Science Fiction - Mark writes

Saturday Morning Cartoons

Grab a bowl full of sugary cereal, and sit down to veg your brain out to heroic cartoons of the '60s to early '90s!

What I'm Reading: Inhibitor Phase by Alastair Reynolds

A couple years ago, when this came out, I read like a paragraph, and then realized I needed to reread the entire Revelation Space sequence (2000-2003), including the Prefect (2007) & Elysium Fire (2018). I haven't at this time reread Chasm City (2001), even tho that's the best book of the series, and the one you should read as an introduction IMO; nor the short story collections. Distraction and scattering in my tsundoku has made that a longer reread than expected. Short review of the series: Mostly great. I got bored rapidly of a lot of Absolution Gap's annoying child who is more than she seems. Scorpio the Hyperpig gets way too much page time. The Prefect books are very cop procedural, in a shitty colonial police force with too many powers over Demarchist citizens. For all the books, I like the tech and setting details, and weird corrupted AIs are always a favorite feature, and body horror/lunatics like The Captain.

Inhibitor Phase (2021) shows a big difference in tone from the decades-earlier books. There's a lot more concern with personal relations, with "feelings"; I don't mean this in the cliché "hard SF fans want equations not emotions" way, just that murderous old Humans & Hyperpigs who haven't previously shown much emotion, explaining themselves to each other, are out of character.

It starts with an isolated colony trying to hide from the Wolves (black cubes, Inhibitors, etc), willing to commit genocide on anyone dumb enough to seek refuge. Miguel, their leader, does not earn much respect from me then, or later when he has to deal with an intruder, or in the hundreds of pages of his whining "I'll keeeeel you!" that follow. "Glass", his captor/guide/nemesis, isn't a lot better, wrapping a few moments of basic humanity in long stretches of emo edgelady transhuman (she's not quite a Conjoiner, but more than most Ultras) contempt for baseline humans. The other people we meet, on or around doomed Yellowstone, are just as terrible; the Pigs aren't as bad, but they don't do much.

Finally halfway thru we get a classic Reynolds heist/assault that goes very wrong. It's… overly familiar. I really should have reread some of the short stories, because I think much of it is in there. There's some deliberately gross torture, the fights are cinematic but not entirely sensible.

The final section's an update of Ararat from Absolution Gap, with unusual behavior from Pattern Jugglers; nothing is explained because nobody knows. Glass and Miguel undergo changes, much as Sylveste and others do in Revelation Space. More interesting outer-space piloting scenes, made easier by the Plot Coupons earlier collected. An alien ship heist at last, and Glass-ish now has too much knowledge. Scorpio/Pinky gets to say "what?" a lot (and I don't think his lifespan and survival at this point is plausible). Another cozy emotional feelings ending.

Most Reynolds I blast thru in a sitting or two, this took many days, I'd often hit a wall of annoyance at feelings or vacation time. Off and on it gets back to the main plot and I'm interested again.

★★★½☆ - unfortunate, since I love the earlier books, and needed more closure than this.

Much of the future from here has been plotted in Galactic North and other short stories, Humans scatter and do well and poorly for a while, with less Wolves on their backs. There's another Prefect book, Machine Vendetta, coming next year, presumably backfilling the end of the Belle Epoque. Hopefully he can stay more on topic?

What I'm Watching: Silo

Over on "TV" (Apple TV+, Apple now believing they own all proper nouns), an adaptation of Hugh Howey's Wool (2011) and sequels. Currently S1E01-2 are out, and they're trickling out more every Friday. That's how they get you to keep a "TV" subscription.

"We do not know why we are here.
We do not know who built the Silo.
We do not know why everything outside the Silo is as it is.
We do not know when it will be safe to go outside.
We only know that day is not this day."

And they really try not to know. They live in a bunker after some apocalypse, look at projected screens of a wasteland from a single camera. Climb hundreds of floors of stairs between management and engineering, so really not much has changed.

You know what's weird? They have wool (sheep? Or something else?), linen, leather. Coffee, beer, bread & cake. We never see (in eps 1-2) any farms, real plants, or animals. Maybe they're somewhere, but oxygen generation inside doesn't make sense from what's shown.

I've read the short story and a bit of the first fix-up novel, but I'm a little confused. There's another series, Jeanne DuPrau's The City of Ember (2003), which had a really trashy movie starring Bill Murray; the book (and sequels? I didn't read them but I think I should) was much better. And it addressed their very limited resources immediately and constantly. Short story Wool didn't cover this, maybe the fix-up and later in the show does?

Anyway. Sheriff Holston (David Oyelowo) & wife (Rashida Jones) have been given breeding permission, which they go at; until her frustrating day job in IT gets her into forbidden knowledge, and we… don't find out what's outside. Then we bounce between flashbacks and investigations a couple years later, because no modern writer's able to stay on one timeline anymore; I shouldn't complain, Ember's dumb movie added a giant monster.

The sets are grim industrial awfulness, a little too blatantly greenscreen CGI, where a practical set, model, and matte painting would've looked better (The Machine in particular). Most of the people in the first two eps are well-acted, tho I'm not always sure how much the Mayor (Geraldine James) knows; is she in on it? She's reading old journals, doing all but heresy to understand the Silo, but her reactions don't always match. She reminds me greatly of "Mom" from Futurama before she dropped her façade.

The premise is great, but having killed & retired a few people right off, there's only Mom and engineer Juliette (Rebecca Ferguson) left. I want to see a lot more development of the background as this goes on, and I suspect it's going to be more political infighting instead. We'll see.

Probably worth starting, but you could also wait a bit and binge when it's further along.

IF Worlds of Science Fiction

IF Worlds of Science Fiction on archive.org: I'd previously found a couple later years of this, but they've since uploaded almost the entire run. IF's heyday was earlier, then was consumed by Galaxy in '74, and had a short attempt at a relaunch in the '80s.

Some fantastic stuff in here, Fritz Leiber, James Gunn, Fred Pohl, Keith Laumer, etc. I bet there's not a single bad issue if you like classic SF. Download & read it all.

Well, there's some dated stuff, too. Happily, Poul Anderson's estate pulled all his shit (he wrote some less-than-toxic stories, but also some of the worst), but also Lester Del Rey's articles (but not all his stories) are missing. There's issues with Robert Heinlein's awful John W. Campbell jr-outlined story "Farnham's Freehold"; don't read that, but there's an A.E. Van Vogt story in the same issue, which makes up for it.

First issue, 1952-03, Howard Browne's "Twelve Times Zero": Starts with a shitty "cop beats suspect with aliens alibi" premise, then actually turns into a good mystery… then SPOILER: The implausibly Human aliens (ugh, pre-DNA aliens) who run the Galaxy and can teleport instantly say they don't have explosives or war-making, just terrene/contraterrene energy. Uh. Maybe you hadn't understood Einstein's formula, Howard. Doesn't flinch from the ending, tho. This should've been in Brian Aldiss' Galactic Empires.

Pretty smart people, the Mythoxians—in more ways than one.
And Kirk, for no apparent reason, thought of a phrase common among children during his own childhood. "Who died and left you boss?"

What I'm Watching: Free Guy

Deadpool is a nebbish bank teller NPC "Guy" in Knock-off Grand Theft Auto Online, who becomes self-aware. Knock-off WildStyle (Jodie Comer, the knock-off of Liz Banks) is looking for the SECRET DATA that will FREE THE SYSTEM. There's a lot of idiot players running around shooting things, which is OK, but there are very few good action pieces for the protagonists. There is a meh kiss, otherwise entirely rated T for Teens, simulated violence and limited profanity, but no nudity. Almost everything this film needs to be interesting, is what it doesn't do.

There's a few unrealistic/terrible for plot things, to say the least.

In MMOs, levelling fast by ignoring quests is not plausible. If there were high rewards for being "good guys", other power-gamers would do it to cheat up to max level, then go bad again.
You can generally nuke or spawn any NPC or knock specific players offline from an MMO's management console. This "ghosting" accounts thing makes no sense.
You don't keep servers physically in your corporate/dev headquarters, they're at some ISP on a main Internet trunk, spread around the world, managed by professional sysadmins and not a petulant man-baby with an axe.
Even if you stole the code of some indie game, you wouldn't keep the original terrain running, wasting CPU/RAM.
We've had "life simulators" where you just watch characters, all the way back to Little Computer People; they don't sell well, they're ignored after a few hours. Games need either a task, or sandbox you can screw around in.
Hot girl realizes that she loves the personality of the ugly bobble-head-lookin' dude (Creepy Steve from Stranger Things) she worked with, even without Deadpool's face & body. Realistically, she'd obsess over her hot CGI guy and congeal into her chair over the next few years.

Everything in this has been done better in TRON (literally the core plot), Dark City, The Thirteenth Floor (especially the hot girl & simulated guy), The Matrix 1-4, and The LEGO Movie (literally the Special and WildStyle). It is better than the abomination of Spielberg's Ready Player One movie, but the book was of course far better.

★★★☆☆ generic movie fails to execute a much better idea.

Star Trek Ranked

In the tone of The Last Star Wars Movie, every Star Trek thing ranked:

The Original Series. Star Trek is, in short, Horatio Hornblower in space, the final frontier, exploring strange new worlds, and new civilizations. To boldly go where no (Hu)man has gone before. You know what works? Paying good SF writers to write good scripts about Science Fiction Ideas, and then getting good actors to read those lines, with adequate special effects to say "you are in space". They didn't always manage any of that, there's a reason it barely made 3 seasons, but when it hits the right points, it's the best art Humans have ever created. (Preferably pre "digital remaster", but the CGI shit does improve matters in a few episodes, inoffensive the rest of the time.)
The Animated Series. Yes, the "animation" is sub-Hanna Barbera level. The matte paintings are gorgeous. They could do real alien aliens since they didn't need makeup. They continued to get real SF writers (including Larry Niven!) like TOS, unlike any other Trek show.
Star Trek novels/novelizations by James Blish, John M. Ford, and Diane Duane. How Much for Just the Planet, The Final Reflection, and My Enemy My Ally are top of that group. I don't remember the Greg Bear book, but he's a great writer, should be acceptable if he didn't phone it in.
Star Trek Movies I-IV,VI. I'm not gonna nitpick which is better, I honestly like I and VI a lot more than the usual rankings, but all 5 of these are great. Why didn't they make a movie V? Weird, huh?
GalaxyQuest. This is the series finale Star Trek classic deserved.
Lower Decks. Yes, it's a very silly-looking cartoon. And there's parts that are slapstick comedy… and parts are the kind of awe-inspiring, the Galaxy is a great place, let's go explore, heroism that Star Trek used to be about. It's like the lighter TOS eps, compressed to 22 minutes.
Strange New Worlds. I'm already very tired of "Gorn" (they're not Gorn as we know them from "Arena", but knockoff Alien xenomorphs) eps. But I like most of the crew, the plots are generally good enough, they're not trying writing techniques far beyond their ability, it's just a good Trek show. Not best ever, but good so far.
Star Trek Continues. Often exactly as amateur as you'd expect, and other times really manages to make A Star Trek Episode. Give it a try.
Star Trek novels/novelizations by almost literally anyone else. I must've read dozens or hundreds of these, and most are junk, no better than slash fanfic.
TNG. Not generally good, or well-written at all. It sort of finds the characters after 2 seasons of absolute crap. But there is occasionally exploration, adventure, Human spirit, all that. Eh.
DS9, I guess. No sense of wonder. Very little exploration. Once in a while, it has a Science Fiction Idea and explores it for one ep, then forgets everything about that and hits the sitcom reset button. Implausibly promotes Miles O'Brien, most useless Human in the Galaxy, to a major character with a hot wife. Mostly it ripped off Babylon 5, and poached actors, because they had no writers, no direction, no ability to plot ahead. Later on it just got repetitive, then wrapped up a war with deus ex machina "let's all be friends because we're amorphous".
Garbage, do not watch: VGR, ENT, STD ("better dead than Disco"), PIC, all of the other Star Trek movies. Just has nothing to do with Star Trek at all.
Crimes Against Humanity: JJ Abrams' "Star Trek" movies. People who hate Star Trek and are soulless husks motivated only by explosions and lens flares shouldn't be making Star Trek-named shows.

I'm not too familiar with the Star Trek comics to put them on this chart; as opposed to Star Wars, where the Marvel comics are among the best material. The Gold Key & Marvel comics were mediocre, gap-between-series fillers. I didn't see any of DC, Malibu, or Marvel II's runs. Wildstorm's run was awful (and I liked their superhero comics, but they were bad at SF). The Tokyopop manga were hilarious, very off-model, off-character, not at all Star Trek except in the Futurama parody sense. I've only seen a few of the IDW comics, and while they're a solid publisher, they do goofy crossover shit a lot.

Lost Infrastructure of the 20th Century

Horrific picture from Larry on ADDN:

Now I'm wondering what other kinds of infrastructure of my yout' no longer exist. Growing up there were always old-timer stories of "oh we used to have horses and play hoop-and-stick! A live theatre show cost a penny!", but they never had useful tech and then lost it.

Mentioned earlier today: Party lines. Rotary phones. Phones only owned by Ma Bell. Landlines. Telephone girls.

Newspaper vending boxes, probably all owl nests now. Newspapers; I used to get a weekly big city paper, alt press paper, and sometimes a daily trash paper (USA Today & the like, for mediocre perspective, and I could do the crossword in <30 minutes). Print magazines, used to be the monthly delivery of all information. Books. I say I'd miss books, but honestly I buy only ebooks now, I have thousands of books in my iBooks & Dropbox, a much smaller physical bookshelf now.

Card catalogs are gone. I spent so much time with a little golf pencil, index cards, and flipping thru the catalog looking for a book, writing down Dewey numbers, then go hunting the shelves. Microfiche. Reference/research librarians. Libraries are under attack from the usual suspects aka the GOP, maybe they won't make it.

Vinyl and cassette tapes have made a temporary, improbable, and really stupid comeback, but once the fad ends they'll vanish forever. SONY MiniDisc. 8-Tracks. Reel to reel (had a brief fad again after Pulp Fiction). VHS (a few online art projects like FORGOTTEN_VCR and RedLetterMedia's "Best of the Worst" aside). I have to check if my VCR still works.
Do you even know how to be kind? R E W I N D
DVDs. There's just streaming you can't even keep, and Blu-Ray with parasitic Java programming, you can't just watch a movie without it spying on you online.

Television. Apparently there's still non-streaming, "cable" and "over the air" (but digital, not analog signal), constantly NCIS and "reality TV" with ads every 10 minutes selling laxatives, painkillers, and Gold Bond Medicated Powder. But that can't last long, all the Boomers will be dead soon and nobody else cares. Projected movies. Plays in theatres. Vaudeville. Nickelodeons (not the kids series).

Videogame arcades. Pinball machines. Computers that boot up instantly and are useful when you turn them on.

Radio. It's just right-wing hate speech radio, and a few oldies stations. And "oldies" now means "greatest hits of the '70s, '80s, '90s, and today" as one near me says; but don't worry, they don't really play anything past 2000. That's a biz model headed for death. Radio dramas have been dead for 70 years. Rock & Roll has been dead a while, there's still old bands playing it, but not many new.

Malls. If you can order everything online, why go "shop" and maybe hook up with a cute person?

Schools are obviously a bad idea. Chalkboards are gone; nobody's beaten erasers or choked down chalk dust in years. One-room schoolhouses died out when schools became about training industrial workers to sit down and take it, and now we obviously can't cluster up kids. Individual education, or none at all, just like in the dark ages.

Work offices are going to be gone soon. It's easier to deliver to customers (using underpaid gig workers, or soon drones), and work from home with chat and videoconferencing.

Trains and trolleys are long gone, except as tourist attractions. Once the schools and offices remove the need to drive around a city every day, it's gonna get awful quiet. No more cars, highways, streets, street lights, skyscrapers, planes. Ships are probably still needed to deliver from factories to target continent. Zeppelins could make a comeback, they use less fuel.

The Earth will go dark again. Little campfires as we all live out in the boonies with a single glowing rectangle or a cable into our skulls. Global economy reduced to swarms of drones delivering goods from robotic factories, until the owners, now on Mars, shut them down and all the lights go off.

What I'm Watching: Star Trek: Strange New Worlds S1E04

I'm not gonna post every ep. S1E03 was a nice normal medical disaster ep, TOS had a bunch of those, every planet's full of plagues. Backstory for Number One and a bit for Dr M'Benga.

S1E04 is a little more involved.

**SPOILERS***

Why are they waiting to the final weeks to deliver AIR FILTERING to a shake-and-bake colony? How about you plan ahead a year and then there's no JIT emergency?

"I'm not going to let some doctor inside my head to try and fix me. I'm not broken, I'm fine." —Someone who is the opposite of "fine"

Oh, it really is Acheron LV-426 down there. Including Fig "Newt"-on. "The monsters come out and click at night. Mostly." Kid is never seen again. I really wanted the Gorn to get on board, have a crew hunt in lower decks, Fig escapes and Number One comes in with an exoskeleton and BFG "get away from her, you BITCH!" Anyway. We still haven't seen a Gorn.

What we do get is a submarine battle against a destroyer group.

Singh: "I will make that adjustment. But I will not lie to them." Ash: "…about their chances. But, they have my sympathy."

"Ortegas, full stop": You can't full stop in an orbit, inside a gas giant. Newton's physics still apply here.

It's the Galileo Two (the same shuttle survives 10 years?!) Never send all your good officers on a suicide mission. And don't do therapy when you're supposed to be scouting! The Gorn apparently still use signal lanterns and morse code on their FTL starships; keep banging the rocks together, lizards, you'll invent encrypted radio someday.

"Suit up, strap in", says a man on a bridge with no seatbelts. I wouldn't even want them to develop seatbelt or non-exploding control panel technology now, they never had it on TOS, but don't lampshade it, maybe?

The actual ship battles are pretty good; they've learned a little bit to fight in 3D space, to think about the ships as spaceships and not wet navy battlecruisers. It's not perfect, their physics is total nonsense, but it's so much better than almost any Star Trek's ship fights.

★★★★☆ Either lean a little more into the Alien ripoff, or more into Das Boot.

What I'm Watching: Love+Death+Robots S3

Previously, S1 part 1, S1 part 2, S2.

Short season this time. No spoilers?

Very Pulse of the Machine: Beautiful, adapted from a fine story by Michael Swanwick, which you should read everything he writes, especially Vacuum Flowers. ★★★★★
Mini-Dead: Horrific subject run at high speed and tilt-shift makes it adorable. ★★★★½
Mason's Rats: Mercilessly bloody, esp if you have any sympathy for rats. I do not, but some kind of accommodation with the enemy must be made. Neal Asher story. ★★★★½
~~Kill Piss Kill~~: Call of Duty garbage that starts with an asshole pissing at the camera and gets worse. Didn't finish, hate it, everyone involved should be composted. ☆☆☆☆☆
In Vaulted Halls Entombed: Call of Duty vs bugs & Cthulhu. Writing's a little better than the shit medium deserves. Alan Baxter, who no shit calls himself "Warrior Scribe", "The Lord of Weird Australia". Wanker, but not the worst modern Mythos story. ★★★☆☆
Jibaro: Mount & Blade battle between a jewelled Siren and a bunch of knights… but one is deaf. And you want what you can't control. Excellent illustration of D&D encumbrance penalties. Very pretty. Written/directed by Alberto Mielgo. ★★★★☆
Swarm: The Bruce Sterling story! Kind of overly gross, dark, uncanny valley graphics, but the aliens look great, the Nest is nearly complex enough to be the Swarm. Doesn't flinch from the story ending. ★★★★½
Bad Travelling: Neal Asher again. Sailors deal with a bad case of crabs. Good story, CGI looks potato-y like the old videogame Summoner, characters except the navigator are moral & personality voids. It's the 3rd of 3 short stories in the Jable Sharks world, but only one adapted. ★★★★☆
~~Three Robots: Exit Strategies~~: Scalzi tries to be politically correct. He will be first to be killed and eaten after the apocalypse, as we all hate smug jerkoffs. I almost appreciate this one for letting my contempt for Scalzi reach a new low. ☆☆☆☆☆

This season there's not a single female writer, 2 directors are women, but one is of that CoD shit, earns a demerit to the female side.

What I'm Watching: Star Trek SNW S1E2

Second episode greatly improved on the first. I guess I'm subscribed and watching this. Nobody is more surprised that Mark liked a modern Star Trek than Mark.

SPOILER TIMES

Mostly liked.

The Captain's dinner was bad. A) I really really dislike their "casual" being mostly 20th C stuff, obvs Pike's old-fashioned, but it's too retro. TOS set a clear standard that the fashion & music & entertainments of the future are NOT just rehashed pre-apocalypse stuff. B) Ortega's gutter trash look is completely inappropriate for Starfleet, even casual. James T. Kirk wouldn't put up with that kind of disrespect to the service. C) The grilling/hazing of Uhura is poor team-building, but also everyone goes on at length with bad writing nobody would ever say. Very cringey first act.

The comet/alien artifact is fantastic, though. Great design for it. Alien thing that is actually alien and inscrutable. A seemingly simple problem, in TOS it would probably be a Prime Directive violation, but they just set up the PD last episode, so here they can just fix it. Except it's not that fixable.

Uhura gets to use linguistics (kind of a useless skill when you have a Universal Translator) and singing, tho she mostly hums. But she can carry a tune. Sam Kirk gets to be "the guy we zap or knock around because he can't die until TOS" for this series. Spock and Singh just stand around and be useless, but Spock & Uhura (and a bit with Nurse Bleach-Blonde Chapel) actually are funny, there's good writing here. Did they borrow writers from Lower Decks?

The alien menace is kind of ridiculous, bad face on the screen, weird shapeship that doesn't make a lot of engineering sense. For "advanced" aliens they have incredibly bad aim and weak, standard-issue plasma torpedo weapons. In Star Fleet Battles terms, they're like one of the minor races, no new tech but a bigger ship, any good pilot can beat them with a stock Heavy Cruiser.

The natives on the planet are barely seen, little fake camp pounding grit, hard to believe there's millions of them. If they're the reason you're doing this, at least show something sympathetic.

I really hope this doesn't turn into "every alien thing has TIME POWERS", because I'm annoyed by that already.

★★★½☆ but keep in mind I'd rate all of TNG, DS9, VGR, ENT, PIC, & STD ★☆☆☆☆ to ★★☆☆☆ with only rare ep exceptions, so this is some high praise from me.