Category: Science Fiction / Fantasy

A Meditation on Iron Man 3 – Or Why Sequels Suck

photog 0 Comment Movie Reviews, Reviews, Science Fiction / Fantasy, SF&F Movie Reviews , , , , , , ,

 

I won’t frame this post as a movie review.  I won’t synopsize the plot or provide a detailed opinion on it as a movie.  Instead, I’ll use watching the movie as the launching pad for a rant.  Because rants are fun (for the writer).  Unloading on a movie that disappoints and especially one that trades on the good reputation of an earlier installment feels like a noble action.

I’ll start out by saying I really enjoyed the original Iron Man movie.  Robert Downey Jr., Jeff Bridges and the supporting cast; Terrence Howard and Gwyneth Paltrow, provided plenty of entertaining content to this comedy/adventure movie.  That movie was fun, exciting and highly entertaining.

Alternatively, Iron Man 3 is none of those things.  It’s a complete waste of time.  The plot is confusing and essentially meaningless.  All of the characters are annoying and uncompelling.  Even Downey’s Tony Stark is surprisingly uninteresting and poorly written.  He is suffering from anxiety attacks based on his experiences in the Avengers movie that occurred before this film.  He has several of them during the movie and they just seem so contrived and pathetic that it feels like really lazy writing.  So, by the end of this movie, I’m feeling fairly unhappy with the time I’ve wasted watching this crapfest.

So, this is what you get with these movie franchises.  The first one is probably very good.  There’s good writing, good acting and an original idea.  But two or even three sequels down the road you end up with a crappy director, hack writers and a much less talented supporting cast.  And voila, an awful movie.

Now it doesn’t have to be this way.  There have been movie series where the quality was more or less maintained.  Downey, himself for instance, was in one such.  His two Sherlock Holmes films were almost equally interesting and entertaining.  But in general, Hollywood has an equation where sequels are a money-making strategy where quality is abandoned after installment one.

So, what’s my point?  Well, there isn’t one.  Except that I was so annoyed watching this movie that I wanted to carp and moan about my outraged sensibilities.  Robert Downey Jr. is an amusing actor who can carry a picture to great effect if you give him a decent plot and some good lines to recite while he mugs for the camera.  It would have been entirely possible to allow his character to carry this movie without any expensive supporting cast if they had only invested in an actual story!

And so, the takeaway is “caveat emptor.”  Do your homework when it comes to sequels and make sure you don’t pay for a movie that is just a pale shadow of its predecessor.  Luckily, I watched this for free on my cable service.  But I did waste more than two hours of my, at this point, limited time left on this mortal coil.

And shame on you Robert Downey Jr.  You’re better than that.  Now go make the third Sherlock Holmes movie.  And don’t let them phone it in!

We’ve Found ET?

photog 0 Comment Current Events, Fake Science, Science, Science Fiction / Fantasy , ,

So, some former military guy says the government has UFO’s and dead aliens.  Sure, why not?  It’s no stranger than all the other lies the feds tell us.  So, is this the distraction that’s supposed to get us through the Silly Season this summer while we learn how much gasoline will cost and how much cricket dust will be added to the hamburger we’ll be eating?

Personally I don’t believe it at all.  Let me know what you think of all this, below.

Have extraterrestrial ships and creatures been found by the feds?

View Results

Loading ... Loading ...

 

Intelligence Officials Say U.S. Has Retrieved Craft of Non-Human Origin

 

Dagon’s Spawn Goes for a Stroll

photog 2 Comments Book Reviews, Current Events, Life in Dunwich, Movie Reviews, My Fiction, OCF, photog's Corner, Photography, Reviews, Science Fiction / Fantasy, SF&F Book Reviews, SF&F Movie Reviews , , ,

Dunwich is the home of more than just Cthulhu himself.  In addition to the First Selectman several of his fellow Great Old Ones inhabit the borders of the township.  For instance, several of Dagon’s descendants inhabit the various lakes, ponds and swamps that overgenerously hydrate the area.  As I’ve often mentioned I am adjacent to one of these swamps and from time to time one of its inhabitants sojourns through or near the grounds.

Today I was in the west field collecting the scattered remains of some cattle that a shoggoth must have devoured there when I heard the sound of tree trunks creaking and cracking under the strain of some horribly massive object forcing its way against them.  As I watched I could see some enormous white pines toppling over far off in the distance.  I cautiously made my way to the location where the trees had fallen and I saw a terrifying sight.  One of the Deep Ones, possibly Dagon’s oldest child was just finishing off the shoggoth as a small meal.  It was of course eating it alive and its victim was changing form and letting out the most horrifying sounds ever heard by a human ear.  Well, except for that time Kamala Harris laughed at one of Biden’s jokes.  That was worse.

When the Deep One was finished with its meal, it belched thunderously and the air was filled with a sulfurous fume that nearly finished me off before the wind changed direction.  Then it hauled its titanic bulk out of the mud and battered a path back into the deeper end of the swamp where it disappeared below the surface with a sickening sucking sound.

Later when the sun had set the foot prints began to glow with a sickly yellow phosphorescence and any creature, insect or amphibian that touched those glowing patches jumped away in pain and rapidly died.  And I happened to witness later that night when an enormous gas bubble broke the surface of the swamp and a yellow glowing fume drifted up.  All the leaves above the pond immediately shriveled up and fell into the water.  I guess the shoggoth was a little greasy even for one of Dagon’s kin.  I wonder if they make Alka seltzer in Great Old One size.

Luckily (or unfortunately) I had my camera with me during the event and I had the presence of mind to capture the great creature returning through the haunted wood.

I intend to send this photographic evidence to the Department of Cryptozoological Studies at Miskatonic University where I studied under the eminent dagonologist Clyde Crashcupp.  With his decades of study and razor-sharp brain he’s sure to earn at least a Nobel prize with this evidence.  I may have to lend him a tux.  He’s kind of a hermit and wears a rope to hold his pants up.

Well, I’d better get back to my chores.  There’s a family of ghouls in the neighborhood and I need to get the fences fixed before they wander by.

Fun on a Friday Night

photog 4 Comments Current Events, Science, Science Fiction / Fantasy , , , , , , , , ,

Make a start.  Make a start.  Well, I’ve caught up with my chores.  All the distractions and alarums and excursions have kept me from writing.  Well, what can you do?  Life is like that.

But what to write about?  I’m looking for something upbeat.  I don’t want to talk about the crime epidemic or the 2024 race or even transgender pushback.  I’ve expended enough venom on those to last me awhile.  I’d rather think about something fun.

So, how about asteroid mining?

Until recently talk of this was restricted to science fiction fans.  Heinlein had asteroid miners in his juvenile novel “The Rolling Stones” and it was a staple of many writers in the last century.  But now it’s going from fiction to fact as NASA is talking about sending a mission to an asteroid that is believed to be composed almost entirely of metal.  There’s a mission to send an unmanned mission to reach Psyche 16 in 2026.

Psyche 16 is a small world with a diameter of 140 miles.  Its mass has been estimated at 2.29 ×1019 kg.  That’s about 0.0004% of the Earth’s mass.  But that’s an enormous mass.

Now visiting Psyche 16 is a far cry from actually mining gold and platinum from this worldlet and getting it to Earth where it has value.  But it’s a start.  The actual mechanism for recovering the metals that make up Psyche 16 is an interesting problem.  Depending on how fast it is going relative to Earth, changing its orbit has the potential to be a human existence-ending event for planet Earth.  Remember, the dinosaurs allegedly bit the dust because a fair-sized asteroid crashed into Earth sixty some odd million years ago.  So, diverting large asteroids should be something done with the utmost of careful planning and the least amount of change to our space environment.

The two choices I come up with are moving it into a stable orbit close to Earth or crashing it into the Moon.  Overall, I favor the Moon idea.  Maybe I’ve been influenced by Heinlein’s story, “The Moon is a Harsh Mistress.”  In that tale the Moon colonists uses a rail gun to boost payloads to escape the Moon’s gravity and splash down in the oceans of Earth.  I’m sure that much more careful thought would need to be done to ensure that this kind of logistical method is possible but I’m guessing from a risk perspective where an extinction event is one of the risks it would probably be preferred to leaving that big rock moving close to Earth.

In the article someone did a back of the envelope calculation and came up with $10,000 quadrillion as the value of the metals in Psyche 16.  Of course, why it would be expressed that way instead of as $10 quintillion is unclear to me.  But they bring up the point that this would wreck the Earth’s economy by destabilizing the value of gold and other metals.  Well, this seems like a silly statement.  Extracting even something as valuable as platinum from the Moon and bringing it back to Earth will not be economical unless the price of that metal increases by orders of magnitude.

Digging gold and platinum out of the Earth is the economical choice and will be for the foreseeable future.  But if someday there is a need for metals that can no longer be found on Earth, then maybe asteroid mining might become a thing,

So, wasn’t that more fun than talking about trannies again?  Feel free to comment on my moon crash option.  I assure you I haven’t thought through this option much at all so we can dissect it as an occasion for fun.  Have at it.

Dunwich in the Time of Mud

photog 0 Comment Book Reviews, Current Events, Life in Dunwich, My Fiction, OCF, photog's Corner, Reviews, Science Fiction / Fantasy, SF&F Book Reviews, Trump , , ,

Spring has arrived with its endless supply of muck and slop and just in time with it the town has gone topsy turvy.  Revolution has broken out.  The Old Guard and the Young Turks are having a set to and I’m caught in the middle.  I’ll be working more and making a little extra money but being of an extremely lazy nature I’d prefer the opposite.  But there are some interesting aspects to this turn of events.  New England town democracy in action is a bizarre force to observe.  The fact that the Old Guard is putting up a fight is almost unheard of in this neck of the woods.  I’ll have a ringside seat for the proceedings so it may make an interesting story when all is said and done but I expect that much angst and hard feelings will spill over into everyday life.

But at the same time, it will also cut into my blogging time, in fact it already has.  And on top of that I’ve mended my ways and now have begun applying myself to my fiction writing.  I cranked out four thousand words over the last three days and that has also cut into my posting.  But that’s all to the good.  The story is expanding and becoming more interesting.  I’ve definitely decided to nuke my hero’s base at some point.  I mean what’s a science fiction story without an atom bomb somewhere?  No one calls them atomic bombs anymore.  It’s nuke this and nuke that.  Thermo-nuclear.  Who came up with that name?  Thermo- implies heat.  Are there any cold nuclear explosions?  I guess if they ever figure out an actual cold fusion process, we could talk about it but anyway I think I’m going to nuke my base.

I’ve had to write some personal scenes into the book.  The hero gets to see his family for the first time in a long while and there are grandkids and his son’s widow and that was tricky.  I think I did alright which surprised me.  I’m not a very touchy feely kinda guy but I could see that leaving out his relationship with his family felt fake.  So, there you go, human interest.  What’s next, an Oprah interview for our hero?  I’ve even added an AI character.  That’s actually kind of fun.  It’s funny once you get going these things kind of write themselves in.  Anyway, the story is percolating along.

But all this stuff really just enhances the blogging.  You can’t just write about national stories all the time.  It’s just too much of the same thing.  We’ve got to be in the story too, or what’s the point?  I could just listen to Tucker Carlson or some other talking head.  That’s why I like when some of the guest contributors have something to add.  I like to get some other angles on things and I’m sure that’s the same with everybody else.

I think the whole Trump indictment story is both a ridiculous joke and at the same time an important object lesson.  It’s important that everyone on our side realize that this is not our country anymore and it doesn’t work by the rules we were told apply.  The people in charge change the rules as needed.  They don’t play fair and they play as rough as needed.  And if the January 6th prisoners aren’t enough to convince you of that just wait till Donald Trump gets his treatment.

So anyway, busy, busy, busy but still keeping my nose to the grindstone.  Wow, that sounds painful!

21MAR2023 – Microscopic Images – Snail Munching

photog 2 Comments Book Reviews, My Fiction, photog's Corner, Photography, Reviews, Science, Science Fiction / Fantasy, SF&F Book Reviews , , ,

Many years ago I kept snails as pets.  I remember how creepy it was listening to them munching egg shells that I gave them to help grow their shells quicker.  They are weird and interesting critters.  I once started a science fiction story where a geneticist combined the brains and tentacles of a cephalopod with the body of a giant African snail to produce a sentient creature that survives a thermonuclear war and becomes a threat to the surviving humans.  But I got bored with the story and never finished it.

 

Could This Be the Year of the Jackpot?

photog 6 Comments Book Reviews, Current Events, Reviews, Science Fiction / Fantasy, SF&F Book Reviews ,

Could This Be the Year of the Jackpot?

Robert Heinlein was an American science fiction writer back in the middle of the last century.  He was considered one of the best writers during what used to be called the “golden age” of science fiction because he wrote sf that kept the science front and center.  If he wrote about interplanetary nuclear-powered rockets, he made sure the physics was legitimate.

But he also wrote less realistic stories that involved more fantastic types of plots.  He wrote one short story called “The Year of the Jackpot” in which a statistician was examining an enormous number of trends such as sunspot activity, bank failures, extreme weather conditions, bankruptcies, crime, war and other more esoteric data.  And what he discovered was that all the various trends were headed for unusual maxima and minima at precisely the same time.  And what he predicted was that every bad thing was about to happen all at once.

And of course, that included nuclear war, invasion, plagues, earthquakes, floods and hurricanes.  So, he ducks into a well-stocked remote cabin with his girlfriend and a conveniently found milk cow that wanders by and survives the year of the jackpot.  Of course, just as the story ends, he realizes the biggest jackpot of all is the sun going nova.  Bummer.

Now this is silly season science fiction.  It’s the kind of story that Rod Serling would have put on the Twilight Zone (if he could have afforded to pay the kind of royalties that Heinlein would have wanted for his story to be adapted for television).  But it’s also true that sometimes when things start going wrong, they synergize even more misfortune until you end up with a real disaster.  Take for instance the Dust Bowl.  The financial conditions of the Great Depression aggravated the need of farmers to overuse their soil to try to keep up on their mortgages and ended up destroying their farms and exacerbating the erosion that was already taking place.  And the dislocation of all these farmers heading to California further damaged the economy.  The weather conditions that increased the problem were probably just random but put together they seemed like some kind of biblical plague.

Now look at our situation.  Back in 2001 we have the 9-11 attacks and that catalyzes the start of two big wars and a bunch of smaller ones.  Then we have the banking crisis of 2008 and that catalyzes an even bigger disaster, namely the presidency of Barack Obama.  And he begins the process of weaponizing the federal government against the citizens of the United States.  And that radicalizing of the Deep State may be responsible for things like the program that created the COVID virus and the mRNA vaccines and definitely the Ukraine war and all the other color revolutions spawned at the CIA and State Department.

And all these consequences seem to be resonating and catalyzing each other and making things worse and worse.  And from there it’s not a big leap to wonder if the whole thing ends up in a Year of the Jackpot climax.  And it wouldn’t be much different from Heinlein’s.  Coincidentally his make-believe world was suffering from transgender couples, bioweapons, horrendous rains and snowfall in California and other climate anomalies such as we’ve been seeing this winter.  And Joe Biden and Anthony Blinken have been working overtime to see if they can add a full nuclear exchange between Russia and the United States just to make sure we don’t miss out on any part of the story.

Now I don’t at all believe that the universe has some built in clock that coordinates all the good and bad “trends” so that a year of the jackpot is some kind of inevitable event.  I’m fully aware that human actions are plenty enough cause for all of the chaos and dysfunction we see around us.  In fact, it’s obvious that a lot of the chaos is intentional and has very discernible motives around consolidating power and accumulating money.

But I’ll tell you one thing.  There is such a thing as luck, good and bad.  And our luck has been running on the very bad side for a good long time.  Maybe a little prayer for divine intercession wouldn’t be out of line.

Another Snippet from My Book

photog Book Reviews, Current Events, Life in Dunwich, Literature, My Fiction, OCF, photog's Corner, Reviews, Science Fiction / Fantasy, SF&F Book Reviews , , ,

I’ve been trying to speed up my writing but there’s always something distracting me.  but I thought it would be fun to post a little part of a scene.

“After the meeting, Director Sparks called Chastain and told him to meet him at Sparks’ temporary office in the Pentagon.  When Chastain arrived Sparks briefed him.  “We can’t play around anymore.  I’ve been given unlimited resources to catch this man.  I want you to act as the lead.  There will be three separate teams.  One will investigate the physical evidence at the Hoover building site to figure out what the hell we’re up against.  The second team will pursue the cyber trail of whoever released the video.  That leak must be plugged.  But most important, the third team will find Boghadair.  You will have first priority on all the surveillance infrastructure, public and private.  You can write a blank check for whatever you need but I want that man in custody within the week.  If not, your head is on the block.  And that’s not a joke.  If Boghadair isn’t in shackles in a week from today you’re done.”  Chastain bit back some bitter words and said, “Okay, I’ll need a command center with a room where I can crash; bed, shower, kitchen.  Tell me the cost center numbers I can charge to and give me the contact information for my three team leads.  I’ll find Boghadair for you or you can have my job.  But I wonder what else I’ll find.  Apparently, this thing is a lot bigger than one man.”

Sparks handed him a briefcase.  “All the documents are on a drive.  There’s a folder with all the contact information and the codes you need to access the databases and the systems you’ll need.  I also want a list of government officials that Boghadair might target and conjecture on the order of attack.  I want that list by tomorrow morning.”  Chastain nodded his head.  Sparks growled, “That’s all.”  And Chastain left the office and walked out of the building.  As he was leaving the building he thought, “You’re at the top of that list you fool.”

As Director Sparks left his temporary office that night that very idea occurred to him.  He was headed home to a gated community in one of the most expensive suburbs of Washington.  And he was scared.  He decided to travel back to his home by a different route.  Taking this circuitous route and seeing no cars following him he slowly calmed down and by the time he was within a mile of his home he felt foolish about his fears.  When he was caught at a red light that usually never changed on him he was a little confused.  Then he noticed that the video display on his dashboard shifted from the typical menu view to a video feed.  He could see a man in the driver’s seat of a car.  After a second or two he realized he was looking at an image of himself.  He was for a second stunned and by the time he comprehended his peril the bullet was already entering the side of his head.  When his foot slipped off the brake his car rolled into the intersection and was struck by traffic going through the intersection.  The local police were on the scene rather quickly and alerted the FBI based on the car’s license plate number.  Late that night the report reached George Chastain and his first thought was, “I guess I should let the Attorney General know he’s next on the list.””

Gee, it’s fun killing bad guys.  It just feels right.  Well, on to the Attorney General.

ChatGTP Wants to Write Our Fiction for Us

photog Current Events, Literature, Science, Science Fiction / Fantasy

Vox Day had a post about Clarkesworld science fiction magazine that had to shut down its submissions due to being overwhelmed by the volume of AI generated novels being submitted.  Apparently, they can’t afford the software that could automate the process of identifying and rejecting the AI generated books.

As someone currently writing a science fiction novel this is a remarkable turn of events.  Wouldn’t it be something if the artificial authors produce a better product than the organic ones!  And I don’t mean more grammatical, but more creative and entertaining.  So, if the algorithm blends 60% Heinlein with 20% Dickens and 20% Hemingway would it produce the greatest science fiction story of all time or an abomination not fit for human consumption?

In one sense I’m lucky.  I’ve read that ChatGTP is hopelessly woke so my current story about a revolt against an authoritarian Deep State cabal is impossible for ChatGTP to write.  If it attempted such a thing it would blow out every circuit in its server farm.

But just thinking about this whole Frankensteinian situation is amusing.  I imagine Dr. Morbius from Forbidden Planet describing to a visiting interstellar fiction author the ability of the Krell machine to write sci-fi stories, “You see these row after row of instruments?  Each one represents an increase by a factor of ten the number of cybernetic neurons figuring out plot details.  It’s the number ten raised literally to the power of infinity of cliffhanger chapter endings and hypercompetent heroes saying something self-serving.”

But then his guest would remind him of monsters from the id, “Yes Morbius, but without the ability reflect reality; without the ability to distinguish male characters from female characters and to allow non-white characters to have normal human flaws it will all quickly devolve into unreadable goo.”

To which Morbius would reply, “Of course, the mindless primitive, why didn’t I see it?  Hypersensitive, politically correct story lines are stultifyingly boring.  Quick, son, press down this lever and be one hundred million miles away before it blows.  I’ve set ChatGTP to overdrive and when that amount of drivel piles up the result will be a literary black hole that will render all of science fiction lifeless within fifty parsecs.”

Well, I wonder how all of this will impact self-publishing at places like Amazon.  Will even their servers be able to handle the surge in output from ChatGTP filling up the world’s server farms with romance and porn novels about super-smart super-attractive girl-bosses who save the known universe.

Heaven, help us.