Recently in Science Fiction Category

Wow, is mankind ever playing with fire. First there was the Skynet thing. Now we're messing around with Europa despite explicit instructions from omnipotent aliens to the contrary. At this point the natural next step is to create a race of slave robots (that are stronger and smarter than us) to serve humanity; or possibly start designing really creepy-looking warp drives for the space shuttles.

As I have no doubt mentioned, I am a fan of the Star Fleet Battles board/wargame. Now, this is a game with a lot of rules. The "master rulebook" runs over 400 pages, and a second master rulebook covering a different quadrant of the galaxy recently came out at an additional 340 pages. While it's a very fun game, those rules do not make for a riveting read-through (not that that's stopped me, of course). But every now and then you hit something quirky in the midst of all the rules legalese that makes you grin.

For example, here's one of my favorite little rules in the entire game. It's something that will probably never happen in a typical game. It describes what happens when a starship captained by a "legendary captain" (think Kirk or Picard) is destroyed:

[G22.223] If his ship is destroyed, he has a 1% chance of doing something that results in his being aboard and in control of the nearest enemy ship of the same or smaller size class.... All legendary officers and remaining crew arrive with him. (Don't ask how he did it; that's what legends are made of!)

I assume that rule is inspired by Star Trek III, which features Kirk self-destructing the Enterprise yet shortly thereafter taking control of the Klingon Bird-of-prey through various bits of trickery. Who could forget this classic scene (thank you imdb):

Torg: [the Klingons have boarded the Enterprise only to find it is deserted] My Lord, the ship appears to be deserted.
Kruge: How can that be? They're hiding.
Torg: Yes, sir. The ship appears to be run by computer. It is the only thing that is speaking.
Kruge: Speaking? Let me hear it.
Enterprise computer: [Torg walks over to a console, placing his communicator towards it] 9-8-7-6-5...
Kruge: [shouts] Get out! Get out of there! Get out!
Enterprise computer: 2-1...
[the Enterprise bridge explodes]

Other fun rules cover similarly rare but cool game events, like crew mutiny on Klingon ships whose security officers have been killed (in the game universe, Klingon ships are crewed largely by slaves) and what happens when you tractor an enemy ship and then drag it at high speed into a planet. They're situations that rarely if ever come up in your average game—but you know that when they do, they fuel Gamer Stories for years to come.

What's the first thing you notice about this image, from an upcoming game called Star Wars: The Force Unleashed?

The issue here is, of course, why sci-fi females seem to wear such impractical armor. And that's a good question to ask. But I'd say that the most striking thing about this image is not the Star Wars equivalent of the chainmail bikini that our Jedi friend here is wearing. The real question was noted by this Metafilter commentor: are those some kind of nightstick lightsabers?

Allow me to quote liberally from his comment:

People, this needs to stop.

Back in Ye Olde Days, people did not sit around nailing swords to just about everything and calling them weapons. [...]

Thus how it should be with lightsabers. Yeah, I know every saber is an expression of its user, but more and more these days that expression is "I am a dolt more impressed by flash than keeping to tried and true rules." There are still a host of sword varieties out there that could be lightsaberified, from slightly curved katanas to monstrous zweihanders. Let's see some more of those before we even hear the whirling whine of lightchucks, smell the ozone-laden tang of the lightmace, or shield our eyes from the horrible glare of the "I just duct-taped 40 lightsabers to my body" lightgrizzlybear encounter suit.

A sword is fine. It's all you really need. It's a classic for a reason. Everything else is needless flash.

Well, except for the lightscythe that my alter-ego Darth Deathilicious has. That's totally justified in her character history.

How right you are, brother. (How do you use lightsaber nightsticks without chopping off your own arms?) In the original Star Wars trilogy, everybody seems quite content with the normal, longsword-style lightsaber. And that was really cool. But in the prequel trilogy, you can't help but notice a weird sort of lightsaber arms race: first there's Darth Maul's dual-bladed lightsaber quarterstaff, then Anakin dual-wielding lightsabers, and Count Dooku dual-wielding stylish, curved-handled lightsabers. And then General Grievous wielding like forty million lightsabers at once. It's all kinda cool... but there's just something classier about those old-fashioned, ordinary lightsabers. This is where it's at, my friends:

But I do like the mental image of Darth Deathilicious and her lightscythe. She sounds like a worthy companion to my own alter-ego, Darth Darkreaver Souldoom (fifty times more powerful than Mace Windu, and beloved by all the ladies; so awesome that he bucks the standard Darth naming scheme), who wields all of the lightsaber types mentioned above, but he also throws lightsaber shurikens.

I sure picked a bad day to stop writing Star Wars fanfiction.

This is probably old news to most of you, but on the off chance that a few of you have not seen this priceless Star Wars blooper, I must post it. During the escape-from-the-Death-Star sequence midway through the film, a group of stormtroopers comes through a door; watch the one on the right closely:

It happens very fast and is easily missed if you aren't paying attention. The sound of his helmet smacking the bulkhead is audible, so I assume it was deliberate. Nevertheless, I watched this movie dozens and dozens of times throughout my childhood years before noticing it one day in college. It was something new in a film whose dialogue I (and most of us back then, before the dark times, before the Empire) could recite entirely from memory. I recall scrambling frantically to the orange dorm room phone to summon my fellow SW geek Jeff, one of only two people I know who can recite poor doomed Greedo's cantina dialogue in the original Rodian. We probably rewound the tape (VHS, in those days) to watch that scene 20 times.

I am sure that those of you who follow politics have heard about Mitt Romney's incredibly significant and newsworthy gaffe. When asked to name his favorite book, he cited Battlefield Earth by L. Ron Hubbard.

Cue a whole lot of snickering and mocking overanalysis by every blogger and pundit in the universe--all of whom no doubt curl up each night in their favorite cozy chair to read from a dog-eared copy of Crime and Punishment. A presidential candidate who likes a book about (snicker) aliens? A candidate who appreciates a nice pulp sci-fi story? God forbid a candidate respond to that question with a title that falls outside our vaguely-remembered high school Intro to World Literature syllabus. Thank goodness the pretentiati is on hand to assure us that anyone who would read, let alone enjoy, such a novel is, obviously, unfit for any sort of serious position in government. Can't have our betters and those Europeans snickering at a U.S. President, can we?

Fortunately, Romney was quick to recant, assuring a worried public that his favorite novel is really Huckleberry Finn. Clearly, that's an answer straight from his heart, and isn't just a book title deemed by his political consultants as the Book Most Likely to Evoke a Positive Response from the Most Potential American Voters. (Let me guess: other Romney favorites include apple pie, the Bible, the soulful poetry of Maya Angelou, and freedom; and his heroes include Jesus, Abraham Lincoln and Martin Luther King, Jr.) Good save, Romney, good save. For a minute there I was worried that I'd spotted a glimmer of an actual interesting personality beneath the soulless political mask, an honest-to-goodness quirk that hadn't yet been sanded down into inoffensiveness by focus groups and asinine political cliches.

I exaggerate a little; Romney has not completely renounced his enjoyment of pulpy sci-fi. And a few brave defenders are standing up to the literary snobs. But this shocking scandal has got me on the defensive, as I enjoyed Battlefield Earth as a teenager and did not grow up to be Scientologist or an illiterate. Whether or not you think that presidential candidates should be reading B-grade sci-fi, mark my words: Romney's Battlefield Earth answer was the most honest thing you're going to hear from any candidate for the next 18 months; and it was us who, at the first sign of deviation from the predicable norm, mocked him into repenting (so we could then mock him for flip-flopping). Xenu help us--it's going to be a long and stupid campaign season.

Why am I content to sit here, blogging in our west Michigan apartment, when I could be writing books like this?

If this were the late 1970s, there would also be a boxed wargame (with 1500 playing chits) detailing this exact scenario. I'm halfway tempted to create it myself.

(Spotted at the Judge a Book by its Cover blog.)

Reason Magazine (which I'm finding to be an increasingly good online read lately) has an interesting interview with Vernor Vinge about the Singularity and related topics. Very thought-provoking stuff. The whole concept of the Singularity is, my wife assures me, crazy; but it's a fascinating idea nonetheless. Anyway, if you, like me, eagerly anticipate the day when the stars are right and our AI overlords will take over to make things right again, go check out the interview. And if you've not read Vinge's A Fire Upon the Deep or (my favorite) A Deepness in the Sky, hasten thee to a library and check 'em out--they represent some of the best sci-fi I've read in years.

This must be somebody's idea of a joke. They couldn't have thought of a different name for that?

How can you not love a book that presents, with a perfectly straight face, the following two lines?

The man gaped at her. "Are the apes after Kenny? I knew something like this would happen." -- p. 134

Doyle kept his face impassive, but his mind was racing. God help us, it's Romany again, he realized. What in hell is the man up to here? What can he hope to gain by brainwashing Lord Byron and turning him loose to make semi-treasonous speeches? -- p. 203

Both quotes are from Tim Powers' The Anubis Gates, a time-travel novel that was definitely one of the best books I read this year. A very fun read, if you're looking for something entertaining and a bit light-hearted. Really, I can't recommend it enough.

The portrayal of the Clone Wars in the Star Wars Episodes 1, 2, and 3 has long bothered me. Long, long ago, when I first watched Star Wars and heard crazy old Ben Kenobi's offhand reference to the Clone Wars (in which he had served alongside Anakin Skywalker, the best starfighter pilot in the galaxy!), my young mind conjured up images of an epic conflict that ravaged the galaxy.

The Clone Wars of my imagining were all part of a civil war in which brother fought brother, master fought apprentice, and hero fought hero. The schism started small but grew to engulf every known star system. There were true heroes on both sides, all struggling to fix a failing Republic: the Loyalists (who believed the dying Republic could be reformed from within) stood on one side and the Separatists (who believed that the Republic had passed the point of redemption and needed to be torn down) on the other.

The heroes of the Clone Wars were to the people of the Rebellion-era Star Wars universe what the heroes of Greek myth are to us today--they were larger than life, with power and might far beyond anything that would come after. And like the heroes of Greek mythology, their flaws were just as great. In time, noble ideals were lost beneath beneath monstrous egos; the forbidden science of cloning was tapped to make good on never-ending battlefield losses; and in the end, Jedi on both sides even turned to the Dark Side in a desperate quest for something, anything that would give them an edge and bring the devastation to an end.

And somewhere in the midst of all this, the Emperor came with the promise of peace. I never thought too much about the details, which didn't seem all that interesting anyway, but as a young Star Wars fan I saw the Empire that grew out of the Clone Wars as a sort of populist movement. The people of the Republic may have hated the corruption of their government, but they grew to hate the hell of galactic war even more. The idealistic Jedi struggle looked more and more to the average Republic citizen like the squabbling of children with too much power. The Emperor, who had earlier fanned the flames of civil war, now tapped into this frustration. The details are lost to the passage of time, but when the bloodshed ended, the Emperor was in charge, the Jedi were on the run, and both Loyalist and Separatist found that they had lost the war.

That was how I envisioned the Clone Wars, at least. But the Clone Wars as portrayed in Episodes 1, 2, and 3 seem... well, pretty lame in comparison. Lucas' Clone Wars isn't a tragic clash of mighty heroes, but a battle between the Good Guys and the Goofy Evil Robots. Despite the extreme amount of boring detail we're given about the state of the Republic, we never get even a mildly satisfying reason why the Separatists are trying to leave the Republic in the first place, except that they're Evil. The Jedi aren't mighty but flawed heroes; they're utterly worthless bureaucrats who can't even stop the Trade Federation from invading the Happiest, Most Peaceful Planet in the Galaxy. Despite the fact that the Republic Senate and the Jedi Council are both portrayed as useless, corrupt, or both, the films expect us to side with the Loyalists simply because the Republic is a Democracy. The battles of the Clone Wars are not tense, tear-jerking dramas in which former friends are forced to fight and even kill each other over their ideals; instead, they're dull CGI engagements between faceless clone soldiers and droids with silly accents. Even the most epic battle scenes of the prequels, like the space battle at the beginning of Revenge of the Sith, manage to evoke only the barest scrap of emotional investment.

It was probably foolish to imagine that Lucas' vision of the Clone Wars would match mine perfectly. And as frustrating as the prequels can be at points, Lucas has packed them with quite a few cool ideas. But the Clone Wars themselves--what should be the epic backdrop against which the fall of Anakin Skywalker occurs--are far more dull than I had hoped they would be.

I wanted the American Civil War in space, and I got a confusing and poorly-explained war between clones and robots.