 3 days (preferably 7 days, because you don't know how long it will take your government to get help to you). For water, have at least 4 litres per person per day ready.

6) Prepare your home.

You can do a few things that might make your home safer such as checking your hot water tank to make sure it's secure. Something that's very important to us nerds: bookshelves! Make sure they're secured to a stud in your wall to minimize the risk of them falling on you. Look around your home to see if you have heavy items up high on shelves or in your kitchen, consider whether you can move them to lower storage spaces or make them more secure so they don't fall on you. Attach door fasteners to your cupboards to reduce the chances of them opening and dumping items on top of you.

7) Utilities and fire prevention.

Make sure everyone in your home knows how to get out of it in an emergency (and where to meet-up afterwards). Ensure you've got a working smoke detector and fire extinguisher. Know where your gas, electrical and water shut-offs are.

8) Plan for helping vulnerable populations

Do you have children, seniors, or people with disabilities living in your home? What about your neighbours? These people may need your assistance in the event of an emergency. Be sure to plan how you will help get these people to safety. If they require special equipment (like a walker or wheelchair), be sure you know how to help the person get to safety in/with this equipment.

9) Plan to help your pets

Pets are part of the family too! Make sure you plan for their safety. Have a grab-and-go kit specifically for your dog/cat/bird/whatever that you can take with you along with your animals if you have to evacuate. Include food, water, medications, a collar and leash, bowls, vaccination & registration papers, toys, a blanket, kitty litter or newspaper and plastic bags for waste, and a carrying cage/kennel. Anything else they might need.

10) Practice your plan.

Hey, your parents and teachers were right: practice makes perfect! Practice your disaster plan and check your emergency kits at least once (preferably twice) every year. That's a good way to keep your food/water supplies fresh and to consider whether you need to add anything else to your emergency kits or if you need to alter your evacuation plan.

If you've got a disaster plan and emergency kits, you'll be better prepared for an emergency. If you're prepared, you'll be in a better position to help your family and friends and others in your community.

For more tips on emergency preparedness, visit the City of Vancouver's emergency preparedness pages.

Or check the website of your city/regional/provincial/state/prefecture/national government to get information specific to your area.

You can also get lots of helpful information from the Red Cross/Red Crescent branch in your country.

Stay safe.

Marking International Women's Day - The Best Female SF Characters

2011-03-08T18:48:00.000-08:00

Today is International Women's Day, a time to reflect on the accomplishments of women around the world and the challenges that still lie ahead.

Certainly women have always played an important role in creating and guiding speculative fiction, from Mary Shelley at the dawn of the genre, to Leigh Brackett, Octavia Butler, Alice Sheldon, Phyllis Gotlieb, Ursula K. Le Guin, Judith Merril, Nalo Hopkinson, Kit Reed, Naomi Novik, Cherie Priest and many, many more.

As memorable and influential as the authors (and directors and producers and pencillers and inkers and letterers) are, so are the female characters that we get to know in science fiction, fantasy, and comics. I thought it would be interesting to take a look at who some of the best female characters are in SF, and what makes them so interesting, and most of all, why are they important?

And because it's International Women's Day, I thought it was especially important that I get a woman's perspective on this issue. So I've gathered a group of female friends who are from different walks of life and different parts of the country, but who all share a life-long

love of SF to share their opinions. I'll throw in my to cents as well, but today, it's ladies first.

First up, my oldest friend, Sam McCreath, university student, private school housemother, and the person who tried (and failed) to get me to like

Terry Pratchett's Discworld novels:

"Discovering sci-fi & fantasy at an early age is what really turned me on to

reading. As a young-ish girl I first found Anne McCaffrey’s Dragonrider series, then Mercedes Lackey's books. I was attracted to their female characters, each of whom was strong, independent, and intelligent. They represented an image of being a girl which is often missing in mainstream literature and other media. The stereotype of being female that required being rescued instead of a woman saving herself never appealed to me. In sci-fi and fantasy, strong female characters are the norm, not an interesting plot twist.

"My appreciation continues today. I’ve found shows and movies like Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Resident Evil, the Lara Croft character in Tomb Raider, and even some of the Bond Girls portray an image of femininity based on strength rather than being compromised by it."

Another friend, Sarah Corbeil, a financial analyst, and hoarder of books with a collection that may rival (or exceed) my own in size, had this to say:

"For me, the female characters in SF that are the best or most important are the strong characters who are women in stories where the fact that they are women is irrelevant and plays little or no part in the point of the book.

"For example, the Honor Harrington series by David Weber. The books cover the career of a very strong woman, starting from a young age and mov

ing forward/upward through her career to various command positions. The fact that she is a woman isn't even emphasized; in fact, it is her class that causes issues in her society. When the series takes you to a planet where women are considered less than men, it was interesting seeing the two societies clash as Honor's people learn to deal with people who look down on women, believing them incapable of things they take for granted. Over several books you see Honor and her society change the views of this planet as she refuses to be anyone but her

self. Honor is respected as a person, and it has nothing to do with her being a woman."

My cousin, Jenn Eades, is an entrepreneur and mother, and used to watch

Battle of the Planets/G-Force/Gatchaman with me when we were kids, and always had a Stephen King book by her side as a teen, summed up her thoughts in

one word:

"Buffy!"

My friend Nicole Yamanaka, a kinesiologist, personal trainer and fitness studio owner, and truly amazing costume maker, had this take on the question:

"As a woman, my love for comic books has always been kind of a 'Secret' (a badly kept one, at that) because it just wasn't cool, even though I spent hours at comic book stores and religiously make reference to Star Wars Day (May 4th, but I'm preaching to the choir here)! My love for comic characters has been a huge influence on my life, ever since childhood.

"Catwoman, since the campy Batman TV show days, has always captured my heart. Admit it, the majority of you women out there have this strange affinity for felines (sexy!) but the appeal to the tom-boy, bad girl in all of us is also satisfied. I don't know if I love her because I love cats, orif I love cats because I love her. Call me sick and twisted, a martyr, or an angry anti-hero and tormented type, which is probably why the Tim Burton version (okay, I love black vinyl and leather too) resonates with me so much. And finally, I do happen to have two 6+ foot bull whips in my possession, which I love dearly and do play with from time to time. Clients hate that. Which brings me to the second big love in my life, Rogue, of X-men fame.

"When I discovered this character, I wished that I was indestructibe and, yeah, that I could fly too. Being a science major, I knew self-propelled flight was out of the question, so when my boyfriend at the time suggested I start weight training (I think he was sick of my whining), I took it up. And it stuck. So I have Rogue to thank for dropping the seed in me that lead me to my career as a kinesiologist, personal trainer, and attempting feats of flight through climbing, pole dancing and whatever else I can laungh myself off of.

"There are a million fun female characters that have meant a lot to me, for various reasons, but I'll stop there before you all get glassy-eyed and skip away from Robin's blog.

"Many women in my life laugh at these stories and judge me for loving a gal in spandex and critique the negative image of women in comics. But I prefer to see the beauty and good in what they can (and have done) for me. At this stage of my life, I look back at the complexity of the women in fiction and realize that we are drawn to them because of how real they are. Story lines, character development, conflicts... they resonate because we see ourselves. Take away the powers and the costumes and what do you have? Us. Simply, and beautifully, just us. I have learned a lot about myself through fictional characters and watched myself evolve through my attachment to certain strong female 'role models'. We take the good from them, leave the bad (I should hope) and make our lives a little richer, if not a little funner (yes, I know 'funner' isn't a real word, but that's why English is so awesome) sometimes, too."

And my wife, Phoebe Lau, an entrepreneur and administrative professional, who always has the last word in this house, had this to say:

"Zoe from Firefly has to be one of my favourite female characters. She's comfortable with being tender and loving with her husband, but she's also a soldier who doesn't take crap from anyone (even Wash) and fights 'till the end. I've also always like Eowyn, shieldmaiden of Rohan, from The Lord of the Rings... another great fighter, responsible for taking down the Nazgul king."

Thank-you, ladies!

For my part, there are a lot of female SF characters that I think are worthy of highlighting:

Martha Jones and Donna Noble from Doctor Who - smart, adult Companions who supported the Doctor but also stood up to him; Admiral Jane Roland from the Temeraire books; Athena and Six from BSG who grew into so much more than replicants; Brawne Lamia from the Hyperion books; Zoe from Firefly; Aeryn Sun from Farscape; Arya Stark and Daenerys Targaryen in the A Song of Ice and Fire series; Galadriel from LOTR, who joined her family's mad rebellion in the elder days of Middle Earth but settled down to rule with wisdom; Ellen Ripley from the Alien movies (except the fourth, which was so bad we shall not name it); Uhura from Star Trek; Chrysalis from the Wild Cards shared universe; Sultana Katima from Kim Stanley Robinson's The Years of Rice and Salt; Machiko Noguchi from the first Aliens vs Predator comic series; Yu Shu Lien from Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon; Briar Wilkes in Boneshaker; Fio Piccolo, whose aeronautical engineering genius keeps the pig in the air in Porco Rosso; and General Susan Ivanova and Delenn (too many titles, so much greatness) in Babylon 5. And I can't forget Wonder Woman, who, when I was just a little guy in the 70's, I first saw incarnated as Linda Carter camping across the TV screen, but over the years has been a character that's revealed herself to be more than a jiggling pin-up girl, rather a strong, intelligent character who holds her own and certainly deserves her status on the front-line, A-list of the Justice League. And last, but never least, Princess Leia, who also formed a lasting impression on me when I was knee-high to an astrodroid; she's smart, tough, tender, and quite capable of cutting down the badguys with either a blaster or her caustic wit. Give me another million pages and I'll name another million women in the pages and on the screens of SF

who I like and respect.

So how about you? Who are your favourite female SF characters? Why? What makes them important? Nominations from ladies and gentlemen are both appreciated.

Top 10 Tear Jerkers of SF

2011-03-05T17:28:00.000-08:00

A few days ago I was having coffee with a friend and we got onto the topic of Futurama. Amidst the laughs about the antics of the crew of the Planet Express, we got to talking about how sometimes the show sucker-punches the audience with something really heartbreaking. That got me thinking about some of the sadder moments in SF in general. So grab your kleenexes, this weakly list is devoted to:

The Top 10 Tear Jerkers of SF:

10) Futurama - "The Luck of the Fryish"

Anyone who has a sibling knows that there are times when your brother or sister is your best friend, and others where you could just kill them. This episode features Fry dwelling quite a bit on the

wrongs his brother did to him over the years, but ends with him discovering just how much he meant to his brother. It's a bittersweet moment that's guaranteed to put a lump in your throat.

9)Pan's Labyrinth

This was a movie that like an oldschool, pre-Disney fairytale didn't pull any punches. The audience is made to sit through the visceral, impotent horror of not being able to do anything but watch while a child is menaced by monsters both supernatural and human, and then ultimately murdered by one of them. The only thing that takes the sting out of this movie (and keeps it from being higher on the list) is that in the end we find out that Ofelia actually is a fairy princess and gets to go and be happy in her "real" life among the fey. Of course, that's kind of cold comfort considering that she had to make the transition in such a painful and frightening way. And, one might even say that she isn't transported to the land of the fairies, but rather passes totally into death, with the magic land really just being her own personal perception of heaven. And if you really want to put a cynical spin on it and leave the movie super depressed, you might say that she doesn't go to the land of the fey or to heaven, and that the final vision in the movie is nothing more than a final hallucination experienced by consciousness as her brain dies. Eeeesh. I think I might just stick with the fairy princess ending so I don't start weeping right now.

8) The Lord of the Rings by JRR Tolkien - Appendix B - when Sam goes into the West

There are a lot of sad moments in the Lord of the Rings: when it seems that Shelob has killed Frodo; the story of the loss of the Entwives; when Gandalf and Boromir die; when Elrond takes Arwen aside to say goodbye forever before he leaves for the West; when Sam, Pippin and Merry have to say goodbye as Frodo and the others sail into the West; or later in the Appendices when Aragorn dies and Arwen goes off to live for ages alone in Galadriel's abandoned forest. But for me, the saddest part of the story has always been the note in the Appendix about Sam's fate. About how he grows old, and his wife Rosie eventually dies, and Sam heads off to the Grey Havens to get a little boat and try to sail into the West himself to join Frodo. We're never told in The Silmarillion, The Hobbit or LOTR what happens to hobbits when they die (we know the elves are sent to the halls of the dead in the West, but that they essentially get a reboot and can come out and hang out with everyone else again when they're ready; humans have some sort of afterlife that's hinted at but never revealed; and the dwarves are pretty convinced they'll get their own little piece of heaven serving the earth god Aule, even if the snobbish elves claim the dwarves will just turn back into dirt and stone) or what they believe will happen. Maybe they're atheists, content to be happy in the world for one lifetime. But if that's not the case, then Sam certainly makes a painful choice by going to live forever with Frodo in the West, rather than waiting out the rest of his days and eventually joining Rosie in the afterlife. Even though all hurts are supposed to be healed in the West, you'd think that after their long life together and the love they had that, content as he may be, the now-immortal Sam would still miss his wife (and later his children, who would eventually die), and missing loved ones for eternity doesn't sound entirely like my idea of heaven. In fact, Sam's decision becomes even more strange and painful when you consider that Sam knows that hobbits are allowed to sail into the West (since only humans are specifically banned, and he's seen Frodo and Bilbo go, and, though Sam doesn't know this, we know also from the appendix that dwarves can go into the West) and so one has to wonder why, knowing this, Sam didn't go down to the shores of the sea and get on a boat with Rosie while she was still alive?! He could have had the best of both worlds then. Lastly, this is an immensely sad footnote to LOTR because there's no guarantee that Sam actually survives the voyage and lands on the shores of the West. Certainly it says the tradition of his daughter's family is that he sailed over the sea. But there's really no info beyond the fact that he departed. There's no mention of whether he found a group of straggler elves and hitched a ride with them, or if he found or built a little boat of his own and set off on a solo voyage - which wouldn't bode well considering that hobbits aren't known as mighty mariners and it's a long voyage for an old gaffer to take on his own. In any case, Sam's journey (or attempted journey) into the West after Rosie's death has always been the saddest part of the tale to me.

7) From the Dust Returned by Ray Bradbury - Chapter 9 "Homecoming"

In this strange, sometimes wonderful, sometimes creepy tale about a family of vampires (and mummies, and ghosts, and assorted other nightmares) living in a huge old house outside a small town in Illinois, and the human child they've adopted, the chapter "Homecoming" with all its raucousness of a family reunited, is, at its heart, terribly sad. The human child, Timothy, can't join in the family's fun, he lacks their abilities, he isn't able to drink their special "wines", he stands out because he has a beating heart. These things together would be enough to make for a painful story about a person who, even in a child, is radically different and thus isolated; someone who doesn't fit in and is reminded of it constantly and can't do anything to change the situation. Add to this the unspoken truth that in being raised by this family, he's apart from normal human society and comfort, and thus will probably always be an outsider from humans as well - really, there's no belonging anywhere for this poor kid. But what makes this chapter especially crushing is the scene at the end where poor Timothy is sitting in the barn with his pets, having just cried about how he's so different, when his mother comes out to check on him. She's tender, she reminds him the family loves him, and tries to comfort him in her own way (from the unnerving perspective of the undead). But in telling him that someday he'll die and the family will make sure his grave is protected, she really only serves to emphasize the fact that he isn't one of them, and will never be, and will someday be parted from them forever. In one blow this poor kid has been confronted with the stark reality of his own mortality and, worst of all, that he will never truly fit in. It's horribly sad, but there's some cold comfort in that because of his status apart, Timothy is able to take on the role of observer/historian/author and keep the family alive in memory in the years ahead as more and more of them fall victim to modern times where supernatural monsters have no place.

6) Babylon 5 In the Beginning - Londo's tale of the war

This movie is one of my favourite parts of the Babylon 5 story for many reasons, one of which is Londo's heartbreaking description of the height of the Earth-Minbari War when humanity was almost destroyed. It's an immensely powerful sequence: a combination of beautiful and frightening visuals as Earthforce ships are blown to pieces, families holding each other and soldiers dying; the sheer moving poetry of Londo's emotional description of heroics, tragedy and inevitability; and underneath it all there's the mournful wail of a pipe and the teardrop-falling notes of a harp. It's a sequence that's designed to illicit an emotional response and it does it perfectly. How many times have I watched it? Doesn't matter. I'm still caught on the verge of tears anytime I see this part.

5) The Martian Chronicles by Ray Bradbury - "There Will Come Soft Rains"

There's no way you could make an SF tear jerker list without including this story. The complete desolation of the city and house (and by obvious extension all of mankind's works) is powerful enough, but then we're confronted with an innocent, uncomprehending victim: a family dog, suffering from radiation (and probably starvation and injuries), dragging itself home to die. Even the animals that have loved us and served us aren't safe from our folly. And then there's the bit that follows that makes my skin crawl where the house's cleaning robots nip out of their holes to cut the carcass up and remove all traces. Bradbury knows how to pluck heartstrings.

4) Babylon 5 - season 4 - "Between the Darkness and the Light" - Ivanova in the Whitestar sickbay

This has always been a tough scene to watch. Forget about 99% of all other Hollywood-made deathbed scenes (especially those made for TV), this one doesn't try to sugarcoat suffering. Where other shows or movies would have some actress made up to look as beautiful as can be (if, perhaps, a tad pale), lying on clean white sheets, alert and making some chirpy speech, hearing about how everything will be okay and then softly sighing her way into heaven, Babylon 5 paints a grim, steely, very real picture of someone whose body has been shattered as the price for a hard-won victory in war. It's a dark, grey room that Sheridan finds Ivanova in, her normally pretty face is pasty and puffy and bruised. There are metal rods jammed into her skull to immobilize her head. She's surrounded by machines. She shudders from the pain and involuntary muscle spasms. Her breathing and speech are laboured and she drifts in and out of consciousness. And she knows she's in trouble and demands to be told the truth, and we have to watch Sheridan's pain as he's forced to bear the awful burden of telling her she's going to die, and probably soon. And he knows he won't be there for her when it happens. What makes it all the more wrenching is that Ivanova got there trying to help Sheridan, and there on the edge of death, she's still trying to help him, telling him not to feel guilty for what happened to her, and thinking about the best place for him to be when he leads the liberation fleet to Earth. Right to the end she's trying to do her job as his right hand. It's a painful scene to watch, but you just can't turn away. Bravo to Straczynski and the rest of the B5 team for not flinching either.

3) Babylon 5 - season 5 - "Sleeping in Light" - the destruction of Babylon 5

Another B5 reference - damn Straczynski & co are good at making me weepy! There are so many painful moments on this list (and many more that didn't make it) involving people, and yet one of the spots in the crucial top 3 is devoted to a thing, a collection of spinning metal, a space station being decommissioned and (violently) dismantled. And yet it's a powerful scene. Certainly it's emotional because the destruction of the station follows right on the heels of Sheridan's death. But the impact of the station's destruction is also so great because of all it has come to mean to us, the audience. For the characters, it's been a home - the one place in the universe many of them could fit in and heal their emotional wounds in; the last, best place for peace; and the last, best place for victory. For the audience however, it's the heart of all of the great tales and characters that we've come to love over five long (but not long enough!) years of storytelling. It's taken a beating but always survived (if not always completely intact). In so doing, it has beaten the odds - those against its chances of success within the context of the story itself, and those against its chances of survival (especially for 5 years) as a non-network science fiction show. And so when the explosions blossom inside B5's hull, blasting it into memory, it feels very much like we've known a person as real as any of the other characters. Perhaps its an unconscious feeling along the lines of Shinto beliefs that everything has a spirit, and so the loss of B5 is legitimately as important as the death of Sheridan. And it's also just a basic, visceral reaction to something so familiar and loved suddenly being destroyed before our eyes. What's especially noteworthy is that this destruction of a vessel has an emotional impact on me in a way that others don't necessarily - certainly as a viewer I spent as much time watching Galactica pull through against the odds in the new BSG, but when when it finally flew into the sun, the sadness just wasn't there; I just shrugged it off. But B5... there's always a catch in my throat when I watch its end.

2) Futurama - "Jurassic Bark"

Remember when I said earlier my friend and I had been talking about the sucker punches that Futurama throws at you sometimes? This was the biggest one of all. If you've ever owned and loved a pet, and been loved by a pet, it's damn near impossible to watch the end of this episode and not have tears rolling down your cheeks. In the space of a minute or two it's a retelling of Greyfriars Bobby. It captures all of the love and loyalty that a pet can feel for its human, and the lengths animals are willing to go, and the sadness they feel if there's an accident and the owner doesn't come home one day. I can say that every person I've spoken with who's an animal lover and a Futurama fan has unfailingly said "Oh, let's not talk about this episode! I don't want to cry!" - and meant it! - whenever "Jurassic Bark" is mentioned. That's a powerful piece of storytelling, not just for a comedic science fiction cartoon, but for any kind of entertainment. Damn. I'm getting kinda choked-up just writing about it.

1) Up - the opening sequence with Carl and Ellie

If you're not weeping into a kleenex by now, this final nomination might clinch things for ya. Whole novels and movies have been written about couples and their relationships over a lifetime, their happy moments and their tragedies, and failed to accomplish what Up does in five-or-so minutes. We see Carl and Ellie come together as children, share their dreams and adventures, grow up together, grow old together, and then get parted by death, with poor old Carl left behind, alone, in a house full of memories that's soon to be taken from him. There are very few words, but it doesn't take much for us to quickly bond with these two, to feel happy for them having each other, and to feel their devastation at not being able to have children (in a scene that looked an awful lot to me like she'd probably miscarried), and finally to cry (or come damn near close to it) when Ellie dies. It's a piece of storytelling that captures in its own way what many couples go through if they're together long enough. If you're in a loving relationship when you're watching this film, you can't help but quickly turn to your wife/husband/partner when there's that shot of Carl sitting alone in the funeral home and feel that lump in your throat as you think "Someday that will be you! Or maybe me! And then what will I do?!" and then you just as quickly look away before they can see you looking at them because they're doing the same thing. Maybe part of the emotional impact comes from the fact that because this is a cartoon, we expect to laugh, not to cry, and so scenes like this tend to ambush us. But when it comes to Up, there's more than simple emotional bushwhacking at work here. It's good writing, plain and simple, effectively and powerfully capturing a truth of the human condition. Though it shows it on an animated face, the movie accurately illustrates the reality of the loss and grief when a spouse dies in a way that few other works ever do. That's why Up is the number one tear jerker in SF in my opinion.

So if that wasn't enough, what other SF short stories, books, TV shows, or movies get you crying?

When Worlds Collide - SF & Food

2011-03-04T00:55:00.000-08:00

"This station is now the ultimate power in the universe! I suggest we use it."

-Admiral Motti, Star Wars - Episode IV, A New Hope

"Next time: we eat Kevin bacon."

-Epic Meal Time, the Meatball Deathstar episode

It's a rare thing for two of my passions to converge, and when it does, I'm a pretty happy fellow. This time, it's science fiction and food. For the past few months (since shortly after they began exposing their culinary shenanegans to the world, really) I've been following the exploits of the gang at Epic Meal Time and I've been pleased to see occasional SF references (both overt and subtle) worked into their schtick.

Epic Meal Time is a weekly online show (each episode running about five minutes) featuring a group of young Canadian men who take experimenting with food to whole new extremes of size, flavour, and meat content. Their motto: "We make your dreams come true, and then we eat them."

Each episode starts with the group's tall frontman Harley Morenstein staring slack-jawed and bug-eyed at the camera and putting on a trash talkin' gangsta act as the cooking gets under way and he describes every ingredient (which always includes bacon, "and more bacon, and more bacon, and more bacon...") and each step in their process as they assemble their gigantic creations. Their accomplishments include the Meatball Deathstar (pictured above): a massive sphere of ground meat stuffed with pancetta and tortellini, then covered with meat sauce and cheese and perched on a wheel of garlic bread as wide as an Imperial interrogation droid - oh yeah, and a few vegetables just for decoration. Then there's the Turbaconepic: a "next level" take on the classic turducken, with a cornish hen and a quail stuffed inside the turducken, bacon and a meat stuffing crammed between each layer, and the whole thing then stuffed inside a pig which is then covered in bacon. And the carnivorous feast goes on. Meanwhile, on the side of the screen, a window displays a calorie counter that climbs faster than the US national debt. Seriously, each concoction has a total calorie count that's probably equivalent to the recommended intake for a family of four for a month. The episodes end with a mock promise of what they'll eat next time, a promise that never comes true, given the absurdity of the item to be devoured. My favourite: "Next time: we eat corduroy pants."

And yet, as frightening as the size of their creations are, I've gotta give these guys credit. There's clearly a lot of creativity that's gone into what they're making, and most of the epic meals look pretty damn tasty. I'd certainly join them in tearing off a chunk of the Turbaconepic or a slice of the Giant Protein Bar - though probably not a serving as large as each of these guys is attacking. The show is to be applauded for its unapologetic glorying of delicious, plentiful food in an era when we're constantly nagged about how pretty much every damn thing that tastes good will kill you and have an unforgivable impact on the environment. Nobody lives forever. Eat, drink and be merry. These guys get that.

By now you're probably wondering what this ode to gluttony has to do with science fiction?

There's certainly a fair amount of horror involved in watching one of these episodes as these dudes gorge themselves on their creations like a T-Rex family digging into a triceratops carcass - and in similar quantities. And while most of the meals look good, the occasional experiment, like the Slaughterhouse Christmas Special "gingerbread house", turns out to be simply disgusting.

But there is a sci-fi element that occasionally spices up episodes. One of the more obvious references is the afore-mentioned Meatball Deathstar. Darth Vader may have said of the original Deathstar that "The ability to destroy a planet is insignificant next to the power of the Force" but if he'd taken a gander at EMT's version with it's ability to curbstomp circulatory systems with its cholesterol levels, incapacitate legions with the meat sweats, and induce enough gout to cripple populations of entire star systems, he might have rethought his position on things.

Then there are the more subtle occurrences like the Giant Protein Bar episode which contains a line of dialogue from the Beasties/Beast Wars/Beast Machines (whichever title of choice you prefer from the 1990's animal-oriented Transformers franchise) series. It also gives a nod to the Carl Weathers-Arnold Schwarzenegger handshake/arm wrestle/pose-off at the beginning of Predator. There may be other geeky references in some of the episodes that I haven't caught, but I'm sure these won't be the last.

What I'm waiting for (and admittedly, it probably won't ever happen) is for Epic Meal Time to display the ultimate synthesis of SF and food... I'd love it if they ended an episode with: "Next time: we eat the Ol' Porkchop Express."

Bon appetite.

MindMelding with SF Signal

2011-03-02T12:45:00.000-08:00

Check out the latest MindMeld over at SF Signal discussing movie novelizations that were worth reading. Among the other, more interesting members of the group, you'll find me!

Admittedly, once in a while I've picked up some adaptations that made me wish I'd left them on the shelf (I'm looking at you, Predator, Ghostbusters, and Ghostbusters 2!) but overall, a lot of the novelizations I've read over the years are reasonably entertaining. That's why I've never really had a problem with them or the authors who write/adapt them. Sure, they're not original works, but how many times through history have we seen authors rehash the stories told or written by others, and do it well? Plenty. The fact that these books come out on the heels of a story that's just been told on screen, and that they're a part of a studio's overarching marketing plan, doesn't matter much to me and borders on irrelevant. Now, I don't read novelizations all the time, in fact it's become a rare occurrence in the past 20 years, but that's more a statement about the size of the pile of original novels in my "to read" inbox and the amount of time I have available than anything else.

My top 5 picks for novelizations were:

Vonda N. McIntyre's adaptations of Star Trek II The Wrath of Khan and Star Trek III The Search for Spock

Orson Scott Card's novelization of The Abyss

Piers Anthony's take on Total Recall

Alan Dean Foster's (the king of the movie novelization) The Black Hole

Check out SF Signal to find out why these novelizations (and others!) are worth reading.

Top 5 Evil Dragons

2011-02-24T00:41:00.000-08:00

As I've mentioned on previous occasions, dragons have always been my favourite creatures in speculative fiction. With these fire-breathing terrors being once again top-of-mind with my recent review of the movie The Flight of Dragons, I thought they'd be a good subject of this edition of the weakly list.

While the fantasy genre (and to a lesser extent, science fiction) does have its share of good dragons, it's the evil ones that tend to be most memorable. Maybe it's because they display more intelligence in hatching their wicked schemes. Maybe it's because they've got bigger hoards (and, let's face it, when you're talking about piles of gold and other assorted treasure, size does matter). Maybe it's because they've got better dialogue (really, isn't it more satisfying to hear one roar "Puny scum!" than something soft like "Yes, I understand, that's a very good decision choosing lilac over key lime to paint your sitting room."). Or maybe it's sheer flashiness: there's nothing as visually stunning as a huge dragon wreaking havoc on its victims with blasts of fire, chomping of teeth, slashing and crushing of claws, and slamming of tail. The bad guys command respect.

For the purposes of this list, it's important to spell-out some disqualifications I've made.

Firstly, by "evil dragons", I mean dragons that are intelligent and have consciously made a decision that doing harm to other creatures is something they will pursue, with enjoyment, as a profession or hobby beyond their life-sustaining requirements. This rules-out dragons (whether they're intelligent or animalistic) like Vermithrax in Disney's Dragonslayer, or the monsters in Reign of Fire, or the hatching that grows out of control in Elizabeth Ann Scarborough's "The Dragon of Tollin" (in Greenberg & Yolen's anthology After the King) who devour and destroy simply as a matter of survival, and beyond that don't care about the affairs of other beings as long as they're left alone. This also includes the dragon in the original Old English poem "Beowulf", who seems indifferent to humans until a man steals a cup from his hoard, and then begins his rampage to get his property back and exact revenge. Eating and protecting one's territory isn't necessarily evil, though it may be unpleasant for those who get in the way of these top predators.

Secondly, I'm disqualifying dragons that aren't really dragons - ones that either started off as some other kind of creature, or ones where it isn't clear whether they're dragons taking the form of humans or humans taking the form of dragons for convenience. That rules out Fafnir of the Norse/Germanic legends (and it pained me to disqualify him, because Fafnir is clearly the inspiration for many of the dragons in the Western tradition, especially in modern fantasy) because originally he's a dwarf who runs off with a pile of treasure and sulks alone in the wilderness until his greed transforms him into a dragon. It also disqualifies the evil queen in Disney's Sleeping Beauty. I'm also leaving out the dragon in the recent animated movie Beowulf because he takes the form both of man and dragon, and being the son of a human and a demon, it's tough to know what his actual form is, or whether form matters to him. Likewise, Beowulf's dragon in Parke Godwin's fabulous novel The Tower of Beowulf starts off as a man transformed into a monster by greed, much like Fafnir.

So having divided our horde of dragons like different coins in a hoard, I give you

The Top 5 Evil Dragons:

5) Bryagh (from Gordon R Dickson's novel The Dragon and the George and the Rankin/Bass movie The Flight of Dragons)

In the original Dickson novel, Bryagh was more of a thug than anything. He began as the big bully in the flight that the good dragons, Gorbash and Smrgol, were members of and only really became evil at the end of the book when he was mustered by unseen dark powers to protect their fortress against the story's protagonists. In the movie, Bryagh (in the picture at the top of the post) is a real power to be reckoned with. True, the red wizard Ommadon is the emperor in the realm of evil, but the dragon Bryagh acts as his Darth Vader (Interesting, since Ommadon was voiced by Vader himself, James Earl Jones. Bryagh was voiced by James Gregory.), enforcing the sorcerer's rule but acting as a significant terror in his own right. Bryagh is dispatched to kidnap a man brought back in time to help save the world from evil, and when it looks like this might fail, the dragon is quite content to drop the man mid-flight in hopes that he'll crash and die. At the climax of the movie, Bryagh kills nearly all of the heroes, taking pleasure in taunting them as he smashes or roasts them, before he's eventually brought down. And if that's not enough, he even takes pleasure in eating the eggs of other dragons. This huge monster is wicked in the extreme.

4) Lien (from Naomi Novik's Temeraire novels)

Once a powerful member of the Chinese imperial court (in Novik's China, dragons are considered full citizens and equal to humans - unlike their Western counterparts, who are treated merely as clever livestock - and members of the rare Celestial breed like Lien are considered part of the royal family), Lien is intelligent, strong and driven. Perhaps her cruelty is partially due to the fact that she was always somewhat ostracized because she is an albino, her whiteness being the colour of death in Chinese superstition. But she also allied herself with a scheming lesser prince who had designs on the throne, and when his plot failed and he died, Lien went into exile and vowed revenge against the English-raised Celestial dragon Temeraire and his human companion Lawrence who had foiled the plan. But it's not enough for Lien simply to want Temeraire and Lawrence to die. She becomes so driven in her desire for revenge that she flies across the world to ally herself with Napoleon to help him conquer the world. By assisting the French emperor in his attempts to crush Britain, Lien hopes to make her nemeses suffer. Lending her own intelligence and Chinese learning to Napoleon's military, as well as own considerable strength, Lien helps the French air corps crush all opposition on the continent and secures a beachhead for an invasion force to land in Britain. She even uses her "divine wind" (an ability of the Celestial breed to generate a powerful sonic blast) to create a tidal wave to destroy many of Admiral Nelson's ships in a battle in the English Channel. That's a huge amount of overkill in pursuit of revenge, and certainly ranks Lien highly among the most evil dragons. What's more, that probably isn't the last from her. While Napoleon's army is forced off of Britain and Lien retreats, I think it's likely that she'll be back to cause more harm in some future novel.

3) Smaug (from JRR Tolkien's The Hobbit)

Going by nicknames like "the Golden" and "the Magnificent", Smaug is one of the great winged dragons of Middle Earth. He's also responsible for a huge amount of bloodshed. In taking over the Lonely Mountain, Smaug slaughtered most of an entire nation of dwarves, with the survivors being forced to flee to the homes of their cousins in the Iron Mountains or to live in the wilderness. He's also pillaged and killed in the elven kingdom of Mirkwood and in the human nations of Dale and the Long Lake. The fact that he's fairly old means he's probably guilty of a fair number of other atrocities farther back in history that weren't documented like the genocide described in The Hobbit, and so it's my guess that his crimes probably outweigh those of Lien. The only thing that put a stop to the dragon's depredations, and specifically his last angry rampage when Bilbo stole the Arkenstone from his hoard, was a good shot by Bard the Bowman, who managed to put an arrow through a weak spot in Smaug's armor.

2) Nomote (from Alan Dean Foster's "Lethal Perspective" in Greenberg & Greenberg's anthology Dragon Fantastic)

He may only be the size of a small hummingbird, but Nomote is responsible for causing suffering and death on a scale that most dragons can only dream of. Every so often throughout the ages, the last surviving dragons gather in a secret cavern in the Himalayas and brag about their wicked deeds. The one who has inflicted the most harm is given a golden chalice and named their leader. At the gathering in the current era, as the great wyrms go through the litany of disasters they've recently caused, they're disturbed when this tiny cousin enters and claims victory. At first they scoff. But all bow when he tells them that he's responsible for causing addiction and lighting a person's first cigarette. Sometimes it's the smallest fires that do the most damage to a village.

1) Glaurung (from JRR Tolkien's The Silmarillion)

It's almost not fair to include two of Tolkien's dragons in the top 5 of the entire genre, but he was just so good at creating them. The most evil of all the evil dragons I've encountered in books, TV or movies over the years is, without a doubt, Glaurung. In the history of Middle Earth, Glaurung is the Father of Dragons, the first dragon bred by the evil god Morgoth. In the great battles outside of Morgoth's fortress of Angband in the north in the First Age, Glaurung was an ultimate weapon, turning the tide of battle against the forces of men and elves until he was wounded by a dwarf king (who he managed to kill in his thrashing around, thereby forcing the dwarven army to withdraw to bury their leader, giving the forces of evil a chance to rally). Later he led a whole group of dragons in another battle, again driving the men and elves back. This wingless wyrm then led a goblin army out to destroy the elven city of Nargothrond, killing or enslaving everyone. But that's not enough: Glaurung likes to torment his prey from time to time. He puts a spell on the human warrior Turin, making him see the worst in himself. Glaurung holds Turin enchanted while goblins drag off the man's elvish girlfriend, then taunts him afterwards, telling him that if he tries to save her then he won't be able to save his mother or sister. The dragon then captures Turin's sister and casts a spell making her forget her identity and past; she eventually meets Turin, who doesn't recognize her when she's grown, and they marry. When Turin eventually meets Glaurung again and fatally wounds him, the dying dragon's last act of cruelty is to take the amnesia spell off of Turin's sister, causing her to realize with horror that she's married her brother; this drives the young woman to kill herself. A dragon that would use its dying breath just to mess with someone's mind one last time, to cause one last death that will make others suffer with grief, is truly the most evil of all. On this list of dragons, Glaurung takes the gold.

Flight of Dragons Ages Well

2011-02-22T01:06:00.000-08:00

Animated kids' movies are like pizza: the best are the ones that age well. In the case of a 'pie, if it's as good or better when eaten cold the next day, you know you've got a thing of beauty. If a film's enjoyable in a decade or two once you've grown up (or at least aged, if not grown up at heart), then it's a keeper.

The Flight of Dragons falls into this category - as a thing of quality, that is, not something dripping with cheese.

Originally produced by Rankin/Bass in 1982 and aired on TV instead of in movie theatres, the story is based very loosely on Gordon R. Dickson's 1976 novel The Dragon and the George, about a 20th Century man who's magically transported to the past and has to embark with a group of companions on a quest against evil, while also having to deal with the fact that he's accidentally been put into the body of a dragon. The film's title, opening credits, and even some lines of dialogue (not to mention the main character's name) give more status though to Peter Dickenson's non-fiction book The Flight of Dragons, which endeavoured to describe how dragons would have been able to have their extraordinary abilities if they'd actually existed. But really, as far as Dickenson's contribution goes, the inner workings of dragons are summed up in about 5 minutes or so in a scene or two, while the story itself, though significantly altered, owes far more to GRD.

As a kid, all it took was the word "dragon" in the title (dragons were - and still are - my favourite critters) and the promise of adventure and this flick had me. And it didn't disappoint. There were dragons aplenty, knights, wizards, ogres, princesses and a desperate struggle to save the world and find a way for magic to co-exist with the growing reality of logic and science.

But as good as it was, over the years, The Flight of Dragons was shown less frequently. By the 90's, it was as good as gone. Sure, some channels would occasionally run older animated features like The Last Unicorn, but it was as though TFOD had faded into its realm of magic and had been forgotten.

Every now and again it came up in discussions with friends when we reminisced about our childhood favourites. But since there was never any sign of it on the videotape and later DVD shelves in entertainment stores, it was never something I gave much thought. Not too long ago though, I found a few minutes of footage on Youtube, and my interest was rekindled. I was pleased to find it on Amazon and got a copy on DVD last week.

And I have to say, as an adult, I think TFOD is still pretty entertaining.

Admittedly, it's not perfect. Some of the dialogue is a little corny at times (especially what was written for the late John Ritter as the voice of the protagonist, Peter), and there's a bit in the beginning where a gaggle of asshole millers has a whole assortment of different accents. The animation may be primitive by today's standards, but it was pretty good for '82 and is still good enough in my books. And there's the difficulty with the plot around the character of Aragh the wolf. Aragh begins his part of the movie dead, made into some sort of revenant by a good wizard to save the heroes from a hoard of monsters that no living creature can withstand. In exchange for his good deed, the wizard restores life to Aragh. But there are still many lethal challenges facing the heroes, begging the question: wouldn't it have been smarter to leave the wolf undead until all the evil badguys in their path were defeated and victory had been achieved? Isn't an undead wolf a far more powerful weapon against ogres and giant worms and evil wizards than a live one? It's the sort of question people ask about The Lord of the Rings and any other story where the dead rise to fight for good. Aren't they the ultimate weapon, since they're already dead? And if so, why would you stop using them after one engagement? With Aragh, there's no formal explanation, although I always got the feeling it was something of a fair bargain issue: a life for a life. It's also a little unsettling in the beginning when the good "green" wizard Carolinus is extolling magic's ability to inspire man to do better, greater things, and in his example lists dragon's hide as prompting the development of weapons of war like armour and tanks. Not so "good" results of influence by magic.

Regardless, there's a lot about The Flight of Dragons that works. It's a straight-forward quest story that's well put together and is consistently logical (pun intended, given the story's theme of logic versus magic) within the world it creates. There are plenty of good fight sequences like the rollicking aside when Sir Orrin Neville Smythe recounts his previous battle with the evil dragon Bryagh, or when Peter and his dragon mentor, old Smrgol, face off against the ogre of Gormley Keep. Along the way it also serves-up plenty of humour, with scenes where the dragons shake-down dwarves for jewels, or where they get drunk in the vaults beneath an inn.

It's a fairly smart movie as well, with the afore-mentioned explanations (as the man Peter is getting used to being in the body of the young dragon Gorbash) of how dragons breathe fire, why they covet gold, and how a creature that large can fly. And Carolinus' statement about evil being a natural part of the world was a good way of not only introducing the red wizard, Ommadon, but also of explaining why the green wizard and their other brothers had to initially try to include him in their plan to create a magical haven, thus accounting for how the enemy found out about it and why he wanted to stop it. Further, the realizations of Carolinus and the wizards Solarius and Lo Tae Zhao that their magic is failing, and the plot device of having the forces of antiquity "forbidding the four magic brothers from warring on one-another" (introduced after the wizards' failed meeting) neatly explains why the quest of Peter and his friends is necessary in the first place, and why the three good wizards can't just get it over with and gang up on Ommadon to end things quickly. Then there's Peter's battle with Ommadon at the end. It might have been sufficient to take the piss out of the bad guy by having Peter simply state that he was a man of science and that he denied magic. But the writers take things a step further, and while the red wizard mumbles incantations and attempts to summon a roster of foul creatures, Peter counters by rattling-off physics and mathematical equations and a litany of branches of scientific study, thereby making the scene far more powerful and driving home the point that science is just as broad and all-encompassing as magic, but also that it's logical and can be learned by anyone and doesn't require powers other than intelligence and curiosity. And I was impressed by a small, clever addition in the scene where Peter and Sir Orrin try to withstand the insanity-inducing noise of the sandmirks by singing: instead of making something up, the writers draw from real Middle English poetry and have the knight sing "The Cuckoo Song", which subtly reinforces that this adventure is supposed to be taking place sometime around the 10th Century (as Carolinus mentions near the beginning).

There are plenty of enjoyable characters too. They're all the better because the writers ensure that they're consistent with who and what they are. The dragons, even the good ones, still behave like dragons and have no qualms about bullying dwarves into giving up their jewels, steal cattle from innocent farmers, or deciding to burn down mills and potentially kill the millers if they cross the dragons' friends. It adds realism to them that makes them three-dimensional characters. Of all the characters, old Smrgol the dragon has always been my favourite. He's good-natured, if a bit prickly at times and is the mentor who has to teach Peter how to be a dragon and guide him through most of the journey to Ommadon's realm. I'll freely admit that I still get a little choked-up when Smrgol dies along the way. Sir Orrin the knight is another well-rounded character. Sure, he's the knight in shining armor, but he's not as young as he used to be. He's a brave warrior who's a force to be reckoned with in a fight, but he also boasts and when he's drunk he gets alternately maudlin and loud and combative. And, of course, we can't forget the bad guy: Ommadon. James Earl Jones does a terrific job with the voiceover for the red wizard, making him alternately lowly menacing and loudly maniacal in a way that's just close to over-the-top, but not beyond it, to be sometimes more frightening than his performances as Darth Vader and Thulsa Doom. It's also a credit to the film's writers that there's diversity among the characters. Not merely in the simple way of having dragons, elves and animals among the heroes. But more importantly, ensuring that the "good guys" aren't all white men. While Princess Melisande doesn't really play much of an active role in the quest, the band of heroes does include a woman, Danielle of the Woodlands, an unmatched archer who knows how to put a gang of elves in their place and is quite prepared to face-down a raging dragon. As for the three good magic brothers (I'm not sure we can count Ommadon in a diversity poll because he's so obviously not human), while Cornelius is white, Solarius is black, and Lo Tae Zhao is Asian.

What's also very important about The Flight of Dragons is that the writers don't pull any punches. This is a quest to save the world from evil, a serious struggle that means life-and-death, and doesn't just give lip-service to the term. People/characters die in this movie. That wasn't quite so much of a big deal back in '82 because filmmakers, even those producing movies aimed at child audiences (including Disney), recognized that for a story to have weight and meaning, there had to be consequences, and that meant that if there was real danger then not every character (and not just the bad guys, but the good guys too) would survive. Nowadays though, I'd be hard-pressed to think of a children's movie where one of the heroes is killed. Even the death of bystanders is unusual. But death is a very real fact in TFOD. As mentioned before, Aragh the wolf starts the adventure dead. An innocent bystander, the innkeeper, is killed when the ogre of Gormley Keep attacks a tavern in the night. Old Smrgol dies fighting the ogre - and killing it. And when Ommadon unleashes his terrible dragon Bryagh to deal with the heroes, the carnage is near-total: Danielle, the elf, and Aragh are all killed in fairly short order. Sir Orrin is critically injured and manages to kill Bryagh before he also dies. Only Peter survives. Granted, Danielle, the elf, Aragh and Sir Orrin are all revived when Peter defeats Ommadon and the magic realm is created, but that doesn't change the fact that the audience has had to watch them be killed. And, even though everyone else comes back, Smrgol remains dead. As well, there's a price for Peter's victory. In denying magic to beat Ommadon, he has severed himself from the magic realm and must return to the future, never to see his friends again (with the exception of Princess Melisande, who, having fallen in love with Peter, journeys to the future to be with him). And, of course, there's the realization for the audience that even though Ommadon was defeated, much of the destruction he was hoping to accomplish and the terrible inventions that he wanted to inspire happened anyway.

Bearing all of this in mind, one has to ask is The Flight of Dragons a movie for children? Yes, in that it's a good, entertaining story that doesn't talk down to them, but shows them that there are consequences for decisions and actions, and also that there's a high value to bravery, friendship, love and hope, and that even in a world that's necessarily of science, we can create a little magic sometimes. But it's also a movie that has the smarts to work for adults. And so it's my hope that The Flight of Dragons may experience a bit of a revival in the future and regain an audience that will appreciate it as a soaring feat of imagination.

Another Great Nerdy Songstress

2011-02-17T01:19:00.000-08:00

Nerdiness is the new chic for up and coming singer-entertainers - at least for young women posting their performances to Youtube. The latest is Victoria, BC's Amy Lee Radigan (way to go, Island girl!) who's hitting it big with her song "Nerdy Girls Need Love Too". A friend and fellow geek sent me the link the other day. It's got a folksy sound to it, but it's funny and full of references to Doctor Who, Star Wars, Star Trek, The Big Bang Theory and other pillars of geekdom and is certainly worth listening to.

Apparently the video came to the attention of author Neil Gaiman (Radigan's holding a copy of Gaiman's The Sandman Preludes and Nocturnes in one shot), who then tweeted about it, included a link, and called it "ridiculously sweet". There's a more flushed-out story on Radigan's sudden appearnce in the spotlight in a recent issue of the Vancouver Sun.

This newest SF chanteuse follows in the footsteps of Rachel Bloom, whose hilariously raunchy "Fuck Me Ray Bradbury" exploded onto the scene last summer (and eventually earned her an audience with the old master himself).

My only question (and this applies to both Radigan and Bloom): does this stuff count as filk, or is it something else?

Top 5 SF Couples Who Are Overdue for a Valentine's Day Kiss

2011-02-16T02:02:00.000-08:00

With Valentine's Day having just concluded, I thought it would be appropriate to put a little romance into the Weakly List. But rather than look at SF couples who have set the standard for great romances, like Sheridan and Delenn, Han and Leia, Adama and Roslin, Aragorn and Arwen, or Mr Universe and his lovebot, I thought it would be more interesting to look at the couples that should have a relationship. These are the ones who, for one reason or another, haven't broken the sexual tension yet, or worked up the courage to open their hearts, or realized their true feelings for one-another, or finally understood that the other person isn't a just a complete pain in the ass but really the love of their life. They're the couples who, if they ever did get together, would prompt fans to say "Well, it's about time!"

And so, with hearts and flowers and chocolates aplenty and love-theme music gushing in the background, I give you

The Top 5 SF Couples Who Are Overdue for a Valentine's Day Kiss:

5) Todd & Jenny (from Todd and the Book of Pure Evil)

As burgeoning highschool romances (or non-romances, as the case may be) go, Todd and Jenny's has it's share of obstacles. Not only is Jenny aloof even though Todd is clearly smitten with her, there's the problem of their school being the centre for evil supernatural activity that they're forced to deal with on a regular basis, which takes up a lot of spare time that would normally be devoted to adolescent melodrama and making-out. It doesn't help either that stoner metalhead Todd, as good-hearted as he is, may be the destroyer of worlds. And yet there's hope for these two crazy kids. Todd has demonstrated that he loves Jenny pretty much unconditionally and is willing to accept her for who she is, regardless of whether she's in her usual frame of mind, or whether she's been put under a spell and forced into a romance with an obsessive girl with an evil twin or with a basketball player possessed by the spirit of a 1950's auto wreck victim, or whether she's been cursed to increase her weight by a factor of ten. And, encouragingly, as we saw in the fat episode, Jenny has (grudgingly) taken notice of this and there seems to be a hope, however dim, that she may someday break down and give Todd a chance. So I say "Get it over with! Kiss the poor bastard!" and maybe, if the satanic cult doesn't bring an end to the world, they may live happily ever after - or at least until Jenny gets tired of Todd getting wasted and eating corn chips with his sidekick Curtis every night.

4) Lister & Kochanski (from Red Dwarf)

From the first day Dave Lister came aboard the Red Dwarf and laid eyes on Kristine Kochanski, he was head-over-heels in love with her. Three million years in stasis for Lister and Kochanski's death (along with the rest of the crew) couldn't diminish those feelings either. Lister even incorporated her into his life goal of returning to Earth and setting up a hotdog stand on Fiji. And, courtesy of a run-in with an alternate universe near-duplicate of the "Short Rouge One", Lister did eventually get Kochanski back. Problem was, she was in love with his alternate universe double, and didn't have much use for this universe's good-hearted slob. My memory of the middle seasons is pretty fuzzy, so I'm not entirely certain, but I've got a feeling that Kochanski never really gave Lister a chance, and we're told at the beginning of series 9 that she'd finally got fed up with him and the other "Boys from the 'Dwarf" and left the ship in one of its smaller craft. And yet the early seasons did contain a time-jump episode where Lister ran into a future version of himself, happily shacked-up with Kochanski. So it appears that eventually she does give him a chance. It's just that we, as the audience, haven't seen it yet. Never-the-less, it's gotta be a long, lonely wait for Lister to get to that point in time, so I say it's high time for Kochanski to realize what a great guy Lister really is. I say it's time that Lister got his Valentine's Day kiss from the woman he'd cross time and the universe for.

3) R2D2 & C3P0 (from the Star Wars saga)

They may have been manufactured long ago in a galaxy far, far away, but it's the 21st Century - time for these two droids to come out of the closet and show their true feelings for one-another. Really, R2 and 3P0 may be kidding themselves, but they're not kidding anyone else. Since their initial meet-up on Tatooine, the robots have been pretty much inseparable. When they're in the same room together, they're always close. Very close. It's not uncommon for 3P0 to have a hand near or on R2's dome. They're always fondly bickering like some old couple, and while 3P0 may storm off into the desert after a tiff, they're always ecstatic to be reunited. R2's always there to put old Goldenrod back together after some mishap. And when R2 takes a hit for the hometeam, it's not the human heroes who worry about him (hell, looking at their reactions, none of the Rebel heroes gives a shit about how much damage the little guy has taken and whether he'll recover), it's 3P0, who's quick to offer his own parts to save the astromech. I don't know whether droids would kiss or not on Valentine's Day. Might be a problem seeing as how R2 doesn't appear to have lips, much less a mouth. But maybe they'd interface with R2's data jack or something (now there's a rather risque image!). At any rate, R2 and 3P0 really need to get on with it and express their love for one another, and Valentine's Day is as good a time as any.

2) Mal & Inara (from Firefly/Serenity)

One Firefly's central sources of conflict is that of the captain and the companion aboard the ship as they struggle against the sexual tension between them that's thicker than Jayne's head. Arguments and insults are more frequent than attacks by the Alliance, Mal gets jealous when he sees Inara with clients and she is deeply hurt when he has a brief romance with a friend of hers. All of this eventually prompts Inara to leave the freighter, although she ultimately returns during the events of the movie Serenity and ends up staying-on again, much to Mal's satisfaction. Watching these two spar, the viewer knows it's only a matter of time until their explosive relationship is fully realized as an open romance, and yet because Whedon keeps stringing it along again and again, we're put in the same position as the rest of the crew of Serenity who see the relationship for what it is and sit on the sidelines in exasperation waiting for Mal and Inara to finally get it over with. Really, these two need to have a serious Valentine's Day kiss before they kill each other.

1) Ivanova & Marcus (from Bablyon 5)

The ultimate in tragic romances. All Marcus ever wanted was for Susan to care for him as much as he loved her. But despite the obviousness of his feelings, Ivanova, a victim of her own jadedness after a lifetime of romantic disappointments, doesn't allow herself to feel anything for him and returns his kindness and humour (usually) with disdain. Finally, once the ranger has given his life to save hers, Ivanova is forced to acknowledge the depth of his feelings, to admit she deliberately passed up a chance at happiness, and to come to terms with the fact that deep down she cared for him too, and she is nearly crushed by these realizations. Ivanova lives out the rest of her life successful in her careers in Earth Force and later the Rangers, but carries the constant burden of the lost opportunity with Marcus. It's a tragedy that's written and performed so well that it's almost as hard for the viewer to bear as the characters. If there's any consolation, it's that series creator J Michael Straczynski mentioned on one of the DVD collection commentary tracks that he eventually wrote a short story (haven't read it myself yet) taking place many years after the events of B5 where Marcus is eventually revived and Ivanova (now long dead) is cloned, and the two are finally able to build a life together on a distant world. Because of that, I hope for Marcus and Ivanova that there's something like Valentine's Day on that world where they could eventually enjoy a long overdue kiss.

Okay, before everyone starts with the "Hey, wait a minute! You left out..." I'll admit there's an absence of literary characters on this list. That's because as I looked through my horde of books, I couldn't find any examples of couples who should be together but who hadn't committed yet. Nor did any examples spring to mind when I sat down and thought about all the books I've read that aren't on my shelves. If there are any you can think of, by all means let me know and we'll put them in the "should have included" pile. Any more examples from TV and film that should be on the list? Let me know and we'll throw them in on the comments board too!

New Look, Same Babble

2011-02-15T02:56:00.000-08:00

It's been nearly two months since my last post and while it might seem like I'd fallen off the face of the Earth (and some may have hoped so), it was only a bit of a break. Partially spur-of-the-moment, part planned, part victim of circumstance.

I'd decided to take a week or two off during the holidays, what with family and friends visiting and the usual run-around, which is pretty much to be expected (Belated "Happy New Year" to everyone, by the way). Bit of a repeat later for Chinese New Year (Again, "Gung hei fat choi" to all of you). And, of course, I made lots of time for reading.

Then there was a recent, vicious bout of bronchitis that lasted several weeks (Note to anyone who may be sick: it's really, really not a good idea to read Arkham Asylum for the first time when you're burning a high fever and it's midnight after you've just watched a story on the evening news, complete with gory details, about the cruel butchering of sled dogs. Trust me.) which sapped me of all motivation to do anything besides read, watch TV, sleep, and ponder just how much goo a human respiratory system can hold before it explodes. The timing for this was especially annoying because I had to miss a screening of Big Trouble in Little China (timed for Chinese New Year no less! "Indeed!") at one of the big theatres downtown that was part of a national film festival sponsored in part by Space (which also included Alien, Aliens, LOTR, Predator, and The Goonies, among others). Being forced to take a pass on Wang and Jack on the big screen will give you an idea of just how bad this bug was. That being said, I'm mostly better now. Mostly.

And I wanted to take some time to recharge - give a little thought to some of the stuff I wanted to talk about here on bloginhood this year, give myself a bit of a kick in the ass about doing more book reviews (I've been Tweeting about the books I've devoured, but over the past year or so I'll admit I've been remiss about doing in-depth reviews here on the blog), give some time to brainstorm some new list ideas, and to give some thought to a bit of a renovation of the blog.

The old Parchment template I'd started with when I first launched was okay, but I've been growing tired of it for a little while. For the past several evenings I've been on Blogger's design page playing around with template options. While this ensemble certainly isn't the be-all and end-all, I think it looks a bit better, brings some of the side features to the forefront, and better reflects the subject matter of the blog. I hope all of you enjoy it.

Tron: Legacy Fun but Doesn't Live Up to the Legacy of the Original

2010-12-19T00:48:00.000-08:00

Warning: Spoilers

I can't say I've been waiting for 28 years for a sequel to Tron. It was an amazing movie by itself, and that was enough for me. Besides, it never presented itself as a story that wanted or really needed a sequel. That being said, when word came out a couple of years ago that Disney was going to continue the story in some way, I was cautiously optimistic and, admittedly, over the past couple of months, fed some cool teaser trailers and the odd tidbit from the rumour mill, I've been pretty excited about Tron: Legacy.

Did that anticipation and excitement pay off when we went to the midnight premier on Thursday? Yes and no. Tron: Legacy is a fun action flick, but it's nowhere near as good as the original.

I tried to go in with an open mind, prepared to give this belated installment to the franchise a lot of leeway in terms of telling its own story and standing on its own feet, but in the end, Tron: Legacy just doesn't have the intelligence, heart, or character development that Tron had.

The basic plot is similar to the original: man goes looking for something, gets sucked into the electronic world, then has to find his way out, in the process saving the residents of said software realm from an evil tyrant. But the protagonist in the original was much more complicated and ultimately realistic than in this newer film.

In Tron, Flynn's motives are pretty self-centred - at least in the beginning. He's out to clear his name and get some revenge and compensation. That means hacking into the Encom system. When the evil Master Control Program uses a laser to send him into the Game Grid, Flynn's still focussed on getting his data, but now he's added escape to his list. Helping the programs overthrow the MCP is something he only engages in because he knows it will increase his chances of achieving his own goals. Their struggle isn't something that really matters to him until its reality is brought home when Ram dies (you might argue that it starts when Crom dies, but that's not about the overall struggle for freedom so much as it is about the seriousness of the situation being brought home to Flynn). It's then that Flynn starts to get an inkling that creators, in this case human users who are seen as gods by the programs, have a responsibility to their creations. But even then, he's still pretty focussed on getting home with the goods. It's not until the end, after he's had to revive Yori and is watching Tron fight a losing battle against the MCP and Sark, that Flynn makes the decision to put the needs of the programs above his own. Despite his brave words to Yori, you can tell that Flynn knows that throwing himself into the beam to distract the MCP is a gamble that's likely to get himself killed rather than a ticket home with his stolen data. Luckily for Flynn, it turns out otherwise. The point is that over the course of his journey, Flynn undergoes a very real transformation of his character.

Sam, on the other hand, sets out in his journey in Tron: Legacy determined to find his father, and that never really changes. He goes into the new Game Grid and is faced with life-threatening challenges, but he deals with them to look for his father. He then finds his father and tries to bring him home. But there's no change in same over the course of this adventure. He's the same dude in the end that he was in the beginning with the exception that at the close he's decided he's got to take a hands-on role in running Encom now, and I would argue that this has more to do with wanting to hold on to something that his father shaped (and thus metaphorically a piece of his father) than it does with any significant character development.

There's another, more unsettling difference between the characters in these movies, and that is how they deal with killing. In Tron, the first death Flynn has to deal with comes during the ring game with the accounting program Crom. Until this point, Flynn's been waiving-off the whole experience in the electronic world as likely being a dream (if one that is occasionally painful when it involves a jab from a guard's shock stick). But when Flynn's shot leaves Crom dangling over the abyss and Sark removes the support, killing him, the reality of the situation is brought crashing home to Flynn. Sure it was Sark that finished Crom off, and it's obvious that Flynn hates him for it, but it's pretty clear from the look on his face that Flynn's feeling the responsibility of firing the winning shot of the match and Flynn has to deal with that. After that, he seems to kill easily enough in the lightcycle match, but remember that this comes immediately after the ring game, and he's probably angry enough to be looking for revenge on Sark and his lackies, and once he's engaged in the match, he's also defaulting back to his game-winning mental zone, and focussed on the escape. By the time he kills one of Sark's men outside the tower, it's a matter of being puzzled at his ability as a user to simply derez a program by copying his colour signature.

But with Sam, killing seems so easy. He's got time to adjust to the seriousness of the situation in transport to the arena, and he's been briefed by his father's stories about the reality of the electronic world, but when he's thrown into the arena in a disc fight, he's got no problems taking out the opposing program. Sure he's confused about how to orient himself properly on the floor or roof and how to use a disc effectively, but derezzing his opponent (which one would assume is hopefully the first time Sam has had to kill someone) doesn't seem to faze him. And that's how he continues through the story, knocking them all down and not really thinking about any of it.

And in terms of what we, as the audience, have to think about, Tron: Legacy falls short of the original. For an hour-and-a-half Disney movie, Tron had a lot to say. It asked us to think about who should control information and creativity, individuals looking to innovate, or the big all-powerful corporate entity only sanctioning what's in its own interests. It took a mature look at the Frankenstein fear of things that man creates going beyond his control - mature in that it didn't just point a frightened finger at the MCP as the example of the only and monstrous ends to man's attempt to make things that think (and this is only as far as most movies - even to this day - go when it comes to examining the possibility of artificial intelligence), it also held up the programs as a counterpoint - creations that thought and cared about each other and their makers. It asked us to consider that humans were on the threshold (and have now more-or-less accomplished) of constructing other levels of existence beyond the physical world. And, as I've mentioned before, it examines the relationship of creator and creation and what responsibilities gods might have to the things they create.

Tron: Legacy, on the other hand, primarily concerns itself with a simple look at the relationship between fathers and sons. With Sam and Flynn, it's a very simple look. There isn't any significant conflict and no examination of the nature of their relationship. Sam wants to find Flynn and wants to know why he was gone all those years. Flynn explains he got shanghai'd by Clu. Sam's fine with that and wants to go home. End of line. The father-son relationship between Flynn and Clu (and don't lecture me about how Clu is part of Flynn himself, a program reflection, rather than a literal son, because metaphorically sons are the reflections in one way or another of their fathers - Clu is just as much a child of Flynn as Sam is - Cain to Sam's non-murdered Abel - although Tron acts as a stand-in for this in a way in being transformed into Renzler) is more complex because Clu's brutality is something that he knows Flynn doesn't approve of, he actually tries to lure Flynn out of his retreat to kill him, he tries to kill Sam, and yet in the end all Clu asks of Flynn is for validation that he followed his programming correctly. But the film never gets into why Clu thought totalitarianism was the way to go, or how his need for Flynn's approval seemingly turned to hate even when things were supposedly hunky-dory between Flynn, Clu and Tron as they built the new world. Nor does the movie explore much in the way of Flynn's feelings towards Clu aside from a quick shot of fear when Tron is apparently murdered and then pity and apology at the end when he merges with Clu (which in and of itself was odd when you consider that in the original the programs resembled their users, but were not in fact the users and thus could be deleted without any apparent reintegration with the users or death on the part of the users).

Through Flynn and Clu, the movie also makes a pithy, shallow statement about the road to hell being paved with good intentions, but there's no real thought put into this because the action is moving too damn fast. As is the growing trend with Hollywood action movies, Tron: Legacy rarely slows down enough to catch its breath, let alone think about any philosophical questions it may raise. Remember that scene in the original Tron where Flynn sits with a dying Ram in a damaged recognizer, and there's a long, quiet moment where Ram studies Flynn's face, realizing at last he's in the presence of a user - one of the gods? Admittedly, that shot may have lasted a second or two too long, but it was a good shot, and a very necessary one for the story. You'd never get anything like that in Tron: Legacy, because it would mean stopping the action for a moment and running the risk of aggravating the ADD that directors, writers and producers in Hollywood seem to now assume that everyone in every theatre audience suffers from.

Beyond these major issues, there were other problems with Tron: Legacy. One of which was the fact that there were plot points that got a fair amount of screen time even though they did nothing to advance the plot itself. One was the whole digression into the bar owned by Castor/Zuse. While his Cabaret-style camping around was funny for a little while, it didn't add any significant element to the story. He was another obstacle, like guards searching on the street or a piece of rock in the landscape, nothing more. And he was totally unoriginal, and not interesting enough (or important enough) as a character to make up for this lack of originality. Sorry, Disney, but we've already seen The Merovingian in the Matrix flicks.

Another irrelevancy was the Iso people. Clu's genocide of them is terrible, but by the time we hear about them we already know he's a homicidal asshole. Besides, up to this point there has been no mention of them and no physical traces of their civilization that would make their loss poignant in anything other than a simply moral sense - we've seen nothing of them to really make us, as an audience, care. Near the end we learn that Quorra is an Iso, but so what? She hasn't demonstrated that she's significantly different than other programs/electronic forms of life. For all that Flynn talks about how the discovery of the Isos could revolutionize human life and philosophy, he hasn't said how that's any different than his discovery 28 years ago that programs, in their own world, are self-aware and have culture. Quorra's ability to come into the real world doesn't seem special either, since it's pretty clear that Clu could have brought himself, his army, and his wacky New Game Grid vehicles into the real world through the uplink in the same manner that Quorra came - it's not like Flynn just brushed-off Clu's advancing army by saying "don't worry - they're only regular programs, they'll never make it through" - he indicated they were a real threat. So why even bother with the Isos?

Something else that didn't work for me was the Daftpunk soundtrack. It had its moments, but after a while, really, it just became a monotonous background of audio oatmeal. It all sounded the same after a while, like background music at a club or rave, as opposed to a real movie score with variety (like original, which also combined electronic with symphonic music - it just did it well). This is even putting aside the fact that the much-lauded "Derezzed" track sounds a lot like the stuff John Carpenter cooked up himself for some of the escape from the Wing Kong Exchange scenes in Big Trouble in Little China (not that I have a problem with Carpenter's electronic score, just that you'd think Daftpunk could do something original maybe). What I did like was the use of the 80's music that kicked in when Sam turned on the power in Flynn's arcade, especially the faint strains of "Sweet Dreams" by the Eurhythmics as he was heading downstairs, about to be zapped into the electronic world. The Daftpunk tracks though... let's just say that by the end of the movie, when Sam, Quorra and Flynn are in the lightplane trying to elude Clu's fighters, the Daftpunk score seemed to actually make the scene less exciting.

I had a few visual nitpicks too:

Why didn't we get to see the laser zap transporting Sam from Flynn's basement to the electronic world? All we had was now he's in one world, now he's in the next. No transition. What a missed opportunity to show off some funky SFX. The abruptness of the change of worlds could also could leave new viewers who haven't seen the original wondering if "it was all a dream", especially if they picked up on the Eurhythmics song just prior to the transition.

Then there were the vehicles. The first one (and admittedly it was a fitting visual bridge to the original movie) was a recognizer. The new look for the recognizers was cool. But it was a bit of a disappointment that these models are clearly smaller than their predecessors. It also appears that they're only being used as transport. In essence, the once feared recognizers are now merely transport helicopters rather than gigantic, weird, stomping attack craft. And what's with the engine wash? Especially with engines that look like they give vertical thrust even though the vehicle moves horizontally? Lots of vehicles seemed to have exhaust or to kick up dust in the new film, even though others, like Clu's command carrier, didn't. Why no consistency?

The clothing was odd too in that is was more-or-less normal (if limited to black and white and orange only for colour and motorbike or space-age chic designs). In Tron, the clothing seemed, for the most part, to actually be a part of the programs. When Flynn arrives on the Game Grid, he's already suited up, and there's no change of wardrobe for him or most of the programs (with the exception of the tower guardians, but that always seemed to me more like they'd been removed from machinery consoles or cockpits than disrobed). In fact, when they're feeding on the liquid energy, or when they're feeling strong emotions, the energy lines (whatever) on their uniforms brighten, and correspondingly dim when they're being derezzed. Here, the clothes are simply... clothes, and the energy lines are merely decoration.

It was a little odd to see Flynn's banquet too, given the liquid energy (electricity?) seemed to be sufficient for the programs in the original film.

And there was far less variety to the landscape in Tron: Legacy. Lots more detail to the buildings in the city, but the surrounding landscape was just jagged black mountains and black ocean with more jagged black mountains. No variety, and so black I couldn't really make out much in the way of details. At least the original, for all its crude, limited texture, tried to present different landscapes with weird creatures and a little colour (red or blue to accent the grey).

The real key to accepting all of the minor differences in the physical forms of things in the film is to remember that 'Legacy isn't happening in Tron's world, it's happening on a New Game Grid - presumably the place next door. Flynn gives us this info (crucial to an existing fan's ability to reconcile the story with the original, but largely irrelevant to a new viewer) midway through the film when Sam finally catches up with him; Flynn telling his son that he brought Tron from the old Game Grid to help him run the new one with Clu. So we can probably infer that when Flynn & co built the new world, they based some of their designs on the old one but made aesthetic changes. But while this accounts for physical differences like clothing, vehicles and landscapes, it doesn't make up for the plot or character weaknesses.

What did work were the action sequences and special effects. The lightcycle match in the first half of the movie alone was worth the price of our IMAX tickets to see it on a huge screen in 3D. The aerial chase in the movie's finale sealed the deal. Throw in some cool disc fights where gladiators have to constantly re-orient themselves around the inner surfaces of their arenas, and catchy new vehicle designs (I wasn't a fan of the new lightcycles, but Flynn's retro bike, the solar sail freighter, Clu's updated command carrier, the wing packs, and the light planes were pretty impressive), and you've got a stunning collection of visuals.

Other sights I really enjoyed included the loving restoration of Flynn's arcade, complete with bachelor pad upstairs and his favourite hand-held videogame (in this case lying down in the basement lab as opposed to up on the couch). Sam's waterfront garage home was cool not merely for being an ultimate rough-and-ready bachelor pad, but most especially for the faded "Dumont" sign on the front of the building - a nice nod to Walter, the character from the original Tron who founded Encom and rhapsodized about the good old days when it had only been in his garage, and who was represented in the Game Grid by his program Dumont the Tower Guardian. Best of all though was the Black Hole poster in young Sam's bedroom. I make no bones about it, I'm probably one of the few people you'll run into who likes that old Disney SF flop, and I'm really hoping that the Mouse, as reported a while back, will take a crack at rebooting that movie if Tron: Legacy does well enough at the box office.

There's also the exterior shot when Sam is at Flynn's retreat that worked really well in my opinion, where the audience sees the lair seperated by a black gulf of wilderness from Clu's city - a nice nod to The Two Towers. Speaking of allusions, I also liked how Flynn's apartment was reminiscent of Dave Bowman's holding quarters at the end of 2001.

It was great to have Bruce Boxleitner come back as Allan Bradley/Tron. He created a nice continuity with the original film, and besides that, Tron, being the title character, had to make an appearance at some point. Given the direction of the plot, I'll even go so far as to say that I was okay with Tron getting Darth Vadered against his will by Clu, especially since he manages to reassert himself at the end (and, from the looks of it, survives his crash and swim).

Another slick little bridge to the old movie that worked really well for me was the board meeting scene where we find out that Dillinger's son has worked his way up the Encom ladder. Seems to be a very clear indication of where future sequels will probably go.

And no fan of the original could help but chuckle at the rehash of the "Now that's a big door!" joke.

So with all of its flaws taken into consideration, is Tron: Legacy worth seeing? If you're looking for a simple action flick with great special effects, yes. If you want a truly worthy successor to the original Tron, one with a smart storyline and interesting characters, you'll probably want to wait a while and rent it at your local videostore or from iTunes or some other online service. I had fun watching this movie, but Tron: Legacy just doesn't measure up to the original.

End of line.

1 Week until Tron: Legacy!

2010-12-10T02:06:00.000-08:00

Only one week until Tron: Legacy hits the big screen and I'm pretty excited!

My wife and I have tickets to see the Wednesday/Thursday midnight screening in IMAX here in Richmond (the suburb just south of where the movie was shot in Vancouver and Burnaby - in fact, looking at some of the "real world" shots in the trailer shows a couple of recognizable locations around the city). I've been deliberately holding off rewatching the original Tron for a few months now, just so I can play it Wednesday night before we head out to the bazillionplex to have it fresh in my memory (not that I really need a refresher, having seen it so many times over the years).

Is there any point to this post beyond simply gushing about the nearness of the movie like a kid asking how many more sleeps until Santa comes? No! I'll freely admit, after all the teasers, trailers and waiting, I'm just so damn happy that Tron: Legacy is finally almost here! Now let's just hope the story and acting are as good as the special effects look - I'd hate to be this hyped only to have my hopes derezzed.

Not Entirely Wild about Harry - Review of Harry Potter & the Deathly Hallows Part 1

2010-12-03T01:10:00.000-08:00

Warning: Spoilers (although, is it really necessary to give a spoiler warning when the film's based on a book that's been on the shelves for 3 years?!)

The biggest problem with going to see Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows (part 1!) last week was that it's been so long since I read the book that it was hard to place everything in context. It was hard to figure out what was faithful to the novel and what wasn't, and whether that was good or bad. Hell, I'll come right out and admit it, I've completely forgotten a lot of details from the book (such as the titular Deathly Hallows themselves!), and while in most cases with a film adaptation that would be alright because the film would be faithful to the book and have a plot that ran smoothly or because it would diverge from the book but still have a plot that ran smoothly, in this case it was a major problem.

The film tries to be faithful to the book (at least, from what I can remember), but faced with the daunting task of trying to compress and represent a huge amount of story (even though it's only half of the story) in 2-and-a-half hours of screentime the pacing is extremely choppy. One minute you're in a scene, the next it's jumped somewhere else - possibly with the same characters, sometimes with a completely different set. It was as though the movie was frenetically trying to jam in everything it could to paint the whole big picture of everything that was going on, even though the only way to adequately do this was to have the huge amount of time and space that the book was able to devote to it. The consequence of the rapid changes from scene to scene was that often scenes were robbed of their full impact.

Case in point: the broomstick escape battle near the beginning. This was significant to the story because it's the big opening act that tells the reader (now viewer) in no uncertain terms that the war is now on. Oh sure, there have been fights in the previous installment of the Potter franchise, but those have been quick skirmishes. This is full-on war with a pitched, take-no-prisoners battle involving many soldiers wielding powerful weapons/spells. I remember the book devoting a fair amount of pagespace to describing the aerial clash between Voldermort's minions and Harry's friends. But the movie just gives us a rapid, confusing, largely dark, twisting flight with distant flashes of light and every now and again an enemy swoops into view before Hagrid dives down to the highway or something. There's no sense of the scope of the battle. Maybe that was deliberate. Maybe director David Yates thought a kid-heavy audience would enjoy a visual rollercoaster ride more than a Midway-style dogfight (in which case I'd say he's seriously underestimated an audience that goes bonkers for Star Wars fighter battles). Maybe Yates has done it deliberately to try to show us the confusion of battle where an individual soldier wouldn't take-in the entire scene, but would rather be focussed on his own survival. And there might be some merit in that point of view, but I think there's an argument to be made for combining the two perspectives, as was done in The Longest Day and Saving Private Ryan, because as valid as it is to show how confused and frightening the speed of things in a battle can be to the individual, it's also important to the overall story to paint the larger picture of what's going on because it helps emphasize the stakes.

And it's the sacrifice of the larger picture and the stakes of the opening battle that create a serious weakness in the movie right from the start. It's a battle where Harry witnesses two significant deaths: Mad-Eye Moody and Hedwig the owl. While everyone would agree (and I have some vague memory of someone saying something to this effect in the book) that old Mad-Eye going down fighting was they way he'd want to die, this death was important because it reiterates right away the lesson that Harry learned with Dumbledore's death in The Half-Blood Prince, that even very powerful wizards can be killed by enemies and that fights are generally not fair. But we don't see this in the movie - it's mentioned quickly in passing later on and then the story jerks off in another direction. The death of Hedwig is important too because Harry has to deal with the death of a true innocent (say what you will about the death of Cedric in The Goblet of Fire, an animal is far more of an innocent for being unaware of and unable to comprehend what's happening - Hedwig only knows that she was more or less content until everybody took off and suddenly someone threatened her boy, she moved to prevent that harm, and got blasted out of the sky) who was close to Harry and died because someone wanted to harm him. It's an especially significant event because this death, possibly more than any other (from what I can remember of the book), weighs on Harry throughout the story and is something that he revisits often. There's no weight given to it in the movie though, just a quick moment when the snow owl swoops in out of nowhere to attack the Deatheater and then she's an exploding clump of feathers. It's quick. It's shocking. But the film promptly discards the moment, doesn't revisit it, and the impact on Harry is totally lost. Sure he shows that he's depressed throughout the film, but he doesn't vocalize it, we get no real window into his thoughts, and so there's no indication of how these things are affecting him.

And this was just the beginning. There were plenty of other scenes that I thought were given short shrift by the choppy pacing.

The other effect of the herky-jerky scene changes was that it heightened my sense that I was missing elements of the plot. It not only reinforced to me the fact that my memory of the story wasn't perfect, it left me with the sense that there was stuff going on - possibly important stuff - that it wasn't showing the audience and that we were just expected to know. No movie should create this feeling. A film, specifically because of its limitations of time, narrative perspective, and scope, should make the audience feel like they're seeing all they need and want to know, and all that's relevant. The illusion should never be weakened or shattered like it is here - it's integral for a movie that you never get the sense that the man behind the curtain is frantic because he can't fit everything in; the audience can't be left wondering if something is missing or walk away with the vague feeling that something didn't make sense.

And yet, for all of the rapid scene changes, there were plenty of moments which were far too slow. Some of the scenes with Harry, Ron and Hermione on the road seemed to drag (and while Clerks 2 may have made jokes about how The Lord of the Rings trilogy had a lot of walking shots, at least those scenes were effective and interesting), and the bit where they're in the Lovegood home limped along painfully slowly aside from the telling of the Deathly Hallows story via animation, which despite being interesting, had a fairly mellow pace.

What's the solution to the pacing issue? Maybe it shouldn't have been a 2-parter. Maybe The Deathly Hallows should simply have been a single, 4-hour movie. Oh sure, a 2-part flick holds the promise of making waaaay more money in box-office and DVD/Blueray sales revenue than a single film does, and the studios need all the money they can get right now, but if Part 1 was choppy, I'm not convinced that Part 2 won't be as well, and that's a serious disincentive for me to shell out extra money to see Part 2 in the theatre or to buy either of them on DVD. Besides, we're talking about how to solve the pacing issue, and clearly splitting the movie in 2 hasn't worked for scene changes. I think forcing the studio to put together a single 4-hour story would require the director to make it flow better and feel more coherent in order to make it watchable - especially for that length of time. One might argue that a film with a large percentage of its audience composed of children couldn't run that long because the kids wouldn't sit still for it, but I disagree; give a kid an interesting plot, and they'll stay locked to the story for hours. Look at kids watching Saturday morning cartoons (at least 20-30 years ago when networks actually ran Saturday morning cartoons and the cartoons were worth watching), or these days playing plot-oriented videogames, or, most importantly, kids reading the Potter books for hours on end. Make it good enough, and they'll sit still to watch it (although an intermission like they used to have for long movies in the 60's & 70's might help). Could a 4-hour film, even if it was cut better so as not to be choppy, contain all of the plot elements of The Deathly Hallows. Probably not. I'll openly commit heresy here and suggest that some of the plot elements in the book could be removed entirely (far more than the current presentation) to make a story that was able to flow onscreen. It worked for LOTR, it could work for The Deathly Hallows. But that would probably take a braver director than currently exists in Hollywood, and somehow I doubt JK Rowling would go for it.

The other problem, and call me shallow if you want to, is that looking at Emma Watson and Rupert Grint onscreen together in the later Potter films is increasingly and alarmingly like looking at a new rendition of Beauty and the Beast. The kid who plays Ron can't help how he looks, of course, and we should probably be giving the Brits serious kudos for casting (and continuing to cast) an unattractive guy in a lead movie role since Hollywood sure as hell wouldn't, but... eeesh!

It wasn't all bad though.

The movie does capture some nice moments in the growing relationship between Harry and Ginny. There's also a nice scene (which I recall reading somewhere was not in the book but rather written for the film) where Ron has left and Harry and Hermione are dancing and experience a quick moment of uncertain attraction that you'd expect from a couple of teens who have shared as much as they have and suddenly find themselves in close quarters with no-one else around. And the scene where Bellatrix tortures Hermione (largely off-camera) is well-done in terms of being genuinely scary - in fact, I don't remember it being as unsettling in the book as it was in the film.

Is Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Part 1 worth seeing? Well, if you've followed the franchise this far, yes. If I had to do it again though, I probably wouldn't have paid full price at the theatre - a cheapo Tuesday or discount matinee would be worth while, but if those options aren't available I'd probably go as far as to recommend just waiting to rent it on DVD/Blueray or download it online. Those options might not be available until next summer or close to the release of Part 2, but if it does get released for purchase that late, at least you will stand less of a chance of forgetting the details ahead of Part 2. Who knows, it might even look less choppy when seen closer to Part 2.

Quick Thoughts on the Finale of Caprica

2010-12-01T00:09:00.000-08:00

Warning: Spoilers

In following the buildup hype towards the finale of Caprica, I recall reading on some US sites that the final 3 episodes were to be shown in January, and yet here in Canada, Space aired what it calls the series finale tonight. Doesn't make much sense that they'd delay the finale in the US but show it in Canada now, but it's been officially labeled the series finale, so that's the info I've got to go on and will proceed with this review on that assumption.

I'm pretty certain that this was the finale though, for no other reason than the big wrap-up in the last 5 minutes showing more-or-less what's happened with all the main characters and laying down the foundations for the coming Cylon war. Moore & Eick and their writers certainly don't like to leave many loose ends/mysteries/unanswered questions lying around, do they?

That being said, I'll give them credit for answering all the questions in a quick, punchy 5-minute set of sequences. This was far more effective in terms of keeping the pacing - accelerating it, in fact, and actually building some tension into the wait for the coming series about young Bill Adama in the war - while giving necessary information than the closer of BSG was. Say what you will about the flaws of the BSG finale (and there were many), one of the things that really bugged me about it was the self-indulgently long and painfully slow wrap-up on Earth.2 of all the characters' plot lines/fates. The bitter irony was that this, what, half-hour, 45 minutes? of television at the end of BSG felt a hundred times longer than the 4 or 5 entire hour-long episodes that it took to do the same job for Babylon 5 - and the B5 wrap worked! Caprica's final group of short, sharp shots was emotionally satisfying, if not shocking.

The Adamas: After last week's shoot-out ending with Willy's death, I figured the only way the writers were going to explain Admiral Bill Adama would be to have Joseph and his secretary/girlfriend have another son and name him after the first boy a-la the Atreides family in Dune with the Letos.

Also no surprise that the Adama boys would go looking for some vengeance against their mafia kingpin. I have to say though that I was pleased at the resolution of the conflict, with the Guatrau's/Don's daughter helping in the assassination and taking over as the new boss. It would have seemed like too much of a stretch for the Adamas to not only survive the gang war, but to come out in control of "the family". This way, they get their revenge and a smart woman who can be trusted takes over the organization, allowing the Adamas to remain comfortably in the upper middle, but not at the top, of the power structure, which leaves Joseph free to pursue the legal legacy that's referred to in BSG.

What I was unsatisfied with, in terms of this family's role in the finale, was the lack of any real presence of Tamara. You'd think that will everything going on in the world(s - real and virtual) that she'd have shown herself, if for no other reason than to watch. Really, given their relationship, I'm surprised that there wasn't any dialogue between Zoe and Tamara about what was going on and what their role would be. Granted, Zoe's probably thinking about herself and her chance to be with her parents again and what to do about Clarice, but given the amount of time she's spent with Tamara and the bond they've formed, I really doubt Zoe would just ignore her co-virtual-goddess throughout the unfolding crisis. It felt like this was a major oversight on the part of the writers. What's intriguing is Tamara's presence in Clarice's virtual chapel at the end. Part of me thought it was a last-minute add-on by the writers who may have realized they'd forgotten Tamara in the finale and had to tie-up her storyline. And yet part of me wonders if this scene means that she was deliberately left absent from the entire episode as a means of indicating that she was just watching from the sidelines. In the end (literally and figuratively), this quick shot in the chapel strongly hints that Tamara will play some role in motivating the Cylon rebellion years down the line. Zoe may proclaim herself to be god, but with Tamara in the chapel among the Cylons, one has to wonder if it's the quiet Adama girl who will in fact grow into the role of the Cylon god.

The Graystones: (for some reason, I've always got to do a mental check when I think of this family's last name, as I always swap it with Greystoke from Burroughs' Tarzan) I have to admit I didn't quite accept the plot device of the monotheist police captain/inspector/chief/whatever going so far as to declare the Graystones to be suspected terrorists after Clarice's failed attempted murder of them. Really, Daniel's company is so huge, wielding so much influence, that even with the admission of Zoe's involvement in the train bombing that happened in the pilot episode, I seriously doubt he'd have the authority or that he'd get the backing, for a carte-blanche warrant against the Graystones - especially after the break-in and attempted murder. He might have been able to get them tailed, but (without any knowledge of Caprican criminal law particulars) I'd wager he'd be bogged-down in the warrants process and backroom police and prosecutorial and judicial politics so long that the attempted bombing of the stadium would be resolved long before he was able to get a public warning put out against them.

It also didn't make much sense to me that with a city-or-planet-wide warrant out for the Graystones that they were able to make it into the stadium at the end. You'd think that the Caprican security computer systems would be sophisticated enough and have good enough facial-recognition software, that Daniel and Amanda would have been snagged by cops on the street, regardless of the sunglasses-and-scarf combo, long before they got anywhere near the stadium.

That being said, I did like the resolution to the bomb crisis, with Daniel calling in the robotic troops to stop the bombing and take down the terrorists. Making the Cylons the heroes of the day was the perfect plot twist and sets up a delicious irony for their eventual rebellion and genocide of the human race.

It was also kinda cool as a Lower Mainland resident to see Caprica cast singer Mark Donnelly, who performs the national anthem at the Vancouver Canucks games, as the anthem performer at the C-Bucks game. Donnelly performs the Caprican anthem well, although the song itself is so ponderous that I had to wonder if it was merely a case of bad lyrics on the part of the series writers, or whether it was done deliberately as another subtle dig against the people of Caprica (as we've seen in other quick flashes from time to time in the series).

The wrap-up scenes with the Graystones made sense too. I thought that in his last media interview, Daniel's optimistic tone of voice despite his unwillingness to speculate how relations between humanity and the Cylons would go gave a hint that he'd grown as a result of the events of the series and wasn't quite so sure of himself or the world anymore. It was also bittersweet to see Daniel and Amanda reunited in the flesh with Zoe, knowing that this was something they'd wanted and yet leaving a nagging uneasiness given what we know of the humanoid Cylons' role in destroying the Colonies. What's also nagging is that the finale doesn't give a clear indication of Zoe's role in the Cylon war ahead. As I mentioned earlier, with Tamara in Clarice's chapel, there seems to be a sign that Tamara might be the Cylon god, rather than Zoe. Zoe may have decided to protect her parents from Clarice, and to destroy Clarice's heaven, but will the girl have any real or lasting sympathy for humanity, or will she become as jaded about humans as she was with her parents at the beginning of the series? And that begs the question that even if she does side with humanity, why was she not able to offset Tamara if Tamara becomes the force motivating the Cylons towards revolution? Wouldn't Zoe be able to stop the Cylons if there's a little of her in every toaster? Despite Moore and Eick's fondness for tying-up loose ends, I don't think we'll get the answer to this one.

Clarice: What happens with Clarice makes sense and is a sign of the talent of the series writing team. It's no surprise early in the episode when she cagily admits that she isn't planning on joining the others in the suicide bombing of the stadium. Clearly, she's a person who lusts for power and glory but firmly believes it's the duty of others to die for the cause - not her (that would interfere with her path to said glory). In washing her hands of that job, she's totally keeping with the nature of her character. I've always thought that there's a direct parallel between Clarice and the Cylon D'Anna Biers - I've wondered if the similarity in their personalities somehow implies that maybe Clarice was used by the Cylons as a personality template for D'Anna, although admittedly that's sheer pie-in-the-sky speculation. Best of all though is when her husband calls her on her ego and unwillingness to put her life on the line. His statement that she'll be in their god's light is as much a condemnation and a warning that she'll be judged and damned by their god as it is a lip-service parting blessing. No surprise either that in the wake of the plan's failure she'd waste no time in trying to set herself up as a religious authority again, targetting a new flock and stirring discontent in the Cylons. No surprise either when she goes to Gemenon and we find that Lacy is the Mother-Superiour of the monotheists with a Cylon on her right. The question is, what happens to Clarice when Lacy tells her to kneel?

I'll also give the finale of Caprica credit for the sequence at the end showing how the Cylons are being integrated into society as more than just soldiers - as slaves doing manual labour and menial chores like dog-walking. It paints a very clear picture of the world described in the Planet of the Apes movies just before Caesar said "no", except in this case, the rebellion is not entirely self-motivated. This time the Cylons, in place of Apes, are goaded by outside forces as much as they are driven by their own discontent.

And now the wait for young Adama's war.

R.I.P. Leslie Nielsen

2010-11-29T01:16:00.000-08:00

Sad news tonight that Canadian actor Leslie Nielsen has died. CBC is reporting Nielsen died in hospital in Florida after a battle with pneumonia.

His best-known connection to SF was for his role as Commander JJ Adams in the classic 1956 film Forbidden Planet. I think the first time I saw the movie was as a teen in the late 80's watching the late night Sci Fi Friday feature on KSTW out of Seattle. What struck me immediately was that it was a rare example of smart science fiction storytelling in 1950's cinema (although it had an advantage over most movies, working from the Bard's excellent source material), and it's one that I still enjoy watching (in fact I'm still kicking myself for not picking up a copy on DVD a couple of years ago when they released the anniversary edition). For his part, Nielsen did a good job of playing the typical square-jawed ship captain forced to deal with a deeply weird and extremely dangerous situation.

Nielsen had other SF gigs as well, including the early 50's TV series Tales of Tomorrow (never seen this one because I've never come across any reruns of it and haven't bothered to try to hunt it down online).

Mainstream audiences probably remember him best for his comedic roles of the past 30 years, including Airplane! and the Police Squad TV series and its successor Naked Gun movies. The Naked Gun flicks were pretty funny, but I also really enjoyed Nielsen as the 'shroom-fuelled Jedi master of curling in Paul Gross' Men with Brooms. Come to think of it, the only one of Nielsen's comedies that didn't make me laugh (surprisingly) was the Mel Brooks flop Dracula: Dead and Loving It. Overall though, Nielsen had a brilliant sense of timing, the ability to keep a straight face amidst the most ridiculous antics, and a twinkle in his eye that always promised more laughs.

His accolades include being made an Officer of the Order of Canada in 2002, and stars on the Hollywood and the Canadian Walk of Fame.

Leslie Nielsen was 84.

5 Long Years

2010-11-25T02:28:00.000-08:00

At the end of November 2005, I launched bloginhood. The night was chill and damp and a typical impenetrable West Coast winter fog was oozing over everything in the Lower Mainland and I was reading Bradbury.

Five years later, in the deep of tonight, it's strangely cold (not the dry, skin-blackening, space-between-the-galaxies cold of the Prairies or the drenching, overwhelming, claw-at-your-bones cold of Eastern Canada) and snowflakes are gently but insistently stumbling out of the low-hanging orange sky and I'm reading Robert Charles Wilson's Darwinia.

In the time between, I've been babbling about this and that having to do with science fiction, fantasy, magic realism and everything else in between that makes up the grand, creaking, expanding, wonderful genre of SF; hopefully with some degree of consistency. Why? Because it's so much fun! All of the book, TV, and film critiques - the savaging of the bad, the gushing over the good and the grand shoulder-shrugging over the indifferent; the sharing of genre-related news tidbits; the meditations or rants on the genre in general or issues affecting it; the reports from the cons; the side projects like launching a short-lived sister blog or playing a small role on the editorial team of an online critical SF magazine in its dying days; the BSG set photos as the writers' strike forced the series into hiatus; the War of the Worlds rehash; the occasional privilege of taking part in discussions on the very cool SF Signal; the 365 Short Story Challenge; and the lists in all their varying lengths and entirely subjective content... all of it has been such a blast! SF is my first love and it's so great to be able to have a place to come and talk about it.

One of the best parts of the whole experience has been all of you. I'm kind of baffled that people bother coming to this site, but for whatever reason, I'm grateful that you do come because it's cool to know that other fans out there are thinking about some of the same books, shows, films, and issues - even if you're also thinking that I'm totally out to lunch in my assessment of them. Which, admittedly, I probably am. So here's a shout-out to all of you, fellow SF fans, to the folks in London and Dorchester and Manchester and Glasgow, in Madrid and Wiesbaden and Berlin, in Torino and Stockholm and Moscow, in New Delhi and Adelaide and Canberra, in Seoul and Urasoe and Osaka, in Sao Paulo and Bogota and Mexico City, in Seattle and San Francisco and Peoria and the Bronx and Houston, and of course here at home in Edmonton and Saskatoon and Kitchener and Toronto and Nepean and Laval and Halifax and Mount Pearl, and yes Metro Vancouver and the Fraser Valley and Courtenay and Kelowna and the rest of BC, and all of the very cool places in between. Thank you, one and all, for being part of the last five years.

I hope you'll all join me here for the next few years.

Review: The Space Opera Renaissance

2010-11-15T01:11:00.000-08:00

I love speculative fiction anthologies. Whether they're historical retrospectives, cultural collections, awards anthologies, a year's best, an author's best, or highlights of a sub-genre, anthologies are the sampler platters that satisfy and educate SF appetites. They not only entertain and highlight the zeitgeist within the genre or larger culture, they frequently contain essays and introductions that provide valuable critical perspectives on their contents, the people who wrote them and the times when they were crafted. I owe my education in the classics of the Golden Age and New Wave to anthologies like Greenberg & Asimov's The Great SF Stories books and nowadays I find the best way to learn about what's happening in the genre around the world is to look for collections from particular countries, like Jack Dann's Dreaming anthologies of Australian SF (one of my biggest disappointments when travelling in Hong Kong this past spring was being unable to find any collections of HK/Chinese SF that had been translated and made available in English language bookstores). One of the highlights of VCon every October is being able to go to the Edge Publishing table in the dealers' room and pick up an advance copy of the year's Tesseracts anthology. The testament to how much I love anthologies is that every few years when I'm forced to go through my book collection and cull the herd to make room for new items, I never remove anything from the anthology shelf. Even the bad ones are kept.

The Space Opera Renaissance, edited by David G Hartwell and Kathryn Cramer is no exception. As a collection offering a perspective on the evolution of a major sub-genre, it's an important book that deserves to be kept, even if its contents are, on the balance, mediocre.

On the up side, TSOR is an enormous volume packed with a large selection of authors from Edmond Hamilton in 1929 on up to present day figures like Alastair Reynolds and Charles Stross. With a selection like this, you're pretty much guaranteed to find something you'll enjoy, whether it's an author/story you already know, or a new acquaintance. Some of my favourites include Leigh Brackett's Burroughsian adventure "The Enchantress of Venus", Cordwainer Smith's "The Game of Rat and Dragon" (read before but still enjoyed), "Orphans of the Helix" by Dan Simmons (a nice return to the Hyperion universe that I was pleased to read again), Allen Steele's "The Death of Captain Future", and "The Survivor" by Donald Kingsbury (something I'd read years ago when going through the Man-Kzin Wars books - a long one, but well worth the time). Many of the other stories included, at least in my opinion, were, if not great, good enough and worth reading. Some, like David Brin's "Temptation" or Iain M Banks' "A Gift from the Culture" weren't favourites, but grabbed me enough to make me interested in reading the Uplift (Brin) or Culture novels at some point.

In addition to the stories, Hartwell and Cramer offer well-researched and interesting commentary on the evolution of space opera from the "shit" of the early days (at least in terms of its reputation) to the current "shinola". Their introductions to each story offer not only the authors' bios, but opinion on the writers' impacts on the genre and where their tales stand in relation to it - either building space opera up along its classic lines or satirizing it or offering a more realistic interpretation. I also enjoyed reading, in the case of more recent authors, comments the editors solicited from the writers themselves for the purposes of this anthology. Great to hear the author's own take on their story's place within the genre.

On the down side, one of the anthology's greatest strengths is also its biggest weakness: in nearly a thousand pages, there are more than a few stories that tanked, and some of these were too long. Edmond Hamilton's "The Star Stealers" and Jack Williamson's "The Prince of Space" were prime examples of this. Others I found so tedious that (and I really hate to admit this), after suffering through a few pages I called it quits and skipped ahead to the next story. The one that comes most readily to mind here was David Weber's "Ms. Midshipwoman Harrington". Far too boring to justify nearly 80 pages (true, Kingsbury's "The Survivor" was pretty fat too, but at least it was an engaging story with that explored the relationship between cowardice, survival and adaptation, and played games with the reader about whether the protagonist was really all that sympathetic). The amount of stories that didn't work for me got to be enough of a problem that TWICE I put the book down to go off and read something else. Granted, to some extent this has to do with personal taste, but I'm sure I'm not the only reader who got bogged-down trying to get through this thing.

For a book of this bulk, Hartwell and Cramer should probably also have included more entries from the early days of space opera. While the title does describe it as the Renaissance of the sub-genre, rather than a complete history, it does span a period from the end of the 1920's all the way up to the early 21st Century, and thus does almost constitute a complete history of the genre. Why not include entries from some of the other early giants of space opera like EE "Doc" Smith, AE Van Vogt or John W Campbell?

That being said, while The Space Opera Renaissance didn't hit the ball out of the park, it is a comprehensive look at the sub-genre that's generally good enough to be worth adding to anyone's collection.

Pausing to Reflect on Remembrance Day

2010-11-12T01:15:00.000-08:00

Today was Remembrance Day, marking the 92nd anniversary of the end of WWI, and a time when we pause and reflect on the sacrifices of those who fought in all of the wars and police actions and peacekeeping missions over the decades. Sacrifices that have made it possible for us to enjoy the freedoms we have today.

Look back through your family tree and you'll find names, and maybe even photos that go with them, of people who were soldiers, sailors, airmen, merchant marines, nurses and others who have served their country. Some of these people you may have known, others may be generations gone. If you're lucky, there are stories to go with the names and faces, because the stories are important. The stories make these people real - more than just names dates and faded photos. And when these stories help us really feel that these people were real, we more fully appreciate their sacrifices.

What does all of this have to do with this site's usual focus on SF? Nothing? Everything.

Because of the contributions of our veterans and war dead, we're able to freely express our opinions on the internet, even if those opinions are only about science fiction and fantasy. It's because we have these freedoms that authors and TV producers and film-makers can tell us all kinds of different stories that challenge not only our imaginations but our beliefs and politics.

It's also relevant because there's some pretty good SF out there that talks about the wars and peacekeeping. Here's a post from a few years ago where I've named a few stories on this theme that I enjoyed the most.

But most of all, regardless of this site's focus, it's important to highlight Remembrance Day because it's simply the right thing to do.

Lest we forget.

Radio Gaga - Listening to Canadia: 2056

2010-11-05T18:07:00.000-07:00

A couple of weeks ago while on the CBC website, I stumbled on an ad for a radioplay that had been airing on Radio One that was surprisingly geeky: Canadia: 2056.

Not being a regular listener of the station, I'd missed the series' original run, so I hunted it down on iTunes and downloaded both seasons. I've been listening to a couple of episodes every night for the past little while and have just finished it. On the whole, Canadia: 2056 isn't bad.

As the title makes fairly clear, this science fiction-comedy is set in the year 2056, where the American government warns that the Earth is threatened by a hostile alien race, and builds a fleet of warships to pre-emptively destroy the enemy before they can leave their own world. Canada is the only other government that supports the US mission, and contributes a single vessel to assist the fleet: the Canadia. But you won't find this ship on the front line of battle - at least, not deliberately. Canadia is a maintenance ship - more to the point, the vessel and its crew specialize in unclogging toilets and various other small jobs like replacing lightbulbs.

The story opens with the crew of Canadia desperately trying to get the ship ready so it will be able to leave orbit with the rest of the fleet, when an unexpected new shipmate arrives. Midshipman Max Anderson is an American, son of a senior admiral who thinks her boy needs to man-up and that the best way to do that is to send him off to war - except, wanting to ensure that he'll get home safe, she assigns him to the Canadian maintenance ship, believing he'll be out of harm's way. Max initially has to put up with resentment, American jokes, and the awful realization that he'll be plunging toilets for the rest of the war. Having to deal with this new member of their crew are the Captain, a petty, egomaniacal, somewhat dim bureaucrat who's obsequious to his US Commanders only as long as the com system is on, then turns on a dime to grumble spitefully about them; the much put-upon First Officer Margaux Faverau who holds the crew together as she puts up with her bumbling captain and jokes about her heavy Quebecois accent; absent-minded old Doc Gaffney; and Amanda Lewis, the engineer who quickly develops a crush on Max.

Throughout their odyssey, Canadia's crew has to deal with everything from nutty AI's to American admirals that are either indifferent or overbearing cowboys, mysterious aliens to time travel, catastrophe to brains in jars, Canada-US relations and the stereotypes each country has of the other, government bureaucracy, and, of course, clogged toilets across the entire fleet.

In many ways, Canadia: 2056 feels a lot like the British TV series Red Dwarf. The crews are very much blue-collar workers going about duties utterly lacking in glory, and you get the sense that pretty much anyone from one series' ship would fit in well on the other vessel. Their misadventures tend to have the same feel too. The main difference is that the crew of the 'Dwarf is wiped-out in fairly short order, leaving Lister as the only living human, kept company by Holly, Cat, Rimmer, and later Kryten and Kochanski, while most of Canadia's gang manages to stay alive, more or less. In fact, I'm fairly certain that the creators of Canadia: 2056 are aware of, and probably intended, the parallels with the UK show, as evidenced by a couple of references in the radioplay to "the Jupiter Mining Corporation", which, as fans of "the short rouge one" know, was the name of the company that owned the Red Dwarf prior to her 3-million-year run into deep space.

There are plenty of nods to other SF works though. The afore-mentioned brain-in-the-jar has been used plenty, although every time it came up in Canadia: 2056, I couldn't help but think of the treatment it gets in Futurama (okay, admittedly, Groening's show uses entire heads in jars, rather than just brains, but you get the idea). Max's best buddy the robot is unapologetically R2D2. The series plays with post-apocalyptic survival a bit (take your pick of inspiration there), there's a time machine that's a half-assed cousin to Marty McFly or Austin Powers' rides, and there's an interfering, godlike alien straight outta Trek, among others.

Most of these references were worth a chuckle, but the first season's running joke with the Doctor and 2001: A Space Odyssey got really stale, really fast. I also thought the series ending was a little too The 13th Floor-ish. Parts of the conclusion were funny, but ultimately it was unsatisfying.

Is Canadia: 2056 worth spending $24 to download 24 half-hour episodes? Yes. I certainly would have preferred to listen to it for free when it aired on the radio, especially since CBC is funded by my tax dollars, but looking back at the original air dates and times, admittedly I would have been busy with other things anyway. But I don't regret paying for the download. It was funny enough when it needed to be and told a genuinely good story about some of the relationships among the crew.

I think it's also worth listening to as a way of supporting the dying art of radioplays. When's the last time you listened to one? Especially a radioplay that told a science fiction story, and in particular, one that was produced recently? I'll bet it's been a while, hasn't it? The last new ones, at least the last newly-produced ones with SF elements to them, that I can remember listening to were back when I was a kid in the 70's and early 80's. After that... nothing. Sure, there are rebroadcasts of Orson Welles' Mercury Theatre production of War of the Worlds, and the odd radio station here and there (like Rock101 here in Vancouver) will have a DJ who loves radio enough to convince the PD to let him do a classic radioplay show overnight once a week, but those are few and far between. As for the Mothercorp, CBC does a good job of maintaining the art form, but it's pretty rare for it to condescend to produce a radioplay as firmly rooted in the SF ghetto as Canadia: 2056 is. If you remember the better days of radio decades ago, when radioplays were still common, and if you want to experience a well-made one again, this program is worth while. If you're a younger SF fan and you've never listened to a radioplay, or have heard the old Welles cast and want more opportunities to listen to a story and create the pictures with your own imagination, I'd say this series is probably worth trying.

He Shoots, He Doesn't Score! - The Close of the NHL Superheroes Challenge

2010-11-05T17:40:00.000-07:00

Well, Hallowe'en has come and gone, and with it my NHL Superheroes Challenge that offered fellow fans the chance to mock the surprisingly silly team-up between Stan Lee and the National Hockey League. And it was a bust. Not one person submitted a tongue-in-cheek superhero suggestion for their local (or favourite) hockey franchise.

Why?

Is it because there's too great a rift between comic/SF fanboys & fangirls and hockey fans?

Is it because comic/SF fans have too much loyalty to their NHL favourites to take potshots at their soon-to-be superhero avatars?

Is it because Stan Lee is too much of a sacred cow for anyone to criticize his comic creations, no matter how much the new ones are blatant marketing schemes for a sport that's big enough not to need them?

Is it because I was unable to offer any prizing for my corny little contest?

Is it because ultimately this challenge was just too weird and lame? I think this is probably most likely.

Ah well.

I'll still be keeping an eye on developments with the Guardian Project and passing them along. And when the time comes at the Allstars when these, er, heroes are finally revealed, I'll play the pointless supervillain and level the weapon of merciless criticism if they fall short.

Top 5 Ramming Scenes of SF

2010-10-25T01:55:00.000-07:00

Sometimes, in the midst of a science fiction battle, you've gotta go for broke and call for ramming speed. Some of the best SF battle scenes that spring to mind most quickly for me involve a ship from at least one side, deliberately or accidentally, barreling into one of its enemies.

I'm not talking about some weenie, half-assed slap of a collision like the Enterprise shuffling into the Scimitar at the end of Star Trek - Nemesis.

I'm talking about a hull-wrenching, ship-wrecking, explosion-causing, full-on crash-up between two vessels, causing significant, crippling, if not catastrophic damage, and perhaps even changing the tide of the battle.

Run for the lifepods, chums, we're goin' in!

Top 5 Ramming Scenes of SF:

5) Star Wars - Return of the Jedi - The A-Wing Fighter Ramming the Super Star Destroyer's Bridge

It always seemed to me that this was an accidental ram: the A-Wing had taken a hit and the pilot lost control. But there's no denying that this was a truly devastating impact. How is it that the Rebel capital ships could pound away at this monster's shields and hull for minutes? hours? and not cause significant damage, but one little fighter, the smallest on the line, takes out its bridge and the Empire loses its flagship - and sustains massive damage to the Death Star II. Sure, we can argue until we're as blue in the face as Grand Admiral Thrawn about how absurd it is that the Super Star Destroyer's non-bridge officers weren't able to regain control in time through an auxiliary CIC or the engine room, but the fact remains that this was a David and Goliath scenario with truly awesome results.

4) Star Trek - Deep Space Nine, season 2 finale "The Jem'Hadar" - The Jem'Hadar Fighter Ramming The USS Odyssey

Sometimes, as we learned from the previous example, size doesn't win the battle, especially if your enemy is a Jem'Hadar fighter (let's call a spade a spade, those suckers are big enough to be small capital ships - they're basically corvettes or maybe big enough to be destroyers) with massive firepower and suicidal determination. The Odyssey, a Galaxy-class starship like the Enterprise, tries to come to the rescue of Sisko & co, but ends up getting pummeled by 2 (or was it 3?) Jem'Hadar "fighters". When the rescue is complete, Odyssey attempts to cover the escape of the DS9 Runabouts, but the Galaxy-class ship is destroyed while retreating when it is rammed by one of the Jem'Hadar. Sisko has it mostly right when he explains to the others that the ram was the Jem'Hadar's way of sending a message to the Federation of how determined they were. It was more than that though. It was really a big "fuck you". A message would have involved crippling or destroying Odyssey, but ramming it and destroying one of their own ships in the process was seriously over-the-top on the part of the Jem'Hadar. This was a scene that was also, at least in my mind, a major turning point for the Trek TV shows in terms of portraying the viciousness and brutality that a space battle might entail, and a promise of things to come for DS9 in particular.

3) Battlestar Galactica, season 3 "Exodus Part II" - the Pegasus 2-for-1

When the time comes to rescue the colonists from New Caprica, Galactica initially goes it alone, but the odds are stacked too heavily against the old battlestar, and it looks like Admiral Adama won't make it out. That's when his son Apollo appears in the Pegasus, and the larger, newer battlestar provides cover for Galactica to get away. Pegasus is heavily damaged in the battle, and so before he abandons ship, Lee sets his battlestar on autopilot and sends it hurtling guns-blazing directly at a Cylon basestar. The impact is so colossal that one of Pegasus' flight pods is sheared clean off and tumbles into a second basestar, destroying that vessel as well. An incredible battle to watch, and a nice nod to the episode from the old series where Commander Cain's Pegasus is last seen diving between a pair of enemy basestars in a hail of lasers and missiles.

2) The War of the Worlds by HG Wells, Chapter 17 "The Thunder Child" - Another Great Double Take-out

Of all the slug-fests described in SF books I've read over the years, the one that stays with me the most is a Victorian-era sea battle, the showdown between an early battleship and a trio of Martian war machines in The War of the Worlds. Wells sets the scene of a harbour clogged with ships loaded with refugees trying to escape the terrible Martian tripods. Suddenly, three of the alien machines appear and it looks like they'll be able to make good on the old cliche of having as easy a time as shooting fish in a barrel. But unexpectedly a large British ironclad comes racing into the harbour. In the first exchange, the Thunder Child is raked by a Martian heat ray, but destroys the alien with a volley from its guns. The battleship then charges towards a second Martian, which fires its own heat ray, destroying the ship's upper superstructure. However, the Thunder Child's hull continues to plow forward, ramming the Martian and destroying both. The third war machine slinks off, leaving the refugee ships to escape the harbour in safety. This scene has all the right ingredients: a surprise rescue, the good guys facing incredible odds (both numerically and technologically), a rousing victory when humanity needs it, the innocent escaping, and even though the heroes die, we get the satisfaction of seeing the surviving Martian retreating rather than destroying the ships in the harbour. Of course, it's also the last break humanity will get in the story until the germs take their toll. Wells shows how great a storyteller he is by giving us a victory that, as the rest of the story unfolds, seems smaller and smaller as the Martian occupation gets worse and worse.

1) Babylon 5, season 3 "Severed Dreams" - the Churchill vs the Roanoke

I've spoken at length before about what a powerful piece of TV storytelling (regardless of series or genre) this episode is, and this particular scene is one of the many reasons for it. The battle is raging as B5, the Alexander and the Churchill defend themselves against the Earthforce ships that have been sent to arrest their crews. The Churchill's captain, Hiroshi, knowing her ship is too heavily damaged to continue to fight, orders her ship on a collision course with the Earthforce-loyal Roanoke, broadsiding the other destroyer and causing both ships to explode. (I'm guessing Straczynski thought it would be appropriate to have a Japanese captain make a kamikaze attack in this scene.) It's an incredibly well-done piece of special effects to watch with a powerful musical score digging at the viewer as well. But ultimately, I think what's best about the scene is that it's treated with a lot of realism from the standpoint of the characters. When the destroyers explode, there's no cheering in B5's C'n'C. Some relief, but no celebration - not only do these people appreciate the danger everyone is in, and the terrible loss of life they've just witnessed, but they're also well aware that even though the Roanoke arrived as their enemy, not too long ago they were all part of the same military - all children of Earth. What we're witnessing in this scene isn't so much a great victory as a terrible tragedy. It's just an amazing piece of writing. As good as all of the other nominations are, they don't hold a candle to this part of "Severed Dreams".

What are your favourite ramming scenes from SF?

1 Week Left in the NHL Superheroes Challenge

2010-10-25T01:32:00.000-07:00

Alright comic fanboys and hockey fans, there's just 1 week left in the NHL Superhero Challenge! If the NHL and Stan Lee can team up in a truly ridiculous marketing scheme to create their own hockey-themed superhero squad, I think we, as fans, are entitled to give it a pre-emptive check into the boards.

Create your own superhero profile based on your local or favourite NHL franchise! Let us know what their strengths and weaknesses are (especially weaknesses!), what strange powers they have, and who their rivals are.

Deadline for submissions: October 31st - it's a Hallowe'en trick and treat!

Randy Quaid Tries for Refugee Status in Vancouver

2010-10-22T17:50:00.000-07:00

The CBC is reporting actor Randy Quaid and his wife have been in an Immigration and Refugee Board hearing today in Vancouver trying to get refugee status in Canada.

Quaid, whose SF roles include drunken father & co-saviour-of-the-world Russell Casse in Independence Day, the monster in Frankenstein, and Bruno in The Adventures of Pluto Nash (not to mention his unforgettable non-SF role as Cousin Eddie in the Vacation movies) was allegedly arrested Thursday by Vancouver Police when officers responded to an incident, ran an identity check on a couple allegedly involved, and discovered the two were wanted on outstanding warrants in the US. The 60-year-old actor and his wife Evi are charged with felony burglary and misdemeanor for allegedly moving back into and vandalizing a home they once owned in Santa Barbara, California.

Today at the refugee hearing, the Quaids claimed they fear for their life in the US. Quaid says eight of his close friends have been killed in recent years and he thinks he's in danger.

Top 5 Insults of SF

2010-10-18T00:21:00.000-07:00

There's nothing like a good insult - unless it's being directed at you personally, that is.

Science fiction and fantasy are full of characters who make fun of others and are poked-at themselves. There's Q from the Star Trek franchise, who wastes no opportunity to make snide comments at the expense of Picard, Riker or Worf. And the tables are occasionally turned when we get to see how ridiculous Q himself can be made to look. The Trek universe, through Deep Space Nine, has also given us Elim Garak, a tailor and former Cardassian spymaster, who while being treated for injuries boasts of having wounded a gang of Klingons for life with his insults. And the Dragonlance roleplaying tie-in books presented an entire race, the Kender, who have a magically-enhanced natural ability to taunt pretty much any person or creature to the point where they're driven into a mindless rage.

Say what you will about how nice it is of Babylon 5's Minbari to find amusement in misunderstandings of language rather than the possibility of personal danger or embarrassment, the rest of the universe usually gets a kick out of a good insult.

It's important to note that when I'm referring to insults, I'm not talking about SF-nal racial slurs here, like "mudblood" in the Harry Potter books, or when Cat offhandedly refers to the human crew of the Red Dwarf as "monkeys", or the Colonial use of "toaster" as an epithet for Cylons.

The true wit is in potshots directed specifically at individuals for real, overblown, or imagined flaws in their personalities, personal appearance, or actions. Sometimes it's an artfully drawn-out description or comparison taking at least a sentence to fire-off. Sometimes it's not that creative at all. Frequently good insults are dirty. And often just a single word will do to really, really get to someone.

And so this week's list is dedicated to:

The Top 5 Insults of SF

5) "Your mother was a hamster and your father smelt of elderberries!" Monty Python's The Holy Grail

Forget swords and armor or catapult-launched livestock and manure, the most powerful weapon the French soldiers mustered against King Arthur and his companions was their never-ending torrent of taunts. There are lots of really funny, merciless lines of beratement in this movie that never fail to get me howling, but this is probably the one that most readily springs to my mind. It's purely idiotic in its own right, but it's leveled with such ferocity and petty cruelty and it's just so creative that you can't help but love it. And let's not forget that it's part of the volley that succeeds in making Arthur cringe and driving him off.

4) "You stuck-up, half-witted, scruffy-looking nerf herder!" Star Wars - The Empire Strikes Back

Princess Leia's tongue-lashing of Han (right before her tongue duel with Luke) is perhaps one of the best-known insults in SF. What makes it really funny, as everyone knows, is that the space pirate takes more offence at being called "scruffy-looking" than a "nerf herder" or "half-witted" (which might be taken as a sign of being half-witted. I'm just sayin'.)

3) "smeghead" Red Dwarf

Short and to the point, this is Lister's favourite jibe at his snooty, idiotic roommate Rimmer (before and after Rimmer's death). What's great about this one, is that the writers no doubt concocted it to use in place of "asshole" and other similar real-life invectives that probably wouldn't be allowed by the TV censors (not entirely sure about the censors in the UK where the show was produced, but most Canadian and American censors would have an issue with it), and yet in doing so they used a real-life, disgusting bodily substance, and ended up getting away with it on air in a bunch of countries.

2) "You nameless licker of scentless piss!" The Man-Kzin Wars 3

Over the years as Larry Niven and his gaggle of co-writers have given us installments in the seemingly never-ending conflicts between humanity and the race of seven-foot, bipedal, intelligent, and highly belligerent tigers that terrorize the immediate neighbourhood of Known Space, they've done a good job of exploring the details of the Kzin culture. Part of this involves their language and especially their insults. The taunts they use at each other very much reflect their feline nature and behaviour. In this case, being nameless refers to low social status, as kzinti are only given names as rewards for outstanding work/war service or if they are noble-born (otherwise they're referred to by nick-names as kits and by their job titles as adults). The rest of the insult refers to an individual who engages in piss licking for no reason apart from enjoyment, since being scentless it would convey no information that a cat would normally pick up from it. In one nasty little barb, this phrase tells the reader a lot about the Kzin. As an insult among Kzinti though, it's very successful at driving the recipient into a rage, provoking him into a "scream and leap" - an attack resulting in a fatal claw-to-claw fight which is the common method for male Kzin to settle serious disputes. I can't recall which particular story from The Man-Kzin Wars 3 this insult comes from or which author wrote it, but it's a zinger that's one of my favourites for being gross, vicious, creative, kinda funny, and a piece of dialogue that provokes explosive action.

1) "petaQ!" (or p'tahk, pahtak, p'tach, patak, or however you choose to spell it) the Star Trek franchises

I haven't been able to pin down exactly what this nasty little bit of Klingon means, but like the previous Kzin insult, it's bad enough to usually force a fast and brutal response. PetaQ makes it to the number one spot for being short, effective, and probably the best-known insult in SF.

What insults from SF books, TV shows or movies stick out best in your mind?

The Fanboy (and Fangirl) Challenge: Your take on the NHL Superheroes

2010-10-17T23:04:00.000-07:00

As I've been harping about for the past week or so, Stan Lee and the NHL have joined forces to create a squad of hockey team-themed superheroes, but they're making everyone wait until the All Star Game on January 30th before they unveil their creations.

But why should we have to wait until the season's half over before we get to see these superheroes? The idea behind the Guardian Project mashup is just so insane that we should be allowed to start making fun of them now!

So I say let's do it!

I'm issuing a challenge to all the comic book/SF and hockey fanboys and fangirls out there:

Choose your local/regional or favourite (if you don't root for the home team) NHL team and create a tongue-in-cheek character profile for that superhero.

Be sure to include:

The Superhero's Name (must be some variant of the actual city/team name)

Powers

Weaknesses

Physical & Costume description

Catchphrase/Warcry

Arch-enemy/Rival

Backstory

Optional: Other relevant data such as battle stats (in place of game stats like never having won the Stanley Cup)

Bonus points if you've got some artistic talent and can send a link to a sketch you've drawn!

Remember: the whole idea of mashing-up superheroes and hockey is so ridiculous that your character and his/her attributes should be equally ridiculous. Be brutally honest about the potential strangeness of any comic character that would be inspired by your city/team. If they play poorly, dress funny, or have a vague name that implies nothing about what the superhero's abilities would be, or if there's something quirky about the team/character's home town, that's all fodder for your character profile.

I can't offer any prizes at this point for those who participate except for honour and glory, but it'll be fun!

Want to participate but you don't have an NHL team in your area? Need a refresher on the names of the teams? Not a hockey fan but want to take part in the fun? Visit the NHL's website for a complete list of all 30 of the current teams.

Note: I will also accept your nominations for superheroes based on NHL teams that no longer exist (ie the Quebec Nordiques, Winnipeg Jets, etc).

Reply through the comments section of this post. Deadline for submissions will be Sunday, October 31.

Stan Plays Coy about new NHL Superheroes

2010-10-17T22:33:00.000-07:00

Comic book legend Stan Lee and others associated with the new NHL Guardian Project took part in an interview with ESPN Radio on the 13th where they really didn't say much about the new batch of superheroes except how big this endeavour is.

At one point, Stan mused that some of the characters could turn out to be villains, but no specifics were given. Later he hinted that there could be some explanation for rivalries that might reflect some of the real teams' histories with one-another. Again, there were no details.

In fact, the closest they got to shedding light on any of these superheroes was one point where a member of Stan's gang mentioned that they'd drawn the Minnesota Wild character as being physically massive.

The rest was all hype about the big unveiling at the All Star game this winter.

Stay tuned for more on the comics-hockey mashup...

New Logo for Sci Fi Trading Post

2010-10-15T21:04:00.001-07:00

We've just posted the new logo for Sci Fi Trading Post to the site!

Kudos to Catherine MacDonald at Phatcat Creative for doing a great job on the design.

And a hefty dose of thanks as well to good friend and webmaster extraordinaire Steven Rowe of Lim Rowe Consultants for putting the site together and getting the new logo up.

We're still in the midst of building the back end of the site and getting the books and comics catalogued, but we're hoping to be open for business in a couple of weeks. Be sure to follow Sci Fi Trading Post on Twitter: @SciFiTradngPost for updates on our launch and information on our products.

The Not-So-Happy Thanksgiving

2010-10-11T23:42:00.000-07:00

Happy Thanksgiving everyone! I hope all my fellow Canadians out there had a great holiday long weekend, and for all of you who aren't from the Great White North, I hope you had a Canadian nearby who was willing to share his/her celebratory turkey with you!

For my part, normally I'd be smiling blissfully in a turkey-inspired near-coma right about now, but instead I've spent the weekend meditating on designed obsolescence in household goods, specifically appliances. While Thanksgiving proper is today (Monday), my wife and I usually do the big supper on Sunday, giving us the Monday to take it easy. But yesterday's meal preparations were far more of a hassle than they normally are: the oven died on us after the turkey had been in it for a couple of hours. Luckily I've got a big-ass barbeque out back with plenty of propane and I was able to finish it off very nicely out there, even adding a touch of mesquite smoke.

That being said, the whole event got me thinking of science fictional ways to get avoid having to deal with inconveniently-timed appliance failure. I was reminded of a very short science fiction story I read long ago (and I'm totally blanking on the title and author's name) about a family of the future getting ready for their big Thanksgiving or Christmas turkey dinner... the mother was bustling around the kitchen getting things ready, the key preparation being putting a big platter on the table and placing a small pill on it. All she had to do was apply water and in a second the pill would expand into a huge, hot and ready to eat turkey with all the trimmings. Meanwhile, the kids are running around, and she's concerned about the baby being underfoot, so she picks him up and puts him in his highchair at the table, then turns back to the kitchen to continue the other preparations. She turns back to the table a minute later, and realizes something is amiss: the pill is no longer on the plate, she looks around, unable to find it, then realizes in horror that the baby has reached across the table and is just stuffing the pill in his mouth. The end. Okay, so maybe the meal-in-a-pill idea isn't the best solution to my GE oven crapping out. Still, there's gotta be some way to build a more reliable appliance that doesn't die at the most inconvenient time.

And the stupidity doesn't end there...

Today (Monday), the fridge died on us. We only found out after it had been dead for a couple of hours. Had to toss a whole lot of food.

Two appliances in as many days, and over a holiday weekend centred on food! I've had streaks of bad luck before, but this is getting ridiculous! What's the plan for tomorrow? Is a meteorite going to brain me as I walk down the street tomorrow to a business meeting?

Why is it that nothing lasts anymore? Up until a couple of years ago, my grandmother had a fridge in her basement that she'd owned since the 50's that was still working perfectly and had the honourable designation of being "the beer fridge". My fridge: no more than 7 years old. Same with my electric oven (grandma's gas oven dated back to the 30's). If I had any doubts before, I'm now certainly a firm believer in the idea of designed obsolescence.

Where's the super smart house that's supposed to stay in working order and take care of me for life? Where's the smart house that Bradbury described in "There Will Come Soft Rains" that's tough enough to outlast its owners (and their dog - excuse me while I wipe some tears away) and stay functional even after a nuclear blast. Granted, it was only functional for a short time before eventually being destroyed, but still, it was pretty tough, and kept working until the end! I'll betcha its fridge and oven were running just fine until the place finally burned down!

Now if you'll excuse me, I've got to dig-out my bike helmet from the depths of the closet. I've gotta be ready if that meteorite makes an appearance tomorrow.

NHL Superheroes' Promo Website Up and Running

2010-10-08T18:48:00.000-07:00

As I mentioned in yesterday's post, the NHL and comic creator Stan Lee have teamed up to create a new line of superheroes based on each of the league's 30 teams. It's called the Guardian Project. Today the new Guardian Project website has gone live.

Upon arrival, the site takes visitors through a short trailer (complete with a driving metalhead guitar and drum score that gets kind of annoying after a while for its repetitiveness) teasing what some of the characters will look like. Problem is, the superheroes are all so shrouded in shadow it's pretty hard to make out any details, much less identify who represents what city.

Once the promo's over, it flips to the homepage, which is even more murky and piled with a legion of generally indistinct figures. There really isn't much more to the site aside from Stan's bio and a news page.

The National Hockey League's news page reports the characters will be unveiled at a special presentation during the All-Star Game on January 30, 2011 in Raleigh, North Carolina.

I've still got a bad feeling about this.

But, at the same time, I think we can have a little fun with it. More to come...

Superheroes Coming to the NHL

2010-10-08T00:39:00.000-07:00

This has got to be one of the strangest mashups ever: Superheroes and the real-world NHL. And who's one of the main characters behind this cultural collision? None other than Stan Lee.

CBC is reporting the creator of Spiderman, the Hulk, and the X-Men (through his SLG Entertainment company) has teamed up with the National Hockey League to create Guardian Media Entertainment, which will work with VICON House of Movies, an animation and motion-capture firm. Under the deal, Lee will create a superhero to represent each of the NHL's 30 teams.

The new squad of costumed vigilantes will appear in games available on a website set to go live tomorrow (Friday), coinciding with an announcement Lee and the NHL will be making at the New York Comic Con. These superheroes will be making appearances in broadcasts and animated sequences (presumably during the games) over the course of this hockey season. The report says a comic could also be published around February. Videogames and merchandise may be coming down the pipe at some point as well.

The aim is to attract 9 to 14-year-old boys to hockey.

Does anyone else have a bad feeling about this?

Reading the story gave me something of a queasy flashback to '79 when as I kid I sat dumbstruck in front of the TV when The Super Globetrotters animated series came on one Saturday morning. That was a weird sports/comic mashup, and that's even considering the Globetrotters were more of an entertainment act than a legitimate sports team in the first place.

What I want to know is how will these new superheroes reflect their actual home teams? Will an individual character have the same name, more or less, as his team? For example, would the Vancouver Canucks superhero be called the Canuck, or Canuckman or something like that?He certainly couldn't be called Captain Canuck because that's the name of an actual trademarked superhero. Same goes for the Nashville Predators - Predator has been a property of Darkhorse Publishing for a long time (although it would be really cool if they could use the name and actually have their superhero be a Predator - except, rather than battling evil or whatever, he'd probably just mercilessly hunt down the other superheroes and take bits and pieces of them as trophies).

What about his/her (I'm assuming it'll be "his" in most, if not all cases, because the marketing goal is to attract male fans) powers? Will their powers have something to do with the name of the team, or the region/city the team is located in, or it's logo (thereby making the superhero an alternate mascot)? Would the Oiler have the ability to extract non-renewable polluting resources from the ground? Would the Flame shoot fire, or just be flaming (sorry, Calgary, I just couldn't resist)? How about the Canuck? With an orca for a logo, would he swim around and eat salmon; or would he go for the Vancouver angle and have the power to knock-off work early, go skiing or golfing, and find someone pretty much anywhere who'd let him take a toke or two of BC bud?

Or will each individual's powers in some way reflect the particular skill or tendency his real-life team is known for? Would that mean that the Maple Leaf would have the power to suck?

What about weaknesses? Would the Canuck start off strong in a fight, but then become kind of indifferent and inconsistent and ultimately get knocked out of the battle? Would the Shark be powerless against Chinese chefs out to make sharkfin soup? Would Capital be neutralized if a badguy could turn him into a lower case?

Presumably all of these superheroes know how to fight really well, since, as the late, great George Carlin noted, hockey is really 3 activities: skating, playing with a puck, and beating the shit out of somebody.

Would there be rivalries among these superheroes, just as there are among the actual teams? Really, would missions be jeopardized because Toronto Maple Leaf and the Montreal Canadien constantly rehash their ancient feud and slug it out with each other rather than the badguys?

What about arch-enemies? Just who will these guys be fighting? What will the forces of evil look like? Will Lee have to create generic non-hockey-related crooks like bankrobbers for them to fight? Even better, what if he were to create supervillains that actually reflected the evils of the game? What about the deadly powers of Low Audience Attendance Man? How about Unsustainably High Player Contract Man? Or the truly horrific Franchise Relocator, who forces lesser, financially unstable superheroes to move to new cities, possibly even regions that aren't known for hockey at all and don't have a significant fan base?

What about supporting characters based on legends from the larger NHL community, like Don Cherry (host of Coach's Corner, one of Canada's favourite hockey curmudgeons, and quite possibly the worst-dressed individual on television aside from the cast of The Big Bang Theory)? Cherry would be awesome as a character... I just can't decide whether he would be a sideline goodguy, like a grumpy kind of Charlie's Angels Bosley who sends them on their missions, a badguy who berates them for their ineptitude until they burst into tears, or someone neutral - like a version of The Watcher who complains a lot. Would Gretzky make occasional appearances in the comic as some kind of supreme being in the manner of the Celestials or Galactus or one of the gods?

What about teams that used to exist but have since moved due to financial insolvency (victims of the afore-mentioned arch-villain Franchise Relocator)? Would the superheroes have to face the ghost army of the Winnipeg Jets, the Quebec Nordiques, the Hartford Whalers, etc? Or would we see the team/superhero they've become have occasional flashbacks to his old identity? That might actually be kinda cool. Wait a minute... I can't allow myself to get caught up in this and actually approve of this mad marketing scheme.

For all the money that the NHL has to throw at this thing, and all the creativity and connections Lee has, I just can't see this insane hybrid actually having much life (much less credibility) in it.

But it does give me an idea...

Stay tuned, comic/hockey fans.

Top 5 Worst Diseases of SF

2010-10-06T23:43:00.000-07:00

I've been sneezing and aching my way through a nasty bout of the flu for the past few days and as I sat around a few hours ago shaking my fist in the vague direction of the hotel where VCon was held (a bug was not the souvenir I wanted to take home from the con this last weekend!) and trying to decide on a topic for the Weakly List, it occurred to me that contagion might be a fitting category. Science fiction, fantasy and horror have been crawling with tales of viruses and bacteria of one kind or another since their earliest days, so it seems fitting to catalogue some of them. To be clear, when I say the "worst diseases", I mean the baddest of the bad, the ones that are scary and harmful in some way, not silly and beneficial like the luck virus in Red Dwarf. These are the ones you'd want to avoid like... well, like the plague.

Top 5 Worst Diseases in SF:

5) Drafa Plague - Babylon 5, season 2, "Confessions and Lamentations"

Unlike the Star Trek franchise, deadly diseases were a pretty rare plot device in Babylon 5 - they didn't pop up every three or four episodes as yet another threat to test the wits or toughness of the lead characters. "Confessions and Lamentations" though was one episode where disease did factor hugely into the plot, as it ultimately exterminated the entire Markab race, and threatened several others before a cure was eventually found. Looking back on it, I'm not sure what was more frightening about this disease: the fact that it annihilated an entire species in the span of about a year, or that the Markab probably doomed themselves by refusing to do anything about it or even talk about it because the contagion fell under religious taboo for being associated with those thought to be morally unclean. Clearly there's an allegory for the stigma around AIDS, with some people back in 80's and early 90's (and unfortunately, even still today) wanting to sweep the problem under the rug (or even more horrifically, considering it a punishment from god) because of its association with the gay community (despite its presence among the heterosexual community as well). What's most powerful about this episode though is the clear message that only by reaching out to each other, no matter what community we come from, by helping rather than shunning, do all of us have a chance at survival; that the loss of one community diminishes us all. Looking at the B5 universe, it might be noted that there's another terrible disease that rears its ugly head (and in fact has an entire - if short-lived - series devoted to it): the Shadow Plague/Drakh Plague. Certainly this is a disease that has destroyed other species that have tangled with the Shadows and their minions, and ultimately threatens the population of the Earth. But it's comparatively slow, taking something on the order of 5 years to do its dirty work, as opposed to the Markabs' Drafa Plague, which annihilated that race in about 1 year. With less time to find a cure, I'd be more worried about the Drafa Plague. The only reason it's going at the bottom of the list is because it appears to be a relatively peaceful death.

4) "germs" - The War of the Worlds, by HG Wells

Wells doesn't single out a particular germ to seal the deal for the Martian invaders, rather he uses the plural and goes on to say that all of the bugs that mankind has had to live with, developing immunity or limited resistance to, at the cost of many lives, have combined to attack the extraterrestrials' bodies. It's bad enough (at least if you're a Martian) that they cause a total Martian kill-off in a matter of weeks, but what's worse is that these are real bacteria and viruses that have killed many humans in the past before natural resistance was developed or immunizations discovered. In fact, if we count the many common strains of influenza that were no doubt part of this microscopic defence force, you can't help but remember that thousands of people around the world still die from germs like this every year. Real germs are scary.

3) Xenovirus Takis-A/the Wild Card virus - Wild Cards, edited by George RR Martin

Developed by a race of humanoid aliens to give themselves super powers, it was sent to Earth for testing to ensure safety. Although one of the aliens, who the people of Earth would eventually call Dr Tachyon, stopped the initial attempt to release the virus, the bomb that contained it was captured by a human and released during a battle above New York, spreading across the world on the winds. It was nick-named the Wild Card virus because of the unpredictability of its effects. 90% of those who contract it die horribly when it manifests: they might explode, burst into flame, melt, get ripped apart from the inside out, or suffer a wide range of other gruesome ends. This is referred to as drawing the Black Queen. With the 10% who survive, 9% draw a Joker and are inflicted with deformities. These can range from problems like translucent skin, tails, squid tentacle mustaches, to full transformations into animals, to deformities accompanied by super powers like Peregrin (a woman with wings who can fly) or Troll (changed into a frightening 8-foot troll with super strength and tough skin), to crippling and painful disfigurements that are awful to behold, like Peanut and Snotman. Only 1% of those who contract the virus draw an Ace and manifest super powers. However, only one-tenth of these have abilities that are significant, like super strength, the ability to fly, telekinesis, or invulnerability; the rest are given relatively useless powers, like Rainbow Man (guess what he can do?). Because of the risk of an unexpected, horrible, agonizing death, or being left to survive with a crippling disfigurement, the Wild Card virus easily earns a place in the top 3 of this list.

2) zombie-ism

Admittedly, this is a meta nomination, referring to a condition portrayed in many, many books, movies, and now TV shows. Do zombies result from a disease? Some works have portrayed the outbreaks this way, while others chalk them up to the supernatural or cosmic rays or whatever. Any way you slice it though, the zombie outbreak certainly behaves like a disease, with infected individuals spreading the condition to others through bites, and those who survive the initial eating attack eventually being overcome and transformed into zombies themselves who then prey on other living people. Zombies aren't the only critters from horror who spread like a disease; certainly vampires and werewolves behave the same way, transmitting their condition through bites (more or less). But of the three types of supernatural infectors, zombies have always been the most frightening to me. Sure, being hunted and bitten by a vampire or werewolf is terrifying and painful, and the eventual transformation itself carries the promise of further pain and horror, but at least with these two there's the possibility of retaining some degree of sentience and free will. For all but the most animalistic vampires, after the need to feed is satisfied, there's time to put one's mind to other things and a retention of the sense of self. For the werewolf, it's a once a month trauma, but again, there's the retention of the self and the possibility of leading some kind of life the rest of the time. Admittedly, for both there's the possibility over time of a weight of guilt for atrocities committed, and, in the case of werewolves, the fear of the pain of the next transformation. But zombies, on the other hand, are completely mindless, shuffling, disgusting monsters constantly in search of the next kill, acting either alone or in a mob to drag their screaming victims on them to eat them alive. It's a frightening, painful process becoming one, and once transformed, there's a total loss of self. The zombie disease is also remarkably fast-spreading, with total apocalypse coming very quickly, whereas vampires and werewolves tend to be far more controlled in their spread, having some degree of choice in whether to transform or permanently kill victims, and generally opting to simply kill and feed on them. I don't tend to follow horror too closely, but I don't know of too many stories about total werewolf or vampire apocalypses (aside from Richard Matheson's I Am Legend and its movie adaptations, or Peter Watts' Blindsight). The zombie "disease" certainly is one of the worst in speculative fiction.

1) the Black Death/Bubonic Plague - The Years of Rice and Salt, by Kim Stanley Robinson; Eifelheim, by Michael Flynn

What's worse than a supernatural disease that kills millions? A real one. And one of the scariest in recorded history is the Black Plague. It's estimated that in the mid 14th century this painful, awful disease killed anywhere from 1/3 to 2/3 of Europe's population, and there were further outbreaks over the next 500 years. Eifelheim tells the story of German villagers who discover a starship that's crashed in a nearby forest and who have to learn to live with their new alien neighbours. Eventually, the plague arrives wipes out the entire town. It is a story of how people cope with the introduction of something immensely different, with change, and with their inevitable deaths in the face of a seemingly unstoppable force of nature. In The Years of Rice and Salt, Robinson creates an alternate history where the Black Death goes into overdrive, killing 99% of Europe's population. The story opens with a haunting image of a Mongol warrior riding alone into a European countryside filled with towns but empty of people. It's fascinating to see how Robinson uses the (exaggerated) effect of a real disease to paint a centuries-long history of the development of the rest of the world's cultures free from Western influence (a history that's neither better nor worse than the real world's, merely different, if equally violent). The Black Death is, without question, the worst disease that's been used in SF because it actually happened and because of its terrible death toll.

(Dis)Honourable Mentions:

-the Vidiian Phage - Star Trek Voyager - The Trek franchise presented a lot of diseases over the years, but this one always seemed the creepiest to me.

-Borg nanoprobes - Trek's variation on the zombie theme

-the Cylon-killing disease - new Battlestar Galactica

So which diseases from SF do you think are the worst?

VCon - day 3 - The End

2010-10-04T00:57:00.000-07:00

Another year, another VCon, another lazy Sunday afternoon where things drew to a close.

I decided to catch up on a little sleep and then grab some brunch before heading to the hotel, so I didn't make it in until shortly after 1:00. Originally, I'd planned to start the day with a hefty dose of literary suffering at the Turkey Readings. For those who don't know, the Turkey Readings are a VCon tradition (don't know if they do this at other cons) where a group of panelists reads passages from a selection of some of the worst novels ever written in the SF genre. We're talking the literary equivalent of Plan Nine from Outer Space, or Manos - The Hands of Fate. Books that are so poorly written, their prose might come close to being classifiable as Vogon poetry. The panelist reading from a selection is assisted by volunteers from the audience who act out whatever's going on in the story as it's read. The rest of the audience has to suffer through this until someone in the audience offers money to make them stop. The catch is, once the money's been paid, anyone else in the audience can make a higher bid to keep the, um, "performance" going. This can in turn be trumped by a higher bid to force a stop, and so on. Bids initially start at a quarter or a buck, but as people in the audience continue to try to outbid each other to force a stop or ensure continuation, the price can soar, with, in some cases, winning bids being in excess of ten dollars. Then the next Turkey Reading begins, and the suffering and bidding renew. Money collected goes to the Canadian Unity Fan Fund, which each year selects and pays for one person from one region of the country to attend a con in another part of the country in an effort to build bridges between fan communities.

At any rate, when I arrived, the Turkey Readings had been rescheduled to later in the day to free that room up for a special surprise session: actor Robert Picardo, of Star Trek Voyager and the Stargate franchise fame (not to mention Innerspace!) dropped by to do a Q&A with con-goers, followed by an autograph and photo session. Seems he was in town shooting an episode of Stargate Universe. I went in and grabbed a seat for the Q&A. Picardo's an entertaining guy to listen to, sharing onset anecdotes from the sets of his various shows, and thoughts on the characters he's played.

After that, I went over to the History is My Playground session, where a panel of authors talked about, well, writing stories in historical settings. At one point, they spent a great deal of time talking about how much their research had taught them about the toughness of people who lived a century or more ago, despite their relatively short lives. This also led to a discussion of battlefield injuries and mortality rates, hospital mortality rates (and how they compare to today's statistics), and medical practices of the previous century. The only downside to the session was the crotchetiness of one of the panelists, Dave Duncan. At the beginning of the session, when Duncan was quietly wheezing through his spiel on something or other, one of the people who was sitting about midway back in the audience asked him to please speak up. A fair request, given his low volume, the size of the room, and the amount of noise from out in the hallway that was getting through the walls. Without missing a beat, Duncan growled at her that there were plenty of empty seats up front. True, but not enough empty seats for everyone who was sitting beyond row 2, and past that point, the noise was an issue. He was also gruff with another person in the audience who had put up her hand to ask a question within the first 10 minutes of the session. Okay, in all fairness, the first 10 minutes of the session is a bit early to start shotgunning questions or wanting to put your own two cents into a discussion that's really only in its nascent stage, but still, I think Duncan could have been nicer about it. Since, you know, it's people in the audience who buy his books and all (not me) and can choose whether to continue to support him and whether to share their reasons for doing this or not with other readers. Anyhow, the other panelists, Donna McMahon, Cherie Priest, and Lisa Smedman were louder, nicer, and, on the balance, had more interesting things to say over the course of the hour.

Once that was over, there weren't any other sessions for the next hour that were even remotely interesting to me, so I headed down to the movie room to see what was playing. Big mistake: they were re-running a low-budget piece of garbage called The Beast of Bottomless Lake that had made its debut Friday night at the con. I could only sit through about 20 minutes of it before I had to walk out. The story about an expedition to find Okanagan Lake's famed Ogopogo (BC's version of the Loch Ness Monster) was shot, written and acted poorly, and given that it was probably supposed to be a bit of a satire of this type of low-budget monster-hunting flick, it didn't even work on that level. I decided my time would be better spent in some quiet corner in another part of the hotel reading and checking email until the next session block started.

When it was time for the next round of panels to start, I decided to take in Where's the Science in Our Science Fiction?. As you can probably guess from the title, the panel consisting of SF mag editors, a physicist, and an author called for more hard science fiction to be written.

From there, it was time to wrap things up. I sat through most of the closing ceremonies, but left when the charity auction started (none of the items up for grabs really interested me, and even if something had, I'd already spent my allotment the other day on books).

Now that it's over, I have to say it wasn't a great con, but it was good enough. I was a bit disappointed that none of the session options really wowed me, and there weren't enough of the ones that managed to catch my attention. But, on the plus side, most of the sessions I did attend were interesting enough, the new addition of Uncle Victor as host of the movie room made for some fun times, the Chinese-influenced steampunk prints by James Ng in the art room were very cool to look at (and the link I passed along the other day has already made a friend of mine into a fan of Ng's stuff), and most importantly, over the course of the weekend I had some good chats with a number of fellow conventioneers. And that's enough to ensure that I'll probably be back next year.

VCon - day 2

2010-10-03T01:56:00.000-07:00

Saturdays are traditionally the "big day" for the Vancouver Science Fiction Convention. Everybody's off work, so the attendance is a lot higher than Friday, and unlike Sunday, they're not thinking about traveling home that night or going to work the next day. You also see more merchants at the tables in the dealers' room as well. Saturday is when the con pulls out the big guns: it schedules the most interesting session topics, along with big-draw events like the masquerade and the dance (which always draw a big turnout from the cosplay crowd). So why did today feel kinda middle of the road?

I'll freely admit it's probably me more than the way the con's been organized. I don't go to the masquerade or dance (I've got nothing but respect for those that do, but I don't make or wear costumes and on the rare occasion that I cut a rug, a national state of emergency is usually declared), I don't tend to gravitate towards the sword-fighting or martial arts demonstrations (which are very cool, but I prefer discussion sessions at cons), and I don't do the rounds of the parties because by the end of the day, I'm kind of geeked-out (insert gasp of amazement) and just want to spend a little time with my wife. But the sessions... the all-important discussion panels... somehow, this year they just haven't seemed as interesting to me as they have before. That's not to say today was a bomb - far from it - there were a couple of good sessions that I attended, but nothing Earth-shattering. My litmus test for con quality (here or anywhere) has always been the frustration factor in deciding which session to go to. The best cons are the ones where in any given hour (or at least three times in a full day) there are at least two (if not more) sessions that look really cool that I want to attend, thus creating a degree of frustration at having to choose only one (I'm not a session hopper - I pick one and stick with it because focus is important to get the most out of a panel discussion or interview. I only leave if the session turns out to be lame). When this happens frequently, you know your con has put together a good lineup. Hasn't happened this year though. Again, maybe that's just me. Maybe this particular year has session topics that resonate with other nerds better than my own particular bent. Maybe I'm just tired from staying up too late every night after days at the con. Maybe (and I certainly hope not) I'm experiencing some kind of con burnout. I don't know. Maybe I'll have to ask some of the old guys in the local SF community whether they've ever experienced this kind of malaise after years of con-going.

Anyhow, on to the day's activities:

I started at the Author Guest of Honour Interview (already nearly at the half-way point because I'd had to stay at home waiting for the dishwasher repairman - not that I'm complaining! I can research an author's opinions on this, that and the other anytime. Getting the dishwasher fixed - and on a Saturday! - so that I don't have to wash them, is a priority). By the time I arrived, Cherie Priest was just beginning to share her thoughts on American Southern Gothic Horror: why the setting and pre-Civil War period resonate so well with authors and audiences. Interesting shift into reflections on the mindset of people from cultures that have been defeated in wars. The only downside to the session was when the interviewer took a turn for the strange and asked Priest to do some role-playing, where he would pretend to be Boneshaker's Maynard Wilkes and Priest would be Briar, and the two of them would have a conversation where the daughter would share her thoughts with her deceased father about the novel's events and what was going through her mind. Uhhhhhhh... what? From where I was sitting, it looked like Priest thought that was a weird idea, and she did her best to squirm out of the proposal and succeeded in changing the topic. I can't speak for the rest of the audience, but I was sure grateful she pulled it off! Anyhow, she reflected further on regionality and its impact on how others perceive a person, and then moved back to the subject of ghost stories, finishing with a creepy tale involving a friend's business. For the most part, it was a good session and I'm glad I was able to catch some of it.

From there I headed over to the Upcoming Movies of 2010 and Beyond session, where podcaster/broadcaster Gareth Von Killenbach gave us the inside scoop on most of the big flicks coming up. No need to really go into detail on that stuff, as you can probably track that on your own online if there's a certain film you want updates on. What he also spent a fair amount of time on was a discussion of the controversy around the advertising of 3D movies. Seems there's a movement afoot to ensure that studios be more specific when advertising new 3D movies to tell the audience whether the films were actually shot in 3D (using proper 3D cameras and thus creating a better 3D viewing experience) or whether they were shot in standard 2D and then digitally altered to appear to be 3D (which is supposed to result in an inferior 3D viewing experience). Von Killenbach pointed out that most movies billed as "3D" are actually shot in 2D and then altered. He argues that since audiences are shelling out extra money to see a film in 3D, they ought to know which process was used to create it so they'll know if it's worth while to spend the extra. Something to think about the next time a special effects blockbuster comes out with the option of seeing it in 3D.

After that I took a break for a late lunch. Coming back, there really wasn't much on the panel schedule that really interested me, so I browsed through the dealers' room (exercising self-control and getting out without buying anything) and had another look at the Chinese steampunk prints in the art room (reminding myself I'd already spent my allotment yesterday). Still lots of time though before anything remotely interesting was going to start, so I walked way, way, waaaaaaay over to the hotel next door where the con had stashed the movie room today (not sure if it's going to change locations again tomorrow).

I have to say that irrespective of whatever's running on screen, the movie room at this year's con is a real blast. The volunteer running it goes by the monicker of Uncle Victor. He sports a wild shock of white hair and a lab coat that's covered with miniature replications of old SF movie posters that have been dyed into the coat's fabric like a T-shirt would. I'm told Victor was a fixture at Keycon for many years, and now that he's moved from Winnipeg to the Lower Mainland, VCon benefits from his presence. Uncle Victor's a warm guy who's got a smile for everyone. He's added homey - if geeky - touches to the movie room, bringing in an inflatable Christmas Mickey Mouse, a plastic monster arm and hand, a statue of a winged pig (subject of a naming contest), and his ubiquitous plastic Darth Vader head that's filled with Hallowe'en candy. Anyone who comes into the room gets chocolate. That's the rule. Even when he leaves his lair, Victor's determined to put a smile on everyone's face and an extra centimeter on their waistlines, tossing mini chocolate bars across the room to people attending other sessions or meetings. Walk into the movie room on the rare occasion when nothing's running, and he'll immediately make you welcome and chat you up about all kinds of movies from every decade and country. Just an all-around great guy.

Anyhow, when I walked in, Earth Versus the Flying Saucers was starting to wind down. As others started to arrive, no-one was too eager to wait it out, so Victor was happy to swap it off for something else. The group ended up choosing to take a break from SF and we ended up laughing along with a Best of Saturday Night Live Commercials collection. Mmmmm... bass-flavoured milkshakes from the Bass-o-matic!

Once that had wound-down, I headed over to the Buffy vs Edward: What would Dracula Think? session. It was okay. Nothing amazing, but it was a way to fill an hour. The panel talked about how pop culture has changed the nature of the vampire over the years, in terms of its abilities and quirks, as well as the nature of the beast, from vicious monster to something romanticized. Plenty of discussion about the highly-watered-down end of the vampire spectrum occupied by the current Twilight craze. And while the panel talked about the more traditional (in terms of abilities and characteristics) rural town vampires of an old X-Files episode (kudos to them for referencing that classic!) or the more menacing bunch in the True Blood series, they didn't include in their discussion of vicious bloodsuckers the excellent Bram Stoker's Dracula done by Coppola in the early 90's (I think they touched on it briefly, but given the way the discussion was going, it deserved greater depth), or John Carpenter's Vampires (the absolute opposite end of the spectrum from the sissies of Twilight), where James Woods' character gives that awesome line about vampires being nothing like the "whiny good-looking Euro-trash in the movies" (or something to that effect - I apologize for any misquote, as it's been a few years since I've seen it). Someone in the audience asked for the panel's take on how science fiction authors have treated vampires, citing Peter Watts' scientific explanation for them. But while some on the panel were familiar with Watts' Blindsight, overall they said they tended to prefer a more traditional horror or fantasy take on vampires, noting they wanted some mystery with their monsters. I dunno... the fact that Watts made his vampires so alien in the way they think made them mysterious enough, and plenty frightening. On a slightly different tack, I was also pleased that someone else in the audience brought up Spider Robinson's vampire Piotr in the Callahan Chronicles, who copes with his vampirism as one would an addiction. Unfortunately, this prompted the panel to reminisce about Forever Knight, which though valid for the discussion, was none-the-less a lame show that's best forgotten.

After the session let out, I took a break for supper. Coming back later, I found the hall where the masquerade was being held was pretty much standing room only, so as cool as some of the costumes probably were, I didn't figure they were quite worth standing behind the door, craning my neck around the corner and trying to see past a horde of heads. Instead, I moseyed back down to Uncle Victor's movie room, where, ultimately, about 20 of us enjoyed Serenity. While I own it on DVD and watch it once or twice a year, there's something about seeing it on a larger screen with a gaggle of fellow fans that you don't get at home.

Anyhow, tomorrow is wrap-up day. Must get to bed.

VCon - Day 1

2010-10-02T00:18:00.000-07:00

The 35th annual Vancouver Science Fiction Convention started off as the convention that couldn't be found. Oh sure, there's no way you can miss the hotel itself, but getting to the con floor, now that's another story. The hotel had a lack of clear directional signage inside, main elevators that were locked-off to con-goers and a usable side elevator that wasn't visible from the entrace, and the dealers' room located in a different building from the rest of the con. But in the end, I (and from the sounds of it, a number of others) eventually made it to the registration desk.

First off, I have to say hats-off to the VCon organizers for getting a gorgeous picture for this year's con T-shirt: a cool totem pole (appropriate for the West Coast) backed by a huge full moon and comets streaking across a star-filled sky, and squadron of zeppelins lumbering across the face of the moon (to go with this year's steampunk theme for the con). I didn't wear it today though - that's for tomorrow; today I was sporting the "White & Nerdy" T-shirt my wife got me at a Weird Al concert a few years ago. Lots of complements from fellow con-goers on this one, but the credit all goes to Yankovic and his people for making it, I'm just exhibiting truth in advertising by putting it on.

After prowling around the con floor and the dealers' room in the neighbouring building to get the lay of the land, I started the afternoon by taking in the last half of the session on the Future of Electronic Publishing. Some differing opinions as to the degree to which e-books might supplant paper, but a general agreement that paper books will probably last in some form for a while yet.

From there it was on to the Tense Viewpoint session, where the panel discussed the value and difficulties in using various tenses (first person present, third person limited omniscient, etc) in scenes or stories. Not the most interesting topic of the weekend, but its blandness was made up for by the lively and entertaining panel. I especially enjoyed their lengthy aside towards the end where they ended up talking aobut unreliable narrators and how this could apply to "the VanHelsing" characters that frequent SF - characters who pop into the story who have all the information and are completely confident that they know the score, just like Dr Abraham VanHelsing when he's called to assist Lucy's suitors in Dracula. The question became what if you introduced a VanHelsing into a story who was so self-assured and convincing that everyone went along with what he/she said, even though in truth this person didn't have a clue what's going on, or was completely insane? Great example of how the right panel can take a blah topic and make an hour disappear.

After that I had a bit of a debate on which session to go to... 4pm featured a panel talking about Killing Off Characters, and while I enjoy discussions on this topic, this is a session that's come up every year for the past couple of years. Every year I sit through it, and sadly, I have to admit that last year I didn't think I was hearing anything really new. I figured that was a sign that this year I had to give it a break. Instead, I attended the Science Fiction and Comedy session. Maybe I should've stuck with the casting bloodbath. I wasn't expecting the SF&C panel to be a laugh a minute, but even though there were a few witty comments here and there, on the whole it was kind of lacklustre.

The con Opening Ceremonies that followed, however, were, suprisingly, a real pleasure. Usually the con opening remarks are overly long, maybe spiced up a little by a good Guest of Honour if they're given the opportunity to give remarks, but generally the procedings are a snoozer. But con Chair Danielle Stephens kept the energy high this year and just charged through the notes, guest lineup, and announcements. Clearly she understands that as a con opener, this is meant really to just convey greetings and essential info and most importantly to let people get on with having fun. Fantastic job on her part! Author Guest of Honour Cherie Priest (I just finished reading her super fun Boneshaker a couple of weeks ago) talked for a few minutes about steampunk and was really entertaining. What a smart, warm, funny and genuine person - and I'm not saying that just because she autographed my copy of Boneshaker right after the opening ceremonies were done.

With those proceedings having wrapped up in just 20 minutes or so, I hiked over to the dealers' room and bought a bunch of books. The Edge Publishing table always brings copies of the newest Tesseracts anthology of Canadian SF to the con a couple of weeks before they hit the shelves in the bookstores, and I never pass up the chance to snag one. Tesseracts 14, edited by John Robert Colombo and Brett Alexander Savory, is subtitled "Strange Canadian Stories", but the jacket doesn't really give any written summary of the theme of the stories within. The picture looks like some kind of film-noire gumshoe who might be magical or alien, but it's all guesswork until I get a chance to crack open the book. The Edge table was also carrying just 2 copies of the new anthology The Aurora Awards - Thirty Years of Canadian Science Fiction. Looks like it's a short run being put out by a small press and Edge was helping out by bringing a couple of the books out to this con, so again, I couldn't resist the temptation to buy one of them. Over at the White Dwarf bookstore table, I bought a copy of Cherie Priest's newest steampunk adventure: Dreadnought. With my bookbuying appetite satisfied, I ambled off into the night to find a quick bite to eat (succulent Chinese barbequed duck on rice with veggies - I love having the con in Richmond!).

After supper I had a little time to kill, so I found a quiet spot to sit down, check email, and chat with a couple of fellow con-goers. I can't say I know a lot of people by name at the con, but one of the great things about these events is that there's a sense of community. People just naturally strike up conversations about... whatever - the latest book by so-and-so, what's the best operating system to run on a netbook, how they modded-out their old costume to make it steampunkish, where's a good place to eat - that sort of thing. Just a nice, comfortable atmosphere.

When the Multi-Author Book Launch got under way, I made a point of digging through my backpack and finding my copy of Dreadnought for Cherie Priest to sign. I'll give her a lot of credit, who knows how many hours she'd been talking with people and signing books, but she still had a ton of energy.

From there I decided to check out the art room. A lot of the usual suspects were there... same artists and in some cases the same works of art that have been there year in and year out. But there were some new items from different artists that were intriguing. I have to say, I loved the Chinese Qing dynasty-themed steampunk paintings by James Ng. My favourite was The Imperial Airship, although The Night Patrol was also pretty cool. Too bad I've already spent my money on books (okay, buying books is never too bad, but not having more budgeting to spend at the con is) and that I don't have more wall space in my study.

I finished the evening at the What Is Steampunk session. This one was a prime example of that law of the universe (similar to the ones stipulating that every culture on every planet will at some point develope a version of the gin & tonic and Swedish meatballs) that dictates that at any con, at least one of the most popular sessions guaranteed to have a packed audience will be held in the smallest meeting room available, while the session in the largest room will likely be mostly empty. There were so many of us jammed in there that we were producing enough heat to steam power the hotel down the street and all the way to the edge of town. But as for the session itself, I'm of two minds. On one hand, the presenter had a lot of good information (for those interested) about what to keep in mind to make a good, authentic-looking Victorian-inspired costume. She also had some interesting things to say about prop-making, and about some of the major steampunk-oriented cons and clubs/groups that attend cons in costume. However, it was pretty clear that for all of her self-assurance on the subject, the presenter's knowledge of history and film were a little spotty. At a couple of points she said you couldn't have electricity in steampunk because they didn't have it in the Victorian era. Um, no. One old guy in the audience with a fair bit of knowledge on the history of science had to point out to her that someone (I can't remember the name he referenced) invented an electric car around 1813, but just couldn't make much of it because of battery issues. She tried to gloss over that and maintained that electricity wasn't widespread in the period and so shouldn't be used in steampunk stories. In fact, by the end of Victoria's reign and into Edward's (with the presenter's boundary of steampunk being the advent of the First World War), many buildings in cities would have been wired for electricity. Perhaps not rural areas, but certainly in the major cities. She also said that while zeppelins were fixtures in steampunk, they weren't around in the Victorian era, or at least not until the very end. I'm pretty sure that's not true either, that while there wasn't a dirigible on every corner, they were around, with propulsion and airframes improving over time. Blimps just didn't spring into being out of nowhere when WWI erupted. She also had some problems talking about steampunk in film, especially when one of the older guys in the audience mentioned an animated film from eastern Europe in the early 50's, and she tried to roll right over him babbling about Disney and clearly showing that she didn't know what the guy was talking about. Just admit the film predates you and you haven't seen it. She also dismissed the anime feature Steamboy as actually being dieselpunk - but later admitted that she hadn't seen the film and that she was going on what her husband had told her. What? Maybe you oughta see the flick before making a pronouncement like that. I own a copy. Seen it several times. It's pretty steamy. Not any diesel that I can recall. You may want to quibble about the nature of the steamball power source, but the bottom line is that the sucker produced steam, which powered the funky devices that rampaged across the screen. It's at least as valid as the "aether" that she said in her opening treatise was acceptable as a steampunk power source. By the time things wrapped up, I was kind of cool to the presentation.

And, at that point, I was ready to head for home. There was still some programming left on the board: filk and movies. But I'm not a filk fan, I wasn't going to stick around for the screening of the Rocky Horror Picture Show because I've never really been interested in the movie or all of the attendant hoopla, and most of all, I wanted to get home to my wife. Time enough for more con stuff tomorrow.

Generation Gap Already Appearing in Tron: Legacy Fandom

2010-09-30T01:54:00.000-07:00

The other day my wife and one of her coworkers were talking about looking forward to seeing Tron: Legacy when something interesting came up: the coworker said he was eager for the new film because he was a huge fan of the original, but he also noted his young son was also super-psyched to see it, even though the boy hasn't ever seen Tron.

Once I got over my initial shock at hearing about a fanboy parent who failed to indoctrinate his son with the awesomeness of Tron, I started thinking about how a kid could be so eager to see a movie that's openly been billed as a sequel, even though he didn't have the foundation of the earlier production.

Obviously it's the sheer power of the marketing by the titanic Disney machine that's Master Control-like grabbed the consciousness of anyone who likes science fiction or action movies with cool special effects, and the fan-fed hype that's followed the advertisements and strategically leaked tidbits.

But what's more interesting is that this kind of young fan break with the source material is something I've only seen and heard about before with the Star Wars franchise: kids growing up on the prequels or the Clone Wars and loving them, without having seen the original trilogy. To my knowledge, this hasn't happened anywhere else.

Granted, there aren't many other franchises that have been around long enough to have tried reinventing themselves to offer this kind of generational disconnect. Star Trek had its recent reboot, but the original Trek is so ubiquitous in our culture that it's hard to imagine that even young mainstream movie-goers heading to Abrams' ADHD-inspiring action and camera glare fest wouldn't have had at least a little exposure to The Shat and co. There was Battlestar Galactica, but the new series really wasn't something you'd want your kids watching, so I doubt it's something that's happening with this show. It's possible this sort of thing happens with anime franchises. Certainly some of them, like Gundam, or the various installments of Macross, have been, if not continuous year-over-year, then at least popping up at regular intervals to allow new generations of viewers to latch on without the benefit of the source material. But even then, regular anime viewers tend to be a fairly devoted bunch, and I'd venture to guess that any kid who's gateway to a particular series has been through one of its newer installments would probably go back and explore its origins. You don't necessarily see that with Star Wars though... some kids seem to be happy just with what's in front of them.

But with Tron... sure, you probably don't need to see the original; the trailers seem to indicate that Legacy will give enough backstory on its own, and with a new character entering the game grid, and with that other world being totally new to this new protagonist, the younger audience won't be alienated without having seen the original because they'll be able to comfortably put themselves in the new hero's shoes (or electronic boots or whatever). That being said, younger viewers should see the original Tron, not just because it's flashy and the old-style graphics are sufficiently old and different as to possibly be interestingly alien to kids who've grown up with slick near-photo-real games, but because it's a great story, one with many layers that they can ponder as they grow older. As much as I want to see Legacy, I suspect it's likely to be a simple, straight-forward (though probably enjoyable) action flick, rather than the thoughtful (and action-packed) film that the original was. Kids need to see movies that are not only cool to look at, but are smart, especially smart, as well.

First Chapters of Todd and the Book of Pure Evil Not Bad

2010-09-30T01:02:00.001-07:00

Warning: Spoilers

(spoilage factor: about the same as a stuffed armadillo violated by a homunculus)

Imagine if Bill and Ted and their friends were inadvertently thrown into the role of Buffy the Vampire Slayer and her gang, and if the writing style had a hefty dose of vulgarity that would do a View Askew production proud. That'd give you an approximation of the new TV series Todd and the Book of Pure Evil.

With the first two half-hour episodes airing tonight on Space, the show seems to be a reboot of a 2003 Canadian-made short film of the same name. Not having seen the original (I only stumbled across it on IMDB while looking for a write-up on the modern take), I can't comment on whether this was a good idea or not, or how faithful the new version is to its predecessor.

In and of itself though, the 2010 take on TATBOPE isn't bad. Sure, there were times when I had to ask myself if it was too juvenile, but then, when has that ever stopped me from watching something before? Besides, while it's not a constant riot, there are enough laughs and well-written lines, and an honest enough portrayal of highschool social interactions (barring the demonic incidents, of course) and the hopes, insecurities, betrayals, stupidies, and yes, angst, of teenagers, to make it worth watching. In fact, with the show in its infancy, I'll give episode 2 credit for having one of the best lines of dialogue I've seen on TV all year:

"Science doesn't love you. Science doesn't even like you."

Starring Alex House in the title role, the show's first episode introduces us to Todd, a metalhead who's at the bottom of the highschool pecking order, dreaming of becoming a rockstar and getting heartthrob Jenny to like him by winning the school's battle of the bands. Problem is, his band, Barbarian Apocalypse (comprised only of Todd on guitar and his chubby, one-armed buddy Curtis on drums), can't even make it past the try-outs. Goaded by a trio of mysterious stoner metalheads in the school parking lot to keep on trying, Todd stumbles upon The Book of Pure Evil (apparently known to all true metalheads) and reads a spell to make him a killer musician. Problem is, while it makes him unnaturally talented, anytime he plays, the music has disastrous results for those who listen. Meanwhile, a group of cultists is trying to obtain the book for their own nefarious designs. Todd's dream girl Jenny comes to his aid, revealing that her father disappeared while investigating rumours of the book. Curtis joins the fight, along with Hannah (Melanie Leishman), a geeky girl with a not-so-secret crush on Todd. The problem is, everytime the group tries to destroy the book, it somehow survives and disappears or is stolen and re-hidden. A little reminiscent of Reaper, each episode involves some new misuse of the spells within and the gang's efforts to battle the forces of darkness and recover the book.

Each episode also features a cameo by Jason Mewes (mouthy drug-dealer "Jay" in the View Askewniverse) as the somewhat helpful, wisdom-dispensing school janitor Jimmy. Playing the role without any over-the-top antics, Mewes reminded me a bit of the janitor in The Breakfast Club, except there's always something just a little quirky about his advice.

I'm not sure if Todd and the Book of Pure Evil will be consistently entertaining enough to make it into a permanent spot on my viewing roster, but at first glance it's certainly good enough to continue watching on a trial basis.

CBC Chronicles Made-in-Canada SF TV

2010-09-29T00:38:00.000-07:00

Jason Anderson posted an interesting story to the CBC site the other day examining Canada as a hotbed for SF TV series production.

The answer to Anderson's initial question of why so many science fiction TV shows are produced in the Great White North is pretty obvious: the Looney is usually lower in value than the Greenback, giving American producers more bang for their buck up here. Add to that talented local film crews and actors, tax incentives, and the fact that Vancouver (Hollywood North) and Toronto offer locations that can easily and believably double for US cities, and you've got a magic combination. This aspect of the article isn't news at all. As Canadians, we've been hearing media stories for years about the factors that attract TV and film productions, especially if there's a fluctuation in the dollar, a change in government tax or permit policies, or protectionist rumblings from factions in Hollywood.

What's more interesting though is how the article chronicles the many series that have been produced up here in the science fictional tidal wave that followed the launch of the X-Files in the early-mid 90's. Anderson examines the Stargate franchise at length, and mentions other big names in the genre like Battlestar Galactica and Caprica (though BSG is only referenced as a quick explanation for its sequel series, rather than given its due for being the critical and audience success that it was), Eureka, and Sanctuary, among others. Unfortunately, there are a couple of glaring omissions to the list: V and Smallville. Anderson may be forgiven for passing over smaller fare like Lexx or Reaper (personally, I disliked Lexx, but Reaper - which had some involvement from Kevin Smith - rocked), but the V remake and the newest incarnation of the Superman story? While I don't watch Smallville, it's had a long enough run and has a big enough following that it certainly warrants a nod. V, while newer, has received enough attention, especially from mainstream audiences, that it should have been mentioned as well.

Hats off to Anderson though for giving a bit of a pre-Mulder&Scully history lesson. Due to the incredibly high suckage factor, a lot of Canadian SF fans don't like to talk about The Starlost, but I'll give the reporter credit for including it in his piece, so that this part of our country's SF history, as bad as that part was, isn't forgotten. The historic record has to be complete, warts and all. What was most impressive to me as a Canadian SF fan though, was a piece of trivia from waaaaaaay back that Anderson dug up: apparently the first dramatic series aired on CBC Television was a locally-made show called Space Command (featuring a pre-Trek James Doohan), which ran from 1953-54. I'd never even heard of the series before (not even being a glint in Dad's eye that far back, and because the mothercorp hasn't bothered to rerun the show in my lifetime), but to hear that it was the first drama on the broadcaster's fledgling TV channel is pretty awesome.

At the same time, I'm disappointed (yet sadly not surprised) that CBC hasn't kept up the tradition of producing home-grown SF. They'll throw millions at period pieces, especially if they're set in the Maritimes, but forget about science fiction. Sure, they partnered with BBC and tossed some money at the revival of Doctor Who, but CBC can't take much credit when it's really a UK production, and CBC stopped funding it after a season or two anyway. Then there was the highly entertaining J-Pod (based on the Douglas Coupland book), which was geek-oriented if not SFnal. CBC, in its infinite wisdom, pulled the plug after one season though, turning its back on the geek audience yet again. I don't even think the show's available on DVD or Blu-Ray in the CBC store. Way to rock that post-production, post-air profit opportunity, guys. Let's hope at some point CBC will remember its legacy and rejoin the rest of the entertainment industry in producing SF shows in Canada.

No Ordinary Family Off to an Ordinary but Okay Start

2010-09-28T23:08:00.000-07:00

Admittedly, I don't think this can be a full-on review of the new SF/comedy/family drama series No Ordinary Family because I missed the first half hour of the pilot tonight (The Mercer Report was on, and as much as I'm a die-hard SF fan, nothing trumps a new episode of Rick Mercer), so I'll just jot down a couple of quick impressions.

The superhero family schtick has been done before, from The Fantastic Four to The Six Million Dollar Man and his bionic spinoffs and their family reunion, to The Incredibles. NOF is definitely on the Incredibles end of the spectrum, even echoing the animated film's tone through the use of asides, only instead of talking to a reporter in a documentary, Mr & Mrs Powell self-reflect and narrate to a mostly unseen family therapist. As with The Incredibles, this plot device actually works as a means of letting us see a little deeper into two of the characters and injecting a little more humour, rather than slowing things down as I feared they might the first time the story made one of these cutaways.

Of course, with things beginning with the family discovering they've recently acquired super powers, and the discovery of a villain who is also specially endowed (and no, I'm not referring to anything X-rated under his trenchcoat, I'm talking about his teleporting ability with the SFX that looked exactly like Nightcrawler's in X-Men 2), NOF also has the same feel that the fallen NBC show Heroes did in the first season. Michael Chiklis' (already a superhero veteran, having played the Thing in the Fantastic Four movies) character's giddiness at finding out he has powers reminded me a lot of Hiro Nakamura, and his tests were a lot more fun than Claire's.

But rather than Heroes-style blunders, I'm actually more worried that NOF will stumble down the road of typical American family dramas and become insufferably sappy. Sure, some love and support amongst the family members is warranted - they are a family, after all. But there's a line, and if the show heads into Party of Five territory, I'm out.

In terms of main characters, again, I really enjoyed the father, Jim Powell (Chiklis), who's acquired abilities much like a powered-down version of the Tick: super strength, the ability to leap great distances, and significant durability (although not seemingly totally indestructible like the Tick). Without having seen the opening of the show, it's clear that Jim's been the primary caregiver for the kids, isn't satisfied with his job (not sure what it is, although from what I caught he seems to be a civilian working in a police setting), and is trying to hold together a relationship with his wife where there's been increasing distance between them. Chiklis does a great job in the role, showing us a family man who's dissatisfied with his life (not dissimilar from Bob Parr/Mr Incredible) and is grabbing at the opportunity to be someone he thinks can make a real difference in the world.

Julie Benz also does a good job as Stephanie Powell, a 21st Century supermom even before she became a metahuman. If there's one thing that's indicated to me this early in the game that the show won't be too sweet, it was near the end when the daughter Daphne (Kay Panabaker) is confiding that her boyfriend cheated on her, and the first words out of Stephanie's mouth weren't something hackneyed and soft like "oh, honey, I'm so sorry"... nope, instead she spits something to the effect of "that bastard!" (correct me if the wording was a bit different, but that was certainly the tone). That's a believable - and more importantly, watchable - modern character, ferociously supportive. A very well-written and well acted moment.

Almost as entertaining as Chiklis is Romany Malco (Jay from The 40 Year Old Virgin) as George St Cloud, Jim's friend who's a District Attorney, part of the show's comic relief, and from the looks of it, is becoming Jim's enabler/handler a-la Robert Culp in The Greatest American Hero. You've gotta love a buddy who not only supports you in your desire to become a superhero, but helps out by transforming your garage into a crime-fighting lair - with WiFi!

As for the kids, Daphne and JJ (Jimmy Bennett), I haven't formed much of an opinion of them yet, except that they're whiny.

At this point, No Ordinary Family seems like a good enough show, though nothing amazing. The real question is, with Mercer conflicting with the first half hour of NOF, will I remember to record NOF so that I'll actually get to watch entire episodes?

The Top 5 Aliens in Human Form

2010-09-20T01:11:00.000-07:00

Science fiction has served readers and viewers aliens of all shapes and sizes over the years, from HG Wells' beaked & tenticled blood-sucking Martians to ET to the weird, rooster-lookin' supreme being at the end of Dan Simmons' Muse of Fire. Then, of course, you've got your various non-corporeals like Arthur C Clarke's monolith builders or Star Trek Deep Space Nine's wormhole aliens. But sometimes these beings take on human form. They're not to be confused with extraterrestrials who just naturally look like us, like Ford Prefect or Klaatu. These are creatures who look nothing like us but for various reasons have chosen to mimic our form. Here are the best among them.

The Top 5 Aliens in Human Form:

5) Mirror Girl - Blind Lake by Robert Charles Wilson
For years, all that any adult knew about Mirror Girl was that she was a figment of the imagination of a socially-awkward little girl living with her mother at a scientific installation. By the end of the book, they discover Mirror Girl is a very real alien entity - the gatekeeper of a very strange device that facilitation observation, communication, and possibly travel between different worlds. While mirror girl certainly isn't evil, she isn't bringing flowers and candy to humanity either. There's a creepiness to her interaction with the protagonists at the end, and especially with the way she uses the child Tessa to observe things over the course of the story.

4) Centauri - The Last Starfighter
This old con man/military recruiter isn't a shape-shifter and doesn't use telepathy to influence how others see him. For Centauri, image alteration is old school - he mashes a mask over his face and slips on a fake pair of eyes. Centauri is a character who sees the rules as being as flexible as external image, but ultimately, he's working for the greater good - although "it never hurts to be rich." He's certainly one of the most entertaining secondary characters in science fiction who dons a human face - and he's got a slick ride and knows how to rock a hat.

3) Ambassador Kosh - Babylon 5
The Vorlon ambassador is almost never seen outside his encounter suit in his natural form by anyone besides members of his own race and a few others. On one occasion he appeared to a group of diplomats on the station as representations of each of their cultures' versions of angelic beings, while rescuing Captain Sheridan from a potentially fatal fall. But "angels" don't count for the purposes of this list. What does count is the season 3 episode "Interludes and Examinations" where Kosh takes the form of Sheridan's father during a telepathic conversation/dream. It's a way for Kosh to put aside the zen koans and cryptic pronouncements that he usually communicates with, a way to show Sheridan a comforting, trustworthy face to have a straight-forward talk. Something entirely appropriate for Kosh to admit to Sheridan that the human is right and has done a good job, that the Vorlon ambassador was afraid, and that he's saying goodbye (sort of). It's an extremely poignent scene, cutting between Kosh with a human face saying farewell in Sheridan's dream, and Kosh in his natural form (which we, the audience, still don't really get a good look at), slugging it out in his quarters in a fight with a gang of Shadows that he's doomed to lose. Kosh only appears as a human once in the entire series (I don't really count the hand shot that Leeta recalls in the pilot), and it makes that appearance all the more powerful because it's done in this circumstance.

2) Starman - Starman
In this story, a not entirely non-corporeal alien (it appears as a ball of blue energy, and yet apparently has enough in the way of physical needs that it needs to get home/back aboard its ship in order to survive) uses its technology to clone a human body to inhabit so that it can go incognito in the US and survive long enough to make a cross-country to make a rendezvous with its mothership. Along the way, it experiences human sensations, interacts with the natives, and falls in love with the woman it's kidnapped (the widow of the human it cloned), and in so doing, it learns - at least a little - what it means to be human, conversely discovering a bit about its own species and what they're lacking. Starman is also worth watching to see Jeff Bridges' performance as the alien. You can see why Bridges was nominated for a Best Actor Oscar the year the film came out - he's extremely convincing as a character that has to learn how to use its body from the ground up, how to communicate with humans, and how to navigate American culture. He's totally believeable as alien - even at the end, when the character has experienced so much, developed a degree of understanding of it, and has enjoyed some of it, for all his appearance, this character is still undisputably inhuman.

1) Q - Star Trek the Next Generation/Deep Space Nine/Voyager
Was there ever any question about who would get the number one spot on this list? Whether he's posing real, lasting harm by forcing a collision with the Borg or threatening to extinguish humanity himself, or whether he's simply being a pain in the ass playing jokes on Picard or making fun of Riker, Q is the most memorable alien to have taken human form. Admittedly, that's a strong claim to make considering shape shifters and highly-evolved entities taking human form are par for the course in the Trek franchises. But John DeLancie's performance was so deliciously over-the-top that any time Q was on screen you couldn't take your eyes off him. Q may have been guilty of many things, but never of being boring. I think ultimately part of the attraction of Q's character is that for all his power and knowledge, the fact that he looked like us reminded the audience that some things never change - it was a visual statement that even if our species were to attain such evolutionary heights, even if we were to shed our corporeal forms and be able to look like whatever we wanted ("We've all been the dog!"), we'd still probably behave the same, we'd still look like humans on the inside.

So who/what are your nominations for the best aliens to take human form?

Tripping the Rift Is Back!

2010-09-16T02:07:00.000-07:00

Years before Ron Moore and David Eick retooled Battlestar Galactica and introduced us to a sexy android named Six, there was another cyborg seductress by that name who made nerdish TV viewers and some - only some - of her shipmates drool on Tripping the Rift. After a few years off, the show is back!

Never seen it before? Think of Futurama - if it was written by Kevin Smith or Trey Parker and Matt Stone at their most vulger. The CGI series follows the misadventures of the crew of the Jupiter 42, led by greedy and lecherous Captain Chode, a short, fat, tenticled, purple alien. His companions include his afore-mentioned cybernetic sex slave Six; his reptilian nephew Whip; Gus, the self-hating robot; T'nuk, the ugly, triple-breasted, somewhat centaur-like pilot; and Bob, the agoraphobic ship's computer. They frequently run afoul of the idiotic Darph Bobo, leader of a race of evil aliens who look like clowns. As the gang wanders the galaxy in search of the next big score (take your pick of meanings), hilarity ensues.

The long-awaited season 3 kicked off tonight on Space with a riff on The Terminator. Not one of the show's best episodes, but funny enough. I'm just glad geeks have another opportunity to go Tripping the Rift.

The Doctor Is In

2010-09-15T03:12:00.001-07:00

Normally when I babble about "the Doctor" I'm referring to a certain Time Lord, but this time the news is about the holographic sawbones from the Trek franchise - or the actor who played him anyway.

The organizers of VCon were spreading the word today that Robert Picardo will be doing a signing at Imperial Hobbies, here in Richmond, BC on #3 Road across from the Lansdown Mall this Saturday starting at noon.

I'm tempted to go, but I don't really have anything for him to sign (except for an old VHS tape of Star Trek First Contact, where he appeared briefly in a funny little cameo), and since I haven't been following his more recent fare, like the Stargate franchise, I don't really have any worthwhile questions to ask.

I'll give Picardo his due: he was pretty funny back in the 80s as "the Cowboy" in Innerspace, and did a solid job as the afore-mentioned Doctor in Star Trek Voyager (Which I've been rewatching a lot of lately in reruns on Space. Does anyone remember what other aliases that character went by? I remember EMH Mark I, of course, and Schweitzer in one episode, but did he take on any other names? Not counting the name of his holo-programmer, of course.). I think my favourite Doctor episodes were the one where he was first transmitted back to the Alpha Quadrant and had to retake a hijacked Starfleet prototype warship with the help of an even more prissy EMH Mark II (a very fun epi), and the one where he gave romantic advice to Seven and developed a crush on her over the course of the lessons. I really had to feel for the character when she foisted the "friend" label on him in the end, 'cause how many of us have been saddled with that crushing, if well-meaning, emotional roadblock at least once in our lives? Picardo aced that quiet, sad accepting expression, and for all the big, flashy singing numbers that the character did over the course of the series, his melancholy rendition of "Someone to Watch Over Me" was probably the Doctor's best performance.

Anyhow, if you're in the area and you're a fan of Picardo's, be sure to drop by Imperial Hobbies.

Sent from my iPhone

Boxleitner Talks Tron

2010-09-11T19:20:00.000-07:00

The Hardcore Nerdity site may be temporarily offline for an overhaul, but that doesn't mean its resident nerds are slacking-off; they're still out gathering interesting bits of geekiness here and there and making some of it available on the site's holding screen. That includes a nice interview with Bruce Boxleitner done at the recent Fan Expo in Toronto. The star of Tron and Babylon 5 reminisces about the original movie Tron and its impact, especially on actors and the movie business. Certainly worth downloading.

Top 5 Lost Civilizations of SF

2010-09-10T00:08:00.000-07:00

Since the beginning, science fiction and fantasy writers have tapped into the idea of lost civilizations for any number of plot devices, from settings to ancient lore, dangerous devices to strange people or creatures. These blank spaces on the map or cloudy periods in history serve to stir wonder, spark adventure, overwhelm with terror, but most of all to intrigue us with mystery. Here are some of the lost civilizations which have stuck out most in my mind over the years.

The Top 5 Lost Civilizations of SF:

5) the Elvish kingdoms of Beleriand - The Silmarillion by JRR Tolkien
In the first age, Tolkien paints a picture of Middle Earth as a place of grandeur as well as chaos. Almost an entire nation of elves who once left Middle Earth to live with the gods in the west has now returned to hunt down the Silmaril jewels stolen by the evil god Melko/Morgoth and to avenge the crime. They establish a number of powerful kingdoms across the region of Beleriand as they wage their ultimately futile war. In the end, with the forces of evil nearly victorious and the elven kingdoms fallen, the gods come east to put a stop to Morgoth, but during the terrible battle Beleriand is destroyed and covered by the waves. The shadow of the loss of Beleriand and its elvish kingdoms is something that hangs over the rest of the Silmarillion in the later ages, and even stretches into the Lord of the Rings, despite the fact that the events of the First Age are only hinted at in passing. There's a profound and palpable sense of loss among the elves in the later years - a longing for the good old days when the world was young, Men were few, and the kingdoms of the elves in Middle Earth were rich, sophisticated and powerful. Elrond's Rivendell and Galdriel & Celeborn's golden wood were either non-existent, or far-flug, provincial settlements back when Beleriand existed. Now, the great kingdoms only survive in memory and story, and even those will disappear as the elves finally leave Middle Earth for good and the few Men who know about them eventually die. The kingdoms of Beleriand are truly lost civilizations.

4) the Krell - Forbidden Planet
When Commander JJ Adams and his crew of intrepid spacemen arrive on the planet Altair to investigate why no-one's heard from the human colonists in years, they find a wilderness where only the strange Dr Morbius, his beautiful daughter, and their servant, a robot named Robbie, live. But as they investigate, Adams and his crew discover Morbius has learned an astounding secret: long ago the planet was home to an incredibily intelligent and powerful race known as the Krell, and while nothing of their cities remained on the surface, their gigantic machines where still active deep underground. What's more, they find out that the frightening unseen force that destroyed the Krell was also responsible for the deaths of the other colonists - and now for members of Adams' crew. Forbidden Planet is a gem of sci fi cinema. The shots of the vast underground complex are breath-taking, and while Morbius is always showing off this trinket or that computer, there's always a sense of mystery about the place - for all the marvels he's accomplished by adapting the Krell technology, the scientist himself admits there's much he still doesn't fully understand. Moreover, the corridors of the complex seem all the more brooding because we don't know what happened to the Krell themselves. We don't even know what the Krell look like, even if we do finally behold the monster from the id that killed them. And the mysteries of this lost civilization will stay mysteries forever because of the destruction of the planet at the end of the movie.

3) Earth
From Asimov's Foundation novels to Whedon's Firefly 'Verse to Disney/Pixar's Wall-E, science fiction is rife with stories where our entire planet's civilization has been wiped-out, marginalized to the point irrelevance, or just plain forgotten. In fact, there are too many good ones to pick just one as the uber-example of a story where the Earth and all that it held are gone; the three mentioned above are among my favourites.

2) Mars
Yes, I know, another meta example. No, I don't think this is cheating. Same as with the last nomination, lost civilizations on Mars have been written about by countless authors. One of the first I can remember encountering as a kid pouring through the library at C. Cornwell School in North Dumphries, outside of Cambridge Ontario, was a story about a boy growing up in a colony on Mars, unhappy at being called a "greenskin" by Earthers because he was just as human as them and didn't have green skin. The story frequently talks about leaving the colony and seeing the ruins of ancient, abandoned Martian cities, with no-one knowing what happened to the planet's original inhabitants. The boy gets embroiled in some kind of mystery (possibly involving the ruins, I can't remember) and at the end of the story, the Martians return in their fleet of black ships. I wish I could remember the title of the book or the author, but it's been so long. If anyone knows what the title is, I'd be grateful if you could refresh my memory. As an adult though, my favourite story, or group of stories, that talk about a lost civilization on Mars, is Ray Bradbury's The Martian Chronicles. It's just wonderful how the book comes full circle, beginning with a fading Martian civilization, stuffed with stories about humans living amidst the Martian ruins and along their canals, and ending with the Earth itself becoming a lost civilization and the human survivors on Mars becoming the new Martians.

1) Atlantis
The mother of all lost civilizations. The one from our most ancient history that's inspired all of the other tales of cultures or cities or islands or continents or whole worlds that rose to glorious heights before being destroyed or fading from memory. Another meta nomination, yes, but again, there have been countless stories that have used Atlantis as a plot device. Most recently, of course, is an entire series in the Stargate franchise: Stargate Atlantis. Not a fan myself, but I have friends who are, so this one's for them. For my own part, I really enjoyed an anthology Asimov, Greenberg and Charles G Waugh pulled together a couple of decades ago called Isaac Asimov's Magical Worlds of Fantasy 9 - Atlantis.

What are your top lost civilizations?