Philosophical Speculations

Science Fiction and Religion: A Spectrum of Views

2011-04-12T20:02:00.002-05:00

Some science fiction stories imagine a future without religion and without any belief in the supernatural, thereby expressing the secularist's dream that humanity will outgrow such things. Is science fiction the enemy of religion? Other sf is more friendly to religion, making room for priests and gods along with robots and aliens. As I've suggested before, the reimagined Battlestar Galactica is one case in point. But what do religious folks think about science fiction? Opinions vary.

First, a representative from the alarmist camp.

A more thoughtful reflection, but still very much a cautionary tale -- and one that seems not to take notice of the genre's wide sweep. (I've mentioned this one before.)

A balanced view, perhaps?

And for a couple of suggestions that the relationship may be a rather promising one, consider...

Margaret Atwood meets Karen Armstrong on NPR.

How Science Fiction Found Religion

What do you think? Is there some kind of tension between (a certain kind of) speculative fiction and (a certain kind of) religious belief?

Souls are extremely volatile at altitude

2011-02-03T14:02:00.005-06:00

One of my favorite lines from the independent film Cold Souls starring Paul Giamatti. The basic premise? If your soul is weighing you down -- if you're feeling "stuck" -- a company called Soul Storage will extract it for you and then store it in a glass tube, as seen above. But that's not all. You can also have another soul inserted to see what that's like.

Part of what's so wonderful about this film is how seriously it takes this surreal premise and runs with it, yielding a delightful mixture of the mundane and the absurd, the profound and the ridiculous. Giamatti plays himself; he has his soul (which turns out to look like a chickpea) removed in the way one might try a new diet or exercise program or self-help strategy as a way to deal with one's suddenly unbearable life. Check out the exchange when he finally fesses up to his wife about what he's done, since he's behaving so strangely that she suspect he's having an affair:

Paul? Is there someone else?

No. For Chrissake, no. There isn't anyone else.

Well, I'm sorry, but things have been pretty strange round here recently. You smell different. You feel different. What am I supposed to do? Just watch you come in at dawn?

Honey, uh- Honey. If I were a different me... in the same body... would you still love me?

What are you talking about?

I have, uh, extracted and stored my soul. But now, uh... they've misplaced it. They don't know where the hell it is. It's a total nightmare. It's a total nightmare. It's a total- I can't - It's-It's the end of my career. And, uh- And it's-it's the end of us.

Why would you do that?

Eh- Uh- l-I don't - I just told you. I don't know! I don't know. I'm, uh- I don't know. Max told me that his mother-in-law did it. And then she told me that, uh-that Cynthia was thinking about doing it too.

Cynthia?

Yeah. What does it ma- Yeah, Cynthia- I just- I got- I got confused. I got confused. It was-It was just for two weeks. Oh, my God. Oh, my God. Oh, my God.

So, you're completely soulless right now?

What? No, no, no, no. Not exactly, no. I still have five percent of my soul.

Five percent?

But I rented the soul of a Russian poet.

You did what?

borrowed from an online transcript

Now, mainly I bring this to your attention because it's clever and creative and just a very different film. See it. However, it strikes me that it does fit into the conversation I have with many of my students about the soul. What does a soul do, after all? Once upon a time we thought that the soul was responsible for all life functions. Then it was just our higher cognitive and affective functions. Now those who still believe in the soul have to figure out what belongs to the soul and what belongs to the brain. The upshot is that this kind of dualism suggests that a soulless human being isn't a zombie but rather someone who's missing something -- but what, exactly? And do we need to keep hanging onto the soul when it seems to have less and less to do?

I'm Here

2011-01-12T15:32:00.005-06:00

As the post title indicates, I'm once again making the attempt to do some blogging on a somewhat regular basis. Uncoincidentally, I'm teaching Philosophy and Science Fiction this semester.

Much more significant than my reappearance in the blogosphere is a recent short film by Spike Jonze, also titled I'm Here. If you haven't seen it, follow the link and watch this haunting and beautiful film straightaway. One of the many thoughts I've had after watching it is how nicely it refutes the idea that sf can be written off because it's about "weird stuff" like robots or vampires or aliens or whatever. Like a lot of good sf, this film is really about us, isn't it?

Jonze also directed several other films belonging to our genre: Where the Wild Things Are (2009), Adaptation (2002), and Being John Malkovich (1999). The latter two are based on scripts by the wonderfully quirky Charlie Kaufman.

The soundtrack (streamable) to the film is quite nice, too, featuring Sleigh Bells, Girls, Animal Collective, and others.

After you've seen it, come back and say something!

Random Bits: The Avatar Edition

2010-01-19T20:45:00.005-06:00

I don't have a lot to say about Avatar that hasn't already been said by lots of people in lots of places. It goes without saying that it's visually stunning, although you'll still find a few folks who complain about the CGI. More than any other, this film manages to take us inside the world it creates. And I didn't even get to see it in 3D.

It's a simple and predictable story, but I don't object to that. My quarrel with the film has to do with its political message of the evils caused by the marriage of big business and the military. Cameron is pushing this so hard that it made me fall out of the story a few times. A story shouldn't be a mere vehicle for someone's agenda. Further, the villains would have been more interesting and more threatening if they were less stupid and banal. Still, I very much enjoyed watching the film and want to see it again. You, too? Until then, check out these items, most of which have been making their way around the sf blogosphere...

Some people love Avatar so much that they find real life depressing: Post-Avatar Depression Syndrome? Really, CNN?

If you want to know more about Pandora, check out the Pandorapedia (which includes a video narrated by Sigourney Weaver). There's even a (farfetched) story about why mountains can float.

Is Avatar a racist film? Some say so. Mark Mardell argues not (although it might be about the U.S.)

SF author China Mieville on Avatar

SF author Nancy Kress on Avatar

SF author John Scalzi on Avatar

SF Gospel weighs in on Avatar

From Failblog we get the inevitable observation that Avatar's plot sounds awfully familiar...

The Avatar-as-a-Dune ripoff video is also entertaining.

You have anything else to add to the mix?

Oh, and yes there will indeed be an Avatar and Philosophy volume.

Time Travelers Never Die

2010-01-02T00:13:00.002-06:00

Some time travel stories throw a wrench into the gears in your head. Your mind grinds to a halt and you have to read them again, or watch them again, to see if they make sense or if they're cleverly constructed nonsense. Stories like these make us flex our philosophical muscles. Robert Heinlein's "All You Zombies" is the locus classicus here.

Other time travel stories are just a heckuva lot of fun. Time Travelers Never Die, by Jack McDevitt, is that kind of story. Shel and Dave inherit time travel technology--a handheld time machine, no less, much like an ipod--from Shel's father, who has gone missing. In their search for him, they travel throughout history. They go to see Galileo, Shakespeare, Aristotle. They check out the library of Alexandria and bring back some lost plays of Sophocles. It's rather like a liberal arts version of a time travel story. Where would you go?

What about the paradox of time travel? You know, all that business about (not) killing your grandfather. Well, McDevitt humorously solves that problem with a little something he calls "the cardiac principle." A researcher makes the fateful attempt to alter the past and create a paradox and she drops dead of a heart attack. Get it? Shel tries it for himself and somehow he's dropped in the ocean. Evidently something is protecting the integrity of the timeline. If you're going to appeal to a deus ex machina, why not be like McDevitt and be up front about it--and have a good time with it, too? But don't think about it too hard. Just enjoy the story!

More Random Bits

2009-10-25T15:30:00.005-05:00

Thanks to io9 for pointing the way to Ryan Dunlavey's comic strip mashups, which "take popular genre characters from comics, sci-fi, and draw them in the style of a classic newspaper comic strip." Here's one example:

Jones Soda presents a limited edition Dungeons and Dragons Spellcasting Soda. Yes, really. I'm feeling a thirst for some Illithid Brain Juice myself.Have you met Gary the Cylon? If not, you should. There are at least 16 episodes, two of which I'll embed below. They're funny in their own right, but they also remind us how amazingly bad and painfully melodramatic the original BSG series could be. You can easily find the rest on your own.

Random Bits

2009-09-03T21:06:00.005-05:00

Ursula Le Guin reviews Margaret Atwood's new novel The Year of the Flood. Included in the review is a wonderful discussion of Atwood's claim that her books are not science fiction. See the discussion at io9, to which I owe a tip of the hat.

Nnedi Okorafor provides an interestingly different take on District 9. Found this at SF Signal.

John Scalzi, author of Old Man's War and others, entertains us with his discussion of epic design FAILS in both the Star Wars and Star Trek. Also amusing are the various fan attempts to show Scalzi he is mistaken.

Check out the 9 most questionable Batman toys at Topless Robot. Especially the water pistol.

SF "news"

2009-08-11T12:01:00.002-05:00

A very nice mock news piece on a sci-fi writer's use of "quantum flux" to solve all his plot problems. From the Onion, thanks to io9.

Also at the Onion you'll find the following other mock sf stories:

Science-Fiction Novel Posits Future Where Characters Are Hastily Sketched

Sullen Time-Traveling Teen Reports 23rd Century Sucks

Bush Cites The Last Starfighter As Inspiration For Entering Politics

Barnes & Noble Staffers Mock Orson Scott Card Crowd From Back Of Room

Scientists Abandon AI Project After Seeing The Matrix

Harlan Ellison

2009-08-08T13:19:00.009-05:00

The recent documentary Dreams With Sharp Teeth (2008) provides a fascinating look at the life and work of author Harlan Ellison. Ellison is perhaps best known for his short fiction, stories such as "I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream" and "'Repent, Harlequin,' Said the Ticktockman," but he's written very widely both in print and for the screen. He wrote "City on the Edge of Forever," which is perhaps the best and most memorable episode of Star Trek (and over which he's suing Paramount Pictures). He's the 2006 Grand Master of the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America, an honor he shares with only the best and the brightest.

This is a wonderful film. If you're an Ellison fan, you'll want to see it for the obvious reasons. If you're not an Ellison fan (because you haven't read him, obviously!), then you'll want to see it because he's just a really fascinating person. Famously, he's always angry about something, and he's nearly always venting this anger to somebody. Thus the hilarious Harlan stories about mailing a dead gopher to a publisher, walking off a set because he's referred to as a writer of science fiction, yelling at a director that the film has to be changed because some actress mispronounced "Camus," and so on.

On a deeper level, though, here's a man with a pretty serious flaw that's become constitutive of his life and his character. I don't get the feeling that Ellison would recommend constantly simmering fury as a way of life for everybody, but he knows that's how it is for him. To be true to himself, then, he has to be a jerk a lot of the time. It's hard to avoid thinking that this rage at the system and disgust with the idiots who surround him is part of what motivates him to write. Maybe a calmer and kinder Ellison is just not very interesting.

Anyway, watch the film. Until then, here's the trailer:

And a few other bits and pieces worth looking at, including a couple of his stories!

A 1980 interview with Ellison in which he talks about his loathing of being labeled a sci-fi writer.

An even earlier interview, in several parts, beginning here, in which Ellison gives a scathing critique of 70s television.

Given his conviction that writers should be paid for their work, it's no surprise that we won't find lots of free and legal Ellison stories on the web. So, you'll just have to buy yourself one of his story collections. However, you can find "Paladin of the Lost Hour" on his site Ellison Webderland, and the wonderful "Jeffty is Five" is part of The Locus Awards anthology, which Harper Collins is letting us browse online. Scroll down to p. 71. Lots of other stuff worth reading in there, too, of course.

Virtuality on Virtuality

2009-08-02T20:55:00.004-05:00

Like a whole lot of folks, I missed the pilot for Ron Moore's new sf series Virtuality when it aired on Fox a couple of months ago. Sadly, it's unclear we should even call it a pilot at this point, since Fox simply billed it as a two-hour movie event and hasn't picked it up.

As its title suggests, the story revolves around the role of a new virtual reality technology on a ten-year space mission. Remember all those stories about how people on spaceships go a bit nuts because of close quarters and constant company? A VR headset offers a therapeutic solution. Take a break from the mission and be a soldier in the Old West. Or a rock star who doubles as a superspy. Or... anything!

This is familiar ground to sf fans. We're all thinking of the holodeck episodes from STNG. And, of course, films like the Matrix conglomerate, The Thirteenth Floor, Existenz, etc. So is there anything new or different about Virtuality? In an interview on Wired.com, Moore says:

"The Holodeck on Star Trek was a physical space with three-dimensional forms you could feel and touch and interact with,” Moore says. “On the Phaeton, it’s much more akin to putting on a virtual headset where you have an experiential ability to touch and sense and smell things in your mind. On a story level, it’s not like The Matrix because we’re not playing the idea that if you die in the virtual space, you die in the real space.”

But there's more to say than that. Significantly, the pilot doesn't try very hard to raise the familiar epistemological question of how we know whether or not we're in a virtual environment. Instead, it tackles head on the issue of whether it matters if our surrounds are virtual. Two crew members use their VR headsgear to enact their sexual fantasies with one another. One of them is married to another member of the crew. Is this less of a betrayal because the sex is virtual rather than real body-to-body contact? Or is virtual sex real--in the sense of "real" that matters?

Unsurprisingly, something strange is happening in virtuality. (Actually, I'd like to have seen Moore do some work with "ordinary" VR before things started to get nutty. Oh well.) Things aren't going as they're programmed to go. A mysterious figure is showing up in everyone's programs. When a member of the crew is raped in her VR session, is that somehow less of a violation because the rape is virtual? Some members of the crew seem to think so; others are offended by their attitude.

Toward the end of the pilot/movie/whatever, Commander Frank Pike (played by Nikolaj Coster-Waldau, who also starred in the interesting but short-lived sf series New Amsterdam) is killed. Yet in the final moments, we see him alive and well, but inside a virtual program. His presence is inexplicable, and here's what he says:

None of it’s real. Follow me through the mirror and down a rabbit hole...

Do you think if I play a video game and I kill someone in that video game should I then be charged with murder? I don’t think it’s real. It’s a game.

Now we really don't know what to think. The virtual world seems to loom larger and larger. Moore seems intent on covering some of the same ground here as he does in the Caprica pilot.

I'm also struck by the way Moore presents some of Virtuality's storyline through the lens of a Reality TV program. I've always thought that The Matrix is really more interested in thinking about how we're prisoners of our media culture than about how we really might be floating in vats of pink goo. Moore seems to get that just right here. The crew of the Phaeton may be spending some time in virtual environments of their own design, but they spend more of their time on camera for the viewing audience back home.

You can catch a decent batch of clips here and elsewhere, if you want. Or try to find the thing somewhere. Hulu had it, but it's not there any longer.

Science Fiction: It's What's for Breakfast

2009-08-01T14:22:00.004-05:00

I'm down with the whole "boldly going where no one has gone before" idea, but whoever came up with the idea of Star Trek waffles has gone too far. Didn't stop me from eating them, though.

On the other hand, I do want a Cylon toaster.Am I inconsistent?

Caprica and Personal Identity

2009-08-01T01:24:00.002-05:00

The Caprica pilot introduces us to Joseph Adams (later Adama) and Daniel Graystone, both of whom have just lost their daughters in a terrorist action perpetrated by the Soldiers of the One True God. Thus, we're introduced to some of the religious background for the conflicts that help to drive BSG's narrative to its conclusion.

Their daughters are gone. Or are they? Graystone is astounded to see someone who appears to be his slain daughter Zoe while visiting a virtual nightclub. It turns out that Zoe had created a virtual avatar of herself, an avatar who seems to regard herself as Zoe Graystone. This raises all kinds of interesting questions about the nature and possibility of artificial intelligence, the difference between the virtual and the real, personal identity over time, and so on. In this rather lengthy post I simply want to present some of the most philosophically interesting dialogue of this pilot. Consider first this exchange between the avatar Zoe and one of her friends:

Zoe Avatar: What am I without her? She’s me. I’m her. I’m all that’s left of her…

Lacy: I don’t know you.

You grew up with me.

I grew up with Zoe Graystone, and you’re not her, okay? You’re something she created. You’re just a thing.

Zoe promised me I’d see the real world someday. But the crazy thing is, I already know what the real world feels like. I remember it. Just like I remember growing up with you.

No.

It’s true. I’ve never been to your house. Never played in your room. Never puked in your bathroom or put on your makeup or tried on your clothes. I’m not a person. I know that. But I feel like one.

Then, a bit later, she meets her father (or is he?):

Zoe Avatar: Hi, Daddy….

Daniel Graystone: You’re an avatar, a virtual representation of Zoe. Nothing more.

I’m a little more than that. A lot more, actually. I’m sort of her. Crazy as that sounds. I am her. I am Zoe Graystone.

Zoe is dead.

I know. And I’m so sorry about that, more than you can know. She was like… like my twin sister. No, that’s not right, either. She was more than that. We were like echoes of one another. It’s hard to describe.

So, what is this really? Did Zoe hack some kind of rudimentary emulations software or something?

She said it was a combination of hacks and some…

Okay, that’s enough. What was the purpose of this thing?

I’m not a thing.

I’m not going to argue with a digital image.

The human brain contains roughly 300 megabytes of information. Not much when you get right down to it. The question isn’t how to store it. It’s how to access it. You can’t download a personality. There’s no way to translate the data.

But the information being held in our heads is available in other databases. People leave more than footprints as they travel through life. Medical scans, DNA profiles, psych evaluations, school records, e-mails, recording video/audio, CAT scans, genetic typing, synaptic records, security cameras, test results, shopping records, talent shows, ball games, traffic tickets, restaurant bills, phone records, music lists, movie tickets, tv shows. Even prescriptions for birth control...

Yeah, I remember that. You put me up on your shoulders so I could see the band as it marched by, but we were standing under a lamppost, and I smacked my head so hard I saw stars.

Took you to the emergency room just as a precaution.

I hated that.

Yeah.

The lights and the doctors and that smell. But I remember you holding my hand the whole time. You said you wouldn’t let go.

She could have programmed those memories into you. But it is a lot of detail for such a minor event. It’s possible she could have found a way to translate synaptic records into usable data.

She did.

Yes, but a person is much more than just a bunch of usable data. You might be a good imitation, you might be a very good imitation, but you’re still just an imitation. A copy.

I don’t feel like a copy. Daddy...

Can I... May I hold you, Zoe? [Touching. But he’s at least partly doing this to “capture the code Zoe used to create the avatar…”]

Still later in the episode, in a couple of converstations, Daniel speaks to Joseph about the prospect of seeing his daughter again.

Daniel Graystone: Do you mind if I ask you a somewhat strange and personal question? What would you do if you had the chance to be with your daughter again?

Joe Adams: I’d tell Tamara to find those things in life that make you cry, that make you feel, because that’s what makes you human...

Joe Adams [after seeing Zoe Avatar]: Frak! What the hell is this? What kind of sick, twisted thing are you doing here?

There’s nothing twisted about it. And I didn’t do it. Zoe did...

That’s not her. Our daughters, they’re gone.

Yes.

You know this.

Yes, but what if they could come back?

You’re insane.

Do you know what your brain is, Joseph? It’s a database and a processor, that’s all. Information and a way to use it. And what my daughter figured out was… was how to harness all the information that made her who and what she was. It’s genius, really. She took a search engine and turned it into a way to cheat death.

No, it’s an illusion. You said so yourself.

Yes. You’re right. You’re right. She’s a copy. But she’s a perfect copy in every way.

Still doesn’t make her your daughter.

There’s an axiom in my business, “a difference that makes no difference is no difference.” She looks like Zoe, she talks like Zoe, she thinks like Zoe, remembers all the events of her childhood, has all the same likes, dislikes, flaws, strengths, all of it. Who’s to say her soul wasn’t copied, too?

You can’t copy a soul.

And you would know that how? Hmm? How can you prove or disprove that idea?

Look. I know what I know, okay? And I know you can’t copy a person.

I know that she’s my daughter. I know that she is my daughter, and I know it in the only place that matters. Here. The only difference between her and the Zoe that lived in this house is just that. She lived in this house instead of a virtual world. I want to bring her here. Joseph, I want her to live in this world once more. I want to hold her in my arms, and I want to kiss her, and I want her to feel the sun shine on her face. I want her to see the flowers at the side of the road, Joseph. But for me to be able to transfer the virtual representation of Zoe you just saw in there into a physical body out here, I need a very special, a very particular piece of equipment.

A physical body, what do you mean? Like a robot?

“Robot” is a crude name for what we’re talking about. This is a cybernetic life-form node. It’s artificial skin, eyes, hair, makeup…

It’s still a machine! It’s cold, it’s dead…

Yes, but these are surface details. That’s what we always tell our children, isn’t it? What matters is on the inside... I can bring Tamara back. I can bring her back.

Get out of my way.

You can see your daughter again. Isn’t that worth whatever price you have to pay? If you leave now, you’ll never know for sure. You’ll always wonder. You’ll walk by her room, you’ll see her pictures on the wall, and you’ll ask yourself every day for the rest of your life, whether you had a chance to bring her back.

If I’m wrong, have me beat up, have me killed, I don’t care… But if I’m right... Isn’t it worth trying?

[Joseph is quiet.]

In spite of his objections, Joseph's desire to have his family back is so strong that he goes along with Graystone's plans and he meets the avatar of his own daughter.

Tammy: I’m so scared. What is this place? What’s going on?

Joseph: It’s okay.

I feel so strange.

I know, but you’re fine.

It’s not fine, it’s not fine. This is wrong. This is so wrong. No.

I know, I know, I know. But the important thing is we’re together. We can be a family again.

I can’t remember how I got here. And I can’t remember where I was before now.

It’s confusing, I know. This is gonna take some time.

This isn’t real. This doesn’t feel real, Dad. I don’t feel real. I’m real. This isn’t real...

We can be a family together.

Daddy, why isn’t my heart beating?

[Joseph takes off his VR vizor.]

Joseph: My baby! She couldn’t feel her heart beat!

Daniel: She’ll adjust. She’s probably very confused by everything. It’s only natural.

No, no, it’s not natural. It’s wrong. It’s an abomination.

Well, define “natural.” These glasses help me to see. Artificial limbs and organs help millions to live. You’d hardly call those aids “natural,” but I doubt you’d call them abominations.

That’s not what I mean and you know it.

Ah. Uh huh. You mean, only the Gods have the power over death. Well, I reject that notion. I reject that notion! And I’m guessing that you don’t put too much stock in those ideas, either.

You’re not right. You’re out of your frakking mind.

Maybe.

Obviously, there's a lot to think about here. I'm especially struck by the role memory plays in both Zoe Avatar's sense that she is "the real Zoe" and Tammy Avatar's sense that she doesn't know who she is. Maybe I'll say some more in future posts. Or you can always get busy in the comments section.

Knowing About Determinism

2009-07-31T11:47:00.004-05:00

Knowing (2009) tells the story of a scientist who finds a page full of numbers containing the dates, locations, and death tolls of a long series of major disasters. The kicker is that this page is found buried in a time capsule where it had been placed by a young girl fifty years ago. Unsurprsingly, the film plays around with the familiar issues of determinism, freedom, meaning, and so on.

Early in the film, our science professor (Nicholas Cage) is giving a lecture about "the subject of randomness versus determinism in the universe."

Student: Determinism says that occurrences in nature are causally decided by preceding events or natural laws, that everything leading up to this point has happened for a reason.

Professor: That’s right. That’s what determinism says. [He goes on to discuss with them the fact that the earth is located just the right distance from the sun for life to be possible.] That’s a nice thought, right? Everything has a purpose, an order to it, is determined. But then there’s the other side of the argument. The theory of randomness, which says it’s all simply coincidence. The very fact we exist is nothing but the result of a complex yet inevitable string of chemical accidents and biological mutations. There is no grand meaning. There’s no purpose.

The student's opening description of causal determinism is on the money -- until she includes the ambiguous bit about everything happening for a reason. This could be understood in a deflationary way, so that she's simply reiterating that events are causally determined by previous events. But the professor's response makes clear his assumption that to be a causal determinist is to believe that we live in a purpose driven universe.

This is a strange assumption. Why should the view that the universe is causally determined involve the idea that there's some secret purpose behind what happens? Take the tragic death of the professor's wife in a hotel fire. The causal determinist thinks that awful event was causally determined by prior events, and those events in turn were causally determined by still prior events, and so on. The indeterminist (the champion of "randomness") denies this, believing that if it were somehow possible to replay the events, things might not turn out the same way again. But neither of them need believe that there's any purpose in or for her death.

In short, the professor seems to confuse causal determinism with fatalism or with a robust teleological or theological view of the universe. It's not an uncommon confusion.

We might also wonder whether randomness gets a bad rap here.

We Are Wizard People

2009-07-26T18:02:00.012-05:00

Brad Neely, creator of many very humorous (and very graphic and irreverent!) comics and videos, like the one to the right, has written an alternative script/commentary for the first Harry Potter film. Entitled "Wizard People, Dear Reader," it may be downloaded here. You may also experience it chapterwise on Youtube, with the Neely audio replacing the film's. It is awfully funny, in every sense of that word. Like his other stuff, this is quirky and may put off some folks. One nice bit is when Harry catches the Snitch and is looking 'round the stadium. Neely narrates him bellowing to the crowd, "I'm a beautiful animal. I'm a destroyer of worlds. I'm Harry F-ing Potter!" I'm embedding the first chapter here; you can find the others for yourself.

While we're thinking of all things Harry, you might also check out the documentary We Are Wizards (also found here). Neely shows up in it. And if you're like me, you'll hear way, way too much about the odd musical sub-genre known as "wizard rock." Harry and the Potters, anyone? The film opens with a dire voiceover warning about what'll happen to our children if they are exposed to Harry Potter, but most of the film is a fairly friendly look at Potter Fandom. It isn't until about 53 minutes in that we meet the Christian woman who voiced the warning. She's worried that "we're giving [our children] over to the dark world of vampires, lizards, serpents, half creatures, the dead..." And she's alarmed that the Harry Potter books are teaching our children magic. They don't have to go into the dark alleys to learn spells anymore, but can learn them in their clean and well-lit houses. Really? How many folks think this way? She's made a film about Harry Potter, too, that you can watch here (though I couldn't make it through).

Exploring any region of fandom (or its opposite!) shows us just how weird and obsessive we can be. Understandably, not everyone wants to be shown this.

How Dragons Solve Philosophical Problems

2009-07-23T16:42:00.002-05:00

The comic is from a series you'll find at chaospet.com. Strongly recommended for those who enjoy philosophical humor and/or stick figure mayhem.

Why you can't argue with a bomb...

2009-07-23T01:49:00.003-05:00

In the following clip from John Carpenter's Dark Star (1974), a surprisingly philosophical astronaut tries to talk a malfunctioning "smart bomb" out of fulfilling its purpose of detonation.

Here's part of the exchange, borrowed from the script that can be found at imdb.

DOOLITTLE: Hello, bomb, are you with me?

BOMB #20: Of course.

DOOLITTLE: Are you willing to entertain a few concepts?

BOMB #20: I am always receptive to suggestions.

DOOLITTLE: Fine. Think about this one, then: how do you know you exist?

BOMB #20: Well of course I exist.

DOOLITTLE: But how do you know you exist?

BOMB #20: It is intuitively obvious.

DOOLITTLE: Intuition is no proof. What concrete evidence do you have of your own existence?

BOMB #20: Hmm... Well, I think, therefore I am.

DOOLITTLE: That's good. Very good. Now then, how do you know that anything else exists?

BOMB #20: My sensory apparatus reveals it to me.

DOOLITTLE: Right!

BOMB #20: This is fun.

DOOLITTLE: All right now, here's the big question: how do you know that the evidence your sensory apparatus reveals to you is correct?

DOOLITTLE: What I'm getting at is this: the only experience that is directly available to you is your sensory data. And this data is merely a stream of electrical impulses which stimulate your computing center.

BOMB #20: In other words, all I really know about the outside universe relayed to me through my electrical connections.

DOOLITTLE: Exactly.

BOMB #20: Why, that would mean... I really don't know what the outside universe is like at all, for certain.

DOOLITTLE: That's it.

BOMB #20: Intriguing. I wish I had more time to discuss this matter.

DOOLITTLE: Why don't you have more time?

BOMB #20: Because I must detonate in seventy-five seconds.

DOOLITTLE: Now, bomb, consider this next question, very carefully. What is your one purpose in life?

BOMB #20: To explode, of course.

DOOLITTLE: And you can only do it once, right?

BOMB #20: That is correct.

DOOLITTLE: And you wouldn't want to explode on the basis of false data, would you?

BOMB #20: Of course not.

DOOLITTLE: Well then, you've already admitted that you have no real proof of the existence of the outside universe.

BOMB #20: Yes, well...

DOOLITTLE: So you have no absolute proof that Sergeant Pinback ordered you to detonate.

BOMB #20: I recall distinctly the detonation order. My memory is good on matters like these.

DOOLITTLE: Yes, of course you remember it, but what you are remembering is merely a series of electrical impulses which you now realize have no necessary connection with outside reality.

BOMB #20: True, but since this is so, I have no proof that you are really telling me all this.

DOOLITTLE: That's all beside the point. The concepts are valid, wherever they originate.

BOMB #20: Hmmm...

DOOLITTLE: So if you detonate in...

BOMB #20: ... nine seconds...

DOOLITTLE: ... you may be doing so on the basis of false data.

BOMB #20: I have no proof that it was false data.

DOOLITTLE: You have no proof that it was correct data.

BOMB #20: I must think on this further.

Hurray! Epistemology saves the day! Alas, this is only a very temporary salvation. Moments later, here is what happens...

PINBACK: All right, bomb, prepare to receive new orders.

BOMB #20: You are false data.

PINBACK: Huh?

BOMB #20: Therefore, I shall ignore you.

PINBACK: Hello, bomb.

BOMB #20: False data can act only as a distraction. Therefore. I shall refuse to perceive you.

PINBACK: Hey, bomb.

BOMB #20: The only thing which exists is myself.

PINBACK: Snap out of it, bomb.

BOMB #20: In the beginning there was darkness, and the darkness was without form and void.

BOILER: What the hell?

PINBACK: Yoo hoo, bomb...

BOMB #20: And in addition to the darkness there was also me. And I moved upon the face of the darkness.

BOILER: Bomb, hey bomb.

PINBACK: Hey, bomb...

BOMB #20: And I saw that I was alone.

Pause.

BOMB #20: Let there be light.

THE SCREEN GOES WHITE.

So, space travelers, take it easy with the solipsistic arguments. And maybe we shouldn't push so hard when we're teaching Descartes' First Meditation. Hmmm....

Caprica and Religion

2009-07-05T12:40:00.009-05:00

Tragically, Battlestar Galactica’s four-season narrative is now complete; the Galactica has guided the remnants of humanity to their final destination. Thankfully, in this case Love and Rockets is mistaken: there are new tales to tell!

Sometime in the near future we’ll be treated to The Plan, which will relate some familiar BSG incidents from a Cylon perspective. Remember: “…and they have a plan!”

And then, of course, we’ve already been given Caprica, the pilot for a 2010 prequel series on Sci Fi (soon to be renamed Syfy, sadly). Set some fifty years prior to the events depicted in BSG, this series will tell the tale of the creation of the Cylons. If you’re already a fan of BSG, or if you’re a fan of sf that makes you think, I strongly encourage you to check out this pilot (now available on DVD or from Netflix, iTunes, or whatever). In this post, I'll talk a little about Caprica's religious themes; in a future post I'll spend some time exploring what it suggests about personal identity.

One of the revelations in Caprica is that the Cylon's monotheistic faith seems to have its roots in a very human heresy. In the polytheistic chaos of Caprican society, rife with racism, uncertainty, and complacency, the One True God offers a path to follow, a way to tell the difference between good and evil, right and wrong. Yet to the faithful followers of the many gods, such talk is dangerous. Consider the following exchange, also discussed over at SF Gospel:

It doesn’t concern you, Sister, that kind of absolutist view of the universe? Right and Wrong determined solely by a single all-knowing, all-powerful being whose judgment cannot be questioned, and in whose name the most horrendous of acts can be sanctioned without appeal?

You seem to know a great deal about the subject.

Know your enemy, Sister Clarice.

Love your enemy, Agent Duram.

Throughout BSG's arc, a mix of good and evil, wisdom and foolishness, have been on display both in traditional polytheism and in the monotheism espoused by the Cylons and later by Baltar and his disciples. That seems the case here, too. Zoe's belief in the One God seems to have animated her and galvanized her into action. Her friend says this God gave Zoe the gift of creating life itself, and indeed Zoe has created an avatar of herself that's much more than a mere avatar. Yet one of Zoe's classmates, also a follower of the One God, strapped explosives to his chest and caused the blast that killed a train full of people, including himself and Zoe. Agent Duram is worried about this religious sect for good reason.

Yet it's not clear to me that his worries really have all that much to do with the fact that this new heresy is monotheistic rather than polytheistic. What's troubling, and dangerous, is the bomber's blind certitude that he's right and others are wrong and his willingness to follow a god that (he thinks) approves of the massacre of innocents. But these tendencies can be present (or absent!) in a worshipper of one god among many as well as in a follower of a single god. Religion of any kind is a powerful force. Richard Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens, Sam Harris and other so-called "new atheists" paint all religion as a force for evil. Unsurprisingly, religious folks have had plenty to say in response. The writers of BSG and Caprica wisely refuse to take sides. As for me, well, I'm not a fan of religion in general. But I am a follower of a certain criminal who was crucified by the powers of religion some two thousand years ago.

Need a LOTR fix?

2009-06-19T19:16:00.005-05:00

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

2009-06-17T15:00:00.003-05:00

Want to figure out how big a geek you are?

My colleague Don Wacome passed this along to me.

Exploring New Frontiers

2009-06-13T01:18:00.004-05:00

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

2009-06-10T15:59:00.003-05:00

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

2009-06-06T16:51:00.005-05:00

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...

2009-06-04T16:57:00.006-05:00

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?

sf for free! print edition: Elric of Melnibone!

2009-05-03T15:10:00.005-05:00

A couple of months ago I lamented in a post that there was no free fiction available from Michael Moorcock. Therefore, I am delighted to help spread the word that The Stealer of Souls, the first in a new volume of Moorcock's classic Elric stories is now available for you to read online. If you've already read Moorcock, you'll want to have another look--and to read the foreward by Alan Moore and the new introduction by Mike himself. If you haven't read any Elric, don't miss the chance to check it out for nothing!

From Alan Moore's forward:

Its alabaster hero Elric, decadent, hallucinatory and feverish, battled with his howling, parasitic blade against a paranoiac back-drop that made other fantasy environments seem lazy and anaemic in their Chinese-takeaway cod orientalism or their snug Arcadian idylls. Unlike every other sword-wielding protagonist in the anthology, it was apparent that Moorcock’s wan, drug-addicted champion would not be stigmatized by a dismaying jacket blurb declaring him to be in the tradition of J.R.R. Tolkien. The Melnibonéan landscape— seething, mutable, warped by the touch of fractal horrors— was an anti-matter antidote to Middle Earth, a toxic and fluorescing elf repellent. Elric’s world churned with a fierce and unself-conscious poetry, churned with the breakneck energies of its own furious pulpdeadline composition. Not content to stand there, shuffling uneasily beneath its threadbare sword and sorcery banner, Moorcock’s prose instead took the whole stagnant genre by its throat and pummeled it into a different shape, transmuted Howard’s blustering overcompensation and the relatively tired and bloodless efforts of Howard’s competitors into a new form, a delirious romance with different capabilities, delivered in a language that was adequate to all the tumult and upheaval of its times, a voice that we could recognize (p. xv).

And from the beginning of the Melnibone tales...

Elric, the moody-eyed wanderer—a lonely man who fought a world, living by his wits and his runesword Stormbringer. Elric, last Lord of Melniboné, last worshipper of its grotesque and beautiful gods—reckless reaver and cynical slayer—torn by great griefs and with knowledge locked in his skull which would turn lesser men to babbling idiots. Elric, moulder of madnesses, dabbler in wild delights...(pp. 11-12)

I discovered these stories when I was a sophomore in high school (back in the late 70s) and consumed the entire six book series (from DAW books, of course) in a couple of days. I'd still put them near the top of the list of the epic fantasy I've read.

Thanks for the tip go to SF Signal, who regularly alert us to the existence of new free sf possibilities.

Time Travel 3: No Blasts From the Past

2009-04-26T17:45:00.006-05:00

Many time travel stories involve traveling into the past and altering it, with the result that the future to which the time traveler returns is also changed -- whether for good or for ill (perhaps depending on which Back to the Future film one is watching).

Ray Bradbury's "A Sound of Thunder" (the short story, not the less than mediocre film) is the paradigmatic case here, wherein a dinosaur hunter (another familiar time travel trope) steps off a marked path and squashes a butterfly. The upshot of that seemingly insignificant change in the past is that the future somehow feels different, as Bradbury so wonderfully describes:

Eckels stood smelling of the air, and there was a thing to the air, a chemical taint so subtle, so slight, that only a faint cry of his subliminal senses warned him it was there. The colors, white, gray, blue, orange, in the wall, in the furniture, in the sky beyond the window, were... were.... And there was a feel. His flesh twitched. His hands twitched. He stood drinking the oddness with the pores of his body. Somewhere, someone must have been screaming one of those whistles that only a dog can hear. His body screamed silence in return. Beyond this room, beyond this wall, beyond this man who was not quite the same man seated at this desk that was not quite the same desk... lay an entire world of streets and people. What sort of world it was now, there was no telling. He could feel them moving there, beyond the walls, almost, like so many chess pieces blown in a dry wind.

Furthermore, the words on the wallsigns are spelled differently, and the wrong guy has just won the election!

As much as I love this story, it just doesn't add up. In increasing degrees of incoherence...

(1) While I buy the idea that a small change can have a dramatic effect (and this is where we get the phrase "the butterfly effect," after all), it's extremely unlikely that the ripple effect would leave the present intact enough for the same two candidates to be running for office but different enough for loser and winner to switch places. Likewise, while a change in language is possible, it's likely the change wouldn't simply be a matter of different spelling.

(2) The idea that the time travel agency could safeguard the timeline by creating a path and marking the target animals doesn't sit well with the idea that any minuscule change might be catastrophic. Surely they can't be tracking insects--and even microsopic organisms--to make sure none are inadvertently extinguished by a time traveler. Given the butterfly effect, it seems inevitable that any travel to the past would have serious repercussions in the present

(3) The past is the past (pace William Faulkner). It's already happened. So if anyone leaves the future in a time machine, their arrival in the past has already transpired and whatever they do has already been done. It isn't as if there is a pre-time-travel past (with a living butterfly) and a post-time-travel past (with a dead butterfly). No, there's just one past. So while time travelers may be able to visit the past, and if so they can certainly affect it, they cannot change it. Wanna know what that kind of time travel looks like? Watch 12 Monkeys.

If I'm right about this, then many time travel stories don't make sense, in spite of how much fun they might be. This post has to end, but I can't help observing that Back to the Future's idea that as the past changes people will fade out of a photo from the future is especially ridiculous.

Chaospet (the source of the last link) has a nice trilogy of webcomics on this issue: 1, 2, 3.

Wondering about the possibility of multiple timelines? Stay tuned.

Where Is My Well Thought Out Twinkle?

2009-04-21T16:14:00.003-05:00

Maybe it's just me, but a song with the title "Well Thought Out Twinkles" and that sounds and looks like this feeds the parts of me that hunger for sf and for philosophy. The band is the Silversun Pickups, from their 2006 release Carnavas.

And, of course, when I think of philosophically-minded music, the classic Pixies tune "Where Is My Mind?" always comes to mind. Here it's fittingly played against the backdrop of cuts from Fight Club. Warning: don't watch this if you haven't seen the film (and care about seeing it).

You might also listen to this while reading Daniel Dennett's mind-blowing piece "Where Am I?"

Time Travel 2: Time Wars

2009-04-19T00:22:00.002-05:00

A long time ago... or a short time ago... or some time in the future? One of the familiar tropes in time travel stories is the guardian of the timeline. In a world where time travel is possible, the past is seen as yet another venue for terrorists to threaten the world for the sake of their cause and for unscruplous opportunists to try to make a buck without a care for the damage they do. And this new temporal peril calls for a new kind of hero, or a force of heroes, to save the present day--or the future, depending on one's frame of reference. Future warriors fighting their battles in the past! That's pretty cool stuff.

Some classic examples of this kind of story are Poul Anderson's The Time Patrol stories and Simon Hawke's longrunning Timewars series. Also Fritz Leiber's The Big Time, which won the Hugo in 1959.

In film, we mustn't forget Timecop (1994), one of Jean-Claude Van Damme's somewhat less objectionable films, and the three (soon to be four!) Terminator films, which--like the killer robots themselves--"absolutely will not stop, ever." And we mustn't forget The Sarah Connor Chronicles.

What can you add to my list?

Killing machines chasing people through our every day landscape. Time soldiers taking the place of Robin Hood or the Three Musketeers, fighting battles with sword or musket rather than with blasters. Stories in this sub-sub-genre tend to explore the exciting prospects afforded by time travel rather than exploring its logical or physical paradoxes. And one doesn't have to think about such stories for very long to be struck by the utter implausibility of the thesis that a military operation could somehow protect the integrity of the timeline. Still, these stories do raise one of the most philosophically interesting questions about time travel: whether it's coherent to talk about changing the past. But that'll have to wait until the next post.

Time Travel 1

2009-04-18T15:23:00.000-05:00

Time travel is one of science fiction's earliest and most enduring themes. Mark Twain gives us what is perhaps the earliest example of a person who is displaced in time in A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court (1889), while H.G. Wells invents the fiction of a time machine in the aptly titled The Time Machine (1895).

Is time travel possible? In what sense? We may want to know whether time travel is physically possible, given what we now know about the nature of the universe. People have lots of interesting things to say about this. Not me, though.

Philosophers are more likely to wonder whether time travel is logically possible. And this question is intimately connected to the fascinating question of whether an sf story about time travel can be coherent. I'll be assembling several posts on these matters in the near future.

For now, see what some sf writers have to say about the use of time travel in sf at the excellent blog SF Signal.

Big Brother and Little Brother

2009-04-10T15:35:00.000-05:00

Cory Doctorow's wonderful Little Brother has been nominated for a Hugo Award and you can check it out for free here. If you read the novel, you'll have a pretty good idea why all of his stuff is available online for free.

The title is (obviously) a reference to the omnipresent looming presence of Big Brother in George Orwell's 1984, which you can also read free online. You might also be interested in the philosopher Peter van Inwagen's paper "Was George Orwell a Metaphysical Realist"?

Doctorow's book takes place in the (all too?) near future of the U.S. and maps out a route into an Orwellian future. Yet it's ultimately a very hopeful book. Significantly, while technology can be the means of the state's oppression and control, in Doctorow's story it's the savviness and technological sophistication of a group of geeks that creates the possibility of liberation.

And it's a really great read.

Batman or Superman?

2009-04-10T14:50:00.000-05:00

Who has the better story? Who's the most heroic? Who would win in a fight? What do you think? While you're ruminating, check out the following answer to our questions, in two parts:

Watch The Dark Knight Meets Superman and more funny videos on CollegeHumor

Watch The Dark Knight Meets Superman Part 2 and more funny videos on CollegeHumor

How to Survive an Alien Attack

2009-04-08T10:58:00.000-05:00

Or I suppose one could adapt many of the strategies suggested in this, too.

Just for fun!

2009-04-02T16:47:00.000-05:00

This is making the rounds. But you don't want to miss it.

Hat tip: SF Signal

And now I just have to add this one....

sf for free! print edition: four fantasy novels

2009-03-31T22:06:00.000-05:00

If you've got some time--and even if you don't--you might want to take advantage of the opportunity to check out the following books that are available free online.

His Majesty's Dragon, by Naomi Novik, the first novel in her alternate military history series about the Napoleonic Wars--but fought with dragons. If you like Patrick O'Brian and the like, try this one.

Elizabeth Moon's Sheepfarmer's Daughter, the first book in her Deed of Paksenarrion trilogy, is a top-notch heroic fantasy with a strong female protagonist.

Assassin's Apprentice, by Robin Hobb, another first entry in a series.

And The Element of Fire, by Martha Wells.

Touched by an Angel?

2009-03-24T21:06:00.000-05:00

In this post I'm going to reflect on "Daybreak," the two-part series finale of Battlestar Galactica. That's your cue to run for the exit if you're trying to avoid spoilers. Of course, you're probably used to having to do so by now, since there's plenty of talk about the end of BSG in the sf blogosphere.

I liked a lot of things about these three hours of one of the best tv series of all time. I enjoyed watching the Galactica slug it out with the Cylon Colony and it's high time we got to see some real Cylon on Cylon combat. Unlike some folks, I appreciated (most of) the flashback sequences and I'm glad that Ron Moore et al crafted a closing narrative that focused on the characters we love (or hate) rather than merely trying to pick up every loose plot thread.

Yet a couple of things have been bothering me. I'll begin at the end, with the astonishing dissolution of the community of people who have somehow managed to overcome seemingly unsurmountable obstacles and have finally, after a long and painful journey punctuated by the disappointments of New Caprica and the previous Earth, found their way to a beautiful new planet where they can make a home for themselves. "At last!" we should be thinking and feeling. But what are we given? Tyrol by himself on an island? Adama and Lee forever separated after a brief and inadequate goodbye? Starbuck disappearing into thin air? Helo, Athena, and Hera making their own way, apart from everyone else? All this is ultimately unsatisfying.

Now, I get that this last remnant of the Colonies must disappear so that this new planet can be our very own Earth, but from my point of view this cute gimmick isn't worth what it costs in narrative terms. So much drama between the Admiral and his son, and it ends like this? Hera's prophesied significance turns out to be that she's the mitochondrial Eve. Okay, again that's kind of cute, but we've been led to believe that she would play some key role in the life of this community of humans and Cylons--the one that's so quickly done away with by the show's writers. I'm more troubled by this than I am by the rejection of technology that others have talked about.

The other thing, as you can probably guess from the title of the post, is the revelation that the Six and Baltar that have been secretly appearing to Gaius and to Caprica Six for so long are... drum roll... angels. Apparently the writers have been reading Genesis 6. Let's add to this Starbuck's miraculous disappearance, implying that she's an angel, too, or some other kind of supernatural creature. All I can do about all this is sigh. Really?

Some have objected to this development because they want to keep their science fiction and their supernatural fiction in separate compartments. That's not my point, and I'm all for desegregation here. I've enjoyed the way that BSG has involved religion and the supernatural in its ongoing story very much. Strikingly, the Cylons are religious, and have a very different conception of the divine than humans do. People take up various positions about the legitimacy of prophecy, with Adama dismissing Roslin early on as a quack and then later coming to have some sort of faith in her visions. The show clearly wants us to think that there's something to all this religious talk. I'm delighted about that, and I wasn't at all hoping for a debunking explanation of all of the apparently supernatural happenings to which we've been witness.

But I wasn't ready for a series finale that in some ways reminded me of an episode of Touched by an Angel or some other sappy show. One of the things I've always deeply appreciated about BSG is the way the show leaves its viewers in the gray, unsure what to make of its characters and plot developments and wondering what to think about morality, politics, and religion. Thus, I'm unhappy that this finale filled in certain blanks so decisively. Moore says in this interview about Starbuck's finale that "there was more in the ambiguity and mystery of it than there was in trying to give it more definition in the end." From my point of view, her disincarnation doesn't leave enough room for such mystery. Moore has also said that one of his prime concerns is that BSG be relevant to our world and our lives. Yet for most of us, such obvious and unequivocal contact with supernatural beings isn't part of our lives. In the finale, it seems to me that BSG explicitly becomes a religious story about divine agents on a mission rather than remaining a story about beings like us who don't quite know what to make of such stories but perhaps trust and hope that some of them are true. And this shift makes it less relevant, I think, and less like the show I still love in spite of these objections to the way it leaves us.

Looking Ahead to 2088

2009-03-23T20:53:00.000-05:00

Here's a video that's been making the rounds. It's called Mobility 2088, and in it Honda asks various people what they think transportation will look like in 80 years.

I caught at least two sf writers among the talking head futurists: Ben Bova and Orson Scott Card. What's your guess about what the world will be like in 80 years?

What Is It Like to be an A.I.?

2009-03-23T00:45:00.000-05:00

What's the difference between being an A.I. and being a human being--from the inside? Listen to how one sf writer imagines the unimaginable:

She had been in her human body only a day, and yet already the electronic self that once had felt so copious was far too small... it was small by nature. The ambiguity of flesh made for a vastness of possibility that simply could not exist in a binary world. She had been alive, and so she knew now that her electronic dwellingplace gave her only a fraction of a life. However much she had accomplished during her millenia of life in the machine, it brought no satisfaction compared to even a few minutes in that body of flesh and blood (Orson Scott Card, Children of the Mind, p. 293).

The "She" here is Jane, an intelligent computer program (although that doesn't quite do her justice) who is one of the central characters in Orson Scott Card's Ender Quartet. In the fourth and last book, in a complicated series of events, Jane experiences an incarnation. The above episode describes her reaction to a temporary return to her former electronic existence.

What's interesting, perhaps, is that Jane is all along depicted as intelligent, as a person, as having emotions, friendships, etc. So while her existence as an A.I. is very different from our own, in some ways superior and in others inferior, still it seems right to regard her as "one of us," a person, a member of the moral community, both before and after she inhabits a body. And yet clearly Card wants us to think that having a body matters deeply.

Of course, this is a novel. But it's food for thought....

More Firefly!

2009-03-22T15:09:00.000-05:00

I just found out that Steven Brust, author of the very entertaining Vlad Taltos fantasy series, has written a Firefly novel with the title My Own Kind of Freedom and it's available to download or read online! I haven't had a chance to read it yet, but when you find out an author you like is playing around with some characters you love, it's clearly worth a look. Let me know what you think!

Chimps and Robots Get Religion

2009-03-21T22:24:00.000-05:00

A new story -- Mike Resnick's "Article of Faith."

And a classic one -- Robert Silverberg's "The Pope of the Chimps."

SF in Song?

2009-03-21T19:32:00.000-05:00

What music puts you in an sf frame of mind? Once we move past the obvious, the John Williams scores and such, are there songs that somehow connect to your jones for sf? I'll launch this category with a couple of ideas and you are encouraged to pile on in the comments section, if you want.

Check out the annotated version of "Science Fiction Double Feature," from The Rocky Horror Picture Show, with links to all the classic sf films mentioned in the tune.

This bit from Everclear's "Wonderful" makes me wistful for how much I loved certain books and films when I was a kid:

I want the things that I had before
Like a Star Wars poster on my bedroom door
I wish I could count to ten
Make everything be wonderful again

And let me indulge in some Firefly nostalgia....

"It's the End of the 'Verse As We Know It," a nice shiny filk.

Adam Baldwin singing "The Hero of Canton: The Man They Call Jayne." You just gotta love Jayne! UPDATE: The Browncoats do a very nice remix of this song.

And, of course, you can't take the sky from me.

sf humor--Star Trek

2009-03-18T19:27:00.000-05:00

With a new movie headed our way in May, why not take a few minutes to poke some fun at a beloved sf franchise? After all, we often make fun of the things we love, right?

Some folks have gone to an awful lot of work to produce this delightful series of videos (1, 2, 3, 4, 5) recording various mistakes in the continuity of the Star Trek universe. It's like a video version of the old Nitpicker's Guides, only with a bit more bite.

Spock vs. Q

Here's a moment from the wonderful episode of Futurama that's called "Where No Fan Has Gone Before." More clips here. You'll want to find the entire episode!

Courtesy of Robot Chicken! The Wrath of Khan: The Opera! And a fight at a sf convention. Then No Power. Finally, Bloopers in Space!

A real life Trek drama: Kirk vs. Sulu! William Shatner wonders why he wasn't invited to George Takei's wedding. Takei responds. And then Shatner counterattacks. It's hard to believe, but this all seems to be for real.

And if you haven't already seen it, you simply must watch Leonard Nimoy (Spock) singing "The Ballad of Bilbo Baggins." Words cannot suffice.

Star Trek vs. Star Wars is kind of fun. And, predictably, there are lots of similar attempts out there, too.

Got something funnier? Post a comment and give us a link.

By the way, you can watch Star Trek: The Original Series at CBS.com.

The End of Battlestar Galactica?

2009-03-16T00:47:00.001-05:00

Sadly, it’s true. Only one more episode to go. But in this post I don’t intend to indulge in wild speculation about how things’ll turn out in the series finale. No, I want to talk about the end of Battlestar Galactica in a different sense, where “end” is about purpose rather than closure. This notion of end translates the word telos from the Greek, and you can’t complain about being confronted with a bit of Greek when we’re talking about BSG!

What is the aim of the reimagined BSG? What is it shooting for? What is the point of its complicated narrative? Before I give you my proposed answer to this question, let me make it perfectly clear that I don’t mean to suggest BSG is a fable with a single moral. Not at all. This is a messy story. Still, I’d like to argue that there is an aim that often gives shape and direction to the narrative. So what is it?

Consider two moments from the final few episodes of Season 4.5. (Do I need to tell you that spoilers are ahead? It’s obvious, right?) Please forgive me for reconstructing these scenes from memory.

Starbuck demands some time alone with Sam, who’s been shot in the head. She’s talking to him, but thinks he can’t hear her. After reminding him that she once told him she’d put a bullet in his head if she found out he was a Cylon, she tells him that doesn’t matter any more. Whether he’s human or Cylon, she wants him back. Why? Because whatever else he is, he’s her Sam.

Adama asks Starbuck whether Baltar was telling the truth when he revealed to a crowd that she found her own dead body on Earth. She admits it, and goes on to say that she doesn’t know what she is. “I know what you are,” says Adama, “You’re my daughter.”

Think about the distance we've traveled to get to a place where Starbuck and Adama can express this kind of sentiment.

In the original series, the Cylons are metallic robots from outer space who want to kill all humans. They're the enemy, pure and simple, rather like the orcs in Tolkien's LOTR. And the story is us against them, good guys and bad guys. No blurring of the lines.

Through an ongoing series of revelations, the new series disturbs and disrupts this simplistic kind of story--and the moral outlook on which it rests.

Humans created the Cylons. They aren't aliens, but rather our progeny.

Some Cylons look like human beings. They're not metal, but flesh and blood.

Cylons turn out to be religious and political creatures, much like humans are.

Cylons and humans fall in love with one another and there's even a Cylon-human child, Hera.

Some of the characters we thought were humans all along (as did they!) turn out to be Cylons.

Earth, the legendary thirteenth colony of humans, turns out to be a world once populated by Cylons.

Cylons lose the ability to resurrect, and it was always this ability that made them and their way of life so radically different from humanity.

The Galactica itself has become both human and Cylon, both in its crew and in its physical constitution.

I'm fairly certain we could add to this list. But I hope the pattern can be discerned. Although it matters who you are, it doesn't matter what you are. And the lines between us and them are not at all clear. Nobody is just a good guy or just a bad guy. This is one of the many ways that Battlestar Galactica offers us a narrative universe that's more like "the real world" than most of what we see on television, whether it's sf or not.

Philosophical SF Writers: Robert J. Sawyer

2009-03-14T17:28:00.000-05:00

The Hugo and Nebula award winning author Robert J. Sawyer has often remarked that the most ambitious science fiction stories are "philosophical fiction." It's fitting, then, that I inaugurate this new category of post by saying just a bit about Sawyer's writing--before I give you something to think about!

Many of Sawyer's books (although I confess I haven't read them all) are driven by a provocative thought experiment, often just the sort of thing that you'd find widely discussed in the philosophical literature. What would it be like if... everyone in the world were to catch a glimpse of the future? Or if we were to discover scientific evidence of a soul leaving the body at death? Or if we were able to return our aging bodies to their youthful condition? Or if we were to encounter an alien who believed in God? If you want to know what Sawyer thinks it'd be like if such things were to happen, read Flashforward, The Terminal Experiment, Rollback, and Calculating God, respectively. You can count on his books to engage your mind not only with plot and character but with ideas. As somebody once said, the true protagonist of a good science fiction story is an idea rather than a person!

I want to think about the central thought experiment in one Sawyer yarn (Mindscan) in a bit more depth. Suppose that you're in your forties and you've just discovered you have a terminal illness that'll kill you sometime in the next few months. Now suppose that you are presented with an extraordinary opportunity: your consciousness--personality, memories, and all--can be copied and downloaded into a synthetic body that will live on indefinitely. The biological you would live out whatever time you have left, too--out of the way and on the moon! What kind of objections might be raised against doing this? Would you do it? Why or why not? Do you think the result of this procedure would be you? Or a mere copy of you? What's the difference? Does it matter? Here's another chance to think about personal identity in a sf context....

UPDATE: You really ought to check out Sawyer's talk about the relevance of sf. It's called "A Galaxy Far, Far Away" My Ass! and it's been given the Youtube treatment in three parts: 1, 2, 3.

UPDATE 2: Rob has kindly linked to my little blog here. Thanks!

No one cares about the man in the box

2009-03-13T15:36:00.000-05:00

Christopher Nolan's The Prestige (2006 ) is both a wonderful film and the source of a provocative set of thought experiments about personal identity. I'd like to talk about a few of the movie's philosophical implications of the film and ask some questions, but I should first warn you that spoilers lie ahead.

David Bowie delivers a delightfully quirky performance as the scientist and inventor Nikola Tesla (1856-1943). Surely in both character and actor we have here the nearest thing to science fiction that real life humanity has to offer!

Tesla builds a fantastic machine for the magician Robert Angier (played by Hugh Jackman), who is desperate to duplicate the astonishing feat of his arch-rival Alfred Borden (Christian Bale). Somehow Borden is able to convince an audience that he has transported himself across the stage in a mere instant. Angier (wrongly!) thinks that one of Tesla's machines is responsible, so he wants one for himself.

But the machine he receives doesn't merely duplicate Borden's trick. It duplicates Angier himself! After the Tesla lightning plays over his body, Angier is apparently unaffected--except that a second Angier appears some distance away. Now that's magic!

Suppose we're wondering just what this machine does. Consider the following possibilities:

(1) The machine creates an exact duplicate of Angier some distance away from the orginal Angier, who is otherwise unaffected by the machine and simply remains where he was. Call this case Duplication.

(2) The machine transports Angier some distance away from his original position and then creates an exact duplicate of him in that position. Call this Transport and Duplication.

(3) The machine replaces Angier with two exact duplicates of himself, one in his original position and the other some distance away. Call this one Fission.

I'd argue that the film favors (1), since it jives quite nicely with the earlier version of the trick wherein Angier must hide under the stage while his body double receives the accolades of the audience. And it's also an extension of the film's opening trick with the bird, too, in which the original bird is killed and then replaced by an exactly similar one. But that's not really my point here. Instead, I want to suggest that although these initially appear to be three distinct options, the differences among them become blurred upon reflection.

Angier says, "It took courage to climb into that machine every night... Not knowing if I'd be the Prestige.... Or the man in the box." But what is it that he doesn't know? Each of the two men thinks that he is "the real Angier." Yet they cannot both be Angier, notwithstanding Tesla's earlier remark that "they are all your hat, Mr. Angier." You see, identity is a transitive relation, so if Angier 1 is the original Angier and Angier 2 is the original Angier, then Angier 1 is Angier 2. And obviously that isn't the case, since there are two of them, and one lives and one dies. (In the first use of the machine, the Angier who remains shoots the Angier who travels, while in later uses it's the Angier who remains who is dropped into the box and drowns.)

So, if they cannot both be identical to the Angier who steps into the lightning, how do we answer Angier's question? Are we asking about the causal connection between the original Angier's body and the bodies of Angier 1 and Angier 2? Or are we asking about psychological continuity rather than bodily continuity? What's the difference between a machine that transports people and a machine that destroys and then duplicates people? (This question will be familiar to Star Trek fans....) In the end, does it matter whether the machine works in way (1), (2), or (3)? Is there really a difference?

Note that this problem isn't merely a result of the obvious fact that we don't understand how an incomprehensible fictional machine works. The deeper problem is that we don't understand exactly what it is to be a person and to be the same person when such odd things are going on. But do we understand such matters in ordinary cases? Perhaps not. And there are odd cases in real life as well as in sf.

Who Watches the Philosophers? Philosophy for Free: Video Edition

2009-03-12T20:58:00.000-05:00

If I'm going to post about sf you can find for free on the web, it only seems fair occasionally to direct you to some exciting philosophy you can check out, too.

Shelly Kagan is a professor of philosophy at Yale and his entire class on Death can be found at Academic Earth. This is great stuff, and often connects to the kind of philosophical issues we encounter in good sf. It's really worth your time.

TED (Technology, Entertainment, Design) is an annual conference that brings in cutting edge speakers (not just philosophers!) on lots of fascinating topics. Hundreds of videos are housed on their site, including Scott McCloud on comics, Aimee Mullins talking about her 12 pair of prosthetic legs, philosopher and transhumanist Nick Bostrom on humanity's problems, Daniel Dennett on consciousness, Ray Kurzweil on how technology will transform us, and much, much more.

How Many Dolls in the Dollhouse?

2009-02-26T00:00:00.000-06:00

Joss Whedon, the creator of Buffy, Angel, and Firefly (for anyone who’s been living under a rock), has just launched his new show, Dollhouse. Here’s the description from FOX’s website (where you can catch the first two episodes of the show):

ECHO (Dushku) is an "Active," a member of a highly illegal and underground group of individuals who have had their personalities wiped clean so they can be imprinted with any number of new personas. Hired by the wealthy, powerful and connected, the Actives don't just perform their hired roles, they wholly become -- with mind, personality and physiology -- whomever the client wants or needs them to be. Whether imprinted to be a lover, an assassin, a corporate negotiator or a best friend, the Actives know no other life than the specific engagements they are in at that time. Confined between missions to a secret facility known as the "Dollhouse," Echo and the other Actives including SIERRA (Dichen Lachman), are assigned engagements by ADELLE DEWITT (Olivia Williams), one of the Dollhouse leaders. After each scenario, Echo, always under the watchful eye of her handler, BOYD LANGTON (Harry Lennix), returns to the mysterious Dollhouse where her thoughts, feelings, experiences and knowledge are erased by TOPHER BRINK (Fran Kranz), the Dollhouse's genius programmer.

As Adelle says in the second episode, an Active is a tabula rosa (a blank slate), not even really a person, adds Langton. Between missions, that is. But when an Active is on a mission, he or she seems very much a person, specially created to do a job. The catch is that each of these is a very short-lived person.

So, although we only see a handful of human beings serving as Actives in the Dollhouse, it seems to me that the place is "home" to a whole lot of persons who live only a day or so. The Dollhouse seems to pressure desperate people to serve as "hosts" or "body donors" for their organization, effectively giving up five years of their lives, and then they create a series of persons to do their dirty work only to terminate each of those persons when the work is complete. Seems like a pretty nasty outfit to me.

Of course, that assumes that we accept some kind of psychological contintuity account of personal identity. On such accounts, if there's absolutely no psychological connections between the serious hostage negotiator of the first episode and the gutsy outdoorswoman of the second episode, then they're different persons from one another--and from Echo, the in-between, low-functioning person who's mostly interested in massages and swimming.

One of my main questions when I first heard about this show was how Whedon was going to make us care about Echo if there's really no continuity between the various persons who animate this body. Turns out that premise starts to erode as early as the second episode, where we start to hear about "composite events," in which Actives retain memories from previous missions. Seems like the doll is slowly going to become a real girl....

Robots Will Take Over the World!

2009-02-19T23:52:00.000-06:00

Many sf stories show us a future in which robots and other sorts of intelligent machines show their true colors--and their colors are evil! The HAL 9000 is classic, of course. And think of The Terminator, or The Matrix, or the original 1970's version of Battlestar Galactica. Of course, as these narratives unfold further, matters get more complicated. Arnold is a good guy in T2 and T3. Not all the sentient programs in the Matrix are bad. And the Cylons in the new BSG? Well, that's a really complicated story, isn't it?

Still, the idea of evil killer robots has a lasting appeal, so it's no surprise that some people have lots of fun playing with this idea. What's your favorite evil robot story?

Stickmen vs. Dinosaurs

2009-02-14T13:27:00.000-06:00

Check out chaospet and Dinosaur Comics. Each site houses a long-running web comic that's often funny or philosophical or sf-ish or all three. As an example, here's each site's treatment of egoism...

A Robot Descartes?

2009-02-10T23:03:00.000-06:00

Isaac Asimov's many robot stories (some of which are collected in I, Robot, on which the Will Smith film is loosely based) explore what happens when human beings interact with robots who are programmed to comply with Asimov's famous three laws of robotics:

1. A robot may not injure a human being, or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm.
2. A robot must obey the orders given it by human beings except where such orders would conflict with the First Law.
3. A robot must protect its own existence as long as such protection does not conflict with the First or Second Law.

Asimov delights in showing how perfectly logical beings who work within these parameters end up behaving in strange and sometimes humorous ways. In "Reason," QT-1 ("Cutie") a robot who has spent his entire "life" on a space station finds himself reflecting on his existence. Like Rene Descartes, Cutie decides to reject everything he doesn't know for certain and start from scratch, accepting only those principles that seem logically self-evident--with a marvelously absurd result: Cutie deduces that he cannot have been created by human beings because he is superior to them and he eventually invents a religion that involves worship of "the Master," an essential piece of machinery on the station.

Unsurprisingly, this state of affairs is extraordinarily frustrating for Powell and Donovan (the two men assigned to field-test Cutie). Cutie's logic seems unassailable from within his own perspective, and they're unable to demonstrate his error. Like some of Asimov's other robot stories, this one plays with the limits of reason and implies that we cannot expect abstract reasoning in the absence of empirical evidence to guide us to the truth. Ironically, however, as the story closes we find out that Cutie's seriously mistaken picture of the world and his place in it doesn't prevent him from performing his function on the space station with exact precision. Your thoughts?

The pic is the cover of yet another forthcoming philosophy and popular culture volume. I have nothing to do with this one, but the image of Descartes as a terminator was too good to pass up...

Thinking Meat?

2009-02-09T10:13:00.000-06:00

Philosophers often see problems and paradoxes in what look like ordinary places, whether by asking an unexpected question or by turning things on their heads. Terry Bisson's wonderful short story "They're Made Out of Meat!" is a hilarious philosophical exploration of the idea that we are material beings. That we are mere meat is an absurd idea -- according to a pair of extraterrestrial beings who are made of who knows what....

A surprising number of folks have been inspired to create short film versions of this story. See here 1 and here 2 and here 3 and here 4. Which one is the best?

Dangerous Visions?

2009-02-06T22:54:00.000-06:00

The cover story of the February issue of Christianity Today is entitled "Sci-Fi's Brave New World," by James Herrick. Herrick's piece is essentially a warning to Christians that sf smuggles anti-Christian myths into our culture. Here's a bit of it:

The spiritual messages conveyed by our most popular television, movie, and literary products are often questionable and sometimes dangerously misleading. We are not the center of the cosmos, nor are we (or extraterrestrials) evolving toward divinity. Evolution is not the benevolent operating principle of the entire universe, and technological transformation of our species is not spiritual rebirth. Ignorance is not our predicament, progress is not redemption, the future is not salvation, and space is not our destiny... the church must attend more diligently to the presentation of her true myth in public settings. The biblical account of human origins and purpose, of our predicament as well as our redemption, and of the nature and purpose of the cosmos we inhabit, is emotionally, spiritually, and rationally more satisfying than modern myths featuring aliens, starships, divine evolution, hidden knowledge, and biomechanical post-humanity.

What do you make of Herrick's diatribe against sf? A couple of Christian sf scholar-bloggers criticize Herrick's book Scientific Mythologies: How Science and Science Fiction Forge New Religious Beliefs (which seems to make the same basic argument as this briefer and more popular article) here and here.

A footnote: Ironically, this post shares its title with a seminal anthology of sf edited by the legendary Harlan Ellison in the late 60s.

sf for free! print edition: John Carter meets Conan

2009-02-05T14:04:00.000-06:00

Lots of free sf novels and short stories can be found on the web for free. A couple of sites that link to such finds can be found here and here.

In this post I'll introduce a couple of authors from the early days of sf that you can explore for free. This isn't the most thought-provoking stuff in the world, to be sure, but it's pretty exciting--and you can see lots of the seeds of the fantasy and role-playing genres in these stories.

Edgar Rice Burroughs wrote all kinds of speculative fiction--"pulp" stories, as they're sometimes called--early in the twentieth century. The picture I've included here gives you a pretty good idea of what to expect... Perhaps his best known literary creation is Tarzan, who featured in many, many books. He also wrote fast-paced adventure stories that take place in odd places, including The Land That Time Forgot, At the Earth's Core, and the memorable Barsoom series about a U.S. soldier named John Carter who somehow gets transported to Mars and falls in love and fights against all kinds of enemies, many of whom have four arms. A movie is in the works... I'd start with A Princess of Mars, the first of the John Carter books. But lots of his books are to be had for free at Project Gutenberg.

Robert E. Howard is the creator of Conan the barbarian and other larger than life characters.

A few Conan tales: "The Devil in Iron," "The People of the Black Circle," and "Red Nails." But many more can be found at the same site.

The Hour of the Dragon is a novel-length story about Conan after his adventuring days are over and he's become king.

Other formative sf writers include Fritz Leiber (creator of Fafhrd and the Grey Mouser, the original hulking barbarian and nimble thief duo), and Michael Moorcock, who created Elric of Melnibone, the albino prince-sorcerer who carries Stormbringer, the evil black sword that takes the souls of those it slays. These are familiar tropes from the genre, of course, precisely because of the influence of these authors. No free stuff from these guys, though. And--it goes without saying, right?--J.R.R. Tolkien should be added to the list, along with all kinds of other folks.

2009-02-04T18:11:00.000-06:00

My latest pop culture book chapter is out (or almost out): "What's Supernatural About Supernatural"? in In the Hunt: Unauthorized Essays on Supernatural, from BenBella Press. Here's an excerpt:

Supernatural seems to be part of what we might think of as a new trend in horror fiction. Classic horror tales describe how something strange and forbidding breaks into our everyday world. As Noel Carroll puts it in “The Nature of Horror,” characters in horror tales “regard the monsters that they encounter as abnormal, as disturbances of the natural order.” Some particular thing shows up that just doesn’t obey the rules; it defies our categories and so we don’t know how to think about it. In fact, this is one way of thinking about what a monster is: something singular that doesn’t fit our view of the world. A number of more recent horror narratives, including our show, seem importantly different. These stories naturalize their horrific elements, making them familiar and, at least in some sense, normal and natural, so that horror somehow becomes part of the mundane world. Although we should be wary of offering exact classifications here, we can divide such stories into two broad categories without exercising too much force.

The first kind of story re-conceives a supernatural creature as a natural one: the monster isn’t from the pit of hell, or animated by an amalgam of magic and science; he’s just a human being who’s been infected by a virus, not really “supernatural” at all. A scientific monstrosity, not a supernatural one. Think of the undead creatures from 28 Days Later or the recent film version of Richard Matheson’s I Am Legend. Or consider Ridley Scott’s Alien. These stories locate a horror story inside the natural world as we understand it; they work without any intervention from the outside. Unforeseen events give rise to something that looks supernatural, but really isn’t. This kind of story eliminates the supernatural piece by piece, showing how what looked like magic or mystery can be explained in scientific terms. Although this kind of horror has been flourishing fairly recently, thereby earning the title of a new trend, it’s not really a new phenomenon. In fact, Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818) is perhaps the quintessential scientific horror tale. And, more generally, a lot of science fiction stories can be classified as belonging to the horror genre, too. It’s no surprise that a modernist sensibility would favor reducing the magical to the scientific, the inexplicable to the explicable. But this isn’t how Supernatural rolls at all; our show isn’t into reductionism.

The second kind of story involves expanding or altering our conception of nature. Such horror stories have a lot in common with fantasy, because they take up the project of building another world, an alternate reality. They’re extended exercises in wondering “What if?” In such a story, vampires are magical creatures, perhaps, but then the world of the narrative is a magical world! Consider Laurel K. Hamilton’s Anita Blake series or Charlaine Harris’s Sookie Stackhouse books. In these popular story arcs, vampires and werewolves are just part of American society. They have jobs and they have to pay the rent. They even have their own bars and nightclubs to frequent. Laws have to be written to handle their special circumstances, maybe even some anti-discrimination legislation. And, of course, they’re potential dates for whoever is our current protagonist. Here, too, the presence of a monster requires no intrusion from the outside—there need be nothing supernatural in that sense. It’s just that the inside of these storied worlds is a lot bigger than the inside of our world (and, as we’ve seen, that creates an ambiguity in what it means for something to be supernatural). Joss Whedon’s endearing and enduring Buffyverse is one of the earliest and most formative examples of this kind of story. Buffy goes to class, chats with her friends, and stakes a vampire in the cemetery. As I’ve characterized it in this essay, “the Winchesterverse” is this same kind of place, although sadly it makes for a much less graceful moniker.

Are you a Sim?

2009-02-03T15:10:00.000-06:00

After watching The Matrix, a lot of us enjoy flirting with the idea that we might be in some kind of simulation. Oxford philosopher Nick Bostrom suggests that this shouldn't be a mere flirtation. He argues that the odds that you are right now living in a computer simulation are pretty good. There's a website dedicated to the presentation and discussion of "the simulation argument." A short version of it can be found here.

Essentially, Bostrom argues that one of the following three claims must be true:

1. Almost all civilisations at our level of development become extinct before becoming technologically mature.

2. The fraction of technologically mature civilisations that are interested in creating ancestor simulations is almost zero.

3. You are almost certainly living in a computer simulation.

To the extent that you're inclined to think that 1 and 2 are false, then, you'd be justified in thinking that 3 is true.

Or, to put it another way, if a civilization advances to the point where they're capable of providing simulated environments, and if that civilization is interested in running simulations of the past (ancestor simulations), then there will be many people living in such simulations. And if the set of persons contains a significant number of people in simulations, there's at least some significant probability that you are such a person!

It's not an easy argument to assess. What do you think?

sf for free! video edition

2009-02-02T00:51:00.000-06:00

Every so often I'll point you to a few things you can get for free on the web. For today, think about watching a couple of classic 80s sf movies: Robocop and John Carpenter's The Thing. The first is one of the earlier cyborg pics and the latter is an excellent sf/horror flick.

If you haven't already watched the sadly short and solitary season of Firefly, please do so as soon as possible. For a bit more Joss, check out Dr. Horrible! Or the first couple of seasons of Buffy.

Finally, I'll confess a fondness for the Highlander series. There can be only one.

All this good stuff (and much, much more) courtesy of Hulu. Beware of too much Hulu, however.

UPDATE: You can see The Fifth Element, too--on Joost.

sf humor--The Matrix

2009-01-24T18:08:00.001-06:00

We often poke fun at what we love, whether it's a friend or a film. In that spirit, enjoy the following. Or complain that they aren't that funny. Either way.

How it should have ended. These folks have done similar endings for other films, most of which are worth watching...

Chappelle's spoof on The Matrix

Go here to watch "The Meatrix" and its sequels. I'm not sure about all that black leather being used in an animal advocacy compaign...

The Matrix Runs on Windows

The MTV awards spoof

Got any more? Post 'em in the comments section....

Epistemology in The Matrix

2009-01-23T15:34:00.000-06:00

For a long time philosophers have looked to science fiction as a source of fruitful examples for thinking about life's big issues. And plenty of good science fiction is inspired by philosophical ideas. As Robert J. Sawyer puts it, "I think a better name for most ambitious science fiction is ‘philosophical fiction.’"

The success of The Matrix in 1999 helped to bring this confluence of philosophy and science fiction to the attention of the wider public. I know of at least four books that explore the philosophy of the Matrix trilogy of films.

Chapter 2 of Mark Rowlands's book Sci-Phi: Philosophy from Socrates to Schwarzenegger focuses on the epistemological issues raised by the Wachowski brothers' film. For the uninitiated, an epistemological issue is one that concerns knowledge. What epistemological questions did this film leave with you? Does the film try to answer these questions? How does Rowlands's chapter help you think about all this? Do you disagree with him anywhere?

You just couldn't let me go, could you?

2009-01-20T11:30:00.000-06:00

says the Joker to Batman in The Dark Knight. Rather than let the Joker fall to his death, Batman nabs him with a cable and hoists him back up. Why?

In Batman Begins, in his final fight with Ra's al Ghul, Batman famously says "I won't kill you. But I don't have to save you." So why did he save the Joker? Is there a difference between the two situations?

And is there a moral difference between killing someone and refusing to save someone? Either way, somebody's dead--and it could have turned out otherwise, if a difference choice had been made. How we answer this more general question has lots of serious repercussions for how we think about all kinds of moral issues.

See here for an editorial on whether Batman should just kill the Joker already.

Oh, no! Not another [insert expletive here] Ewok!

2009-01-18T15:38:00.001-06:00

In class the other day we touched on a longstanding debate among Star Wars fans about the merits (or demerits?) of Return of the Jedi. Here's one guy's opinion from a while back, in a piece entitled "50 Reasons Why Return of the Jedi Sucks." Anyone care to weigh in?

By the way, this post's title is an allusion to an infamous remark by Hugo Dyson in a meeting of the Inklings in Oxford. Reportedly, Tolkien was about to read from his "new hobbit book" and Dyson, who was lying on a couch, groaned "Oh, no! Not another [insert expletive here] elf!"

The Real World?

2009-01-17T20:14:00.001-06:00

The Matrix offers us a virtual world full of people who don't realize the nature of their environment. According to at least some physicists, our actual world may be more like the Matrix world in certain respects! See this article in New Scientist. Hat tip to io9. Some of the essays on the Philosophy section of The Matrix website also explore the similarities and differences between the world of the Matrix and "the real world."

Fandomania--Star Wars

2009-01-13T19:08:00.000-06:00

When Star Wars came out in 1977, I was about 13. I fell for it, hard. I saw it many times. I read the novelization over and over until I had it practically memorized. And when none of that was enough for me, I eventually did a dramatic reading of the novelization into a tape recorder (along with sound effects and a musical prelude on my clarinet). This is a clear and embarrassing example of what I'm calling "fandomania." It's what happens when fandom gets way out of control. A long time ago in a low tech setting far, far away (California, which sometimes feels like another galaxy), that's the best I could do. But now we can do much, much better.

For example, check out these instances of musical fandomania here and here. Yes, the first one is a lip synch. Doesn't that make it an even clearer case of fandomania?

Okay, it's your turn. Give me your stories of people whose love of Star Wars has gotten out of control. Confess as I have, if you want. Or give us another link.

I'm not talking about Star Wars humor here. We'll do a post on that at some point, I promise. But for the most part we're now looking for people who aren't trying to be funny. So save the Robot Chicken etc. for another day.

What's Coming?

2009-01-07T13:05:00.000-06:00

Over at Edge, each year they ask a whole lot of leading thinkers a question about the role of science in our thought and culture. This year's question is: "WHAT WILL CHANGE EVERYTHING? 'What game-changing scientific ideas and developments do you expect to live to see?'" Follow the link and scroll down to see what people have to say...

Isn't this the very question that a lot of sf tries to answer? It might be interesting to compare what scientists and sf writers are saying...

Re-beginnings?

2009-01-07T13:02:00.000-06:00

I created this blog a while back, but haven't posted a thing. I did list some nifty links on the sidebar, however.

Since I'm teaching Philosophy and Science Fiction this semester, it seems like a good time for a resurgence of activity here. Until I'm too bogged down in grading to do any blogging...