The 500 Pound Gorilla on My Back

I'm falling way behind on the 365 Short Story Challenge.

For a variety of reasons I haven't had a chance to plow through as many short stories as I'd like to. One of the main targets of blame is too many good novels. Since I made the 365 resolution, I've been trying to balance things out: read a short story every day or two to start, then allocate the rest of the day's reading time to a novel. Problem is, when you get into a huge monster of a book like Dan Simmons' "Drood" (more than half-way through now!) that's utterly absorbing, it's hard to ignore it and go for the short story anthology first.

As much as I may enjoy the short stories, they almost become a chore if they distract me from the novel. Sure, I recently enjoyed the hell out of rereading Charles Sheffield's "The Treasure of Odirex" for the first time in something like 20 years (Erasmus Darwin made for an interesting protagonist, never mind that he was a real person) in Isaac Asimov's Wonderful Worlds of Science Fiction 6: Neanderthals - edited by Robert Silverberg, Martin H Greenberg & Charles G Waugh. But it was hard to make time for it when part of my mind kept wanting to get back to the misadventures of Charles Dickens & Wilkie Collins in Simmons' tome. I feel like a little kid who has to eat his veggies first. And I don't want to feel that way about reading the short stuff, because I love it.

The solution, of course, once I'm done with Drood, is to get in a couple of solid doses of anthologies instead of novels, like I did earlier with Jack Dann's Dreaming Again (a collection of Australian SF that's definitely worth adding to any collection), to bring the tally back up. And yet, there's still the siren's call of the in-box full of novel's that I can't wait to get to.

Another way to add a few more to the total is to download a couple of anthologies to my Iphone so I can read at lunch at work or when I've got some downtime when I'm on the go. Recently, those of us registered with this year's Worldcon, Anticipation, have been given access to many of the Hugo nominees' material, so I might be able to dump that onto the phone and kill two birds with one stone - adding another notch to the challenge belt and digesting this year's Hugo nominations so I can make an informed vote. As well, I'll have to find a couple of websites where I can download some SF anthologies in a format that Stanza can read for my Iphone (still trying to figure out all the ins-and-outs and functions of that device). Anyone got any suggestions?

In the meantime, I'll have to make a greater effort to getting back to reading at least one short story a day. I'm not giving up, but this is certainly shaping up to be a tougher slog than I first thought!

Missed Storytime This Evening

First of all, sorry to all of you for not posting anything for the past few weeks. My non-SF life has been hectic and kind of weird lately. There have been lots of things I've wanted to post, but I just haven't had the time or I've been completely exhausted. Anyhow, over the next few days I hope to catch up.



And speaking of missing things, I'm a little frustrated that I had to miss out on a geeky happening this evening. Robert J. Sawyer was doing a reading and signing for his new novel "Wake" over at White Dwarf Books. Sawyer's a nice guy, has some interesting thoughts, and gets into his read enough to be pretty entertaining.



And what could have pulled me away from an evening with fellow fans listening to one of Canada's top authors and finishing the night getting an autographed copy of the book? An hour at the personal trainer. Yes. The anti-geek experience. I've been going once a week for the past couple of months as a means of holding the line against the threatened expansion of the waistline and as a long-term investment in my health. Not looking to pump up to Schwarzennegarian dimensions or anything, just mainain things in a capable state. So far, I think it's working. Now, normally, faced with a dilemma between indulging my SF pursuits and going to the trainer, the nerdlife would win hands-down. Tonight was a different story though - my wife also sees the trainer (has been much longer than I have) and with us being a one-car family, it's difficult for her to get there if I'm galvanting around on the other side of town. Score one for the trainer. If only I could get a clone for days like this.



Luckily, I was in the neighbourhood on the weekend and my friends at the store were kind enough to set aside a copy to be signed for me. Yet another reason why I make my SF purchases there instead of Chapters - friendly, personal, above-and-beyond-the-call service, and more importantly, a real feeling of community. Thanks, White Dwarf!

Code Nimoy: "Monsters vs Aliens" is a Full-On Laugh Attack

We went for some Saturday afternoon cartoons today, taking in the new animated flick "Monsters vs Aliens" at the local bazillionplex, and hours later we're still chortling over some of its one-liners.

This newest offering from Dreamworks is the story of Susan, a young woman on her way to get married to her overbearing boyfriend when she gets hit by an asteroid and transformed by its mysterious energy into a 50-foot woman with super strength, super durability, white hair, and a wedding dress that, while made of normal fabrics, has the power to assuage the concerns of censors rating a family-friendly movie by vastly increasing in size to protect her modesty (which is kinda too bad). Dragged off by the military to a secret facility, she's renamed "Ginormica" and locked up with a group of other "monsters": Dr Cockroach, PhD - a man-roach hybrid produced when a lab experiment went awry; The Missing Link - half ape, half fish, thousands of years old, cocky as all hell and determined to make it to the beach in time for Spring Break; Insectosaurus - a friendly grub the size of Godzilla; and BOB - a one-eyed pile of blue goo. When an alien attempts to invade the Earth (and drain Susan of the energy that powers her), it's up to the monsters to stop him.

Lots of great laughs and action sequences in this film, and the SF references fly as fast as meteorites (the president's attempt to communicate with the alien's robot probe is a funny encounter you won't forget, and any film that references Mel Brooks' SF offering is automatically tops in my books). BOB, voiced by Seth Rogan, steals many of the scenes, especially with his opinion of dessert and his (sort of) famous last words (which are probably the second-best famous last words I've heard or read yet - right after Jetboy's final remarks in the first "Wildcards" book). And TV's Stephen Colbert has a nice supporting role of the President in his Strangelovian command center.

Monsters vs Aliens is definitely worth full price of admission - even the inflated rate for IMAX. Your kids will love it (we were in a theater full of them - and all of the little ones applauded and cheered when the final credits rolled) and, as you can tell from this spiel, there's enough in it to make it pretty entertaining for adults too. And getting back to IMAX, I'd highly recommend you see it in IMAX 3D. It's one of the best 3D experiences applied to a Hollywood movie I've seen (sorry, Count Floyd), and unlike others, this isn't a glasses come off again-on again flick - it's 3D the whole way through.

Now, if only some mad scientist (cockroach-crossed or otherwise) could figure out how to design some 3D glasses that don't leave monsterous marks on my nose for the rest of the day!

1951 Short Story Predicts Post BSG Life for the Colonials: Nasty, Brutish and Short

Warning: Spoilers
(BSG spoilage factor: about the same as that one donut from the variety box at Timmy's that no one likes the flavour of and thus gets left on the office counter for a week)

Last weekend's BSG finale put me in mind of an old short story. As the refugees of the Fleet when traipsing off happily across the African grasslands, confident in their prospects for challenging but happy futures of living wild and free among the Earthlings (cousins by a Cylon Earth.1 refugee colony?) and unfettered by technology, all I could think of was H. Beam Piper's "Genesis" (originally published in 1951, but I came across it years ago as a teen when I bought the just-released anthology "Isaac Asimov's Wonderful Worlds of Science Fiction 6: Neanderthals").

Piper's tale concerns a group of aliens (Martians) fleeing their dying world, forced to evacuate their colony ship as it suffered a cataclysmic accident, and forced to survive - and try to rebuild their culture/repopulate their species - on a primitive Earth with their few supplies steadily dwindling, without the benefit of modern medical care, and under frequent attack from hostile locals (in the case of the short story: Neanderthals upset at the presence of the interlopers and possibly looking to add them to the menu; in the case of the BSG Earth inhabitants: possibly the same). In short, far from being a refreshing change of pace, these aliens find themselves in a life not too far off from Hobbes' state of nature: nasty, brutish and short.

The story's final section put the fate of the colonists' descendants into fast forward and explained everything in a fashion about as subtle as a sledgehammer and, in a way that was ultimately unecessary. But the bulk of the story is a good, well-paced adventure about the concerns of people who might find themselves in this kind of situation. Concerns which, if they'd occured to the people of BSG's Fleet, might have encouraged them to rethink their strategy and maybe have kept them in a city with modern conveniences, and possibly with working ships still in orbit.

Definitely worth the read if you can find it.

Quick Thoughts on the Finale of BSG

Warning: Spoilers
(spoilage factor: about the same as food in the backpacks of the colonists in the heat of... oh, well, that'd be a spoiler, wouldn't it?)

It was alright but not great.

I saw the first run of the finale Friday evening on Space, and then again this afternoon when the channel re-ran it.

The mysticism didn't impress me. And before you get protesting that BSG was full of religion, let me point out that it's one thing for a show to portray a culture that has a regligion or a couple of religions, and quite another for mysticism to factor into the resolution of the plot. The whole "God wanted it that way", the Kara nonsense, and the casual acceptance of the miraculous same-ness of the local humanoids was cheap and unnecessary.

And then there was the giving up of the technolgocially-enabled life for facing down hungry predators of unknown size and cunning, not to mention potentially hostile native humanoids? Uh-huh.

And then there was the outcome of the final battle itself. I don't want to come off as bloodthirsty, but that was way too much of a complete victory for the Colonials. Cue the prolonged happy ending.

Don't get me wrong, I didn't dislike the finale. There was some good character development (especially in the form of some of the flashbacks), and the battles (space-based and aboard the Cylon colony) were pretty cool and had me on the edge of my seat.

But at the end of it all, I wasn't left sitting there stunned. While I was somewhat emotionally engaged, I wasn't emotionally spent by the end of it like a show of this calibre with an ending of this scale should have left me.

More later.

My Prediction for the End of BSG

Here's my prediction for tomorrow's big BSG finale:

The dream of the opera house says it all.

We know Adama's going to take a limping Galactica in for one last slugfest against Cavil's Cylons in their black hole-surfing (USS Cygnus anyone?), vaguely B5 Shadow vessel-looking, also vaguely naughty-looking colony to try to rescue Hera. He's got about half of his crew volunteering to go on this Charge of the Light Brigade with him. Dying President Laura Rosalin is among them, as is Karl "Helo" Agathon.

One notably absent face from the crowd of rescuers is Gaius Baltar. I'm betting that's going to change. For some reason, probably as a gesture of apparent faith and courage but in fact really in an effort to maintain control of his religeon, possibly also to enhance his group's status among the Fleet, but for some reason anyway, I think Baltar will change his mind and by hook or by crook remain aboard Galactica when she sails off to glory.

No sign of whether Sharon/Athena has made her choice - I didn't see her in the crowd, but maybe I missed her - but I figure she'll snap out of her depression enough to volunteer to come along, if for no other reason than for blood and revenge.

When the attack comes, there will no doubt be a boarding party. At this point, I think Sharon/Boomer will succumb to her new-found affection for Hera and spring the kid from wherever she's being held. I'm betting Galen Tyrol and the other Final Five will be among the boarding party, and it'll be the Chief that finds Boomer. At that point, my bet is the Chief, despite his love for her, will probably kill Boomer.

As to how Hera gets away from the fighting and back to the safety of the Fleet, I think this is where the opera house dream comes in. Remember that both Rosalin and Sharon/Athena were chasing after the girl in the dream, but neither was able to get to her? I bet this means that Rosalin, whether she stays at Adama's side aboard Galactica, or whether she stumbles after the boarding party wheezing her last breath, will not survive to reach the child. Sharon/Athena's thirst for revenge and belief that Hera is already dead will probably mean that she'll be in a Raptor in the thick of battle, or part of the boarding party and hunting for Sharon/Boomer. Either way, I think she'll get killed before she's able to escape with her daughter. That leaves us with the rest of the dream, where Caprica Six and Baltar take Hera into the theatre section of the opera house. We know that Six is among the volunteers, and I'm guessing she'll take part in the boarding party. My bet is that Baltar will be with her. Together they'll be the ones to find Hera and get her to safety.

And as for Adama, Galactica, and the rest of the crew? Death and glory. There's a part of me (and probably every other fan) that kind of wishes that the old ship will triumph one last time against incredible odds and jump battered but intact back to the Fleet. But Battlestar Galactica has never been about total victory for humanity. Nothing in that universe comes without a price.

The only question in my mind is will the show end with the Fleet find a new home, or just drift off into space and the credits and infinite, if unsympathetic, possibility? I seem to recall reading an interview with Ron Moore where he said they'd tie up the loose ends, so I'll go out on a limb and say the "Earth" discovered earlier in the season may have been the original home of the 13th Colony, but, in fact, is not our Earth. My bet is that the Fleet will discover another habitable planet, one settled by the 13th tribe after they left their devastated world, and one that they renamed "Earth" - one that became our Earth. There's certainly partial precedent: in the old series, which the new BSG does make nods towards from time to time, the Fleet did encounter a planet called "Terra", which they initially thought could be Earth, but later discovered it wasn't. Took them some time to find the real deal later on. And, in the new series, the Fleet's first attempt to rebuild their civilization was on New Caprica, named after one of their old worlds. It's certainly possible that refugee 13th colony folk, having left their Earth behind, would have settled another world and named it New Earth and, over time, just dropped the "New" from the name. Ultimately, I think while Galactica may perish, humanity - and the new Cylons - will live on. That's the trade: survival bought in blood.

But who knows? I could be wrong. My predictive track record hasn't been that accurate lately, as evidenced by the short lists for the Auroras and Hugos! At any rate, we'll find out tomorrow night in the last Battlestar.

Not Much Luck with the Hugo Nominations Either

The Hugo Award finalists were announced today and, not surprisingly, very, very few of my nominations made it to the short list(s).

Three of my picks for the best dramatic long-form presentation made it - WALL-E, The Dark Knight, and Iron Man - though no surprise there since they were widely released and were all very good. Although I'm a little surprised Cloverfield didn't make the cut.

And BSG Revelations made it through to the finals for the best dramatic short-form presentation.

At any rate, congratulations to the finalists!

Now, I'll have to see if I can catch up on reading some of the short-listed nominations before voting time, otherwise I won't have much to vote for.

Books Are Not Sponges

Note to self: do not leave a pile of half-a-dozen books stacked beside your computer desk where a glass placed upon said desk can spill its entire contents onto them, when you, being a clumsy git, knock it over.

D'oh!

Aurora Award Short List Is Out

The short list for the Aurora Awards is finally out. Looks like I missed a lot of the more popular nominees, but hey, my picks seldom match the finalists or winners from year to year. I just nominate what I liked best. That being said, getting recognition from the fans is no easy feat when there's a lot of works to choose from, so those that did make it to the final list have certainly earned their place. I'll have to see if I can track down some of the short-listed works I haven't read yet prior to the end of the voting period.

At any rate, congratulations to this year's Aurora Award finalists!

I'll follow-up later with my final ballot picks and a note on the awards when they're given out at Anticipation, the Montreal Worldcon, this summer.

Help Me Introduce a Twilight Fan to Books that Are Worth While

Okay, folks, I need your help on this one. Recently, one of my much younger cousins has finished reading the "Twilight" books (I applogize for sullying this blog with mention of that... stuff) and has put out a request for recommendations of what she should read next.

I'm normally one to let people read what they want to and stick to my own business, but when there's a call for SF literary help, I can't ignore it. Now's the crucial time to steer her towards good speculative fiction, rather than the dreck she's just inflicted on herself.

My initial recommendations were, if the Twilight aberration was a sign of an interest in urban fantasy, that she give pretty much anything by Charles De Lint a try. Yes, I know, read more than two of his books and they all start to look the same, but in limited quantities they're entertaining enough. I also suggested Cory Doctorow's "Somone Comes to Town, Someone Leaves Town".

But I thought I'd put the question out to you. You might think other books are a better way to nudge her into reading better fare. Maybe you think urban fantasy is the wrong direction and you have a different take on where the interests of a Twilight fan might point to in terms of sub-genres (aside from cheesy romance novels).

What are your gateway recommendations to introduce a Twilight fan to good speculative fiction?

Watchmen Definitely Worth Watching

Warning: Spoilers
(spoilage factor: about the same as the basket of fries in the prison caffeteria after Rorschach got finished with it)

It was about as faithful a big-screen adaptation of the comic classic as you're gonna get, and while it wasn't perfect, it was good enough. Good enough to pay full price for an IMAX ticket. Good enough to wait an hour-and-a-half in line on opening night last Friday (with a highschool princess braying behind us in line the whole time - but that's another story). Good enough to see a late showing after a long day of work. "Watchmen" was a damn good movie about good people damned by having to make a compromise to make a damned world a bit better.

The opening sequence (including a shockingly graphic depiction of Kennedy's assasination at the hands of the Comedian) did a good job of laying out the recent history of this alternate world, along with enough glimpses of the backstories of the early superhero pioneers, the Minutemen, as well as the newer generation. It was enough to bring the uninitiated up to speed and let the film get on with its business - killing Eddie Blake and getting on with the unfolding conspiracy.

Overall, the film had the same feel as the comic. Sacrificing a lot of the secondary story lines, narratives and add-ons (although some may argue, and rightfully so, that the stories involving the other characters like the newsman and the comic reader, the psychiatrist, Nite Owl I, the black freighter comic, etc orbiting that of the conspiracy were actually primary storylines in their own right) took away from the depth of the story, but allowed for greater focus on the conspiracy and enabled a slightly faster pacing. I say "slightly" because with all of the flashbacks and the reminiscing conversations, the movie's pace was thoughtful, methodical - which is as it should be. The story's about reconciling the past as much as it is coping with the present and averting or ushering-in the future. Anyone who came to this film looking for a relentless head-banging action piece like "The Increadible Hulk" was blinded by the fact that there are superheroes in the movie. Yeah, these people are costumed vigilantes, but they're people - highly damaged people - first and foremost.

The casting was pretty much spot-on. Jackie Earle Haley was Rorschach and got cheers from the audience with his delivery of the "You're locked up in here with me!" line. Billy Crudup's voice work for Jon was distant, vaguely appologetic, matter-of-fact, and utterly creepy. And Patrick Wilson did a great job as Dan Dreiberg. Wilson had to carry a lot of weight on his shoulders for this role - and I'm not talking about the owl suit. Rorschach may get the ball rolling and let us know what's going down, but he's a complete nut and we, as an audience can't ever really connect with him. Dreiberg, on the other hand, is more-or-less a normal guy and provides the real emotional window to what's going on. Being something of a geek, he's the perfect choice for a character to focus on, given the comic readers and SF fans who make up the primary audience for the movie. Because of this, I was actually a little disappointed that Dreiberg wasn't given more screen time for his backstory (I think it was just a quick throwaway line about liking birds), but, admittedly, his is probably the least interesting of the personal histories. In a way, it's also kind of a-propos that his backstory gets marginalized - as a geek in our society, he's overlooked anyway. But as the film unfolds (as in the comic) we see Dan come into his own and become more confident. If there's anything to nitpick, it's that Wilson didn't pack on enough weight to show off the paunch Dreiberg has in the comic, but that's certainly not a story-killer.

On the subject of nit-picking though, what I didn't think was necessary for the film was the addition of so many concocted scenes with Nixon and his gang. His part is quite minimal in the comic (in fact, I don't recall that his face is ever seen in the comic - or if it is, not for more than a frame or so). It's enough to know that the US and Soviets are squaring off, and if Zack Snyder wanted to ramp-up the tension while staying true to the original story, he could have done so with panic on the streets or more TV newsflashes. Don't get me wrong, I've got no problem with anyone picking on Nixon - it's entirely justified. My issue is with taking up extra screen time with him unnecessarily. Those were minutes that could have shown us something else.

Lastly, there's the end. No doubt many fanboys will complain about the absence of the manufactured giant squid alien and the substitution of Manhattan-esque explosions by Veidt to carry out his scheme to sow unity through mutually-shared fear of the superman. I didn't have a problem with this. It was logical and consistent with the story and with what Veidt was capable of doing. What's problematic about it for me is that it creates in the movie a noticeable departure from Ozymandias' character in the comic. The Adrian Veidt of the comic would not have framed Jon with the attack/disaster/mass-murder because he would have known that Manhattan's repsonse to the fear and hate generated around the world by the explosions would have prompted him to leave for good. And that would be the last thing that Veidt in the comic would have wanted. In the comic, Veidt manouevered the situation to get Jon off Earth, but I never got the sense that he wanted that to be the case permanently. Ozymandias sees (in a way, worships) Jon as his only superior. He wants to learn from Manhattan, to get validation from him. And Adrian's mighty upset that Jon leaves without giving him the answers he wants. It's one of the few times that he displays true humanity (which underscores how different he is from Jon). Movie-Veidt, on the other hand, doesn't have much to say when Manhattan toddles off on his merry way to make some life on the other side of the cosmic tracks. Movie-Veidt is in many ways as inhuman as Jon. Because there's no sense of loss in the film for Ozymandias, his personal victory is total (aside from the need to grow/breed another souped-up kitty). And I think the movie loses something because of that. It's this loss of the final exploration of flawed humanity that's more significant as a weakness of the moive than the lack of the other sub-plots of other characters who have been cut out or minimized.

That being said, "Watchmen" remains a thoughtful and well-crafted story and is certainly worth seeing.

Reaper Takes a Slice Out of a New Season

Warning: Spoilers
(spoilage factor: about the same as a gob of cheese dried onto the inside of the pizza box that Sock... well, that would be a spoiler, wouldn't it?)

It was a solid enough start to season 2 of "Reaper" tonight. Not a great episode, but entertaining. Sock's dilemma with his newly-acquired sister was a hoot, and Sam had a nice escaped soul takedown. All it needed was a little place-the-vessel-on-the-mat action with Gladys.

My problem was with the sub-plot about Sam and Andi's tiff. They've been through that kind of thing already. Hell, that was most of the first season. You'd think that with Sam bringing Andi into the full truth of what's going on, and with her accepting it, at the end of season 1, they'd be past all that by now. You might argue that's precisely Sam's problem, that he still can't get his shit together, but I don't think so. His finally-realized relationship with Andi at the end of season 1 was significant enough that he would have let her know he was roadtripping, or taken her along (like any sane guy with a scorching hot girlfriend that he's head-over-heels for would do when she feels the same), instead of just taking off like some little wuss with only a note to be sent by the least reliable person he knows. The whole set-up for their fight just seemed like the writers got lazy. Let's hope the rest of the season doesn't have any repeat performances of this nonsense.

The question remaining from last season of course is what's the deal with Sam's father (meaning the father he grew up with who was buried alive in the finale - and then uncovered by Sam's mom) and mother?

And then there's a new question for the new season: has the escaped soul from the end of the episode really gotten out of his deal with the devil, and if so, can Sam cash in on the same kind of strategy? Somehow, I have my doubts. Funny that when the devil showed up at the end in his red muscle car to congratulate Sam on a good take-down he didn't rag on him for letting the soul escape like he normally would. Seems like a convoluted trick is in the works, and I'm guessing, that in some way, in the end, the joke will be on Sam.

The Allegedly Renovated Doctor's Interdimensional Spacecraft

The word from the Mirror.co.uk (thanks for the heads-up, Steve!) is that the powers-that-be over at the BBC have ordered a reno for the interior of the TARDIS as part of the switch to the 11th Doctor. The report says the exterior of the vessel will get an improvement to its quality.

While the organic and somewhat dark interior of the current TARDIS design is a bit weird, it's also condusive to a somewhat intimate feeling and does a good job of focussing the audience's attention on the interplay between the Doctor (9th or 10th, take your pick) and whichever Companion is along for the ride. It's also got the feeling of being aged and well-used - something that's tramped its way across the universe a few times, gotten beaten up along the way but always able to face the next challenge.

So if the old girl is going to get an interior design treatment, what sort of new look to you think it should have? (aside from the claims in the report of it being "intricate" and "hitech"?)

I'm thinking an early 80's tiki bar. You heard me: wacky tiki god idols on the walls (and maybe also as stools), a grass overhang above a bamboo bar, brightly-coloured drinks topped with fruit and paper umbrellas, Don Ho music playing in the background, and the Doctor presiding in a loud Hawaiian shirt. ; )

Where Trademark Lawyers Have Gone Before

The town council in Vulcan, Alberta is asking CBS for a license to use the Star Trek trademark, according to the local paper. While this town at the edge of the Badlands only by coincidence, for years it's used its monicker to attract Trek tourists like Tribbles to, well, any kind of food. The cost of a license is $5,000. You just know that somewhere, the one resident who isn't making money off the tourist traps is probably howling: "Dammit, Jim, I'm a taxpayer, not a Trekkie!"

Take Your Dolls and Go Home

I'm finished with Joss Whedon's "Dollhouse".

Friday's episode was like a bad combination of a mediocre installment of "Quantum Leap" and "The Bodyguard" (a lame offering from Costner). Not only was it boring and uninspired, it was downright annoying. Nothing could make me want to turn the channel faster than a couple of 20-something characters strutting around congratulating themselves on how cool they are and letting their egos explode during their argument near the end.

The one scene in the episode that had the potential to redeem it was the confrontation between the security chief and the lead programmer of the Dollhouse (whatever the company is called, I can't be bothered to remember or even check) about Echo going off-track, but it felt forced and ultimately fell flat.

"Dollhouse" is now 0-for-3, and I've got better things to do on a Friday night than sit around hoping it'll get better and be consistently disappointed.

My Nominations for the Hugo Awards

One of the perks of having registered/purchased my membership for Anticipation - the Worldcon this summer in Montreal - nice and early is that I get to submit nominations for the Hugo Awards. Why I've waited until just before the deadline to actually get around and submit said nominations is (as I've noted in my previous post for my Aurora Awards nominations) due to wanting to give myself a little more time to read a couple of more books/stories published in 2008, giving everything I have read and seen some thought, and, of course, a healthy dose of procrastination.

But having finally made some decisions, and most importantly, finally receiving my Hugo pin number from the Anticipation organizers, I've finally put in my two cents. And so my nominees are:

Best Novel:
"Very Hard Choices" by Spider Robinson
"Firstborn" by Arthur C Clarke & Stephen Baxter
"Valley of Day-Glo" by Nick DiChario
"Victory of Eagles" by Naomi Novik

(I left the 5th nomination space empty because I haven't read anything else eligible, or at least nothing I can recall, which means it wouldn't be worthy of nomination anyway.)


Best Novella:
"Ancients of the Earth" by Derryl Murphy
"Wylde's Kingdom" by David Nickle
"Wonjjang and the Madman of Pyongyang" by Gord Sellar

(Not entirely sure if these three are eligible - not sure if Tesseracts Twelve ever got published in the US, but I'm nominating them anyway on the off chance this will work. At any rate, I've left the other 2 nomination spots empty because no other novellas have jumped out at my from this year's reading experience.)


Best Novelette:

(Nothing here. The distinction between Novella and Novelette has always pissed me off - it's not like the medium-length works I read in anthologies or magazines come with word counts beside them! Because of that, I'm not sure if a kind of longer story I've read is in fact a Novelette, or whether it's too long and actually a Novella, or too short and thus a Short Story. Is your head spinning too? No nominations!)


Best Short Story:
"Empire" by Simon Brown
"Smoking, Waiting for the Dawn" by Jason Nahrung

(These two stories from the Australian anthology Dreaming Again just kick ass. Empire, because who doesn't love a smart take on life under the Martian occupation from War of the Worlds, and Smoking because it made me think of John Carpenter's Vampires tempered with the thoughtfulness of Coppola's Dracula. No other nominations because most of the short stories I've soaked up this year were in On Spec, which isn't published in the US.)


Best Related Book:
"The Savage Humanists" edited by Fiona Kelleghan

(I nominated this one for its long, but thoughtful and accurate opening essay about several authors' use of science fiction for social commentary. Didn't read anything else this year that stood out that was non-fiction concerning the genre.)


Best Graphic Story:

(No nominations here because I haven't had the time or resources to read many comics or graphic novels.)


Best Dramatic Presentation, Long Form:
"WALL-E"
"The Dark Knight"
"Cloverfield"
"Iron Man"

(No nomination in the last slot - again, nothing was good or really stuck out.)


Best Dramatic Presentation, Short Form:
"BSG: Revelations"
"Reaper: Unseen"

(Nothing else really sticks out)


Best Editor, Short Form:

(Again, no-one really comes to mind from this year.)


Best Editor, Long Form:

(Same as above.)


Best Professional Artist:

(As I mentioned in my previous post, I don't follow the art scene in the genre that closely.)


Best Semiprozine:

(I don't follow this end of things much.)


Best Fanzine:
"SF Signal"

(Assuming, of course, that websites count as 'zines, the boys at SF Signal deserve a nomination!)


Best Fan Writer:

(No-one really jumps out.)


Best Fan Artist:

(Same as above.)


John W. Campbell Award:

(I'm not sure I can think of a new writer who would qualify, so unfortunately, I've got to pass on this one too. Pity, because if I could think of an eligible new writer I'd like to give them a boost.)


Now it's a matter of waiting until voting time.

My Nominations for the Aurora Awards

I've been putting off my nominations for this year's Aurora Awards (Canada's highest honour for literary speculative fiction) for a while now. Partly because I was still mulling over which works to nominate, and, admittedly, partly because I just didn't make any time for it. But the deadline's looming (February 28th, for those of you who have been procrastinating like me), so it's gotta be done now.

I don't claim to have read everything published by every Canadian author in 2008, but I've read enough that's good, mediocre and down right sloppy to be comfortable nominating the ones I have encountered that I consider to be the best.

The rules allow for three nominations (each given equal value) in each category. Voting for takes place shortly after the nomination period ends and the Awards will be given out at Anticipation/Worldcon in Montreal this August.

And so, my nominations for the Auroras:

Best Long-Form Work in English:
"Very Hard Choices" by Spider Robinson

(This is my only nomination in this category because I haven't read any other novels that were eligible)


Best Long-Form Work in French:

(No nominations because I haven't read any novels published in French)


Best Short-Form Work in English:
"The Devil's in the Details" by Kevin Cockle - in On Spec, Summer 2008 issue
"Ancients of the Earth" by Derryl Murphy - in Tesseracts Twelve
"Wylde's Kingdom" by David Nickle - in Tesseracts Twelve

(This category was a real tough one to make choices - there were a lot of other really good stories this year, but ultimately, you've got to go with the ones that are not only top notch, but stick out in your memory)


Best Short-Form Work in French:

(Again, no nominations here, not having read any French language publications)


Best Work in English (Other):
"Tesseracts Twelve" edited by Claude Lalumiere
"Identity Theft and other stories" by Robert J Sawyer
On Spec magazine


Best Work in French (Other):

(Same as previous - didn't read anything in French, so no nominations)


Best Artistic Achievement:

(As much as I hate to say it, there wasn't any art this year that really blew me away. Admittedly, I don't tend to nominate art at all though.)


Fan Achievement (Fanzine):
Fan Achievement (Organizational):
Fan Achievement (Other):

(No nominations for any of these final categories because nothing I've come across relating to them this year really stands out. I won't be nominating my own blogs, "bloginhood" and "Not A Planet Anymore" in the fanzine category because I kind of think it's in poor taste to nominate yourself for awards, especially ones of this stature.)


Stay tuned for my Hugo Award nominations tomorrow.

Dollhouse Made of Plastic

Warning: Spoilers
(spoilage factor: about the same as an apple that's fallen down a flight of stairs)

Two episodes down and I'm still less than impressed with Whedon's new show "Dollhouse". No interesting dialogue, cliched characters, and this week's story was about as unoriginal as it gets.

How many times have we seen or read about a manhunt where our plucky protagonist is told, "Okay, skippy, you've got --- minutes/seconds/whatever headstart, then I'm comin' after ya!" Chalk one more up to "Dollhouse", and what's really disappointing (especially from a storyteller of Whedon's calibre) is that there's no new angle to it.

With all of the plot possibilities that "Dollhouse" has open to it, why would they retread old ground like this? Granted, the point is that our hero plays a diverse set of roles as she goes from one assignment to another, and not all of them can be new or cool. But at least if there's no way to avoid old hat like this, if no new angles can be found, there should be some sense of tension - and there is none, 'cause it's only episode 2 and we can't kill-off the lead character; or maybe some good banter, but again, none.

Episode 3 of "Dollhouse" hits the air this Friday, and it's going to have to wow me, otherwise it's strike 3. I've got better things to do on a Friday night than waste time on a show that's boring me as much as this one.

Time to Cut the Puppet Strings

"Star Fleet" is back - and I don't mean a revamp of James T. Kirk's employers. A week or two ago, my friend Steve (a fellow fanboy at the office) brought to my attention news that the old marionation series is being re-issued on DVD.

Apparently the show had a big British following. I remember it from when I was a kid back in the early 80's in Ontario... my parents had bought the family's first VCR (wisely: a VHS) and the department store that sold it had its own rental section. After renting "Star Wars" a couple of times and going quickly through the Disney collection, we decided to give "Star Fleet" a try. I mean, it had a blatant SF name - it had to be cool, right? Right? Ugh.

I've never been a fan of marionation to begin with. There's something vaguely creepy about it, especially when it tries to be detailed and real. Amidst the scale furniture and intricate clothing there are these strange big-headed figures that either move in bobbing, syrupy slowness or quick, clumsy jerks. As much as I enjoyed parts of it when I was little, I always found the Christmas classic "Rudolph the Red Nosed Reindeer" and similar holiday productions to be vaguely unsettling. Worse still was "The New Adventures of Pinochio" on Sunday mornings, followed by some other show that was kind of like the "Addams Family" except in marionation. To this day I don't like that style, which is one of the main reasons why "Team America: World Police" didn't work for me.

"Star Fleet" was worse. It was a science fiction show with lots of scenes of space flight and space battles, but every shot of the cruisers and planets out there in the void felt cramped and clausterphobic. The ship itself looked like a hand-vac with the engine block and foils of an X-Wing fighter lashed on to its aft section. The giant robot didn't do anything for me either. Admittedly, I remember very little of the plot, except that it felt disappointingly like the anime "Battle of the Planets" that had been a staple of my TV watching in the late 70's.

Funny thing though: I hadn't given "Star Fleet" any thought since I'd last seen it as a kid, but as soon as Steve mentioned it, the theme music from the opening title sequence and even the song from the closing credits came back with crystal clarity. I wish they hadn't.

Leave the puppets to biodegrade on the compost heap of the past.

All of This Has Happened Before...

Warning: spoilers
(spoilage factor: about the same as the fruit Tyrol was looking at just as the nukes fell)

Watching the final season of BSG these past couple of weeks has frequently left me with the same kind of feeling of deja vu that the Final Five Cylons seem to experience on a regular basis. No, that doesn't mean that when I go for a walk along the shore at Boundary Bay that I get the impression I'm in a street market on another world - far from it. Rather, it's the case that some moments in recent episodes seem to have been lifted from other SF productions.

Take last Friday's episode for example. Sam's bullet-wound to the head allows him to see the Final Five's past as well as the big picture, and he's just dying to tell the others. Kara eventually has to decide to allow the doctors to perform the operation that will save his life, but could cause him to lose his newly-acquired memories and awareness. This felt an aweful lot like the episode of "Star Trek: Deep Space 9" where Sisko is endowed with prophetic abilities during his search for a lost Bajoran city, but faces death because of the strain on his body. His son decides to allow the operation that saves him, but costs him his visions. Now, BSG co-creator Ron Moore had a solid history working with DS9, and while I don't know if Moore was around during that particular episode, I wonder if he and his writers aren't drawing from it.

Also last week, the episode's final confrontation between Cavil (or "Jonathan" if you prefer) and Ellen felt familiar. She tries to tell him that it's okay to be who and what he is, and Cavil responds by assuring her he'll open her brain. The whole thing felt distinctly Blade Runner-ish to me. Reminded me a lot of Roy coming for a reckoning with Tyrrel and using his thumbs like egg-beaters in the doctor's eyesockets when he's told that it's fine that he's an android who won't get to live any longer.

Lastly, on the episode two weeks ago, there was Gaeta's last second of life in front of the firing squad. Just before the order to fire is given, he remarks that the pain from his amputation has finally stopped. This cease of pain in the moment before death is one that's been used a few times in other stories, but the one that comes most quickly to mind for me is the death of The Master at the end of "Doctor Who" series 3 where he notes that the drums he's been hearing all his life have finally stopped.

Now, don't get me wrong, I'm not complaining about BSG doing a little borrowing or being inspired by other SF. The adaptations to BSG circumstances have certainly been done well. And yes, BSG has on many previous occasions made allusions both to its predecessor and other shows. But these examples seemed different in a way... perhaps more overt because they had something to do with the plot rather than being merely asides? I'm still trying to figure that out.

Dollhouse Needs A Reno

I'm waiting for Joss Whedon's new series "Dollhouse" to prove it's more than just plastic.

Sure there was an action sequence, and yeah it tried to create a couple of dramatic moments with confrontations with dangerous people and painful memories (sort of) and intense debates about morality, but, as odd as it sounds (especially with a Whedon series), there just didn't seem to be any life in it. All of the actors looked like they were trying to act their parts, as opposed to giving engaging performances where they were their characters. And characters that have a life of their own are crucial to a series like this that isn't giving the audience anything especially new in terms of concepts (we've seen artifically-implanted personalities many times over the years, most recently with Christian Slater's Jekyll & Hyde remake "My Own Worst Enemy" - and if you're looking for an example of people having multiple personality reprogramming sessions, think back to that episode of "Star Trek: Voyager" when the Hirogen turned the ship into a hunting preserve). In fact, it's characters and dialogue that make a Whedon series enjoyable, intelligent and memorable, but so far, nothing's at the level it should be.

Now you may argue that "Dollhouse" is a different type of show than Buffy, "Angel" or "Firefly", and that's true, and so the same types of dialect and terms of reference can't be rehashed. But creating a different mood, world and set of problems doesn't negate the need for characters who make the audience want to pay attention. And the characters in the premier didn't feel authentic enough and didn't say anything compelling enough to really make me care.

To be fair though, it was only the pilot. A lot of great SF shows are pretty wobbly for the first few episodes, or even the first season or two (the first season of "Star Trek: The Next Generation" is absolutely unwatchable, as far as I'm concerned). Maybe "Dollhouse" will get stronger once it gets a few more episodes under its belt. If it lasts that long (and the guessing game about Fox and the awful Friday night slot is a whole different discussion).

I didn't hate Friday's premier, but I didn't love it either. I'll give it another week or two to see if it gets stronger.

No Room for Fanboys at the Cinema

It looks like on BC's Lower Mainland at least, the movie theatres want geeks to come and spend money on films and popcorn and the like, just as long as the films aren't about geeks themselves. It's pissed me off to no end that in the entire Metro Vancouver region this weekend, not one cinema is devoting a single screen to "Fanboys". Not one!

Now, to be fair, with the amount of incessant tinkering and revising that's been done to this little flick, and with all the delays, it does, admittedly, have a reasonable potential for suckage. And yes, I've read one review so far (the film seems to be strangely absent from reviews in big media here, as though they've all turned their backs on it because it's openly nerdy and thus not cool enough to warrant their "Bride Wars"-obsessed critiques). But to not have at least one multiplex show it on one screen? Come on!

I mean, there are still theatres showing "The Day the Earth Stood Still" (a couple of months after its embarrassing debut) and anyone (like me) who made the mistake of seeing that one knows the only thing it's standing in is a pile of shit as deep as Keannu Reeves' inability to act. Never mind the other crappy new flicks that are fresh out and getting plenty of screen time. Don't the theatre chains know that while they're getting mediocre turnouts for the low-quality mainstream stuff, they'd probably get good turnouts for "Fanboys" even if it isn't that good (and I'm not saying whether it is or isn't 'cause I haven't seen it yet and likely won't for a while at this rate) because they'd probably get a ton of geeks turning out to watch it out of curiousity at how it portrays geek culture. Never mind the flood they'd get if the film's any good. In an age where movie theatres are kicked hard in the bottom line by video stores, sales of DVD's for home viewing, and internet downloads, they can't afford not to diversify and bring in any flick that might attract paying customers, especially fanboys, who tend to come out to flicks like this in flocks and spend lots of money on junk food and video games in the lobby while they're waiting. Way to cultivate a profitable market, Cineplex!

Seattle Drops Out of Worldcon Race

I was greatly disappointed today when I was reading Rob Sawyer's blog and came across word that Seattle has dropped out of the race to host Worldcon in 2011.

Bid organizers say there were other groups competing for the same facilities in the Emerald City during the same period Worldcon was planned, and these other groups were already able to make financial commitments. Unable to get the top-notch facilities they'd wanted, the bid group decided to pull-out, rather than continue with a second-rate setup.

As a result, Reno wins the Worldcon 2011 bid by default.

Good for the Nevada crowd, certainly. But I think Seattle would have made a good location, especially since it's the home to the Science Fiction Museum and Hall of Fame. Personally, I would have gone to a Worldcon in Seattle in a heartbeat, because it's just two hours down the road from Vancouver (once you've spent the prerequesite 9 years waiting in line to cross the border, that is) and I've always enjoyed day trips there. Reno, on the other hand, is a bit more of a trek and has (no offence to Reno residents) never much interested me. With any luck, Seattle will be able to pull something together again for a bid in the future.

In the meantime, I'm very much anticipating a good time at Worldcon this summer in Montreal.

Update on the 365 Short Story Challenge

I admit, I've started to fall behind.

The challenge seemed easy at first, read one short story in the evening before resuming whatever novel was in front of me and I'd be able to keep pace. Problem was I got into a stretch of really, really good novels that I didn't want to put down for even a few minutes to allocate time for something short. I mean, with Gaiman's "American Gods", Dan Simmons' "Muse of Fire" and Moore's "Watchmen" can you blame me?

At any rate, now that I'm done "Watchmen" I'm going to be putting the plan back on track. I'm in the middle of a backissue of On Spec (Winter '99) that I picked up at VCon a couple of years ago, and once that's done I'll crack open one of the anthologies I aquired recently and bring the tally up to where it should be, or even put myself ahead of the game again. I'm thinking either of the Australian collection "Dreaming Again" that wife gave to me for Christmas, or "Gaslight Grimoire" (an anthology of fantasy riffs on Sherlock Holmes) which I got at VCon last fall.

As for thoughts on some of the short stories I read just prior to the recent hiatus, the only one that really sticks out in my mind was Claude Lalumiere's "Njabo" (again from a backissue of On Spec - Fall '03). It's the tale of an artist living in a multi-partner family who struggles to come to grips with dreams where her daughter becomes an elephant and leads other pachyderms on a crusade to rid the world of their human tormentors. The strange situations Lalumiere presents always demand that the reader go hunting for metaphors amongst the brush of the story. Here, the obvious one seems to be of the power of art, or, because of the child, of any creative act, to force us to re-evaluate our perception of the world, and to bring the possibility of radical change. Given the diverse natures of the narrator and her partners, and that dispite their differnces they continue to stay together as a family unit and love one-another, and with their ultimate fate steered by the daughter, I wonder too if Lalumiere is using the family as allegory for a Canada, with its diversity, struggling with changing identity, staying together despite the differences of its components, and perhaps with a large, world-changing destiny (though I would hope for one not nearly as violent as that implied by the child's transformation). Always enjoyable to read his stuff.

Now back to the challenge and making up lost ground.

Happy Chinese New Year

Gung Hei Fat Choy to everyone out there at the beginning of the year of the Ox. My wife's Chinese, so we usually mark the new year with a nice supper centred around a few traditional dishes. But for my part, being an SF fan, the holiday's gotta be celebrated with some good storytelling too.

First and foremost in the tradition, is sitting down to watch John Carpenter's masterpiece: "Big Trouble in Little China". One of my all-time favourite movies. I've enthused about it here before, so I won't got into too many details, but it's a great combination of humour and action as we ride along with John-Wayne-talking (at least when his confidence is up) fish-out-of-water truck driver Jack Burton, perhaps one of the greatest movie sidekicks of all time. Bonus points to Carpenter for being dedicated enough to make sure the insults and threats the Chinese characters fire back and forth at each other in Cantonese actually make sense (I know because my wife often chuckles away when she watches and has translated some of them). And of course, the dialogue in the film is ripe with one-liners that stick in the memory for years. My favourite is from the villain, Lo-Pan: "You were not brought upon this world to 'get it', Mr. Burton!"

The laugh fest was followed-up by Ang Lee's melancholy fantasy "Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon". This too is movie that never gets stale. It's easy to get swept up in the golden-age tapestry of flying heroes wielding swords against foes to settle epic grudges. Each viewing unveils a new nuance in the acting or the characters' interactions with one-another, and the lush visuals are always a treat.

Of course, this year New Years eve fell on Robbie Burns night, so the turnip cake was followed up with a double-shot of scotch. Not the most obvious culinary combination in the world, but it worked, and as "Big Trouble in Little China" illustrated, more often than not, East and West work very well together.

geekTunes

I've been spending quite a few evenings lately crawling around the Apple iTunes store hunting for music that I don't already have on CD to load into the new iPhone I was given for Christmas. In addition to an assortment of rock, blues, jazz and classical pieces, I've been pleasantly surprised at how much in the way of SF-related stuff I've been able to find.

Tonight's geeky acquisition was a historical piece - Orson Welles Mercury Theatre radio play of "The War of the Worlds". That'll be a great one for a road trip sometime.

And yet, I would have been somewhat surprised if the site hadn't had that gem. The real shocker was some of the soundtracks that turned up, from movies that were either old or not well received by the general audience. I mean, I found the main theme for "Krull"! The movie was shit (mostly) but man did Horner write a big, ballsy piece of classically-inspired music. John Barry's score for "The Black Hole" is also there - another craptacular movie (which, I've admitted openly before is one of my guilty pleasures) that you wouldn't expect to find on a site like this ('cause Disney sure as hell doesn't seem to have any memory of it beyond the anniversary DVD that was released a few years ago). There are a couple of renditions of the "Tron" score available too, although with "Tron 2" (or however they're trying to funk-up the spelling now) in the works, it isn't surprising that this old chestnut would get dusted off for playlists. This led my to Journey's "Only Solutions" from the movie's end credits, which I've enjoyed for years but have had a tough time finding until now. Follow that up with a couple of John Carpenter pieces - Snake's Uniform from "Escape from LA" (a badass blues riff on the old "Escape from New York" theme) and The Porkchop Express from my favourite "Big Trouble in Little China" (and no piece of music could be more appropriate right now, what with me living hin the heart of Richmond - the new Little China - and the whole Lower Mainland being socked-in with fog as thick as wet wool that would make San Francisco envious) - and I'm a happy guy.

And bonus points for stocking comedian Sean Cullen's "Food of Choice" song. Not SF per se, but it's the kind of thing a mad scientist or wannabe Bond villain might hum under his breath while preparing to proceed with his nefarious and science-fictionally-inspired scheme, so it's worth mentioning here.

Say what you will about how loyal geeks are in buying up stuff related to their favourite cult classics, I hadn't expected to find this stuff because, let's face it, the site is about making money and you'd figure they wouldn't be devoting storage space to music that the largest percentage of the population wasn't clamouring for. Makes me wonder what the purchase stats are for some of this stuff - whether, in fact the geeks are logging-on in droves, or whether the site's geeky creators added this music as part of their own little sub-culture corner.

At any rate, good on Apple for picking a nice bushell of geek tunes!

BSG Resumes

Warning: Spoilers!
(spoilage factor: take a trip down to your local dump - any ol' day will do)

Frak me!

What a crushing way to open a new - and the last - season! (I've said it before and I'll say it again, as much as they want to call this 4.5, as far as I'm concerned, if it's kicking off a year after the season initially began, then this isn't just a hiatus and this isn't 4.5 - this is season 5, fellow toaster-lovers)

D's suicide was a shocking moment. But only for a moment. I then began to reflect on the fact that Dualla's survived the near total annihilation of her species, lived in a pretty much constant state of siege for several years, has seen her marriage crumble and then, when she finally arrives at Earth, humanity's last hope, it's a somewhat radioactive cemetery. Seen in that light, her depression and feelings of hopelessness are not surprising. Sure, she appeared to pick up at the end, but it's not uncommon for those who are suicidal to display an apparent change in outward attitude once they've made their decision to end their life - her last date with Apollo could be seen as putting her affairs in order and allowing herself to be happy knowing she would not be allowing her self to continue in a bleak tomorrow. A very sad end for a likable, and very human character.

And then there's the Earth issue. Yeah, they're calling it Earth, but is this 13th Colony really Earth? Our Earth? I suspect the answer is no. Bear with me here... At the close of the season last spring, when the Fleet finally arrived in orbit, there was a suspicious little part of my mind that doubted this planet was the real deal. Not just because that would be too fortunate for a group of people beset by every turn of ill luck imaginable short of alien anal-probing (unlike the old series - I mean, come on, what do you think was really going on in that glowing white ship in the "War of the Gods" episode?). No, part of me was doubting because the space scenes showed no shots of the moon, nor was there any sign of it in the ever-cloudy sky. Nor did we see any other pix of recognizable real estate from the home system.

Now, you might point out that the Fleet was in pretty close orbit, and the moon's kinda out there, so it wouldn't necessarily be visible in the space scenes. And you might note that because the jump drives bring the ships instantaneously to where they want to go (usually), of course we wouldn't see any shots of the Tharsis volcanoes rearing up from Mars, or Jupiter's great red spot, or Saturn's rings, because there would be no need for a leisurely tour through the solar system in a long sunward orbit, and no direct flights in, and no aerobraking maneuvers in the Oort Cloud or some gas giant's atmosphere. And you'd be right on both accounts.

And yet, if we don't see any of the other familiar land (er, space) marks of our solar system, how can we really know that this is Earth and not some other little blue wet rock zipping around a cheery little yellow star in any ol' corner of the galaxy? We can't.

Here's my theory, for what little it's worth: During the exodus in the wake of whatever mysterious disaster befell Kobol (now green and quiet and probably a perfect home if anyone thought of doing the unexpected and turning around and deking around Cavil and his cabal and making the long trek back towards where they started, but I digress), the last-cycle Cylons went west and set up the 13th Colony on "Earth". A millenium or two of relative peace and prosperity passes, then there's some trouble and some nukes and history repeats itself. Refugees leave the 13th Colony and head out some unknown distance across the stars where they find another reasonably hospitable little blue planet and set up shop. Fondly remembering the home they left behind, they probably named the new planet Earth or New Earth or something to that effect - just as the homesick colonials named their first attempt to settle down "New Caprica". In short, I don't think the ruined "Earth" we've just been shown is the real deal - the final stop, the actual Earth - our Earth, is probably a little way down the road and will likely be found and fought over in the coming episodes. This would allow for a nod towards the old series (as the writers like to do from time to time) where the real Earth would be ours as it is now - except, in the vein of the new series, we would be the descendants of the 13th Colony Cylons. And my theory can't be that out to lunch, because Adama suggests as much at the end of this first episode where he says the people of the 13th Colony would have set out to find a new home, just as the new-era Colonials have over the past five years. That's my two bits. Make of it what you will.

Of course, the whole issue of mega disasters and refugee migrations across the stars makes me wonder about something... What's happening back on the 12 Colonies? We haven't seen anything of life there since Starbuck rescued Anders and the other survivors. At the time, the Cylons were definitely working hard to restore the Colonial worlds so they could live there themselves. Then we don't hear anything else from them except for the ones aboard the basestars chasing the Fleet across the galaxy and subsequently engaging in civil war. But all of the Cylons didn't just pack up and leave the Colonies to help with the extermination efforts, did they? There's gotta be some still behind on the Colonies continuing the home-renos, right? If so, would they have been embroiled in the civil war, or would that have only been their space-bound brethren? Would they spawn a human-like civilization on the 12 Colonies, now that the Resurrection Hub has been destroyed? (And how stupid would a machine mind have to be to think that it was safe putting all of its reincarnation eggs in one basket? Wouldn't there be other hubs? What about the Cylon homeworld that they used as their base of operations between the end of the last war and the attack on the Colonies? No spare parts or Ikea-style blueprints there?) Is the idea behind this series that there would ultimately be human and Cylon-as-close-to-human-as-makes-no-difference civilizations existing in isolation (but sometimes simultaneously) all over the galaxy - humanity and its children accidentally seeding the cosmos with life one disaster and war at a time? But if so, over time, it might get to be a crowded place if every disaster spawned an exodus as well as stay-at-homes (whether conquerors or survivors who never made it off-world and began to rebuild). Granted though, there's no evidence that the culture lasted on Kobol too long after the Colonials left thousands of years previous (unless they did something really cool and became post-human). But I digress...

The other big question this season-opener presents is who the frak is the final Cylon? For a big chunk of the episode, it sure looked to be Starbuck, especially with the discovery of the downed Viper and the blond-haired pilot's body with a wedding band and Kara Thrace dogtags. And yet, if nothing else, this series has repeatedly slapped audiences around with the hard lesson that appearances can be deceiving. So was it Starbuck, and is she the final Cylon? But things get complicated at the end where Tigh has his regressed vision/repressed memory, where his dead wife Helen is a part of his old life on the 13th Colony. Could she be the final member of the Final Five?

Last year, I was leaning towards Gaeta being most likely to be the last Cylon. But tonight's revelations throw that into question.

I now have a new theory: the final Cylon isn't a person/character per se, it's a artificially-designed, possibly quasi-intelligent piece of deliberately self-replicating genetic code. I'm thinking the final Cylon is an organic program of sorts, created who-knows-how-long-ago to periodically rebuild a group of the original Cylons. They're born, they live their lives, they have children and thus pass the code along, then die, and every so often, possibly every lifetime, somewhere among the population, this genetic program cobbles together a new copy of one of the original Cylons to resume the life cycle and continue to spread the genetic program throughout the gene pool so it can continue to replicate over time. Included in the program might be memories of the original (perhaps several of) former lives/incarnations/models that might be either time-released or dormant (possible for several generations/versions) until triggered by specific circumstances. In a sense, at some point in the deep past, the proto-Cylons/last-cycle Cylons figured out that they didn't need a huge Resurrection Hub ship in space that could be blown to pieces, if they just tricked biology into doing what they wanted they could still have immortality and without putting all their eggs in one basket. Sounds like a wacky idea, I know, but it would certainly explain why Saul Tigh (for example) has always been Saul Tigh, but doesn't remember living for 2,000 years, but suddenly dimly remembers a life with Helen (who might also have been from the Cylon gene pool and thus occasionally reprogrammed and relaunched every few generations) on the 13th Colony.

So what's your take on the big BSG questions? Is this Earth or will they find a true Earth elsewhere? What's your guess for the final Cylon? What's going on with Starbuck (the million dollar question of the entire series)? And are there any other mysteries that are nagging you?

The Best of BSG So Far

Just hours away from the resumption of "Battlestar Galactica" and the beginning of the series' end.

All this anticipation got my faithful sidekick harrysaxon and I in a bit of a reflective mood, so over at Not A Planet Anymore we cooked-up a Top 10 List of the Best BSG Episodes so far.

Must get some sleep now so I'll be able to fully appreciate the new episode tomorrow after a full day of work.

The Countdown to BSG - Boob Tube Groove

Only a few days left until season 4 (let's call a spade a spade: after this humongous delay, it's really season 5!) of Battlestar Galactica resumes.

To get everyone in the mood, here's the recent Fandom Forum from Space (Canada's science fiction specialty channel). Unlike most home-grown programming on Space, this show was actually pretty good. Lots of interesting speculation around how the series will end and who the 5th Cylon is.

Bonus: It was extremely cool to see comic and author Sean Cullen (the dementedly funny genius behind the song "Food of Choice") is a BSG fan and was on the panel.

The 365 Short Stories Challenge - An Update

Warning: Spoilers
(spoilage factor: about the same as a heaping spoonful of stuffing taken out of an undercooked Christmas turkey)

So far, things have been going well with the Challenge. Starting out with the Fall 2008 issue of On Spec as my primary reading material was a good way to rack-up a bunch of short stories quickly.

Fall 2008 (which I received in the mail in December) was On Spec's special Youth theme. The editors focussed entirely on getting stories from young authors in two categories: ages 15-18 and 19-23. For some, the lack of maturity, learning and experience was evident. Others, however displayed some fine talent and will be a treat for fans of good SF to read if they keep up with their writing. Here are the highlights:

"Too Long to Forgive" by Brittany McCartney
This could have been an interesting development on the Merlin legend, if not for the fact that it was far too deliberately vague, to the point where I didn't much care about what happened by the end.

"Lifeshop" by Susannah Ripley
Not a bad little description of the location for a possible turnaround after death, just not much of a story to it.

"A Cat Named Wellington" by Seanah Roper
Not a bad story. The Beatles' "Elinor Rigby" kept running through my head as I was reading it.

"Mad Science" by S. R. Kriger
Disturbing yet cute. Kriger has the makings of a good, solid writer.

"'No Entry' Signs and Other Cosmic Mysteries" by Stephanie Gray
Now this was a cracking good yarn. A typical young person in an uninteresting job pushes the boundaries in a banal kind of way and winds up, briefly, in a tunnel (feelings of the old "Zork" text-only computer game here) which she follows into a horrific scene, and upon escaping comes across an old guy at a coffee shop who shares some secrets of the universe. The importance of the "no entry" signs reminded me of the explanation for roadside attractions in Gaiman's "American Gods". Loved the little details in this story - having Odin wearing a Zepplin T-shirt was awesome - from that point on I had Robert Plant wailing "The Immigrant Song" in my head as I read the story. Gray's got some real talent.

"The Finale" by Yuri Fabrikantov
A solid, melancholy story.

"Blank" by Leah MacLean-Evans
Not really an SF story. Not an especially wowing piece of writing either.

"Paddywhackers Come Home" by Don Norum
Another good one. Not great, mind you, but a good story about an encounter with the other side.

"With Love" by Ashlin McCartney
This one read more like an installment from the middle of a novel the author's been working on, rather than a short story. Didn't feel terribly original either.

"Emily's House" by Andrew Campana
This one didn't feel terribly original either - I've come across a few stories over the years about kids in their creepy houses. That being said, this story was well done, especially in giving the sense that the girl in question was more-or-less at home in the place without herself being creepy. I'd look forward to reading more from Campana as he developes his talent.

"Charlotte's Eyes" by Priscilla McGreer
Another good, solid story worthy of this collection. McGreer knows how to write believable characters.

"Burning Feathers" by B. L. Trogen
Not bad. Not good. Kind of meh. The whole robot rights in court thing has been done before - a lot - and this twist on it wasn't especially gripping.

Now that this issue of On Spec out of the way, I've slowed down a bit. I'm currently focussing most of my attention on reading Neil Gaiman's "American Gods", but I'm adding to the short story tally every now and again by keeping a back-issue of On Spec - the Fall 2003 edition - on hand for when I go out for something like a haircut where I know I'll be waiting a little while and can get a short story or two under my belt. I'd missed Fall 2003 when it initially came out (I was buying off the shelf at the bookstore - which stocked the mag pretty irregularly - at the time, whereas now I have a subscription) but I was lucky enough to find it in the back-issues pile at the On Spec table in the Dealers' Room at VCon a couple of years ago. Having this in the back of the car to pick up now and then when I'm out and about will be a good way of making sure I don't fall behind.

Stay tuned for more updates.

Christmas in Who-Ville

Warning: Spoilers
(spoilage factor: the same as the leftover meat sack once the Cybermen have converted someone)

I finally had a chance to watch the new Christmas episode of "Doctor Who" the other day (thanks to a co-worker of mine who's also an SF fan and, being a Brit, can't miss episodes of the new Doctor and was kind enough to pass this one along when he was done with it). A good installment in the series, if not great.

It was appropriate for the Cybermen to be behind the invasion of Victorian London. With that era focussing on bigger and better machines, the advancement of science and the ever-present question of man's place amidst the adaptations (with people frequently being dehumanized into little more than flesh machines in the factories), the Cybermen, with their goal of conversion and mechanized progress, were a good fit.

That being said, I have to admit I'm getting a little bored with the constant apparent extinctions of the Cybermen (and the Daleks too), followed by their reappearances. Yes, yes, they're among the favourite badguys of the series, but it's more than a little contrived to see them brought back time and again after banishments and wipeouts just because the writers need some super bad-asses (or, in the case of the Cybermen, hard-asses) to perpetrate terrifying acts of brutality as part of some larger scheme. As neat as they have been to watch, let's just be done with them, shall we?

And there was something about the plot that didn't make sense... So they snagged kids from the workhouses to use as labour. Fine. Makes sense for the time period. But why wouldn't they convert them into more Cybermen? Even mini-Cybermen? Isn't that the Borg-ish thing that Cybermen are supposed to do?

And what was with thsoe weird, brass-face-plated Cyber-ape things?

However, I did think the TARDIS balloon created by the other trauma-induced-amnesiac "Doctor" was pretty funny.

And the steampunk mech that the Cybermen were driving in the end simply rocked! Ya gotta love a hundred foot tall steam-powered, gear-driven Cyberman/mobile factory. Steampunk + giant robots + Doctor Who = extreme coolness.

And now the waiting begins. Not too many more appearances left for Tennant before he hands the reins over to the 11th Doctor - that really young guy I've never heard of (my coworker says he's apparently a stage actor). I'll miss Tennant's frenetic energy, and part of me thinks they should have swung the pendalum back a bit and cast someone older than Tennant, but I'm willing to give the kid a chance - after all, the producers have been spot-on with their casting so far.

A Blizzard of Book Reviews

For a long time now, I've been meaning to catch up on writing book reviews. The last time I actually sat down and put down some thoughts about a book I'd just finished was probably May, and since then, the "finished pile" beside my desk has been growing larger and larger, increasing the risk of avalanche, and causing no end of clutter. Since most of Canada was hammered by snowstorms this holiday season (yes, yes, I know... we always get hammered by snowstorms during the winter, but this year was worse than most in the last decade or two), I thought it fitting to unleash my own blizzard and get all of these book reviews (some for relatively new books released in 2007 & 2008, others for older fare that I've just gotten around to for the first time) out of the way in one shot. Grab your shovel and Sorrel boots, you're about to be hip-deep in SF goodness.

Warning: spoilers
(spoilage factor: about the same as any given fruit taken off a wild apple tree in the middle of a field or on a farm that's been abandoned for a hundred years - some might have no spoilage at all, others, well, worms are extra protein, aren't they?)


"Valley of Day-Glo" by Nick DiChario
This quirky take on the post-apocalyptic journey follows a young man (the last member of his First Nation) named Broadway Danny Rose across parts of the eastern US that have been turned to wasteland seeking to find the mythical Valley of Day-Glo. Along the way, he has to avoid other hostile natives (bearing equally odd monickers) who fight for legitimate resources as well as absurd relics like marketing textbooks and Igloo water coolers. It's a real page-turner that has the reader constantly asking not only what will happen next, but also what new weirdness will BDR encounter. I didn't enjoy this book as thoroughly as DiChario's debut work of genius "A Small and Remarkable Life", but it's certainly worth a read.

"Identity Theft and other stories" by Robert J. Sawyer
Sawyer always does a solid job of writing entertaining hard SF, so it was a no-brainer when I saw his new collection on the shelf at the book store one day. The title was taken from one of the 17 stories within. "Identity Theft" and its companion piece "Biding Time" are film-noire style detective yarns that had me picturing the likes of Humphrey Bogart and Sydney Greenstreet in some of the character roles (if Bogart and Greenstreet had been doing gumshoe flicks on Mars, that is). The collection also includes "Shed Skin", which Sawyer would later revisit and adapt into his successful novel "Mindscan". My favourites though were "Mikeys" about astronauts finding the remains of an alien observatory on the Martian moon Deimos (which reminded me of an old sci-fi novel that I read in my childhood where a plucky young adventurer discovers Phobos and Deimos are both alien starships - can't remember the title for the life of me) and "On the Surface", where Sawyer picks up the tale of the Morlocks of H.G. Wells' "The Time Machine" after the human inventor has fled back into the past.

On Spec - Spring 2008 issue
Why they chose cover art reminiscent of a giant testicle is beyond me, but aside from the pictures, this was a reasonably good issue. The highlights were Marissa K. Lingen's "Carter Hall Sweeps a Path" (another entertaining installment in the ice arena misadventures of the title character), Leah Bobet's poem "The Pack Rat's Manifesto". "Trickster", by Steve Stanton, about some really ambitious graffitti, was also worth the read.

"The Difference Engine" by William Gibson & Bruce Sterling
A great piece of steampunk from the early 90's revolving around the machinations to possess stolen computer punch cards. Gibson & Sterling to a top-notch job of creating the look and feel of Victorian England - the descriptions of London could have been from Dickens and they've nailed the Victorian mindset of the characters. The fragmented final section was perhaps a little too jarring for me, but ultimately it's a book I'd read again.

"Snow Crash" by Neal Stephenson
It's taken me far too long to get around to reading this. You have to fully concentrate when you're reading Stephenson's masterpiece of cyberpunk (masterpiece may not be a good enough term... along with Gibson's "Neuromancer", "Snow Crash" is one of the twin gods of the cyberpunk sub-genre) to pick up on all the ideas he's firing around. It's worth every minute to explore a world where pizza delivery guys work for the mob when they're not spending time in cyber bars or crossing paths with glass-spear-wielding hitmen or trying to avoid getting their brains hacked by ancient Sumerian memes. It's not the kind of book where you just hang on and enjoy the ride -it's one that you'll be thinking about long after the ride is over.

"Rainbows End" by Vernor Vinge
I'm a bit conflicted about this singularity story. On one hand, I think Vinge has done a successful job at creating a story where the primary character is, for the most part, unlikeable, but where we feel for him as he tries to adjust to what is essentially an alien world and re-invent himself. "Rainbow's End" also at times felt like a bit of an eerie techno homage to "The Wizard of Oz" as much as "Alice in Wonderland". And yet, it failed to "wow" me. I'm not sure why, either. I may have to re-read it in a year or two to try to answer the question. It certainly wasn't a bad book, it just wasn't great, in my opinion, either.

"Victory of Eagles" by Naomi Novik
Typical of Novik's Temeraire books, VoE is a quick, fun read - a nice summer book. It's always great to see what new spin she's put on the Napoleonic wars and what kind of strategies the military minds of that era would have cooked up for dragon aerial corps. Novik takes us in a darker direction with this installment, as Temeraire and Laurence are seperated for much of it as they deal with different kinds of imprisonment as punishment for bringing Napoleon the cure for the dragons' illness at the end of the previous book. Even when the two are reunited after Temeraire forms his own vigilante dragon militia, it's still not a happy time as Laurence feels his honour slipping further and further away under orders from the Admiralty to wage a guerilla war against the French with no mercy for the enemy's men or dragons. I'm looking forward to the next book where Novik will again be giving us a glimpse of what life is like with dragons in other parts of the world.

"Something Wicked This Way Comes" by Ray Bradbury
Normally, I'm a huge Bradbury fan. For some reason though, this classic didn't really do anything for me. Yes, he does do an excellent job of painting the old travelling carnival as a potential source of terror, but overall, I think he's written other stories like "The City" that were more frightening, and done a better job with many others that take us on strange adventures, or portray small town life, or shine a light on the compromises that adults make in life and how they bear up under them, or the explosion of life within youth. It was good to get this book under my belt as part of my familiarity with Bradbury's body of work, but it's not one of my favourites.

On Spec - Summer 2008 issue
A creepy cover on this one - little plastic babies crawling around what looks to be a bee hive. Daniel LeMoal's "Beach Head" was a very tense piece of work and well worth reading, and Kevin Cockle's "The Devil's in the Details" was unsettling too.

"Futures from nature" edited by Henry Gee
In an anthology of about a billion (okay, maybe not a billion, but there are a whole lot of them crammed into this book) really short stories, each no more than 3 pages long, you're bound to get a lot of misses. Quite a few of the stories contained here were way too heavy on the jargon (some authors, I think, putting more weight on speaking the highly-specialized languages of some of the scientific journal's readers than with simply writing good stories) and lacking in story. That being said, when you're dealing with a three-pager, the story itself is going to be fairly simple with little characterization in most cases. That being said, there were some gems that made this book worth reading. Warren Ellis' "At the Zoo" was a real hoot, and, though not the smartest, the one that sticks out in my memory. I also enjoyed "Speak, Geek" by Eileen Gunn and Ken Macleod's vampire-tech tale "Undead Again" and a few others.

"Kafka on the Shore" by Haruki Murakami
There's a bildungsroman wrapped in a lot of deeply weird goings-on in this book. A teenager decides to run away from home and ends up finding himself after finding a woman who could be his mother who he takes as his lover, and along the way he steps into another dimension for a while. And did I mention the old codger who talks to cats and goes on an adventure across Japan with a young trucker looking for a stone that will re-align reality? This is a book that has to be experienced rather than encountered in a review.

"Song of Kali" by Dan Simmons
I'm a huge Simmons fan, but it's taken me forever to get around to reading his debut novel. It's highly unsettling, but I'm glad I did. Not a lot in the way of the fantastic in this book - despite the encounter with an undead poet and a scene where the protagonist is chased around a dark room by the Hindu destroyer goddess herself, the real horror in this book is in the evil that people inflict on one another. This is a theme that Simmons seems to have kept with throughout his novels - the exterior stuff really isn't as bad as the monsters that can lurk within the human heart. That being said, redemption and hope also come from within oneself and from other people in Simmons' worlds, and not from magic or super-scientific trinkets. A must read.

"Dreamsongs - volume I" by George R. R. Martin
Seeing Martin's writing style evolve from the boy imitating what he saw in the comics to the man who explores new territory in his own voice is what makes this collection worth while. Martin's essays on various periods in his life and what influenced him are entertaining in and of themselves, but it was good to revisit some of his short stories like "Sandkings". Worth buying for Martin fans.

"The Android's Dream" by John Scalzi
A crisis in interstellar relations, a film-noire style chase story that would have worked well with the cast of "Blade Runner", secret societies founded on the ramblings of a drunk, an AI based on the mind template of the protagonist's dead friend, the hope for humanity being related to a sheep, and fart jokes - this book has it all. Scalzi's cooked up one heck of a read.

"Very Hard Choices" by Spider Robinson
This short but powerful book is memorable for a couple of reasons. First, it’s inhabited by well-rounded characters who stay true to themselves, but who are still capable of change. It also examines the emotional consquences of making very hard choices, and how people deal with them. Robinson has written one of the most deeply unsettling portrayals of what it’s like to die that I’ve ever come across. But amidst the pessimistic backdrop of global threats and the exercise of staggering powers, this is ultimately an optimistic book showing that the connections between human beings are things of the highest and most enduring importance. I'd initially seen this book on the shelves at the bookstore and thought, "I'll get around to it at some point" but then I heard Robinson read an excerpt at VCon in October and thought, "Must read now!" Good thing too. "Very Hard Choices" is easily one of the best novels of 2008 and I'll sure as hell be recommending it for an Aurora this year.

"Tesseracts Twelve" edited by Claude Lalumiere
This installment of the annual anthology of Canadian SF focusses on novellas, which is refreshing. I love the usual collections of short stories, but I'm always left wondering what good stuff was left out because it might have been too long. This time around, it's the long stuff that rules. And, unlike some of the recent editions in the Tesseracts series, Twelve, under Lalumiere's hand, had a good, strong line-up. The two bracketing stories, Derryl Murphy’s gold rush-neanderthal collision “Ancients of the Earth” and David Nickle's “Wylde’s Kingdom” where a washed-up reality show adventurer lives amidst the grim reality that there’s a new species on the extinction list, were the ones that stand out most in my memory. That being said, "Wonjjang and the Madman of Pyongyang" by Gord Sellar was a fun ride too. An anthology that's definitely worth reading.

"The Savage Humanists" edited by Fiona Kelleghan
A collection of stories using SF as a foil for biting social commentary. Gregory Frost’s “Madonna of the Maquiladora” was perhaps the most memorable for its brutal look at the means used to keep people down to make them easy to exploit, and how they accept it. I enjoyed this anthology overall, but could have done without Kelleghan's gigantic and frequently repetitive essay at the beginning. While I don't disagree with what she's saying, I think she could have made her point far more concisely - a full academic essay belongs in a collection of essays, rather than a fiction anthology where the stories can illustrate the point from a variety of perspectives. Still, it's a book worth reading.

"Ten Monkeys, Ten Minutes" by Peter Watts
Watts has assembled a group of violent stories. This is not to say that physical violence takes place within the each of the stories in the form of monster attacks or space battles or other usual SF means, but violence is there in some form, present or past, physical, psychological, sexual or other, in each of these tales to some degree, exerting its influence on characters and events. These stories occupy a Hobbesian state of nature, where things are brutish, nasty and lives, or, at least lives before they're altered forever by some form of violence, are short. A brooding, dark collection, but certainly worth while.

"The Name of the Wind" by Patrick Rothfuss
This is another book I'd noticed at the store but had mentally filed away under "eventually" until I heard Rothfuss speak at a couple of sessions at VCon back in October. Good thing I did too, because "The Name of the Wind" is a smart and refreshing addition to the fantasy genre at a time where a lot of the stuff on the shelves looks stale. A renowned adventurer now living quietly under an alias begins to tell the story of his life in this book, but it's not the usual increasing steps of glory. No, the protagonist sometimes scratches some forward progress for himself, but always at a price and not without a lot of tough, scarring lessons along the way. It's not about a young man's adventures so much as it is about how a boy becomes a man as he tries to survive and what he learns along the way. I'm eagerly looking forward to the next book in this series.


And that catches things up for the book reviews.

What have you been reading lately? What should the rest of us be picking up?

Aurora Award Nominations Now Open

It's time to get all judgemental and make some nominations for the best in Canadian SF - the nomination process is now open for the annual Aurora Awards.

Visit the Aurora website for the online nomination form and elegibility information.

You can find a partial list of elegible novels, short stories, anthologies, etc on the Canadian SF Works Database site (which has lists of works in English and in French). However, the site doesn't list info that would be relevant to the 3 fan awards.

I'll be doing some thinking over the next couple of days and going back over a few items from 2008 on my bookshelves. I'll post a recap of my choices here once I've filled-out the online nomination form.

Good luck to all!