Category Archives: Sci-Fi Saturday
Bear with me; I have another get it off my chest rant about how something on the TV machine made me angry. In this case it concerns a show that’s risen quite high on the list of shows I watch: NBC’s Grimm.
I enjoy the show a lot, but I’m really annoyed about one particular aspect. It’s a glaring flaw in an otherwise very appealing show. I understand why the flaw exists, but it concerns something that’s generally bugged me in storytelling for a long time. In the case of Grimm it especially grates; I wish the writers had taken another tack.
The issue concerns keeping secrets from loved ones.
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18 Comments | tags: Batman, Castle (TV series), Galaxy Quest, Ghost Rider, Grimm (TV series), mistaken identity, Nick Burkhardt, secret identity, secrets, Spiderman, Superman, The Man Who Knew Too Little, TNT, wesen, woge | posted in Rant, Sci-Fi Saturday, TV
Science Fiction — or rather Speculative Fiction — has the general quality that it contains all other fiction genres. There is mystery and detective science fiction. There is romance (and sexual) science fiction. Action? Horror? Psychological thriller? Drama and pathos? Allegory? Westerns? Science fiction has them all and more.
In a sense, SF is just a property that fiction can have. I’ve tried to explain what I think that property is. I also took a stab at separating science fiction from fantasy. Now that thread resumes to explore the idea of SF hardness.
But first we return to and start with…
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31 Comments | tags: Anne McCaffrey, David Brin, George O. Smith, Greg Egan, Hal Clement, hard SF, Isaac Asimov, James P. Hogan, Larry Niven, Orson Scott Card, Robert L. Forward, science fiction, soft SF | posted in Sci-Fi Saturday
One of the great things about science fiction is how it allows an author to explore the human condition in contexts that ordinary fiction cannot. For example, it can explore the idea of immortality. Is boredom a problem? If you are immortal, but others aren’t, what is it like to see everyone you know age and die? Is it as desirable as it seems?
Some themes occur repeatedly in science fiction. Immortality is just one. A very common one is the idea of alien races — or even intelligent machines. Such stories view humanity through new eyes.
Another common one is time travel, and that is the subject of today’s Sci-Fi Saturday!
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26 Comments | tags: H.G. Wells, Looper, Poul Anderson, Primer (film), Special Relativity, The Shield of Time, The Time Machine, Time Patrol, time travel, time tunnel | posted in Sci-Fi Saturday
The punchline is that I was suddenly struck by how modern fiction seems to have conditioned me to expect an apparent White Hat to secretly be a Black Hat. The question I find myself asking now is whether fiction has actually changed (and if so why) or is it just me? The more I think about it, the more I’m inclined to think modern fiction has changed.
If so, does that reflect a modern sensibility about people today? Does the rise of the modern anti-hero bring with it the idea of the betrayer? Do we expect so little of people anymore that our heroes need to be dirty and double agents seem matter of course?
This all started with Diane Duane…
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9 Comments | tags: anti-hero, Deep Wizardry, Diane Duane, Ghosts of Mars, High Wizardry, Judas, Manse Everard, Poul Anderson, So You Want to be a Wizard, Star Trek, Star Trek novels, story plots, storytelling, Time Patrol, Weeds, Young Wizards | posted in Books, Sci-Fi Saturday
The Earth orbits our star, Sol, at a distance of roughly 93 million miles (150 million kilometers) — a distance we call an Astronomical Unit (AU). Our little rock is just under 8,000 miles wide (a bit over 12,000 km) and has a surface area (including oceans) of just under 200 million sq miles (510 million sq km). Depending on how you look at it, the Earth seems very large or very small.
What if, instead of a rock spinning around its star, it was a ring encircling it? Suppose the ring spun fast enough (770 miles per second) to create “gravity” on its inner surface? And suppose the ring was one-million miles wide and had walls 1000 miles high long both rims to keep air inside? Such a ring would have a surface area equal to about three-million Earths.
And what you’d have is Larry Niven’s Ringworld!
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26 Comments | tags: Dyson sphere, Elysium (movie), Freeman Dyson, Larry Niven, Ringworld, Teela Brown, The Ringworld Engineers | posted in Sci-Fi Saturday
Today is a date most folks living in the USA write as 12-13-14, and for anyone who loves numbers a date like that demands a post of some sort. I’d planned to goof off today, maybe catch up on some movies, but there’s just no way I won’t post on a date with a sequence like that.
Of course, others write today’s date as 13-12-14, but they’re not from around here. And there’s just no helping those who insist on writing 2014. The real error is putting the year last — the sensible way is 14-12-13, which allows proper sorting of dates chronologically. We should all change to that immediately.
If it’s not obvious yet, today is just a meandering ramble.
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2 Comments | tags: Cirocco Jones, climate change, female characters, fitted sheets, folded sheets, girl power, global warming, grey skies, humor, John Varley, melting snow, Numberphile, Santa Claus, science fiction, science fiction movies, snow, Titan trilogy, USAnian, winter | posted in Sci-Fi Saturday
What if, suddenly, you found you could not only read minds but change them? What if the eponymous hero of the ancient Epic of Gilgamesh was real, was two-thirds god, was immortal, and — from sheer boredom — had divided his powers of mind with you just so he could have a really good war between the eastern and western hemispheres?
What if you and your brother, both young students, went along on a wild drunken graduation party that spanned a dozen galaxies and were left behind on some primitive no-account planet as a joke. What if, as extremely long-lived energy beings, it was millions of years before anyone remembered and came back for you? What if — from sheer boredom — you’d illegally tampered with the minds of the primitive indigenous apes?
This Sci-Fi Saturday: two authors, two tales, two books each.
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21 Comments | tags: Brenda Clough, Doors of Death and Life, Gilgamesh, How Like a God, paperback books, Parke Godwin, Robert Parker, science fiction, SF Books, Spenser, The Snake Oil Wars, thick books, thin books, Waiting for the Galactic Bus | posted in Sci-Fi Saturday
It’s hard to remember exactly, but I think I first noticed it back in the days of Star Trek: Deep Space Nine. It’s even possible it really started in the earlier series, Star Trek: The Next Generation. By the time of the final series, Star Trek: Enterprise, it was definitely a thing, and by then it went way too far.
In the original Star Trek series, Gene Roddenberry gave us Vulcans. They were, in many ways, better than humans. They lived longer, they were stronger and smarter, and — crucially — they were, in some ways, wiser than us. Rick Berman, Roddenberry’s heir apparent, re-wrote that vision to make them conniving, lying, self-interested bastards. In other words, he made them more human.
My question here is: Why did our heroes turn into such assholes?
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27 Comments | tags: Deep Space Nine, ethics, Gene Roddenberry, Madam Secretary, moral compass, Mr. Spock, Rick Berman, Star Trek, Star Trek: Enterprise, Vulcans | posted in Rant, Sci-Fi Saturday
Earl Grey. Hot!
I’ve written about the Yin-Yang of analog versus digital, a fundamental metaphor for how reality can be smooth or bumpy. I’ve applied the idea to numbers, where we see two types of infinity — countable (discrete, digital, bumpy) and uncountable (continuous, analog, smooth). There is also how chaos mathematics says that — the moment we round off those smooth numbers into bumpy ones — our ability to use them to calculate certain things is forever lost.
I’ve also written about Star Trek replicators and transporters, as well as the monkey wrench of the hated holodeck. According to canon, all three use the same technology (which raises some contradictions for the holodeck).
Today, for Science Fiction Saturday, I want to tie it all together in another look at transporters and replicators!
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12 Comments | tags: analog, Captain Kirk, Captain Picard, chaos theory, digital, Earl Grey, infinity, replicators, Star Trek, transporters, Yin and Yang | posted in Sci-Fi Saturday
I thought Zack Snyder blew the doors off Watchmen. The movie does total justice to a classic graphic novel that I would have thought impossible to put on film. It turned out to be a work that doesn’t just honor the source material, it elevates it. I liked his version of 300 okay, and I thought Sucker Punch interesting (although it’s a rather strange movie).
Plus, I have a high regard for Christopher Nolan. I very much enjoyed Memento, Insomnia, The Prestige, Inception and the first two Batman movies (as I’ve written before, I thought much less of the third one).
Snyder at the helm, Nolan as a producer and writer… I was really looking forward to Man of Steel.
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11 Comments | tags: Batman, Christopher Nolan, Christopher Reeve, Clark Kent, Lex Luther, movie violence, superheroes, Superman, Superman Returns, Zack Snyder | posted in Movies, Rant, Sci-Fi Saturday
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