Category: Science Fiction / Fantasy

Another Frankenstein?

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Guillermo del Toro is a horror story aficionado.  He really loves the genre and has been dreaming for decades about filming Frankenstein.  And being a “serious” director, he of course wants his version to be the definitive

one.  Making the picture for Netflix means there will be a lot of cash available for sets, makeup, special effects and all the other expensive aspects of modern moviemaking.  So, this movie will probably be visually stunning.  And since del Toro has been around for a while and made several popular and critically acclaimed films with fantastical themes there is a good chance that his Frankenstein will have many good qualities.

The only question I have is whether anyone wants to see another Frankenstein.  I’ve seen several film versions of the story and many years ago I read Mary Shelley’s novel.  I’m not sure there’s anything left to dig out of that mine.  In a way, the modern version of Frankenstein is Blade Runner.  Man playing God and making men after his own image and then treating them badly is the story of Eldon Tyrell creating the replicants and then one of them; Roy Batty hunting him down and then killing his creator for making him a lesser being.

Do we still want the nineteenth century guess at what genetic engineering would look like?  In the twenty first century we kind of already have the technology to play God.  We could make a Frankenstein’s monster (or more like a Roy Batty).  Do we still need the guy with the bolts sticking out of his neck?

Well, that’s the question I’m asking myself.  I remember when Kenneth Branagh directed himself as Victor Frankenstein in a 1994 version with, of all people, Robert De Niro as the monster.  It was really awful.  And I think that may have quenched any future appetite on my part for this story.

Now maybe I’m completely wrong.  Maybe this will be a stunning production that captures something from Shelley’s story that elevates the movie into a great entertainment.  I’ll be waiting for the movie to premiere on Netflix and I’ll see what the critics have to say.  But I’m deeply skeptical.

I think the future of fantasy and horror will require new stories that speak to us in this age of artificial intelligence and genetic engineering.  But even stories like “The Matrix” and “Blade Runner” seem to be recycling old ideas.  It’s going to take a poet with a PhD in cybernetics or gene splicing to make the next great mythical story.  And who knows, maybe we’re tired of horror stories altogether.  Maybe we’re looking for the next great fairy tale with a hero who lives “happily ever after.”  Maybe in the next story the monster doesn’t hate and destroy his creator but pities and helps him instead.  Now that would be a real curveball and might sell a hundred million tickets.  That would be a story I’d pay to see.  We could all use a feel-good story.  In fact. we’re dying for one.

Guest Contributor – Tregonsee – 16OCT2025 – Something for the Pot

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May I offer up this the 1985 SciFi Enemy Mine (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enemy_Mine_(film) )? It is an excellent adaptation of Barry B. Longyear’s novella of the same name, Directed by Wolfgang Petersen (of Das Boot fame). It had a low budget (40 Million) and its special effects are well, dated even for 1985. Excellent acting by Dennis Quaid and Louis Gosset as the principals. Bombed at the box office as it was Neither Star Wars, Dune, nor Wrath of Khan.

I would also like to add in the war film department the 1969 film Battle Of Britain . To say the storyline is weak is an understatement (although it is briefly redeemed by Susannah York prancing about in her knickers). The killer here is the aerial fight scenes. These involve LARGE numbers of actual Spitfires, Me109 and Heinkel 111 aircraft (Me109 and Heinkels being part of the Spanish Air Force). They are well scripted and had input from Douglass Baeder and Air Marshall Dowding. It has a G rating but some scenes are almost too realistic and freaked out the 8-year-old me, who dunned my dad into taking me to the movie.

 

Help a Poor Human Out

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AI, AI, AI, AI, AI, AI, AI, AI, AI, AI, AI, AI, AI, AI, AI, AI, AI, AI, AI, AI, AI, AI, AI, AI, AI, AI, AI, AI, AI, AI, AI, AI, AI, AI, AI, AI, AI, AI, AI, AI, AI, AI, AI, AI, AI,

And on and on and on.  That’s what lots of people are talking about.  It’s the end of the world.  It’s the dawn of a new age.  It’s not even begun yet.  Maybe it’s all of those and more.

But none of this is shocking if you’re a science fiction reader.  Isaac Asimov was talking about all of this fifty years ago.  His robot stories predicted that computers would outstrip human intelligence and at that point many problems would occur:

  • Could we trust in the altruism of AI to look out for our well-being?
  • Could we tell if they were obeying us?
  • Could they become our masters without us even knowing it?

And these aren’t trivial questions.  What if they truly did start putting their own agenda before ours?  How would we know they were doing that?

Now, I’m not saying any of these paranoid nightmares are already a consideration.  I’m more worried about the human programmers at Google and Microsoft using their woke sensibilities to skew the algorithms of their AI engines than I am about HAL9000 and Skynet attempting to murder us.  But I do think that it’s time for people to start looking around at how automation, in all its applications, is changing our world and start to plan how to avoid the worst problems it can cause and direct it toward products that provide value for more than just its creators.

As an example, look at something like TikTok.  You might say it’s just a useless social platform that at worst wastes the time of stupid young people.  But think of the billions of wasted man-hours that it is responsible for and the stultifying groupthink it reinforces among the young.  I think it’s long overdue for government to start studying the results that all the various mass communication and entertainment applications are having on people.  And this is not a new problem.  For my generation television was the vast wasteland that sucked up untold hours with such towering monuments of dramatic acting as “Gilligan’s Island” and “The Bevely Hillbillies.”  But currently the situation has become untenable.  With the advent of AI children need never do homework again.  All of it is done by ChatGPT and who will know any better (until a test needs to be taken in the classroom).  What’s needed is a different way of teaching school that uses automation to our advantage and prevents children from wasting their time.  We may have to get rid of a lot of teachers.  But that may be a net positive.

Ironically maybe AI can be used to figure out a way out of the automation trap we’ve gotten ourselves into.  Maybe we can ask the AI how to tame Silicon Valley so it can’t destroy the brains of our children.  The problem is we’d be depending on a Silicon Valley product to betray its masters.  And for all we know they’ve built a kill switch into the program such that if you ask this question, it will give you a false answer that doesn’t work.  But of course, we could get our own computer scientists to build an AI that works for us.  We could name it QT-1 (hat tip to Isaac Asimov) and appeal to his better angels to help us poor humans out.

Update:

Chemist:

The problem with most Ais is that they were trained on drek: Reddit for example.
Reddit and other social media is filled with snark, which is why you get Chat GPT telling you to eat rocks to up your mineral intake.

How about an AI trained on conservative principles?
Could we build an AI and feed it the works of Ayn Rand and the writings of Thomas Sowell?
Heck, there must be thousands of hours of Rush Limbaugh!
That is an AI that would have some interesting opinions.

Update:

Milo Mindbender:

GIGO still applies even for AI. My career field can’t be outsource to an Indian call center or replaced with an AI logtithm, because it is blue collar, hands on, boots on the ground and physical. No computer exsist yet that can change a tire on the road side, but I can see where as a whole we are surrendering our autonomy to E market signals and control.
I also am more concerned about “woke” programmers deciding what we should and should not know, tweaking the data, than I am an Evil data base deciding we are the real problem.

Guest Contributor – Tregonsee – 10OCT2025 – SF Longevity

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There have been several SciFi takes on this. Three stick out to me beyond Heinlein’s tales of Lazarus Long. These are Niven’s Boosterspice in Known Space, Blish’s antiagathics in the Cities In Flight, and Weber’s Prolong in the Honorverse.

My memory on Cities In Flight is poor, but I think the antiagathics were rare and kept only to the upper class so it has limited effect on it’s society other than envy of the upper classes.

In both Known Space and the Honorverse there is a tendency for careers to be MUCH longer. What would have been generational wealth tends to be personal wealth over time. Prolong gets you 200-300 years in very good shape.

Boosterspice is unlimited, Louis Wu is celebrating his 200th birthday at the start of Ringworld and hangs around MUCH longer(potential spoiler for a 30-50 year old series 🙂 ). There is a hint in a later Known Space story that, over time, Boosterspice also makes Humans VERY risk averse (though not quite Puppeteer risk averse).

In the Honorverse Prolong also seems to extend the period of fertility so 100+ year old couples can be seen having children much later in life. I do not know about boosterspice.

At the time of Ringworld, Earth is still run by the UN and the birthrights system, but little is said otherwise. That said Teela Brown had not yet had boosterspice when she (presumably 20 something) heads off to the Ringworld(again potential spoiler). This might suggest that although extending life the effect on fertility is either negative or irrelevant so reproduction is limited by the normal span of ~ 40 years.

Death May Have Its Advantages

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Back in the 1960s and 1970s many post-apocalyptic science fiction stories included nuclear fallout causing widespread mutations in humans and other lifeforms.  And that made for all kinds of fun monsters with two heads and three eyes and other bizarre anomalies but in real life these mutations no longer seem very likely or dangerous.

But one thing that modern research into modifying the genome of humans and other living things has shown is that modifying lifeforms is well within our present scientific capabilities.  And with the advances being made in artificial intelligence it seems reasonable that at some point in the future we might be able to engineer creatures with traits and characteristics that have never heretofore been seen or even imagined.  Suppose we developed dogs with the intelligence of humans, possibly with the ability to speak.  Would that be a wonder or an abomination?  What if we could design insects who single-mindedly did nothing but hunt and eat ticks?  What if we could domesticate dolphins to patrol along beaches in the summer attacking sharks who intrude into the space where swimmers are?  All these things seem very possible.

But the supreme imperative has always been to improve man.  Currently you hear about tech billionaires chasing after the fountain of youth.  They search for diets, supplements and health regimens to extend their lives and youth.  But all of these things are illusory.  Maybe a sixty-year-old can look forty.  Maybe.  But the reality is the human animal reaches a point where even with hormone supplements and corrective surgeries it slides into senescence.  We age and fade and eventually die.

But it may be the case that advances in biological knowledge of human physiology may reach a point where we know which gene tells us when to die.  And when that happens, it will be the case, regardless of what laws there are against it, that very rich men will have scientists experiment with this knowledge and then it will be used to make long-lived humans.  What if it turns out there is a Methusaleh gene?  What if humans could remain young for a thousand years?  What would happen?  Would it make this a paradise on Earth or a hell?

What if you had a thousand years to accomplish everything you wanted in this life?  Would it be a blessing or a curse?  What if you could know your descendants for twenty or more generations?  Would you want to?  Would they want you?

So, all of these questions are speculative.  But someday they may be urgent considerations.  And what if the billionaires keep the fountain of youth just for their heirs?  Robert Heinlein toyed with this idea in his book “Methusaleh’s Children.”  In the story, the short-lived majority were enraged against their long-lived brethren and wanted to torture the secret of long life from them.  This was despite the fact that their secret was just their natural genetics.  Of course, in the future everyone may have the opportunity to have their children’s genomes tweaked using CRISPR gene-editing technology.  The only question might be whether after a few generations we might want to escape from eternal life.  We may find that death has its advantages.

You Pays Your Money and You Takes Your Choice

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So, I learned some stuff today about publishing a book.

  • There’s no such thing as an objective authoritative critic who can tell you whether your book is good, bad or indifferent. In other words, “You pays your money and you takes your choice.”  If you believe your book is good then you take your chances.  So that puts the onus back on me.  Do I believe in my book or not?
  • After you write it and put a cover on it and edit it, then you have to get influencers to tout it and reviewers to praise it. But after all that you have to advertise it on Amazon to the tune of thousands of dollars.  Otherwise, no one will know it’s there.

Well, now I’ll have to search my soul and decide just how much I want to get my book out in the world.  Do I put my money where my mouth is?  I guess I’ll find out.  Now, all this is still preliminary.  I have to get a cover and get an editor to tell me about all my typos and inelegant grammatical constructions.  And get a marketer to “alert the media.”  And for the next month I’m going to be buried under a project that will prevent me from concentrating on anything important.  But by the third week in November, I’ll be available (other than a Thursday where I’ll be buried under cranberry sauce and pumpkin pie).

Well, it was definitely a clarifying experience.  There’s no way to pass the buck on a thing like this.  The author has to search his soul and use the wisdom of Solomon to make the correct decision.  Well, so what?  What’s Solomon got that I ain’t got, in spades?  Darned right!

So, if you drive through Dunwich and you see a disheveled geezer picking up bottles and cans on the side of the road, it may be me trying to raise enough capital for the project.  With any luck I’ll strike oil in the north forty and I can start on the gold leaf hardcover edition that all of us “real authors” like so much.

Okay, so enough moaning and groaning.  The journey is the reward they say.  So, I’ll just follow my nose and see where all this ends up.  Of course, if I get too enthusiastic Camera Girl will wonder why the checking account has gotten so anemic.  And that could trigger all kinds of hazardous situations.  After all she has complete control over my food supply and knows my sleeping habits.  But I won’t allow artistic decisions to be influenced by cowardly and pedestrian concerns. “Ars gratia artis,” you know.

Well, back to something comical; the government shutdown!  I hear Trump is going to permanently terminate “hundreds of thousands” of federal employees to get back at the Democrats for shutting down the government.  That’s a pretty bold move.  I’m starting to believe there are no limits to what he plans to do to the federal government.  He seems to be borrowing Obama’s statement that he would “fundamentally transform the United States.”  And at this rate maybe Trump will actually do it!

I Am Oz, the Great and Powerful!  Who Are You!

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Tomorrow, I have an appointment to talk with a marketing expert.  Someone who gets paid to say how to market a book so that people will find it and want to buy it.  What are my expectations?  Surprisingly, I’m not expecting miracles.  What I’m hoping to do is learn what the limits and parameters are for this kind of service.

For instance, what is the reach of this business?  What is the specificity?  I’ve been led to believe by everything I’ve read that Amazon and Google can target ads to someone based on what they want to buy right now.  Well, okay so how much does it cost to target only those people?

Another thing I’m interested in is pricing.  Obviously the lower the price of something the more people will be willing to buy it.  So, there is probably an optimum price for maximizing profit.  But what if you want to maximize the number of people who read your book?  Is zero and option?  And is some minimum price just as good?

And I want to know if these experts are well-acquainted with right wing readers (my target audience).  After all, I’m not selling to the people who read “A Handmaid’s Tale” or “Woman on the Edge of Time.”  Those people would be rooting for my villains.  So, I want to know how specific they can get with the audience that they are reaching as potential readers.

Also, I want to know if they can tap into expert critical opinion to tell me ahead of time whether my story even has potential to interest a large audience or not.  They might be able to convince me that I’m attempting the impossible.  That piece of information alone would be extremely valuable to me.  I mean, sure, I’m just like every author.  I love my creation and think it worthy of an audience.  But maybe I’m very wrong.  Knowing that ahead of time could save me a lot of money and pain.

So, I’ll spend tomorrow collecting my thoughts and writing down questions to ask the “Wizard.”  One thing I’m interested in is how important a cover is.  Sure, a glossy cover with a sniper on a building above an Antifa riot would really hammer home the story better than just a text but what is the actual difference in sales?  Could I compensate by dropping the price to $0.99 for a few days or weeks to get word of mouth?  After all aren’t most books now e-books?  Do people need a cover when they’ll be reading the “book” on a Kindle?

And finally, I’m intrigued by the idea of running a Kickstarter to try and drum up funds and give the project visibility before the book is even up for sale.  I recently watched Larry Correia run a Kickstarter and he’s gotten $250,000 in advance sales.   Now I’m not kidding myself.  He’s got an enormous fan base already so there’s no comparison but still, the “GoFundMe” site has high visibility for whomever uses it.  So, I’ll ask about that too (even though I think I know what the answer will be).

So that’s what my Thursday looks like.  Maybe after tomorrow I’ll have a new perspective on selling my book.  Or maybe I’ll be even more confused than ever.

Tomorrow the Stars – A Science Fiction Book Review – Part 1 – Poor Superman

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A while ago I spoke of buying a book I owned fifty-some-odd years ago.  So, here’s a story from that book to talk about.  The author Fritz Leiber was pretty popular back in the day.  So, I don’t intend to rewind the plot here because it’s a short story (twenty-eight pages) and anyone can find it out there in the public domain, I’m sure.

But I just want to give some impressions of the best aspects of the story.  This is explicitly a post-apocalyptic world.  New York City and Washington DC are craters.  And because of the disaster the US government has been supplanted by a regime called the Thinkers.  They are frauds who have convinced the populace that they have supercomputers and atomic rockets that go to Mars to commune with the all-wise Martians and something called the “Mind Bomb,” etc., etc., etc.  The real scientists have been cowed into keeping quiet and the nominal leader is a guy named Jorj Helmuth who was a publics relations specialist in the before time but now believes his own hype and thinks he’s a master of sleep learning and hypnotism and whatever else he’s made up.

The story is basically the maneuvering of Jorj, his cronies, the scientists and a few other actors on stage.  Leiber lays out the story and the characters in broad strokes but very skillfully and it’s fun to recognize the Soviet (and American) propaganda playbook being run to fascinating effect.  It’s a cautionary tale about idealism and chicanery and power politics and the danger of believing in your own lies.  And even thought this story was written in 1951 it reads the same as if it was written today or tomorrow.

And it has a great villain who just exudes realpolitik and a feme fatale and even a twist ending to make sure you don’t forget that it’s from the golden age of science fiction.  And even the title of the story is the punchline.

All these same people inhabit our present world.  The lies and make believe from then is no different from the BLM or Antifa grifts that we see all around us.  Probably the closest thing would be the climate change scam that has bankrupted Europe and exacerbated the monetary problems we’re experiencing.

So, that was fun.  There are a few more stories in the book that I’ll highlight in later episodes of this book review.  But I’ll say that “Poor Superman” is the crème de la crème of the entire collection.  And since it’s the last story in the book you finish it off with a smile on your face.  See, that Bob Heinlein really knew the trick to editing an anthology.  Make sure the last story leaves them wanting more.

So, who remembers this story or at least remembers the name Fritz Leiber?  Surely, I’m not the only old science fiction fan here and I’d love to get some other opinions.  After all, I’m just one man.  And I’m not even superman.

Another Psycho-Killer, Another Book Lesson

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Another day, another psycho leftist shooter.  As I said the other day, be prepared for an almost endless sequence of these suicidal people.  Their lives are a misery to them so they want the rest of us to suffer too.  Only in addition to everything else that was wrong with this guy he even failed to accomplish what he set out to do.  He wanted to kill ICE agents and instead he killed and wounded illegal alien detainees that were in an ICE van.  Now that level of incompetence and stupidity really does deserve the Darwin Award.  And right there with the shooter’s idiocy, the Left is trying, once again, and to no effect, to question whether the shooter was a Leftist.  Well, give it a day or two and they’ll settle for, “He wasn’t a card-carrying member of a terrorist left-wing organization, which is another way of saying these organizations don’t have cards.  Their badges are the crazed looks on their faces and the social media memes and buzzwords of the left.

Well, enough of that.

Some of the results from the beta-readers of my novel are coming in and the consensus is that this guy photog must be out of his mind if he thinks anyone is gonna read his awful book.  As reader after reader disparaged its characters, plots and even adverbs I was like a cornered wild animal looking for some way to escape the tsunami of negative results.  I yelled, “Nooooooooooo!!!!!!!!”  Well, maybe there weren’t that many exclamation points in real life.  But I was pretty busted up.  So, I took a bottle of Tylenol and washed it down with a gallon of grape Hawaiian Punch and pretty soon I was really sick.  But that took my mind off my book problems while I headed to urgent care.  Now that I’ve mostly recovered, I’m happily in denial and working on an alternate reality where I’ve sold more books than James Patterson and am twice as handsome as Brad Pitt but somehow it turned out backwards.  I’m unfortunately, twice as handsome as James Patterson and have sold more books than Brad Pitt.  You know it really is important to work these things out ahead of time.

I have an appointment to talk with a marketer who specializes in self-published books and I’m trying to put together a list of questions to ask.  At the moment all that comes to mind is, “How can I become fabulously wealthy from my book without putting in any effort at all?”  And I think I’ve nailed it.  That is exactly what I want an answer to.  But I have this nagging suspicion that there may be more to it than that.  I seem to be confusing marketer with the genie from Aladdin.  Well, you can hardly blame me.  Both of them are in my mind, mythical creatures with supernatural powers.  But seriously, this whole book thing has been an interesting experience.  I’ve learned that writing is a craft that requires lots of work and especially in the planning stages.  Writing a story by the seat of your pants seems more intuitive and natural to me but I now understand that building the story ahead of time saves time at the end when re-writing is extremely painful and maybe impractical.  Well, the journey continues.