We watched the highly-anticipated "V" this past week. I must not willingly suspend my disbelief any more or have lost my senswunda because I couldn't watch the pilot episode (or most TV for that matter) without picking holes in the plot and science. I understand that science must be stretched to accommodate an ostensible science fictional show, but stretch it too far, or perhaps the character's in the show response to it and I think you start to lose your audience. My comments below contain spoilers from the pilot episode so be sure to watch it before you continue reading.
In the comic above the man crassly uses his time machine to go to a time when the girl is in the mood, not realizing that if he in the present has a time machine and has this idea, he in the future might do the same thing and thus a crowd of eager men converge on the one time his love interest was in the mood. Extra humor comes from the fact that it appears to be only a single day from the evidence of all the guys at every age who appear.
i09 has saved me the trouble of figuring out the many different timelines created by all of the jumping back in time in the Terminator movies and series. I took a crack at compling when the various Judgement Days are in Postponing Judgement Day - Terminator style, with an obligatory graph.
These musings were prompted by the novel The Sparrow by Mary Doria Russell (which coincidentally won the Arthur C. Clarke award, see the Clarke reference below) and its sequel Children of God. In The Sparrow the Jesuits themselves send a mission to another star system when a radio signal reaches Earth revealing an intelligent, technological civilization conveniently close around Alpha Centauri. While the UN debates, the Jesuits just go. The novel is a way for the author to explore First Contact with an alien culture, reflect on the Jesuit's missionary history and point out that what you don't know about an alien culture can kill you. "Things are not always what they seem."
In Children of God, poor Father Sandoz, the protagonist of the first book, returns to Alpha Centauri, less than willingly, and sees the consequences of the previous book played out on the planet. The novel serves as a case study in the sometimes corrosive nature of contact between two dissimilar cultures.
The wikipedia entry on The Sparrow points out that James Blish wrote a novel "A Case of Conscience" in which a main character is also a Jesuit priest joins an expedition to the planet Lithia, a pleasant enough place, but with no concept of God or the afterlife. This forms the basis of tension in the book. The book was expanded in 1958 from a novella written in 1953 and reflects its times in archaic psychology and a dystopian future that is a product of the Cold War mentality of its day. I enjoyed the Cities in Flight series more."God, there were so many stars you could have used. What was the need to give these people to the fire, that the symbol of their passing might shine above Bethlehem?"Heady stuff for a high school student, I guess. I should find the paper and see what score I got.
In Manifold: Space Stephen Baxter answers Fermi's paradox with a burst of alien colonization activity flowing over the outer reaches of the Solar system starting with the Von Neuman machine-like Gaijin. The Gaijin don't fly from system to system, they use an ancient interstellar teleportation network. After Reid Malenfant is the first human to travel through the blue ring that is a gate of the network at the edge of the Solar system, others eventually follow. One is a woman priest, Dorothy Chaum (Catholic!) who travels through the blue gateways as an envoy of the Pope and the Vatican. She is qualified to deal with the Gaijin aliens in the novel because they prefer to talk to humans using Latin because of its logical structure. The light speed limit of the gateways and the long trips she takes has her most likely outliving the Catholic church in the novels. This is only hinted at once or twice in the book. She travels after Reid Malenfant to try to save his life because he has to "save the universe".
Baxter also has a Jesuit in (inner) space appear as an illegally created sentient program in the short story Dante Dreams in the collection Phase Space.
In the short story collection "The Last Man on Earth", Damon Knight's short story "Second Class Citizen", tells the story of a marine biologist who is attempting to teach dolphins how to speak and is pretty successful at it, but has misgivings about dolphins fitting into human society. The twist in the story occurs when the world gos to war and drops bombs that heat the air up to an unlivable degree so he escapes to the ocean to avoid the heat and his dolphin friends teach him to fish. Thus the tables are obviously turned and he must live like a dolphin.
A short story "A Deeper Sea" by Alexander Jablokov in "The Year's Best Science Fiction: Seventh Annual Collection" is about a man who figures out that the ancient Greeks taught dolphins to speak. It turns out that all of the cetaceans are much smarter than people gave them credit for. He uses sound imagery of underwater earthquakes and eruptions to torture the dolphins into revealing the secret that they can speak. They speak Attic Greek. It turns out that the dolphins, whales and orcas are foul mouthed and unpleasant. This story was expanded into a novel with the same title. (review fifth paragraph down).jpg)
The most famous dolphins in science fiction have to be the dolphin crew of the Streaker in David Brin's novel Startide Rising. This novel is part of Brin's Uplift Universe in which humans finally encounter a thriving billions of years old intergalactic society of aliens in which advanced races uplift unintelligent ones to sentience. The only reason the humans, a wolfling race because they appear to have not had an uplift patron, are not immediately given to an elder race to uplift is because we had already started uplifting dolphins and chimpanzees ourselves, proving our sentience. The dolphin and human crew of the Streaker discover some unpleasant secrets about galactic society and must hide from the consequences of their activities. I wholly recommend the entire Uplift saga, these are fantastic books.
Top 10 Science-Fiction Films
Top 10 Animated Films
The advent of the new chapter in the Terminator saga, The Sarah Connor Chronicles had prompted someone to ask me the other day, just exactly when is Judgement Day, the burning of the world to come when the computer Skynet becomes self-aware, declares war on mankind and launches the world's nuclear arsenals to protect itself.
The pictures are from the recent series of Craftsman ads which built human anatomy from Craftsman products. The results look like Terminators to me. Perhaps Craftsman is building Skynet and the Terminators? Sarah Connor better get over there and stop them!
I have been reading a graphic novel series called Powers. It imagines a world with superheros, but where it is illegal to be one. The idea is similar to that in the Incredibles. After some damage caused by the Powers, the government has generally frowned on the idea of people with "powers". The stories center around superhero crimes, especially murders of the heroes with powers.
Your Score : 85 creditsI only earned 85 credits, but I thought I knew more than that. There are some pretty old movies references in there. My dad would love this one.
You're an extreme sci-fi geek! You're probably wearing your very own homemade TRON costume right now!
I just finished reading the book Shuttle Down by Lee Correy. This 1981 story of an emergency landing of the Space Shuttle on Easter Island definitely has many of my favorite things all wrapped up into one.
It has the Space Shuttle, an exciting emergency landing, Easter Island (or Isla de Pascua or Rapa Nui or Te Pito O Te Henua), heroes that are engineers and finally a little Cold War intrigue.
The book takes place long before the airport on Easter Island was prepared to take a Space Shuttle landing and the story revolves around getting the airport upgraded to allow NASA to get the Shuttle off of the island and one of the true heroes of the book is Red Richardson the NASA engineer who is in charge of getting it done. The book is credited with getting the NASA emergency procedures changed to take into account these situations and may be responsible for getting Easter Island its long runway, which allowed us to honeymoon there in the first place. Thank you, Lee Correy.
While the book seemed to portray Easter Island fairly authentically the one critical mistake is that it repeatedly described the Moai as pointing out to sea and watching over the part of the world towards which they faced. Any Moai standing on Easter Island that are not in the quarry are restored, since every statue was knocked down during the wars on the island and when they were standing or when they were restored they faced inland, not out to sea. Our guide on the island pointed out that the Rapa Nui people believed the Moai concentrated the mana of their ancestors and watched over the part of the island they faced.
The side bar books, that I have actually completed reading, are listed below.
You probably couldn't buy the publicity for an old book like Battlefield Earth that Republican candidate Mitt Romney gave it by revealing that it is his favorite book.
Stephen hawking floating in zero-G
Waldo floating in zero-G
Technically, Tuesday is tax day, since today is a Sunday and tomorrow is a holiday in D.C., so much of my weekend was spent finally putting the data into the computer program (TaxCut) and learning new tax arcana. To celebrate we watched the movie Stranger than Fiction in which the protagonist Harold Crick, played by Will Ferrell, is an IRS agent who hears a narrator inside his head. He is the protagonist of a book someone is writing as well as the movie. It is quite clever post modern stuff. Ferrell is a good and sympathetic character in this movie without being his wacky over the top comedy self that is his cinematic hallmark. Deadpan can be funny too.I used to think the brain was the most important organ in the body, until I realized who was telling me that.
All this suggests that consciousness may be an illusion tacked onto otherwise autonomic or mechanical processes by a part of the brain that lets us just think we are in charge so we don't get too upset about things. There are studies that suggest that we perform the action before our conscious mind (whatever that is) decides to do it. This is much the theme (besides other interesting gedanken experiments) in the novel BlindSight by Peter Watts (of Rifters fame). His characters face a powerful alien intelligence with magnetic fields that warp the insides of their brains enough to cause hallucinations, elimination of self, godlike presences and all manner of horrors. All of which seem to suggest that the brain as computer and seat of "self" isn't all it is cracked up to be.
Synchronicity strikes again, this time linking several vampire related activities, I guess they got jealous of the zombies.
The powerpoint is a scientific/marketing presentation on crack, with a cheerful amoralism in which the Canadian accented voice over narrator pokes fun at laws restricting his research even as he enthusiastically relates the story of the atrocities committed to discover the vampiric genes. The presentation claims we all have pieces of these genes that when expressed incompletely reveal themselves autism, savantism, sociopathy, and superior strength. Their suggestion for the name of the new Homo species created by activating all of the genes, Homo sapiens whedonum (an homage to Buffy the Vampire Slayer creator Joss Whedon). And that's just one character in the book, I can't wait to read it.
3.) Last week's episode of the Office was entertaining as always with Micheal Scott asked to give a talk at Ryan's business school class. A side story had a bat flying loose around the office. Jim spoofs Dwight by claiming to have been bitten by the bat and then starts to display all of the symptoms of vampirism - fast healing, burned by garlic and crucifixes, aversion to light. Dwight never dealt with him in the episode, I wonder if we will get a conclusion in the next or if the joke is done. One of Dwight's best lines: "If a vampire bat was in the US, it would make sense for it to come to a 'sylvania." (the show is set in Scranton, Pennsylvania). Coincidentally, but obviously, Joss Whedon directed this episode of the Office.
Recent archaeological evidence suggests that chimpanzees have been tool users for over four thousand years. The researchers found stone hammers used to break open nuts. The earliest European record of tool use by chimpanzees is from the diary of Duarte Pacheco Pereira, a Portuguese explorer in Africa in 1506. Besides tool use and their obvious intelligence, chimpanzees are very closely related to humans genetically. Technically, chimps, humans, orangutans and gorillas all fall into the classification of the great apes. The taxonomic diagram has humans and chimps quite close.
I remember reading in the science fiction novel "The Terminal Experiment" by Robert Sawyer that in the future described in the story, chimpanzees and other great apes had finally been reclassified from genus pan to genus homo due to the mounting DNA evidence of their close relationship to humans. This reclassification had given them rights closer to humans than to animals. From the novel:"It took thirteen years but eventually their declaration came to be argued at the UN. An unprecedented resolution was adopted formally reclassifying chimpanzees as genus Homo, meaning there were now three extant species of humanity: Homo sapiens, Homo troglodytes, and Homo paniscus. Human rights were divided into two broad categories: those, such as entitlement to life, liberty, and freedom from torture, that applied to all members of genus Homo, and other rights, such as pursuit of happiness, religious freedom, and ownership of land, that were reserved exclusively to H. sapiens."Thus in the book you couldn't kill chimps for scientific experimentation or imprison a chimp in a lab. The protagonist wanted to test his Soulwave detector on a chimpanzee, he waits for one to die of natural causes for the test, the cows in the book weren't so lucky. Good thing that it turns out that cows don't have souls, at least according to the book. Robert Sawyer even has a little vignette on his website about a future lawsuit to guarantee these rights to chimpanzees. This is not just fiction, there is a real life group trying to get such a declaration passed.
 | I am:Gregory BenfordA master literary stylist who is also a working scientist. |
