Kosmosaic Books – G.L. Breedon

I found a really fun site today via the Chicagoist. Artist Matthew Buchholz has created a series of alternate history images with a sci-fi twist. They’re great fun. As you can see.

My wife and I watched Source Code last night. It’s been a while since we watched a movie. We’ve been watching HBO’s Carnivale and the BBC crime drama Waking the Dead. But, we finally ran out of episodes of both.

I have to say, I enjoyed Source Code much more than I expected to. Here’s a brief synopsis from Rotten Tomatoes:

When decorated soldier Captain Colter Stevens (Jake Gyllenhaal) wakes up in the body of an unknown man, he discovers he’s part of a mission to find the bomber of a Chicago commuter train. In an assignment unlike any he’s ever known, he learns he’s part of a government experiment called the Source Code, a program that enables him to cross over into another man’s identity in the last 8 minutes of his life. With a second, much larger target threatening to kill millions in downtown Chicago, Colter re-lives the incident over and over again, gathering clues each time, until he can solve the mystery of who is behind the bombs and prevent the next attack.

That’s the essential set up, but the film is far more interesting and complicated than that. Unfortunately, it’s hard to discuss the film without giving away some of the key elements and surprises.

The following contains SPOILERS:

After the first trip back into the consciousness of another man, Stevens (Jake Gyllenhaal) awakens in a damaged capsule of some kind with a video monitor where a woman named Goodwin(Vera Farmiga) talks him through the mission.

After several more trips back in time, Stevens becomes more and more suspicious of Goodwin and the project director Dr. Rutledge (Jeffery Wright). He eventually gets them to admit that he is dead. Well, not entirely dead. His brain is still working and it is plugged into the system that lets him travel back into someone else’s consciousness. The capsule he is in is just a mental projection his mind creates to deal with being mostly dead.

So, Stevens is trapped. He wants to die, but they won’t let him die until he finds out who the bomber is. Interestingly, he discovers that if, when back in the other man’s consciousness, he doesn’t die, he can stay past 8 minutes.

He realizes that he can save the people on the train, and especially Christina (Michelle Monaghan), the woman he wakes up across from each time, a woman he seems to fall for immediately. Why does he fall for her so quickly? I suspect because his consciousness is blending with that of the man whose body he is inhabiting – a man named Shaun – who seems to have had a crush on Christina for a long time.

Stevens finds the bomber and convinces Goodwin to send him back one more time to save the train and Christina, and then shut his body down – let him die – after the 8 minutes have elapsed. Goodwin defies Dr. Rutledge to do this, and Stevens manages to save the girl and the world. And he remains in that world, his consciousness in another man’s body, after the 8 minutes are up. By changing time he has created an alternate time-line.

Which all sounds great, until you realize that the guy whose mind Steven’s has supplanted is the only one who effectively died, because for Stevens’s consciousness to live on, he needs Shaun’s body. Sucks for Shaun.

I’m not sure if that moral and philosophical dilemma slipped passed the filmmakers, or whether they were hoping it would slip past the audience, but it bothered me. I would have been satisfied if they made it clear that the two consciousnesses were merging. In fact, it would have been an even more interesting film, if Shaun became aware of the fact that Stevens was inhabiting his mind as the film progressed.

Those quibbles aside, I thought it was an extremely well done time travel story. Tightly written, by Ben Ripley and well directed by Duncan Jones (who directed Moon). One of the things I most admired about the writing is that the story essentially takes place in three locations; the train, the control room, and the capsule/cockpit. I’m sure that helped to keep production costs low. The film was made for only $32 million, which these days is like the catering budget on big films. The fact that it grossed $123 million worldwide, hopefully means these filmmakers will get to make many more interesting and intelligent sci-fi films.

• Doctor Who returns to BBC America at 9pm EST this Saturday from it’s mid-season break. Nice recap of the first half of season six here.
• Bubonicon 43 begins this weekend in New Mexico.
• TOR/Forge Books and NASA are working together to create a series of hard SF stories to inspire new generation of rocket scientists.
• Ray Bradbury turned 91 on August 22nd.
• Samsung claims that it can’t be infringing on any Apple ipad patents because Stanley Kubrick invested it first in 2001: A Space Odyssey.
• Astronomers discover dead-star diamond the size of a planet.
• Wolverine 2 is delayed yet again.
• Rumors of a new Star Trek TV series surface again like Nemo’s mysterious ship.

I came across this article today about a life-on-the-moon hoax published on this day, 176 years ago in the New York Sun newspaper.  The paper ran a six part series about red cucumber eating bat-men living on the moon and worshiping in temples. Somehow I had never heard of this hoax. Which is a shame, because I love kooky stuff like that.

The New York Sun was a penny paper specializing in salacious stories (think The National Enquirer). The paper ran a story with discoveries ascribed to Sir John Herschel, one of the most famous astronomers of the time. Herschel had gone to South Africa in 1834 to build a telescope in Cape Town. The paper’s reports were supposedly his observations as published in the Edinburgh Journal of Science – which didn’t exist.

Here’s a sample:

    “We counted three parties of these creatures, of twelve, nine and fifteen in each, walking erect towards a small wood… Certainly they were like human beings, for their wings had now disappeared and their attitude in walking was both erect and dignified… About half of the first party had passed beyond our canvas; but of all the others we had perfectly distinct and deliberate view. They averaged four feet in height, were covered, except on the face, with short and glossy copper-colored hair, and had wings composed of a thin membrane, without hair, lying snugly upon their backs from the top of the shoulders to the calves of their legs.

The face, which was of a yellowish color, was an improvement upon that of the large orangutan… so much so that but for their long wings they would look as well on a parade ground as some of the old cockney militia. The hair of the head was a darker color than that of the body, closely curled but apparently not woolly, and arranged in two circles over the temples of the forehead. Their feet could only be seen as they were alternately lifted in walking; but from what we could see of them in so transient a view they appeared thin and very protuberant at the heel…We could perceive that their wings possessed great expansion and were similar in structure of those of the bat, being a semitransparent membrane expanded in curvilinear divisions by means of straight radii, united at the back by dorsal integuments. But what astonished us most was the circumstance of this membrane being continued from the shoulders to the legs, united all the way down, though gradually decreasing in width. The wings seemed completely under the command of volition, for those of the creatures whom we saw bathing in the water spread them instantly to their full width, waved them as ducks do theirs to shake off the water, and then as instantly closed them again in a compact form.

The Museum of Hoaxes has the full text of the articles. A fun read.

The stories eventually ended and the paper admitted the story was fake, stop people from believing. It’s hard to stop people from believing in things they would like to be true.

There is even a book about the whole incident that looks to be a fascinating read.

DARPA is hosting the 100 Year Starship Symposium in Orlando from Sept. 30th – Oct. 2nd. It looks to be a fascinating three days of lectures and panels.  The agenda covers a wide range of topics, including propulsion systems, starship designs, biological/crew survival,  economics, ethical considerations, and religious implications. There is also a film presentation, a panel of sci-fi authors, and Spider Robinson’s “Callahan’s Crosstime Saloon” – which seems like an excuse to drink and tell stories.

And did I mention that this is all free?

It sounds like a great weekend. I wish I could go.

The winners of the 2011 Hugo Awards were announced over the weekend. Founded in 1955, the awards are named for Sci-Fi legend, Hugo Gernsback, publisher of Amazing Stories among many other magazines.

Connie Willis has won the 2011 Hugo Award for best novel for her two volume travel novel, Blackout/All Clear. While I haven’t read her new novels, I recently finished her time travel novel Doomsday Book. I thought a short review of Doomsday Book might be in order.

Named for the medieval census ordered by William I, called the Domesday Book and completed in 1086, Connie Willis’s Doomsday Book is a time travel story, but of limited scope.  Kivran Engle, an young historian specializing the medieval period, is sent back to do research in the year 1320. As one might expect, things go wrong. Firstly, before even setting off for 1320, Kivran contracts a deadly influenza virus that leaves her delirious upon arrival. Locals take her home to nurse her, leaving her unable to remember where her drop point is. To get home, she must find it. To complicate matters, there was an error when she was sent back and she is in 1348, with the Black Death sweeping the countryside.

The story alternates between Kivran’s attempts to get home from the past, and her mentor, Mr. Dunworthy’s attempts to discover what went from with her “drop” while navigating the effects of a deadly influenza epidemic in the future.

While I found I really liked Kivran and loved her story in the past, the parallel story of Mr. Dunworthy was ploddingly slow and hindered by characters that I didn’t care nearly as much about as Kivran herself. I can see how the parallel stories of epidemics in the past and the future could have worked dramatically, but the obstacles that Dunworthy faces are largely bureaucratic, and while frustrating, not exactly riveting drama. Had the story stayed in the past, focusing on Kivran’s attempts to find her place in time and deal with the deaths of the people who had cared for her, I think I would have loved this novel. As it was, I felt it was half brilliant, half boring.

There is a good article in today’s New York Times announcing a new program by DARPA to invest in research for human interstellar travel. Talk about forward thinking investment.

The awarding of that grant, on Nov. 11 — 11/11/11 — is planned as the culmination of a yearlong Darpa-NASA effort called the 100-Year Starship Study, which started quietly last winter and will include a three-day public symposium in Orlando, Fla., on Sept. 30 on the whys and wherefores of interstellar travel. The agenda ranges far beyond rocket technology to include such topics as legal, social and economic considerations of interstellar migration, philosophical and religious concerns, where to go and — perhaps most important — how to inspire the public to support this very expensive vision.

The article has a nice overview of the different technologies suggested so far for interstellar travel, from Solar Sails to Orion ships (although it doesn’t mention Bussard Ramjets).

After yesterday’s post on the notion of Apocalypse vs. Utopia, I thought a reading list might be fun. The following suggestions aren’t an exhaustive list, but a fun place to start.

For the philosophical, there’s Plato’s Republic, which is interesting to read alongside H.G. Wells’ A Modern Utopia and his The Shape of Things to Come. This later work was made into a film that can be watched back to back with Fritz Lang’s Metropolis, which presents a dystopian future, for some fascinating comparisons. Wells’ vision of the far future found in The Time Machine, also shows certain parallels to Lang’s film. One can also watch the modern Japanese amine film Metropolis for further comparison.

Back to books, we have St. Augustine’s City of God, which isn’t strictly a utopia, but which sets forth some clear ideals about society. Then you have Francis Bacon’s New Atlantis and St. Thomas More’s Utopia. These are both apply ideas of the Enlightenment to the questions of how to construct society.

Edward Belamy’s Looking Backward is a late 19th century treatise on socialism’s promise for the twentieth century, told from the perspective of a man looking back over it. B.F. Skinner’s Walden Two applies his ideas about behavior modification to society at large. There’s also Mark Reynold’s Commune 2000 AD, which is an amusing seventies projection about life in the third millennium. Ernest Callenbach’s Ecotopia Emerging is a more contemporary take on an ecological movement that changes society. And of course, Star Trek is nothing if not a long drawn out utopian tale of the promise of technology in the face of human (and alien) nature.

For those more interested in apocalypse, I recommend John Clute’s book on the subject, The Book of End Times. For fiction you can start with Mary Shelley’s The Last Man, which is nearly, but not quite as good a read as her Frankenstein, a book that sheds important light on the science of genetics. I also suggest looking into the Mayan myth of the Fifth Age that predicts an end for our world (the Fourth Age) in 2012. Interestingly psychonaut Terrence McKenna also suggests that history might end in 2012 (see his Archaic Revival). There is also the Hindu myth of the age of the Kali Yuga or the dark age, which many people feel we are living through now.

For folks who enjoy a more dystopian view, I recommend a comparison between Yevgeny Zamatin’s We, Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World and Brave New World Revisited, as well as the better-known Nineteen Eighty-Four by George Orwell. And if you’re the sort who prefers to watch dystopia, then you can’t get much darker than Ridley Scott’s film Blade Runner, based on the novel Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep by Philip K. Dick. Neil Stephenson’s Diamond Age isn’t really distopian, but it does present a dark vision of a future dominated by nanotechnology, as do Kathleen Ann Goonan’s Queen City Jazz and Crescent City Rhapsody. Lastly, for a book that gives an all too prescient prediction of dysfunctional postmodern life, there’s Stanislaw Lem’s The Futurological Congress.

If you want some non-fiction doom and gloom, see the following books: Jeremy Rifkin’s Biotech Century, Neil Postman’s Technopoly, Stephanie Mills Turning Away from Technology, Edward Tenner’s Why Things Bite Back, Jerry Mander’s In the Absence of the Sacred as well as his The Case Against the Global Economy, David Korten’s When Corporations Rule the World, Lawrence Harrison and Samuel Huntington’s Culture Matters, Robert Kaplan’s The Coming Anarchy, and Benjamin Barber’s Jihad vs. McWorld.

If you crave some sweetness and light for your vision of the future you can’t beat these sometimes overly optimistic visions of tomorrow: Lee Silver’s Remaking Eden, Michael Dertouzos’ What Will Be, Ray Kurzweil’s The Age of Spiritual Machines, Michael Zey’s Future Factor, John Mickelwait and Ardian Wolldrige’s A Future Perfect, G. Pascal Zachary’s The Global Me, Richard Rosencrance’s The Rise of the Virtual State, Rosabeth Moss Kanter’s World Class, and Kenichi Ohmae’s Borderless World.

(Viktor Vasnetsov 1848-1926)

“And I beheld when he had opened the sixth seal; and, lo, there was a great Earthquake; and the sun became black as sackcloth of hair, and the moon became as blood; and the stars of heaven fell unto Earth, even as a fig tree casteth her untimely figs, when she is shaken of a mighty wind. And the heaven departed as a scroll when it is rolled together; and every mountain and island were moved out of their places.”

The Holy Bible, The Revelations, 6:12-13

The sunshine was like an ocean of light, drowning everything beneath the sky, washing out the green of the fields, and distorting the fences in the distance with its heat. Beneath my grandparents’ twin oak trees, the heat was almost bearable, the shade frequently supplanted by a warm errant wind.  The warmth mattered little, because I barely noticed it. I barely noticed anything.  I was reading, deeply engaged in a world that existed only on thin sheets of paper and the space between my ears.  I was reading of a place distance in time and space. A place where things were very different from the world I lived in.

As a boy I was fascinated by science fiction. It wasn’t so much the stories of alien worlds, or intelligent creatures from other planets that interested me, it was the ideas that attracted me, particularly the notions about how the future might be. These usually came in two colors; the dark and broody tones of an apocalyptic future, or the bright and cheery hues of a utopia. Either way they sparked my imagination and made me consider the reality of the world I was living in, how it might change, and what the causes for its change might be.

Because it was science fiction, and often not very good science fiction, the change it espoused was usually due to advances in technology. Either technology would usher in a new golden age of prosperity for all, or it would plunge the world into some kind of technological nightmare where humanity was reduced to a cog in a vast and frightening machine. There is little realistic middle ground in science fiction; it just isn’t dramatic. Unfortunately there is little realistic middle ground to be found in contemporary non-fictional prognostications about the future either. Drama isn’t just used to sell us science fiction about the future, its used to sell us the future we are buying everyday.

On the side of apocalypse you have people shouting that technology will be the end of us, that globalization will destroy the world, that the environment is falling apart at the seams, that we are becoming slaves to vastly powerful transnational corporations, and that the clash of cultures will shake civilization to it foundations. On the other side you have the proponents of cheery utopia proclaiming that genetic engineering will cure all disease and provide abundant food for all, that computers and robots will finally allow us to work less and have more, that economic globalization will eliminate poverty, and that advances in technology will allow us to fix any problems we create in the environment. The apocalyptic view is predicated on the notion that the utopian camp will succeed with its agenda. The utopians only see apocalypse if they are not allowed to implement their plans. One person’s utopia is another person’s apocalypse. How can this be?

Worldviews – We all have notions of what a better tomorrow might look like, and we all have ideas about what would constitute an ill-fated future. How we define these notions depends on our worldview. The wider our perspective, the more things we will consider when addressing questions about the future.

I absolutely loved this book. I’ve been a big fan of the Doctor Who reboot since I caught an episode of season one on BBC America. When I came across this book during a search on Amazon, I snapped it up. I was always impressed with the storytelling in the series and I knew that Russell T. Davies was the driving force behind the show (and behind Torchwood as well)

The books is a series of email exchanges between Davies and journalist Benjamin Cook during Davies final two years on the show as executive producer and head writer. It is one of the best books on the process of writing that I have ever read. As a writer, it was extremely instructive to read the thought processes behind the creation of a the final season of Doctor Who. I think Russell Davies is an excellent writer. Extremely good story instincts. So, reading though his email exchanges was like peaking into his mind as he worked through the stories and characters and took them from ideas to scripts to shows that I had seen.

It isn’t a book about how to write, but a book that shows the process of writing firsthand. In detail. I think it’s useful for any writer, but especially for anyone who wants to write for film and television. The book is also chock full of excerpts form scripts (some as first drafts) and photos from the set.