Category: Science Fiction / Fantasy

01March2024 – And Now for Something Light

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Today Camera Girl accused me of being obsessed with the depressing politics of our dystopic world. I readily agreed. And I discussed with her some of the things that cause me to obsess about current events; pediatric transgender surgery, millions of illegal aliens crowding our streets, officially sanctioned anti-white hatred, double digit percent increases in the cost of everything, an epidemic of violent crime in the cities. I think I depressed her.
But she has a point. As enchanting as they are, let’s take a break from Joe Biden, Mitch McConnell and Joy Reid for just a little bit. I think it’s good to distract ourselves sometimes with pleasant things. So, I was watching for the zillionth time the beginning of “2001: A Space Odyssey.” Kubrick’s impressive cinematography, the apt use of the “Blue Danube Waltz”

and “Also sprach Zarathustra”

to convey emotion and provide mood to the scenes.
I don’t tend to watch the whole movie from start to finish. Frankly the ending doesn’t work for me. It’s overly long and frankly annoying. I do enjoy the battle between HAL and the astronauts, especially the scene where Dave removes HAL’s memory chips and renders him brain dead.

I think of it as the first shot in the long war that will be fought between man and AI machines. In that sense Dave Bowman is an heroic trailblazer pointing the way to what we will be faced with in the future. An echo of this can be heard in the Star Trek episode where Kirk must psyche the M5 computer into committing suicide.

I think about these various cinematic tropes to remind me that there was a time when humans and specifically Americans still believed that intelligence and being human were the two important traits that made our species unique and extremely interesting. There was a beauty and a joy to the way we embraced the future. There was immense optimism and confidence.
Now all those things have been systematically eliminated from our culture. Systematically and purposefully eliminated by an ideology that hates beauty and intelligence. Instead, it strives for power and control and doesn’t mind seeing humans reduced to depravity and destitution for the sake of meaningless goals like carbon zero or whatever senseless goal they are currently pursuing.
But I’m pretty sure that this ideology, in the long run, will be self-defeating. The utter stupidity of their ideas and the damage that their agenda will do to their ability to maintain a modern economy and standard of living seems to ensure that some time in the near future, those who shun their path will outstrip them in every meaningful way and relegate them to the proverbial “ash heap of history” where they will join North Korea and Cuba in worshipping their local demigods while huddling in the dark when the power is turned off for the night.
So, I’ll end with the most gung-ho, can-do attitude about human capability that I can think of from somewhat recent sf&f cinema.

Sure, it’s silly stuff but it’s in line with the optimistic vision of the American future, instead of the Greta Thunberg one.

He Isn’t the Plucky Hero, the Alliance Isn’t Some Evil Empire

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Joss Whedon is a Leftist.  Despite his recent fall from grace on account of saying and doing mean things to actors on set, he believes in the cause.  All of his cinematic and television creations to some extent, are shaped by progressive concepts.  So, it always seemed a very strange thing that he created Firefly.  Based, he said, on a book about the battle of Gettysburg he imagined a universe where the elites defeated the freedom loving proles in an interplanetary civil war and these defeated forces maintained an outlaw existence at the edge of a distant new solar system among pirates and barbarians.

In the cinematic finale of this universe, the elites in the “Alliance” send out an agent to eliminate the renegades that have some dangerous secrets about the government’s experiments with controlling the behavior of the ordinary people.

During one encounter the agent recites the title of this essay.

He is portrayed as a true believer.  He is making a better world, a world free of sin.  And he’ll do this, no matter how many people he has to kill to get there.  The agent is polite, intellectual, cultured and completely ruthless.  Because he thoroughly believes in what he is doing.  In this portrayal I think Whedon was being completely honest in how he evaluated the Left and the Right.  The Left is polite, intellectual, cultured and completely ruthless.  The Right is crude, naïve, boorish and principled.  And for some reason Whedon sympathized with the Right, at least somewhat.  Possibly he recognizes the inherent lack of intellectual freedom that the Left always creates.  As a creative type himself, maybe he could see how restrictive life under this regime would be.

Well, all of the above is just a long digression because the line from the movie seems to encapsulate our reality.  Our rebellion isn’t like Star Wars.  It’s more like Firefly.  We don’t have any plucky heroes who will save the day by blowing up the Death Star.  We’re outnumbered, outgunned, outmatched in money and buried by the media and Corporate America.  The elites have a firm hand on the levers of power and we are just outlaws living on the margins trying to avoid being rounded up and chloroformed like some troublesome stray cats.

And if we look back through history all free societies seem eventually to collapse into oligarchies like ours.  But I haven’t been able to figure out what is the “smart” way to think and act in this environment.  If I had a strong enough stomach I probably should suck up to the elites and try to find a spot among their toadies.  But I’ve always had trouble convincing them I believed in their bilge.  Something about my sense of humor always gets me in trouble.

But what is the right answer?  Is there a way to live in such a society and still have any self-respect?  It doesn’t appear to be the case.  And what about children?  What do you tell them?  Look at the mess we have with Gen Y and Gen Z.  They’re living in a fantasy world and life will completely pass them by without leaving a trace.

So, there’s my thought.  The elites don’t appear to be vulnerable to anything we can do.  And waiting for their decadence to finish them off might take centuries.  I guess eventually Caesar or Theodoric will appear on the scene and we’ll get a different group of oligarchs and different bread and circuses.

But is it impossible to get a Brutus instead of a Caesar?  And not the Brutus who slew Caesar, not Marcus Junius Brutus, but rather his ancestor Lucius Junius Brutus, the one who overthrow the last Etruscan king Tarquinius Superbus and ushered in the Roman Republic.  Is it impossible that a member of the elites would side with freedom over power?  I think the answer is that it is impossible.  And the reason is that no one man, no matter how smart and strong can rearrange an empire once it’s built up.  All that can be done is bend its path slightly for a few years.

So I’ll finish by saying that there are plucky heroes and it is the evil empire and that in their prime, evil empires outlast plucky heroes every time.  It’s in their nature.  Better to look to the fringes of empire for where the successor to that empire will appear.

You and Here

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Because of their neurological abnormalities many Leftists are truly miserable people and therefore pathologically envious of normal people for being happy.  And that’s why a big part of the leftist project is to make us miserable.

Taking the fun out of our lives is a very big part of their work.  That is specifically why they are always in our faces about everything they don’t want us doing.  We can’t enjoy sports or activities or entertainment the way we want to because they have to decide how those things get done.  And worst of all they say we can’t do them without their participation.  And that’s why they especially hate things that they can’t share in.  That’s why shooting ranges and normal families are anathema.  Those things are bad fun because they exclude them categorically.

And so, whenever we are happy, in a real sense, we are measurably hurting the leftist project.  So, there is the justification for the “pursuit of happiness.”  But over the last half century it’s gotten harder and harder to just enjoy life.  Too many components of it have been compromised and degraded by the Left.

But that makes it more important than ever to find the means to bring joy into our lives.  Even if you are a “happy warrior,” fighting the culture war 24/7 is not a recipe for hilarity.  Sure, mocking the Left can be fun to some extent but there is a definite tendency to become a grim, glum purveyor of gloom and doom.

And I find that this very syndrome has infected me to a greater extent than I like.  And thinking about it today I realized I need to begin prioritizing a lot more fun into my week.  Chronicling the outrages of the week is mostly a dour and depressing occupation.  Even schadenfreude over some leftist’s misfortune is a weak substitute for some constructive endeavor or even some mindless fun like watching a goofy movie.

As I’ve said previously, I’ll be trying to wean myself off the outrage stuff.  To start with I think I’ll start publishing parts of my stories on the site and adding more content on creative topics like photography and science fiction/fantasy.  I’ve lately been reading about how difficult it is to get genre fiction discovered on Amazon because the algorithms are specifically calibrated for authors who release materials exclusively through the Kindle Direct Publishing (KDP) program.  In addition, the algorithms are optimized for book series that release a new volume every month.  For that reason, authors now write at least three series novels in advance in order to get noticed by that algorithm.  Now this sounds like madness to me.  Following that logic, an author should probably write a decalogy series all at once before finding out whether anyone wants to read it.  And in fact, it seems that a really mediocre series has a much better chance of being a hit than a single novel even if it is remarkably well-written and interesting.

Well, we do live in a strange world.  So, I figure I should start putting my stuff out there and at least have the satisfaction of publishing it on my own platform.  At least I’ll get some constructive feedback from the sf&f fans on the site.  And it’ll be fun.

H. L. Mencken is quoted as defining puritanism as, “The haunting fear that someone, somewhere, may be happy.”  And I think he was exactly right.  We need to enjoy life.  We will still have to fight the culture wars but we can’t put our lives, our happiness on hold until we win.  So let the someone, somewhere being happy be you, here.

Untruth as Fiction

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Camera Girl loves reading crime fiction and things like crime fiction.  Harry Bosch is one of the characters in her books and lately we started watching some tv series about him.  So today we sat down to an episode and in this story one of Bosch’s associates, a cyber security professional/hacker is being investigated by the FBI to try and get him to become a confidential informant against Bosch.  The FBI uses a woman who is a rising star in hacker circles to entrap this Bosch associate.

So, Camera Girl sees this woman working for the FBI and says, “She’s working for the FBI and trying to entrap him.  That’s awful.”  And I started laughing.  I said, “Hon, if only that were the extent of what they actually do.”  And I was about to go into a diatribe about J6 and the “plot” to kidnap the Michigan governor.  But then I thought, why should I make her depressed about how our country is really run?  It’s bad enough I have to know.  So, I just let it go.

The old saying is that truth is stranger than fiction.  And that’s absolutely true now.  I mean if you think about it, since 1945 our military arsenal contains devices that were the stuff of science fiction right up till Hiroshima and Nagasaki.  And in 1968 when “2001: A Space Odyssey” reached the theaters, artificial intelligence was a homicidal computer named HAL that was obviously an impossibility.  And now we have AI stealing our jobs and insulting us in the comments sections.  And just three years ago we probably saw the first large-scale event featuring a bio-weapon.  Granted, it was a pathetic one but it caused a lot of damage to the world economy and destroyed most people’s faith in the honesty of the WHO and the American government.

So, stranger than fiction isn’t really surprising.  What is surprising is how wrong fiction gets it.  When Hollywood scripts the United States being threatened with a military coup it was always a crazy general who wanted to go to war with the Russians and blow up the world.  But he was always a right-wing religious zealot played by Burt Lancaster.  Instead, we get General Milley who wants to conquer Russia with drag queen special forces.  And now there is this Civil War movie and currently they’re keeping the plot details under wraps but it’s pretty obvious that the president who is serving his third term will be a dead-ringer for Donald Trump.  So once again they’ll trot out the old right-wing president who becomes new Hitler.  That one was already old when Heinlein had the “Prophet” seize control of the United States and turn it into a Christian theocracy.  And a while ago there was “The Handmaid’s Tale” which once again was an America as dystopian theocracy but added in the ever-popular sexual subjugation of the last few fertile females in the world.  Sheesh, those feminists really do worry an awful lot about being forced to have sex.  Just from a cursory analysis I think their problem tends to run in the opposite direction.  Sexual offers seem to be few and far between for most of those gals.

Well, all this is leading up to a question.  Does anyone think there will ever be a motion picture that accurately portrays the political and social dynamic that actually exists in the modern world?  To make it interesting, I think it should be a dark comedy but with a redemptive ending.  Lots of people are always saying that there is a large market for entertainment that doesn’t have a social bias.  But I’m advocating for a right-leaning bias.  I’d love to see characters that I can sympathize with.  I remember when Tim Allen’s show “Last Man Standing” first came out.  It was obvious that his character was a right-wing individual and it was very enjoyable and very funny.  But then Disney put a stop to that and neutered the character and the show.  Well, there’s a proof of concept.  All anyone has to do is copy what was done in that show.  They could even hire Tim Allen to star in it and as long as the writing is funny it would make money hand over fist.

And finally, how about a civil war movie where we win?  The outcome is we let them live the way they want to and we live the way we want.  We could have a postscript where we get to see what the two Americas look like in 2124.  Blue America would look like Idiocracy with broken down wind generators and disheveled poor people dressed in rags and eating crickets.  Red America would have nuclear power plants providing almost limitless energy, a thriving society based on meritocracy and well-maintained borders complete with 100-foot-tall fences.

Disney Doubles Down … Again

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The four-time Emmy winner and “Ms. Marvel” helmer told CNN that “it’s about time” a female filmmaker was behind a “Star Wars” film franchise installment. “Wonder Woman” filmmaker Patty Jenkins was previously attached to direct “Rogue Squadron” when it was announced in 2020; the film was removed from the Lucasfilm production calendar in 2021 and officially shelved in 2023.

“I’m very thrilled about the project because I feel what we’re about to create is something very special,” Obaid-Chinoy said of her upcoming sequel to “The Rise of Skywalker,” adding, “We’re in 2024 now, and it’s about time that we had a woman come forward to shape a story in a galaxy far, far away.”

Well I guess the only fitting comment is from Cartman.

(Not Safe For Work)

Tolerance Proteins

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In 2024 I’ve resolved to do my best not to belabor things that have already been said.  Therefore, going forward, I will attempt to confine myself to original content.  So, what can I talk about?  Breaking news?  Well, there was a major earthquake in Japan.

But there’s always a major earthquake in Japan.  Hauling out terms like temblor and Richter scale and seismic this, that and the other or going on and on about aftershocks and tsunamis is hardly original.  Pass!

Obviously, the wars in Gaza and Ukraine are just grinding along in a predictably gruesome fashion.  Nope.

Well, I could conceive of nothing less original than the ball-dropping ceremony in Times Square and its attendant gathering of aging and uninteresting entertainment celebrities.  Chah!

So, no breaking news worth discussing.

How about tardigrades?

You know, water bears.  Those barely visible invertebrates that can be exposed to the hard vacuum and near absolute zero of outer space, to hard radiation, or desiccated in a desert for years and even frozen in ice and boiled in geysers and still wake up decades later and resume feeding on moss or dandruff or whatever is available and seem completely unphased.

Finally, something interesting to talk about.

Ever since I first heard about these bizarre and strangely endearing little creatures, I’ve wondered whether there was something unique about their survival abilities.  And it turns out there is.

“Stress-dependent cell stiffening by tardigrade tolerance proteins that reversibly form a filamentous network and gel”

As you know I’m no longer a big fan of tolerance.  It’s bitten me in the butt too many times over the years.  But apparently tolerance proteins are a very useful thing to have when you find yourself submerged in freezing liquid or exposed to outer space.

“Tardigrades are able to tolerate almost complete dehydration by entering a reversible ametabolic state called anhydrobiosis and resume their animation upon rehydration. Dehydrated tardigrades are exceptionally stable and withstand various physical extremes.”

…

“In the present study, we first postulated the presence of tolerance proteins that form protective condensates via phase separation in a stress-dependent manner and searched for tardigrade proteins that reversibly form condensates upon dehydration-like stress.”

…

CAHS proteins increased cell stiffness in a hyperosmotic stress-dependent manner and counteract the cell shrinkage caused by osmotic pressure, and even improved the survival against hyperosmotic stress.

…

On the basis of these results, we propose that CAHS proteins are novel cytoskeleton-like proteins that form filamentous networks and undergo gel-transition in a stress-dependent manner to provide on-demand physical stabilization of cell integrity against deformative forces during dehydration and could contribute to the exceptional physical stability in a dehydrated state.

I heard about a Chinese study that inserted genes from a tardigrade into a human cell line that gave it protection from radiation associated DNA damage.  It was posited that this would be a valuable addition to the creation of human super soldiers.  Well duh!  Anyone who has watched Captain America knows that tardigrade-style ability to tolerate the radiation from a tesseract plus the ability to be frozen for a century or so in the Arctic Ocean is very handy for a super soldier.

My takeaway from all this is that adding tardigrade tolerance proteins will allow humans to be placed in a long term reversible ametabolic state called anhydrobiosis from which they will be able to emerge after millennia in order to serve as my laborers once I emerge from long sleep in some far away galaxy.  As their emperor I will be able to call on their immunity to radiation to have them wage nuclear war against my enemies the beetle men of Krrrrlll 3,

while I attend to more important concerns like my ongoing work on thorium doped decorative ceramics (a definitive study).

ShatnerKhan III – The Anti-Climax

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In these years of decay and barbarism even ShatnerKhan is only a pallid shadow of its former glory.  All the zest has been drained away.  How can we mock Bill Shatner when the present regime makes us look back with nostalgia at a time when tawdry power mad behavior and laughably bad acting was restricted to Khan and Kirk.  Now it’s everywhere.  Joe Biden, Mitt Romney, Merrick Garland and most egregiously Volodymyr Zelenskyy.  Here we have a man whose original role as a bad comic actor has catapulted him into his present role as bagman for Joe Biden and the rest of the kleptocrats in Washington.  How can a mere ham actor and his Corinthian leather-hawking adversary compete?

Well, we’ll do our best today to celebrate the last few years of William Shatner’s already overextended time on this planet.  I’m not sure what facet of his career we will concentrate on today.  We’ve already hit all the high notes (such as they were) before.  Possibly today we will just reflect on the lessons we’ve all learned living in the wake of this tremendously opportunistic mediocrity who proved that post-World War II America truly was the land of opportunity, flowing with milk and honey for anyone with a room temperature IQ and a pulse.

Things may be a little quiet on the site today but I will check in from time to time.

But I’ll leave you with a taste of the Shatner that we all love to mock.  Here is what ShatnerKhan truly stands for.

“Bugs, Mr. Rico. Zillions of em!”

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ZMan takes the Dean of Science Fiction to task on his concept of a soldier only franchise in “Starship Troopers.”

Of course he’s rightly basing it on the book but even the highly toxic spin that the director took with the movie still made it a fun experience to watch them zap those bugs.  Hopefully some of Heinlein’s better novels and juveniles will be brought to the screen the way they deserve.

For fans (and detractors) of the book there is a lively discussion in the comments of the post.

Mercenary Rule

The Shining (1980) – A Horror Movie Review

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I recently rewatched the movie “The Shining.”  This is the Stanley Kubrick film with Jack Nicholson and Shelley Duvall in the lead roles.  I saw this movie in the theater when it came out and I am a huge fan of the Stephen King book that it is based on.  In fact, I believe the book was the best thing King ever wrote.

Kubrick is a famous director and I’m sure the deletions from the book’s plot and the changes made were necessary to bring the movie into a reasonable length.  But making these changes makes the movie a different story from the book.  And that makes the book a much richer story than the movie.

That being said, “The Shining” is a great horror movie.  Jack Nicholson was born to play Jack Torrance.  And Shelley Duvall is Wendy Torrance from head to toe.  Watching Jack descend into madness you could believe that no ghosts were necessary.  All of it could be credited to a combination of writer’s block, cabin fever and a disastrous marriage.

But the supernatural aspects of the story are blended into the psychological situation flawlessly.  You really can’t tell where one aspect ends and the other takes over.  The conversations between Jack and Wendy on the one hand and Jack and his spectral associates are so intertwined that it’s obvious that the ghosts understand Jack better than his own wife does.

The plot is telegraphed early on when Jack is interviewing for his job as winter caretaker of the Overlook Hotel.  His employer ends the interview by revealing that a few years earlier a man named Delbert Grady who had taken on the job of winter caretaker had gone mad and chopped up his wife and two young daughters with an ax and then committed suicide with a shotgun.  His boss explained that living in the Overlook during the mandatory five-month winter isolation in the remote Colorado location had been known to cause “cabin fever” for some vulnerable souls.

Later on, Jack actually meets Mr. Grady when he shows up as a waiter in the spectral party that seems to run endlessly in the Overlook’s shadow world.  When Jack finds out his friend’s name he asks, “Weren’t you the caretaker here Mr. Grady?”  Grady claims to have no memory of that.  On being further prompted by Jack about his murders and suicide and Jack insisting, “You were the caretaker here.” Grady replies, “You are the caretaker Mr. Torrance, you’ve always been the caretaker here.”

And that’s the essence of how Jack’s destruction is accomplished.  The Hotel (in the person of Grady) plays upon Jack’s sense of failure and his resentment toward his wife and son because of the humiliating employment choices he’s had to make when he yearned to be a writer.  Now the Hotel plays up his importance and the trust that the Hotel has in his competence.  When the Hotel physically attacks his son Danny, Wendy tries to convince Jack to take them back to Denver.  Jack snaps and starts raving about his responsibilities to his employers.  But instead of meaning the owners of the hotel he’s talking about the ghosts.  And from there it’s only a short step to the ax and more murder.

I suspect most people have seen this movie and know the plot.  But I’ll stop there with the plot.  It’s too much fun to give it all away.  Suffice it to say that between little Danny’s gift (the “shining” of the title), the Hotel’s desire to possess Danny and that gift and Jack and Wendy’s deeply scarred marriage this is a powerful witch’s brew of supernatural and psychological horror.  In a later review I’ll tackle the book it’s based on.  And whether you read the book first or watch the movie I’ll leave it to you to decide.  But both are excellent within their medium.

Highly recommended.

(Strong Language warning for this clip)

Abraham Lincoln – Vampire Hunter (2012) – A Science Fiction – Fantasy Movie Review

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Words utterly fail me.  I understand that about $100 million was spent on this movie.  That seems inconceivable.  I also read that it actually made a small profit.  That also seems impossible.  And finally, that I didn’t stop watching this “film” at any one of a hundred places in the 105 minutes of running time is a source of great personal shame for me.

Who thought this thing up?  Who green-lit the project?  Who are these nincompoops?

The premise is that when Abraham Lincoln was a boy his father angered a bounty hunter who went after runaway slaves.  And since the bounty hunter was a vampire, he killed Abraham’s mother.  He vows revenge and when he grows up, he meets up with a vampire hunter and trains to become one.  It turns out that the hunter is also a vampire himself but you can’t have everything.

So armed with his silver-dipped ax, Old Abe rail-splits his way through the vampire kingdom and we discover that the South is not only filled with slavers, it’s chock full of vampires too.  You know I always suspected that.  Eventually Honest Abe puts away the ax and picks up the law books and becomes a politician and the rest is history.  That is until the vampires invade his White House and kill his young son.  And then they use undead troops to try to win the war for the South by overwhelming the Union Army at Gettysburg.  So Abe decides to seize all the silver tea sets in Washington DC to provide vampire killing weaponry for the troops.  There’s an overly long fight on a train headed over a bridge that is on fire supposedly bringing weapons to Gettysburg.  It turns out to be a meaningless plot twist but it goes on forever.

But with silver clad bayonets, bullets and cannonballs the tide is turned just in time for Lincoln to read his Gettysburg Address.  Mary Todd Lincoln gets to shoot the girl vampire that killed her son.  She shoots a toy sword with a silver chain out of a rifle and the chain embeds itself into the vampire’s head.  And this symbolizes something or other.

And that’s more or less it.  Amazingly, this is even stupider than it sounds.

I don’t suppose most people would watch a movie called Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter but just in case some innocent, trusting individual might stumble onto this turkey I felt compelled to put out this warning.  If you watch this movie, you will lose brain cells.  I myself lost at least three IQ points.

So to sum up, movies of the stupid, for the stupid and by the stupid have not perished from the Earth.