Category: Science Fiction

Improving on a “Classic”

How a mediocre episode of Star Trek might be improved:

Bele is taken to Lokai, and the two begin to argue about the history of their two distinct peoples. Kirk is puzzled by the animosity between the two, who appear to him to be of the same race.

When Bele explains that Lokai is evil because his people are black on the left and white on the right, Lokai interjects that the opposite is true: Bele’s people are evil because they are black on the right and white on the left.

Kirk, in an attempt to be clever, responds that he’s white on the top and black on the bottom – which, given he is clothed, they have to take his word on. “What does that make me?”

The two Cheronians howl in instinctive horror, Kirk’s snarky question having triggered the racial memory of another Cheronian people exterminated many millennia earlier. The two aliens immediately put aside their differences and unite in a campaign of annihilation against humanity, who they now perceive as either white-top-black-bottom (Kirk) or black-top-white-bottom (Uhura) members of the feared and loathed third Cheronians.

After a decade-long campaign of genocide across the Federation, Kirk is brought before War Admirals Bele and Lokai in the ruins of Starbase 1, the final survivor of the human race. When the tatters of his uniform reveal that humans are not, in fact, different colors top and bottom, the Cheronians belatedly realize that they’ve made a terrible mistake.

“Um. So sorry about that.”

“Yes, yes. We really should have checked.”

Kirk, spared execution at the last moment, sighs with relief tinged with grief and regret. Looking out a nearby viewport at the scorched and ruined Earth passing below, he says wistfully, “If only I’d joked that we were colored front-to-back, instead.”

At which the two Cheronians scream in uncontrollable terror at the racial memory of a fourth, much older and more fearsome Cheronian people, and transport themselves into the blessed escape of the void.

Spock arrives to rescue Kirk as the wreckage of the station begins to enter Earth’s upper atmosphere. A trite moral lesson is presented, and the credits roll. In the following episode, everything is back to normal and none of these events is acknowledged to have happened.

Reading Analog, May/June 2024 Issue

Which would be this one:

If you’ve seen Analog covers from 1960-65, you understand why this hurts to look at.

So far, it’s reminded me very clearly why I cancelled my subscription in 2008 (and stopped actually reading the issues I received sometime around 2002).

Continue reading “Reading Analog, May/June 2024 Issue”

Melodrama and Bootstrapping

Came across this trailer the other day:

I haven’t watched any of the series, only a couple of other snippets, so I don’t know what the content is actually like, but this trailer put me off ever finding out.

When it first came out, I watched a couple of clips showing the launch of a Truax SeaDragon which, given my background and paired with the alternative history angle, piqued my interest.

This looks like…crap. Melodramatic crap. Soap opera crap on Mars. I mean, sure, the spaceships look fun, but the characters and their interactions look insufferable.

No thanks.

One of the comments caught my attention, however:

All “space colony” stories on TV and movies either stop short of the actual colonization, or skip the colonization part and move straight to how the colony was destroyed or how colonies fought against each other.

Okay, so we’re not TV or movies, but…Hello? We’re right here… That’s a major point of the entire Ares Project universe: showing the initial development stages of Mars settlement, the part that everyone else skips over.

Martian Technology: Science Pins and Pingers

These devices have been featured so far in In the Shadow of Ares and quite prominently in Redlands and He Has Walled Me In.

A science pin, as described in ItSoA, is a device shaped like a scaled-up golf tee, with a stem 1-1.5m long, and a head 100-150mm across and anywhere from 50mm to 400mm tall. The stem contains common power generation, storage, and management functions, and in the field is mounted to a peg or sleeve drilled or driven into the soil or rock.  The head consists of one or more cylindrical modules of different heights and a wide variety of functions. These modules thread together at the center with a common physical and electrical interface.

In all applications there is a communications and C&DH (command and data handling) module. This module links the pin to local and satellite communications networks, as well as to specialized instruments such as seismometer arrays or deep soil probes which are not located on the pin itself.

Modularity and standardization make it possible for science pins to be quickly emplaced and easily maintained, and readily upgraded with new or additional instruments as needed. The size and external features of the modules make them easy for suited settlers to handle with gloved hands.

Lindsay Jacobsen is shown in ItSoA maintaining a science pin she had previously deployed to monitor ground water for evidence of biological activity.

In HHWMI, Leon Toa has a strange encounter with a strange science pin in the Wilds.

Redlands prominently features a gold-plated science pin, and the action is set at one of the settlements where the devices are manufactured.

In Ghosts of Tharsis, we introduce a specialized application of the science pin concept, the “pinger”. A pinger is a science pin used as a navigation aid, particularly during mild to moderate dust storms when travel by rover is still somewhat feasible. The head of a typical pinger is a single mass-produced module containing navigation strobes and the power storage required to operate them for a month or more. The head is crowned with a passive reflector that rover navigation radars can use for distance and triangulation measurements.

Pingers at intervals and in problem-prone locations include additional instruments to monitor local weather conditions and transmit them back to a central data hub for use in travel planning.

A real-world approximation of Martian navigation pingers
A real-world approximation of what Martian navigation pingers along a rover track might look like (Öskjuvatn, Iceland).

I particularly liked the idea of reusing science pin components as the basis of navigation aids, as it reflects a potential real-world solution to the problems of navigating across a landscape with minimally-developed roadways prone to obscuring by dust. It has the added benefit of eliminating the ability of the MDA to bring to a halt surface transportation among the independents by scrambling the signals from the positioning satellites on which they have a Charter-granted monopoly. But most importantly for our purposes as authors, it makes possible a dramatic rover chase in a Class 1 dust storm…

H.G. Wells on…Puppies?

“Very much of the Fiction of the Future pretty frankly abandons the prophetic altogether, and becomes polemical, cautionary, or idealistic, and a mere footnote and commentary to our present discontents.”

-H.G. Wells, Anticipations

This is a prophetic observation indeed, having been written over a century before the Sad Puppies/Rabid Puppies foofaraw, whose core complaint was that mainstream science fiction as a genre had been co-opted by the totalizing left as just another conduit for its political propaganda and grievance-mongery and wasn’t fun, exciting, thought-provoking, or inspiring any more.

And yes, it’s ironic to have Wells complaining about that when he later in the same book advocates subverting all human activity and institutions to indoctrinate the public with his “global commonweal” idea. I guess when its his own “future technocratic utopia” instead of the mere “present discontents” of others, using absolutely every literary product for propaganda is peachy.

If I Were One to Squee…

…I’d be squeeing about now.

‘Babylon 5’ reboot in development with original series creator J. Michael Straczynski at the helm

No word yet on what the story, period, or characters might be, but it does sound like it’s a ground-up reboot a la Battlestar Galactica. As others have observed, it’d be difficult to simply re-film the original story as we already know the twists and turns and surprises, so like BSG it may only borrow the overall concept and some thematic and universe elements for a very different story. 

On the bright side, JMS is in charge, and has 25 years of added experience to draw on and technological advances at his disposal. Imagine the ships, battles, Shadows, etc. rendered using state-of-the-art CGI rather than (for-then state-of-the-art) Amigas. It’s also been suggested that this time around, Warner Brothers is actually very supportive of the project and is giving Straczynski a lot of latitude in writing and producing the show – and, one hopes, an adequate budget.

But then, as Ridley Scott and Prometheus show us, such things don’t automatically translate into a good product. So, I’m tempering my enthusiasm for now until more information is available. 

 

Families in Science Fiction

At Powered by Robots, James Pyles asks “Where Are the Families in Science Fiction?”

I’m curious. Of the science fiction and fantasy you read, have you seen any family life shows in a positive way, especially in more recent publications?

I haven’t seen much in recent science fiction, because I haven’t been reading much science fiction recently. My reading priorities lately trend to the Classics and other nonfiction.

However, when we started out writing what became “In the Shadow of Ares”, this was one of the elements that we noticed was missing from a lot of SF at the time. We wanted to write a young adult novel that avoided the cliches of that genre and SF itself. So, we created a main character who was human, who made mistakes, and who wasn’t some sort of infallibly smart and precociously wise Secret Chosen One destined for greatness, and we set her in a family with parents who made some pretty risky sacrifices to make a go of it. We explicitly avoided making her an orphan, or situating her on her own in some manner like many of Heinlein’s juveniles’ protagonists (stowaways, runaways, castaways, and kidnappees). Too, families fit with the overall nature of the fictional universe, in which Mars is just starting to be settled – one character observes (perhaps only in draft) that if you’re not having babies, it’s a base and not a settlement…you’re not really committed to stay and build a new world.

In “ItSoA”, Amber’s positive relationship with her parents (especially her father) is a key element, while in the sequel, “Ghosts of Tharsis”, her close relationship with her mother is explored. In both books, the issue of children and families on Mars is an important theme, and this theme reappears in “Redlands” and (indirectly) in “He Has Walled Me In”. In “Pipeline” (unpublished), Thoreson’s children are entrusted with his business empire on Earth when he emigrates to Mars with his grandchildren to run the project. Also in “Ghosts of Tharsis”, every protagonist is shown in the context of family: Amber, Marek’s children, Ethan and his parents, Ezekiel and his brothers, even some tag characters. The only story we’ve published so far without a positive family element in it is “Anatomy of a Disaster”, which is appropriate given the story is a farce inspired by the Piper Alpha disaster. Even our non-Ares Project story, “Silent Stalker”, involved the positive portrayal of two families.

The funny thing about it, though, is that while we chose consciously at the beginning to include positive portrayals of family, it’s played out naturally in the creation of characters and situations. For example the “Baby Taboo”, once conceived (no pun intended), took on a life of its own in the fictional universe and suggested different but always opposed reactions from different characters – everyone hates the taboo, and you never see anyone but the villains truly supporting it. At the beginning of “Ghosts of Tharsis”, when the MDA relents and allows a small number of children 13 and older to emigrate, that not only brings Amber some kids her own age to associate with but necessitates exploring the family backgrounds of those new arrivals to explain how and why they ended up on Mars.

Apart from that initial decision, though, it’s not something that we’ve shoehorned in, and is not presented in a treacly or sentimental way. It just followed naturally as we drew on our own experiences and those of families around us.

Perhaps that’s the real problem: those authors who cannot or will not write positively about something as commonplace and essential as families are themselves broken children from broken homes. Like the majority of modern culture creators, their creative priority is the non-stop masturbatory airing of their childhood resentments – they hate their fathers so much that they write them out of the future.

2020 Reading List

A probably-incomplete list of books and short stories I read in 2020. I’d have expected a longer list, given COVID lockdowns, but then I’ve also been working a lot more than usual over the past several months. Most of the fiction was re-reads, as I haven’t seen much lately that appeals to me. There are also several books not listed that I grew bored with and gave up on – something I normally don’t do, but in each case the reading was a slog and was keeping me from reading something more interesting and useful.

  • “Endurance”
  • “Alone on the Ice”
  • “Persuasion”
  • Giants Series: “Inherit the Stars”
  • Giants Series: “The Gentle Giants of Ganymede”
  • Giants Series: “Giants’ Star”
  • Frank Herbert, “Dune”
  • Walter Tevis, “Mockingbird”
  • Isaac Asimov, “Foundation”
  • Niven and Pournelle, “The Mote in God’s Eye”
  • H.P. Lovecraft, “The Case of Charles Dexter Ward”
  • H.G. Wells, “Anticipations”
  • Herodotus, “The Histories”
  • Lawrence A. Rubin, “Bridging the Straits”
  • “There Will Be War”, vol. 5
  • “There Will Be War”, vol. 7
  • “20 Master Plots and How to Build Them”
  • Nassim Taleb, “Antifragile”
  • “How to Talk So Your Kids Will Listen, How to Listen So Your Kids Will Talk”
  • “Miss Manners Minds Your Business”
  • Harvard Classics: “The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin”
  • Harvard Classics: “Journal of John Woolman”
  • Harvard Classics: “William Penn: Fruits of Solitude”
  • Harvard Classics: Plato’s “The Apology,” “Crito,”  “Phaedo”
  • Dumitru Bacu, “The Anti-Humans”
  • Clark Ashton Smith, “The Tale of Satampra Zeiros”
  • “Collected Works of Robert E. Howard”, vol. 4:21
  • Balmer and Wylie, “When Worlds Collide”/”After Worlds Collide”