Ray Bradbury: The last of the sci-fi ABCs departs
posted 6-8-2012 - 8:16 pm

 
There is a scene in the middle of The Martian Chronicles wherein a human and a Martian accidentally meet. Each has left his settlement, distracted, and wandered out in search of solitude, quiet, a chance to think. In a strip of Martian desert, past boulders in a narrow place where no one should be, a thin veil separating two realities dissolves, and they suddenly see each other. The thing is, the Martian civilization has been gone for thousands of years. Dead. To the human, the Martian is a ghost of the planet’s past; to the Martian, who is quite alive, the human is a ghost of its future. Surprised, they encounter one another, connect. And marvel.

Whenever I think of The Martian Chronicles, the first thing I remember is that scene: two intelligent beings confronting The Other in the vastness of space. It was breathtaking to me then, and still is. I thought of it again last week when I heard that Ray Bradbury had died.

I grew up reading the ABCs of science fiction: Asimov, Bradbury and Clarke. Isaac, Ray and Arthur C. I encountered them by accident at a time when I was first being introduced to real science in school, and the space race was on television for everyone to see. It was all of a piece to me then: I watched the Mercury and Gemini launches on television before I got on the bus to school. I read science in class in SRA reading supplements (one of IBM’s projects) whenever I got my classwork or homework done half an hour before everyone else did, which was daily, and ran out of other things to do. In truth, I hurried to finish my own work so that I could read the SRA materials: I’d quickly run out of things to read in the school library, which was geared to babies, I thought (even in first grade, I was way past the appalling Dick and Jane, which I’d concluded was written for idiots).

Shows we hope to love:  FlashForward gets reduced to Hollywood's lowest common denominator
posted 7-22-2009 - 8:11 pm

 
I dread the premiere of this show (relax, no spoilers here: you can learn this much just by watching the ABC trailers). Yet I was prepared to love it, based on my reaction to the book. The show hasn't even debuted yet, and already people are wondering: can this show be saved from its developers' mistakes? Disclosure: I am an aficionada of sci-fi author Robert J. Sawyer's work and have just recently reread the novel on which this new TV series is presumably based (except that it isn't, really). Given how much I liked the book, I was looking forward to the show's premiere, until I actually learned something about the show. Talk about disappointing.

It's not new for Hollywood to botch something from the get-go, but I keep hoping at least a few people in the TV and film business will learn from Hollywood's mistakes. That hope isn't usually rewarded, but I comment here just in case there's still time to influence the show's developers. To that end, I left a lengthy comment on one of the industry sites earlier today, then decided I should at least post that much on my own blog; therefore, I'm going to repeat here most of what I've already posted there. When you're the author, you get to do this. But back to Sawyer and FlashForward.

I hesitate to say that I'm a Sawyer fan because fan is short for 'fanatic,' and I'm not a fanatic about anything (except, possibly, the correct use of the English language, which is an occupational hazard for all good writers and editors anyway). But I've enjoyed and been challenged by Sawyer's novel and his books Calculating God and Factoring Humanity. The Neanderthal series, not so much: I've never liked alternative histories and am much more interested in speculations about the present and future. Earlier this summer, I read Sawyer's latest, WWW.Wake, and loved that. So when I heard about the spin-off show, I reread (and again enjoyed) FlashForward.

Shows I love: Battlestar Galactica season 5, so far
posted 1-31-2009 - 4:37 pm

So: Felix Gaeda has deteriorated into a bad guy. He's not the fifth Cylon, Ellen Tigh is; but he is a mutineer and a traitor, demoralized by having come this far for nothing and blaming everything on the Cylons, including rebel Cylons. And this requires a lot of rationalization, but there's a lot of that going around now in the fleet as morale descends into near nothing and order into chaos.

I'm wondering, on this morning after the third episode, why neither Tigh nor Adama anticipates the rebels tossing in a grenade once they crack the door and isn't in place to immediately toss it right back, where it could explode on the other side. I was thinking about that even as it happened. They did have just enough time to prepare, after all. But I digress.

Shows I love: awaiting Battlestar Galactica
posted 1-16-2009 - 7:27 pm

In less than an hour, Battlestar Galactica returns after months of absence. Its fans have been alternately hopeful, pissed, confused, exasperated, and excited. Same here, but I've been mostly pissed -- at the lousy ending of the last episode that aired, at the fact that the timeline was so drastically condensed in the last 15 minutes of that episode, and that it was done in such a not-at-all credible, nonsensical fashion.

I'll get to more about that later, perhaps after I've seen the new episode of this final half-season. For now, let me indulge in what has preoccupied most fans for months: the identity of the final secret Cylon. That will be revealed in tonight's episode anyway, so the wait is nearly ended by now.

Shows I love: Battlestar Galactica
posted 4-19-2008 - 10:04 pm

 
WELL. Only three episodes into the new season, and Battlestar Galactica has gotten even stranger than usual.

Everyone and everything seems to be unraveling in its own way. The four newly revealed human-looking Cylons, aka 'skin jobs', the relationships among the key Galactica players, and, interestingly, even the Cylons themsevles are comping apart. As convoluted as things already are, they manage to get even more complicated. Curiouser and curiouser, said Alice. This is indeed a human diaspora through the looking glass.

At the end of last season, four of the five remaining skin-job Cylons were revealed to be key Galactica players — Tigh, Tyrol, Torie, and Sam — who are in critical positions attached to other key Galactica players. They're all stunned by the realization that they're been secret Cylons all their lives and have pledged to each other to collectively keep the secret; but that's getting increasingly harder to do. Even more shocking is the return of the presumed-dead Starbuck, whose fighter plane exploded as it spiraled down into the atmosphere of a gas giant and who claims to have been to Earth. No one is more stunned than she is to learn that she's been gone for two months, not the mere hours that it appeared to her. As glad as some are to see her, they all suspect she's a Cylon — how else could she have cheated death?