The seven deadly sins

Actually they started out as the eight deadly temptations and later got edited down to seven and rebranded as sins. And of course, like the depiction of Hell in Dante’s Divine Comedy, they appear nowhere in the Bible. Which might come as a surprise to the catholic nuns and priests who I had to listen to in grade school, going on endlessly about how Jesus warned us about the seven deadly sins. Did they ever even read the thing?

“All the Universe…or Nothing”

Watched “Things to Come” last night – the classic version with Raymond Massey based on the H.G. Wells masterpiece. I think scifi did a remake – or one’s planned. Who knows. Anyway, I was struck by how differently progress and technology were viewed in Wells’ time, right through to the 30’s than they are today. The contemporary vision of technological progress is dominated by a Kurzweillian sense of inevitability. Technological advancement is defined by an exponentially accelerating curve that we have no real control over. We’re just along for the ride. Wells on the other hand saw progress as a manifestation of individual and collective will, sustained by continuous, unrelenting effort. Relax for even a moment, and progress instantly ceases and reverses itself. I think the history of societal collapses bears out Wells’ version over Kurzweil’s. Civilizations collapse either from calamity, or because enough  people lose the interest and the will to maintain the mushrooming infrastructure necessitated by technological progress. There’s nothing inevitable about aqueducts, for example. What seems more inevitable is people standing around beneath the ruins of aqueducts going “So, how do we get water from the lake to our fields? Any ideas?”

Things that sneak up on you

It just occurred to me  that I can’t remember the last time I read a review of anything, written by an actual  full-time professional reviewer.  Not for electronics, movies, books, TV shows, games…anything. Every review I’ve read in the last five years or so has been written by my peers and equals – either in the form of customer reviews, or just comment threads, blogs or fan sites. Strange that I hadn’t noticed. I used to read movie reviews on a regular basis, especially by Roger Ebert, who I think is an absolutely fantastic writer. So it’s not like I’ve got some weird internet fascist thing against professional reviewers:  “the internet is so empowering! Professionalism is as obsolete as intellectual property rights in the NEW ORDER!”  But I guess it’s just something I don’t think of as a specific profession anymore. I don’t even care to speculate whether that’s a good or a bad thing. As my friend Terry might say, it is what it is.

It’s called SCIENCE fiction for a reason

I’ve always been pretty inclusive in my definition of scifi, which I think includes metaphysical speculation by default. But I draw the line at pure unadulterated mysticism. I’ll accept just about anything in scifi except magic* or the suggestion that we surrender reason and accept “God’s plan for Humanity”. You can call it whatever you want. But the presence of robots and spaceships isn’t enough to make it science fiction. And if that’s where scifi has come to – being nothing more than a vehicle for generating alternate postmoderny religious mythologies – then I no longer find myself able to argue with those who claim that the genre is dead.

* and in case you’re going to invoke Clarke’s famous law – yes, I have actually heard of it and no, sufficiently advanced technology will only seem to be indistinguishable from magic. It won’t BE magic. That’s the difference between science fiction and fantasy.

Why I like Stargate

I’ve got no problem admitting that Battlestar had some brilliant moments – even right up to the end. You’d have to be an idiot to deny that. But as a fan of Genre, I’m much more fond of the Stargate franchise. Yes, Rodney Mackay got on my nerves and I thought that the last season of Atlantis really fell flat. But the reason I like Stargate is because in over 12 years of programming, the writers have never lost touch with the core sensibility of science fiction, which apart from science, involves people thinking their way out of problems. I think that has to be central to any definition of what makes science fiction distinct as a genre.

Stargate’s never lapsed into mysticism (even the ’Ascended’ have an electromagnetic basis to thier existence and can be killed), never resorted to leaps of faith, or had characters babbling incoherently about angels and divine plans. I mean, all that stuff’s OK on its own, but when you have that you don’t have science fiction anymore. You have Harry Potter and the Secret of the Cylons. You have Supernatural with spaceships.

I get what they tried to do with Battlestar too: craft a replacement mythology for a generation that’s rejected old world religions but which still has the same longing for mystical narratives that’s been hard-wired into every generation of humanity for the last 100 thousand years and which will be with us – probably forever in some form. And that’s fine. But people gushing about how Battlestar is where science fiction is at right now gets me up in arms. Battlestar has absolutely nothing to do with science fiction beyond a superficial use of traditional scifi iconography. It’s a mythological parable.

Science fiction has always distinguished itself by offering an anti-mythological counterpoint to our deep need to embrace epic supernatural fantasies. In science fiction, the apparently mystical always turns out to have a rational, comprehensible explanation. In Battlestar, all hope of reason is ultimately abandoned and the characters are forced to confront the fact that their situation is ultimately beyond thier comprehension or control. That is the absolute antithesis of science fiction. That’s why to me Stargate with its reliance on rationalism and non-mystical problem solving is where pop scifi is really at – for the moment at least.

Update: or, in other words, “on the air right now”.  I still consider Star Trek to be the gold standard for pop scifi franchises that adhere to the rationalist worldview of scifi. But if I had a young child watching TV today I’d encourage them to watch Stargate and do my best to steer them clear of Battlestar’s cynical anti-intellectualism.

A few notes on life in a post-Battlestar world

For starters, after the way they dealt with the Starbuck question we now live in a world where I don’t ever have to listen to some fanboy crow about how Battlestar Galactica is “serious” science fiction. Not unless Deus Ex Machina and magic are now formally considered acceptable scifi plot devices writers can use not once  but as many times as required  to get themselves out of corners they wrote themselves into whole seasons ago and which they hoped would just sort themselves out “somehow”. There’s even a new law –  Wren’s First Law: Any sufficiently clumsy scifi plot contrivance will be indistinguishable from magic.

Living in a post-Battlestar world means I never have to hear about how stupid it is that in Star Trek, the ship takes a beating but the artificial gravity never fails. Not for the rest of my life. We also live in a world were the “If robots look and act and feel just like us, then what does it mean to be human?” cliche is done. Forever. No one can ever use that one again. It’s so done that even if Honda unveils a completely convincing humanoid robot tomorrow and the first thing it says when they turn it on is “Give me liberty or give me death!”, people are just going to roll their eyes and go, “Oh, god, not that again.”

Airlock Alpha

A scifi news site written by people who actually like scifi! What will they think of next?

What you call an ecology I call a liesured class with way too much time on their hands and nothing useful to do with their B.A.s

Here’s an article about the future of news that’s making the rounds. It’s exciting because it talks about media using ecological metaphors! It’s Greeny!

I can’t tell you what the future of  news is. What I can tell you is that the blogosphere will have precisely the same relationship to the news industry in the future as it does today: that of a parasite to a host. Sorry, I just don’t buy that bloggers comprise this essential layer of commentary that the little people need in order to make sense of the news landscape in a multi-sourced information environment. There’s nothing wrong with blogging or commenting on the news. It’s fun! But let’s be clear: if you’re not adding original information to the landscape, you’re not part of the news industry. Why is that so hard to understand?

The Sony Playstation Will Kill Your Children

That’s the message conveyed by this UK ad. Because it’s surely not incompetent, negligent parenting to blame. The distinctive Sony controller is unmistakeable, and so is the message. Sony’s considering suing, and they should. Best of luck to them.

Casa Mondolithic Update

We’ve moved into the place we’re renting for 8 months in the little village of Ajijic, about a 45 minute drive  from Guadalajara, Mexico. Pictures to come soon. We have our first houseguests too – Lisa and Aruna from LA and my best friend Alec from Vancouver. Ken and Lisa and Aruna managed to keep it a secret that Alec was coming down, so needless to say I was pretty f–cking surprised when I saw Alec come through the gate yesterday morning when I went to pick them up at the airport.

So we’re settled in and enjoying country living so far. It’s hard to get used to the quiet. Nothing but birds singing all day, with the ocassional truck on the road, invisible through the trees that surround the property. At night, no car alarms or honking horns or fights, or barking dogs. I think Ken and I have had enough of big city living for a little while. Maybe we’ll be climbing the walls after 8 months, complaining that there’s nothing to do. We’ll see – but  for now, a little peace and quiet with a nice view of the lake isn’t a bad way to ride out a global recession.