GalacticMu

I’ve hinted at the following sentiment over the last few months, but I now feel inclined to fully vent: I am mad at literature. And mostly science fiction. Settled down with a sammich and a mug of laudanum? Then let’s begin.

Every once and a great while I go through periods of not wanting to read, and almost always this is set off by reading a particularly terrible book — the great Not Reading Anything of 2001 in the wake of China Mieville’s aneurysm-inducing Perdido Street Station, for example. However, just before I moved across the country (the second time) I had a sudden and unpleasant realization: It had been a while since I read a book I’d actually enjoyed.

I looked over my shelves. 2006 Hugo Award-winning Rainbows End by Vernor Vinge? In the dictionary? Next to ‘Trying Too Hard?’ That’s right, there’s Rainbows End. And don’t even get me started on Richard K. Morgan’s Altered Carbon: I’ll take the high road and just say that nothing spells unintentionally funny like preposterous, confusing sex scenes.

In fact, after picking through my shelves with increasing frustration, I found that Peter Watt’s Blindsight was the extent of the good reads in the last year. Good old Watts. Meanwhile, Altered Carbon was purchased for a reported million fucking dollars to be made into a movie. O, the infinite horror of this dimension that I keep trying to insist is merely chaos but is more obviously the result of a cruel and mentally retarded god.

Unrelated: my doctor seems delighted that I am only 29 and need to be on blood pressure medication. Early and often, as they say.

What is going on here? Have I become hard to please, or is science fiction getting shittier?

I’m inclined to say a little from column A and a little from column B, and not just because I’m a noncommittal poser. I had a half-strength epiphany while camping last week with my family and reading John Updike’s The Witches of Eastwick. This being my first Updike (yes, I went to college, shut up - and anyway, I never graduated), I was officially thrown for a loop. Firstly, I remember trying to read Updike years back and curling my lip. Back on the shelf it goes. Secondly Nicholson Baker once wrote a touching ode to Updike, which gave me pause. If Baker likes him, surely…? But no, I still couldn’t be bothered with it. And then, in a fit of pique (”I’ll show those smart people and prove that I don’t like Updike once and for all.”) I picked up a battered copy of Eastwick. And there I was, several pages into it and thinking, “This is fucking brilliant.” It was like reading Baker’s liquid, fizzy train-of-thought, the same bumbling honeybee of prose - but with a story! It’s humane and active, meaningful and profoundly mundane. It is somehow familiar and totally surprising. Stephen King famously complained that Baker’s writing was a “meaningless little fingernail paring,” which is a lot like saying that pie is a pointless trimming of beard hair; also, someday soon Naglfar will be coming for you and it won’t seem so meaningless after all, will it?

Blah blah blah, anyway, I had a mini-epiphany: people don’t know how to write anymore. Or rather, there is no reward for knowing how to write anymore. That has to be it. So that you have these masses of writers who might be technically good but cannot string an arc along to save their lives (any contemporary scifi writer who is obsessed with the singularity, I’m looking at you), and you have these terrible writers who have a whole laundry basket of good ideas but need to be told that no one “stares broodingly”. And they both get five-novel deals with movie options. Huh?

Before I started writing this I thought: I can’t complain if I can’t fix it. But I spent some time with myself, listening to myself’s side of the story, and I came to see a different point of view. I am the consumer. If my TV doesn’t work well, no one expects me to head down to the basement and hack a TV out of a block of butter and some twist ties. Other than MacGyver, who remains disappointed with humanity on a daily basis (like me!). But me, I argued, books aren’t a machine. They are art. Au contraire, me! I said. They are a recipe, like a cake. There are a near-infinite range of variations, but they are still cake, and they are still made according to a finite series of rules (don’t check my math, just trust me). And we’re talking about taste here, anyway. If publishers claim that Americans aren’t reading anymore, I can’t help but ask, is it maybe because the product is shitty? Have you gone off the recipe?

The answer is yes, if you aren’t capable of following my faux-rhetorical questioning.

That just leaves us with my being hard to please, which is straight-forward. In my old age, I find that I want an increasingly rare and perfect balance of real story with quality writing. Poor me. It wasn’t all that long ago that I liked passing time with a book as much as I liked scoring a really excellent read. Currently I’m alienating friends by calling them at work just to read them an especially atrocious sentence of Altered Carbon. DID HE EVEN HAVE AN EDITOR? I guess I’m still upset about it. The point being: popular scifi lit is morphing into a lethal combination of Idiocracy and Fahrenheit 451, and I’m certain it’s not just that I’m getting smarter (I call it “The Dumbening”). But clearly instead of censoring thoughts they are quietly replacing them with lamer ones. And by “they” I don’t know who I mean. I vote Russians. Or possibly Boing Boing.

We are here. We are well. We will soon be back to direct transmission status. We miss you.

Saw this ad today that made us laugh because at heart we are old women whose grandchildren set us up computers against our will. Wait, that’s for kitty photos. Well, this is the new kitty photo, just like cyberdolphins are the new pony.

From Dark Roasted Blend.

This morning a comment was left by Dr. Chris Lintott, astrophysicist. ASTROPHYSICIST. Oh, I am squirming with delight right now. And seriously, if that isn’t awesome enough, he co-wrote the book Bang! The Complete History of the Universe with Brian May - yes, THE LEAD GUITARIST OF QUEEN, WHO IS ALSO AN ASTROPHYSICIST. Buckaroo Bonzai naysayers can stuff it!

In February of this year I wrote an offhand snippet about my adoration of the science fiction movie Sunshine that included a few one-liners aimed at Dr. Lintott. He had been consulted as an astronomer to comment on the movie, and I used his quotes in my own post.

Today Halcyon wrote a response to Dr. Lintott that I wanted to publish it here as a front-page post rather than a comment (both due to its length and my continuing interest in the subject). I am thankful that Dr. Lintott felt comfortable responding to my previous post here at GalacticMu, and I hope that he forgives us for responding on our own turf like this.

Your Captain,
Sunday

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(For ease of reading, I will reprint Chris Lintott’s comment here before Halcyon’s)

“I was asked to comment as an astronomer; to an astronomer, it’s hard not to notice that the science is, well, ‘complete rubbish’. That’s different from saying I didn’t enjoy the movie (which I did), but it does matter. The emotional impact of the film came partly from the fact that we believe this is our world we’re watching - otherwise why does the shot at the end of the Sydney Opera House under snow have such an impact? To me, that’s completely undermined by the fact that physics appears to work differently in the sunshine universe.”

Dr. Lintott, it is truly an honor. Thank you for stopping by our humble blogship.

I’m sad to say you seem to be arguing around the point of Captain Sunday’s post. There is a larger context here, which is explored thoroughly in a newer post. Here’s the gist: our community, the science fiction community, has taken an ugly turn toward realism… mundane fiction, as Sunday calls it. Part of the reason for this shift is that scifi authors have suddenly become quite concerned with what real scientists think of their work. Plausibility is running roughshod over imagination.

Science fiction, as Sunday points out, has never been about empirical science; it has always been about fictional science. The goal of SF is not to illustrate what is real, but to ask “What if?”

Many of SF’s greatest works completely ignore one or more fundamental laws of physics. Take “Fantastic Voyage” for example. The physics are preposterous. That’s a given, part of the contract Asimov makes with the reader at the beginning of the book. Everyone knows it’s impossible to shrink a human being down to the size of a blood vessel, but what if you could shrink a human down to the size of a blood vessel? How cool would that be? How many future scientists and doctors were inspired by that book (and the movie)? And what do you want to bet that Fantastic Voyage was the inspiration (directly or indirectly) behind today’s endoscopes? How about the camera-pill?

Scientific discoveries (and theories) inspire science fiction. Likewise, SF can and has inspired scientists. This reciprocity of inspiration is healthy. But it is lost when scientists take fiction too seriously and when authors (and auteurs) take scientists too seriously.

When SF creators become too concerned with how (as in: “how does this spaceship have artificial gravity”), they wind up sacrificing the what-if. SF becomes devoid of entertainment and inspiration, as dry as a scientific journal. A little suspension-of-disbelief is a small price to pay for a movie as beautiful as Sunshine.

Besides which, suspension-of-disbelief is good for you. It’s a healthy part of a scientist’s diet. Because almost everything you know to be scientifically valid would have been considered complete rubbish by scientists like yourself 100 years ago. And every new theory starts with someone suspending his or her disbelief about how our world works.

Always here to help,
Halcyon
Psych Officer
Galactic Mu

Chris Lintott’s personal blog.

The official Bang! The Complete History of the Universe website.

Not so many years ago, during the Perseid meteor shower, on this very day, our beloved Sundaynaut was born. And we’ve been counting the days to the apocalypse ever since.

From me and your entire crew: Happy Birthday to the finest captain in Starfleet!

We love you dood.

On our way west we spotted this car:

It’s a small photo, so you can’t see that in addition to the Quakecon or Bust! homemade bumper sticker and the PEBCAK license plate, the holder says “Will work for bandwidth.”

As an aside, aren’t we all working for bandwidth?

Everyone once and a great while I, like many, am bum-rushed by the villagers and the time comes to gather up the bindle and escape by the protection of night. Wait, I already mentioned I was moving to Los Angeles.

Anyway, things are reaching critical mass, so poor put-upon GalacticMu will be on silent autopilot for a short while. Hopefully our Engineer, who will be monitoring from a remote station, will have time to chat a little in my absence.

If I make speak of the mundane, but BALLS, moving is horrid. They say it’s worse than divorce/separation, but I don’t seem to recall divorce involving so much fucking physical labor. Or wait, are they including the having to move part? Because then it is worse. Otherwise, I pick divorce over moving, rain or shine. The emotional strain of realizing we are nothing but an accumulation of utterly disposable hauls of junk is SO HEARTENING. I swing wildly between saying “Fuck it all!” and throwing perfectly good crock pots into the trash and then scrabbling it back out muttering, “But that’s good, that’s a good thing for the apocalypse, if we had electricity, because it’s good for one-pot meals.”

Just. Give me some medication. Okay?

I wonder why people don’t do that. People get chemical intervention when they’ve had a loved one die or they’ve, I dunno, come back from war - I can imaging walking into a doctor’s office and saying, “I’m moving,” and have the doctor go, “Goodness me, here’s some Percoset.”

In the mean time, since folks are keen on asking, here’s a little FAQ:

Why are you moving to Los Angeles?

Process of elimination. It’s a boring story that involves work. But basically, we wanted to move back to the West Coast and Seattle was automatically out (it’s a beautiful city to visit, as they say), San Fransisco seems lovely but terrifyingly expensive, Portland was an option and the Los Angeles area was an option. Portland didn’t have any work nibbles. Los Angeles did. Done and done. And something I haven’t spoken too much of yet: I just feel something about Los Angeles. Oh, hello, Deanna Troi, when did you get here? It’s difficult to describe and I don’t like to flaunt it because it I fear being mistaken for one of busloads of folks who daily arrive and are certain that they’re mere days away from Fame and Fortune, but I have this hunch. I’ll leave it at that.

Where are you going to live?

No idea. That’s how I moved to Cincinnati, and if it’s good enough for Cincinnati it’s good enough for Los Angeles. Our plan is to stay for a little while (maybe 2 weeks) at a gracious friend’s house, after which we will have settled enough for finding a weekly hotel to stay at until we get an apartment. It’s going to be rough living - suitcases and take-out food, for the most part. But the alternative was to go to the Seattle area to stay with friends and family, then fly to Los Angeles to try and find an apartment, then fly back and get the car and drive down. Costly and ineffective. Normally a big draw for us, but not this time.

As an aside, the internet has been, as ever, an utterly unrivaled resource. Thanks to weeks of poking around I now have a good idea of what neighborhoods to concentrate our housing search in, as well as the never-ending driving advice. Right now I have reams of notes to aid our search and we have every confidence that we’ll find a big, free, wood-floored house in a crime-free part of the city where wild unicorns deliver baskets of ripe figs and avocados to residents every morning.

You don’t seem the type to want to live in LA.

Yes, well. You don’t know me very well, do you? I’ve talked about it for years, as a pipe dream. I’ve wanted to work on special effects (practical effects, not CG) since I was a kid. It is true that I am pale and my lips are naturally thin and pinched, but I suspect it’s an urban myth that everyone is made of plastic. That kind of thing only happens in Miami. And despite my nacho-eating, booze-swilling ways, I’m actually a closet health nut. I bitch constantly about high fructose corn syrup and bleached flour. I love salad and vegetables and bulgur wheat, when my Crohn’s Disease allows me to eat them. I’d slather an avocado on every thing I ate, if the baby jesus granted me the wish. I’d rather eat fish than any other meat. By all accounts, I’m already addicted to “California Cuisine,” but I’ve been calling it “Angry Hippie-Spawn Cuisine.” So we’ll see how me and LA get along.

How are you moving there?

I’m glad you asked! We’re taking I-40 across Missouri, Oklahoma, Texas, New Mexico and Arizona. Yes, we are aware it is summer, but it is a preferable route over driving through mountainous Colorado and then south through Las Vegas. On this end we are packing our goods into two ABF U-Pack cubes. We used them in 2006 and the system worked out great. You schedule the cubes to be delivered (you have to have street parking or a driveway available for them to be placed on), after which you have three days to pack them, after which you call and arrange them to pick up the cubes. From there they can either start to deliver them or they can send the cubes to their gigantic freight shipping yards for storage, for which they charge a perfectly reasonable monthly fee. What we are doing, since we don’t know when we’ll be needing them, is sending them straight to storage in Cincinnati (rather than store them at the other end in LA, for two reasons: one, there are three shipping yards in LA and you must pick the closest one to the destination, no exceptions, or they charge you additional moving fees and two, the contents will be cooler sitting in a shipping yard in Ohio). When we know where we need them we just make a phone call and within a week our stuff arrives. Pretty slick. Not terribly cheap, but we don’t have much of a choice.

So there you have it.

This interview with American astronaut Dr. Edgar Mitchell, the 6th human being to walk on the surface of the moon, has Dr. Mitchell by no means mincing around the subject of alien contact with humans. They are real. They have been here for a long time. He’s not joking and indeed, appears to not have a sense of humor at all.

Try to ignore the sniggering British interviewer and listen instead to a very articulate scientist lay it all out for you.

Note: I deeply respect this man and I’d appreciate if snarky comments were left to a minimum.

It’s not exactly science fiction, unless you count alternate history as scifi. Which I do.

It’s that sad and wonderful time, meatbags, Act III and the final episode of Dr. Horrible.  Go watch them all in succession before they are all gone tomorrow.  Of course they’ll reappear for a fee, but all the world loves a free gleaming jelly.

Two movie posts in one day! I know, but it’s summer blockbuster time which means one thing: getting excited over what is coming out next year.

I’m not ashamed to defend my love of the Terminator franchise, and like any true love I can admit to its failings. The Sarah Connor Chronicles, for example - I’ve never seen a whole episode and while I like the concept, something in me just fails to get a nerd boner. I can wait until they come out on DVD, and even then I’m not going to be breathing heavy all over my Netflix waiting for the Saturday night clock to roll over to New On DVD day.

But imagine my temporary blackout when I learned that Christian Bale was set to not only be John Connor, but to star in a possible trilogy of post-apocalyptic machine-war movies. This! Is! Me! Hitting myself in the head with a nerdstick! There is bad news, as always: the producers have made it clear they want the franchise to become PG-13, unlike the first trilogy, to “broaden audiences.” I like the generous wording of “broaden audiences,” it sounds so much more respectable than “make more money” and “abandon integrity”. But there is also strange news: since The Governator cannot reprise his most famous role due to some conflict having to do with being a politician or something, they’ve hired Roland Kickinger, a Schwarzenegger look-alike. I can’t imagine that someone pretending to be Schwarzenegger pretending to be a robot could be any worse than the original, but time will tell I suppose.

All this aside, this is the story I’ve always wanted to see: the resistance, John Connor meeting his paradox-headache-inducing teenage father, Kyle Reese, GIANT MACHINE ARMIES. You know, the important things.

60-seconds of cruel, teasery cruelness.