Need a LOTR fix?

If you haven't already, check out The Hunt for Gollum, a 40 minute fan film that tells the story of Aragorn's quest to find Gollum before he falls into the wrong hands. And, if you don't already know, that makes it a prequel of sorts to LOTR, based on some bits in the appendices.

A Hierarchy of Geeks

Want to figure out how big a geek you are?

My colleague Don Wacome passed this along to me.

Exploring New Frontiers

The philosophically inclined sf author Robert J. Sawyer recently appeared on Listen Up, a Canadian religion news program, along with Robert Charles Wilson, author of Darwinia, The Chronoliths, etc., Gabriel McKee, author of The Gospel According to Science Fiction, and others.

You might want to take a look!

Part 1 (Mainly Sawyer)
Part 2 (Mainly McKee)
Part 3
Part 4

And if you want to think some more about sf and religion, I'll refer you to an earlier post linking to a couple of intriguing short stories as well as this this post that excerpts a more cautionary perspective.

Philosophy and Science Fiction Projects

For the final project in my Philosophy and Science Fiction class last semester, I gave my students the following choice: Either (a) write a philosophical essay exploring some interesting question in the context of sf or (b) write an sf short story that explores some philosophically interesting territory. Unsurprisingly, most of them chose to write a story. The results of their labors can be seen here. Take a look! And let the student authors know what you think!

Reality and/or Virtuality

Is this the real life?
Is this just fantasy?

Queen's questions have driven many an sf story. The love-it-or-hate-it blog io9 offers a dozen fine examples of (un?)successful attempts to escape from a virtual environment in two posts: the first six and then the second six. Take a look. What'd they miss?

The most recent film I've seen that blurs the boundaries between reality and fantasy is Charlie Kaufman's wonderfully eccentric Synecdoche, New York. You wouldn't classify it as science fiction, although it's decidedly speculative! And it doesn't use the idea of a virtual reality at all. In fact, the film's characters aren't ever wrestling with the question of whether what's happening to them is real or not. No, it's the viewers who must grapple with that one. And I still haven't figured it out. If you have, let me know.

Philosophically, this kind of story raises lots of questions. The main metaphysical question is what it is for something to be real. In The Matrix films, for example, we gradually move from thinking that the Matrix is an unreal deception to seeing it as simply another part of reality. We do call it virtual reality, after all! For an intriguing treatment of this issue, see David Chalmers's "The Matrix as Metaphysics."

More familiar is the epistemological question: how do we know what's real and what's not? Or, better, how do we know we aren't being deceived about our surroundings? After all, I could be perfectly aware that I'm in a virtual world, or I could be deceived into believing I'm in a virtual world when I'm not. Christopher Grau gives an elementary account of these issues, Matrix-style with clips, here and here.

Finally, and perhaps most interestingly, we might wonder with Jim Pryor "What's So Bad About Living in the Matrix?" Why do most sf stories depict a virtual reality as a prison or a trap or a trick? What precisely would be missing in a virtual existence? As more and more of our lives happen digitally, this question may become increasingly important.

What Happened While I've Been Away...

It takes a while to recuperate after being buried alive under a crushing pile of papers and final exams. During my absence, the first few summer sf flicks have come and gone. I haven't the time for a full review, but I'll offer a few random and impressionistic observations:

X-Men Origins: Wolverine. Hugh Jackman is Wolverine. It’s fun to watch him work, and there were some nice moments here. But this film helped me to realize that I don’t want to know Wolverine’s origin. Plenty of superheroes have clear and obvious origin stories. The risk of cliché is very high. Think Superman, Batman, Spiderman, Punisher, Hulk, and so on. For me, one of the things that set Wolverine apart from the rest is that he doesn’t have a sense of purpose that depends on his origin. He’s a hero whose past is a mystery. And that’s where this film leaves him at the end, right? But it doesn’t leave us there with him, and that’s my major complaint.

I gotta add that I’m really unhappy about what they did to the Merc’ with the Mouth. Deadpool is a delightful character, so why mess so badly with him?

Star Trek. Clearly the best of the three. A great film to watch, a point deliciously made by The Onion! But J. J. Abrams hasn't forgotten where this film comes from. I enjoyed the reboot of a classic set of characters: Kirk, Spock, Bones, Scotty, Sulu, Chekov, Uhuru, all recognizable yet fresh at the same time. The expected lines were delivered and enjoyed, at least by me:

"Dammit man, I'm a doctor, not a physicist."
"I'm giving her all she's got, Captain!"

Now, I'm of the opinion that the Star Trek writers use the time travel trope far too often, but at least this one didn't turn out to be a desperate race to restore the original future. No, we're in an alternate timeline, and thankfully that opens up the possibilities for the sequel.

The weak point of the film was the stereotypical villain. A Romulan lunatic out to destroy the earth? Didn't we see that in Star Trek: Nemesis? I'm hoping next time around we get a more interesting and frightening foe for the Enterprise crew to combat, and a better story, too. This film got quite a lot of mileage out of its nostalgic elements and its sheer watchability. I suspect the bar will be higher next time.

Oh, and what's the story with J. J. Abrams's obsession with red matter? Sydney ran into some of that on Alias, too, right?

Terminator Salvation. Better than Terminator 3, but not up to the standard set by the first two films. The Terminator films are all animated by killer machines and extravagant chase scenes, but only the first two manage to make us care very much about what's going on--and even to think a little bit!

I liked the way this movie channeled The Road Warrior and tricked it out in high tech, but mainly it struck me as a missed opportunity. The new guy in this film is a blend of human and machine. He doesn't know what he is, and neither does John Conner. That's some really interesting territory to explore, as Battlestar Galactica has shown, but this film goes nowhere with it. Too bad.

What did you think?