2008 Science Fiction Year in Review
It’s 10pm Dec 31st, 2008, and I’m a little tipsy on a shot of whiskey, but stuck in bed, sick with a tummy ache. Since I’m not able to attend any New Years Eve parties, why not invest a moment in reflecting on the past year in science fiction?
The following list of events is not exhaustive and is based only on what’s at the forefront of my thoughts at this particular moment. If you have any additions to make to my list, please feel free to add them in the comments section.
Books
The single biggest news in the world of science fiction books was death of the final old school Grand Master of SF, Sir Arthur C. Clarke. Along with Asimov and Heinlein, Clarke was one of the pioneers of skiffy in the so-called golden age of the 1950s. Clarke was not just a leader in this genre, but also a societal thought leader. He is credited by many as the philosophical inventor of the communications satellite, and certainly was a driving inspiration in the development of Project Spaceguard, a programme for the detection of near-Earth asteroids that could prove possibly dangerous to our planet.
Clarke’s biggest contribution to popular culture was, of course, his penning of the screenplay for the movie, 2001: A Space Odyssey, which was in turn based on his short story, “The Sentinel.”
Clarke’s additional masterpieces included Rendezvous With Rama and the various sequels to 2001. I was particularly pleased that Clarke was able to give us a trilogy of so-called “orthoquels” to 2001 before he died: Time’s Eye, Sunstorm and Firstborn, all part of a series he called “A Time Odyssey.”
Sunstorm in particular was a fitting conclusion to Clarke’s career, as it told a very exciting and believable –and inspirational– tale of mankind preparing itself for a storm of Apocalyptic solar flares.
My personal Clarke favourite remains Songs of Distant Earth. I recommend that all true skiffy fans find a moment to peruse it spages.
Movies
It was not a particularly exciting year for skiffy in movies. No, I do not include The Dark Knight as a science fiction title, though the audiences for both comic books and science fiction products often overlap. Thus, Ironman also does not qualify.
Possibly the best skiffy title this year was Hellboy II: The Golden Army. I’m hesitant to include it, since it’s more fantasy than science fiction
While I hated the movie, I must admit that the latest M. Night Shyamalan, The Happening, presented an interesting science fiction premise: that plants could be made so “upset” by ecological degradation that they would emit a substance that reduces animals’ inhibition against self-harm.
Television
It was in television that the skiffy genre really flew this year. I am a fan of Heroes, but its science is laughable. Lost, the finest show on network American television, finally revealed itself to be a pure science fiction show with the addition of time travel. And the champion of the space operas continued to be Battlestar Galactica, whose climax this coming year will be the reveal of the so-called “final cylon.” I’m willing to put money on that cylon being Felix Gaeta.
Other big news included the cancellation of Stargate: Atlantis and the successful transfer of Stargate:SG1 from TV to dvd movies. But the big triumph in TV skiffy this year was the further maturation of the modern incarnation of Britain’s Doctor Who.
David Tennant is, for my money, the finest Doctor ever. Yes, the show is still cheesy at times, and doesn’t engender the same gravitas as American offerings of the same genre. But remember that the Doctor saves the galaxy every week without ever wielding a weapon or uttering a foul word; he’s a timeless hero.
The brilliance of the Who writing this year was in the realization that the show is called Doctor WHO. Who is this man? Why do we care? Transforming the decades old vehicle from a campy kids show into a character drama was brilliance.
I don’t know what to expect from 2009, but I’m pretty sure there will be plenty of skiffy for us all.
The Andromeda Strain (Part 1)
The Andromeda Strain (2008)
Released as a miniseries by A&E in the spring of 2008, The Andromeda Strain is based on Michael Crichton’s classic 1969 science fiction novel of the same name. TAS-08 is written by Robert Schenkken (who played David Deaver in the 1990 film Pump up the Volume), and is directed by Denmark’s Mikael Salomon, more famously known as the cinematographer on several Oscar winning films (Far and Away, Back Draft, Arachnophobia).
The narrative opens with a botched recovery of a NASA satellite that has unexpectedly fallen from orbit and crashed to earth near Piedmont, Utah in the present day United States. Curious Piedmontians discover the satellite before the arrival of a US Army recovery team and decide to look inside; releasing a toxin of unknown origin on unsuspecting townsfolk. While moving quickly to quarantine Piedmont, the Department of BioDefence scrambles Wildfire – an elite team of scientists providing the evidence in The President’s evidence-based decisions on biological crises (talk about your science fiction…). Operating under the indirect supervision of General George W. Mancheck (Andre Braugher); Dr. Jeremy Stone (Benjamin Bratt), Dr. Angela Noyce (Christa Miller), Dr. Tsi Chou (Daniel Dae Kim), Dr. Charlene Barton (Viola Davis) and Major Bill Keane MD (Rick Schroder) retrieve data from the contaminated area and are seconded to a top secret, underground government laboratory. On the outside, all this secret/not-so-secret activity draws the attention of journalist Jack Nash (Eric McCormack) who tries to figure out what is really going on.
As the first of a two disk release, disk one is almost completely context; introducing characters, new technology, and describing the cultural and political environment the plot unfolds in. The story is portrayed using five different perspectives – the scientific team sequestered in the underground lab, the decision-maker president and his white house staff who while being decisive have to run everything through the “how-will-this-play-out-in-the-election” filter, the US Army, the ultra-secretive National Security Agency (NSA), and (of course) the media.
Schenkken taps into real world events and popular culture by drawing repeatedly from the endless list of individual and institutional failures that lead to the war in Iraq – primarily the dysfunction surrounding the US Military, intelligence agencies and the Oval Office – with a sideways reference to rogue nations, economic greed, the environment and “Area-51.” All of this is presented through the use of short vignettes that introduce characters, outline personal relationships and establish institutional dynamics; effectively creating a patchwork of information that may or may not allow the viewer to grasp what is going on.
Some of the reviews I have read have been critical of the cast, the story and the interpretation of the novel. As I am reviewing this in a bubble so to speak – having not seen the first theatrical release, nor having read the book – I’m inclined to disagree with this criticism in a state of blissful ignorance. The cast comes across as reasonably real – I found the performances to be authentic. No one steals the show, and at no point did any of the actors’ performances remind me of a previous role.
The story has a very current feel to it – contentious ideologies, hot-button issues, public cynicism for those in charge. At its heart is the portrayal of competing bureaucratic entities in the face of a serious crisis – can these bodies be trusted to set aside their partisan nature when decisions need to be made; or will they be constantly distracted from the real issues while playing an obtuse game of perception manipulation?
Technically, the special effects are well done and used relatively sparingly. I did find the medical computer in the Wildfire lab to be a little far-fetched for a story that is supposed to be contemporary. I’m all for voice-directed, diagnostic tools that can provide real-time patient data (right down to hematology results) in addition to performing all kinds of medical tests at the verbal request of a doctor – I’m just not sure if it exists yet!
One thing I wished the writers had done is explain the animosity between some of the main characters. This history is referred to abstractly in dialogue, but has an impact on the plot development. Perhaps more will be revealed in part 2.
Taking part one of The Andromeda Strain at face value, and not comparing it to the original or other interpretations – I recommend it. Nothing exists in a vacuum however, so once having seen part 2, reading Crichton’s original and checking out the 1971 movie this opinion could change.
Bloody Immortals
I’m oficially sick of immortals. Really. They’re all over TV science fiction, and frankly it’s getting a bit stale.
Now, in literary science fiction, immortality has a proud and dignified history. My favourite contender in this sub-genre is This Immortal by Roger Zelazny. But in the medium of television, it’s all quite too much.
The most famous case, of course, is that of the Highlander and its various spin-offs (Highlander: The Raven, The Methos Chronicles, and even the freakin’ Animated Series.) A pale imitator and contemporary that was even worse than the worst of the Highlander offerings was Lorenzo Lamas’s The Immortal.
Then there’s the Vampire meme: Dark Shadows, Angel, Forever Knight, Moonlight, Blood Ties, and so on.
Currently, we have BBC’s big hit Torchwood, which features as its main character the mysterious Captain Jack Harkness, who ages but who cannot die. (This fact was strangely forgotten by the writers in the season 2 finale, in which Jack is buried alive for 2000 years, but emerges unscathed and un-aged, both mentally and physically.) We also have New Amsterdam, about a (sigh) immortal detective living in New York.
And now, Zod save us, comes news that Sci Fi is about to launch Sanctuary, starring perennial American science fiction stalwart Amanda Tapping as –wait for it– an immortal.
As I explored earlier, I believe the source of literary fascination with immortality transcends that of our intrinsic fear of death. For a storyteller, the lure of the undying is not in the immortal’s ability to bypass that which awaits us all, but rather, firstly, as a plot device to ensure several lifetimes of conflict and characters; and secondly, as a recapitulation of the original motivations underlying all of Western fiction, the Greek myths.
The Greeks presented their gods has shallow, jealous and scheming immortals who nonetheless envy us weak and vulnerable humans, because we can be hurt and can die, and can therefore risk. And with risk comes heroism, and with heroism crisis and conflict.
The genius of this literary style is that the immortals must play in the background. It is the mortal men and women who become the centres of the tales. Perseus slew the Gorgon. Jason retrieved the Golden Fleece. Theseus mastered the labrynth and defeated the Minotaur. And even Hercules (Herakles), greatest of all the heroes of Greco-Roman lore, could not be allowed to be a full god; his human half provided his mortality, which was eventually literally burned away by fire, till all that remained was the divine bits.
Indeed, the tale of Hercules is a parable for all storytelling involving immortals. There is divinity and an immortal spark within each of us, which pushes us to great and heroic feats. Upon death, it is the mortal that dies, while the divine is granted a seat by the throne of Zeus. As hero to all heroes, Hercules showed that physical risk and sacrifice are dreadfully painful, but eventually drives us to oneness with the immortals.
But to be an immortal without the experience of risk and vulnerability is to be devoid of that drive, that spark. The gods are dot draped across the heavens in the form of constellations. No, only mortal heroes were granted that status: Orion, Andromeda, Cassiopeia, etc. For it is they, not the gods, who are heroes.
And this is the bit that has somehow been missed by modern tellers of the immortals’ tales. For reasons of marketing, modern TV shows cast the immortal in the role of hero. But where is the heroism in not risking one’s life? The various protagonists of Highlander toyed with the idea of their tragedy being that they must witness the passing of their mortal loved ones. At least those particular overacting swordsmen ran the risk of literally losing their heads, so there is some heroism implicit in their risk-taking.
The vampires are a less defensible lot. Much has been written of the innate romanticism of an undead creature of the night who must suck blood to survive. This strikes me as a great perversion of even the most earnest stereotypes of the male ideal within the eye of the naive teenage girl. But it certainly explains why pale, emaciated, unsmiling rock stars are still seen as sex symbols.
Beyond obvious marketing concerns, there’s a reason that Captain Kirk, and not Mr Spock, was the star of Star Trek. Spock was smarter, stronger, had extreme longevity and mysterious powers. But Kirk was human and vulnerable, short-lived and short-tempered. In today’s lore, Kirk is dead and Spock lives on. But Kirk remains immortally heroic, for he bled and fought and risked, while his godlike first officer pontificated in divine recline.
Bring back the days of heroic vulnerability, and leave these immortals be.
The Greatest Science Fiction Novels
This article was originally a blog post, published Aug 9, 2007.
Well, the previous post (greatest science fiction movies of all time) was pretty popular, so let’s try a similar tack… how about the greatest science fiction novels of all time? Clearly, we are each entitled to our own definitions of both “science fiction” and “great”. I defined the former last time; but for the latter, I’m going to go with something incorporating a gripping narrative, good writing, a lofty and inspiring idea, and even something to do with the book’s impact on either society and/or the genre.
So here’s my top 5 list:
5. The Martian Chronicles – Technically this is not a novel, but a loosely strung together collection of short stories about the fanciful colonization of Mars, told poetically by one of the original grandmasters, Ray Bradbury. Its science is poor, but its poetry is deep.
4. Second Foundation – The third book of the original Foundation Trilogy, this one brings together all of the amazing initial threads of a grand tale lasting a thousand years. Pure, “golden age” science fiction at its best.
3. Red Mars – Really, this only works if one considers the Mars Trilogy as one great book. Robinson was created a modern, believable tale of the colonization of Mars, injecting politics, economics, human will and fragility in with a strong dose of speculative science.
2. God Emperor of Dune – An odd choice, considering the original Dune is considered to be the classic. But this, the fourth installation, is the grandest, spanning a time frame of tens of thousands of years, and embracing a truly wondrous political, scientific and emotional imagination.
1. A Deepness In The Sky – This probably doesn’t appear on anyone else’s #1, but this to me epitomizes the best of hard science fiction. In it, Vinge tells a tale of truly inspiring scientific imagination, with a gripping narrative told at various levels, any one of which would have been a satisfying novel for a lesser writer.
Honourable mentions:
Gateway, Ringworld, Rendezvous With Rama, Startide Rising, War Of The Worlds, The Time Machine, The Illustrated Man, The Robots of Dawn, The Caves of Steel, Dune… the list goes on and on.
Did I miss any? (And no, Neuromancer, doesn’t make the cut.)
Review: “Songs of Distant Earth” by Arthur C. Clarke
This article was originally a blog post on Deonandan.com, published Oct 7, 2007.
Today’s “SciFi Book of the Day” is Songs of Distant Earth by Arthur C Clarke (1986).
Clarke is known as one of history’s greatest “hard” SF writers, i.e. an author who focuses on the technical aspects of the science being fictionalized, to the exclusion of character development and lighter plot points. In many ways, this novel was his response to critics who found him too “hard”. The book is a real tear-jerker. In fact, ambient composer Mike Oldfield was so moved by its story that he wrote an entire album inspired by it.
Little known is the fact that the basic story of the novel was first published in a short story back in 1958. And it was further developed into a movie treatment in the 1970s before finally maturing into a full length novel in the late 80s.
The basic premise is that Earth is going to be destroyed by natural phenomena in a few generations. So scientists send robot ships into the cosmos to create new colonies of humans, based on stored genetic material, over a period of thousands of years. Human civilization might die, but humans will live on. The final generation on Earth, however, finally finds a way to build a true interstellar space ship and masters cryogenic freezing. So, at the last minute, a final ship of Earth-born humans is launched onto a millennia-long voyage to reconnect with the children of the robot craft, as Earth, its histories and billions of inhabitants perish in a fiery orgy of finality.
The essence of the narrative is the encounter between this last ship of “true” humans and a small colony of humans descended from the humans “created” by the robot ships generations earlier. Like much of Clarke’s work, the colony resembles his beloved Sri Lanka, with many Tamil names throughout. And, to Clarke’s credit, he does not allow his characters to descend into a racist argument over who is the “true” human remnant; that perversion is left for the reader.
This is a very moving and inspiring tale of optimism, heartache, loss, maturity, finality and love, yet quite light on the technical specifics. As such, it would be a fine read for those of you not too inclined toward the hardcore SF titles. Twenty years after reading it, I still think of it often; it’s the kind of literature that sits at the heart of one’s emotional core, that travels with a reader for the remainder of his life.
Review of Vladimir Tasic’s book, “Herbarium of Souls”
This article was first published in the magazine Prairie Fire, then again in The Podium on April 21, 2000.
by Raywat Deonandan
The accolades on the back of Vladimir Tasic’s Herbarium of Souls pronounce the Serbian-Canadian writer to be an avatar of the late Jorge Luis Borges and a wunderkind who melds the scholastic with both the mystic and the metaphysical. In truth, this collection of short stories bears a strong resemblance to Borges’s classic anthology Ficciones, though Tasic’s book falters in emotional scope and literary complexity – an unavoidable failure, given the legendary heights to which it aspires.
A first impulse is to blame the stuttered writing on a poor translation from the original Serbian. Indeed, the two pieces that were translated by the author himself are the only ones that glow with pleasant, flowing writing and compelling choices of words and organization.
While Borges explored with resolute assiduity the ultimate metaphysical preoccupations of modern existence – time, destiny and the absurdity of human existence – Tasic seems limited to somewhat scholastic dissertations on the occult, approaching meaningless subjects as if they were apocalyptic profundities. For example, Tasic’s first story, titled “Professor Corben’s Last Discovery,” concerns an academic’s obsession with a fiction writer’s omission of a character in his final masterpiece. This obsession, shared by the scholar’s peers, seems completely unjustified and uninteresting, and serves to overshadow a promising relationship between the narrator and the scholar’s wife. This relationship, by the way, is teased but never explored – yet another frustrating aspect of either Tasic’s writing or the book’s poor translation.
The final story, from whose name the collection’s title is taken, is perhaps the most frustrating. Though benefiting from tight writing and some depth (better conveyed, perhaps, because Tasic translated this one himself), this story is nonetheless an obvious imitation of one of Borges’s masterpieces. A critique of a non-existent art exhibit by – it is assumed – a non-existent artist, this piece is interesting only for its homage to Borges, but offers little in isolation.
Tasic does, however, display a complex understanding of some of the more obscure sidebars of metaphysics. The most impressive story in Herbarium of Souls is the second last, titled “Herr Doctor’s Wondrous Smile.” In it, Tasic introduces us to the “omega point,” a mystical number that presumably has meaning to mathematicians and occultists, but would still prove compelling fiction if it were actually entirely made up. Since Tasic is a mathematician by profession, it is possible that much of “Herr Doctor” is based upon genuine mathematical theory.
Tasic’s real life role as a maths professor provides a comfortable arena in which he sets all of his stories: attached, in some way, to the ego-strewn world of academia. This is both a strength and a failing since, after the third story, one wonders if Tasic is truly able to describe or understand compulsions other than the intellectual. After all, a thread of passion detached from the forebrain is, in this reviewer’s opinion, what marks a true work of literature.
The Novels of Charles Pellegrino
This article is reprinted from an original post on The Podium, published back in Jan 8, 2000.
by Raywat Deonandan
For some years now, Charles Pellegrino has been one of my favourite science-fiction writers. His lack of fame is not easily understood, but I would suggest that it has something to do with his ability to straddle too many worlds at once: he is too reality-based to rank among the SF masters (Niven, Clarke, Asimov), and too technically oriented to cross into the mainstream lists. His closest mainstream parallel is Michael Crichton (Jurassic Park, The Andromeda Strain, etc.). But Pellegrino’s encyclopaedic knowledge of history and many sciences transcends Crichton’s medical specialization and Hollywood sensibility. Reading Pellegrino’s books is more of an educational experience than a literary one. His novels are textbooks disguised as entertainment.
My exposure to Pellegrino thus far has been via three novels: Flying To Valhalla, its sequel The Killing Star, and now Dust. It’s clear from this sample that the man has a morbid fascination with global catastrophes and the end of the world. Whether it be via alien invasion or ecological collapse, Pellegrino has the scientific clout to make Armageddon believable and terrifying.
I was first struck by Pellegrino’s pervasive, insidious and fatalistic rationality when, in The Killing Star, he provided a compelling counterargument to Carl Sagan’s famous premise of “any alien civilization we encounter will necessarily be peaceful since they will have solved their own domestic quarrels before venturing to the stars.” Pellegrino responded with three rules:
- Wimps don’t become top dog (i.e., the dominant species of a planet is never a passive vegetarian, but an expansionist, carnivorous warrior)
- The top dog will always ultimately consider his interests above your own
- He will assume the same of you
With that logic, Pellegrino argued that interstellar meetings will invariably become violent. It’s therefore in everyone’s best interest to destroy every alien space-faring civilization we encounter, ‘cause they’ll be doing the same. This, he suggested, explains why project SETI has heard no sign of interstellar intelligence: they’re all smart enough to stay quiet; the loud ones shouting “We’re here! We’re here!” were wiped out early on.
This sounds like paranoid fluff, I know. But the man’s inventive genius compels pause. He describes a doomsday device he calls a “relativistic missile” which physicists now concur can be built. He was the first to describe a recipe for cloning dinosaurs, long before Jurassic Park. He has designed a viable interstellar rocket drive, and was involved in the early 1970’s debates on whether a comet impact could have killed the dinosaurs. A genuine polymath, Pellegrino demands admiration.
Dust is by far Pellegrino’s most terrifying novel. In it, he suggests a mechanism for the periodic spates of global extinction (having occurred 33 million and 65 million years ago) having less to do with meteors than with a “genetic time bomb” built into insect species. With the sudden die- off of insects around the world, a chain reaction of ecological catastrophes ensues, culminating with nuclear war brought about by environmental insecurity.
As is his wont, Pellegrino has peppered Dust with fascinating scientific trivia: for example, the rapid evolution of a filter-speeding sponge into a predacious carnivore, the link between prion diseases and the origins of life, and the unexplained global spontaneous crystallization of almost all laboratory glycerin molecules in 1910.
Pellegrino is no literary master. His characters are not compelling creations who evolve through life journeys —mostly because his characters are his real-life scientist buddies! He does not pretend to explore the human condition as would a Rushdie, Conrad, Hemingway or Forster. But he provides hard supportable science, and surrounds it with plausible scenarios that cannot fail to compel greater thought.
Time spent reading Pellegrino is time well-spent indeed.
