Recently in science fiction/fantasy Category

This is one of the reasons why I love the BBC: it takes science fiction seriously. I’m not just talking about the awesome entertainment the Beeb has given us over the years, like Doctor Who and Blake’s 7 and The Tripods. I’m talking about its new multimedia project My Science Fiction Life, which is looking at the impact that SF -- books, comics, movies, TV, and more -- have had in Britain, on ordinary people, on artists and scientists, on society as a whole. The site invites readers to contribute their own memories of growing up with SF and what SF means to them today. You don’t have to be from the U.K. to contribute, but when the site closes to contributions later this month and organizes itself as an archive, the focus will be on the experence of SF in Britain.

“They call me MISTER Chewbacca!”

Oh dear god, this is worse than Chewie not getting a medal at the end of A New Hope. I just saw an ad on TV for the new Star Wars DVDs that’ll be out next Tuesday -- these are the individual discs of each of the first three movies, which are actually each two discs containing the original theatrical releases and the CGI-abomination versions; and also the first three movies are actually the last three movies; there are whole new realms of thereoretical mathematics to be found in the Lucasian system of counting.

Anyway, this ad starts out all charming and sweet and family and hugs, Dad talking about how he grew up with these movies and how he loves sharing them with his kids, the tykes saying famous lines from the films, Mom enthusing about how she loves the music, and so on. And then, the adorable blond Nazi Hitler Youth moppet of a daughter says:

I’d love to have a Wookiee as a pet!

A Wookiee as a pet. These are intelligent, sensitive, noble, moral, sentient beings we’re talking about, but hey, if Little Miss Aryan wants one for a pet, who are we to stop her?

It astonishes me that in this day and age, humor and cuteness continues to be mined from casual specieism. I intend to notify the Wookiee Anti-Defamation League and the Intergalactic Association for the Advancement of Wookiees.

(Technorati tags: Star Wars, Wookiee)

Seen in the parking lot at Worldcon, interesting bumper stickers:

And even more interesting cars in their entirety, such as the automobile painted by the artisans of Lascaux:

You may never have thought you’d live to see the day when the phrase “the $12 million Bernie Taupin/Elton John stage musical adaptation of Anne Rice’s beloved vampire novels” could be uttered in polite company, but that day has arrived. (For those of you counting, this is sign of the apocalypse no. 7,092,164.) Lestat opens on Broadway tonight, and I had the very bad luck to attend a preview performance a few weeks ago.

Like many girl geeks my age, I devoured the Lestat books as a teenager, imagining my life would be immeasurably better should I chance to have my neck sucked by a sexy vampire and become an immortal rock star or something cool like that. But of course, this very cultural provenence is what was guaranteed inevitably to doom such a godforsaken idea as Totally Cool Awesomeness: The Musical! to totally frigid awfulness, with songs. Because some things -- like, say, the existential teenage-style angst of one who does not fit into the world in which he finds himself, and the curse of the person displaced in time -- cannot be reduced to a snappy tune and a spry lyric.

To wit:

I think I’ve pretty much settled on going the print-on-demand Lulu.com route with my Princess Bride book, the one that got orphaned when its publisher died. And even though I won’t be published through a traditional publisher, the traditional publishers are rethinking their way of doing business anyway, according to Business Week Online:

A new scheme set to be announced in early April, dubbed the Caravan Project, calls for books to be delivered simultaneously in five formats -- hardcover, digital, audio, print-on-demand, and by chapter.

...

Six nonprofit publishers (three are university presses), No. 2 retailer Borders Group (BGP ), a few independent bookstores (not Tome on the Range, however), and publishing wholesale powerhouse Ingram Industries are participating in Caravan. The first step: Publish 24 books initially across the five formats in early 2007. Funded by a $250,000 MacArthur Foundation grant, the project is relatively small, Osnos admits. "But we don't have to be big," he adds. "We just have to show that this model is irresistible to everyone in the chain -- to authors, publishers, and booksellers. We can't continue to print 10 books to sell 6." Adds Tom Dwyer, director for adult trade books at Borders: "We never want to underestimate the public's desire for information and choices. This lets us put our foot in the water."

Look, I’m not gonna deny it: I started out as a writer, editor, and publisher in the mid 80s with xeroxed science-fiction fanzines, with a primary focus on Doctor Who and Blake’s 7, though I also published a Starman zine called Endangered Species that won a Fan Quality Award from the MediaWest Con people in 1989... though *sob* the con’s site mysteriously credits the zine to publisher “Mary Ann Bohling.” (Maybe I’ll post my Doctor Who fan fiction someday -- it’s really quite good, if I do say so myself.)

And holy crap, look at this! This Google cache of an email newsletter about Blake’s 7 fanzines from 19-freakin’-94 has me listed... at an address I haven’t lived at since that year:

Portals ( editor )
multimedia fanzine
MaryAnn Johanson --> 27 St. Mark's Place #4D New York NY 10003 USA

SG-1 goes "Off the Grid":

I'm loving the leather...

...but when did Teal'c turn into Ripley?

The team on Atlantis says "The Long Goodbye":

It's official: Atlantis is just like bad fan fiction...

(screencaps snagged from GateWorld and Atlantica)

So, the guys and girls up at the space station are gonna pull over onto the orbital shoulder and check some hoses on shuttle Discovery... so to speak. Astronaut Stephen Robinson is going to spacewalk out to the underside of the orbiter and fix or remove some material that may reduce the shuttle’s aerodynamics when it reenters Earth’s atmosphere, with potentially diastrous results.

This kind of repair has never been done before, and it made me think of SF author Allen Steele’s novels and short stories, some of which center around construction workers in space, whom he dubbed beamjacks. We have this image today of astronauts being elite scientists and engineers and pilots, but Steele’s beamjacks were just regular joes and janes doing a dirty job and generally being unappreciated for it.

And in that free-association way that Web surfing sometimes produces, I found Steele’s Web site, on which he has the entire text of his early-2001 testimony before the House Subcommittee on Space and Aeronautics about the new direction our efforts in space should be taking. The whole thing is interesting reading, and I found myself nodding in agreement throughout. Isn’t this all just basic common sense?:

This hypothetical agency, which I'll call the Commercial Space Administration (CSA), would be much like the present Federal Aviation Administration. Its primary purpose would be to foster private space enterprise; unlike NASA, it would have no launch facilities of its own, nor would it actively engage in research and development. It would probably be organized under the Department of Transportation, with major support from the Department of Commerce and the Department of Defense.

By offering "seed money" to such fledgling companies, the CSA would assist private industry in developing advanced launch systems. Instead of having NASA pick one design over another -- such as in the case, several years ago, with the government-sponsored competition among four different major aerospace companies to build a second-generation shuttle, which in turn led to the ill-fated X-33/VentureStar being selected while the three competing designs were left to wither and die -- the CSA would encourage many different companies to build their own spacecraft without having to rely on NASA as its primary customer. In this way, free-market competition would drive the development of the advanced spacecraft.

Geeks are influencing the course of history. Savor the power.

Do they transport secret battle-station plans that many Bothans died for? Can they shut down garbage compactors on the detention level -- no, all of them? Will they tell you you’re quite resourceful, for a human being?

I didn’t think so.

Hoorah! Spaceflight Now (and lots of other sources) reports that the Mars rover Opportunity is finally free of the sand dune it’s been stuck in since the end of April, thanks to a weeks-long and undoubtedly pizza-and-chocolate-fueled effort on the part of NASA geeks to get it moving again. (What can’t geeks do? The rover, which was of course designed by geeks, is a year and a half into a mission originally planned to last 90 days.)

The thought that that plucky little robot has been literally spinning its wheels for a month without ever giving up just about melts my heart, in a similar (but much happier) way that the thought of the Mars Pathfinder fruitlessly trying to call home to Earth after the batteries on its lander had run down made me unspeakably sad. Man, I remember like it was yesterday sitting around watching TV all day on July 4, 1997, waiting for word -- and pictures, holy crap: pictures -- from the red planet that the lander had landed and the rover was roving and that we were on Mars again for the first time since Viking. And now we’re there again, and it’s too bad it ain’t people walking around in the Martian sand, but damn, those rovers got spunk, don’t they?

I was born a month after humans walked on the moon. I remember absolutely everything about that day when I was junior in high school when the Challenger shuttle blew up. Inseparable in my mind are the return to orbit of the shuttle and the offer of my first job in publishing after I dropped out of college -- they both happened on the same day in 1988. Generation X has been witness to the beginnings of human exploration of space at precisely the right tender age to imprint the excitement of it on our brains. We’re hardly the first generation to enjoy or create science fiction, but we’re the first for whom it hasn’t all been entirely science fiction.

Of course, not every member of GenX appreciates this. I remember, maybe a year or two after graduating from high school, where I had never made a secret of my geeky proclivities, running into a former, nongeeky classmate who was working as a cashier in a drugstore where I was shopping. We fell into conversation, and I noted with geeky glee the fact the some customer was paying with a credit card that had been personalized (an option that was just starting to be offered by the banks) with an image of the space shuttle blasting off. And this former classmate said, "Oh yeah, you were always into that science fiction stuff." I didn’t say anything, but I recall thinking, "Science fiction? This is science fact -- it’s happening now."

We’re all living in this world of rapidly accelerating technological change -- where, within the Xer lifetime, we’ve gone from black-and-white TVs showing three channels to global online networks of thousands of illegally downloadable movies and TV shows; from painful smallpox vaccinations that left us all with unmistakable scars on our upper arms to human cloning. But it seems to take the geeky mindset to get a real grasp on the impact all these cool toys will have on everyone. Sure, we geeks have an affinity for new technology and an irresistible urge to find unusual ways to use it, but intrinsic in "geekiness" seems to be a recognition that it has the potential to change everyone’s lives... that it’s not merely silly "science fiction" that’s easily dismissed.

And that, ironically, is part of why I suspect geeks are drawn to science fiction, and why science fiction is so big a part of Xer culture, not just in the form our stories take but in the metaphors that really speak to us in general. Of course the genre existed long before we came along... but if one literary tradition could have been specifically designed to speak to us, this’d be it.