Random Bits: The Avatar Edition

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

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

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

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"

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

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

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.