Movies & TV Star Trek: Discovery

The Game Is Afoot — Star Trek: Discovery’s “Jinaal”

This week, the Discovery crew is off on a game-style quest.

By Keith R.A. DeCandido

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Published on April 11, 2024

Credit: CBS / Paramount+

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Credit: CBS / Paramount+

If there was any doubt whatsoever that the fifth season of Discovery is a role-playing-game-style quest narrative, “Jinaal” beats those doubts to a pulp. We’ve definitely got ourselves a goal that will be found by our heroes being clever, by getting through traps, by figuring out riddles, and so on.

And it’s fun. Trek hasn’t really done this sort of straight-up game-style narrative before, certainly not on this scale, and while you can practically hear the dice rolling with each scene, it’s fun, dangit.

It helps that the episode does something that the Secret Hideout shows have been much better about than the previous wave of Trek TV shows, and that’s embracing the history on the microcosmic level as well as the macrocosmic. I love that they do things like last week’s use of the Promellians. The first wave of Trek spinoffs would have just made up an alien species rather than re-use one, but there’s no reason not to use one that’s already established. Especially since “Booby Trap” made it sound like the Promellians were a well-known extinct species, yet were only mentioned in that one TNG episode.

While this tendency can sometimes go overboard into the fan-wanky territory (cf. the third season of Picard), Discovery has generally made it work. This episode in particular makes very good use of Trek’s history, particularly the Trill both as developed on DS9 and also as seen on this show, particularly in “Forget Me Not.” And we also get some background on why the Progenitors’ technology was classified.

The clue on Trill is held by a joined Trill named Jinaal, whose current host is still alive on the world. It’s been eight centuries, and both host and symbiont are near the end of their lives—indeed, they’re clinging to life in part because nobody has approached them for their clue yet.

Discovery’s arrival is met with a riddle to prove that they figured out the clue on the Promellian necropolis last time—in particular that it initially appeared to lead to Betazed. Once Burnham provides that right answer, Jinaal’s current host is willing to talk to them, but the host who actually was there eight hundred years ago wants to talk directly to the Discovery crew. So they perform a zhiantara, first seen in DS9’s “Facets,” where prior hosts’ personalities can be temporarily downloaded into another person. The Guardians (including Gray, still apprenticing as a Guardian) perform the ceremony on Jinaal, transferring the older host into Culber.

As with “Facets”—and indeed every other science fiction story that involves characters getting a temporary new personality, a well Trek has dug into any number of times, from the original series’ “Return to Tomorrow” and “Turnabout Intruder” to TNG’s “The Schizoid Man” and “Masks” to DS9’s “Dramatis Personae” and “Our Man Bashir” to Voyager’s “Infinite Regress” and “Body and Soul” to Enterprise’s “The Crossing” and “Observer Effect”—this is at least partly an acting exercise for Wilson Cruz. And, to his credit, Cruz nails it, creating a fully realized character in Jinaal, who is crotchety, enigmatic, and more than a little manipulative.

He was a scientist who worked with the Romulan whose scout ship was found last week, along with a bunch of other scientists, after the Romulan found the Progenitors’ technology. This all happened at the height of the Dominion War, which—as we know from DS9—was a time of significant paranoia in the Alpha Quadrant. Because of that, and because of how dangerous the technology had the potential to be, the scientists all agreed to hide it and only have it be findable by someone who can figure out the clues and who could be counted on to use it for good.

Having this all happen during the Dominion War was very clever, as that was a time when worry about things like Changeling infiltration was at its height. And it’s remained a big secret since then simply because nobody knows where it is without the Romulan journal.

Besides his initial riddle and his general questioning of Burnham and Book about the state of the galaxy in the thirty-second century, there’s one final test. Jinaal claims to have hidden the next physical puzzle piece in a canyon occupied by a nasty predator animal that can cloak itself. Eventually, Burnham and Book realize that it isn’t just a big nasty creature attacking them, it’s a mother protecting its eggs. Once they realize that, they back off, which is what Jinaal was waiting for.

Having passed the compassion test, he gives them the final doodad. Culber then gets his body back and Jinaal can rest.

There are also three character-based subplots, two of which work nicely. Back at Federation HQ, Saru and T’Rina are about to announce their engagement, but Saru’s new career as an ambassador complicates matters for T’Rina’s chief aide, who advises Saru to convince his boss that they should postpone the engagement announcement. Saru goes along with this, thinking he’s protecting his fiancée, but T’Rina wastes no time in whupping him upside the head on that score. The Ni’Var President understands her staff’s need to be politically acute, but she refuses to let political concerns interfere with her personal life—a very logical decision, though logic and politics so rarely mix. It’s a nice little subplot, elevated, as usual, by brilliant performances by Doug Jones and Tara Rosling and their picture-perfect chemistry, as well as the script by Kyle Jarrow & Lauren Wilkinson, which illustrates the conflict potential when Saru’s compassion clashes with T’Rina’s logic.

On Discovery, Burnham charges her new first officer with getting to know the crew. Rayner resists this—he’s read their service records—but Burnham thinks there’s no substitute for talking to people. Rayner’s solution to this is to give each crewmember twenty words to tell him something about themselves that isn’t in their service record. It takes Tilly whupping him upside the head to remind him that his command style on the Antares isn’t going to work on Discovery. Mary Wiseman is particularly good here, showing us how far Tilly has come. (She’d better damn well be one of the stars of the upcoming Starfleet Academy series…)

The third character bit doesn’t quite work, mostly because it feels like some scenes are missing. Adira and Gray are reunited, and they apparently haven’t hardly talked since Gray went to Trill. Given the ease of holographic communication over absurd distances in the thirty-second century, this is surprising, but there it is. Gray and Adira are still obviously in love with each other and still are thrilled to see each other—but then they have a conversation that ends with them deciding to break up because the distance thing isn’t working. They’re both incredibly happy where they are. And yet, in the very last scene, they’re still hanging out on Trill, the mission itself long over. So are they broken up or not? It feels like there’s a scene or two missing there…

In that last scene, we find out that Mol, contrary to Discovery’s report that she and L’ak are on another world, is on Trill, having infiltrated the Guardians. That doesn’t bode well…[end-mark]

The post The Game Is Afoot — <i>Star Trek: Discovery</i>’s “Jinaal” appeared first on Reactor.

Book Recommendations Science Fiction

Five SF Novels Inspired by Disproven Scientific Theories

Plenty of exciting hypotheses eventually fall out of scientific favor — but not before they’ve found their way into science fiction!

By James Davis Nicoll

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Published on April 11, 2024

Credit: NASA

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Credit: NASA

The history of science is filled with beautiful hypotheses slain by ugly facts. The tendency of the universe to disregard the professional needs of hard-working scientists is something about which little can be done¹. In fact, disproof is a vital and necessary element for scientific progress, no matter how vexing it must have been to Thomas Gold². However, in that interval between hypothesis and disproof, a sufficiently enticing model can inspire intriguing science fiction stories.

Don’t believe me? Here are five science fiction works based on since-discredited science.

Polywater

Russian scientists suggested that under certain conditions, water could be polymerized. Subsequent experimentation revealed that under certain conditions, water could be contaminated, and the results wildly misinterpreted by Russian scientists.

In the context of the Cold War, the possibility that Russia had access to a novel form of water was sufficient to spark fears about a “polywater gap.” This may have helped inspire Wilson Tucker’s decision to incorporate polywater as a key component to the time machine that plays a central role in Tucker’s The Year of the Quiet Sun(1970), in which a politically, militarily, and racially torn America attempts to secure its destiny by dispatching time travelers to map out the near future. Can America be saved with foreknowledge of its unalterable timeline? The answer not only won a Campbell Memorial Award, but the book also won the award in a year other than that in which The Year of the Quiet Sun was published. Time travel!

Memory RNA

James V. McConnell and others believed they had evidence suggesting that memories could be transferred via RNA from one planarian to another. Attempts to reproduce McConnell’s results failed and the model fell out of favor, as models without support do.

Chemically-transferred memory is a wonderful plot enabler. Thus, it was no surprise to see memory RNA appear over and over. Take for example, Larry Niven’s A World Out of Time (1976), in which the memories of a dead 20^th-century American, Jerome Branch Corbell, are transferred into the body of a condemned man. The state that rules the Earth of tomorrow requires a specific mindset for its interstellar starships, which the late Corbell appeared to possess. The state’s assessment is incorrect, as the state realizes once Corbell hijacks his spacecraft for a tour of the distant future.

In fact, A World Out of Time features a number of intriguing but wrong ideas, one of which is…

Bussard Ramjets

Physicist Robert W. Bussard’s 1960 proposal transformed major challenge to relativistic star flight into an asset. He theorized that the thin interstellar medium of hydrogen through which starships would plow could be used as fuel. One could use magnetic fields to divert the hydrogen into a fusion rocket and thus obtain endless fuel and reaction mass. Star farers would not have to worry about being bombarded with relativistic particles and at one gravity forever, the whole galaxy was within reach³!

Too bad that the math does not work and Bussard ramjets, if built, could work far better as brakes than as propulsion systems.

Bussard ramjets were wonderful plot enablers for relativity-curious SF authors, so it was no surprise that ramjets showed up in numerous SF works. Take for example, Lee Killough’s SF procedural The Doppelgänger Gambit (1979), whose plot is kicked off when conniving Jorge Hazlett bilks would-be space colonists by selling them a subpar Bussard Ramjet, with lethal results. Rather than face justice for negligent homicide, Hazlett decides to kill his way to safety with premeditated murder. Of course, it is so hard to stop with just one murder, even in a panopticon state.

Quicksand Moon Dust

Prior to space probes landing on the Moon, the precise nature of the lunar surface was unknown. Among the contending models was Thomas Gold’s⁴ proposal that the lunar surface could be covered in a layer of fine dust. Depending on the properties and the depth, the layer might act like quicksand⁵. As it happens, the lunar surface is dusty, but visitors do not have to worry about sinking into it. That is the only good news. Lunar dust is actually much nastier than Gold envisioned. Abrasive lunar dust is a hazard to machines and humans alike.

Arthur C. Clark’s A Fall of Moondust (1961) embraced the most extreme case of Gold’s model. Deep dry dust seas are traversed by lunar boats conveying tourists. A mishap strands a boat deep beneath the lunar surface. Will rescuers locate and retrieve the tourists in time, or will they smother or be boiled in their own body heat⁶?

The Destruction of Planet V

The region between Mars and Jupiter is filled with a myriad of small bodies. That is not controversial. The Belt’s origin, however, has been the subject of various competing theories over the years. In 1972, M. W. Ovenden proposed that the Belt is the remnant of a large planet that exploded about sixteen million years ago. Subsequent evidence… did not support this model* (imagine an emoticon of extreme disappointment inserted here).

[*Note to the editors at Reactor: please use a “this is an extreme understatement” font for “did not support this model.”]

This is not a huge surprise, given that it would take a phenomenal amount of energy to disrupt a 90-Earth-mass planet⁷, not to mention the total lack of evidence found on Earth for such massive disruption of a nearby world⁸.

Despite what was even at the time overwhelming reason to be skeptical about Ovenden’s model, there was at least one Disco-era SF novel that incorporated the model in a plot-significant way. In fact, Ovenden’s hypothesis may be the least bonkers thing about Charles Sheffield’s Sight of Proteus (1978), in which advanced biofeedback enables form change, which amounts to shape-shifting. Exposure to fragments of the exploded world prove to have unexpected effects on form change. What these effects are will surprise and delight readers.

Just because a hypothesis may be eventually disproven does not mean it cannot be inspirational before that comes to pass. Indeed, some ideas linger in SF long after they have been discarded by the scientific community. The above is only a small sample of a large field. I may have missed some of your favorite examples. In fact, I hope I have. Please entertain us all with other suggestions in comments below.

1. Trust me, you don’t want to go down the “what Lysenko says is science and true” path. ︎
2. Trust me, this is very funny, for reasons that will become apparent… ︎
3. In the reference frame of the traveler. ︎
4. Yes, the same Thomas Gold as in footnote 2. Gold had a talent for being brilliantly wrong in a wide variety of fields. Sometimes he was brilliantly right. Gold correctly identified the source of Jocelyn Bell Burnell’s mysterious repeating signal as a pulsar. His success rate was high enough that even his outré suggestions could not be dismissed out of hand. The fact that there’s never been a Thomas Gold Inspirationally Incorrect Hard Science Fiction anthology is one of SF’s great injustices. ︎
5. It is impossible to fully sink in quicksand. I do not recommend quicksand for your body disposal needs. ︎
6. The struggle to save the tourists is reminiscent of the efforts to save the Apollo 13 crew, although, since the novel preceded the Apollo mishap, it cannot have been inspired by it. ︎
7. Even with perfect efficiency, it would take a full week’s worth of the sun’s output to disrupt the Earth. ︎
8. One tends to think of planets as effectively isolated from each other, aside from gravitational perturbation. This is not always the case. The formation of Mercury’s Caloris Planitia about four billion years ago may have deposited up to sixteen million billion tons of debris on Earth. ︎

The post Five SF Novels Inspired by Disproven Scientific Theories appeared first on Reactor.

Featured Essays Star Trek: Discovery

Why Star Trek: Discovery Is My Favorite 21st-Century Star Trek

After a rocky start, Discovery has become a sterling example of Trek’s ability to ask big, challenging questions while still being a whole lot of fun..

By Charlie Jane Anders

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Published on April 10, 2024

Credit: CBS / Paramount+

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Credit: CBS / Paramount+

Back in 2022, I wrote a newsletter saying that you can love Star Trek: Strange New Worlds without putting down its sister show, Discovery. Which is true! I love both shows a whole lot. I also am obsessed with Lower Decks, which I rewatch pretty obsessively. I have a lot of love for Star Trek: Picard as well. And I’ve grown to appreciate Star Trek: Prodigy greatly since it moved to Netflix. We are truly blessed to have so much amazing Star Trek right now, and there’s no need to pick one show over the others.

And yet, I still feel the need to come out and say it: Star Trek: Discovery is my favorite Trek of the 21st century so far. 

The final season of Discovery launched last week, and I’ve been remembering why I adore this show so much. These characters have a special place in my heart, and I’ve been loving the exploration of Starfleet in the 32nd century, centuries after the other Trek shows. Discovery has become a thoughtful, expansive show that asks big, challenging questions, while also being a whole lot of fun. 

Minor spoilers for the most recent episodes of Discovery below… 

Discovery got off to a rocky start, to say the least. Annalee Newitz and I discussed the first season in the very first episode of our podcast Our Opinions Are Correct, and there was a lot to talk about. Season one leaned into being a war story, something that Deep Space Nine had already done brilliantly, and then veered into the Mirror Universe, which is one of those settings that gets less interesting the more you see of it. The first season featured a lot of upheaval behind the scenes, with co-creator Bryan Fuller leaving early on and the replacement showrunners being let go. Season two served as a backdoor pilot for Strange New Worlds, while also unspooling a somewhat tangled storyline about black ops and A.I. from the future.

Much like Star Trek: The Next Generation, Discovery really hit its stride in its third season. That’s when the crew of the Discovery traveled forward into a far more distant future than Star Trek had ever explored before. The show gained a new lease on life and the Federation felt wide open once again, with so many new places and ideas to explore. 

Season three of Discovery tells a nuanced, brutal story about rebuilding the Federation after a huge setback—and questions how far our heroes are willing to go restore what has been lost. Season four is a rich story of first contact, in which aliens from outside the galaxy have unknowingly unleashed an anomaly that threatens civilized worlds, and we have to learn to communicate with them before it’s too late. Season five, without going into too much detail, is following up one of the most tantalizing stories from TNG, about the Progenitors, those ancient humanoids who seeded the galaxy with humanoid life long ago. 

(Side note: this trope of ancient humanoids who spread their DNA around the galaxy is sorta adjacent to all those “Ancient Aliens” memes. It seems to emerge from Chariots of the Gods by Erich von Däniken, and it inspired the movie Prometheus as well. A huge part of my young-adult novel Victories Greater than Death is my attempt to deconstruct and subvert this trope, by having my ancient superscientists turn out to be basically eugenicists who wanted to breed humanoids to be part of a bizarre weapon. I originally wanted to have everyone refer to my ancient beings as the First Humanoids, but the She-Ra cartoon introduced some ancient creatures called the First Ones. So I decided to change them to the Shapers, which was honestly a little bit less catchy.)

Anyway, at this point, I should probably lay out some criteria. What makes for a good Star Trek show, in my view? 

There are a few elements that seem really important. I love Star Trek when it explores humanism, using huge cosmic stories to show the resilience and ingenuity of human beings, and to explore what it means to be human. Exploration feels like a key part of Star Trek‘s DNA as well: not just traveling to places where no human has gone, but also finding vastly different forms of life and learning to understand creatures who are nearly incomprehensible at first glance. Finally, I like Star Trek when it explores the relationships among the crew, and lets us see how they help each other to grow and reach their full potential, something that Gene L. Coon was keen to explore on the original series and which became a key element in TNG. 

Resilience and ingenuity have been at the core of Discovery, especially since the third season. The crew are forced to grapple with a radically different future, one in which the Federation has suffered some huge setbacks, and they use their wits and pure inventiveness to help the Federation rebuild and regain its ability to travel at warp speeds. The fight against the oppressive Emerald Chain, which enslaves people and exploits whole worlds, includes many temptations to compromise the Federation’s values, and it’s gripping to watch our heroes struggle to stay true to their beliefs.As mentioned above, Discovery’s storylines have also involved the struggle to understand creatures whose way of thinking and communicating is vastly different from our own, which forms the climax of season four. 

At this point, Discovery has a robust cast of science geeks. Engineering is actually getting a bit crowded, what with Stamets, Adira, and sometimes the wonderfully deadpan Jet Reno all standing around being geniuses—and that’s before you add Tilly, who is capable of being an absolute science mastermind in her own right. If you missed all those scenes in TNG where Data, Geordi and the other crew debate scientific problems and technical solutions, then Discovery has been serving up huge chunks of catnip for quite some time now. 

A lot has been written about just how gay Discovery really is, from Stamets and Culber’s marriage to the T4T relationship of Gray and Adira to Tilly’s lesbian fungus fling. Plus, again, there’s Jet Reno. But the thing I really love about Discovery, going into its final season, is just how much beautiful romance there is across the board in this show—even besides the stuff I just mentioned. Saru has been having a whirlwind courtship with T’Rina, the president of Ni’Var, which is the reunified Vulcan and Romulan homeworld. And Captain Michael Burnham has a stormy on-again-off-again love affair going with Book, a smuggler she met when she first arrived in the 32nd century—I’m really rooting for those two to work out their problems, because they have ridiculous chemistry. I’m not used to seeing Star Trek put romance front and center for so many of its major characters, and I love it.

Finally, the thing I love about Discovery is how its characters have been allowed to change and grow, something the first two episodes of season five take great pains to remind us of. Out of the characters who’ve been there since the first season, none of them is the same person they used to be, and we’ve gotten to see them evolve over time. In particular, there’s a huge emphasis on redemption arcs, which is a subject close to my heart. Michael Burnham starts Discovery as a disgraced mutineer, and is now a highly respected captain with a twinkle in her eye. But a lot of these characters have been allowed to make terrible mistakes and learn from them, becoming better people as a result.

When people call Star Trek an optimistic show, I don’t think they’re just talking about fancy technology. I believe Star Trek’s true power is its optimism about people: our ability to keep being better than we were, and to choose kindness and understanding over brute force. More than any other Star Trek show right now, Discovery exemplifies this belief in our potential as a species, which is something that I personally really need right now.[end-mark]

This article was originally published at Happy Dancing, Charlie Jane Anders’ newsletter, available on Buttondown.

The post Why <i>Star Trek: Discovery</i> Is My Favorite 21st-Century Star Trek appeared first on Reactor.

Movies & TV Babylon 5 Rewatch

Babylon 5 Rewatch: “Soul Hunter”

A mysterious alien ship almost crashes into the station, and things only get weirder from there…

By Keith R.A. DeCandido

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Published on April 8, 2024

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“Soul Hunter”
Written by J. Michael Straczynski
Directed by Jim Johnston
Season 1, Episode 2
Production episode 102
Original air date: February 2, 1994

It was the dawn of the third age… Dr. Stephen Franklin reports on board, replacing Kyle, who is now working for the newly reelected President of Earth Alliance. His first patient is the sole occupant of a badly damaged ship that comes unexpectedly through the jump gate. Sinclair manages to wrangle the ship with a Starfury and a grappling line before it crashes into the station.

The sole occupant is an alien none of the Earth Alliance personnel recognize. Franklin works on him in the iso-lab where the atmosphere has been tailored to his needs. Delenn, however, recognizes him as a Soul Hunter, who is apparently the Minbari equivalent of the boogeyman. According to Delenn—who urges Sinclair to kill the Soul Hunter right there in the medbay—Soul Hunters are vultures who are attracted to death. They steal souls right at the moment of death. To Minbari, this is awful, as they believe that Minbari souls are melded together and reborn in the future.

The Soul Hunter—let’s call him “Rufus,” mostly because constantly typing “the Soul Hunter” to refer to him is annoying—wakes up at the same time that a shell-game grifter in downbelow is found out, chased down, and murdered. Rufus announces that he can sense the man’s impending death, and later Sinclair determines that Rufus woke up at the exact time of the grifter’s death.

Rufus then sits up and starts meditating and chanting, ignoring Sinclair’s questions—right up until Sinclair accuses him of being a thief. Rufus angrily retorts that his people preserve souls, they don’t steal them. They wish to preserve the great beings of society. The Minbari hate the Soul Hunters because they tried to save the soul of Dukhat, the great Minbari leader whose death precipitated the Earth-Minbari War. Sinclair informs Rufus that he must remain in the isolab until his ship is repaired, at which point he’s to leave the station.

After Franklin does the autopsy of the grifter, he and Ivanova supervise his body being cast out into space, as his family can’t afford to have him shipped home.

Delenn visits the medlab. She tells Rufus that she’ll tear his ship apart to find his collection of souls and free any Minbari souls she finds. Rufus tells her that he recognizes her as a Satai from the Grey Council, who was there when Dukhat died, and he wonders why she’s playing at being an ambassador when she’s so much more.

Rufus escapes, injuring one of Garibaldi’s security people in the process. A second Soul Hunter ship—this one intact—comes through the jumpgate. The second Soul Hunter—let’s call him Xavier—says that he’s here for Rufus, who is apparently deeply disturbed. After failing to preserve Dukhat’s soul, Rufus went a bit binky-bonkers, and is now killing people in order to preserve their souls. This is a violation of Soul Hunter law, and Xavier is here to arrest Rufus. Xavier is the one who damaged Rufus’ ship.

Rufus goes to N’Garath, a criminal kingpin in downbelow, who sells Rufus a level-five clearance that enables him to find and access Delenn’s quarters, all the better to kidnap her with.

Aided by Xavier, Sinclair, Garibaldi, and the security force search for Delenn. Xavier is able to sense Delenn’s impending death in a particular section, and, because he’s listed first in the opening credits, it’s Sinclair who finds Rufus and Delenn, the latter being slowly bled to death so that she’ll die semi-naturally and Rufus can take her soul.

Sinclair is able to stop Rufus by turning his soul-sucking machine on him, which kills him. Delenn is brought to the medlab, where she recovers, and Xavier departs, with Sinclair making it clear that Soul Hunters are not welcome on B5.

After she recovers, Delenn takes Rufus’ collection of souls and breaks the globes, releasing the souls.

Nothing’s the same anymore. Delenn’s line about how they (meaning the Minbari, or possibly the Grey Council) were right about Sinclair is another hint, along with the “hole in his mind” mentioned in “The Gathering,” that he’s important to the Minbari for some reason.

Ivanova is God. Ivanova’s deadpan and pessimism are both on full display in her interactions with Franklin.

The household god of frustration. Garibaldi’s security guard who is watching Rufus falls for the sick-prisoner trick and gets his ass kicked and his weapon taken, which probably got him fired.

If you value your lives, be somewhere else. Delenn’s response to the presence of a Soul Hunter is to try to shoot him and to generally act batshit. We also get someone else who figures out that she’s part of the Grey Council, and just like G’Kar in “The Gathering,” she tries to kill him (though she did that part first…).

Looking ahead. Rufus sees what Delenn has planned for the future and is horrified. Delenn says before losing consciousness that the Minbari were right about Sinclair, the meaning of which will become clear before long…

Welcome aboard. The late great W. Morgan Sheppard plays Rufus, while John Snyder plays Xavier. Sheppard will return in “The Long, Twilight Struggle” in season 2 as a Narn warleader.

Trivial matters. This episode is Richard Biggs’ first appearance as Franklin. Though they are listed in the opening credits, we still have yet to see Bill Mumy or Caitlin Brown as, respectively, Lennier and Na’Toth.

This is the first mention of Dukhat, the great Minbari leader, whom we will later learn was Delenn’s mentor. It’s established that Dukhat’s death is what got the Earth-Minbari War started.

The echoes of all of our conversations.

“Typical human lifespan is almost a hundred years, but it’s barely a second compared to what’s out there. It wouldn’t be so bad if life didn’t take so long to figure out. Seems you just start to get it right, and then—it’s over.” 

“Doesn’t matter. If we live two hundred years, we’d still be human—we’d still make the same mistakes.”

“You’re a pessimist.”

“I’m Russian, Doctor.”

Franklin and Ivanova discussing philosophy.

The name of the place is Babylon 5. “The soul ends with death unless we act to preserve it.” Thirty years ago, I watched the first season of B5 and was not all that impressed. I don’t remember specifics, but I remember in particular finding each of the first two episodes to be awful.

On this rewatch, I actually really liked “Midnight on the Firing Line,” but “Soul Hunter” is, if anything, worse than I remember.

Part of what I dislike about the episode relates not so much to the episode itself, but the pre-show hype that B5 had online. Creator J. Michael Straczynski spent a great deal of time promoting the show in advance of its debut on the various online bulletin boards of the era, particularly GEnie and CompuServe, and one of the things that he said would be the hallmark of the show was that it would that it would be scientifically accurate, unlike most other screen science fiction.

And then we get this episode, which starts with a damaged ship coming through the jump gate that, somehow, is on a collision course for B5. At this point, my disbelief needs the Heimlich maneuver, because, as Douglas Adams reminded us, space is big—really big. There’s no reason for the jump gate to be all that close to the station. In fact, it makes sense for there to be a certain distance for safety reasons. Yet somehow, this badly damaged ship winds up on a collision course with the station—which is, in astronomical terms, incredibly tiny—and it’s so close that Sinclair is barely able to grapple it in time (after missing twice) to keep it from crashing.

After that, we get the entire concept of Soul Hunters, which is exactly the kind of fantastical thing that Straczynski was supposed to be avoiding. True, we’ve already got telepathy, which is equally fanciful, but the use of telepathy in science fiction is pretty well established, from Alfred Bester’s The Demolished Man (which, as we’ll see, is a huge influence on the use of telepathy in B5)to Professor X and Jean Grey of the X-Men to the Ghosts in the StarCraft game, so one can forgive it a bit more readily.

But this episode presents the swiping and storing of souls as a real thing that Rufus does. Now, you can argue that it isn’t really what he’s doing—but he’s doing something. His soul-sucking vacuum cleaner enables him to see something in Delenn, so it obviously functions on some level. (Also, does he really need to carry that big-ass soul-sucking vacuum cleaner around every time he does this? Is that really practical?) Heck, the whole idea of “sensing death” is pretty much nonsense, too.

There’s some fun foreshadowing of the connection between Sinclair and the Minbari and of Delenn’s true purpose, and nobody ever went wrong casting W. Morgan Sheppard, but these are very minor good points in an episode that is just awful. It doesn’t help that there’s no sign of Andreas Katsulas or Peter Jurasik, and an episode without G’Kar and Mollari doesn’t bear thinking about.

Next week: “Born to the Purple.” [end-mark]

The post <i>Babylon 5</i> Rewatch: “Soul Hunter” appeared first on Reactor.

Book Recommendations Poetry

12 Poems That Consider the Cosmos 

From the Moon landing to Pluto’s orbit, these poems explore space and all of our weird human feelings.

By Holly Kybett Smith

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Published on April 10, 2024

Photo by Daniel Álvasd [via Unsplash]

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Photo by Daniel Álvasd [via Unsplash]

For as long as we’ve been observing the night sky and the movement of planets and stars, humans have been curious about the other worlds that might be out there. We’re adventurous creatures: we like to explore, and we like to make friends, too. This month, I’ve selected twelve poems to carry you on a journey through space.

Three… two… one… liftoff!

“Zero Gravity” by Eric Gamalinda

Published thirty years after the Apollo 11 Moon landing in 1969, this poem takes a reverent look at the event through the eyes of a child. Possibility and longing suffuse each stanza, alongside a forward-reaching nostalgia.

“Model Solar System” by Michael Mesic

By contrast, Mesic’s poem invites the reader to look down on our solar system from above, the way a child might, creating a model for class. From this simultaneously childlike and godlike angle, one unveils the secret mechanisms that govern the workings of space; the tiny lightbulb inside the sun; the wires holding everything together. It is no less wonderful.

“Heliocentric” by Keith S. Wilson

This painful yet poignant poem tells the story of an astronaut caught between their beloved on Earth and the siren-song of outer space. It brims with love, and yearning—the yearning of fingertips brushing what’s just slightly out of reach.

“Sunflower Astronaut” by Charlie Espinosa

“Sunflower Astronaut”—with its accompanying illustration by Romie Stott—adopts a truly unique perspective on space travel, written in the voice of a sunflower seed.

“Life Centered Around” by Moon Bo Young (trans. Hedgie Choi)

Like Wilson in “Heliocentric,” Moon Bo Young’s prose poem uses the solar system as set dressing for a profound exploration of human emotion. In this instance, the narrator is not caught between two warring desires but trapped in a codependent orbit, like Europa around Jupiter.

“Wide Shining Craters” by Jace DeAngelo

I knew the moment it mentioned Laika that this poem would hurt to read, and I wasn’t wrong. A meditation on the sacrifices made in the name of scientific progress, “Wide Shining Craters”asks important questions about who is deemed disposable enough to sacrifice, and who makes those choices.

“Pluto Shits on the Universe” by Fatima Asghar

We reach now to the edge of our solar system, where Pluto looms defiant, forever a symbol of self-determination in the face of arbitrary, externally-enforced categories. In this lively, profanity-laden poem, Asghar gives Pluto a voice, imagining the erstwhile planet as a rulebreaker, jubilant in its flouting of the universe’s laws.

“Some Facts Are Difficult to Discuss” by M.E. Silverman

Beyond the solar system, there are nebulae where space dust glitters; the building blocks of the universe. Silverman writes of one such nebula in this prose poem, and even though the nebula in question is far away—4500 lightyears away, to be precise—his words bring it straight back home.

“Doppler Effect” by Lydia O’Donnell

With its experimental structure, its almost-duelling verses, “Doppler Effect”is an experience to read. It follows a researcher’s journey to determine whether life can exist on planets orbiting distant stars.

“I Roll Up to the Club in a Gundam” by Eric Wang

Meanwhile, this short prose-poem offers a snapshot into a glittering sci-fi future where a gaggle of space travellers reunite to pass an evening partying. Even though they are far-flung, galaxy-traversing adventurers, their loneliness—at only being able to see each other once in a blue moon—echoes the familiar loneliness we feel on Earth, when we grow up and all our friends move away to different towns.

“Earth Light: I” by Lynn Xu

Our penultimate poem is brief but dark, taking its narrators to the very edge of what is known. How to fill the endless, stretching silence?

“Everywhere That Universe” by John Ciardi

For our final poem, we descend back to Earth. The Universe is boundless, full of possibilities, but so is our own planet, right here at our fingertips. Look around with new appreciation. What do you see?[end-mark]

The post 12 Poems That Consider the Cosmos  appeared first on Reactor.

Column Science Fiction Film Club

The Mysterians: Flying Saucers, Mecha Kaiju, Ray Guns, and… International Cooperation?

Spectacle! Giant Mole Robots! Meetings! This 1957 Japanese film grapples with the anxieties of the post-WWII atomic age…

By Kali Wallace

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Published on April 10, 2024

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The Mysterians (Japanese title: 地球防衛軍, Earth Defense Force) (1957) Directed by Ishiro Honda. Starring Kenji Sahara, Yumi Shirakawa, and Akihiko Hirata. Screenplay by Takeshi Kimura and Shigeru Kayama based a story by Jojiro Okami.

It’s not possible to truly separate any film from the political context in which it is made. That’s a fairly bland observation about cinema. But context really does stand out in some cases more than others, and movies from the 1950s about aliens visiting Earth are one very obvious example. Last week’s The Day the Earth Stood Still and this week’s The Mysterians are companions in many ways, exploring the same themes and ideas that dominated so much of 1950s science fiction, but they are doing it from different perspectives, in different ways, with very different results.

And with very different robots that shoot death rays, but we’ll get to that.

The Mysterians came out in the middle of an absolute deluge of 1950s movies from Toho Company, the film production company behind so many beloved Japanese movies. Toho has some interesting history behind it, so pardon me for a brief detour. Toho started as a kabuki theater company in the 1930s and began producing films shortly thereafter. After Japan’s surrender at the end of World War II, one of the things the American-led Occupation government did was encourage the organization of labor unions, and one of the industries that seized this opportunity was Japan’s film industry. The workers at Toho organized into a union in late 1945, and between 1946 and 1948 they participated in high-profile labor strikes.

But the anti-communist hysteria that was running rampant in the U.S. was also in full force in occupied Japan, and the Occupation government began thinking they had encouraged things to get a bit too liberal. The third Toho strike began when the company president fired over a thousand workers with the stated goals of ridding the company of both communists and debt. The union responded by occupying the studio from April until August 1948. They had the public support of many in the Japanese film industry, including director Akira Kurosawa and rising star Toshiro Mifune, but the strike was finally broken by a joint force of Japanese police and American military, who showed up with armored vehicles and tanks. As a result, Toho ended the 1940s nearly bankrupt and barely producing any movies at all. The company entered the 1950s badly in need of a smash hit to keep itself afloat.

In 1954 it made two: Seven Samurai, which contemporary critics expected to succeed based on Akira Kurosawa’s rising domestic and international fame, and Ishiro Honda’s Godzilla, which contemporary critics expected to flop because it was about a giant monster stomping around.

Godzilla did not flop. Instead it launched one of the most successful media franchises in history, still going strong seventy years later, and sparked an entire genre of atomic age monster movies. It also brought fame and recognition to the partnership of Ishiro Honda and special effects director Eiji Tsuburaya. Tsuburaya pioneered what came to be known as the tokusatsu genre and style of films, which involve the use of elaborate practical effects. The two men would go on to make many kaiju films together, including Rodan (1956), Mothra (1961), and Ghidorah, the Three-Headed Monster (1964). But they weren’t only making giant monsters. Somewhere in there they found time for a few sci fi movies, including The Mysterians.

Just as Godzilla was inspired by the success of American monster films King Kong (1933, but re-released in 1952) and The Beast From 20,000 Fathoms (1953), the idea behind The Mysterians came in part from wanting a successful science fiction movie in the vein of War of the Worlds (1953) or Earth vs. the Flying Saucers (1956). Japanese studios were making Japanese movies for Japanese audiences, but they were also very much aware of the fame and moneymaking potential of getting their films in front of international, and particularly American, audiences.

Big-budget movies about space and aliens were all the rage at the time, so that’s what Honda, Tsuburaya, and producer Tomoyuki Tanaka (also the producer of Godzilla) set out to make. Tanaka got science fiction writer Jojiro Okami to come up with a treatment for an alien film; Godzilla screenwriter Shigeru Kayama revised the story—adding, among other things, the mecha-kaiju that comes along to fuck things up—which was at last finalized by Rodan screenwriter Takeshi Kimura. They also brought in familiar cast members from Godzilla, Rodan, and Godzilla Raids Again (1955). All of that, plus a massive budget and full-color filming, was designed to make The Mysterians a big hit.

The movie was successful, both in Japan and later when it was dubbed and released in the U.S. Even at the time, however, many critics recognized that it was mostly the visual spectacle of The Mysterians that made such an impact, rather than its story or themes or overall quality. And that’s as true now as it was then. The film has a pretty thin plot with pretty shaky writing, and the talented cast can only do so much with the bland characters.

But the spectacle! We can’t deny the spectacle of it all. The incredible miniatures, the vibrant colors, the sweeping scenes of disaster—it’s all so much fun to look at.

The Mysterians opens with two young couples enjoying a festival in a rural village. One of the young men, Ryoichi Shiraishi (Akihiko Hirata), has broken off his engagement to one of the young women, and when his friend Joji Atsumi (Kenji Sahara) asks him about it, he gives no reason except that he must stay in the village to complete his work. This makes little sense to Atsumi, as they are astrophysicists and the village is not exactly a hotbed of scientific research. It’s about to become one, however, because a unnatural forest fire disrupts the festival, and soon thereafter the village is swallowed whole when the land is split by a massive chasm. Atsumi is back in the city when he receives this news, but Shiraishi was still in the village and is presumed dead.

Atsumi is part of the team sent to investigate the disaster. The village and temple are gone, the river’s fish poisoned by radiation, and the ground is hot enough and radioactive enough to melt the tires of their trucks. But the real problems start when an enormous mole-like robot burrows out of the mountainside and comes after them. This is Moguera, a mecha-kaiju who would decades later return to the movies in Godzilla vs. SpaceGodzilla (1994).

Apologies to all giant mole robots, but it must be said: Moguera is very, very silly looking. He’s wreaking havoc, but I still want to boop his pointy little mole nose.

I love the first part of this movie, with the mysterious destruction of the village, the strangeness left in its wake, and Moguera’s implacable advance—shooting death rays out of his eyes all the while—on the city while people race to evacuate. It’s tense, it’s exciting, and there is a real sense of triumph when the humans manage to stop Moguera by blowing up a bridge.

This sequence was made using Tsuburaya’s signature method: building elaborately detailed miniature landscapes and filming an actor in a monster suit at a high frame-rate as he stomps around. This is very different from the way American movies were creating giant monsters at the time; King Kong and the films of special effects legend Ray Harryhausen mostly used stop motion animation combined with live footage and projected backgrounds to put giant monsters into scenes. Tsuburaya had initially wanted to use stop motion animation with Godzilla, but constraints of time and money meant he had to use an actor in a monster suit instead, and that’s what he kept using throughout his career. (The men inside the Moguera suit are the same actors who were inside the Godzilla suit: Haruo Nakajima and Katsumi Tezuka.)

It may not have been the method Tsuburaya wanted when he started making giant monsters, but “suitmation” is undeniably effective when it comes to capturing the scale of destruction needed to make these scenes work. The quality of the miniatures is so important too, and I absolutely love how well they trick me into seeing villages and landscapes. It’s not that we can’t spot the difference when we look closely; what matters is that the overall scale and spectacle of the scene remains exciting to watch even when we can.

After Moguera is defeated, Atsumi and his mentor Adachi (Takashi Shimura) determine that the robot came from outer space. Helpfully, before he was swallowed up with the destroyed village, Shiraishi sent them a research report regarding a planet called Mysteroid that once existed in the solar system. (Note: The English subtitles sometimes refer to Mysteroid as a “star,” but that seems to be a linguistic quirk lost in translation rather than an egregious scientific error. The word they use is星, pronounced hoshi, which can refer to a star, planet, or other celestial body in either a literal or a figurative sense.)

Almost as soon as Atsumi and Akachi make the connection, the Mysterians themselves make an appearance, as their massive, hidden dome emerges from the ground near Mount Fuji. They claim to come in peace and ask to negotiate with Adachi, Atsumi, and a few other scientists. The humans are very skeptical, on account of the destroyed village and the giant mole-robot that just blasted a city with its laser eyes, but they agree to talk. They head into the Mysterians’ dome, which is wonderfully designed with bright colors and weird tubes and spinny things, and meet with the aliens directly.

The skepticism turns out to be justified, because the Mysterians have an offer they really don’t think the Earthlings should refuse. The Mysterian leader (Yoshio Tsuchiya, unrecognizably clad in an orange cape and helmet) explains that they destroyed their own planet in a nuclear war several generations ago, and they have been living on Mars ever since. The long-term effects of that war mean they all have high levels of strontium-90 in their bodies. All they ask of Earth is a plot of land three kilometers square to live on and access to human women to breed with. It would be very unfortunate for the humans to refuse, says the leader, because that would force the self-proclaimed pacifist Mysterians to respond with great force.

Let’s be clear about something. Not every science fiction story is symbolic or allegorical. Not every alien race is an analogue to people or governments in the real world. I think it is a disservice to both storytellers and audiences to view every work of science fiction through the lens of being required to dissect and determine its real-world meaning.

However, I also think that when Japanese filmmakers in 1957 make a movie about a shocking and indiscriminate act of destruction that causes radiation poisoning and has the purveyors of that destruction show up and say they really only want peace and all they ask is a bit of land to establish themselves on so they can make sure everybody does as they say… It’s maybe not a stretch to contemplate multiple levels of meaning.

The latter half of the movie, unfortunately, is not nearly as exciting as the beginning. There are a lot of meetings. Shiraishi is revealed to be alive and working with the Mysterians in their base. Women get kidnapped. The Mysterians take more land. Tokyo is in danger. There is a lot of military action. Through all of this, the special effects are still great, even if the plotting and pacing leave much to be desired. The dome itself is weirdly effective as a threat considering that it is literally just a dome that lights up and spins. It shouldn’t feel dangerous at all—but somehow it does. I am also impressed by the scene where water spouts from a lake and floods a village; the water rushing over the miniatures is very effective. But: there are so many meetings.

In a lot of ways, the meetings are the point, because this is a movie that ultimately advocates for international cooperation in response to an existential threat. There is a nice moment of Cold War commentary where a character remarks that whether they like it or not, the U.S. and the Soviet Union exist on the same planet and ought to act like it. The Mysterians was made just after Japan joined the United Nations in 1956, so the theme of international cooperation and mutual defense was very much on people’s minds. The movie does not create any tension around the notion of cooperation; the other nations show up as soon as they are needed to form the Earth Defense Force of the original Japanese title.

When the Mysterians prove difficult to defeat and somebody brings up the possibility of using a hydrogen bomb, the Japanese scientists react with horror. So, in the end, Earth’s victory comes from technological advancement that turns the Mysterians’ own weapons against them. The Mysterians flee Earth but are not destroyed. The movie ends with the message that they are still out there in the solar system, with potential to return in the future.

Even with its flaws, I find this movie to be an interesting addition to sci fi of the post-WWII atomic era. The ultimate message is very much the same as in films like The Day the Earth Stood Still: the development of nuclear weapons has set humanity on a dangerous path, and if we continue unchecked we will destroy ourselves. But where The Day the Earth Stood Still has an alien visitor show up to sincerely warn us about our own future actions, the alien visitors in The Mysterians show up unrepentant about their own past actions and fully prepared to visit that same destruction onto Earth.

And, yes, in the most obvious interpretation, that is an unsurprising difference between a film made in the country that dropped the atomic bombs and a film made in the country the bombs were dropped on. But there is also optimism in The Mysterians, not just in the success of cooperative action, but also in the ability of science to solve problems, even those problems that science has created in the first place. There are moments of individual heroism and sacrifice—Atsumi and Shiraishi in the dome at the end—but for the most part the focus is on the actions of the group, not the individual, from the large-scale civilian evacuations to the military operations.

It is a war movie, never mind the fact that the war is started by a giant mole-shaped robot that shoots lasers from its eyes and perpetuated by aliens dressed in fabulous citrus-bright capes, and more specifically it is the type of war movie where everybody working together saves the day. The Mysterians is, in a way, providing one answer to the question posed by the uneasy ending of The Day the Earth Stood Still. Is it a particularly plausible or convincing answer? Well, not especially, but I still find it notable, because it is yet another example of science fiction as a genre looked around after the end of WWII and tried to make sense of how the world had changed and would continue to change.

What are your thoughts about The Mysterians and where it sits in the subgenre of atomic era sci fi? Do you want to see more of Eiji Tsuburaya’s practical effects? You’ll get your chance; we are definitely going to watch Godzilla. I’m thinking there is a giant monster month in the future, so feel free to drop suggestions below.

Next week: We’re stepping away from the aftermath of WWII and jumping headfirst into the 1980s. We head back to the United States for some hijinks in Harlem with The Brother From Another Planet. Watch it on Amazon, Roku, Tubi, Shout TV, Apple, all over YouTube, and Internet Archive.

The post <i>The Mysterians</i>: Flying Saucers, Mecha Kaiju, Ray Guns, and… International Cooperation? appeared first on Reactor.

Book Recommendations Jo Walton Reads

Jo Walton’s Reading List: March 2024

Poetry, romance, science fiction, history, and a seafaring memoir all feature on this month’s list!

By Jo Walton

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Published on April 8, 2024

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I began March in Florence, with friends. I had a totally asymptomatic case of Covid, where I took a lot of long walks outside and read and worked inside. Halfway through the month I flew to Chicago to go to the Renaissance Society of America conference, where I told a lot of surprised academics that I loved their books. Then we started preparing for this year’s papal election of 1492, which is just going to eat April. I read eight books, and as usual they’re a mixed lot!

10 Things That Never Happened — Alexis Hall (2023)
So there are contrived set-ups where you throw the book across the room, and there are contrived set-ups where you sigh and go with it, and there are contrived set-ups that actually work. The difference is the motivation of the characters. If you’re in someone’s head and the ridiculous thing is a thing they would do, or if things are moving too fast for them to stop without making things worse, then the most implausible things can work. That’s the case here. Hall gives us long enough to get to know our first person narrator Sam before he gets hit on the head. The way that in his concussed fuddle he feigns amnesia then makes that feigned amnesia just seems like a thing he would do, for reasons that, if not perfectly sensible, are at least reasonable to him, and therefore to us, his invisible audience.

It’s a case of complicity, really, getting us to go along with it and be invested in it by having the character be a person who would totally do this nonsensical thing and be unable to back down from it, and having him confide in us why he is doing it and make us go along with it. This is a lot of over-thinking for a sweet romance of two guys who are very different but who each need what each other has to offer, but I got thinking about why it works. Sam’s voice is great, I was invested in his worries before the concussion so that his solution made sort of sense. The fact that other characters who were in on it also thought it was bonkers helped. So, in conclusion, sweet romance, excellent other characters, contrived premise: Hall is a very good writer.

Pietro Bembo on Aetna: The Ascent of a Venetian Humanist — Gareth D. Williams (2017)
This is a non-fiction book about Pietro Bembo’s 1496 account of his ascent of Mount Etna in Sicily, including the text of Bembo’s book both in the original Latin and in translation. It analyses everything about Bembo’s life, his father’s life, his choice to make the book a dialogue between them, his classical allusions, the volcano, the printing of De Aetna—it’s a very thorough book with tons of detail and discussion. If you’re interested in Bembo, in the Renaissance relationship with nature on the one hand and antiquity on the other, or early modern books, then this is great. It’s well written, but very long.

Selected Poems 2009-2021 — Roz Kaveney (2022)
A collection of Roz Kaveney’s poetry, showing her immense range of subject matter. The thing that unites these poems is a powerful ability with metre and rhyme, combined with Roz’s intense emotional engagement with her subjects. Although Roz is a fantasy writer, these are not for the most part genre poems; they deal with history, people, transition, queer and trans issues, life and death. Some of the most moving are those addressed to recently dead friends.

Murder by the Book — Martin Edwards (2021)
Another collection of Golden Age short stories, these themed around books and writers, and almost all of them excellent. I thoroughly enjoyed reading even the slightest of them, and some of them were truly engaging. I didn’t find any new-to-me authors I wanted to read more of this time, sadly, but what was here was great.

The Fair Miss Fortune — D.E. Stevenson (1937)
I wanted to read this for ages after Claire of the Captive Reader blog said that it was about twins setting up a teashop, which means there is an entire subgenre of twins setting up teashops in the 1930s. (The other two are Ada Cambridge’s The Three Miss Kings and Elizabeth von Arnim’s Christopher and Columbus.) I was therefore disappointed that the teashop in this book remains an unaccomplished intention and never actually opens. This is one of those romance novels in which the setup provides all the obstacles. There are secretly two Miss Fortunes, they’re identical twins, so sometimes Jane isn’t as kind as other times because she’s actually Joan. All ends happily ever after, and though this is a very slight book it’s a pleasant enough read. Sometimes Stevenson is very good, and even at her shallowest her descriptions are sprightly and funny. So I wouldn’t start here, but I enjoyed it nevertheless.

Defiance — C.J. Cherryh (2023)
Volume 22 of the Foreigner series—talking about “don’t start here,” I think this would be completely incomprehensible if you did start here. This series is very strange. It starts off jerkily, which doesn’t do it any favours, and then it gets brilliant from books 2 to 6, and then it, weirdly, becomes a kind of soap opera set on an alien planet in which we are concerned with characters, most of them aliens—there’s one major human character, and some books have a handful of others. As so often with Cherryh, they are about being between cultures, between species, alone in a place where nobody is like you and home isn’t home if you go there. But what can I say about volume 22 except that I didn’t need a long recap at the beginning (even if it is on a train) and I no longer believe that the subplot with the Shadow Guild is actually resolved when it has seemed to be actually resolved too many times now. I’m just going to keep reading these for as long as Cherryh wants to keep writing them.

You Can’t Hurry Love — Portia MacIntosh (2017)
Sequel to Bad Bridesmaid. Sequels to romances are tricky, because the romance reader contract requires that the characters are happy ever after at the end, and if you undermine that it’s bad, and if they’re happy ever after, how do you have a plot? This is a story of Mia Valentine, who changed her life so she could be with her true love, but she did actually like her life and she misses it, and she does want to be with him forever but she doesn’t want to have a big fancy wedding…so essentially there are misunderstandings to do with her career and wedding, but they never really question each other’s love. It almost works, and it is funny.

Two Years Before the Mast — Richard Henry Dana Jr (1840) 
Re-read. Terrific memoir of a trip Dana took as a Harvard dropout on a sailing ship from Boston to California (then part of Mexico) around Cape Horn, as a common sailor. The details of the sailing of the ship and the working conditions, along with Dana’s own nineteenth-century point of view, are fascinating, and so is the account of the industry of California—hide curing—and all the detail of how he lives on the beach and gets picked up again by the ship, and how he’s worried about staying too long and not being able to get back to being anything but a sailor. There are also some very dramatic storms off Cape Horn. It’s also notable that when the Gold Rush happened a few years later this was the only book about California, so everyone read it, and his description of what a great location San Francisco would be for a city is one of the reasons it’s a city.

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The post Jo Walton’s Reading List: March 2024 appeared first on Reactor.

Movies & TV Star Trek: Discovery

Secrets, Sequels, and a Synth Named Fred — Star Trek: Discovery’s “Red Directive” & “Under the Twin Moons”

Reviewing the premiere episodes of Star Trek: Discovery’s fifth season — spoilers ahead!

By Keith R.A. DeCandido

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Published on April 4, 2024

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The start of the fifth season of Star Trek: Discovery is unique in many ways, but probably the biggest one is that it establishes that the same person will be in command of the U.S.S. Discovery for the second season in a row, which has never happened before. The hallmark of the inaugural show of the Paramount+ era of Trek has been a new captain every year: Lorca for season 1, Pike for season 2, Saru for season 3, and Burnham for season 4.

But Burnham’s still in charge in season 5. And that’s an indication that—for once—nothing has changed on Discovery. They’ve finally found a status quo, and it’s one that works.

So, of course, it’s the last season. Sigh.

There’s only one really significant change, and it doesn’t come to fruition until the end of the second of the two episodes that went live today: Saru is being promoted to the role of Federation Ambassador-at-Large, and so will no longer be Burnham’s Number One. This is a good move on several levels, as it never sat right with me that Saru took a subordinate position to Burnham on Discovery after doing such a good job as her captain in season 3. Not that Burnham didn’t also deserve the promotion, but Saru didn’t deserve a demotion, either. They made it work last year, mostly because Sonequa Martin-Green and Doug Jones make a really good team. But Saru is, bluntly, the best thing to come out of Discovery, and he deserves better.

And he’s getting it! Not only is he being promoted, but his relationship with T’Rina has deepened to the point that she hits him with a marriage proposal. Being Vulcan, she of course phrases the proposal in the most pedantic and bloodless manner possible, which Tara Rosling manages to make incredibly adorable.

Saru’s last mission comes from Kovich, a classified mission that’s a Red Directive. Not to be confused with other directives that are prime or omega, this one is not defined, but is obviously a shut-up-and-go-do-it-now-please mission that you go on and do not fuck around. (It’s Trek’s latest red thing. The original series had red alerts, redshirts, and the Red Hour, DS9 had Red Squad, the 2009 movie had red matter, and season 2 of this very show had the Red Angel.)

In this case, an eight-hundred-year-old Romulan ship has been found that has a Tan zhekran on it that needs to be retrieved. Established in Picard’s “The Impossible Box” as a Romulan puzzle box, this particular Tan zhekran has something very valuable and very classified on it. In fact, it’s so classified that even Vance doesn’t know the specifics.

Unfortunately, two ex-couriers named Mol and L’ak have gotten to the Romulan ship, and the Tan zhakren, first. Played by, respectively, Eve Harlow and Elias Toufexis, I’m honestly not sure what to make of these two yet. I’m getting a Bonnie-and-Clyde vibe from the two of them that’s kind of a mix of Spike and Drusilla from Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Pumpkin and Honey Bunny from Pulp Fiction, though as yet they’re nowhere near that level of interesting. (Their names are also interesting, as “moll” is a name given to a female companion to a criminal, and “L’ak” is similar to “lackey.” Makes you wonder if there’s a bad guy they’re working for…)

They take the Tan zhakren and some other stuff, and head out in their own ship, with Discovery and the U.S.S. Antares giving chase, a thrilling sequence that has Burnham in an EVA suit on the hull of L’ak and Mol’s ship, the Antares using a tractor beam, and a game of chicken among the participants. However, the ex-couriers get away, and do so in a manner that leaves dozens of warp trails behind, only one of which is the real one.

But Burnham knows this courier’s trick from her year as one between “That Hope is You” and “Far from Home,” and she puts in a call to the courier she knows best: Book.

Book is still doing his community service, helping out the worlds that were ravaged by the DMA last season. More to the point, this summoning is the first time Book and Burnham have spoken since the end of last season. Martin-Green and David Ajala continue to sparkle in their scenes together, but Book’s betrayal last season has twisted everything. The scenes are beautifully played and written, as Burnham and Book obviously still love each other deeply, but Burnham absolutely cannot trust Book anymore, and Book knows full well that he doesn’t deserve to be trusted, and it puts the pair of them in a weird place. That place remains weird, as Book stays on after the first episode, assigned by Vance his own self to be a consultant on the mission, since he knows how couriers think.

Book’s arrival signals the season story kicking in: chasing after the contents of the Tan zhekran. Mol and L’ak take the stuff they looted from the Romulan ship to a centuries-old Soong-style synth named Fred (which is fabulous). Fred has Data-like makeup, and his serial number is later established as starting with “AS” for Altan Soong, the cyberneticist son of Data’s creator, Noonien Soong, established in Picard’s “Et in Arcadia Ego, Part 1.”

Played with Spiner-esque curiosity-filled deadpan by J. Adam Brown, Fred is a collector of ancient things, and he’s thrilled at the twenty-fourth-century artifact. He’s also easily able to open the Tak zhekran, which contains a diary, written in Romulan. Being a synth, Fred is able to read the entire thing in half a second. He’s also not willing to pay a fair price—or, indeed, any price, and the negotiation turns into a fight, which ends with Fred and his security dead. (Why Fred doesn’t have the super-strength and speed seen in other synths like Data is left as an exercise for the viewer.)

Book figured out that Fred would be the fence in this little adventure, and so Discovery and Antares head there, but by the time they arrive, Fred’s dead, baby—Fred’s dead. Luckily, Fred is a synth, so they send the body up to Discovery, where between them, Stamets and Culber are able to extract his memory, including his speed-read of the diary. Which means they also have the text of the diary.

This is followed by another thrilling action piece, and it’s to the show’s credit that both action sequences in “Red Directive” are actually plot relevant. And character relevant, as in both sequences, we find out a lot about Antares Captain Rayner, played by new series regular Callum Keith Rennie, a Canadian actor who is, I believe, contractually obligated to appear in every show that films in Canada at least once. Rayner is a Starfleet captain of many years’ standing who is, in many ways, still acting like they’re in the middle of the Burn, when Starfleet was just trying to keep the tattered remains of the Federation together, unlike Burnham, who spent most of her life in the twenty-third-century version of the Federation.

That conflict comes to a head during the motorcycle chase through the desert at the climax of “Red Directive.” L’ak and Mol are heading to a cave system. The notion of phasering the caves to block off the entrance is floated, but there’s a 30% chance that it’ll cause an avalanche that will wipe out the city and kill thousands. Burnham rejects the plan, but Rayner thinks it’s worth the risk for a Red Directive mission and Antares fires on the caves. There’s no avalanche, and Rayner proudly declares, “70% for the win!”

But the problem is that they gave Mol and L’ak an idea. They do what bad guys have been doing in heroic fiction for ages: they cause an avalanche, meaning our heroes have to spend time saving lives, giving the bad guys the opportunity to escape.

That’s not the only consequence. The two ships are damaged when they both crash nose-first into the surface to break the avalanche and have to return to HQ for repairs. Rayner is the subject of an inquiry that includes Vance and Rillak (always good to see Chelah Horsdal as my favorite on-screen Federation President, whom I got to write a story for in Star Trek Explorer, cough cough). At first, he’s encouraged to retire, and he does lose his command, but Burnham convinces him to replace Saru as her first officer.

Before he can take over, Burnham and Saru have a final adventure together. Kovich has decided to read Burnham in on the full story. I said earlier that the season’s story is a chase, and that’s an appropriate way to refer to a season that is a sequel to TNG’s “The Chase.” The Romulan ship belonged to one of the background Romulan science officers in that episode, and he knows what the power source is of the Progenitors, the humanoid beings who apparently seeded the galaxy with humanoid life.

Now here’s where I have to confess that I really didn’t much like “The Chase,” as it was a giant wink at the viewer in desperate search of an interesting plot that it never found. I’ve got very little patience with taking the time to explain something that doesn’t need explaining, which is all “The Chase” was.

But since we do have the Progenitors (a term first heard from Kovich in “Red Directive”), it is also true that whatever they did to, in essence, create humanoid life is pretty powerful stuff, and is something that could be abused.

The diary leads them to a Promellian necropolis. (The Promellians were established as a long-extinct species in TNG’s “Booby Trap.”) This is a straight-up video-game adventure, as Burnham and Saru have to get through various security features and figure out puzzles and clues and things. And scripter Alan McElroy has a little fun, because you wonder if this is Saru’s swan song. I mean, he’s just accepted a marriage proposal, it’s his final mission, and he and Burnham have several conversations about the adventures they’ve had together, and you realize that Saru’s fulfilling every dead-meat cliché in the book. He’s the partner at the beginning of the cop buddy movie who’s one week from retirement and then gets killed to piss off the main character. We even find out he has a nifty nickname—coined by Reno and used by Book, he’s apparently referred to in his post-vahar’ai state as “Action Saru.” And it is the last season…

Luckily, McElroy is just toying with us. Saru not only survives, but proves his “Action Saru” chops by using his spines to blow up some of the security drones. And he’s returned to T’Rina in one piece, and with a new clue.

I’m liking this direction for the season. The stakes are high, but not a threat to the entirety of the galaxy as we know it. It’s a quest narrative of a type we’ve seen a thousand times before and twice at our weekly role-playing game, but we’ve seen it so often because, dammit, it works. More to the point, the threat isn’t so over-the-top insane with a high body count, as every other threat Discovery has thrown at us has been. It’s therefore a less exhausting storyline, which is all for the best.

The clue they find will send them to Trill, thus giving Adira a chance to be reunited with Gray.[end-mark]

The post Secrets, Sequels, and a Synth Named Fred — <i>Star Trek: Discovery</i>’s “Red Directive” & “Under the Twin Moons” appeared first on Reactor.

Book Recommendations Octavia Butler

Octavia Butler, Audre Lorde, and the Power of Pleasure

In three of her stranger works, Butler asks us to interrogate the nature of pleasure, and the relationships and connections made possible through desire.

By Logan Dreher

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Published on April 8, 2024

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As we’ve reached the year in which Octavia Butler’s Parable of the Sower begins, it’s become something of a cliché to comment on how prophetic the novel truly is. The Earthseed duology, which imagines a world ravaged by climate chaos and besieged by incipient fascism, is frightening prescient. It’s no wonder countless podcasts, think pieces, and social media posts have proclaimed, “Octavia was right!”

And don’t get me wrong, I love the Parable series. It certainly deserves its praise, as does Octavia Butler, whose visionary career paved the way for a new generation of Black SFF writers. But I also think the acclaim around the Parables sometimes eclipses Butler’s other work, which is just as fascinating, just as disturbing and challenging. Octavia Butler has more to tell us than what we can glean from Parable of the Sower.

I’ve been especially interested in revisiting three of her strangest works—her vampire novel Fledging; “Bloodchild,”a short story about a colony of humans living alongside an insectoid race of aliens; and the Xenogenesis trilogy, which explores human’s post-apocalypse relationship with a bioengineering race of extraterrestrials called the Oankali. Across these stories, I see a recurring fascination with the reality of our bodies, our needs and frailties, and the way our bodily desires inextricably link us to each other.

In each of these stories, humans are less powerful than their nonhuman counterparts, whether that’s the tentacled, pheromone-exuding Oankali in Xenogenesis or the three-meter long, centipede-like Tlic in “Bloodchild.” But for all of their physical superiority, the nonhuman characters are desperately reliant on their relationships with humans. In Xenogenesis, the Oankali can exude chemicals that drug humans with a thought and heal with a touch. They manipulate their own genetic makeup and easily heal their own bullet wounds. Yet they depend on their human relationships in order to live. Oankali adolescents go into metamorphosis where they are comatose—profoundly helpless—and rely on their human partners to care for them. In Imago, the final book in the trilogy, a young Oankali begins to physically dissolve, unable to survive because it does not have human companions to ground it in a stable form. As the narrator notes, “We called our need for contact with others and our need for mates hunger. One who could hunger could starve.”

And in Fledgling, the Inaaren’t your typical vampires who can feed on any convenient person. They instead form lifelong connections with human “symbionts” and hunger for physical intimacy just as they do for blood. This relationship is one of mutual symbiosis, as human symbionts live longer and healthier lives than typical humans. For both Ina and their symbionts, these relationships come with challenges; much of Fledgling is about navigating the tangled web of resentment and jealousy in these sprawling, polyamorous households as Shori, the novel’s vampiric protagonist, learns how to care for her symbionts and let them care for her.

There are similar themes in “Bloodchild.”In the story, the Tlic aliens rely on human hosts to carry their parasitic eggs. Tlic “grubs” born from human bodies are bigger, healthier, and more likely to live. It’s implied that the Tlic were sickly, perhaps even dying out, before humans crash-landed on their planet. The humans are restricted to a patrolled area called the “Preserve,” but the Tlic are dependent on humans for their own species’ survival; they regard humans with a “desperate eagerness.” “Bloodchild” references a past where humans were treated as little more than animals, but in the story’s present time Tlic are integrated into the families of their hosts and the position is one of honor. Humans are “necessities, status symbols, and an independent people.”

“Bloodchild” is sometimes interpreted as an allegory for slavery, an interpretation Butler flatly denies—“It isn’t,” she says in the story’s afterword. She describes it instead as “a love story between two very different beings”—between Gan, a teenage human boy, and T’Gatoi, the insectoid alien who will come to implant her eggs in his body by the story’s end. Butler also said she wanted to challenge herself to write a story where a man chooses to be impregnated “as an act of love.”

“Bloodchild” has a lot of body horror for a love story. Gan witnesses a Tlic birth gone wrong, a bloody and painful affair that seems to him like a form of torture as the ravenous grubs burst from a man’s flesh—Gan thinks, “it was worse than finding something dead, rotting.” There’s horror in Butler’s others stories, too. Shori, starved and gravely injured, kills and eats a man in one of the first scenes in Fledgling. And across the Xenogenesis trilogy humans struggle with their horror of the Oankali, their revulsion at something so alien, so different from our own bodies.

Despite their revulsion, despite the bloody horror of Tlic birth or the slimy Oankali tentacles, the human characters in these stories still chose to join with the alien, the nonhuman; to become their symbionts, to reach eagerly for those same tentacles, to be held still and impregnated with Tlic eggs. In “Bloodchild,” Gan chooses to be implanted out of obligation, but afterward, as he rests his naked skin against hers, he admits it was to also because he wanted to keep T’Gatoi for himself. In this choice I see Octavia Butler’s fascination with pleasure, its seduction, its irresistibility. She seems to be asking: what does pleasure do for us? What does it make us willing to give up?

The pursuit of pleasure is often treated as hedonistic or self-indulgent. As Audre Lorde says in her 1978 essay on the power of the erotic, “we have been raised to fear the yes within ourselves, our deepest cravings.” In Butler’s stories, characters follow their own pleasure, whether that’s the sensual bite of a vampire or the healing of the Oankali’s tentacles. But her characters aren’t punished for this pursuit. Pleasure is depicted as seductive, as addicting, but not shameful.

Instead, pleasure becomes a way of overcoming what Lorde calls the “threat of difference,” the means by which the human and nonhuman characters come to better understand each other. Pleasure is, as Lorde says, “a bridge between the sharers which can be the basis for understanding much of what is not shared between them.”

In the final book of the Xenogenesis series, the Oankali discover a group of humans who have resisted their influence. Hidden in the mountains, the human colony has persisted for generations to “preserve” the human race by refusing to birth constructs—the children born of both humans and Oankali. Generations of inbreeding has burdened the colony with congenital diseases that leave them in physical pain and increasingly disabled. Their young people are offered few other options than to marry and keep having babies; some of the residents are driven to suicide by the bleakness of their lives.

As the colony is seduced by Oankali, the residents’ desire for pleasure isn’t depicted as immoral or self-destructive. Pleasure is a guidepost, a way of moving the colony from a life of unnecessary suffering to one of healing, satisfaction, and connection. Once the residents experience the pleasure of being with the Oankali, it’s unimaginable that they could return to a life of such pain. This is the power of the erotic that Audre Lorde names: its ability to teach us the pleasure our bodies can experience, to demand of ourselves and the world the fullness of feeling we have learned we are capable of.

Fledgling, “Bloodchild,”and the Xenogenesis series aren’t without their violation or violence. There’s an aspect of coercion to all of these relationships; the Ina and Oankali have physically addictive qualities that make consent to their partnerships uncertain. The Oankali, especially, often manipulate and lie to their human counterparts as part of their seduction, and it’s eventually revealed that they will destroy the Earth through their habitation, leaving only an empty husk behind.

Despite Butler’s objections, you can read “Bloodchild”as a parable for slavery, or at the very least as a story of an alien race violently exploiting a captive colony of humans as meat for their parasitic children. And let’s not even get into the disturbing sexual politics of Fledgling, a book where a vampire in the body of a child seduces several adults into sexual relationships. To be sure, Butler explores violation alongside pleasure. But I think that’s intentional. Our own relationships are not without the complications of power, exploitation, or hierarchy. Pleasure is a bridge, and any connection has the potential for harm.

This is explicitly discussed in the climax of “Bloodchild.”After witnessing the gore of a Tlic birth Gan, sickened and terrified of his own fate, threatens his life with an illegal gun. Though T’Gatoi talks him down from any bloodshed, he convinces her to let him keep the gun despite the danger it poses to her safety. As Gan tells her, “If we’re not your animals, if these are adult things, accept the risk. There is a risk, Gatoi, in dealing with a partner.”

All of these stories explore how to deal with this risk, and with how to care for ourselves and each other across such immense difference. Though they are capable of physically overpowering them, the Ina, the Oankali, the Tlic all learn to give back to the humans they come to see as partners; to share in pleasure, to heal, to care for them. They learn to make concessions for the benefit of their relationships, to give their human partners autonomy knowing that autonomy comes with risk. Sometimes that leads to violence, as it does it in our world.

Like the characters in Butler’s books our bodies, our desires, entangle us in relationships of mutual dependence, whether those relationships are sexual, platonic, or familial. And if pleasure is as Butler imagines it—addicting, irresistible; if it is not frivolous but necessary and life-sustaining as Audre Lorde argues, if our pleasure depends on the pleasure of others, then it also a responsibility. We all hunger, and anyone who can hunger can starve. With these stories I see Octavia Butler asking us to interrogate what we owe to the partnerships that shape our lives and our future, what our obligations are to the people we rely on, the ones who care for us when we’re sick and who share our joys as their own.[end-mark]

The post Octavia Butler, Audre Lorde, and the Power of Pleasure appeared first on Reactor.

Book Recommendations

Five Science Fiction Stories About Involuntary Organ Donation

Back in the 1960s, there was certainly a trend for writing about organ procurement…

By James Davis Nicoll

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Published on April 9, 2024

Photo by Nhia Moua [via Unsplash]

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Photo by Nhia Moua [via Unsplash]

I was intrigued to see a recent announcement that a pay-for-plasma clinic will soon open in Cambridge, Ontario. For too long Ontario’s poorer citizens have hoarded life-giving blood that would be better used by major pharmaceutical companies. Now these folk will be able to explore the fine line between financial stability and medicinal exsanguination.

Indeed, the various ethical hang-ups standing in the way of a free-flowing blood/plasma economy are part of a more general social issue, which is the unjust distribution of body parts. Why should some teenager enjoy perfect skin, a pain-free back, and functional joints when persons of my age could make much better use of these body parts? Yet such are the politically correct times in which we live that simply proposing, never mind implementing, mandatory organ¹ donations is considered somehow controversial.

Science fiction can see past the squeamishness of short-term social fashions to the glorious world we might have if we were willing to apply technology in a socially responsible—which is to say, one that benefits the people in charge—manner. Consider these five classic tales.

“The Jigsaw Man” by Larry Niven (1967)

Advanced medical technology allows for large-scale organ transfer programs. Spiraling demand from the public for transplant organs is met by a responsive government; organs are harvested from prisoners who have run afoul of increasingly draconian laws.

Warren Lewis Knowles believes that the law under which he will be condemned and consigned to the organ banks is unjust. Legal reform is outside his resources but perhaps, if he does his utmost, Knowles can commit crimes worthy of dismemberment.

“The Jigsaw Man” is by no means the earliest organ bank story, but it is arguably one of the most famous, which is why I list it out of chronological order. Despite certain flaws in the premise², “Jigsaw” came in in second to Ellison’s “I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream” in the 1968 Hugo Awards. In addition to its organ bank fame, the story stands out in a different way: the government in this setting efficiently provides citizens exactly what they want, which is a phenomenon not exactly common in real life or science fiction.

The Reefs of Space by Frederik Pohl and Jack Williamson (1964)

The Plan of Man provides all the people of Earth with useful roles appropriate to their abilities. In the case of mathematician Steve Ryeland, that role is to serve as a living organ bank, to be harvested piece by piece until he dies. Luckily for Ryeland, the Plan of Man’s Planner has a particularly grandiose scheme in which Ryeland will play a central role. Ryeland’s life expectancy is still dismal, but exploring the reefs of space will be far more interesting than waiting for that final, lethal organ donation.

Reefs features an intriguing deep space ecology in no way inhibited by plausible science. The use of political prisoners as involuntary organ donors is much more plausible.

“A Planet Named Shayol” by Cordwainer Smith (1961)

Shayol provides the worlds of the galaxy with a convenient oubliette for political prisoners. There they play a vital role as unwilling organ donors. Better yet, this world allows for the regeneration of excised organs. The galaxy need never worry that the supply of parts will run short; the condemned will live in endless pain.

The administrators of Shayol manage a very difficult trick by story’s end. They manage to discover an application of Shayol’s peculiarities that is so outrageous as to offend the relentlessly pragmatic Lords of the Instrumentality. Given what the Lords are willing to turn a blind eye to, finding an offense that prompts an immediate response as soon as the Lords learn of it is rather remarkable.

“Beyond the Weeds” by Peter Tate (1966)

The crown declines to directly increase organ supply. Her Majesty’s government prefers to leave such matters to private agents such as Anton Hejar. Unhappy relatives of Hejar’s victims think turnabout is fair play. Thus, Hejar is given the opportunity to play a new role in the supply chain.

It seems a little odd that it’s the British author in this list who went for the private enterprise solution to organ supply, whereas American author Niven foresaw a carceral solution.

Star Well by Alexei Panshin (1968)

Remittance man Anthony Villiers extends his stay in the deep space hotel Star Well rather than admit that he cannot pay his bill. His hosts, hoteliers Godwin and Shirabi, are unaware of Villiers’ reduced circumstances and guess at another explanation: Villiers could be a covert investigator aware of their “thumb-running,” the illicit organ smuggling from which Star Well derives its income. The thumb-runners resolve that Villiers must die. This is only the first of a series of terrible decisions by Godwin and Shirabi.

Isn’t “thumb-running” more pleasing to the ear than Niven’s “organlegging”? But for various reasons, Panshin’s Villiers books never won the prominence of Niven’s Known Space works, allowing organlegging to win out over thumb-running. SF authors, this is within your power to change!

These are but a few of the involuntary organ donation stories with which SF authors have delighted, entertained, and inspired audiences. (Oddly enough, such stories haven’t inspired any real-world legal reforms, that I know of.) If I happen to have overlooked your favorite works, feel free to mention them in comments below.[end-mark]

1. Ontario students wishing to graduate are required to put in forty hours of voluntary community service. Requiring them to voluntarily donate various organs would be a simple extension of this practice. ︎
2. It doesn’t seem to occur to any of the citizens that having the death penalty for the most trivial of crimes could land them in the organ banks. An inability to do even the most rudimentary cost-benefit analysis is, of course, not limited to characters in SF stories. ︎

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Column Science Fiction Film Club

The Day the Earth Stood Still: Suspicion, Paranoia, and a Very Polite Alien Visitor in 1950s America

Released during the rise of McCarthyism, the film poses questions about how humans deal with fear and uncertainty that still feel startlingly relevant today.

By Kali Wallace

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Published on April 3, 2024

Image: 20th Century Fox

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Image: 20th Century Fox

The Day the Earth Stood Still (1951) Directed by Robert Wise. Starring Michael Rennie, Patricia Neal, Hugh Marlowe, Sam Jaffe, and Billy Gray. Screenplay by Edmund H. North, based on the short story “Farewell to the Master” by Harry Bates.

I had never seen this movie before I picked it for this film club. I know it’s a genre classic. I know it’s widely influential and has been referenced in all kinds of sci fi works. I had heard of it, of course, and vaguely knew the premise—alien comes to Earth, Cold War politics—but not much more than that. And I avoided researching it until after I had watched it. I wanted to see it before I delved into what people thought of it.

I’m glad it approached it that way, because: (a) I really enjoyed the movie for itself, because it’s great, and (b) subsequently delving into what people think about The Day the Earth Stood Still is so overwhelming it makes me feel like I’m back in graduate school. For 70+ years people have been writing editorials, reviews, articles, dissertations, and books about the film’s impact and meaning. There are multiple scholarly debates still occurring across both academic journals and fandom spaces: Is the movie anti-war and anti-atomic? Is the main character a Christ-like figure? What is it saying about the doctrine of mutually-assured destruction? Is the position of the visiting alien justifiable from the perspective of ethical philosophy?

All of this is interesting, but there is absolutely no way I can cover everything in this piece, nor do I really want to, not unless somebody is going to give me another PhD for it. So I’m going to focus on a few things that I find most interesting, and I encourage everybody else to share their own thoughts in the comments.

First, a bit about the context, because we are talking about a high-profile, major studio Hollywood movie released in 1951, and there is a hell of a lot of relevant context. A few years earlier, in 1947, the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) subpoenaed ten Hollywood producers, directors, and screenwriters to testify about suspected communist activities. They refused to answer any questions, were charged with contempt of Congress, and were subsequently fined and imprisoned. The heads of major studios, along with the Motion Picture Association of America and the Association of Motion Picture Producers, responded by declaring that they would not employ any of those ten men, nor anybody else linked to communist politics or any other vaguely-defined “subversive and disloyal elements.”

The statement they released on the matter, the Waldorf Declaration, is an odd piece of legal wriggling. There was not agreement among the studio heads about what to do, or even if they should do anything. Even at the hysteria-driven height of the so-called Red Scare, it was still, in fact, a violation of the First Amendment to fire somebody for having politics you don’t like, but the pressure to do exactly that was coming from the Congress. The studio heads decided that the financial risk of being sued outweighed the inevitable public backlash if they did nothing. (There are a million articles, books, interviews, and thinkpieces on this matter, but check out this Hollywood Reporter piece for a quick summary and timeline.)

The Waldorf Statement more or less became industry policy for the next few years, and the initial blacklist of ten people ballooned to more than 300, especially after Senator Joseph McCarthy began driving the widespread persecution that would come to bear his name. The impact on Hollywood was significant and very, very high profile. Just a few examples: Charlie Chaplin was denied re-entry to the United States in 1952 and subsequently cut ties with Hollywood; actor Edward G. Robinson, who was an outspoken anti-fascist as well as a civil rights supporter, was called to testify before the HUAC and basically forced to jump through political hoops to avoid being blacklisted; Dashiell Hammett, author of The Maltese Falcon and The Thin Man, which became beloved Hollywood movies, refused to cooperate with HUAC and was blacklisted in 1953. The list goes on and on.

Right in the middle of all this came The Day The Earth Stood Still, a major studio film that was conceived, written, and filmed as commentary on the social and political environment in which it was made. Producer Julian Blaustein set out to make a movie about the paranoia and fear that gripped the world in the post-World War II atomic era; he was specifically interested in promoting a strong United Nations and said as much during press for the film. He looked around for a science fiction story that could be used as a basis for such a film and found Harry Bates’ short story “Farewell to the Master,” published in Astounding Science Fiction in 1940. Screenwriter Edmund North took a great many liberties with the original story, as is the way of such things, and the result is the script that director Robert Wise would turn into The Day the Earth Stood Still. Robert Wise would go on to become one of Hollywood’s absolute legends, as he would later direct West Side Story, The Sound of Music, The Haunting, The Andromeda Stain, Star Trek: The Motion Picture and many, many other films. In 1951 he wasn’t a legend yet, but he was well on his way there; he had been the editor on Orson Welles’s Citizen Kane (1941) and The Magnificent Ambersons (1942) before he began directing his own films.

The Day the Earth Stood Still opens with a montage of people around the world reacting to the appearance of an unidentified craft soaring through Earth’s atmosphere. The craft soon reveals itself to be a sleek flying saucer. Articles about the film frequently claim that set designers Thomas Little and Claude Carpenter designed the spaceship with the help of architect Frank Lloyd Wright (for example: this article shared by the Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation), but it’s just as frequently claimed that this is an urban legend, so I have no idea if it’s true. If there are any Frank Lloyd Wright biographers hanging around, please let us know.

Whoever designed it, the spacecraft is striking and elegant as it settles into a landing spot on Earth: right smack in the middle of the National Mall in Washington D.C.. The ship opens and a humanoid alien emerges to say, “We have come to visit in peace and with goodwill,” and asks to meet with the leaders of Earth. A nervous soldier responds by shooting him, which is one of the most American things that has ever been committed to film. A large robot (played by Lock Martin) from the ship vaporizes all of the soldiers’ weapons, but the injured alien stops him before he can do more damage.

The alien is taken to the hospital, where he introduces himself as Klaatu and asks to speak to representatives of all the world’s governments. Klaatu (Michael Rennie) looks and acts human, which baffles the doctors, but it is necessary for the story the film is telling. Through the 1930s and ’40s, there was significant overlap in American cinema between sci fi films and horror films. There were popular space-based adventures like Flash Gordon and Buck Rogers, but for the most part American sci fi movies didn’t really begin to distinguish themselves from juvenile serials or monster movies until the ’50s. Another big sci fi release of 1951 was The Thing From Another World. The Thing was more representative of what Hollywood was doing with extraterrestrials at the time: alien visitors to Earth were often monsters and invaders, existing to be fought and feared. There weren’t characters or people. They weren’t us.

Klaatu, a polite, well-spoken alien who can easily pass as human, was a novelty. Wise initially wanted Claude Rains in the role of Klaatu, but he would later say it was a good thing Rains had been unavailable, because Michael Rennie turned out to be such a great alternative. And he was right, because Michael Rennie is fantastic as Klaatu. He’s friendly and warm, but there is a steely solemnity just beneath the surface that reveals the seriousness of his mission. When Klaatu escapes from the hospital, he tries to learn more about Earth and its people by walking around Washington, D.C., staying at a boarding house, spending a day with a child—all very human and ordinary things.

The mundanity of Klaatu’s actions are also key to the story the film is telling. There are very few special effects in The Day the Earth Stood Still; the goal of the production from the start was to give the movie a very realistic, almost documentary-style look. When we see the inside of Klaatu’s ship, it’s very minimalist in design and nothing is explained; when the robot Gort vaporizes human weapons all the audience sees is a blinding flash of white light. The stunning musical score by Bernard Hermann underscores this approach, as it is a compelling mix of recognizably orchestral and notably alien, with two theremins among the array of unusual instruments chosen to create a range of sounds. This was before stereophonic sound was standard in cinema—movies weren’t “presented in stereo!” just yet—and Hermann employed a lot of very clever techniques in both composing and recording to achieve the otherworldly sounds. Hermann is a genuine legend in Hollywood music history; he was wrote the memorable scores of many Alfred Hitchcock movies, several Ray Harryhausen fantasy epics, and many, many other movies you have probably seen. Check out a live performance of the theme of The Day the Earth Stood Still at an international theremin festival in 2018. Seventy years later, and this score is still so eerie, haunting, and beautiful.

The movie has a very clear goal in making these choices: the biology of the alien visitor, the nature of the world he came from, the details of his advanced technology, none of that is what we should be focusing on. What we should be focusing on is ourselves.

Klaatu’s time amongst the people of Earth explores a range of reactions. Presidential representative Mr. Harley (Frank Conroy) is sympathetic to Klaatu’s request to address the world’s leaders but unwilling to explore ways of helping; Mrs. Barley (Frances Bavier) at the boardinghouse thinks there is no extraterrestrial, only a Soviet agent, a conviction she states with confidence while sitting across the breakfast table from the actual alien; Helen Benson (Patricia Neal) thinks about how Earth must appear to an alien visitor who was attacked moments after greeting humans for the first time; her boyfriend Tom (Hugh Marlowe) only cares about alien visitation if it impacts his own life; Helen’s son Bobby (Billy Gray) is curious and excited more than scared. The various military men instantly see a threat to be eliminated, the news reporter is only interested in interviews that will support fear-mongering headlines, but for the most part people keep going about their lives as the tension and paranoia rise. We get glimpses of people around the world that are clearly meant to imply reactions are the same everywhere, including in the Soviet Union.

While tooling around Washington with young Bobby, Klaatu comes to the conclusion that politicians won’t help him deliver the message he needs to deliver, so he turns to scientists. He does this by asking Bobby to identify the smartest man around, a question that really bears no thinking about in a modern context (I do not want to consider what the range of answers would be), but makes a bit more sense in the context of Professor Barnhardt (Sam Jaffe) being an obvious analogue to Albert Einstein, who was hugely popular with the general public at the time. Barnhardt agrees to summon scientists, philosophers, and all manner of thinkers to the city so they can all hear what Klaatu has to say.

What’s most curious about the film’s range of character reactions to alien contact is, perhaps, how very familiar they are to anybody who has watched a movie in the past 70+ years. From E.T.: The Extraterrestrial to Independence Day to The Avengers, the widespread paranoia, the childlike naivete, the military aggression, the scientific curiosity, the selfish disinterest, the histrionic press coverage are all so common they are often compressed into a montage. But here the reactions of the people of Earth aren’t a prelude or epilogue to the story, or an element that must be dispatched with before the action can start. Those reactions are the entire story.

Nothing in The Day the Earth Stood Still is actually about aliens. We learn almost nothing about Klaatu’s home or any other civilizations out there. It’s all about humans, about how we see ourselves, about what we do when we meet somebody a little different, about how we deal with fear and uncertainty.

Because those aspects of the film are so familiar, even comfortable, in the genre of sci fi, I am struck by how strongly I reacted to the ending. At the very end, Klaatu finally has a chance to address thinkers from all over the world. He tells them that because Earth has developed rockets and nuclear weaponry, other civilizations on other planets now view us as a threat. He has come to deliver a warning: change our violent ways, or be destroyed. He explains that his own civilization has achieved peace by outsourcing the enforcement of this moral and ethical dictum to a force of robot police, including his companion Gort, who have the absolute and unretractable mission to destroy any planet that is not sufficiently peaceful.

Now, look, I am an American living in the year 2024. The situation Klaatu describes as peaceful and ideal is, to me, the one of the most horrifying scenarios imaginable. I hate every single thing about it. We can’t even trust cops with handguns to make good choices; I’m sure as fuck not eager to trust a bunch of cops who never have to justify themselves with the power to destroy an entire planet.

But, setting aside my own visceral full-body shudder, I am fascinated by two things about this film’s ending.

The first is that I’m not sure how audiences in 1951 were expected to react to Klaatu’s ultimatum, because reactions were not at all uniform. Within the film itself, we don’t really get a good sense of how the gathered scientists and thinkers react to Klaatu’s message, only that they are taking it seriously. (Any crowd of real scientists would immediately begin arguing, but maybe they wait until Klaatu and Gort have noped out.) The film ends before we get a look at how humanity reacts—which is, of course, the entire point. There are several troubling assumptions behind Klaatu’s ultimatum: that everybody will define terms like threat and violence and freedom in the same way; that a serious enough and clear enough threat will unite the world; that it is possible to create a universal ethical standard that can be enforced without exception; that outsourcing our ethical choices beyond a certain level of significance to external actors is better than making those choices ourselves.

I don’t know that the movie is advocating acceptance of any or all of those assumptions. It is promoting international cooperation as a much better choice than mutually-assured destruction, but there is still skepticism about enforcing peace by means of violence. But, as I have already mentioned, people have been arguing about this for more than 70 years, and will probably be arguing about it for 70 more.

I’ll let the philosophers carry on and move on to the second thing that fascinates me, which is less about what the film itself is saying and more about where it fits into the history of science fiction, because most of the sci fi genre seems to be with me in experiencing that full-body shudder of revulsion. The Day the Earth Stood Still was asking if humankind could or would abandon its violent ways when forced to by an objective, unstoppable external force—and we’ve gotten a lot of answers from other stories over the years. Consider Colossus: The Forbin Project (1970), The Terminator (1984), and Robocop (1987), to name just a few films in which humans try to outsource their warfare and policing to machines and it does not, alas, result in peace and harmony for all mankind.

The Day the Earth Stood Still is, like all films, a product of its time and place, but in this way it seems to be a movie that could only have come from that particular time and place. Because the film ends before we learn what humans will decide, there is very much a sense of this being a story that stands on a precipice, one that is looking around at the world in the aftermath of WWII, in an environment of intense fear and paranoia that was actively harming the lives and careers of all kinds of people, and asking, “Now what do we do?”

What do you think about The Day the Earth Stood Still? How do you interpret the promise/threat of Gort’s robot police force and the politics of sci fi during the atomic era? I haven’t watched the 2008 remake with Keanu Reeves, and I’m curious how the story was changed for a different era. Feel free to chime in with your thoughts on that or anything else about this film in comments!

Next week: We’re bringing some different alien visitors down to Earth in The Mysterians (1957), one of the many epic collaborations between director Ishirō Honda and special effects master Eiji Tsuburaya. Watch it on Criterion and FlixFling, and it’s worth checking YouTube, the Internet Archive, and other upload sites. Some of the uploaded versions I’ve found are the English-language dub and some are of very sketchy quality, but poke around a little to find one that works for you.[end-mark]

The post <i>The Day the Earth Stood Still</i>: Suspicion, Paranoia, and a Very Polite Alien Visitor in 1950s America appeared first on Reactor.

Movies & TV Babylon 5 Rewatch

Babylon 5 Rewatch: “Midnight on the Firing Line”

The Centauri agricultural colony on Ragesh III is the victim of a surprise attack!

By Keith R.A. DeCandido

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Published on April 1, 2024

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“Midnight on the Firing Line”
Written by J. Michael Straczynski
Directed by Richard Compton
Season 1, Episode 1
Production episode 103
Original air date: January 26, 1994

It was the dawn of the third age… The Centauri agricultural colony on Ragesh III is the victim of a surprise attack, with the identity of the attackers left a mystery to the viewers.

On B5, new first officer Lt. Commander Susan Ivanova is informed of one of Sinclair’s eccentricities by Garibaldi, in this case that he spends some time every day in the observation dome with his link turned off. Ivanova goes to observation to inform him of the attack on Ragesh.

In the casino, Mollari tries to inveigle Garibaldi for a favor, but is interrupted by his new aide—also his entire staff—Vir Cotto, who informs him of the Ragesh attack. Mollari calls for an immediate emergency session of the council; he also receives apologetic condolences from Delenn and G’Kar, though Mollari is suspicious of the latter, despite his insistence on being ignorant of what has happened.

Ships in the area have been attacked by raiders. Garibaldi and one of his people take a couple of Starfuries out to investigate the latest attack.

New telepath Talia Winters reports in to Ivanova, who brushes her off.

Security footage comes in from Ragesh, revealing that the attacking ships are Narn, and they’re now occupying Ragesh. Mollari confronts G’Kar, and they almost come to blows. However, Mollari bumped into Winters en route to confronting G’Kar, and she was able to sense his murderous rage, so she warned security, who separate the ambassadors before they can kill each other. Later, in the ambassador’s quarters, Mollari apologizes to Sinclair, while the latter says that he’s agreed to call the emergency council session he wanted. However, Mollari has more skin in the game, as it were: his nephew Carn, is on Ragesh. Mollari pulled some strings to put him in charge of the agricultural colony in lieu of military service. He swears that if Carn dies, he will stop at nothing to go to war with the Narn.

Sinclair invites Kosh to attend the meeting, and he agrees to do so, but makes no commitment as to how he will behave.

Vir informs Mollari that the Centauri government has decided that there will be no response. Ragesh is too distant and too unimportant a part of the Republic to be worth dedicating the resources necessary to retake it. Mollari is livid and instructs Vir not to tell anyone what the government decided. He will try to talk the council into taking action against the Narn, and hope that the council’s action will embarrass his government into taking some as well.

Winters asks Garibaldi why Ivanova is being so standoffish. Garibaldi suggests meeting up with Ivanova at the bar when she’s off duty, and she might be more approachable. He also invites her to his quarters to share his “second favorite thing,” which sounds incredibly creepy.

G’Kar meets with Sinclair and making it clear that the Narn are out for Centauri blood, hoping to avenge their years of being subjugated by them. G’Kar also reminds Sinclair that the Narn sold weapons to Earth during their war with the Minbari, but Sinclair counters that the Narns will sell to anyone who’ll buy. The commander also is less than impressed with the Narns’ sneak attack on a civilian target.

Sinclair is instructed by a senator to abstain from the vote. There’s a presidential election about to happen, and Earth can’t afford to act as the galaxy’s police—at least not until after the election.

Garibaldi has turned up a connection among all the ships that were raided: they all bought their transport routes from the same company—which, it seems, has a leak. Sinclair decides to lead the Starfury contingent to protect what they believe to be the next target, leaving Ivanova to run the council meeting. Sinclair also tells her that he couldn’t find her to tell her the instructions from Earth, ahem ahem, so she’ll just have to vote yes to sanctions against the Narn…

In the council meeting, G’Kar reveals two things that kneecap Mollari’s plan. One is that he knows full well that the Centauri government’s official response is to do nothing. How can he ask the council to take an action his own government won’t take?

The second is the revelation that Ragesh was a Narn colony which was then taken from them by the Centauri when they conquered the Narn. The attack was simply taking back their world, and as “evidence” he provides a recording made by Mollari’s nephew Carn saying that they welcome their new Narn overlords and everything’s hunky dory and pay no attention to that gun to my head.

G’Kar moves that the motion to sanction Narn be dismissed, and it passes.

Sinclair and the Starfuries (totally the name of my next band) drive off the raiders, but doesn’t chase them, instead checking an asteroid field in the opposite direction, where he finds the command-and-control for the raiders.

There’s a Narn on that C&C base—as Sinclair said, the Narn will sell weapons to anyone. But they also leave someone behind to make sure they know how to use the weapons properly. That Narn also has data crystals that prove that—Carn’s testimony to the contrary—the attack on Ragesh was wholly unprovoked. Sinclair gives G’Kar an ultimatum: pull out of Ragesh, or he will show this evidence to the council. G’Kar chooses door #1.

Winters meets Ivanova in the bar, and the latter explains that her mother was a low-level telepath who refused to join Psi Corps. So she took the option of suppressing her telepathy with drugs. Those drugs changed her forever, and eventually drove her to suicide. So Ivanova is never likely to look kindly upon any member of the Corps.

Garibaldi has convinced Delenn to join him for his second favorite thing: a viewing of Duck Dodgers in the 24½th Century, complete with popcorn. It’s not clear what Delenn is more baffled by, the cartoon or the popcorn…

The episode ends with the announcement that President Luis Santiago has been reelected.

Nothing’s the same anymore. Sinclair is a legacy, as his family have served in the military going back to the Battle of Britain. His grandfather, also in EarthForce, advised his grandson to trust what you see over propaganda. Because of that, early on before it’s revealed who’s behind the attack on Ragesh, Sinclair believes firmly that the Minbari weren’t responsible, because what he saw during the Earth-Minbari War showed him that the Minbari would never engage in a surprise attack on a helpless target.

Ivanova is God. Ivanova says she’s voting for Marie Crane for Earth President over the incumbent Santiago because the latter has a weak chin and she doesn’t trust someone with a weak chin.

The household god of frustration. Garibaldi is, it turns out, a Daffy Duck fan. Despite this, he never once tells Mollari that he’s despicable…

In the glorious days of the Centauri Republic… Earth’s first alien contact was with the Centauri Republic. The Centauri made a lot of wild claims to what they perceived as gullible humans, including that humanity was an offshoot of the Centauri. (When Garibaldi reminds Mollari of this, Mollari dismisses it as a clerical error.)

Though it take a thousand years, we will be free. The Narn obviously targeted Ragesh to see how the Centauri would react. It’s a gambit designed to see if war is feasible. That the Centauri declined to respond likely meant it was a successful one, even though they had to give up Ragesh.

The Corps is mother, the Corps is father. Any humans who are discovered to be telepaths are given three choices: join the Psi Corps, go to prison, or have your telepathy tamped down by drugs.

The Shadowy Vorlons. Sinclair visits Kosh when he’s out of his encounter suit, but he’s hiding behind a screen, though something is glowing back there. Kosh also seems to teleport into his encounter suit…

Looking ahead. Mollari tells Sinclair that Centauri sometimes dream of the moment of their death. In Mollari’s case, it’ll be being strangled by G’Kar while he strangles G’Kar. He had the dream when he was young, and was gobsmacked when he first met G’Kar and recognized him from his prophetic dream. This event Mollari dreamt will be seen down the line, more than once…

Welcome aboard. Paul Hampton is back from “The Gathering” for his second and final appearance as the senator. Peter Trencher plays Carn.

Trivial matters. With Tamlyn Tomita, Johnny Sekka, and Patricia Tallman declining to return after “The Gathering,” we meet two of their replacements: Claudia Christian as the new first officer and Andrea Thompson as the new Psi Corps telepath. In addition, this episode marks the first appearance of Stephen Furst as Vir.

Richard Biggs, Bill Mumy, and Caitlin Brown are all listed in the opening credits as playing, respectively, Dr. Stephen Franklin, Lennier, and Na’Toth, but they do not appear and the episode gives no indication who they are.

Both Delenn and G’Kar have new makeup/facial prosthetics. In Delenn’s case, there’s less of it, as they’re no longer trying to make her look more masculine (or at least more androgynous), and just in general, she looks more “traditionally” feminine. G’Kar’s has simply been refined a bit, one hopes in a way that made it easier for Andreas Katsulas in the makeup chair…

This episode has the first reference to spoo, a meat dish popular among the Centauri and Narn (and also “oops” spelled backwards). J. Michael Straczynski also had a food called spoo in an episode of She-Ra: Princess of Power that he wrote.

The echoes of all of our conversations.

The name of the place is Babylon 5. “I’m in the middle of fifteen things, all of them annoying.” There are some ways in which this feels like a do-over of “The Gathering.” You’ve got character introductions (in this case to Ivanova, Vir, and Winters), you’ve got Garibaldi investigating things, you’ve got the senator telling Sinclair to do something he doesn’t want to do, you’ve got G’Kar and the Narn being the bad guys and plotting evil things of evil, you’ve got Sinclair bopping off on his own and leaving his first officer in charge of a council meeting, you’ve got a council meeting where, once again, G’Kar doesn’t apparently have a seat, instead leaving poor Andreas Katsulas to wander around during it.

And you’ve got epic rants from Mollari, though the Centauri gets much more focus here than he did in the pilot, which is all to the good given that Peter Jurasik was the best thing about the prior episode.

The Centauri/Narn conflict is one of the bedrocks of B5, and it is very much on display here. While G’Kar is still being written as a one-note mustache-twirling villain, Katsulas imbues him with a palpable sense of outrage and fury. He’s matched by Jurasik, whose anger both at the Narn for their surprise attack on a civilian target that includes his nephew and at his government for their spineless response drives the episode.

Stephen Furst’s Vir is another character like G’Kar who will improve as the series goes on, but his introduction, alas, creates very little impression beyond “oh look, it’s Flounder from Animal House with worse hair and sharper teeth!” (The Centauri had massive incisors initially, though that makeup choice was dropped after the first season or so, probably as a favor to the actors.)

By contrast, Claudia Christian creates an instant, excellent impression as Ivanova with her cynicism, her sarcasm, her fatalism, and her bluntness. Though she also has a tendency to speak without contractions in this first appearance which comes across as mannered, and which will also be dropped before long.

As for Winters, there’s nothing to really distinguish Andrea Thompson from Patricia Tallman’s Alexander beyond hair color, at least so far.

This is a stronger opening to the series than “The Gathering” was by far, setting up one of the show’s core conflicts as well as establishing some of the character dynamics. And Garibaldi is, at least, portrayed as competent in this one, actually solving the case and not faffing about the way he was last time, plus we get his Daffy Duck fandom, which is delightful.

Next week: “Soul Hunter.”[end-mark]

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News Red vs. Blue

Halo Parody Series Red vs. Blue to End after 21 Years with New Feature Release

Who will … win? Can anyone win this?

By Vanessa Armstrong

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Published on March 28, 2024

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After twenty-one years, the Rooster Teeth Halo parody Red vs. Blue is officially coming to an end. In a little over a month, the final installment, an eighty-seven-minute feature titled Red vs. Blue: Restoration, will become available for digital purchase and promises to give an ending to the series that started before YouTube was even a thing.

Red vs. Blue takes place in the Halo universe and centers on two teams of soldiers—a Red team and a Blue team—who are in perpetual battle with each other. Their skirmishes under the questionable leadership of Church and Sarge are tinted with comedic, often absurd, moments.

Here’s the nondescriptive synopsis for Restoration:

Warner Bros. Discovery officially shut Rooster Teeth down earlier this month, so this installment—four years since the last one in the series—will likely be the last project from the studio.

Rooster Teeth co-founder Burnie Burns came back to pen the script for Red vs. Blue: Restoration, with Matt Hullum directing the feature.

“I’m thrilled to return for Red vs. Blue: Restoration and to conclude this incredible twenty-one-year journey with our longtime fans,” Burns said in a statement to Variety.

“Red vs. Blue has been a cornerstone of Rooster Teeth’s legacy,” added Hullum. “We’re immensely proud of what we’ve accomplished together.”

Red vs. Blue: Restoration is being distributed by Warner Bros. Discovery Home Entertainment and will be available for purchase on digital, with a price tag of $14.99, starting on May 7, 2024. It will be available to rent on digital for $4.99 starting May 21.

Check out the teaser trailer below. [end-mark]

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Column Close Reads

The Artistic Bravery of Jonathan Glazer’s Under the Skin

What are things we don’t want to look at, but should?

By Leah Schnelbach

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Published on March 28, 2024

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Welcome to Close Reads! Leah Schnelbach and guest authors will dig into the tiny, weird moments of pop culture—from books to theme songs to viral internet hits—that have burrowed into our minds, found rent-stabilized apartments, started community gardens, and refused to be forced out by corporate interests. This time out, we take a trip to a rocky beach to talk about a haunting scene from Jonathan Glazer’s film adaptation of Under the Skin.

I’m not a brave person, but I am trying to get better at being brave on the page. What are things I don’t want to look at, but should? How can I get at truth in my fiction? How can I write criticism that people find useful?

When I was trying to think of artistic bravery, my mind washed up on the shores of Jonathan Glazer. Specifically, what I think of as “the beach scene” in Under the Skin.

Under the Skin is the rare example of me liking a movie better than the book—mostly because I think the movie is its own entity. The book (by Michel Faber) is quite good, a dark sociological look at humans and the environment (it actually reminds me, weirdly, of Mary Doria Russell’s The Sparrow) that spends most of its time in the mind of an alien hunting human prey.

But Glazer’s adaptation of the book is a miracle. The way he takes the book’s themes and runs into a direction that uses the strengths of film, color design, sound design, showing us a story rather than telling us a damn thing. When I watched it I felt like I was seeing something new.

And the beach scene to me is the best example of what it does well.

The scene opens with something innocuous, even nice. A dog is swimming in an inlet off Scottish coast. The unnamed alien, whom we’ve already seen prey on several men, watches a man swim a little further down the beach. In a cut back to the other end of the beach, we see a woman standing right at the shore, waving to a man and a baby, her back to the dog. Then the camera’s back with the alien, hanging a few feet behind her as the swimming man comes in and walks up the shore.

She begins what we know is her usual routine: asking him questions that will, potentially, get him to explain something to her—the aliens have figured out that it’s an easy way to get a man to open up—interspersed with questions that seem innocent and pleasant but are actually her way of learning if anyone will miss him if he disappears. He’s wary, but does tell her he’s travelling, alone, from the Czech Republic. As she’s about to press further, he looks past the alien and abruptly sprints off down the beach. The alien looks after him, her face reverting to the blankness she holds when she isn’t flirting for work.

The woman we saw before is swimming out past the breakers to save the dog, who’s been caught in a tide. She’s fully clothed, even leaving her heavy jacket on. The man (presumably her partner) leaves the baby to chase after her, and the Czech man dives in after both of them. The camera stays at its remove. We watch the dog go under, then the woman, as the man desperately takes on wave after wave. The Czech man gets to him after he goes under once and hauls him back to shore, but he’s no sooner let go than the man plunges in again. He goes under as the Czech man sprawls on the beach, too exhausted even to crawl out of reach of the waves.

The couple’s child sits alone on the rocks and screams.

The alien walks down the beach, inexorable. She lets waves break over her legs and boots and shows no sign of cold. She stands over the Czech man. Then she sorts through the stones for a moment until she finds one that fits easily in her fist, and bashes the Czech man in the back of his skull. Just once, just enough to knock him out. She drags him back toward her waiting van.

She never looks at the baby.

Just this could have been enough. Instead Glazer shows us the alien driving the man back to her house, the man still slumped over and unconscious in the passenger seat. He shows us the silent man, who appears to be the alien’s handler also in human disguise, back at the beach in the dark, gathering up the Czech man’s belongings so as to leave no trace of him. Again, this could have been enough. Instead, the camera follows the man down the beach as he retrieves the Czech’s towel.

The baby is still there. Still screaming. The man takes no notice of it and leaves the way he came. But the camera doesn’t follow him, instead it gives us one of the only closeups of the sequence, sitting squat in front of the baby, watching it sob, try to stand, fall back down. The camera is impassive. We know that no one knows it’s here. No one will hear it over the waves.

A few scenes later, we watch the alien as she hears a different child crying, in a car next to hers in traffic. In another scene, later still, she listens to a news bulletin that says the man’s body has been found on the shore, but that his wife and their child are still missing.

Did someone else take the child? Was it taken by the sea when the tide came further in? Is it still crawling down the beach alone? We don’t know. We never know.

Why did this come to me when I was rifling through moments of artistic bravery like stones on a beach? In some ways it’s the best moment in a very good movie, but it’s also doing something I hate. I hate child endangerment in fiction, and I hate animal deaths. They’re both cheap plays for emotion, easy screws to turn if you want your reader or audience to feel something.

So why does this work so well?

Part of it’s the camera placement. The camera neutrally records everything from a slight distance. It’s not a totally zoomed out God’s Eye shot that would elbow us in the ribs with the idea that some Unseen Other is watching tragedy unfold. It’s not fully the alien’s POV, because her actions are also recorded. It’s not zooming in on people faces. We’re never in the water with the dog or the people as they drown.

The humans act in recognizable, though slightly heroic ways, the woman going to rescue her dog with no thought for her own safety until it’s far too late, the husband diving in after her even though he can see how bad the tide is now. The Czech man going after both of them, despite already being worn out from a swim in these cold choppy waters. There too—the Czech charges after the family. He’s focused entirely on what he can do, which is get the husband, the closest one, the one who hasn’t been caught between tides or swept into a rock. The husband blindly going back in without even a backwards glance at the man who saved him, or the baby.

The camera doesn’t take on the alien’s point of view as she walks up the beach to the Czech man. It stays back and lets us see that she’s simply pursuing prey. She’s not angry—this is just part of the hunt. And then my favorite moment of all: the rock selection. As the baby sits a few feet away, crying, the alien matter-of-factly chooses a rock to hit the Czech man. She’s completely focused on finding a good rock. She’s not in a hurry, she’s not worried about being caught, or the man escaping.

So many other ways it could go: the Czech man could yell to the alien for help. The wife could scream at the husband to go back to their child. The husband could look back at the kid instead of diving for his wife. He could take a swing at the Czech man rather than saving all of his panic and energy for the second attempt in the water. The husband could make the second attempt while the wife was still above water. The alien could use a rock to silence the child, annoyed by its screaming. She could hit the Czech inexpertly the first time, and have to hit him repeatedly to incapacitate him. She could reveal extreme strength (as happens in the novel) and be able to lift the man and carry him easily. The baby could try to walk to her, could hold its arms up to be lifted.

But none of that happens. Nothing is told, nothing is indicated, nothing is underlined or highlighted or italicized. No tip into melodrama or pathos or torture porn. There is only what we see: the tide flowing in and out. The man who abandons the child to go after the woman—twice. The other man who goes in after them, despite knowing what he’s getting into. Who saves the person closest to him, and then is too exhausted to see that his rescue has been undone. The baby screaming with no awareness of what’s happening, only that it’s alone suddenly. The alien watching all of them, waiting to see what happens, finishing her assignment with no fuss or extraneous violence.

A different movie might show us the alien going back for the baby, or calling the police about it. A different movie might show us an alien who listens thoughtfully to the broadcast. Instead there isn’t even the barest hint of emotion. Even when she hears the other baby crying in a later scene, her expression only hints at curiosity—not empathy or pity. The beach scene is only the first tiny step toward empathy with humanity as she watches a succession of people try to help each other and fail. There’s still another half hour to go before she frees one of her captives, and another ten minutes after that before she attempts human food. It isn’t that she hates us or fears us or that we disgust her—we are precisely as interesting as the ant she observes in the opening scene, the fly she watches later, the dog swimming out into the waves.

The water flows, the waves crash, the cliffs loom over the tragedy. Nature doesn’t care that these people and their dog are dying. It doesn’t care about the terrified baby. It doesn’t care that an alien has come to Earth and is standing by and watching it all. Nature is implacable, unreasonable, unswayable. The sun goes on shining, the water goes on flowing.

Glazer keeps his camera back and observes. He neither holds our hands (the camera is going to sit right there and watch the baby cry, and there’s nothing we can do about that except close our eyes and stick our fingers in our ears), nor pats our heads (the radio bulletin doesn’t give us the happy news that the baby was saved, at least). By staying impassive and allowing cause and effect to play out, he creates a gap between us and the movie. We can fill that gap with emotions, empathy, sorrow, anger, a sense of futility—or we can balk and reject the film. It’s an act of artistic bravery to trust the audience to pay attention and come all the way to him, rather than meeting us halfway.[end-mark]

The post The Artistic Bravery of Jonathan Glazer’s <em>Under the Skin</em> appeared first on Reactor.

Book Recommendations new releases

All the New Science Fiction Books Arriving in April!

Visit a divided colony ship, a war-torn galaxy, a “perfect” town, and more in this month’s new sci-fi titles

By Reactor

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Published on April 2, 2024

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Here’s the full list of the science fiction titles heading your way in April!

Keep track of all the new SFF releases here. All title summaries are taken and/or summarized from copy provided by the publisher. Release dates are subject to change.

April 2

Four Minutes — Brian Andrews & Jeffrey Wilson (Blackstone)
Special Operations Chief Tyler Brooks might not know quantum mechanics, or have an eidetic memory, but he is the very best in the world at one thing: leading covert ops. When an unpredictable enemy causes the catastrophic loss of his entire SEAL team, Brooks is recruited by Pat Moody to lead a new elite squad, Task Force Omega. Moody’s promise—access to mind-bending tech that grants a glimpse of the future. Together with Navy Intelligence Specialist Zee Williams, Brooks leads a new kind of counterterrorism task force, one that collects intel from the future to stop attacks in the present. But there’s a catch. Each mission can only last FOUR MINUTES. Stakes quickly escalate when Omega discovers an unprecedented future attack against America threatening the lives of millions—including Tyler’s daughter. Despite their prescient advantage, Brooks and Williams find themselves thwarted at every turn as they try to stop the plot. To make matters worse, they have somehow gone from hunter to hunted, targeted by an unknown enemy hidden in the shadows. With the country on the brink of nuclear war, Tyler’s daughter in mortal danger, and a commanding officer they’re not sure they can trust, Omega Team faces a terrible dilemma: Even if you know the future, is FOUR MINUTES enough time to change it?

Calypso — Oliver K. Langmead (Titan)
Rochelle wakes from cryostasis to take up her role as engineer on the colony ark, Calypso. But she finds the ship has transformed into a forest, populated by the original crew’s descendants, who revere her like a saint. She travels the ship with the Calypso’s creator, the enigmatic Sigmund, and Catherine, a bioengineered marvel who can commune with the plants, uncovering a new history of humanity forged while she slept. She discovers a legacy of war between botanists and engineers. A war fought for the right to build a new Earth—a technological paradise, or a new Eden in bloom, untouched by mankind’s past. And Rochelle, the last to wake, holds the balance of power in her hands.

A View From the Stars — Cixin Liu (Tor Books)
A View From the Stars features a range of short works from the past three decades of New York Times bestselling author Cixin Liu’s prolific career, putting his nonfiction essays and short stories side-by-side for the first time. This collection includes essays and interviews that shed light on Liu’s experiences as a reader, writer, and lover of science fiction throughout his life, as well as short fiction that gives glimpses into the evolution of his imaginative voice over the years.

Disquiet Gods (The Sun Eater #6) – Christopher Ruocchio (Baen)
The end is nigh. It has been nearly two hundred years since Hadrian Marlowe assaulted the person of the Emperor and walked away from war. From his Empire. His duty. From the will and service of the eldritch being known only as the Quiet. The galaxy lies in the grip of a terrible plague, and worse, the Cielcin have overrun the realms of men. A messenger has come to Jadd, bearing a summons from the Sollan Emperor for the one-time hero. A summons, a pardon, and a plea. HAPSIS, the Emperor’s secret first-contact intelligence organization, has located one of the dreadful Watchers, the immense, powerful beings worshipped by the Pale Cielcin. Called out of retirement and exile, the old hero—accompanied by his daughter, Cassandra—must race across the galaxy and against time to accomplish one last, impossible task: To kill a god.
The end is nigh. It has been nearly two hundred years since Hadrian Marlowe assaulted the person of the Emperor and walked away from war. From his Empire. His duty. From the will and service of the eldritch being known only as the Quiet. The galaxy lies in the grip of a terrible plague, and worse, the Cielcin have overrun the realms of men. A messenger has come to Jadd, bearing a summons from the Sollan Emperor for the one-time hero. A summons, a pardon, and a plea. HAPSIS, the Emperor’s secret first-contact intelligence organization, has located one of the dreadful Watchers, the immense, powerful beings worshipped by the Pale Cielcin. Called out of retirement and exile, the old hero—accompanied by his daughter, Cassandra—must race across the galaxy and against time to accomplish one last, impossible task: To kill a god.

Toll of Honor (Honorverse) — David Weber (Baen)
Lieutenant Brandy Bolgeo has come home from the Battle of Hancock station wounded in both body and spirit. She will need months to regenerate her lost leg, but how long will it take to heal her heart? She’s come home to find that her wounds, her ship’s brutal damage, the deaths of so many friends, were the fault of an arrogant, aristocratic coward who broke and ran in the face of the enemy. Who left her ship to pay the price for his craven desertion under fire. And whose powerful political allies are determined to protect and preserve him at any price.

April 9

Mal Goes to War — Edward Ashton (St. Martin’s)
The humans are fighting again. Go figure. As a free A.I., Mal finds the war between the modded and augmented Federals and the puritanical Humanists about as interesting as a battle between rival anthills. He’s not above scouting the battlefield for salvage, though, and when the Humanists abruptly cut off access to infospace he finds himself trapped in the body of a cyborg mercenary, and responsible for the safety of the modded girl she died protecting.

A Better World — Sarah Langan (Atria)
You’ll be safe here. That’s what the tour guide tells the Farmer-Bowens when they visit Plymouth Valley, a walled-off company town with clean air, pantries that never go empty, and blue-ribbon schools. On a very trial basis, the company offers to hire Linda Farmer’s hus­band, Russell, a numbers genius, and relocate her whole family to this bucolic paradise for the .0001 percent. Though Linda will have to sacrifice her medical career back home, the family jumps at the opportunity. They’d be crazy not to take it. With the outside world falling apart, this might be the Farmer-Bowens’ last chance. But fitting in takes work. The pampered locals distrust outsiders, snubbing Linda, Russell, and their teen twins. And the residents fervently adhere to a group of customs and beliefs called Hollow… but what exactly is Hollow? It’s Linda who brokers acceptance, by volunteering her medical skills to the most influential people in town through their pet charity, ActHollow. In the months afterward, everything seems fine. Sure, Russell starts hyper­ventilating through a paper bag in the middle of the night, and the kids have become secretive, but living in Plymouth Valley is worth sacrificing their family’s closeness, isn’t it? At least they’ll survive. The trouble is, the locals never say what they think. They seem scared. And Hollow’s ominous culminating event, the Plymouth Valley Winter Festival, is coming. Linda is warned by her husband and her powerful new friends to stop asking questions. But the more she learns, the more frightened she becomes. Should the Farmer-Bowens be fighting to stay, or fighting to get out?

Star Wars: The Living Force — John Jackson Miller (Random House Worlds)
The Jedi have always traveled the stars, defending peace and justice across the galaxy. But the galaxy is changing, and the Jedi Order along with it. More and more, the Order finds itself focused on the future of the Republic, secluded on Coruscant, where the twelve members of the Jedi Council weigh crises on a galactic scale. As yet another Jedi Outpost left over from the Republic’s golden age is set to be decommissioned on the planet Kwenn, Qui-Gon Jinn challenges the Council about the Order’s increasing isolation. Mace Windu suggests a bold response: All twelve Jedi Masters will embark on a goodwill mission to help the planet and to remind the people of the galaxy that the Jedi remain as stalwart and present as they have been across the ages. But the arrival of the Jedi leadership is not seen by all as a cause for celebration. In the increasing absence of the Jedi, warring pirate factions have infested the sector. To maintain their dominance, the pirates unite, intent on assassinating the Council members. And they are willing to destroy countless innocent lives to secure their power. Cut off from Coruscant, the Jedi Masters must reckon with an unwelcome truth: While no one thinks more about the future than the Jedi Council, nobody needs their help more than those living in the present.

April 23

Ocean’s Godori — Elaine U. Cho (Zando – Hillman Grad)
Ocean Yoon has never felt very Korean, even if she is descended from a long line of haenyeo, Jeju Island’s beloved female divers. She doesn’t like soju, constantly misses cultural references, and despite her love of the game, people still say that she doesn’t play Hwatu like a Korean. Ocean’s also persona non grata at the Alliance, Korea’s solar system–dominating space agency, since a mission went awry and she earned a reputation for being a little too quick with her gun. When her best friend, Teo, second son of the Anand Tech empire, is framed for murdering his family, Ocean and her misfit crewmates are pushed to the forefront of a high-stakes ideological conflict. But dodging bullets and winning space chases may be the easiest part of what comes next.

The post All the New Science Fiction Books Arriving in April! appeared first on Reactor.

Book Recommendations Science Fiction

Five SFF Books About Idealistic Pursuits That Failed

True believers can change society—though not always in a positive way, according to these SFF stories…

By James Davis Nicoll

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Published on April 1, 2024

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Who among us has not envisioned a more perfect society? One that will be realizable if only everyone (masses and elites alike) could be convinced to adopt the one true path? One realizable if all of us were to follow the inspired leaders who promise perfect happiness!

A few science fiction authors have written to advance their views as to the perfect society (ahem, Ecotopia, cough cough). But it has been as common, or perhaps more common, for authors to imagine either flawed utopias (The Dispossessed) or dwell on the miseries that follow mistaken idealism.

Here are five books about idealistic pursuits that failed.

The Mercenary by Jerry Pournelle (1977)

Fearing nuclear war, the United States of America and the Soviet Union formed the CoDominium, dividing Earth between them. This cynical power-sharing arrangement has thus far succeeded in its two goals: world peace and entrenched power for the American Unity Party and the Russian Communist Party.

Of all the American parties, only the Unity Party is willing to make the compromises necessary to keep the CoDominium functioning. The Unity Party is threatened in the polls by the pugnacious Patriot Party and the idealistic Freedom Party. If the voters are too irresponsible to vote Unity, the only choice for continued world peace, then it is the duty of men like the Honorable John Rogers Grant to protect voters from their own terrible judgement. That this will keep Grant in office is but a trifling side effect.

I apologize to modern readers for whom the idea of an American political party making common cause with the Russians in exchange for short-term political is absurd. It was the Cold War! There were lots of odd ideas floating around. In the Unity Party’s defense, their belief that they’re America’s only bulwark against nuclear war does prove correct… unfortunately for most of the inhabitants of the Northern hemisphere.

In the Hands of Glory by Phyllis Eisenstein (1981)

When the unworkably vast Stellar Federation bowed to reality and dissolved itself, the officers of the Stellar Patrol found themselves suddenly unemployed. This was unacceptable to General Bohannon of the 36th Tactical Strike Force. His force easily conquers the agrarian world of Amphora—just the first step in Bohannon’s grand plan for the future of the galaxy.

Eighty years later, Lt. Dia Catlin has been loyally playing her part in achieving the vision of the long-dead Bohannon. Captured by Amphoran rebels still not reconciled to Patrol rule, Dia’s eventual rescue turns her into a Patrol hero. This in turn puts Dia in a position to discover the undisclosed portion of Bohannon’s glorious plan… an “Are we the baddies?” revelation sufficiently alarming to compel Dia to switch sides.

Points to Bohannon for setting in motion a social movement still active long after his death. However, as characters in the novel observe, his grand scheme is basically a less workable version of the Federation, which, as was previous established, never managed to successfully administer a realm on a galactic scale.

Shadows of the Short Days by Alexander Dan Vilhjálmsson (2014)

Garún is determined to see the rise of a just, egalitarian society in Kalmar-occupied Reykjavík. Garún works tirelessly in the cause of reform despite the considerable personal risk involved. Garún is one of the half-human and despised huldufólk; in the eyes of the Kalmar Commonwealth, Garún and her people have no rights that need to be respected. Should she be detained by the authorities, she can expect punishment that will be even more dire than the dismal fates meted out to fully human dissidents.

Garún’s ex-boyfriend Sæmundur has a cause of his own. Sæmundur is determined to master the forbidden esoteric secrets of galdur, magic by another name. In Sæmundur’s hands, galdur could transform Garún’s revolutionary quest. Should Sæmundur succeed in his aims—and nothing seems sufficient to deter him—nobody will call Sæmundur “Sæmundur the Mad” again. Quite possibly because there will be nobody left alive in Reykjavík to do so.

Garún is a legitimately inspirational figure. Alas, her ex, Sæmundur the Mad, is the sort of deranged researcher who gives vainglorious tampering in domains that have been forbidden to humans for good reason a bad name. Not only is he determined to undermine reality itself, the means by which he funds his research are socially irresponsible at best.

These Fragile Graces, This Fugitive Heart by Izzy Wasserstein (2023)

Mid-21^st century Americans enjoy the full benefits of climate change and corporate domination without the distraction of functioning state or federal governments. Kay refused to serve the oligarchs. Kay also refused to simply starve. Instead, she founded a commune. Under Kay’s leadership, the commune has survived while remaining loyal to its founding principles… despite considerable pressure to compromise.

Kay’s death seems to be suicide. Kay’s ex-girlfriend Dora is certain that Kay was murdered. Worse yet, Dora believes that the killer had to be a member of the commune. Dora is not quite correct about what’s going on. The situation is actually much worse than Dora fears.

This novella is admittedly something of an outlier to my theme, in that the idealists aren’t the problem. The pragmatists are. Further, Kay has somehow managed to keep the commune on mission without becoming some sort of cult leader. Due to the focus of the story, we don’t see how she managed that trick. There has to be more to it than sincerity and hard work…

Fathomfolk by Eliza Chan (2024)

Forced from their traditional homelands by human-caused climate change, Fathomfolk are grudgingly granted refuge by those same humans. Relegated to second-class status, Fathomfolk are a valuable but despised underclass. Half-siren Mira has spent her career proving herself a loyal, hard-working guard. She is eventually the first Fathomfolk promoted to captaincy of the border guard. Too bad for Mira that the job largely involves keeping her fellow Fathomfolk in line.

Mira’s sister-in-law Nami cares nothing for incremental social progress. Nami believes in deeds not words! Nami believes in revolution, not evolution! Nami also believes that hunky revolutionary Firth is far too handsome to be as evil as his actions suggest he is. Nami means well. Too bad for everyone near Nami.

Many will suffer for Nami’s belief in the redeeming effect of Firth’s irresistible cheekbones. Not Nami herself. Nami has the most annoying ability to convince those around her to give Nami second chances. This might make Nami a greater threat to the public good than Firth.

Idealists and their selfless drive to change less-than-perfect societies have often transformed such societies… though not always in positive ways. Not only that; their example has inspired authors to pen compelling stories. Idealists abound in SFF. I may have missed some of your favorites. If so, feel free to remind me of them in comments.[end-mark]

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Movies & TV Babylon 5

Babylon 5 Rewatch: “The Gathering”

Keith R.A. DeCandido revisits the start of the Babylon 5 franchise

By Keith R.A. DeCandido

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Published on March 26, 2024

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“The Gathering”
Written by J. Michael Straczynski
Directed by Richard Compton
Season 1, Episode 0
Production episode 0
Original air date: February 22, 1993

It was the dawn of the third age… We open with Ambassador Londo Mollari’s voiceover setting the stage: the dawn of the third age of mankind, whatever that means, and how the last of the Babylon stations, Babylon 5, was the last best hope for peace. A station in neutral space constructed by the Earth Alliance and administered by their military, EarthForce, it is home to dozens of species, with the five major powers in this area of the galaxy represented: Earth Alliance, the Minbari Federation, the Centauri Republic, the Narn Regime, and the Vorlons. Tensions are high, as the Earth-Minbari War wasn’t that long ago, and the Narn used to be a subject species of the Centauri, but now are the ascendant power while the Centauri are a shadow of their former selves.

Lt. Commander Laurel Takashima, the first officer, is in Command & Control, overseeing a ship docking at the station. The security chief, Michael Garibaldi, calls C&C saying that the station commander is needed to greet a new arrival. Takashima says that he’s already on his way.

Sure enough, Commander Jeffrey Sinclair greets Lyta Alexander, a telepath from Psi Corps who will be working on the station, available to be hired. Sinclair tells her a bit about the station, taking her through the alien sector, where those species who require something other than Earth-normal atmosphere and/or gravity hang out.

Another person who arrived on the transport is a human named Del Varner. In fact, we saw him initially during Mollari’s voiceover, so we know he’ll be important….

Four of the five representatives are on the station: Delenn representing Minbar, Mollari representing the Centauri, G’Kar representing the Narn, and Sinclair reprsenting Earth. The fifth is en route: Kosh from the mysterious Vorlons, about whom very little is known. At one point, Sinclair joins Delenn in the Chinese garden, and she, to his surprise, provides all the intelligence the Minbari have on the Vorlons. It’s not much, but it’s more than Earth has…

G’Kar complains to Takashima about a Narn supply ship that is being denied docking. Takashima explains that the shipmaster has refused to consent to a weapons scan, and they can’t let the ship dock without that. G’Kar leaves in a huff. In fact, he leaves in a minute-and-a-huff.

Kosh’s ship arrives two days early. Also en route is the ship belonging to Sinclair’s girlfriend, a trader named Carolyn Sykes. Garibaldi asks G’Kar and Delenn to be at the docking bay to meet Kosh, but he’s having trouble tracking down Mollari—eventually finding him in the casino, losing a lot. Mollari asks Garibaldi for a loan (obviously not the first time he’s made that request), which Garibaldi refuses (obviously not the first time he’s said no). However, Varner offers to stake him.

G’Kar changes his mind, and tells Takashima to go ahead and do the weapons scan on the supply ship.

En route to meet Kosh, Sinclair’s elevator stalls out. By the time he makes it to the docking bay and meets Garibaldi, they find Kosh unconscious on the deck. Vorlons have to wear full-body encounter suits in order to interact with other species for reasons that nobody’s too clear on (which is par for the course with the Vorlons). Takashima reports that the Vorlons have stated in no uncertain terms that Kosh’s encounter suit is not to be removed. Dr. Benjamin Kyle is not happy, as he can’t treat his patient without removing the suit.

Sinclair instructs Kyle to open the suit, but to do it alone, with all monitors turned off. Kyle is bound by doctor-patient confidentiality not to reveal what he sees. Kyle’s subsequent examination reveals that Kosh was poisoned. But Kyle can’t determine where the poison was applied, nor what the poison is.

Sinclair locks down the station, and Garibaldi conducts an investigation. One of his prime suspects is Mollari, who wasn’t at the reception with Delenn and G’Kar.

G’Kar approaches Alexander after she finishes a job. The Narn have no telepaths, and they wish to produce some. G’Kar makes her an offer to help them do so, either by G’Kar and Alexander mating, or by cloning, which would be a much more complicated process. G’Kar will pay her more if they just mate.

Sinclair finally gets to have some mad, passionate nookie-nookie with Sykes. He also tells Sykes a bit of his personal history that he’d been avoiding telling her before: that he was part of the Battle of the Line, the final battle in the Earth-Minbari War, of which he was one of the few survivors. He was doing a kamikaze run at one Minbari ship, then he blacked out, and the next thing he knew, it was twenty-four hours later and the Minbari had inexplicably surrendered, ending the war.

Takashima and Kyle convince Alexander to perform a mind-scan on Kosh. She reluctantly does so, only to discover that Sinclair is the one who poisoned the ambassador by putting a skin tag on Kosh’s hand.

Garibaldi’s investigation leads to Varner, but checking his quarters reveals Varner’s dead body. Confusing the issue is that he’s been dead for days, even though he’s been sighted more recently.

Sinclair is temporarily removed from B5’s council, replaced by Takashima. After the council questions several witnesses, including Kyle, G’Kar moves that they turn Sinclair over to the Vorlons. Takashima votes no, Delenn abstains, while Mollari and G’Kar vote yes. But that tie is broken by the proxy vote the Vorlons provided to G’Kar, making it a majority yes vote.

The Vorlons will arrive in twelve hours. Mollari apologetically explains to Garibaldi that G’Kar blackmailed him into the yes vote. He had information about one of Mollari’s ancestors that would prove politically embarrassing to him.

G’Kar approaches Delenn about the possibility of a Minbari-Narn alliance. But when he mentions a rumored shadowy organization in the Minbari Federation called the Grey Council, Delenn immediately attacks G’Kar, nearly killing him, and making it clear that she’ll do worse if he ever even mentions the Grey Council again.

Another body is found, that of a technician who has been seen since his time of death. Kyle is working in the medical bay, having found an antidote to the poison, when he sees Alexander enter, and she starts sabotaging the medical equipment—and tossing Kyle across the medical bay when he tries to stop her. But then the real Alexander walks in, and the duplicate runs away.

It’s now clear what’s going on: Garibaldi has learned that Varner was a smuggler dealing in black-market tech. His most recent trip had him acquiring a changeling net, which would enable its wearer to look like anyone. The net would give off a lot of energy, so Sinclair has Takashima do a scan of major energy sources, and then blank out anything they know about—life support, lights, and so on—and the only one that isn’t accounted for is small and moving through a remote part of the station. Sinclair and Garibaldi suit up and go after it. At Takashima’s suggestion, they take a recorder that will document everything, so they have proof for the Vorlons.

Garibaldi is injured, but Sinclair manages to stop the assassin, after he has cycled through several different disguises (including Sinclair himself). Eventually, he’s revealed to be a Minbari, a member of their Warrior Caste. Before blowing himself up, he says that Sinclair has a hole in his mind. Later, Sinclair queries Delenn about that, but Delenn blows it off as a standard Minbari insult. The nervous look Delenn gets before saying that makes it obvious to the viewer (but, for some reason, not to Sinclair) that she’s lying.

Sinclair shares a drink with G’Kar, revealing that he knows that the changeling net was brought on the delayed Narn supply ship, which was why Varner had to come to the station to pick it up, and then provide it to the assassin. G’Kar says Sinclair has no proof; Sinclair counters that he put a nanotech tracker in the drink they just shared, so now Sinclair will always be able to follow G’Kar. Outraged, G’Kar once again leaves in a huff. Sinclair then reveals to Garibaldi that he was lying, but that’ll it’ll be fun watching G’Kar try to find the tracker that isn’t there in his intestinal tract.

The big hole made by the assassin is being fixed, Ambassador Kosh is up and about, Sinclair has been cleared, and the station is, as Takashima says, open for business.

Nothing’s the same anymore. Sinclair gets to hit several rough-and-tumble leader clichés, including the close friend whom he hires even though nobody else wants him, being accused of a crime he didn’t commit, and insisting on stopping the bad guy himself despite having an entire frickin staff under his command.

The household god of frustration. Garibaldi is established as difficult, having bounced from assignment to assignment. He also doesn’t exactly light the world on fire with his investigation, as most of the work is done by Kyle and by the assassin being seen disguised as Alexander when Alexander walked into the room.

If you value your lives, be somewhere else. Delenn is surprisingly friendly to Sinclair, which he doesn’t expect, given the history between Earth and Minbar.

In the glorious days of the Centauri Republic… Mollari is pretty broken, reduced to gambling and drinking and lamenting the days when the Centauri Republic was a super-power instead of a has-been power.

Though it take a thousand years, we will be free. G’Kar is a manipulative bad guy in this one, showing an impressive ruthlessness and a tiresome nastiness.

The Corps is mother, the Corps is father. We learn that humans have developed telepathy, and there’s a Psi-Corps that supervises and adminstrates telepathic activity. The rules regarding telepaths are very strict, including no unauthorized mind-scans.

The Shadowy Vorlons. Vorlons wear encounter suits at all times and “for security reasons” don’t allow them to be removed. Very little is known about them by anyone else on the station.

Looking ahead. The hole in Sinclair’s mind will become extremely important down the line.

No sex, please, we’re EarthForce. Sinclair and Sykes are in a nice relationship; at one point Sykes tries to convince him to resign his commission and go off adventuring with her. He says he’ll think about it.

Also G’Kar tries to mate with Alexander in a scene that is eye-rolling and creepy all at the same time.

Welcome aboard. In this pilot movie, the only stars are Michael O’Hare (Sinclair), Tamlyn Tomita (Takashima), Jerry Doyle (Garibaldi), and Mira Furlan (Delenn). Peter Jurasik and Andreas Katsulas are listed as guest stars, as are Blaire Baron (Sykes), Johnny Sekka (Kyle), and Patricia Tallman (Alexander), even though all were intended to be regular characters. In addition, John Fleck plays Varner and Paul Hampton plays the senator.

Hampton will return next time in “Midnight on the Firing Line.” Tallman will return in “Divided Loyalties” in season two.

Also Ed Wasser plays one of the C&C officers; he’ll return in the recurring role of Mr. Morden starting in “Signs and Portents” later in the first season.

Trivial matters. Two different versions of this exist in the world: the original as aired in 1993 and a re-edit that was released when the show moved to TNT in 1998. Some of those changes were to fix things that later became continuity errors, including G’Kar’s reference to his wife and Mollari’s referring to Sinclair as the last commander of the station in his opening voiceover. Others were simply tightening some scenes and including some scenes that were cut, including a confrontation Sinclair has with a smuggler and Sykes meeting with Delenn. Sinclair and Alexander’s trip through the alien sector was cut down, as there were (legitimate) complaints that it looked too much like a zoo. The music by Stewart Copeland was redone by Christopher Franke, who was the composer for the series. In the original, Tamlyn Tomita’s dialogue was redone and looped in when Warner Bros. complained that she sounded too harsh; the new version restores Tomita’s original performance. Finally, the biggest change was Kosh referring to the assassin disguised as Sinclair as “Entil’Zha Valen,” a reference that will pay off in the “War Without End” two-parter in season three.

Tomita, Blaire Baron, Johnny Sekka, and Patricia Tallman were all intended to be regulars, but they did not continue on the series for various reasons. Tomita was replaced by Claudia Christian’s Susan Ivanova, Baron by Julia Nickson-Soul’s Catherine Sakai, Sekka by Richard Biggs’ Dr. Franklin, and Tallman by Andrea Thompson’s Talia Winters. Tallman’s Alexander would, however, return to the show as a guest in seasons two and three and become a regular for seasons four and five. Plotlines originally intended for Takashima were transferred either to Ivanova or to Winters.

Delenn was originally intended to start out as a man, but would emerge from the chrysalis at the top of season two as a woman. But they couldn’t make Mira Furlan masculine enough, apparently, so they abandoned it and just had her be female all along.

Furlan’s and Andreas Katsulas’ makeup were both changed when the show went to series, as were the EarthForce uniforms.

“The Gathering” was nominated for a Hugo Award for Best Dramatic Presentation. The award went to Jurassic Park.

The echoes of all of our conversations.

The name of the place is Babylon 5. “Babylon 5 is open for business.” There are three things a pilot needs to introduce: the characters, the types of stories that will be told, and the setting. The latter is more challenging in the science fiction/fantasy genre because it’s the only genre in which the setting isn’t real. So in addition to everything else, you’ve got to build a world and make it convincing.

Whatever the flaws of “The Gathering”—and they are legion—it did that part of it beautifully. Creator/writer/co-executive producer J. Michael Straczynski gives us a fully realized future history. We get an Earth that’s a power, but not the biggest power. We get the ugly history between the Centauri and the Narn, with the latter having burst onto the scene after being subjugated by the former, while the Centauri themselves are much less than once they were. And there’s the history of the Earth-Minbari War, which left scars on both sides—as well as the complete confusion as to why the Minbari surrendered.

Surrounding this world-building is a story that’s a pretty straightforward whodunnit with tech and a script that can generously be called awkward. The moment where Alexander asked Sinclair why the station was called Babylon 5, I groaned. Thirty-one years later, that conversation remains the tin standard for awkward exposition, not aided by the fact that I kept thinking of the Swamp Castle litany in Monty Python and the Holy Grail. (To this day, I always refer to Babylon 4 as having fallen into the swamp.)

That clunkiness of dialogue runs throughout, alas, not aided by performances that range from mediocre to uneven. Jerry Doyle’s Garibaldi is a walking, talking cliché of the maverick cop, Andreas Katsulas’ G’Kar is a mustache-twirling villain of the most ludicrous type (the scene where he proposes mating with Alexander is embarrassing), and Patricia Tallman’s Alexander ranges from stilted (her accusation of Sinclair comes across as a teenager throwing a tantrum) to excellent (her body language when she’s the disguised assassin is completely different, making it clear from jump that this isn’t really Alexander). All three characters will, of course, get better, but that just makes watching the early versions of them even more painful to watch. G’Kar especially—Katsulas was one of the finest actors of his time, always able to bring menace and nuance to his roles (which were almost always villainous to some degree or other), and G’Kar would certainly become a complex and tragic character as the show went on. But the G’Kar of “The Gathering” has muted menace and absolutely no nuance, and feels like an utter waste of Katsulas’ talent.

The leader of an ensemble needs to have a certain charisma in order for the ensemble to work, and sadly Michael O’Hare doesn’t quite have it. O’Hare is the type of actor who’s better off playing the sidekick or the helpmeet or the bad guy. (He played Colonel Jessup in the theatrical version of A Few Good Men on Broadway, and he was amazing. It was a hundred and eighty degrees from Jack Nicholson’s performance of the same role in the movie version, instead bringing a quiet, solid intensity.) He would’ve been perfect to play Garibaldi, truly.

Besides the world-building, the other way in which the pilot absolutely shines is in the character of Londo Mollari, brilliantly played by the great Peter Jurasik. In 1993, he was best known for his role of the squirrelly and slimy Sid the Snitch on Hill Street Blues and its short-lived spinoff Beverly Hills Buntz, which in no way prepared anyone for this. He magnificently brings the broken-down Centauri ambassador to life. The bit I quoted in “The echoes of all our conversations” above is a masterpiece, showing us how far the Centauri Republic in general and Mollari in particular have fallen.

Finally, there’s the CGI visual effects, which were groundbreaking at the time, and which I was dreading on this rewatch, as I feared they wouldn’t have aged well. And, well, they haven’t, but it wasn’t as bad as I was expecting. Mostly the biggest problem with the VFX is the same problem CGI continued to have up until 2010 or so: too bright and shiny and completely unable to convey mass. But it’s not fatal, and the CGI is well integrated.

Next week: “Midnight on the Firing Line.”[end-mark]

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Excerpts Space Opera

Read an Excerpt From Elaine U. Cho’s Ocean’s Godori

Becky Chambers meets Firefly in this Korean space opera about a disgraced space pilot struggling to find her place while fighting to protect the people she loves.

By Elaine U. Cho

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Published on March 27, 2024

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We’re thrilled to share an excerpt from Elaine U. Cho’s science fiction debut Ocean’s Godori—out from Hillman Grad Books on April 23^rd.

Ocean’s fussing with the tie on her jeogori when her nimbus rings. She checks the display and answers.

“Don’t worry, Dae. I’m on my way.”

On her way meaning that she’s almost ready to leave, of course. She adjusts her jeogori for the fifth time.

“Yeah, about that,” her captain’s voice blares too loudly. “I need you to do something first.” Ocean waits, listening to the bursts of laughter on the other end. “Can you move the Ohneul? I’d do it, but I’m already at Coex. They’re holding a separate event for higher-ups.”

One where the alcohol’s flowing, judging by Dae’s voice. “Where do you need me to move it?” Ocean asks.

“Alliance’s Seoul dock. It’ll be more convenient for when we leave tomorrow.” Dae’s voice raises in pitch. “Dangyeol, Lieutenant Seo! Yes, yes, I’m speaking with my pilot now.” When Dae’s responding to a superior, she has a particular laugh calibrated to warmly flatter. She launches into it now, and Ocean rechecks her jeogori tie. Maybe she should watch the instructional video again. Dae’s tone drops. “I think it might be dicey tonight, with all the Alliance ships in the parking hangar because of the gala.”

“If you’re worried about the ship, I wouldn’t mind staying with it—”

“You need to make an appearance at the party,” Dae says. “It reflects badly on me for you to always skip out.”

As if Ocean needs another reminder of what’s waiting for her at the gala, some inevitable trotting out in front of Dae’s superiors as a reminder that she’s been the one keeping Ocean in line all these years. The problem with begging off every social event of the year is that Ocean has to make an appearance to one at least, and Dae chose the biggest. Everyone’s flown back for it. The only upside is that there are so many people, she might not even see Adama and the rest of his crew.

“I’ll be there,” Ocean says.

“If you show up after 1900, I’m requiring you to attend the next Alliance event too.”

“You want me to be there by 1900? That’s impossible!”

“You better book it then, don’t you think?” Dae hangs up abruptly.

Ocean leaves her room, and in the elevator she jabs the P2 button more energetically than she needs to. After presenting her palm for a scan and inputting the Ohneul’s ship ID, an illuminated map offers directions to where it’s parked. When the doors slide open, lighted blue arrows on the ground point the way. Her heels click on the concrete, echoing in the massive hangar. As she follows the arrows, she hears low voices. She can’t place exactly where they’re coming from—the noises are ricocheting off the ceiling and the gargantuan ships lined up in rows—until she gets to the Ohneul and finds two huddled figures nearby. One of them, a large Asian man with a buzzed head, crouches on the ground keeping watch while the other, a Black woman with braids gathered into a high bun, pulls back her fist, ready to punch open the side door. She’s wearing large gloves that are glowing bright green. Power gloves, if Ocean had to guess. All three of them freeze.

“Well, this is awkward,” Ocean says.

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Ocean’s Godori

Elaine U. Cho

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Ocean's Godori

Elaine U. Cho

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The woman slowly lowers her fists, and the man says completely unconvincingly, “Oh no. This isn’t our ship?”

The woman puts her hand up to her ear. “Lupus, you were supposed to be on watch!” she hisses, and then after a pause, she snaps into her comm, “What do you mean it was your favorite scene?”

“I told you not to count on Lupus while they had on Midnight in Europa,” the man says, straightening. “Every scene is their favorite scene.”

Ocean thinks over her options. Her gun is somewhere in a closet about eight floors up. She hates having it with her even if it is regulation; the weight of it on her hip is all wrong. She sighs. It looks like Dae did have something to worry about after all. The raiders’ idea was not a bad one—the garage is packed tonight, and with the party going until the morning hours, they’d only need to take out the cameras to have free rein.

“Were you planning on punching your way into every ship?” Ocean asks.

“The configurations for this one weren’t quite what we were expecting,” the man explains.

“Aries!”

“Cass,” the man replies mildly.

“Ocean.” Ocean points to herself and then to the Ohneul. “And this is a 180-Han. An older model. Nothing fancy and usually easy to break into. But we have a mechanic who upgraded its security settings.” Maggie will be pleased to hear she kept two raiders out. Ocean checks the time on her comm. If she’s going to make Dae’s ludicrous deadline, she has to leave now. “If you’re looking for Han-series ships, there are three in the next row,” Ocean says. “The Narae ships have similar entry doors too. They have that distinctive scalloped fletching on their tails.”

“Damn, that’s cold.” Cass narrows her eyes. “I thought you Alliance kids were at least loyal to one another.”

“I’m kind of on a tight schedule,” Ocean says, ignoring how that comment stings.

“Oh, I’m sorry,” Cass sneers at Ocean, taking in the silk jeogori, the black Sav-Faire dress underneath that’s seen better days, and the heels that are too high to be of any use in this situation. “Are we keeping you from your party?”

“I’m supposed to move the ship for my boss,” Ocean says. “I have to get it to the Alliance Seoul dock and be back at Coex by 1900.”

Aries checks his comm while Cass scoffs, “There’s no way.” “It’s becoming less likely by the minute,” Ocean agrees.

Aries remarks, “You don’t seem too concerned to catch us breaking into your ship.”

“Trying to break in. You don’t seem too bad on the raider scale,” Ocean says. They’re calm for one thing; if they were skittish, she’d have a problem. “You must be pretty low grade if you’re rifling through Alliance ships for loot.”

“Low grade?” Cass sputters. “I’ll have you know—”

“So you are raiders?” Ocean asks. From Ocean’s experience, the more defensive a raider is, the more they feel they have to prove. Ocean has no gun and no way in hell of beating someone in a fist fight, especially not someone wearing power gloves. “It doesn’t matter to me either way, but I’d rather avoid the delay.”

Aries eyes her without any of his partner’s judgment. After his once-over, he nods. He steps onto the walkway, tugging Cass along by the elbow, and gestures for Ocean to go ahead. “We’d rather avoid that too.”

“Seriously?” Cass asks. “You can’t trust Alliance trash, Aries.”

Ocean slips past them, but she waits until they’re far enough away before entering the passcode and pressing her palm to the panel.

“Oh, I don’t know about that,” Aries says breezily as the hatch door opens with a metal creak. “But I do know he’s going to be disappointed if you attract any unnecessary attention. You promised we’d keep a low profile.” He touches his ear. “Lupus, will you actually keep an eye out this time?”

“Thanks,” Ocean says to them as she pulls the door closed.

“You’re never going to make it!” Cass yells at her as the door seals.

All the lights blink on in the hallway, except the one at the far end that always flickers a few times with a buzzy zap before giving up. Ocean cocks an ear; she half expected Gremio to be here, asleep in his room by the infirmary, but the ship has an unmistakably empty feeling. Good. She can very clearly picture a disgruntled Gremio bursting out of the ship to knock his cane on the heads of the hapless raiders. He would also definitely not approve of the ride she’s about to take the ship on.

Ocean checks the time again as she strides to the cockpit. Aish. She really might not make it. She slides into her pilot seat and flicks switches with one hand while undoing the straps of her heels with the other. She kicks them off and settles her feet against the pedals.

Immediately, all the tension eases out of her body. Her right hand takes the wheel, and her left one rests on the shift. This feeling may have been the real reason she agreed to Dae’s order.

The metro leaves every five minutes from the Seoul dock. It takes about twelve minutes to get to Coex from there, including all the stops. So that gives her about six minutes to move the Ohneul and find parking. Just for kicks, Ocean connects her nimbus to the console and opens up Gilla maps to check what it thinks. Seventeen minutes. Marv. She shifts right and down on the lever, and the satisfying weight of the mechanics confirms her existence. The ship lifts into the air, and from the left display, she sees the two raiders heading over to the next row where she pointed out the Han ships. The closest one is the Samjogo, piloted by Kim Seunghoon, who once roughed up Von outside A-Mart.

“Good luck,” she says, although she’s not sure whether she’s speaking to Cass or herself.

Ocean jabs in the code to open the garage’s entryway, and she follows the slow slope of the hangar floor out. Then she’s streaming through the Seoul air. The sun’s just setting now, and she admires the purple hue of the sky behind the city lights.

Another memory comes to mind, of hands on the wheel, of wind streaming in through an open window. She allows herself a brief moment, then she pushes the clutch, her right foot ready to supply gas to the thrusters, her left hand on the gear lever, all moving in smooth synchronization. The Ohneul zooms forward.

“Five minutes,” she says to herself as she angles around the Lotte World Tower and over the World Peace Gate. She knows Seoul better by air than by foot and is making good time; the air’s free of traffic tonight, probably because she’s the only one being sent on an errand by her commanding officer. At least that’s what she thinks until she spots blinking lights out of the corner of her eye. Her console beeps, and she squints at it before reluctantly opening the transmission. If it’s an Alliance officer, word will get back to Dae that she ignored it.

“Dae swore you started from the Alliance dorms.”

The transmission’s coming from the Flying Cloud, which means the pilot is Lim Yeri.

“I did,” Ocean says.

“Liar. No way you got here that fast. Still, keeps things interesting, yeah?”

“What do you mean?”

“Didn’t they tell you? There’s one parking spot left at the Seoul docks. Our captains made a wager to see which one of us would get to it first.”

Ocean remembers Dae’s drunken glee. “Marv,” she mutters. “We’re subject to the whims of our seonbae, I guess.”

“You can take the spot.” Ocean couldn’t be less interested in Dae’s latest pissing match.

“Oh, come on.” Lim laughs. “I was kinda interested in seeing what the famous Crane had to offer, but I guess that was all talk?” Despite herself, Ocean stiffens. She reflexively looks down at the tattoo on her right hand. The profile of a crane in flight stretches its beak up to her index knuckle, its wings spreading up the back of her hand, legs pointing toward her wrist.

The Flying Cloud’s drifted close enough for Ocean to see the cloud pattern etched on its hull. This one’s a Byeol-10X, an actual racer. It’s last year’s model, the X-wing an homage to space fighters of old, the layered divots in its shield an aerodynamic dream. Ocean flexes her fingers against her wheel. Truthfully, she doesn’t want to have to go to another party.

“Don’t say I didn’t give you a chance,” she says as she punches her feet down.

The display flashes blue then green. The Ohneul spirals out, jetting forward amid a cloud of profanity from Lim. A rush of pure pleasure floods Ocean, and she can’t remember the last time she felt this focused, this awake. Lim catches up easily. Byeol-10X models are built for speed, and the Ohneul is barely keeping it together as it is. If their route was a straightaway with nothing but sky, Ocean wouldn’t have a prayer. But Lim doesn’t dare go high enough to gain that advantage because of how close the Alliance dock is, and Ocean knows Seoul like the back of her right hand. Lim swerves in front of Ocean, cutting off her path. Ocean veers right, then left, but Lim blocks her each time.

“You think you can pass me in that clunker?” Lim yells.

Ocean doesn’t need to. Lim’s flown the Flying Cloud far enough to the left now that the Ohneul can’t edge between it and the fast-approaching Shinjeong Tower with its distinctive crescent moon top. Ocean fakes right, and when Lim moves to cut her off again, Ocean hits the brakes. She loves feeling the lurch in her body as the ship reacts. She’s piloted the Ohneul for five years, and even if she’s never raced it, she still knows each clank, every fluctuation, and the exact resistance of its wheel. At the perfect moment, she spins the wheel in the opposite direction, fighting its inertia, and the Ohneul’s back slides out. Ocean turns the ship sideways and up so that it cradles in the curve of Shinjeong’s crescent before completing its somersault.

Ocean predicts the Flying Cloud’s brake lights flashing even before Lim stops short. She knows there’s that new apartment development just ahead. Ocean’s already calibrated her landing, so once she flips in front of the Flying Cloud, she’s ready to corner sharply around the stalled ship, cutting Lim off. As if on cue, the panel pings at Ocean to complain, telling her this ship is not equipped to travel at these speeds. She smiles as she curves around a block of hotels. At this point, she’s not even worried about Lim; she’s just following the best line. The gates to the Seoul dock are in front of her, and she’s home free.

“Injeong halggeh.” Lim laughs over the transmission. “I’m not even mad. What the hell are you doing piloting a Class 4?”

Just like that, the thrill running through Ocean’s veins dries up. “You can take the parking spot,” she says.

“Wait, what? Really?”

Ocean turns off the transmission and drops her head back on the seat, putting the Ohneul on coast. The console beeps and Ocean slaps the button to respond. “I’m serious, just take—”

“Ocean-ah.” Damn. It isn’t Lim. Too late, Ocean realizes that the alert was a different tone than the internal calls between ships.

She slumps forward over the wheel. “Why didn’t you call? You said you would call last night when you got to Seoul. You’re too busy with your friend to call your umma?”

Her mother’s insistence on calling all her steadies “friends” is, at least, consistent. She’ll probably be happy to hear they’re not friends anymore.

“I’m sorry, Umma. I forgot.”

Her umma has an unerring instinct to call at the absolute worst times. Then again, it’s not like Ocean’s taken the opportunity to create her own battlegrounds. Ocean pulls the ship up higher so she can idly guide the Ohneul through the clouds with one hand on the wheel.

Her umma exhales heavily. “Babeun meogeoseo?”

“Not yet, Umma.” A wave of guilt always accompanies this response, but she can’t lie. Her mom’s able to sniff out a lie quicker than a priest in a confessional box. “I’m on my way to the Alliance gala. They’ll have food there.”

“Alliance gala?”

“You know, Umma. The party they throw every year.”

“Euh, the gala. Where they gave Hajoon that award?”

“Yes. That one.” It was years before Ocean’s time at the Alliance,  but the memory is painfully bright. She remembers the crisp rustle of her mother’s brand-new hanbok. Even more palpable is the pride her parents wore that night, the tears glistening in her mother’s eyes as her older brother waved to them from the stage.

The silence gapes so widely that if Ocean sighs, her mother will hear it, no matter how much she stifles the reaction. “I was going to call, Umma. I’m sorry I didn’t. But I’m flying now, and I need to park the ship.”

Ocean holds her breath.

“How long are you going to live like this?” The weariness in her mother’s voice sucks all the air out of the cockpit.

“I should go. I’ll call you later, Umma.”

Ocean hangs up. Her nimbus display clocks the call in at barely over a minute. The sun has fully set now, but Seoul is still spread out in vivid color below. Ocean rests her hand on the shift. She still has a party to get to.

Excerpted from Ocean’s Godori, copyright © 2024 by Elaine U. Cho.

The post Read an Excerpt From Elaine U. Cho’s <i>Ocean’s Godori</i> appeared first on Reactor.

Column Science Fiction Film Club

Ikarie XB-1: Imagining a Journey Across the Stars, Martinis Included

This visionary 1963 film acknowledges the challenges of interstellar travel, but expresses a refreshing optimism about the future of space travel and humanity

By Kali Wallace

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Published on March 27, 2024

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Ikarie XB-1 (1963) Directed by Jindřich Polák. Starring Zdeněk Štěpánek, Radovan Lukavský, František Smolík, and Dana Medřická. Screenplay by Pavel Juráček and Jindřich Polák based on The Magellanic Cloud by Stanislaw Lem.

Let’s start with the ending, so we can get that nonsense out of the way.

After its release in Czechoslovakia in 1963, Ikarie X-1 was picked up for distribution by American International Pictures, an American film production company that had a sideline in importing, editing, and dubbing foreign films in the 1950s and 1960s. The film had a bit of buzz at the time; it had won the top award at the inaugural Trieste Science Fiction Film Festival (alongside Chris Marker’s French New Wave short film La Jetée, which we will watch in the future). But when AIP acquired Ikarie XB-1, they changed the title to Voyage to the End of the Universe, rewrote a lot of the dialogue, cut several minutes from the running time, altered many of the names in the credits to look more American, and gave the film an entirely different ending.

An entirely different and—let’s not mince words—really incredibly stupid ending.

In the original film, when Ikarie finally reaches Alpha Centauri’s mysterious White Planet, the crew gaze down on a heavily developed and populated surface, knowing they have encountered an alien civilization. In the American version, the view of the alien planet is replaced—this is painful to type but I promise I am not joking—by stock footage of New York City.

The intent, it seems, was to give the film a shocking! twist! ending! by suggesting that Ikarie and its crew were from another world, and their destination was Earth all along.

It’s so stupid. It’s such a bad choice! Why did they even bother? I know, I know. These are rhetorical questions. Because it’s Hollywood. Because they wanted to Americanize the film to keep any suspected Eastern Bloc socialist cooties away from it. Because sometimes people make really stupid decisions while believing themselves to be very clever and/or trying to make a lot of money.

I know some of you are wondering the same thing I was wondering, so: the dubbed Voyage to the End of the Universe was released in 1964, four years before Planet of the Apes and its famous Statue of Liberty twist ending.

The incomprehensible twist ending did the film no favors: Voyage to the End of the Universe was not exactly a smash hit, although a lot of sources claim it was an inspiration to Stanley Kubrick and many speculate the same for Gene Rodenberry. For a few decades it just sort of bounced around in the obscurity of niche sci fi film circles. Due to the names in the credits being Americanized, there was even confusion about where it came from and some viewers heard that it was Russian in origin. It was more than forty years before the original film would become widely available through DVD/Blu-ray releases and streaming for international audiences to watch again. (Matthew Keeley wrote a bit about this on this site: “Ikarie XB-1, Based on the Fiction of Stanislaw Lem, Is a Fascinating Obscurity.”)

And I, for one, am very glad that it is, because I think this is a fascinating movie. I didn’t know what to expect going in; all I knew was that a lot of people across the internet recommended checking it out as a worthy entry into classic sci fi films.

The film opens in media res, with a tense and disorienting scene in which the crew of a spaceship are trying to calm a man named Michael, who is having a dangerous breakdown in a series of corridors straight out of a trypophobic’s worst nightmare, accompanied by the unsettling and often jarring score by Zdeněk Liška. Before we learn anything about this situation, we skip backwards several months to the very beginning of Ikarie’s journey.

In the year 2163, the spaceship Ikarie (Icarus, which is, yes, a terrible name for a spaceship, but no, never explained) has set out from Earth with an crew of forty men and women. They are headed for Alpha Centauri, where their scientists have identified Earth-like planets that could be home to life. This is purely a mission of scientific exploration and possible contact; life on Earth is implied to be pretty nice. The crew have a range of names clearly intended to convey people of multinational origin: Abayev, MacDonald, Svensen. The introductory voiceover tells us that fifteen years will pass on Earth while they make the round-trip journey, but only eighteen months will pass aboard the ship due to time dilation.

Before we get into the story, I want to talk a bit about the lookof the film. Pavel Juráček and Jindřich Polák even visited Stanislaw Lem during production to ask him about how he imagined The Magellanic Cloud; but he was, apparently, not terribly interested in providing many details. So it was up to set designer Jan Zázvorka, which turns out to have been a very good thing, because the delightfully modernist interiors he built are incredible. Filmed in striking, high-contrast black and white by Jan Kališ, this is an environment of pronounced geometry and open spaces, carefully placed light and shadows, octagonal corridors and long perspectives. The exterior shots of the ship are largely forgettable, and inside there are plenty of standard sci fi technological details—the usual flashing lights and unlabeled buttons—but it scarcely matters because the rest of the environment is so beautiful.

The first part of the film is essentially a slice-of-life look at Ikarie’s journey. We learn how the crew eats, how they stay healthy, how they socialize, what they left behind, what they hope to discover. In a very obvious narrative example of Chekhov’s Gun—with a robot on the stage rather than a firearm—they tease Antony, an elderly scientist, for bringing a beloved, outdated robot aboard as a personal item. (The robot, Patrick, seems to share some robot genetics with Forbidden Planet’s Robby.) A young couple embarks upon a happy flirtation; a married couple worries about their unborn child. It’s all very congenial and pleasant, with much of the same feel that would come from moments of downtime aboard the Enterprise when Star Trek premiered a few years later.

Ikarie’s journey runs into its first trouble during Antony’s amazingly groovin’ birthday party, where everybody was having a grand time drinking martinis, dancing, and sharing huffs of earthy scents in place of cigarettes. An alarm interrupts the festivities: the ship has spotted an unexpected object in space. Closer inspection reveals it to be a spaceship. After some debate about the best way to greet potential extraterrestrials—with impersonal robots or friendly faces?—they send two men over to check it out. Just as I appreciate the inclusion of time dilation in the travel time and the presence of women on the crew, I also appreciate the film’s attempt to show some realistic zero-gravity movement in this section—especially considering that in 1963, humans had been going to space for all of two years.

They discover that it’s not an alien ship after all, but a ship from Earth’s dark and violent past—that is, the year 1987, and implied to be American, or at least distinctly Western. The men from Ikarie learn that the people aboard were poisoned, presumably by the final two crew members, in an ill-fated attempt to save themselves as they ran out of air. I love a spaceship full of corpses, it’s one of my favorite sci fi tropes, so I appreciate this entire tense sequence in which the men explore the derelict ship. The moment in which the desiccated flesh crumbles from the pilot’s skull is a particularly great, gruesome image that I totally want to steal for the next time I write a novel about a spaceship full of corpses.

But it ends poorly for the two men from Ikarie as well, because the ship is carrying nuclear weapons in addition to poison, one of which is accidentally armed during the search of the ship. It explodes before the men can get away, killing them instantly—which I was absolutely not expecting, even though the movie opened with a scene proving that the journey would eventually encounter some very serious problems. There is anger among the crew back on Ikarie, most of it directed at the humans of the past, the ones who built chemical and nuclear weapons, then fled Earth only to bring all that careless greed and violence with them. (I would also be angry if in the year 2163 the relics of the Reagan Era are still ruining everything. I’m already angry about that in the 2024.)

After the tragic encounter with the 20^th-century ship, the crew of Ikarie face some more excitement: the Dark Star (not to be confused with Dark Star (1974), which we’ll watch during this film club’s future John Carpenter month), the mysterious radiation, the equally mysterious force field that saves them from the radiation, and poor Michael almost losing his mind, as shown in the film’s opening.

When they reach Alpha Centauri’s White Planet, they are triumphant and excited, a mood emphasized by the successful birth of a new baby. Not only have they achieved the goal of their journey in finding life on another planet, but this life has already proven itself to be helpful in protecting their ship from the dangerous Dark Star.

The movie ends very abruptly after that, but the point is made: their journey was a success, they found what they hoped to find, they are breathless moments away from making contact, the galaxy is full of exciting things to discover and encounter.

The bright optimism of the ending just makes the changes in the American dub so much worse, but never mind all that. Let’s pretend it never existed, now that we have the original to appreciate.

I love this ending, abrupt though it is, as a natural extension of the themes set up in that great sequence aboard the ’80s spaceship full of corpses. Because the film is saying space exploration is dangerous, but worthwhile. It will take a while. We’ll fuck it up before we get it right. We’re always going to bring our problems with us. But when we get there, it’s going to be even more worthwhile if we’re not going out there conquer or colonize or make money—all the usual reasons humans have historically gone places—but simply to discover.

At the same time, it’s very interesting to me how much commentary about this film frames that optimism as nothing more than Soviet propaganda. It’s not entirely off-base; Ikarie XB-1’s screenwriter Pavel Juráček would come to be very critical of the film himself, viewing it as a failed attempt to work within a utopian vision of the future without accepting it unquestioningly. Less than a decade later, Juráček would be blacklisted from the Soviet-controlled Czechoslovak film industry for his absurdist satirical film Case for a Rookie Hangman, when it was judged that his “activities disrupted the socialist social order.” So I think it’s a mistake to view Ikarie XB-1 as nothing more than propaganda. It is, yes, presenting a socialist future as a good one, and the entire sequence with the derelict ship is a critique of capitalism, but there is a difference between a story intended to impose a future and a story intended to imagine a future, however imperfectly it does so.

For me, there something refreshing about Ikarie XB-1’s kind of optimism. Not only because there is often a tendency for science fiction films of any era, from anywhere in the world, to be cynical about science, but also because sometimes it feels like it’s almost fashionable these days for sci fi to be more interested in asserting that we can’t do exciting things like travel to other stars or live on other planets, rather than imagining how we can.

That’s what Ikarie XB-1 is doing: imagining how future space travel might go, from the lofty mission goal of discovering life on another planet right down to the minute detail of everybody on board taking their vitamins. Science fiction is a massive genre, with room for any kind of story. I want there to always be one little corner that saves some room for imagining the great and exciting things we can do and how we might be able to do them.

What did you think about Ikarie XB-1 and its rather domestic portrayal of interstellar travel? Has anybody seen the Voyage to the End of the Universe cut and have thoughts on the two versions? Why do you think the ship is called Icarus, because I honestly couldn’t find an explanation for such an ominously portentous name for a ship that never suffers any tragic fate? Do you also love it when a movie provides a surprise spaceship full of corpses?

We Hear Earth is Lovely This Time of Year

Last month we sent humans into space, so this month we’re bringing some aliens down to Earth. It’s weird how so many of them showed up after WWII to offer pointed commentary about the nature of humanity.

April 3 – The Day the Earth Stood Still (1951), directed by Robert Wise
An alien goes to Washington D.C. during the Cold War, and seventy years later some people on the internet still insist Golden Age American sci fi was apolitical.
Watch: Cultpix, Apple, Google Play, Amazon, YouTube, Vudu, Microsoft, Hoopla (if available).
[Note: Hoopla and similar site Kanopy are streaming services that allow you to use U.S. public or university library logins to access videos. I have no idea if public library systems in other countries have something similar—if they do, let me know. Support your public libraries!]
View the trailer here.

April 10 – The Mysterians (1957), directed by Ishiro Honda
Aliens go to Japan in the 1950s and probably do not actually come in peace.
Watch: Criterion, FlixFling. And, as always, I suggest a search of YouTube and the Internet Archive, although the quality of different uploads seems to vary widely.
View the trailer here.

April 17 – The Brother From Another Planet (1984), directed by John Sayles
An alien crash-lands on Ellis Island and experiences Harlem in the ’80s.
Watch: This film is widely believed and reported to be in the public domain since its release, so you can watch it in any number of places, including Amazon, Roku, Tubi, Shout TV, Apple, all over YouTube, and Internet Archive.
View the trailer here.

April 24 – Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977), directed by Steven Spielberg
Alien graduate students go to Wyoming to complete their thesis research on columnar jointing in unique intrusions of phonolite porphyry. At least that’s why I would go to other planets: to look at cool rocks.
Watch: Apple, Amazon, Google Play, YouTube, Vudu, Microsoft. There’s the original version, the special edition, and the director’s cut/collector’s edition, but, hey, just watch whichever version you feel like.
View the trailer here. [end-mark]

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Book Recommendations Vernor Vinge

A Brief Guide to the Fiction of Vernor Vinge

From his earliest novels to his magnum opus, Vinge crafted inventive, insightful works of hard science fiction.

By James Davis Nicoll

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Published on March 26, 2024

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Vernor Vinge, acclaimed author of hard science fiction, died on March 20, 2024. Vinge’s career stretched from the early 1960s to the early 21^st century. His mantlepiece accumulated a healthy assortment of trophies over the years, from the Hugo to the Prometheus to the Campbell Memorial¹. That said, no author is so famous that everyone knows of them or has read their work. Some of you may have discovered that Vinge existed at all by reading about his passing. Such folk may wonder where to begin with Vinge’s work.

While Vinge had a long career, he was never a prolific writer. Indeed, reading all of his fiction is quite doable. If you’re up for that (or if you’d rather just pick and choose where to dive in), here’s a list of his novels and collections², with brief comments.

Grimm’s World (1969)

Grimm’s World details the adventures of one Tatja Grimm, a brilliant young woman determined to earn a destiny far greater than any calling her backwater homeworld could offer. Her prodigious abilities make her a valuable asset to potential employers. However, each employer and ally are but stepping stones on the Übermensch’s journey.

Grimm’s World seems consciously crafted to appeal to editor John W. Campbell, Jr.; the plot features a science fiction magazine. Thus I was somewhat surprised to find that Grimm’s World began as a story not in Analog but in Damon Knight’s Orbit 4³. Perhaps dissatisfied with the original novel, Vinge later revised and greatly expanded the work into 1987’s Tatja Grimm’s World.

The Witling (1976)

No sooner do the Novamerican scouts land on Giri than most of the crew dies in a mishap, leaving Yoninne Leg-Wot and Bjault marooned on a planet whose biochemistry will soon kill them. Fortuitously, not only is Giri inhabited, and not only do the locals have an extraordinary gift (teleportation), but alien Prince Pelio considers Leg-Wot an exotic beauty. Too bad about that Giri’s cutthroat dynastic politics. Too bad that the plan to return to Novamerica may require betraying Pelio, of whom Leg-Wot is quite fond.

Unfortunately, every author has their worst book. This is Vinge’s. Vinge had considerable fun playing with the implications of psionic teleportation. Other elements disappoint, in particular the fact that Leg-Wat’s happy ending involves a lobotomy.

The Peace War (1984)

Next up, Vinge’s Realtime duology.

In a heartbeat, astronaut Allison Parker was transported from Cold War America to the quasi-feudal world of the so-called Peace Authority. Peace Authority founders wielded the “bobble,” a spherical forcefield, to shatter civilization, kill billions, and smother progress all in the name of global peace. That doing so empowered and enriched the Peace Authority was surely a happy side effect. However, not having invented bobbles, the Peace Authority fundamentally misunderstands their nature. They have also woefully underestimated humanity’s determination to be free.

The Peace Authority’s big mistake (well, second biggest, after being an authoritarian cabal in a novel with libertarian themes) was failing to understand that time stops inside bobbles. As with the teleportation in The Witling, Vinge has considerable fun playing with the implications of spherical stasis fields.

Marooned in Realtime (1986)

Bobbles offer escape from immediate calamity at the cost of being displaced into an uncertain future. The protagonists of Marooned in Realtime emerged from their individual bobbles to find themselves alone in a world without humans. The impressive technology of tomorrow offers hope of survival, but it will not protect the castaways from the killer in their midst.

Marooned is a number of things: a fast-forward tour of Earth’s development over millions of years and a murder mystery are but two of them. It is also an example of the thinking that shaped Vinge’s career: having convinced himself of the nigh-inevitability of the technological Singularity, Vinge then had to figure out how to create characters and events that would not be too alien for modern day readers.

A Fire Upon the Deep (1992)

All of which brings us to Vinge’s magnum opus, the Zones of Thought trilogy. The Zones of Thought, first showcased in his then-wife Joan D. Vinge’s The Outcasts of Heaven’s Belt, were Vinge’s other solution to the Singularity. Computational prowess depends on location within the galaxy. Earth (which is far off-stage) cannot experience singularity because local laws of physics preclude superhuman intelligence. Migration to other regions facilitates more advanced technology…at a risk.

Bold archaeologists locate and open an archive on the edge of the Transcend. The archive contains a Blight. This is a terrible mistake, and the last one the explorers make. The sealed evil in a tin wastes no time infecting and enslaving every being within reach. However, the Blight is as overconfident as it is ravenous. A lone spacecraft bearing a handful of survivors, mostly children, flees from the Blight, bearing with them a countermeasure as old as the Blight itself. Will the Blight’s enemies be willing to pay the price that the Countermeasure demands?

While the Singularity appears to have been at the back of the author’s mind when plotting the novel, in Fire Vinge keeps the focus on the struggle against the Blight and the adventures which his plucky freedom fighters must survive in order to save the galaxy⁴.

Fire is the novel where all of the elements of Vinge’s writing fully came together. If it’s not the novel Vinge fans count as their favorite, then their favorite is almost certainly…

A Deepness in the Sky (1999)

Set 20,000 years before Fire, Deepness details the efforts of a sublight human starship manned by Qeng Ho traders to contact a most curious alien race, for the material betterment of both sides. Unfortunately for the humans aboard the ship and the alien Spiders, the authoritarian Emergents also have designs on both the ship and the Spiders—those designs being subjugation and slavery.

Some readers may be fascinated by Vinge’s efforts to imagine what thousands of years of singularity-free civilization might look like. Bad news: it’s an endless boom/bust cycle, spiced with inescapable relics of ancient technological decisions. Others may simply enjoy a tale of struggle between the self-congratulatory evil of the Emergents and their hapless victims. Me, I am here for the Bussard ramjets.

The Children of the Sky (2011)

The third and final book in the trilogy, Children is set ten years after Fire. Remnants of the Blight have survived Countermeasure, and may someday target the backwater world on which Ravna and the other survivors are currently marooned. Ravna sets out to provide the Tines, the local aliens, with the means to fend off the Blight’s remnants…but not only are some of the Tines uninterested in cooperating with Ravna, they have convinced themselves that the Blight was the hero of the recent conflict.

I greatly resent how recent events make it impossible for me to complain that nobody could possibly think the brain-eating monster from beyond the stars was their friend. Still, it is best to focus on the positive: authors now have so much more leeway for characters to plausibly embrace willfully self-destructive courses of action.

Rainbows End (2006)

Rapidly advancing medicine cures Robert Gu’s Alzheimer’s disease.  Gu must learn to adapt to the rapidly changing world he expected to soon exit. Also, the grave will no longer protect him from the consequences of his abominable treatment of friends and family. Are rehabilitation and reconciliation possible, or are some mistakes unfixable?

Rainbows End is set right on the cusp of the Singularity, when things are getting weird but are not yet incomprehensible to Mark I human brains. Many readers will most clearly remember the thriller plot that manifests partway through the narrative. Me, I am haunted by the legitimately horrifying approach to archives featured in the novel.

The Collected Stories of Vernor Vinge (2001)

Finally, the short fiction. Like many authors of his vintage, Vinge began as a short fiction author, first appearing in New Worlds⁵.

The Collected Stories is (save for one omission) the go-to collection for which the Vinge-curious should search. The contents span Vinge’s career from its beginning to the publication of the collection, allowing readers to enjoy Vinge’s development as an author.

However, my single caveat regarding this collection is a huge one: Vinge’s most famous short story is arguably the Hugo and Nebula-finalist “True Names,” which is nowhere to be seen. For that, readers will have to track down the anthology True Names and the Opening of the Cyberspace Frontier (2001) or the collection True Names… and Other Dangers (1987)⁶.

Are there upcoming Vinge projects of which I am unaware? Are there individual works that Vinge fans wish to discuss at greater length? If so, comments are below.[end-mark]

1. Not the award that is now known as the Astounding, but a different award that is also not a Hugo Award. ︎
2. I am omitting chapbooks, Binary Stars, and anthologies. ︎
3. The same Orbit series whose New Wave tendencies so inflamed the outrage of the Science Fiction Writers of America grognards. Despite appearing in Orbit, Vinge was not a New Wave SF author. ︎
4. Another player in Fire is a galactic communications network oddly similar to Usenet. We now know that if a galactic communications network existed, it would resemble MySpace LiveJournal Twitter Tik Tok. ︎
5. New Worlds was known for publishing New Wave SF. Nevertheless, Vinge was in most respects the antithesis of a New Wave SF author. ︎
6. You might want to keep an eye out for the Vinge collection Threats… and Other Promises (1988)as well. ︎

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Movies & TV Star Trek: Discovery

Star Trek: Discovery’s Sonequa Martin-Green Says Season 5 Will Have “A Sense of Joy and Adventure”

There’s gravity to the final season, but everyone will still get to have fun

By Vanessa Armstrong

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Published on April 1, 2024

Credit: James Dimmock/Paramount+

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Credit: James Dimmock/Paramount+

“Remember, it’s an adventure!”

That, according to star Sonequa Martin-Green, was the advice the writers on Star Trek: Discovery told the cast when they shot the fifth and final season of the show.

During a roundtable discussion with Martin-Green that Reactor attended, the actor, who plays Captain Michael Burnham, shared how everyone—even before the cast and crew knew they were filming the series’ final episodes—knew this season would be different than the ones that came before it.

“We knew that we wanted to make a tonal shift,” Martin-Green said. “[Showrunner] Michelle Paradise was really vocal about that. She let us in on that process, and she said we really want this to be an adventure. We want this to be our Indiana Jones season. We want everybody to have fun.”

That doesn’t mean, however, that Season Five will be light on the major challenge the USS Discovery crew faces. “We went even bigger with our subject matter,” teased Martin-Green. “But even while we went bigger, we wanted to bring levity to the gravity of it all….”

The adventure the crew goes on is something that Paradise said in a separate roundtable was something that had been brewing with the writers since Season Four, and as such wasn’t something they thought they’d explore when the show was first created.

Alex Kurtzman, the co-creator of several Star Trek shows, including Discovery, also reflected how certain developments in the series came about as the show’s seasons passed. “I don’t know that we necessarily thought when we created the show that we’d be jumping to the 32nd century, and that turned out to be a total delight for us, and I think a delight for people who watch the show,” he shared during a separate roundtable discussion.

Kurtzman added that Burnham’s character arc—moving from a mutineer to a Starfleet captain—was something he and co-creator Bryan Fuller wanted to have happen from the beginning. These two contrasting examples, said Kurtzman, reflect how Discovery—for lack of a better word—discovered what kind of show it would be.

The first two episodes in the fifth and final season of Star Trek: Discovery premiere on April 4, 2024 on Paramount+. Subsequent episodes drop weekly, with the finale airing May 30, 2024. [end-mark]

The post <i>Star Trek: Discovery</i>’s Sonequa Martin-Green Says Season 5 Will Have “A Sense of Joy and Adventure” appeared first on Reactor.

Book Recommendations space colonization

Five SF Stories Featuring Unsuccessful Attempts at Space Colonization

When poor planning meets insufficient technology and resources, anything can happen!

By James Davis Nicoll

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Published on March 21, 2024

Credit: NASA/SAIC/Pat Rawlings

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Credit: NASA/SAIC/Pat Rawlings

While perusing the latest edition of the tabletop roleplaying game 2300 AD¹, this passage caught my attention:

Given that alien worlds will tend to be, well, quite alien, and settlements on Earth, the planet on which humans evolved, have been known to collapse and vanish in the face of calamity, this passage seems quite plausible. It is not surprising that a significant part of the current edition of the game touches on the technologies required to survive on other worlds, and what social effects these enabling technologies might have. Nor is it surprising that SF authors have sometimes turned to what I will call “premature settlement” for inspiration.²

Starman Jones by Robert Heinlein (1953)

Frustrated farm boy Max Jones abandons his vapid stepmother and her latest beau for a life among the stars. At least, that’s the plan… Max’s lack of credentials in the guild-dominated Earth of tomorrow dooms his ambition to join the starfarers’ guild. It falls to Max’s ethically flexible pal Sam Anderson to wangle berths on starship Asgard through the power of applied lying.

A navigational mishap maroons Asgard in a hitherto unknown system. Unless Asgard can find its way home—if, say, a former farm boy turns out to have a cognitive knack seemingly designed to fulfil a very specific plot need—the crew and passengers will live the rest of their lives on the unfamiliar alien world. As the planet in question already has owners who have little interest in sharing, those lives could be quite short.

Heinlein has something of reputation for placing humans above all other beings in his fiction. However, several of his pre-Starship Troopers works feature aliens that humans are well advised to treat with respect and caution (lest humans discover the hard way the full extent of the aliens’ abilities). Starman Jones is such a novel.

“On the Last Afternoon” by James Tiptree, Jr. (1972)

(Collected in Warm Worlds and Otherwise and Her Smoke Rose Up Forever) Their ship irreparably damaged, Mysha and his fellow humans were forced to set down on an alien world. The surface of the world appeared relentlessly hostile until—at the very last moment—a convenient clearing appeared, a clearing where they could safely land and build their new community.

The human castaways assumed that the clearing was due to a tornado. This is not, in fact, the cause. The unfortunate settlers are about to get firsthand experience of the thing that cleared the forest. Unless they can produce a miracle at the last moment, the experience is likely to be the humans’ last.

Readers will be cheered to discover that humanity survives the calamitous events of this story… in the same way that humanity survives the events of Joanna Russ’ We Who Are About To…

The Keeper of the Isis Light by Monica Hughes (1980)

The class-B, marginally habitable planet Isis has but two inhabitants: robot Guardian and young orphan Olwen Pendennis. Olwen accepts her solitary circumstances as normal. The impending arrival of a starship packed to the gunnels with colonists promises unwelcome change.

As the newcomers discover firsthand, almost all of Isis is uninhabitable absent certain advanced technologies not immediately available to the colonists. Clad in an environment suit to protect her from the colonists, Olwen does her best to provide the newcomers with guidance. Alas, the promising arrangement is imperiled when the settlers discover precisely how it is the young girl has survived on the hostile alien world.³

While this colony doesn’t totally fail, there aren’t all that many settlers and they are confined to a single, specific region from which egress is impractical. On Earth, a species with such constrained numbers and restricted location would be seen as endangered. Making matters even worse is the fact that this group of settlers is somewhat lacking in ingenuity and willingness to change and adapt.

Aurora by Kim Stanley Robinson (2015)

Seven generations after launch, an aging generation starship approaches Tau Ceti. The original crew hoped that their descendants would found a new community on the potentially habitable world known to be orbiting Tau Ceti. Said descendants, having been involuntarily drafted into the effort through the misfortune of having selected the wrong ancestors, are rather less enthusiastic about the whole settling-an-alien-world concept.

The good news: Tau Ceti does indeed have at least one potentially habitable world. The bad news: there is a huge gap between “potentially habitable” and “actually habitable.” It is in no way clear that the involuntary settlers have the correct combination of technology, ingenuity, and leeway for error to bridge the gap. The only alternative is to return to the Solar System, a task that may be as beyond their limited abilities as settling an unfamiliar world.

Rather than dwell on the hilarious science errors scattered throughout this jeremiad against space colonies as a coping mechanism for climate change, I will admit there are two factors that legitimately doom this effort. First, that two thousand people is too few to ensure survival after the inevitable setbacks. Second, that these folks are for the most part incurious nincompoops whose failure is as foreordained as that of any Robert Sheckley characters. Unlike Sheckley’s works, this novel does not seem to have been intended as comedy.

The Scourge Between Stars by Ness Brown (2023)

Having abandoned the Earth as irredeemably damaged, the Calypso and the rest of the Goddess Flotilla set off for Proxima. Proxima b proved beyond the would-be settlers’ ability to colonize. The disheartened crew of the Calypso reluctantly abandoned efforts to turn Proxima b into a new home and set off to see if Earth was quite as hopeless as their ancestors thought.

The return voyage is far slower than the outward journey. More time for aging starships to fail and fall silent. Whether their ingenuity will be sufficient to keep Calypso functioning long enough to discover what has become of Earth  is a question that concerns the crew. Thanks to an alien stowaway, insufficiently closed life-support loops are the least of their problems.

There are some basic rules that would-be colonists should follow to enhance their odds of survival. First, don’t go haring off to an unknown world on a generation ship with only a handful of colonists armed with untested colonization methods. Second, try very hard not to be written by James Tiptree, Jr. or (arguably worse) a depressed John Brunner.⁴ Third—and this is the mistake the crew of Calypso makes—don’t be characters in a horror novel.

These are only a few of the heartwarming tales SF authors have spun about intrepid colonists boldly settling hostile worlds…then failing thanks to insufficient technology and resources. While this is not a large subgenre (see footnote two), there are certainly other examples not mentioned here. If I missed your particular favourite—such as that Poul Anderson story; you know the one I mean—feel free to mention it in comments below.[end-mark]

1. 2300 AD is the game whose three-dimensional map you may recall me praising in a previous entry on this site. I was recently delighted to see that someone has created a resource that handles the heavy lifting of working out routes from interstellar origin to interstellar destination. ︎
2. Not all that many books about premature settlement, because failed settlements are a bit of a downer. ︎
3. I’ll just reassure readers now that the method used is not the one so memorably deployed in John Wyndham’s “Survival.”: “Look, baby,” she said. “Look there! Food! Lovely food….” ︎
4. Why, yes, I did just read Brunner’s Total Eclipse. Why do you ask? ︎

The post Five SF Stories Featuring Unsuccessful Attempts at Space Colonization appeared first on Reactor.

Book Recommendations architecture

Arkady Martine in Singapore: On Sci-Fi City Planning and What Makes a “City of the Future”

A discussion of futuristic cities and architecture as inspiration for science fiction.

By Alexis Ong

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Published on March 27, 2024

Photo by Julien de Salaberry [via Unsplash]

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Photo by Julien de Salaberry [via Unsplash]

On Arkady Martine’s first trip to Singapore, following the advice of an old professor, one of her first ports of call was the Singapore City Gallery. It’s a city planning museum that charts the country’s 60-year evolution into a modern metropolis whose skyline, mainly the Marina Bay Sands hotel with its distinctive “boat” on top, has become synonymous with the idea of a futuristic city steeped in polished, techno-corporate sci-fi aesthetics. As a trained city planner, Martine’s interest in Singapore’s urban planning history was obvious, but as a science fiction writer—there’s such a marvelous amount of infrastructural detail in A Memory Called Empire—there’s plenty to unpack about Singapore’s image as a “city of the future,” too. 

“It’s part of the scale,” says Martine, who was here in November for the 2023 Singapore Writers’ Festival, along with her wife and fellow author Vivian Shaw. “I will fully admit that I got here and I was like ‘wow, that looks like someone landed on top of three buildings.’ That’s not a thing I see in my daily life, and I’ve lived in big cities with very cool architecture.” When we spoke, she hadn’t been over to Marina Bay Sands yet, but had observed it from a distance; if you’re staying in that part of town, it’s frankly hard not to see it. “There’s an echo for a westerner, of a kind of still-capture of a childhood film image. I’m thinking mostly about Star Wars, but not just Star Wars, it’s Blade Runner, it’s the whole thing.” 

Martine enjoys wandering around, sticking to public transport, and the perks of getting lost (“you learn stuff and get better food that way”), which means ample opportunities for her to observe new environments as a wanderer. Her preferred methods of exploration inevitably involve drifting away from the most touristy spots that serve as visual fuel for fictional on-screen dystopias in Westworld and Equals. “[Singapore] does not feel slick like that except in specific, very designed places,” Martine says of the country’s tourist-facing public image. “But those are there.”

I’d spent most of my adult life in the US, holding my home country at arm’s length while trying to reconcile my interests in science fiction with “smart city” marketing and Singapore’s carefully-cultivated reputation as a sparkling-clean, forward-thinking metropolis, albeit one with high-strung, often draconian approaches to media transparency, citizen “management,” and freedom of expression. For many, it does well to live up to this image; for someone trying to integrate back into a home they never really knew, it’s a little bit like parsing an uncanny valley of tolerable, all-too-familiar dystopia. 

In 2020, just after Singapore’s appearance on the third season of Westworld, researcher and academic Joanne Leow wrote:

Like Leow, as a then-diaspora Singaporean who watched my home country as a Southeast Asian stand-in for the usual dystopian sprawl of Los Angeles, it was hard not to think of the difficult relationship between Singaporean political priorities and the city as an ongoing extension of said priorities: an orderly place of efficiency, stability, and conformity. Here, more so than other big cities, there is a place and time for everything, with infantilizing PSAs and reminders of the social contract and correct civic behavior on public housing notice boards and train platforms.

A Memory Called Empire is where Martine’s professional background shines in all its technicolor space-opera glory; it’s one of a handful of sci-fi books where the relationship between citizen and public space feels deeply, specifically personal to me. In Teixcalaan, I see familiar hints of top-down policymaking that grease the empire’s efficient wheels. Through Mahit’s eyes, I can see how meticulously Martine digs into the culture of infrastructure and the use of memory as a political, institutional weapon, manifesting in various ways in city architecture and historical buildings. And most of all, I see my long and exhausting relationship with the US, my even more exhausting relationship with Singapore, and how a life split between these two places has shaped my own perceptions of urban dystopias both real and fictional. 

Buy the Book

A Memory Called Empire

Arkady Martine

Winner of the 2020 Hugo Award for Best Novel

Buy Book

A Memory Called Empire

Arkady Martine

Winner of the 2020 Hugo Award for Best Novel

Winner of the 2020 Hugo Award for Best Novel

Buy this book from:

• Amazon
• Barnes and Noble
• iBooks
• IndieBound
• Target

Usually in a sci-fi setting, the city functions as a snapshot in time that helps to illustrate how characters engage with their environment; for Martine, this might involve how long it takes for a character to get to their job, or if they even have a job to get to at all. It is not so much concerned with planning, or what drives planning decisions. “Fiction in general, and science fiction specifically, is bad at thinking about city planning as a discipline,” she explains. “Mostly because it feels absolutely dull, it’s worse than economics. I say this as someone who’s trained as a city planner and who loves it very much and actually finds it deeply fascinating and exciting and horrifically political.” More often than not, she finds that the idea of a constructed, planned city in science fiction—with some exceptions—is simply a given. 

“In the US they go on and on…that planning is some kind of neutral process, and that the point of a planner is to be a facilitator,” says Martine. “This is why I ended up in politics and policy and not in planning, because to be perfectly honest, it’s bullshit.” She cites the origins of Victorian infrastructure as a starting point for the western view that the constructed environment determines behavior, “which is that there are too many people and too little space and it’s not sanitary, which is all true.” The solution is not actually ‘everyone has to live in a perfect little garden house,’ but that’s the ideal that is constructed.” Martine hints at this topic (albeit using the smaller scale of a single building) in her recent novel Rose/House. But the city is a different creature. “I don’t know a ton about the experience of life in Singapore, not really at all,” says Martine. “And the way it is written about in planning textbooks, articles, examples, there’s an almost…to condemn my countrymen a bit, a gleeful sense that ‘oh, if we could only trap everybody on an island, we could do it too’.” 

Cities are complicated; smart cities, where constant data harvesting and surveillance is  almost unavoidable, much more so. A lot of discussion has unfolded over the years of the idea of authenticity in Singapore (aided by the insufferable “Disneyland with the Death Penalty” essay by William Gibson over twenty years ago), which prompts me to ask Martine about the role of authoritarianism and “authenticity” in a city of the future. One of her areas of focus is climate resiliency planning, which necessitates a fluid, responsive approach to drastic environmental changes; I ask her if this requires an inherently authoritarian streak, as helping people survive difficult conditions within a state framework is inevitably going to require hard compromises, or violence. “Yes,” she says carefully, “but only in the sense that I find that all forms of complex social arrangements have an element of authoritarianism to them, especially all state forms. And I want that to be a neutral statement that is neither positive nor negative. It’s just true, for me at least.” 

I ask if she’s heard about the exorbitant NEOM megacity project in Saudi Arabia, which includes a wall-like smart city called “The Line” that will supposedly house 9 million people and run on 100% renewable energy; if there ever was a truly fantastical science fiction-driven dystopia project going on, that would surely be it. “[Those projects] are art. They’re not real yet,” Martine says matter-of-factly. “You show me one that has 9 million people living in it and I’ll tell you what I think.” She remains perplexed by the design; since The Line is also displacing and imprisoning local desert tribes to make way for its existence, I suggest that maybe it’s supposed to literally function as a wall. “But why do you want to make [The Line] so linear?” muses Martine aloud. “What’s the driving thing behind that? Why that choice? And that one I continuously have trouble wrapping my head around. Aside from ‘that’s how a shopping mall works’ which feels like it’s too simple an answer.”

The shopping mall vibe is one I know well—Singapore’s prevalence of malls, stitched together by basements and walkable underground passages, is well-known. A shopping mall as a structure is a pure uncut vein of hypercapitalism—designed to orient you in a space dictated by advertising and spending, easily readable and pleasantly generic enough to avoid any friction. The wealth of sanitized shopping malls is one of the most common criticisms of Singapore, and one that often comes up against discussions about the concept of cultural authenticity, especially given that land is at a premium, the neophilic culture, and the government’s love of shiny new “hubs” and tightly controlled real estate developments. But the shopping mall is also an easy distraction from bigger discussions about how parts of even the most “futurisitc” cities—even smart cities—can diverge from their intended design. 

“I don’t feel like you can sanitize a city, that it’s possible to do so,” she says. “Cities inevitably complicate… they’re full of a lot of people very close together; it’s the best thing about them and the worst thing about them at the same time.” And so in this dense mess of humanity, spontaneity and practicality tend to arise in unexpected ways – the use and reuse of space by its actual inhabitants rather than its designers. “So can a writer write a city of the future that isn’t authentic? Of course. If you’re thinking about designing an actual one, as soon as you’ve got it, it’s going to be used by people in it and it will develop forms of authenticity anyway.”

Martine, who has spent years living in multiple cities around the world, is still impressed by Singapore’s futuristic architecture, especially in the way greenery and nature are functionally incorporated into buildings to improve ventilation, air circulation, and heat management. “I’d only read about it in theory, I hadn’t seen it, and I’m really glad I got to,” she adds. “It’s an interesting place, it’s different than others I’ve been in.” She doesn’t feel like Singapore is a definitive city of the future or a “science fictional” place in the way that it is sometimes discussed, in games of online broken telephone about the payoff between the will of a one-party state and having omnipresent “smart” future-forward infrastructure. I agree with her that being here is easy; it is easy to be told what to do on the train or how to take the bus, where to stand or buy a ticket, but yet, Martine also finds it more complicated than the cities of her childhood. 

“It has a particular kind of – and again, I’ve been here for a week so what do I know—willingness to do the kind of self-surgery and projection into the future that very few other places I’ve been to have expressed so clearly,” she says thoughtfully. “Like not an excisement of the past, but a ‘here’s how we changed ourselves.’ It’s almost like transhumanism. Everywhere does this, but most places don’t make it a point of telling you. And here I have a sense of being told all the time.” 

Perhaps this is what being a “city of the future” is all about—Martine’s description of self-surgery is frighteningly precise and feels right to me. The overlap between science fiction is far less about glass-wrapped skyscrapers and driverless cars, but a self-consciousness, or self-awareness, of how cities are made and remade, and the relationship between a place and its people. But in my fixation on all the ways one can dissect the reality of my own city, I’m turning into my own worst enemy, and Martine is quick to snap me out of it. “The future’s right here, we’re in it,” she says with a smile. “There’s no future. There’s only now.”[end-mark]

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Book Recommendations

Exploring Nordic Speculative Fiction in Five Novels

These five memorable works encompass magical realism, futuristic dystopias, zombies, trolls, and sorcery, and quite a bit more.

By Rowdy Geirsson

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Published on March 20, 2024

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In the world of English-language books, the Nordic countries have a solid reputation for providing us with a steady stream of crime fiction (under the apt descriptor of “Nordic noir”) and children’s literature, including classics like Pippi Longstocking and the Moomins.

Fantasy, science fiction, supernatural horror, and other speculative fiction by Nordic authors haven’t hit the mainstream in quite the same way—but this is also true in the Nordic homelands of Denmark, Finland, Iceland, Norway, and Sweden themselves. Despite all the fairy tales, folklore, and Norse/Finnish mythology abounding in these nations, the Nordic speculative fiction novel just hasn’t enjoyed the same robust tradition as its counterpart in native English.

But that’s been steadily changing. Nordic speculative fiction still isn’t being written or released at the same rate as Nordic noir, but there’s a growing scene. Nordic speculative fiction authors are often strikingly original—rather than bandwagoning onto a popular, prevailing theme or familiar premise with a slight twist or added extravagance, these writers frequently totally subvert or eschew expectations entirely. English-language translations aren’t hugely commonplace, and the novels that have found their way to the US, UK, and beyond most often tend to be set in our own world (typically in the author’s own Nordic homeland) rather than in alternate worlds. So this list doesn’t feature any examples of high fantasy or space opera, but if you’re a reader who enjoys monsters, alternate realities, magic realism, or dystopia, then one of these titles may be for you.

Smilla’s Sense of Snow by Peter Høeg

(Translated by Tiina Nunnally) A winner of multiple mystery novel awards when it was released, Smilla’s Sense of Snow is the least obvious book on this list and also the oldest, having first been published in Denmark in 1992. Despite the fact that it’s generally labeled as a mystery, Smilla’s Sense of Snow is more akin to a Michael Crichton-style sci-fi thriller heavily wrapped up in the trappings of Nordic noir.

The plot follows the actions of Smilla, a Greenlandic woman living in Denmark, who begins to investigate the mysterious death of young boy in her neighborhood. The deeper she digs, the stranger and more sinister things become as the setting gradually shifts from urban Copenhagen to the desolate, icy coast of Greenland. The narrative voice is hugely entertaining, provided you enjoy an abundance of highly cynical witticisms interspersed throughout the text, and while the speculative element is only revealed towards the very end, it remains the clear motivational force for all of the book’s main events. Smilla’s Sense of Snow was adapted into a movie in 1997 starring Julia Ormond and Gabriel Byrne. (Note: released in the UK as Miss Smilla’s Feeling for Snow)

Memory of Water by Emmi Itäranta

(Translated by the author.) Set in a drought-ravaged distant (yet easy to envision) future, Memory of Water takes place in former Finnish territory that has come under the foreign rule of a draconian, new empire based in what is now China. The book focuses on the teenage protagonist, Noria, and her family of traditional tea masters—who by decree enjoy a more generous rationing of water than most citizens—in a secluded village near Kuusamo at the moment when a new military commander with a serious chip on his shoulder arrives in town.

Adding to the tension and suspense is the side-plot that occurs predominately in the second half of the book involving Noria and her best friend’s discovery of…something that shouldn’t be commented upon further for anyone who might want to read it. Full of lush prose about the tangible and ephemeral qualities of water, Memory of Water is more drama than action or thriller; it’s a very somber novel, but also very memorable. A film adaptation of the book premiered in Finland in 2022.

Handling the Undead by John Ajvide Lindqvist

(Translated by Ebba Segerberg.) A highly original twist on the zombie theme, Handling the Dead presents readers with the notion that the undead aren’t really evil, slavering fiends, but just sad, somewhat dim-witted people who simply want to go home upon awakening—it’s the living who are scary. The story follows three separate pairs of individuals in Stockholm who are confronted with the mysterious reanimation of a recently deceased loved one, and how each of these pairs independently handles the situation on a personal level while society at large spirals out of control around them. Also, there’s rabbit telepathy. The book is the second offering by Lindqvist, who is best known as the author of Let the Right One In (adapted in some versions as Let Me In). A new feature length film based on Handling the Undead was just released in February of 2024 in Norway.

Troll: A Love Story by Johanna Sinisalo

(Translated by Herbert Lomas.) A charming but twisted little book that posits the notion that trolls are very real—and have been  scientifically studied and classified as the incredibly rare species, Felipithecus trollius. Among regular interludes comprised of invented documentation about trolls as well as text from actual volumes of folklore, the plot follows the trials and tribulations of the main character, Angel, as he struggles to house-train and raise an abandoned baby troll that he happened to find by chance one day. Taking place in the interior Finnish city of Tampere, the journey is a bizarre ride through Angel’s private and personal world of ex-boyfriends, friends and lovers, and an abused mail-order bride that steadily builds up a thickening atmosphere of obsession, paranoia, and darkness. (Note: released in the UK as Not Before Sundown)

Shadows of the Short Days by Alexander Dan Vilhjálmsson

(Translated by the author.) Set in a present-day, alternate-reality version of Reykjavik, Shadows of the Short Days has the feel of a steampunk novel in terms of its attitude and general aesthetics, but built on concepts related to Old Norse sorcery rather than the technology of Victorian England. Many of the Icelandic locales referenced in the book actually exist, though not necessarily with the same functions or purposes as in real life—the city’s iconic, hilltop hot water tank construction known as Perlan is presented as a thaumaturgical power plant, for example. The story follows two main characters on separate paths that sometimes intersect as they struggle to achieve their goals: Sæmundur’s is to become the greatest practitioner of galdr (a specific form of Viking Age sorcery) the world has ever seen, and Garún’s is to overthrow the oppressive regime of the Kalmar Commonwealth (inspired by the actual Kalmar Union of the Middle Ages).

The book is a wild ride and should appeal to anyone who might like the idea of magical human skulls that operate as music/audio devices, highly restrictive schools of dark Norse sorcery, tribal human-bird warrior clans, exiled huldufólk (Icelandic fairy people) who feast on human memories, hostile scorn pole-based magical attacks, and clumsy golems made from unwashed laundry.

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The post Exploring Nordic Speculative Fiction in Five Novels appeared first on Reactor.

Column Science Fiction Film Club

Silent Running: A 1970s Environmental Fable Remains Depressingly All Too Relevant 

Director Douglas Trumbull’s special effects and Bruce Dern’s intense performance anchor this haunting, melancholy classic.

By Kali Wallace

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Published on March 20, 2024

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Silent Running (1972) Directed by Douglas Trumbull. Starring Bruce Dern. Screenplay by Deric Washburn, Michael Cimino, and Steven Bochco.

For just a moment, let’s time travel back to the summer of 1962. In the U.S., John F. Kennedy is president and committed to sending astronauts to the moon. Dodger Stadium is brand new. The Supreme Court issues rulings declaring mandatory prayer in schools unconstitutional and decriminalizing nude photographs of men. The Cuban Missile Crisis is lurking just a few months in the future. And, starting in June as a lead-up to a September publication, The New Yorker begins serializing a little book called Silent Spring, in which marine biologist and conservationist Rachel Carson documents research into the harmful effects of man-made pesticides on the natural world.

Silent Spring had a huge and immediate impact on the American public, which Carson and her publisher, Houghton Mifflin, had very much expected and prepared for. There was somewhat panicked pushback from the U.S. government and chemical industry giants like DuPont and Monsanto, but all of that only made Silent Spring more influential in public opinion. A culture of unchecked growth and technological development had dominated life in the U.S. since the end of WWII, and Carson’s book was one of the many catalysts that prompted people to seriously ask if all that progress was doing more harm than good.

The environmental movement picked up momentum over the next decade. By the end of the 1960s, the Environmental Defense Fund, founded as a direct response to Silent Spring, was actively filing lawsuits to end use of the pesticide DDT. The first Earth Day was declared in 1970; the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency was established that same year. Environmental concerns were in the news, in the halls of government, in the courtrooms, and in the public consciousness. It’s no surprise that those themes showed up in movie theaters as well.

Humanity’s impact on the natural world—whether our own Earth or other worlds—has always been a part of science fiction, but Silent Running was not initially meant to be an environmental story at all. Douglas Trumbull had recently finished working with Stanley Kubrick, creating the special effects for 2001: A Space Odyssey, so he had big, thoughtful, serious science fiction on his mind when he first starting putting Silent Running together. His earliest conception of the film was about first contact with an alien civilization.

But it evolved, as stories tend to do, and what he ended up with is an environmental fable that simply—and not remotely subtly—calls out the dysfunction in humanity’s relationship with nature. Trumbull had never directed a film before, and in fact he would only direct one more feature in his life. (That would be Brainstorm (1983), which is largely remembered now for being Natalie Wood’s last movie, as she died during production.) What Trumbull is mostly known for is his absolutely legendary special effects work on some of Hollywood’s most influential sci fi films: 2001, Star Trek: The Motion Picture, Close Encounters of the Third Kind, Blade Runner. So much of how we imagine science fiction to look comes from Trumbull’s special effects work.

Here are some fun details about how Silent Running was made, which I share for no real reason other than the fact that I love learning about this stuff and hope you do too:

• The exterior shots of Valley Forge and the other ships use a 25-foot model built from wood, metal, and plastic, with much of the mechanical detailing coming from literally hundreds of model kits of WWII airplanes and tanks.
• For the interior, Trumbull made a deal with the U.S. Navy to film inside the aircraft carrier USS Valley Forge, which was waiting to be decommissioned and scrapped at the Long Beach Naval Shipyard.
• The forests were filmed inside a hangar at the Van Nuys Airport, and many scenes with the stars and domes were done “in-camera,” that is, using projected footage in the live scene, rather than added afterward during processing.
• And, finally, the three robotic drones—Huey, Dewey, and Louie—are not mechanical at all, but are actors in costume: Mark Persons, Cheryl Sparks, Steven Brown, and Larry Whisenhunt, all double amputees. (Additional fun fact: A few years later, George Lucas would direct Ralph McQuarrie to consider the Silent Running drones as an example of what he wanted R2-D2 to look like.)

On that note, if the business and craft of making sci fi movies in ’70s Hollywood interests you, I recommend Trumbull’s lengthy 1978 interview with Fantastic Films Magazine.

Trumbull was inspired by working on 2001, but he wasn’t working with 2001 money. As a result the practical effects in Silent Running are a great example of doing a lot on a comparatively limited budget, just by looking around Los Angeles and getting creative with what was available. (We are talking about more than a million dollars; this is Hollywood budgeting, not normal people budgeting.) And the film still looks really, really good. The ship exterior is visually interesting, the sense of interior space is convincing, and the images of the darkness of space outside the forest domes are hauntingly effective.

But let’s be real. The most important special effect in Silent Running is Bruce Dern’s crazy eyes.

Dern plays Freeman Lowell, a man who has spent the better part of a decade aboard the spaceship Valley Forge, caring for the last remnants of Earth’s flora and forests. The film doesn’t explain why the last pieces of nature have been enclosed in domes and launched into space aboard American Airlines spacecraft—and I have questions about what the hell American Airlines was thinking with this sponsorship, because it does not make them look good. We learn that there are no trees or plants left on Earth, no parks or wild areas, no places where kids can dig in the dirt or run through the grass. There is also, apparently, “…hardly any disease. No poverty. And everybody has a job.” Everything has been replaced by absolute uniformity: everywhere is 75 degrees Fahrenheit and everybody looks and acts the same. (Feel free to insert your own joke about Hollywood here.)

The film doesn’t dig deeply into any of this; these details emerge when the characters are arguing. I’m skeptical enough to doubt fictional characters when they claim the world has no poverty or disease, nor am I entirely convinced the audience is supposed to buy it. (The whole world? Or just the world of white guys working corporate space jobs? I have questions.) It’s vague and muddled worldbuilding anyway, so we won’t dwell on it. Whatever the intent, as a person who likes trees and seasons a lot more than I like being an anonymous cog in the grinding wheels of capitalism, I agree with Lowell that this future Earth sounds pretty bleak. But even bleaker is the fact that of the few characters we meet in the film, only Lowell believes it’s a situation than can be changed.

When Valley Forge and its fleet receive orders to destroy the precious forests and return to Earth, with no explanation except that it’s time they get on with the business of commercial shipping, Lowell is crushed, but the other members of the expedition are happy to be going home. They acknowledge that it’s kinda sad to destroy the last of Earth’s forests, but to them it’s inevitable. They don’t even question that they’re doing it just so their bosses can make more money using the ships for something else. There’s no point in trying to fight it, or dream about a different world. One of them says, “The fact is, Lowell, if people were interested, something would have been done a long time ago.”

I’ll pause there to let everybody wince before we move on.

Lowell decides to do something about it. What he decides to do is murder: he kills his three crewmates to stop them from jettisoning the last forest dome, then stages an explosion so the other ships in the fleet think he’s suffering some sort of catastrophic mechanical failure. He sets course for Saturn, hoping to run away far enough that the other ships don’t follow.

Because Lowell is the only character on screen for the majority of the film, so much of the movie depends on how Dern plays him. Contemporaneous reviews of the film had some mixed opinions about Dern’s portrayal, but I come down on the side of loving it. Even before things start to go wrong, he’s wide-eyed and strident, soft-spoken but intense, and more than a little sanctimonious. His crew uniform has a prominent Smokey the Bear patch on it, but when he’s working in the forest dome he wears a loose robe to talk to rabbits and birds, like some sort of space-age St. Francis of Assisi, complete with Joan Baez on the soundtrack. (The music was composed by Peter Schickele, better known as musical satirist P.D.Q. Bach; Diane Lampert wrote the lyrics to the songs Baez sings.) He’s a hippie, a wild man of the woods, a bedraggled mystic, a wise hermit. He’s committed to his counterculture perspective. He’s an insufferable dinner companion.

The fact that he’s right about what a terrible decision it is to destroy the forests has nothing to do with how he comes across; there is no effort here to artificially link righteousness or morality with likability. Lowell’s crewmates are good-natured and affable—they’re also the ones who laugh while blowing up cute little bunnies with nuclear bombs.

But they are Lowell’s fellow humans and almost-friends, and their deaths weigh on his conscience, even though he believes he made the right choice. The way he unravels as the film goes on is fascinating, because he uses the robotic drones to replace the crew. He reprograms them to follow his lead when it comes to work, but also to keep him company in poker games. He even has them bury the corpse of a former human crewmate, just in case the symbolism wasn’t clear enough. (About the poker: A computer scientist by the name of Nicholas Findler was programming computers to play poker in the 1970s—there may have been others, but his research articles were the ones that came up when I dug around—so this element wasn’t actually very futuristic at the time, just a few years on the early side.)

This progression grows more unsettling when Lowell teaches the drones to care for the forest, recalling the children of Earth who will never have a chance to climb a tree or play in grass. It’s interesting to me that the drones are never actually proven to have any personality or human characteristics; Lowell’s perception is what anthropomorphizes them. And when we get to the end of the film, Lowell uses the last drone to replace himself as the final caretaker of Earth’s forests. Humans may be willing to save themselves—after all, the other ship shows up to rescue Lowell, even after he assumed they would abandon him—but they can’t be trusted with the last scrap of Earth’s forests. That’s up to one little robot with a watering can.

Silent Running is far from a perfect movie. If we started listing the scientific inaccuracies we would be here all day. In a 1978 New York Times piece about science fiction, Carl Sagan wrote, “Trumbull’s characters are able to build interplanetary cities but have forgotten the inverse‐square law. I was willing to overlook the portrayal of the rings of Saturn as pastel‐colored gases, but not this.” And, really, that about sums it up. Science fiction often has very silly science.

But as a fable about man’s relationship to the natural world, the film is anything but silly. It’s heavy and melancholy, even more so now, fifty-two years of escalating climate crisis later, than it was upon release. Silent Running was a modest success at the time, sandwiched as it was in an era of some of the biggest, flashiest, most genre-defining sci fi films to come out of Hollywood, but it’s easy to see why it’s maintained a long-lasting cult status, even as its style of earnest and heavy-handed moral commentary has fallen out of style.

There are a lot of climate crisis stories in modern sci fi, but a great many of them focus, intentionally or not, on the natural world’s utility to humans: we must preserve it or else we doom ourselves. Silent Running argues that we should preserve the natural world even if we can live without it, even if it serves no purpose in feeding the hungry or curing the ill, even if we can find a way to get along just fine. That’s a less common philosophy in environmental sci fi, and it’s one of the reasons I find this film so interesting.

One last note: On the wall besides Lowell’s bunk is a copy of something called the “Conservation Pledge,” which dates back to 1946, when the magazine Outdoor Life held a contest to encourage outdoors enthusiasts to dedicate themselves to the preservation of the America’s natural resources. The winning entry, the one that adorns Lowell’s wall aboard Valley Forge, was submitted by L.L. Foreman, a former ranch hand turned author of pulpy adventure Westerns.

The second-place winner of that 1946 contest? Rachel Carson.

What are your thoughts on Silent Running and its place in the subgenre of environmental sci fi? Do the cute little drones succeed in emotionally manipulating you even when you’re fully aware you’re being emotionally manipulated? Share your thoughts below!

Next week: We’re traveling back into deep space with another (loose) adaptation of a Stanislaw Lem novel, traveling to a distant planet aboard the spaceship Ikarie XB-1. Watch it on Criterion, Cultpix (some locations), British Film Institute (UK only), and I suspect you all know how to poke around the internet for other options, if you need to. If the version you stumble across is the American dubbed release titled Voyage to the End of the Universe, take note that it has a different cut and ending.[end-mark]

The post <i>Silent Running</i>: A 1970s Environmental Fable Remains Depressingly All Too Relevant  appeared first on Reactor.

Book Recommendations Front Lines and Frontiers

Leaving the Nest: Fledgling by Sharon Lee and Steve Miller

This engaging coming-of-age story expands the Liaden universe, and provides a perfect jumping-on point for new readers.

By Alan Brown

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Published on March 19, 2024

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In this bi-weekly series reviewing classic science fiction and fantasy books, Alan Brown looks at the front lines and frontiers of the field; books about soldiers and spacers, scientists and engineers, explorers and adventurers. Stories full of what Shakespeare used to refer to as “alarums and excursions”: battles, chases, clashes, and the stuff of excitement.

Today, we’re looking at an entry in one of the longest-running series in science fiction; the Liaden universe created by Sharon Lee and Steve Miller. This novel, Fledgling, published in 2009, is a departure from the previous books in the series—it’s a coming-of-age story set on a planet that was new to the series’ readers up to that point, and has a storyline disconnected from previous adventures. That choice proved to be quite effective, as upheavals in the publishing business landed the series with a new publisher, and a book that served as jumping-on point for new readers was a perfect way to begin that partnership. Indeed, the story behind the creation of the book is as interesting as the book itself. For this review, I’m using the Baen second paperback edition from 2010, which was adorned with a striking cover painting by Alan Pollack.

About the Authors

Sharon Lee (born 1952) and Steve Miller (1950-2024), while they have written solo works, are best known as a writing team who created the Liaden universe. They are Maryland natives who married in 1980, and moved to Maine. Both have long been involved with science fiction fandom, and their connection with the fan community, both in person and on the Internet, has helped the Liaden Universe survive and thrive. Steve Miller was a graduate of the Clarion Writers’ Workshop. Sharon Lee has served as Executive Director, Vice President, and then President of the Science Fiction Writers of America.

I previously reviewed the first book in the Liaden series, Agent of Change, here, and that review contains more biographical information, and a description of the Liaden universe in general.

Baen Books has long offered free books to entice readers into sampling their wares, and you can find a free e-book version of Fledgling here.

In Memoriam — Steve Miller

While I was working on this review, Steve Miller passed away suddenly. The website File 770 published an obituary for Steve, and SFWA recently also published a memorial. My own interactions with Steve and Sharon started as a fan, possibly as long ago as a Balticon back in the 1990s, asking them to autograph their books. Steve and Sharon would often host a breakfast or some other gathering for Liaden fans during conventions, were always generous with fans, and often appeared in panel discussions and readings. Steve was always a valuable member of those panels, never the loudest voice at the table, but more often than not the one whose comments were the most noteworthy. Shortly after his death, a picture of a panel we were both on from a Boskone about five years ago appeared in my Facebook feed, bringing back memories of the last time I had seen Steve.

There are two Facebook groups dedicated to the work of Lee and Miller, Clan Korval and Friends of Liad, and those who want to reach out or provide assistance to Sharon can find information on how to do so there. Sharon has stated she will continue the Liaden series herself, at the very least finishing the books she and Steve had been writing under their current contract with Baen.

The Story Behind Fledgling

Agent of Change, the first book in the Liaden universe, was published in 1988, the first of three books published by Del Rey, under a contract that was not renewed. But there was still strong interest in the books, and Lee and Miller started writing and publishing chapbooks set in the universe under their own SRM Publisher, Ltd. They found a new small-press publisher, Meisha Merlin, which republished the first three books in an omnibus, and began to release new novels. Meisha Merlin ran into financial difficulties, however, and the authors again found themselves without a publisher. Lee and Miller had an idea for a new book, Fledgling, set in the Liaden universe, but not connected to the main story line. The book would be a coming-of-age story for a new character, Theo Waitley, from a planet not before visited in the series.

Applying the concept of the chapbook to the internet, the authors distributed the chapters online to subscribers donating to the cause, an endeavor that turned out to be very popular. The authors prepared to self-publish Fledgling under their SRM imprint. But Lee and Miller’s efforts had also attracted the attention of Baen Books, a publisher with some innovative ideas about electronic publishing, and that imprint offered the authors a new home, a partnership that has proved quite durable.

Fledgling was not the first time the authors had introduced new characters who could provide readers a convenient entry point into the Liaden universe (they provided a list of those entry points on their website, here). That practice, and an emphasis on romance, intrigue, and adventure, has produced one of the most prolific and long-lasting series in the science fiction field, which currently weighs in at 26 novels, with a number of related short-story collections also being published. In the meantime, Theo has become a major character in the series, appearing both in books focused on her own adventures and in novels where she interacts with characters from the previous books.

Fledgling

Theo Waitley is a young teen coming of age on the world of Delgado. Delgado is dominated by academics, and its university is the major source of interaction with the worlds around it. This scholarly domination of the planet’s economic and political spheres has created a unique culture. Delgado has declared itself a “Safe World,” and its government is obsessed with providing a safe and nurturing environment for all its citizens, with decisions made in consensus as much as possible. There is a strong element of social satire in the portrayal of Delgado, as this society is far from perfect (absolute scholarship corrupts absolutely, I guess you could say).

Delgado’s social conventions cause problems for Theo, who is headstrong and sometimes reacts inappropriately, to the point where she has been declared “physically challenged,” and the authorities have recommended drugging her to make her more docile, and less of a threat to herself and others (on their world, the safety of society is definitely more important than the rights of the individual). Theo’s home life has been an anchor for her, as her mother, Kamele, has lived off-campus in a cozy house with her partner, or “onagrata,” Jen Sar Kiladi. But now, Kamale has given into peer pressure, and separated from Jen Sar, moving back inside the “Wall” to faculty quarters to focus on her studies. Jen Sar, a Liaden scholar, has always stood aloof from the politics of Delgado, and Theo keenly misses his guidance and presence in her life. Unknown to the other characters, Jen Sar has an odd quirk: He often consults with a presence that is either an alternate personality, or an imaginary friend. Those who have not read Liaden books before will perceive this as a curiosity, while those who have read the other books will realize that Jen Sar is hiding a very interesting past.

We spend a good bit of time with Theo in her new quarters, and at school. She finds that her cat had stowed away in their luggage, and without asking permission from her mother, decides to keep him. She decides her room needs a rug, and heads outside the campus to a second-hand store to buy one, which introduces the reader to the fact that not everyone likes the scholars who dominate the society, and she has a scary encounter with some ruffians on her bus ride home. We meet Theo’s classmates, organized into Teams by the group-oriented school. One of Theo’s friends falls on a moving walkway, and Theo also falls attempting to help her, and takes the blame for the incident. Later, an altercation in a team sport—in which Theo gets blamed for actions instigated by a classmate whose mother is politically connected—underscores the fact that this safety-dominated society is not as fair and impartial as it aspires to be. The authorities continue to push their plan to drug Theo even more forcefully, although ultimately, it is a parental decision.

Buy the Book

Fledgling

Sharon Lee and Steve Miller

Buy Book

Fledgling

Sharon Lee and Steve Miller

Buy this book from:

• Amazon
• Barnes and Noble
• iBooks
• IndieBound
• Target

Kamele, newly promoted to an assistant chair position, has uncovered evidence of faulty scholarship and forgery by a professor at the university, and the more she digs, the worse the problem gets. The university decides to send a contingent of scholars, including Kamele, to the planet Melchiza to check their documents against the originals, a journey that will take over half a year. Kamele, still on friendly terms with Jen Sar, meets with him, and asks him to look after Theo while she’s traveling. But Jen Sar realizes the trip will get Theo away from the authorities for a time, and could be a good learning experience for her, and Kamele soon agrees. So Theo, much against her will, is thrown yet again into a new and unfamiliar environment.

But the environment of the liner Vashtara proves to be a good one for Theo. She befriends a young Liaden apprentice pilot, Win Ton, who from the start insists on calling her “Sweet Mystery,” although that is as far as he goes in a romantic direction. She and Win Ton defeat a dancing machine in the liner’s arcade, and he introduces her to menfri’at, a dance/exercise routine rooted in the martial arts that pilots use to hone their reflexes (which to me sounds a bit like tai chi). He also introduces her to the vigorous sport of bowli ball, a game of catch played by pilots with a mechanical ball that moves with a mind of its own.

Win Ton’s mentor, Captain Cho sig’Radia, befriends Kamale, and warns her that Melchiza is not a safe destination. The planet’s new government has fascist leanings, and seems to be gearing up for conflict. What seems a simple academic search might be seen as threatening to a government that does not shy away from violence. Captain Cho also teaches Theo the sign language that pilots use as an alternate means of communication.

Meanwhile, back on Delgado, Jen Sar is investigating a mysterious artificial intelligence that Theo and Kamele found wired into their new apartment, which seems to be connected to the academic scandal, and soon leads him to a shadowy religious sect that opposes the presence of the university on Delgado. Upon arrival at Melchiza, Kamele and the scholars find themselves put under virtual house arrest, and discover an enemy in their midst. Theo, who has been sent to a boarding school and barred from contact with her mother, is transferred into pilot training when the authorities discover the skills she has gained during her travel aboard Vashtara. She is pressured to stay and join their space forces once her training is completed.

All these threats and challenges keep the narrative fizzing along, as the plot gallops to a satisfying conclusion. I enjoyed this book when I first read it, and enjoyed it even more the second time around. Theo is a very compelling protagonist, demonstrating a good mix of strengths and flaws, and you can see her growing and learning throughout her adventures.

Final Thoughts

Fledgling is an excellent entry in an enjoyable series, and a good starting point for new readers. The worldbuilding is solid, the characters are engaging, and there is a lot of action and intrigue to keep things moving at a brisk pace.

And now, I’d be delighted to hear from you about Fledgling in particular, or the Liaden universe in general. I’ll bet there are a lot of readers out there who enjoy the books as much as I have.[end-mark]

The post Leaving the Nest: <i>Fledgling</i> by Sharon Lee and Steve Miller appeared first on Reactor.

Movies & TV Babylon 5

Introducing the Babylon 5 Rewatch

Welcome to a new weekly rewatch of J. Michael Straczynski’s groundbreaking science fiction series!

By Keith R.A. DeCandido

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Published on March 18, 2024

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Three decades ago, in the wake of the success of Star Trek: The Next Generation in first-run syndication, there was a plethora of shows that were released in that form—not beholden to a particular network, but sold to individual markets separately. Into that boom stepped Warner Bros., who formed a sort-of syndicated network: the Prime Time Entertainment Network, which would syndicate a series of shows to various markets: Kung Fu: The Legend Continues, Pointman, Time Trax, a few miniseries, documentaries, and TV movies, and a science fiction show from the mind of J. Michael Straczynski: Babylon 5.

Straczynski had an ambitious plan: to do a science fiction show that would succeed on a reasonable budget and also that would tell a complete story—a novel in television form, as it were. While such serialized storytelling is de rigeur now, it was very rare on television in the 1990s, seen mostly in places like soap operas, as well as the occasional drama like Hill Street Blues.

B5 was planned as a five-year arc. Straczynski simplified budget concerns in two ways. One was to have the action all in the same location rather than hopping from planet to planet, as most screen science fiction shows did.

Another was to do the effects entirely via a process that is almost universal in the 2020s but which was virtually unheard of in the 1990s: Computer Generated Images. B5 was a pioneer in CGI, using the Video Toaster for the Amiga to create the visual effects rather than models and miniatures. This meant that episodes of B5 could be produced for less than half the budget of an episode of TNG.

B5 debuted in 1993 with a television movie, The Gathering. It had the misfortune to air the same week as the World Trade Center bombing in New York in 1993, which put the antenna atop the WTC out of commission, keeping the movie from being broadcast in certain parts of the New York metropolitan area. Despite this ratings hit, the movie did well enough for Warner Bros. to order a series, which debuted exactly thirty years ago on PTEN.

Straczynski’s five-year plan hit a few roadblocks, including losing his main protagonist. Series lead Michael O’Hare, who played the Babylon 5 station’s commanding officer Jeffrey Sinclair, was suffering from severe mental illness, and departed the show after the first season to seek treatment. (At O’Hare’s request, Straczynski kept the real reason for O’Hare’s departure secret until the actor’s death in 2012.)

Other real-world issues with various actors caused rewrites and rejiggers of the plotline, but perhaps the biggest was PTEN’s collapse in 1997, with B5 still in its fourth season. Straczynski wound up cramming a lot of the planned storyline for seasons four and five into season four—only to then have the show rescued by TNT (also at this stage owned by Warner Bros.’ parent company, Time Warner), which not only aired the fifth season, but also commissioned several TV movies and a spinoff series. Alas, the spinoff, Crusade, only lasted one season. Straczynski created another pilot movie, Legend of the Rangers, for what was then called the Sci-Fi Channel, but it was not picked up for a series.

In addition to being a CGI pioneer, Straczynski’s B5 was also an early forerunner of viral Internet marketing, using CompuServe, Usenet, and especially the GEnie bulletin board to create buzz for the show. In tribute to the support of the show prior to its airing on GEnie, Babylon 5 station’s coordinates were Grid Epsilon 470/18/22. Grid Epsilon was a reference to GE, the company that ran GEnie, while B5’s bulletin board was on page 470 (one of the three Science Fiction Roundtables, specifically the one dedicated to screen productions), category 18, topic 22. (Your humble rewatcher was a regular presence on GEnie in those days, under the username KEITH.D.)

In September 2021, Straczynski announced that he was rebooting B5. That’s still in development at the moment, delayed at least in part by the writers’ and actors’ strikes of 2023. Also in 2023, Warner Bros. released an animated film, The Road Home.

Partly in honor of this reboot, partly in honor of the TV series’ thirtieth anniversary, and partly because I’ve been wanting to rewatch the show for the first time since its initial airing, next Monday will kick off The Babylon 5 Rewatch here on Reactor. We’ll be covering everything, starting with The Gathering, continuing to the five seasons of the TV series, the one season of Crusade, and each of the various movies, from In the Beginning all the way to The Road Home. I might cover some ancillary material, too…

Like my rewatches of the first five Star Trek shows, of the 1966 Batman, and of the Stargate franchise, each entry will be broken down into categories. A few will be familiar, though most will be new.

It was the dawn of the third age… A summary of the plot.

Nothing’s the same anymore. Jeffrey Sinclair’s role in the story.

Get the hell out of our galaxy! John Sheridan’s role in the story.

I’m not subtle, I’m not pretty. Matthew Gideon’s role in the story.

Ivanova is God. Susan Ivanova’s role in the story.

Never work with your ex. Elizabeth Lochley’s role in the story.

The household god of frustration. Michael Garibaldi’s role in the story.

If you value your lives, be somewhere else. In general, the role of the Minbari in the story, as well as the specific roles of Delenn, Lennier, and the Grey Council.

In the glorious days of the Centauri Republic… In general, the role of the Centauri Republic in the story, as well as the specific roles of Londo Mollari and Vir Cotto.

Though it take a thousand years, we will be free. In general, the role of the Narn Regime in the story, as well as the specific roles of G’Kar and Na’Toth.

We live for the one, we die for the one. In general, the role of the Rangers in the story, as well as the specific role of Marcus Cole.

The Corps is mother, the Corps is father. In general, the role of telepathy, telepaths, and Psi-Corps in the story, as well as the specific roles of Lyta Alexander, Talia Winters, John Matheson, and Alfred Bester.

Never contradict a technomage when he’s saving your life—again. In general, the role of technomages in the story, as well as the specific role of Galen.

The Shadowy Vorlons. The role played by one or both of the Shadows and the Vorlons, the two ancient foes whose conflict makes up the tapestry of much of the series, in the story, particularly the uses of Kosh and Morden.

Looking ahead. B5 made copious use of foreshadowing by way of flash-forwards and prophecies, and this category will show when they’re used, and also when they later come to fruition (often not in the way you expect).

No sex, please, we’re EarthForce. A chronicle of the romantic and/or sexual exploits seen in the story.

Welcome aboard. The guest stars in the story.

Trivial matters. Various bits of trivia, ephemera, connections, revelations, etc. seen in the story.

The echoes of all of our conversations. A particularly good quote from the story.

The name of the place is Babylon 5. A review of the story.

Note that this rewatch will not have a 1-10 rating of each story. My least favorite part of prior rewatches has been having that silly rating system, which removes all nuance from the words that appear above it. I inherited it from the first Star Trek Re-Watch that appeared on this site back from 2009-2011, so I reluctantly continued it through all the Trek rewatches. I managed to not have to use it for the Great Superhero Movie Rewatch or the Stargate Rewatch, and I’m just as happy to avoid it here.

It’s possible I will think of other categories to add. I tried to anticipate all the various changes we’ll see throughout the various series, but I may have missed something that is worth having its own category. And I’m aware that not every character gets their own category, and in response I’ll just say that Jim Kirk, Jean-Luc Picard, William Riker, Miles O’Brien, Julian Bashir, and Chakotay are among the major characters in the Trek rewatches that didn’t get their own categories. It happens.

We’ll be back next week with The Gathering![end-mark]

The post Introducing the <i>Babylon 5</i> Rewatch appeared first on Reactor.

News Black Mirror

Next Season of Black Mirror Will See the Return of the USS Callister

Infinite virtual space awaits

By Vanessa Armstrong

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Published on March 14, 2024

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One of the most popular episodes of Black Mirror was season four’s “USS Callister.” In it, a CTO of a tech company named Daly (Jesse Plemons) escapes via VR to a Star Trek-like starship that he commands. All well and good, I suppose, except Daly stole DNA from his co-workers (including parts played by Cristin Milioti, Jimmi Simpson, and Michaela Coel) and created sentient genetic clones inside the program—prisoners to his every whim.

The 74-minute episode had a definitive ending, but today, Netflix shared (via Deadline) that the seventh season of the anthology series will see another episode centered around the surviving characters. “USS Callister will return… Robert Daly is dead, but for the crew of the USS Callister, their problems are just beginning,” said a teaser Netflix released in London at their See What’s Next Event.

The original episode was directed by Toby Haynes and written by Charlie Brooker, who is helming the seventh season of Black Mirror along with Annabel Jones. No news yet on who will pen the upcoming episode featuring the USS Callister again, but odds are good it will be Brooker. We also don’t know what challenges the digital survivors will face—when we last saw them, they had escaped the confines of Daly’s pocket universe and were free to explore the virtual Infinity that exists outside it. Where we’ll meet up with them on their adventures is uncertain, but odds are good it will be an engaging-yet-disturbing story, as most Black Mirror episodes are.

In the meantime, we can watch the first six seasons of Black Mirror, including “USS Callister,” on Netflix. [end-mark]

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Column Science Fiction Film Club

Solaris: Guilt, Grief, and the Many Human Facets of Science Fiction

Tarkovsky’s film highlights different aspects of the story than the novel it’s based on; both use science fiction to explore deeply human experiences and emotions.

By Kali Wallace

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Published on March 13, 2024

Image: Mosfilm

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Image: Mosfilm

Solaris (1972) Directed by Andrei Tarkovsky. Starring Donatas Banionis, Natalya Bondarchuk, and Jüri Järvet. Screenplay by Friedrich Gorenstein and Andrei Tarkovsky based on the novel by Stanislaw Lem.

When Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey came out in 1968, it made a huge splash in the movie world. Some people loved it so much they declared it the end-all-be-all of science fiction filmmaking; some people hated it so much they dismissed it as a boorish waste of time. Just about everybody with even a passing interest in cinema or science fiction had something to say about the film, and they keep saying it now, decades later.

We are not talking about 2001 this week; we’ll get to that one in the future. But I want to mention it briefly, because the reaction to 2001 is such a significant part of the legacy of Solaris that it’s impossible to ignore. The two films are often set in direct contrast to each other, a cinematic rivalry first driven by the politics of the Cold War and still going strong more than fifty years later. I’m not terribly interested in any perceived competition or any manner of compare-and-contrast, but I am interested in the way pieces of art influence and inform each other. Science fiction, as a genre, is often in conversation with itself, and so too are films as a medium.

Among 2001’s critics was Soviet filmmaker Andrei Tarkovsky, who disliked what he viewed as a phoniness, a sterility, a cold and off-putting technological obsession in 2001. A 1970 interview in which he describes this reaction is very interesting, because much of his reaction seems to be about the fact that he simply thinks about storytelling, filmmaking, and the themes that fascinate him very differently from Kubrick. The dislike was not mutual; Kubrick was reportedly fond of Solaris and Tarkovsky’s work.

There is another layer to this conversation, and that’s the fact that Stanislaw Lem, the Polish author who wrote the 1961 novel Solaris, did not like Tarkovsky’s movie at all—although it’s not entirely clear if he ever watched the entire film, or if he never fully viewed it because he was so annoyed with the screenplay and the argument he had with Tarkovsky about it. Most sources indicate that it was the screenwriter Friedrich Gorenstein who wrote the parts of the movie that stray most significantly from Lem’s novel, including the lengthy opening on Earth, but Lem always focused his ire on Tarkovsky. (Lem also criticized Steven Soderbergh’s 2002 Solaris without watching it; his opinion was based only on reviews.) And, once again, the dislike was not mutual; Tarkovsky spoke very highly of Lem’s novels.

Some of Lem’s objections to Tarkovsky’s film do seem to be borne of a stubborn, almost petty, refusal to acknowledge that any change to the story would be necessary. But that’s not all there is to it. It seems that, similar to Tarkovsky’s response to Kubrick, they were simply, fundamentally interested in very different stories. Lem famously declared that Tarkovsky didn’t make Solaris; he made Crime and Punishment. Later critics take it even further, such as Philip Lopate, writing for the Criterion Collection, who suggests Solaris is more akin to Hitchcock’s Vertigo, in that it’s focused on a sad man’s guilt about a beautiful dead woman, a very common theme in cinema across many genres. I can see the point about the sad man and the beautiful dead woman—it’s one of my least favorite tropes in any fiction—but I am very wary of any comparison, regardless of who it comes from, that tries to take the science fiction out of Solaris when searching for its “real” meaning.

It is true that Solaris the book and Solaris the movie do explore different themes and ideas, even while following the same characters and plot. That’s one small part of what makes the film so interesting to me. The much larger part is the fact that it’s a stunning movie, regardless of what inspired it. It’s weird, moody, ponderous, melancholy, and tense, full of disconcertingly long scenes and oddly disjointed conversations, with characters who feel unreal in one moment and achingly human in the next. It’s both alluring and frustrating. I love that about it.

The film opens on Earth, where we meet Dr. Kris Kelvin (Donatas Banionis, fittingly broody) at his family’s home on Earth: wooden farmhouse, running water, saturated greens, sudden rainstorms. The pastoral quiet of this setting is interrupted by the arrival of a man named Burton, who comes on the eve of Kelvin’s departure for space to share a report of his own strange experience on the planet Solaris. We learn that people have been studying Solaris for many years, attempting to understand what is theorized to be a sentient ocean that covers the entire planet. Kelvin’s task is to determine if the research should continue or if the project should be abandoned.

Kelvin travels to Solaris to meet the three scientists remaining on the dingy, dilapidated station. He learns that one of them has died by suicide, and the other two behave in suspicious and off-putting ways, including apparently hiding the presence of other people aboard the station. Kelvin makes some half-hearted attempts to find out what’s going on, but all of that stops when he wakes up the next morning to find that his dead wife has shown up.

His wife, Hari, died by suicide ten years ago. This new Hari (Natalya Bondarchuk, truly fantastic in an intense and challenging role) is a construct created from Kelvin’s memories and dreams of her. She doesn’t know this, exactly, but she does know something is very wrong with her existence. Kelvin panics and kills her (by launching her into space), but she appears again the next day.

This is what the sentient ocean of Solaris does: it plucks memories from the subconscious minds of the humans in orbit and creates living beings out of them. The two surviving scientists on the station, Drs. Snaut (Jüri Järvet) and Sartorius (Anatoliy Solonitsyn), have figured this out already, but they didn’t explain it to Kelvin when he arrived. He, in turn, demonstrates almost no curiosity about the planet, the research, the attempts to communicate with the sentient ocean, any of it. So many obvious questions go deliberately unasked, as though the events and their explanations are too heavy for the characters to handle.

Tarkovsky was open about the fact that he had little interest in the shiny technological trappings of science fiction; that’s where much of his dislike of 2001 came from. One of Solaris’s few concessions toward a “futuristic” look is the a long, lingering, drawn-out scene that follows Burton’s ordinary mid-century car along the Shuto Expressway near Tokyo, which was specifically chosen because it was thought to have a futuristic look at the time. But even that is, quite literally, grounded: it’s just a car on a highway, a man and a child, a city at twilight.

There is similar purposeful neglect to other science fictional elements in the film. After the long, lingering highway scene, Kelvin’s journey through space is dispatched in a matter of seconds, with no details about how it happens, how long it takes, or what effects it has. The station itself is in a depressing state of disarray, with damaged equipment and exposed wires everywhere, signs of long neglect and disregard. All we see of the planet itself is the whirling ocean; I don’t know how it was filmed, but it sure looks like footage of frothy, foamy water that has been color-graded and adjusted, nothing more, nothing less. The single instance of the scientists attempting contact with the sentient ocean happens entirely off-screen, almost as a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it afterthought.

All of this combines to create a story that is science fictional, yes, but very much not meant to impress us or inspire awe. It keeps us uneasy instead. It wants us to feel uncomfortable, not astonished, because this station is a deeply unsettling place to be.

The film may not draw attention to the story’s science fictional trappings, but that only makes the attention it pays to other sensory elements more significant. For example, the extremely subtle electronic score by Eduard Artemiev is punctuated by repeated uses Bach’s Ich ruf’ zu dir, Herr Jesu Christ, BWV 639, a chorale prelude for organ that sets an inescapably mournful tone throughout. (The use of this piece is also one of the very few religious elements left in the film after Soviet censors forced Tarkovsky to remove all mentions of God.) Another example is a mundane oddity when the first Hari construct appears: Her simple, decidedly non-Space Age dress has no fasteners, and Kelvin has to cut it off with scissors to help her change—because Kelvin doesn’t remember how her dress fastened, so Solaris’s sentient ocean could not recreate that detail from his memories.

There are so many other low-tech details like this. Burton’s testimony is shared via tape on a 1970s-appropriate television. The bed in Kelvin’s room aboard the station is covered with stiff, uncomfortable plastic. The few instances of violence in the film are brutal and intimate: Gibarian’s suicide by handgun; Hari frantically beating her way through a closed door; her failed attempt to die by drinking liquid oxygen.

But my favorite of these not-very-science fictional elements is the library at the heart of the station. It’s such a terribly human space. With its dim lighting, wood-paneled doors, and green walls, it could have been plucked from any university professor’s office or slightly shabby social club. There are books stacked haphazardly amidst mirrors and stained glass and classical art replicas. There is a copy of Don Quixote, from which the characters read a passage. They drink from crystal glasses. The candles are chunky with wax drippings. There are no windows overlooking the planet below; that’s why Snaut chooses it for his birthday party.

In this very human room, surrounded by the art and aesthetics of humanity, the characters talk about what it means to be human. It’s almost as though they couldn’t have this conversation anywhere else on the station, where everything is coldly technological and Solaris is visible through the windows. Sartorius makes a toast to science, which Snaut wearily counters: “We have no interest in conquering any cosmos. We want to extend the Earth to the borders of the cosmos. We don’t know what to do with other worlds. We need a mirror. We struggle for contact, but we’ll never find it.”

While the men are talking, Hari is wandering restlessly around the library, growing more and more agitated. She doesn’t speak until the men begin to bicker. She accuses Snaut and Sartorius of being inhumane to the “guests”—the simulacra, like her, who were created from their own minds but destroyed for being too frightening, too unexpected. Sartorius is unmoved; he tells Hari she is nothing more than a copy of a dead woman. She doesn’t back down. She can feel that she is becoming more human.

This argument about the nature of humanity provides no satisfaction or resolution. After the bleak birthday party disperses, Kelvin and Hari are alone in the library. Hari is studying a print of Pieter Bruegel the Elder’s Hunters in the Snow, a 16^th-century painting depicting part of the seasonal cycle of rural life. The camera, showing Hari’s perspective, takes in the painting not as a whole, but in a series of cuts focusing on small details. The visual metaphor is obvious and effective: the constructed woman, created from memories plucked from a grieving man’s mind, studying an image of humanity piecemeal, disjointed and unsteady.

When Kelvin speaks her name, Hari’s concentration is broken, and what follows is the loveliest, saddest scene in the film. The station is adjusting its orbit, and for a moment the gravity vanishes. Hari and Kelvin cling to each other as they drift gently through the library. We don’t know in the moment, but we will learn very shortly, that this is when Hari has decided to die.

Because in spite of the Bach and the Bruegel, the candlesticks and the crystal, they’re not on Earth, safely tucked away in a wood-paneled library at a university club, having a friendly but ultimately inconsequential philosophical discussion. And Tarkovsky did not make Crime and Punishment, nor did he make Vertigo. He made Solaris, a film with a sentient ocean that creates living things out of memories that it telepathically obtains from people’s minds.

Stanislaw Lem wrote a novel about the impossibility of understanding an entity that is so entirely alien to us that communication fails even when it can literally make our subconscious thoughts into reality. Andrei Tarkovsky made a movie about guilt and grief and the excruciatingly human experiences of life and love and death. They both believed they were focusing on the most important part of the story—and they were both right.

They were both right, because for all that sci fi fans love to draw intragenre lines—”that kind of sci fi is about technology and ideas, this kind is about humans and emotions”—such distinctions have a way of feeling so very pointless after a while. Curiosity and awe and exploration are part of the human experience, and so are the desire to communicate and a craving for understanding, and so are guilt and grief and death. Science fiction can be used to explore any and all of those human experiences. That’s one of the genre’s great strengths.

I love this movie mostly for itself, because it’s such a unique and fascinating experience, but I also love it because it’s such a great example of one artist picking up another’s work, turning it this way and that to see what facets catch the most light, and creating something different and new out of the same basic shape. Maybe Lem and Tarkovsky (and Stanley Kubrick, for that matter) were talking past each other, but they were still engaged in the larger conversation of science fiction.

What do you think of Solaris, either as a movie in itself, as an adaptation of a beloved classic novel, or as a major influence on so much serious, heady sci fi that followed? What do you think of those long scenes and heavy silences and all of Tarkovsky’s most Tarkovsky-est filmmaking quirks? Did anybody else finish the film and immediately have to look up Hunters in the Snow to stare at it for a while, or was that just me? Share your thoughts below! (To anticipate the obvious question and suggestion: yes, we will be watching Tarkovsky’s Stalker in the future.)

Next Week in the Science Fiction Film Club: If that wasn’t heavy enough for you, don’t worry: it gets worse. We head to the outer planets to do some gardening with Douglas Trumbull’s Silent Running. Watch it on Amazon, Apple, Google Play, Vudu, and others.

And a quick note: I just want to thank everyone who has dropped movie suggestions into the comments. I am noting down every single suggestion. I knew there were many films—especially older non-American films—that I would need help finding, and I am delighted to have so many to add to the list. No need to worry if you have a suggestion that doesn’t seem to be available for streaming right now. I’ll make a note and keep an eye out, because streaming availability changes constantly. Thank you![end-mark]

The post <i>Solaris</i>: Guilt, Grief, and the Many Human Facets of Science Fiction appeared first on Reactor.

Movies & TV Spaceman

Eight Crazy Eyes: Spaceman

In space, no one can hear a giant space spider eat Nutella

By Leah Schnelbach

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Published on March 14, 2024

Image: Netflix

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Image: Netflix

When it comes to space movies, it seems like moviemakers have a choice to make: is this story a work of competency porn? Or is it a Haunting Meditation on Time and Grief and Possibly Dad?

The Right Stuff, Apollo 13, and The Martian march enthusiastically down the first path. Scientists and engineers scribble out equations and use slide rules to apply Newtonian physics to a problem, and astronauts deal with the cold reality of space. There’s a lot of gallows humor, and the only musing is maybe on America As an Idea.

First Man, Ad Astra, and The Midnight Sky put that nerd shit in the background to deal with GRIEF and/or DAD STUFF. Space may be real, but it’s also a metaphor for the unknowability of existence.

Then you’ve got your Gravitys and Interstellars, that act like the first one, but turn out to actually be the other one once the plot kicks in. (Although to be fair, Gravity at least adds MOM STUFF to the equation.)

I love both of these types of films (First Man was one of the most haunting movie experiences I’ve ever had, but I can literally watch Apollo 13 and The Martian once a week and be fine with it) but all of this is to say I came into Spaceman with a lot of other Space Movies in my head.

Spaceman sticks to the second path. If you saw it pop up on the Netflix menu and thought you’d tune in for Adam Sandler in a wacky space misadventure, this is not that. If you thought it was a technical exploration of a near-future or AU Czech space program, it’s also not that. This is a quiet movie about relationships, with a little world history folded in, spiked occasionally with humor and uncanniness. It doesn’t always work, but while I don’t think it’s entirely successful as an adaptation, it’s an interesting addition to the Space Feelings subgenre.

Spaceman is based on Jaroslav Kalfar’s 2017 novel The Spaceman of Bohemia, which I had the joy of reviewing. It was written for the screen by Colby Day and directed by Johan Renck, late of Chernobyl. Parts of the film work well, but I think the book is richer in many ways, and I hope that, whether you like the film or not, you’ll check the book out. As usual, I’ll give a spoiler-free overview first, and warn you when there will be light spoilers further down.

The main plot of the film is thus: There is an Interstellar Cloud called Chopra hanging out just beyond Jupiter and tinting Earth’s sky purple. In either a near-future or alt-universe Czech Republic, the government has teamed up with various corporations to fund an exploratory mission. If their chosen Cosmonaut, Jakub Procházka, can beat the South Koreans to the Chopra, all glory and fame will go to the Czechs. The only problem is that Jakub (Adam Sandler in sad quiet mode) is being slowly chipped away by the isolation of space, troubled by memories of his Communist father, and even more troubled by the collapse of his marriage to Lenka (Carey Mulligan), his luminous, and very very pregnant wife. Will he make it to Chopra? Will he and Lenka work stuff out? Is the GIANT SPACE SPIDER (voiced perfectly by Paul Dano) who shows up on his ship real, or a hallucination? Spaceman spends more time on the last question than the others, and mines some great comedy and a fair bit of eldritch horror from the Jakub’s reluctant partnership with the many-legged alien creature he calls Hanuš.

Having said that, I’ll dive into a bit more the plot now—jettison yourself from the airlock if need be!

Much of Kalfar’s novel focuses on Czech history, and the upheavals that communism brought to the Procházka family, and how the Velvet Revolution of 1989 affected it. This is cut down in the film, with a simplified thread about Jakub’s relationship with his true-believer communist father, and much more emphasis on how those emotions are affecting his relationship with Lenka. Lenka is often more of a symbol than a person—sometimes literally, as she and Jakub meet when she’s dressed as a Rusalka—but that’s part of the point, as Jakub gets lost in memories of her and thinks of her as a fixed point to get home to.

Fortunately, the film also gives us a few scenes of Lenka living her own life back on Earth, but I’ll come back to those in a moment.

The reason Jakub is able to fall into hallucinatory memories? He’s kind of stuck in a mind-meld with a giant space spider. The spider turns up when Jakub is a particularly low emotional point. He’s an alien who fled from his home planet, and he thinks human are interesting. He appears in the ship, subjects Jakub to a series of intense conversations/therapy sessions, looks into his mind to understand him, and samples his food. Is he real? Is he a product of Jakub’s loneliness? I didn’t care in the book because I loved him too much, and here I don’t care because the film gives him heft and weight, and a fantastic voice provided by Paul Dano. He and Sandler make for a solid odd couple—but more than that, the arc of their relationship really comes together by the film’s end, I think. I’ll come back to that, too.

Lenka’s sections on Earth are gauzy, meditative. One of my complaints about the film is here, but first I’ll tell you what worked: Lenka has a muted standoff with the head of the Czech space program, Commissioner Tuma, played by Isabella Rossellini. Rossellini is so good, so real and true in this scene that could have felt either like throwaway connective plot tissue, or like a stereotypical “person in authority tries to bully a civilian” scene—my least favorite type of scene. The other aspect that’s great is that Lenka’s mother is played by Lena Olin, who played Sabina in Philip Kauffman’s 1988 adaptation of Milan Kundera’s classic The Unbearable Lightness of Being, which you should watch if you haven’t. I never thought I’d get to say: “nice callback of Czech classic casting!” but now I do. And of course, Olin is perfect in the role… which brings me to my complaint. I wanted a lot more of Earth.

In the book, the reader is almost entirely, or maybe entirely, in Jakub’s experience, mind, and memories. He’s alone in space for large parts of the plot, and when he does have company it’s a giant spider he might be hallucinating, so there are many pages of philosophical meditation, musings on Czech history, and excavated memories. And that works really well for the book. But for the film adaptation I wanted to see more of the near-future society that sent him into space. I wanted to see what the purple-tinted Chopra cloud was doing to human consciousness. And wanted much more of Lenka’s struggle with being the person left behind, dealing with being very famous and basically almost powerless. Once again Carey Mulligan is stuck in a relationship with a troubled man who finds a greater emotional attachment with someone else: unlike in Maestro, here it’s a sentient space spider, and once again I wanted to spend more time with her as an individual person, rather than half of a couple.

One of the highlights of the film is how much Czech stuff they’ve carried over from the book. (Czechtches?) As I mentioned, when Jakub meets Lenka she’s dressed as a Rusalka, a Slavic water sprite, and Czech composer Antonín Dvořák’s opera Rusalka plays in the film. The communication system the pair use to speak to each other is called CzechConnect. Jakub’s ship is still named the Jan Hus 1—Jan Hus being a Bohemian religious reformer whose ideas were a precursor to what later became Protestantism. And Hanuš is still named Hanuš after the possibly-folkloric clockmaker of Prague. Best of all, Hanuš and Jakub bond over the greatness of chocolate-hazelnut spread.

I’m so glad they allowed Jakub to be as shitty and self-centered as he is. They don’t sugarcoat the fact that he’s acted terribly, but they also allow him to be human and loveable despite it—or maybe because of it. Sandler imbues Jakub with so many layers of insecurity, fear, and ambition that we can see why Lenka fell in love with, and why he’s driven her away.

I also want to mention as an aside: yes, there are similarities to Project Hail Mary. Kalfar’s novel came out in 2017, and Spaceman is solidly based on that, not Weir’s book. But it’s a fascinating exercise to look at how two very different writers use an idea of first contact—I might just have to essay the heck out of it later.

Now I know I shoved people out of the airlock for spoilers a few paragraphs ago, but I’m checking in again now: I’m about to talk about the ending. Definitely get outta here if you haven’t seen the film, but you’ve been reading along anyway and don’t want to know how the movie ends.

Jakub’s rift with Hanuš is really, really upsetting. I’ve read the book and I was still surprised at how upset I was! If a giant space spider ever locks its eight eyes on me and says: “My interest in you has expired,” I will walk into the sea. Or space, whichever’s closest. So naturally when they come back together, and Hanuš reveals that he’s dying, and doesn’t want to face that alone, it wrecked me even more than I expected. Because it isn’t quite that he’s changed his mind about Jakub, it’s more that he’s incredibly lonely, and still trying to help his new human friend despite everything. As they reach Chopra, Hanuš tells Jakub that it’s “The Beginning”. The cloud is made up of particles from the beginning of the universe. (“In the beginning was bi lighting” is an encouraging thought for some of us, so thanks for that, movie.)

The movie is a more straightforward experience than the novel, and the filmmakers made two choices for the ending that, weirdly enough, mirror the two paths for the subgenre I mentioned above. When you’re ending your space movie, I think you have to choose between reality and metaphysics. Either the engineers and the astronauts solve the problems and survive the voyage or they don’t, OR, you get into Star Baby/The Alien Is Her Father territory. (Or you end on a vague note of gooey hope wrapped in harsh reality, as in perpetual outlier Interstellar.)

Spaceman creates a different path in order to have it both ways. As Jakub collects Chopra particles to take home to Prague, Hanuš leaves the ship. (Hanuš has been able to phase through the ship at will, one of the points toward him being a hallucination.) Jakub has to make a choice in that moment between continuing his glorious mission or following his friend. The film nods to reality by having Jakub in his spacesuit, but from there? Hanuš is somehow able to float through space, to hold and carry Jakub, and to usher him into a swirling CGI Beginning full of stars… and decades of Jakub’s memories, and his acceptance of the idea that Lenka is the most important part of his life, but he might never get back to her.

If the film only did this, I’d still consider it a decent adaptation. But it takes another step. Hanuš told Jakub that he was infected with parasites called Gorompeds, and now we, and Jakub, see what that means: the tiny maggoty creatures swarm from Hanuš’s pores, devouring him before our horrified eyes. This is not a peaceful death, a merging with The Beginning, or an ancient Hanuš transformed into a Star Spider Baby: it’s life devouring life. End/Beginning.

Rather than tipping entirely into metaphysics, the film gives us time to contemplate the wonder of The Beginning—and then yanks us back to the reality of Jakub in space, the mission, the South Korean ship gliding into view, Lenka and a new life waiting back on Earth.

While I don’t think the film worked all the time, and I wish there’d been room for more Czech Stuff and more Lenka, Spaceman is still a compelling work of Space Meditation, and I want the entire universe from Beginning to End for Hanuš. [end-mark]

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