Hey Fanboy! – Page 23 – The Metaphorager.

First Graf: Ringworld

SINCE 1970, LARRY NIVEN HAS written four books and a number of articles concerning the Ringworld: an Earth’s orbit-diameter ribbon made from disassembled planets and populated by its builders with all manner of adaptive species, each with its own culture and agenda.

Who built it? Why? And what caused its civilization — one vastly superior to 29th century Known Space — to fall so abruptly? These questions are at the core of the eponymous first novel, where two humans — 200-year-old Louis Wu and his 20ish inamorata, Teela Brown — join the aliens Speaker-to-Animals (a Kzin, something like an ironic feline wookiee) and Nessus the Puppeteer (a three-legged, two-headed galactic captain of commerce) in an exploratory mission to the mysterious structure.

Neal’s bias: Classics, especially for those with a heavy worldbuilding fetish, although Ringworld and The Ringworld Engineers also stand alone fairly well. I enjoyed the first two novels immensely;The Ringworld Throne I thought better the second time (but was close to the Eight Deadly Words on first read) and Ringworld’s Children largely for how The Master integrates (the technical term is “retcons“) the latest cosmological theories on dark matter and the like. Four rockets. Check ’em out.

In the nighttime heart of Beirut, in one of a row of general-address transfer booths, Louis Wu flicked into reality.

His foot-length queue was as white and shiny as artificial snow. His skin and depilated scalp were chrome yellow; the irises of his eyes were gold; his robe was royal blue with a golden stereoptic dragon superimposed. In the instant he appeared, he was smiling widely, showing pearly, perfect, perfectly standard teeth. Smiling and waving. But the smile was already fading, and in a moment it was gone, and the sag of his face was like a rubber mask melting. Louis Wu showed his age. …

Why We Didn’t Finish Watching “Avatar”

ME: “THEY SURE USED A lot of tech to spin a yarn about how tech is bad.”

She: “Nice visual imagination, though.”

Me: “Very nice. And the acting and casting are spot on. But it’s a planet full of Magic Negroes. Blue Magic Negroes. And there’s still two hours left.”

She: “Let’s read aloud ‘Lord of the Rings’ instead.”

Me: “Okay.”

(Okay, maybe that’s a bit harsh. But I did find it to be so obvious as to insult my intelligence. (I mean, the Good Guys wearing organic bodies and the Bad Guys wearing robot bodies would be thrown back as too small by other metaphoragers. But mostly I don’t like being preached at, even when I agree with the preachment (and especially the latter if it’s heavy-handed). I did want to like it; some of my friends did, and one who’s reminiscent of Sigourney Weaver’s character, and doing some fairly serious and beautiful work along tangential lines (i.e., avatar as revelatory experient), is “all about it” the way I am about, well, Judaism. But when A&I started saying things like “This must be where the hero doesn’t know that the monster behind him frightened off the monster in front of him,” the spell was, alas, broken.)

Jack Horkheimer, A”H

HIS CRACKLY EXHORTATION TO “KEEEP Looking Up!” now residing in the ears and cassettes of those who loved his weekly five minute-PBS-slice of observational astronomy, Jack Horkheimer, AKA “The Star Hustler,” passed through the luminiferous aether this morning on the way to consult Mr. Sagan about young DeGrasse-Tyson. Mr. H will be missed as much for inspiring stargazers to look out into time as for inspiring nerds to keep it real, old-school (e.g., Demosthenes or Galileo):

Recognized by his TV sign-off “Keep Looking Up”, Horkheimer revealed that although he intends to be stargazing well into the third millennium, nevertheless he has already erected his own tombstone with the following epitaph:

“Keep Looking Up was my life’s admonition,
I can do little else in my present position.”

Prosatio Silban and the Mayor of Ixtachet

EVERYONE WANTS TO BE THE Mayor of Ixtachet, at least until they become so — this Prosatio Silban discovered on a chance visit to the edge of the Azure Void which forms the southwest border of the Uulian Commonwell.

Ixtachet was one of the few villages in the Commonwell not blessed with verdant pasturage and running streams. Instead, its inhabitants lived in a series of cliffside huts, each with a breathtaking view of the Void’s eternal twilight, and a small terraced landhold containing a handful of roosts for the prolific and precarious-clinging snoat whose large, richly flavored eggs were the economic foundation of Ixtachet’s existence. Continue reading “Prosatio Silban and the Mayor of Ixtachet”

Pithyism #4 of 8+

KNOWLEDGE IS POWER, BUT SO is imagination: isn’t it sad that today’s kids will never know the fun we had speculating about Martians?

From Persephone to Canaveral

REMEMBER THE TV SERIES FIREFLY? The epic, intelligent, Star-Wars-without-aliens, Emmy Award-winning 2002 Joss Whedon production? Which Fox canceled after 14 episodes? Big fan campaign spawned the 2005 cinematic sequel Serenity? A feat unequaled since Star Trek v. NBC c. 1968? Remember?

If yes: Did you know that since June 19, 2007, the complete DVD sets of both series and film have been whizzing overhead every 90 minutes or so on the International Space Station? Neither did I, until I happened across the blog Breaking Atmo: Serenity to ISS on STS-117 written by one of the fellows who put them there. The blog’s not been updated since that tremendous day (or shortly after), but if you’re at all a Browncoat (or just want to be shiny) you’d best not be ignorant of this. Dong ma?

If no: It’s not too late for you[1]. Rent or buy them today; you’ll want to see each of these again at least twice (except maybe for part of “War Stories”). Seriously. Ferstehen?

(PS to Mr. Whedon, who in these days of technowonderment may even be reading this: Thank you, sir, for creating the quintessential retroseminal space opera. You’ve really upped the ante for, and inspired the hell out of, the rest of us.)

[1] For another view from our couch, see Ann’s excellent http://sacredwilderness.net/2010/07/why-you-need-to-watch-firefly-and-serenity/.

Sizing Science Fiction

ADMIT IT: YOU’VE ALWAYS WANTED to compare the Millenium Falcon to a Danube-class runabout. Well, they’re about the same length according to Jeff Russell’s STARSHIP DIMENSIONS. SD scales nearly every species, starship and space station in the visual science-fiction universe (I mean, he’s got Robbie the Robot and the whale probe from Star Trek IV and the space stations from 2001 and DS9 and even real vehicles like the Apollo rockets and ISS and and and GoshWowBoyOBoy).

Metaphorager say: 5 beanies. Click ’em out.

Frank Frazetta, RIP

IF YOU GEEKLY ADOLESCED IN the 1970s, his illustrations danced through your dreams, between your headphones and into your all-night D&D sessions. His is the pen that transported us to immortal Barsoom and summoned Conan with his blood-dark legions; whose ink-wet brush splashed with light and weird shadow barbarian, cowboy, and demon prince alike; whose voluptuous Vampirella idiom was often copied, occasionally parodied, never equaled.

Frank Frazetta: February 9, 1928 – May 10, 2010. Thank you, sir, for bringing us wonders.

Lunar Update: Back to the Redrawing Board

LAST OCTOBER, I POSTED “A Proposal for the Moon of Earth” — “a suitable solar-powered visual display in the lunar crater Tycho, for the purpose of looping Stanley Kubrick’s 1968 film ‘2001: A space odyssey.'” The original idea visualized a miles-wide JumboTron that could be seen through a backyard telescope (say, the 90mm Maksutov-Cassegrain in my living room). The seemingly impossible logistics didn’t bother me — after all, it’s Only An Idea, and one for which I’m offering a spurious and very large reward to anyone who can complete it. I put out some feelers, made appropriate noises on appropriate websites, and figured we’d all have a good laugh and go on to the next thing.

Then I heard about the IPN Project, whose goal is “to define the architecture and protocols necessary to permit interoperation of the Internet resident on Earth with other remotely located internets resident on other planets or spacecraft in transit.” And it occurred to me that APftMoE might actually be possible: not by building a giant video display, but a smaller one — oh, say, large enough to fit inside a full-size monolith model and produce an image sharp enough to be transmitted to Earth by a moon-based webcam (see Fig. 1).

Thus, and from this moment on, APftMoE is no longer dedicated to building a giant video display — we are now dedicated to building a rocket which will deliver and deploy the “TVA-1” module consisting of a power source, webcam, transmitter and monolith with embedded HD display. This should give us a great view of the crater rim in the background, prove less costly of both time and money, and make it more feasible and attractive to potential backers and/or sweat-equititians.

I’ll make a few phone calls. Meanwhile, stay tuned to https://metaphorager.net/lunar-enterprise/ for updates!

5 Thoughts: DS9 Reruns

1. SATURDAY NIGHT, STARBASE 33 MINYAN (Ann‘s and my official Couch Potato Lodge) commenced to go where two geeks had lately gone before: the entire seven-season, 149-episode run of Star Trek: Deep Space Nine. We first encountered this most operatic of the Trek offerings less than a year ago, about a day after discovering them through a popular online DVD service[1]; despite being raised on the original and animated series and enthralled by the Next Generation, I/we missed most of DS9 after its premiere back in 1993. Seeing it once through only made us want to see it again — the word “operatic” accurately describes DS9’s scope and themes, and this time ’round we also wanted to pay attention to the detail.

2. Chief among these is the amazing amount of character development: something which the first two series lacked, but without which DS9 wouldn’t be DS9. It’s set on a space station on the edge of civilization, so that unlike TOS/TNG the main characters have to deal with each week’s problems instead of fleeing them at warp speed. (Just like life, at least for those with the courage to live it.) Complex characters call for able actors, and DS9’s ensemble are all Shakespeare veterans of one or another stripe. We don’t have many rules here at Starbase 33[2], but chief among them[3] is that suspension of disbelief doesn’t just happen — even for a well-grounded universe like Star Trek‘s.

3. Apparently, the show’s religious elements — primarily the development and applications of Bajoran theology — honked off a number of otherwise fans. For myself and Ann, the religious elements are some of the most appealing in that they deal with the day-to-day life of “the faithful” without recourse to stereotype (TNG did this when they made Worf a sort of Klingon ba’al teshuvah: he’d been raised by humans and had to learn for himself what it meant to be Klingon). Such characterizations are few and far between (although I’m writing some m’self); religious folks are usually fanatics, and while DS9 has plenty of those (especially among the Bajorans and the Jem’Hadar) the writers are careful not to make that the main aspect[4].

4. One thing that did bother me is the heavy use of homage/derivative stories, especially in the later seasons. We seem to have reached a culutral point where recycled injokery stands in place of creativity. I imagine part of that is due to the intense pressure under which weekly television productions operate, but as a viewer, it just makes me wonder what better line / funnier gag / more interesting effect might have been. In SFnal productions, and DS9 in particular, such homage is hard to spot without the encyclopedic knowledge most fen carry like a business card. Much of DS9’s humor derives from same, in fact — but you don’t need that to enjoy the series.

5. Two must-have, double-bag websites will greatly enhance your viewing experience: Memory Alpha (http://memory-alpha.org) is the online Talmud of all things Star Trek (try this random page if you don’t believe me); Jammer’s Reviews (http://www.jammersreviews.com/st-ds9/s1/) cover TOS, TNG, DS9, VOY, ENT and all 11 feature films (if you count Star Trek V). They’re great to read after a strenuous evening’s sedentation.

NOTES:
[1] Name withheld to encourage custom at your local DVD shop.
[2] Three axioms: a) Good science fiction is about ideas. b) Great science fiction is about characters. c) The best science fiction is about the human condition.
[3] Our Prime Directive: If it’s well-written, -directed and -acted, we don’t care what it’s about.
[4] For more on the links between religion and science fiction, see https://metaphorager.net/posse-commentatus/.

5 Thoughts: 21st Century SciFiFlix

FROM SOMEONE WHO WAS 15 when the first Star Wars premiered, and has recently been introducing the companion to the pre-1977 fruits of sfnal cinema:

1.) Though splashier, CGI doesn’t provide half the sense of wonder these days as models. “You mean somebody built that? With their hands? WOW.”

2.) Those films have aged least which most successfully combine visceral message with kitbashed production values. (When’s the last time you saw Silent Running, Soylent Green or even Dark Star?)

3. WHAT’S with all the DAMN VAMPIRES? Robots are less pretentious and, unless they’re C3PO, can be just as scary.

4. As we move into the 21st century — my generation’s cultural event horizon; remember wondering whether 1984 would resemble 1984?) — I’m beginning to understand the truth that the past is an inaccessible country. Once upon a time, there was an unanticipatable future to look toward; today, our dreams more resemble the tools we use to construct them. (Which isn’t bad; after all, we’re still dreaming, and doing so with greater togetherness. And yet I miss the hand-drawn days, free of ironic self-commentary, when men were men and “derivative” was still “seminal.”)

5. I’ve finally gotten over not having a jetpack. And a transfer booth. But foregoing a 100-mile-up HoJo lunch: not so much. (And whatever happened to Space Food Sticks?!?)

HoJo, per 2001: A space odyssey — Howard Johnson, c. 2001

Lunar Immortality: Vote Today!

A PLAN TO LOOP STANLEY Kubrick’s 2001: A space odyssey in the lunar crater Tycho is now ranked 413th on the website http://www.goodideas.org — and Metaphorager.Net readers can help this dream become a reality.

Although the project originally offered as incentive a million-dollar prize, today anonymous reader David S. pointed out that since the prize money doesn’t actually exist, the purpose might be better served by an appeal to like-minded ~~nerds~~ visionaries through GoodIdeas.org, “a web site which gathers, tags, ranks and distributes good ideas.”

Despite that most of the ideas thereon are goody-two-shoes attempts at cheap desalinization, environmental survival and feeding the hungry, we’re hoping the maginificent frivolity of Lunar Immortality comes to the notice of someone who might actually build it. If you are one, or would like to become one, vote today for “Lunar Immortality Now!” at http://www.goodideas.org/a/dtd/37744-6782. (And don’t forget to sign our online petition at http://www.petitiononline.com/2001shot/petition.html!)

Vote Lunar Immortality Now! It’s not every day you get to save a million bucks.