Recently in the SciFi Category

All kinds of awesome metatronics going on here.

Okay, this is my one frivolity before diving into my hell Monday (featuring an unbroken stretch of three back-to-back classes and a committee meeting):

According to a Natural Resources Defense Council survey, 78 percent of sinister one-eyed industrialists based in the Arctic have been forced to relocate their powerful underworld shadow governments, with many now secretly orchestrating world affairs from dormant volcanoes on remote islands. --The Onion

I'm not sure many people really care that today marks the 10th anniversary of the date that the moon was supposed to have blasted out of Earth's orbit in the British sci-fi show Space: 1999, but here's a YouTube clip that presents an alternate opening of Star Trek, redone in the style of Space: 1999.

Yes, this is very, very obscure, but I need a break from marking papers, so here it is.
 

In 1970, the gap between shows featuring magic and shows featuring more science-based themes is fairly wide, which may be related to the relative cost of producing the different types of shows; Captain Kirk required pricey sets and a makeup crew while Samantha Stevens just needed a film editor and the ability to wiggle her nose. But as audience expectations for shows involving magic become analogous to their expectations for science fiction shows, magic's peaks and valleys start to correspond to those of other themes, though supernatural shows may be a bit more resilient to overall drops in television spending. --i09.com

I was on the road (and away from a computer) for the past few days, on a little family outing.  My wife brought along a copy of Choose-Your-Own-Adventure #4 that she picked up cheap at a library sale.

The cover of this book, originally published in 1979, features a big-jawed space hero in a suit that sports a familiar color scheme.

Political message? You decide.

Blip from Sean Mullen on Vimeo.

Set phasers to "meh"! 

My wife arranged a visit to The Franklin Institute a couple of weeks ago. We didn't actually know that this Star Trek exhibit was there.  I was ready to pass, in favor of the more educational exhibits, but my wife made it a Father's Day treat and shelled out enough gold-pressed latinum for the four of us.

No photography was allowed in the exhibit, which was annoying, so I wasn't going to blog it at all because, well, sometimes words are boring.  But this YouTube clip, in between the chatter and the promos, shows some of the collection.



Despite her ability to channel William Shatner, my seven-year-old quickly got restless. My son enjoys reading every single line on every single card in every single display, so we took our time working through the place.  I kept hoping maybe there would be a ball pit full of tribbles for the girl, or a dress-up area where she could try on different forehead bumps.  No such luck.  My wife had to take her out early.

I've never been a phone guy.  My voicemail recording advises people to e-mail me rather than wait for me to remember to check my messages. 

Around 2004, I told a class of students that I didn't use instant messager because I would have nobody to talk to.  I got a generous "awww!" of pity from the class. 

I didn't mean to imply that I had no friends; rather, for years I had already been keeping up with friends and family via e-mail and telephone, and with professional contacts through e-mail, blogs, and Usenet.  I had no personal or professional need to hang out in chat rooms, so I've never done it (just as I have never gone para-sailing, or owned a ferret).

If you spread my handheld computer investment across the 12 years I've used a PDA, I've spent a very reasonable $4/month.  I will probably want my next PDA to have WiFi, but I'm never more than a few steps from a computer when I'm at work or home.  I just don't feel obligated to pay the phone company so that, if I'm out on an errand or playing with the kids in the backyard, I will be available to high school students with grammar questions or SEO prospectors asking me for reciprocal links.

While liveblogging a talk at Computers and Writing 2009, I overheard people talking about the back-channel discussion that was occurring on Twitter.  In the registration room, there was a projection stream displaying the Twitter feed for #cw09. 

For the first time, I found a reason to tweet. 

With the recent release of the new Star Trek, I started to wonder how is this going to affect the kids? Thankfully, mine have heard of and have watched plenty of the original series, so I didn't have to worry about their state of mind. But there are a lot of kids out there who think that this new movie is Star Trek. That it's some flashy action adventure space movie with chiseled young actors and massive special effects. While that's all well and good, since it's a reboot for the purpose of gathering new fans, I think it's important that kids have a sense of history when it comes to things as influential as Star Trek. GeekDad, Wired

My 7-year-old daughter just finished watching a YouTube version of More Tribbles, More Troubles, the 1970s animated return of the Tribbles.

Last night, I went to see the new Star Trek movie with a member of the computer science faculty. A math professor was hoping to come, but had a change of plans. The previews suggested it would be a bit intense for me to take the kids to see it, but now that I've seen the show, I think it will be OK.  You have to know your kids though -- the opening sequence pushes some buttons that I didn't expect to have pushed in action film, and the combination of tug-at-the-heartstrings and pulse-pounding action in the opening few minutes might be a bit overwhelming.

I haven't shown my kids the whole run of classic Trek, mostly because I'd rather do other things with them besides watch TV. 

They do know a handful of the best episodes -- the ones that are really worth taking time to see (such as The Doomsday Machine and The Trouble with Tribbles). They haven't seen any of the later incarnations of the show, nor any of the movies.  What with all my wife's old videotapes of Dr. Who, and the complete run of Babylon 5 (dutifully taped by my sister and mailed to us in batches), we already have a big enough backlog of good TV that we're not watching at the moment.

As for the remake... I don't mind at all that they redesigned the sets and models to look futuristic to a 21st-century audience. Communicators and phasers are still cool.  As if to atone for the snail-paced original Trek movie (thirty years ago... 1979), there were no talky briefing room scenes -- they handled all the exposition during the action sequences, and the turbolift is still a great location for two characters to have a private conversation.  All the various characters have been tweaked just a bit, so that we recognize their iconic nature, but also see them change.  The movie has more of an ensemble feel, which is something The Next Generation developed well.

My geek-boy katra can't quite grasp what the producer was thinking when he put Delta Vega that close to Vulcan.  The engine room set was a cop-out. I know they filmed it in a brewery, but I wonder just how much money they spent on the little tribute to Agustus Gloop... was it some elaborate reference to certain characters being wet behind the ears?

Speaking of cop... where have I heard the thrumming sound made by the flying motorcycle?  It feels like an old friend, but I can't place it. Blade Runner?

The amount of lens flare, especially in the bridge scenes, was noticeably distracting. I think the goal was to tie the bridge scenes in with the CGI sequences, since the space shots also featured lots of animated lens flare. The closing credits even features an elaborate CGI sequence that renders dust or some other kind of imperfections on the camera lens. But I found that whole concept -- the shaky camera cinema verite conceit -- bothersome. The original series used handheld cameras to occasional good effect... would occasionally march into the turbolift behind Kirk, or the camera would do a 360 around Spock while he is doing a mind-meld.  It used to be far too expensive to do special effects on a moving image -- that's why the actors in the original series stood still while the transporter beam dissolved them away.

When there's reason, within the story, to watch hand-held footage -- someone's recording from a hand-held tricorder, for instance -- then I'd say, bring on the shakies. But surely in the future there will be digital stabilizer. But when I see lens flare on a CGI shot, it hurts my ability to enjoy the scene, because I know the producers aren't trying to make me feel like I'm there, floating in space with a God's eye view of the battle. Instead, they're trying to make me feel like I'm watching documentary footage.

I completely understand the need to dirty down the models and make the props and sets more functional, but I found it distracting to be reminded so often that I'm watching a movie... I just want a direct sensory infusion of space opera goodness... I was annoyed by the amount of effort the producers put into simulating the constraints of modern movie cameras.  When the shaky camera trend has run its course, its overuse in this movie will make this Star Trek outing look dated.

Having picked my nits, I will say that there were a couple of beauty shots of the new Enterprise, some surprising revelations about character backstory (now we know why Spock never took the Kobayashi Maru test), and a bold and brash feel that was just thrilling to watch.

The cuteness of a tribble, the temper of a mugatu, and the ham of a Shatner.

I know that my bridge playset has long since gone to the big warp core in the sky, and I can't seem to find the shoebox where I kept my original Star Trek action figures from the 70s.  

Even as a kid, I remember being frustrated that the playset didn't really look all that much like the bridge, though the captain's chair is a reasonable replica. Those little stools never did much for me -- the action figures kept falling off them, so I replaced them with blocks from my beloved Alpha Truck (which did double duty as the shuttlecraft).

Anyway...

The Star Trek Bridge playset was, hands down, the best toy I owned as a child. I played with it for approximately 10,000 hours. Especially the whirly-twirly transporter cubicle. I loved the psychedelic cardboard viewscreens, the tippy chairs and furniture, the stick-on UI for same that was as inscrutable and ridiculous as the authentic show computers. This toy had the magic, a vinyl-covered, detailed, configurable kind of magic that made you want to play with it for hours and hours on end. -- Cory Doctorow

While hiding from the stack of final papers, I took a break in the cafeteria. Some of my colleagues were talking about the new Star Trek movie, and the conversation shifted to what's on TV now.

My daily household duties include putting the kids to bed. My wife doesn't really do mornings, and homeschooling doesn't start until she gets up, so the kids tend to stay up late.  So I spend every prime time reading bedtime stories and supervising the brushing of teeth and the donning of pajamas.

I should point out that today's TV has evolved in order to compete with video games and the internet... Lost and Battlestar Galactica and ER all engage brain cells in a way that assumes the viewer is intelligent, and does not need laugh tracks or "waah-waah-waah-waaaah" trombone noises in order to respond emotionally to a complex story with many dramatic twists and turns. So I'm not ranting about the poor quality of TV.

I'm sure that, if we had cable, I would find something worth watching. But that's precisely the reason I don't want cable. Ever. I haven't really followed a TV show since Babylon 5.  I've never seen an episode of Lost or the new Battlestar Galactica, though I have read online summaries of the plot, and I can understand the draw of those shows. 

When I'm free for the evening, rather than make the next two hours disappear into the boob tube black hole, I'd much rather make a Blender3D animation and upload it to YouTube, or convert a literary work I've never read before into an audio file so that I can listen to it during tomorrow's commute, or edit a Wikipedia page, or update my blog, or just noodle around in my server logs and figure out why I suddenly got that burst of traffic from Ireland.

I'd rather DO something.

I recently came across a talk by Clay Shirkey, who uses the term "cognitiive surplus" to describe the creative potential that we're not using when we sit and watch consumable TV.

I was being interviewed by a TV producer to see whether I should be on their show, and she asked me, "What are you seeing out there that's interesting?"

I started telling her about the Wikipedia article on Pluto. You may remember that Pluto got kicked out of the planet club a couple of years ago, so all of a sudden there was all of this activity on Wikipedia. The talk pages light up, people are editing the article like mad, and the whole community is in an ruckus--"How should we characterize this change in Pluto's status?" And a little bit at a time they move the article--fighting offstage all the while--from, "Pluto is the ninth planet," to "Pluto is an odd-shaped rock with an odd-shaped orbit at the edge of the solar system."

So I tell her all this stuff, and I think, "Okay, we're going to have a conversation about authority or social construction or whatever." That wasn't her question. She heard this story and she shook her head and said, "Where do people find the time?" That was her question. And I just kind of snapped. And I said, "No one who works in TV gets to ask that question. You know where the time comes from. It comes from the cognitive surplus you've been masking for 50 years." -- Clay Shirky

The grammar offered an irresistible linguistic challenge. Klingon is difficult but not impossible, weird yet totally believable. Anyone can put on a pair of pointed ears or memorize some lines of dialogue, but learning to speak Klingon requires genuine hard work.

Most languages created for fictional worlds involve simple vocabulary substitutions, such as moodge for man in A Clockwork Orange, or meaningless streams of noise, like the high-pitched jabbering of the Ewoks in Return of the Jedi. Klingon is something altogether different. There is a logic behind it; a linguist doing field research among Klingon speakers would be able to work out the system and describe it as he would an exotic indigenous tongue. -- Arika Okrent, Slate

My wife can't stand computers, but she's more than an honorary geek because she knows her classic sci-fi. She pegged this scene instantly.

In this re-creation from "The Cage," green-skinned Orion slave girl Vena dances for Captain Pike. Why does Elchesen put in the hours necessary to create such images? "The time involved depends on if I feel like working on my latest creation or not," Elchesen said. "As for the effort, when someone sees it, I want that person to see something that is one of a kind -- never done before."  -- Wired

People. This is serious. Is nothing sacred?

Matt will play the character of Mondain Minax, a cyber-space explorer and weirding weapons expert who lives more in VR than RL. Minax is a member of the crew of the alien Sontarans space vessel Zero Wing (veQDuj'oH Dujllj'e') which acts as a foil to the Stargate Universe crew during episodes 3, 7, & 11.-- Kairos News

THERE is nothing particularly unusual about the living room of the two-story town house that Scott Veazie shares with his wife in Washougal, Wash., except for one piece of furniture in a corner: a full-size replica of the captain's chair from the bridge of the U.S.S. Enterprise, as seen in the original "Star Trek" television series.

[...]

"It's not the most comfortable of chairs," Mr. Veazie said. "The arms are too low and they're too far apart. Now I know why William Shatner was always leaning forward in it."

There is another possible explanation, suggested Eddie Paskey, who as Mr. Shatner's stand-in on "Star Trek" spent much time in the chair during camera and lighting set-ups. "Early on, Bill sat down, leaned back, and it went over backwards," he said. -- Thomas Vinciguerra, New York Times

When I was first watching Star Trek reruns as a kid in the 70s, Eddie Paskey was a "Guy Who Always Gets Killed."  (He played an extra that was killed off, but got cast again the next week as another extra, and wisely kept his mouth shut.) I was a little miffed later on, when I learned the word "redshirt."

Since the NYT is apparently issuing takedown notices to bloggers who use NYT photos ("Pop quiz: You're a troubled media dinosaur struggling to find your way on the Web. What steps can you take to actively discourage people from linking to you, thus reducing your pageviews and revenue?"-- Cory Doctorow) I will instead post my own 3D depiction of this famous chair.

I smell trouble. Via Trekmovie.com:

Genki's "Red Shirt" cologne (whose tag line "Because Tomorrow May Never Come" is priceless) celebrates the sacrifices of those often nameless crew of the USS Enterprise. Described appropriately as a cologne for those with a "devotion to living each day as it could be your last" the cologne has top notes of green mandarin, bergamot, and lavender, with base notes of leather and grey musk.

Live every day as if it could be your last, with 'Red Shirt' cologne

Also available: Tiberius, and Pon Farr.

As I was putting my 10-year-old son to bed tonight, as usual we had a long, free-ranging, unrushed conversation. Somehow I mentioned the missing Doctor Who tapes.

Peter got very thoughtful.

"If I had a time machine, I could go back to the moment those tapes disappeared. And I could bring them forward in time, so that they wouldn't be lost. But there would be one problem. By going back in time to the moment the tapes disappeared, and keeping them from being lost, wouldn't I be responsible for making them disappear? But I wouldn't have ever gone back in time unless the tapes had disappeared."

I told Peter he had stumbled across a closed causal loop -- a concept that I introduce when I teach the play Oedipus Tyrannos. (In that play, the protagonist hears a prophecy that he will kill his father and marry his mother, leaves the court of his foster-father in order to escape the prophecy, kills a stranger who just happens to be his real father, and ends up marrying a widow who just happens to be his mother.)

Ricardo Montalban (1920-2009). My kids know him as the grandfather in Spy Kids 2 and 3.

Let's hope they lay him to rest dressed in a spotless white suit, in a casket lined in soft, Corinthian leather.

He will always be Captain Kirk's finest foe, the would-be conqueror who first tried to steal the Enterprise in the classic Star Trek episode "Space Seed" and then finally robbed Kirk of his best friend in Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan. Montalban's magnetic, robust presence; that voice that sounded like a ride over rolling hills -- he made Khan Noonien Singh the worst kind of despot: the kind you're pretty sure you'd die for. --Mark Bernardin, Entertainment Weekly

Forget WALL-E and GORT. Forget sexy Summer Glau and Tricia Helfer in Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles and Battlestar Galactica. OK, don't forget them. But check it out: Long before Autobots, Fembots, and the Urkelbot, PGA SF authors obsessed over electricity-, steam-, and clockwork-powered machine-men or "robots" (a term introduced in 1921) that might free us from the burden of labor... or else run amuck and destroy/enslave us. -- Joshua Glenn

Nick Montfort just e-mailed a link to his brilliant textual interpretation of Star Wars. Great use of characters in a purely linear narrative environment.

I like to think of the cosmos as a theater, yet a theater cannot exist without an audience, to witness and to celebrate. Robot craft and mighty telescopes will continue to show us unimaginable wonders. But when humans return to the moon and put a base there and prepare to go to Mars and become true Martians, we--the audience--literally enter the cosmic theater. Will we finally reach the stars? -- Ray Bradbury, National Geographic

Tonight I was reading my 10-year-old son a chapter in Beorn the Proud, a youth historical fiction that describes the relationship between a 9th-century Irish girl taken as a slave by the son of a Viking king. The heroine, Ness, spits out angry prophecies and pretty much gives the Vikings a piece of her mind every chance she gets, in a parallel of the story of St. Patrick (who, as a slave, brought Christianity to Ireland). For the convenience of the story, several of the Viking main characters have learned to speak Irish, so Ness has an audience for her rage.

I pointed out that her character was very different from the heroine of Indian Captive: The Story of Mary Jemison, an American pioneer girl who was kidnapped by the Seneca. Molly Jemison was depicted as in complete shock, then over the course of the book she comes to understand the Seneca language, then eventually she accepts her new life (even choosing, on more than one occasion, to return to her Indian family when she has the chance to escape).

The captivity narrative is a great vehicle for historical fiction, in part because the culture clash means that when you read, you learn about the captive's former culture as she contrasts it with her new experiences. We're trying to cover geography this year, and the captivity narratives let us get two different cultures at once. 

The way a captivity narrative is set up, you automatically sympathize with the victim, but a good author who contextualizes the culture can make you, if not actually condone the kidnapping, see what function the taking of captives serves in the victim's new culture. Though Molly Jemision gets a lot of attention for her cornsilk-colored hair, the author presents the culture of her Senca captors with considerable depth; the first few chapters of Beorn the Proud suggest the author may intend to showcase the resilience of Ness's Christianity under duress, with the Viking culture being presented as materialistic and opportunitstic -- so far the only Vikings we've met have been raiding parties sacking monasteries -- but even so, Beorn himself shows glimmers of kindness toward his captive.

As I was tucking Peter into bed, and wondering what sort of conclusions he might be drawing about the patterns that one finds in the traditional captivity narrative, I thought I should say something about the gender relationships.

As Peter was settling himself into bed, he said, "Yes, that's the way women used to be depicted in stories all the time, weak and weepy."

Then, stifling a yawn, and said, "Thank goodness for Ripley in Alien."

At 10, he's still a bit too young to see the Alien movies, though he's right about Sigourney Weaver's legendary kick-ass performance in the role. As I watched him curling up under the covers, I wondered aloud where he got that idea.

In reply, my son pointed sleepily towards his stack of reference books. "Science Fiction's Greatest Monsters," he said.

As I write this, it occurs to me that I was about his age when the original Alien first came out. (I didn't see it until I was a teenager.)

The challenge in an adventure game is not based on fighting enemies, building armies, or the usual competitive activities associated with video games. Rather, the player has to figure out what the designers were thinking when they built the game and follow some script of events in order to win. These events are activated by actions the user can perform and the necessary actions are created by the player executing a particular command on a particular object in the game world. The player interacts with the world by performing actions on individual objects, using objects with each other, and navigating through the world. To progress in the game, the player needs to find a particular sequence of events or combination of actions which trigger other behaviors and events in the world. Gradually, those events lead to some winning state. The user is given a set of graphical, verbal, or textual descriptions of the game world and is supposed to figure out exactly what the programmer expects him or her to do. -- Mark Newheiser, Strange Horizons

I've blogged before about an episode of Blake's 7, a British sci-fi series from the late 70s, that centered on the thief Vila, who usually played a supporting comic-relief role. In this episode, the main action focused on his efforts to escape from a trap, and we see him develop a relationship (of sorts) with the long-dead designer of said traps.

Here's a bit of the script from City on the Edge of the World, written around 1980... I think it does a good job describing one way of thinking of the player's relationship with the puzzles in an adventure game:

KERRIL: We're shut in. Vila, we're shut in!
VILA: Don't worry. My man knows we're here.
KERRIL: Your man?
VILA: The designer. He knows we're here, and he knows we're not stupid because if we were, we wouldn't have got this far.
KERRIL: So?
VILA: So if he wanted to stop us, there's only one way left to him.
KERRIL: What?
VILA: Shh.
KERRIL: According to the locals, this lot is thousands of years old. You sound as though you're expecting to meet this character.
VILA: He may be dead, but he's still trying to outthink me. Keep behind me. Step where I step, and don't touch anything. Right?
KERRIL: Right. What are you expecting him to do?
VILA: I'm expecting him to try and kill us.

But note that the encounter with the puzzle is less meaningful when it's divorced from its context. As I noted, Vila is the comic-relief sidekick, who chooses cowardice and self-preservation over action. This episode is memorable not simply becuase of the cool puzzle, but also because the story furnishes the character with a love interest (who's turned on by the very geekiness that dooms him to sidekick status in an action TV series). I enjoyed watching Vila figure out what the designer was thinking, but that's becuase the show provided a framing narrative that explained the stakes, and I got to watch how Vila reacted to changes in the environment.

But if, while playing an adventure game, my primary reaction is "What was the designer thinking?" it's probably because the story was not sufficiently interesting. 

When I play an adventure game, I want to spend time thinking, "What would I do if I were in this situation?" or, better yet, "What would the protagonist do if he/she were in this stituation?"  If I click randomly on the screen in hopes of hitting a hot button, or if I have to type ten different synonyms to get the game to understand me, then the game world does not contain sufficient clues to help me solve the puzzle on my own.

Given my obsession with narrative, I would have liked Newheiser to have spent more time talking about the story that contextualizes the puzzles, so that the player feels that solving each separate puzzle advances the PC one step closer to reaching a goal.

An adventure game is a series of puzzles, solved by interacting with discrete elements in the game world, usually in a way that does not depend on reflexes or real-time concerns.

Bloxorz and Echochrome both fit Newheiser's definition, but they certainly aren't adventure games. Portal is a string of puzzles, but they're given meaning by a story.

It's worth the time to look back at Grahamn Nelson's classic "The Craft of Adventure," (which refers specifically to text adventures, which continued evolving on their own trajectory after the graphic adventures became popular) and Jesper Juul's Half-Real for some meaty analysis of the relationship between puzzle and story.

Sad news for Trek fans.

Majel Barrett Roddenberry, wife of "Star Trek" creator Gene Roddenberry and the actress who portrayed Nurse Chapel on the original science-fiction television series, died Thursday of leukemia, according to the family. --NBC

For more, see her biography on Wikipedia.

I'm willing to give the new Star Trek a chance. I loved Babylon 5 during its initial run, and I'm intrigued by the possibility of a re-imagined Trek.

From Wired:

This is from the robots category of Paleo-Future, which also has categories devoted to picturephones, jetpacks, and each decade's collected futurism (that is, see what our future looked like to people writing in the 1880s, the 1930s, or the 1980s).

Try as it might the robot could not make its desired turn. Its little broken wheel jerked and jumped, but to no avail. Malorie then started crying uncontrollably, quietly pleading, "Why won't someone help that robot! All he wants to do is pick up the ball and put it in the middle so that he can get some points!"

This may be an extreme example, but it illustrates our ability to anthropomorphize robots.