Category: Science Fiction / Fantasy

Learning to Love Hopeless Gloom

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So, I wrote that review last night about “Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep.”  And afterwards, I was surprised at just how negative my review was.  I went to great lengths to stress that I thought it was a well written story.  But I couldn’t disguise how little I liked the reading experience.  I characterized the problem as being a matter of story type.  It was an extreme example of dystopia where all the characters reflected a dismal outlook and nothing happy or positive intruded on the gloom.

And that got me thinking.  Maybe my dislike of this genre was short-sighted.  Possibly I was shutting myself off from treasures that lurked around every corner.  And in agreement with that idea, I remembered how I had never been able to get myself to finish 1984.  I skimmed through it several times but always got bogged down by just how depressing and irritating I found all the characters and plot.

So apparently, I am a literary lightweight.  My guess is that I read fiction for enjoyment.  And apparently, I don’t enjoy being depressed.  That must explain why I gravitate toward action/adventure and scientific razzmatazz.  I like reading stories where things happen and even if the bad guys are winning the good guys don’t roll over and play dead.  Even better, I like it when the good guys are also the smart guys and win in the end.  But either way I want there to be someone I can empathize with.  And no one can empathize with someone whose highest aspiration is to own a sheep (living or mechanical) and have it live on the roof of his apartment building.  PKD’s world is made up of mental cases of one type or another and while you may pity some crazy people, they’re really no fun to read about.  Unless they’re somehow funny.  And these people weren’t.

Maybe that makes me shallow but that’s where I stand.  If I was writing 1984, I’d have an underground that did more than just exist as a shadow.  I’d have them organize and expand and then one day rampage through the politburo and have Big Brother’s head nailed to the highest flag pole in the capitol.  Or even if they fail, I’d have them go down fighting, not meekly cower under their beds waiting for the thought police to drag them off to the dungeon.

But I do wonder whether that puts me in the majority or the minority.  Possibly I’m in the majority among my age group but in the minority among the current cohort of readers.  So, I’m very interested in how the rest of you out there come down on this question.  Are dystopias fun or not?  And I’m talking about the real dreary, hopeless worlds.  No shreds of joy or hope.  Just misery and dysfunction as far as the eye can see.  Tell me what you think and list a few examples of the various levels of joyless horror and how you would characterize the experience.

Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep by Philip K. Dick – A Science Fiction Book Review

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I won’t give a synopsis of the plot.  If you’ve seen the movie “Blade Runner” then you have an approximate idea of the world and the action of the story.  Rick Deckard is a bounty hunter who kills androids that break free of their service as bond slaves for humanity on Mars.  He lives on an Earth where a remnant of humans remain who haven’t emigrated off-Earth.  The Earth is contaminated with radioactive fallout called “the dust’ that is slowly mutating and killing every living thing.  And many species have gone extinct and there is an almost cult-like love for animals that is expressed by owning farm animals like sheep and goats.  And the extension of this cult is something called Mercerism that expresses empathy for all living things (except androids).

Let me give my impressions of Philip K. Dick’s writing and style.  He is a very effective writer.  His characters are sparingly but clearly represented and his narrative is interesting and cleverly crafted.  He has carefully thought out many details of how this strange world works.  The interpersonal interactions between Deckard and his wife, his boss, the androids, the other people in his surroundings are all consistent and keep you immersed in the story.  He is a very talented science fiction writer.  And if this book is representative of his type of story, he is not for me.

If I would sum up this book in one word it would be “dystopia.”

Everything in this book is downbeat.  Deckard is depressed.  His wife is practically suicidal.  His boss is bleak.  The owner of the corporation that makes the androids is harried.  And finally, the androids are schizophrenic.  The only ones who seem cheerful are the tv comics meant to sedate the populace and the pet salesmen who sell overpriced animals and fake animals to the desperate remnant of Earth’s human population.

So, here’s the thing.  I think PKD is a major talent and I’m sure his reputation as a talented author is well deserved.  And I’m sure there is a large audience for his type of fiction.  Unfortunately, I’m not a part of that audience.  I’m not a hopeless dystopia kind of guy.  That doesn’t mean I need utopia.  I don’t mind crises and catastrophes.  But a story that has absolutely no one to root for just doesn’t inspire me to keep reading.  If everyone in the story is a neurotic basket case and no one can summon the will to try and overcome the awful things that are happening in the story; or if morally speaking, the “good guys” are completely indistinguishable from the “bad guys” then why the hell should I care who wins or loses?

So, yeah, this is a good book.  But it’s not for me.  I’ll probably read a few more PKD “masterpieces” to see if there’s anything for me.  If they’re all like this then I’m going to assume that the author was an extremely unhappy man and if I don’t want to end up that way myself, I should move on to greener sf pastures.

Space Fiction in the Modern Age

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With all the excitement about “Project Hail Mary” making a gazillion dollars at the box office I was thinking about how we get past the reality of the limitations on humans surviving space travel.  I mean what do we think about our interplanetary (not to mention interstellar) travelers bombarded with cosmic radiation and metabolically wasted away by microgravity?    Yikes!

First off, think of all the great old books and movies that have been rendered null and void by these realities.  Other than maybe the Moon, the old ideas of colonies are falsified by what we’ve learned.  No colonies on Mars and the Jovian moons.  No asteroid miners in the Belt.  All just flights of fantasy.  What’s an American boy from the baby boom to do?

Well, I guess the thing to remember is that one age’s wild guess is eventually replaced by a later age’s measured recalculation.  Jules Verne had men travel around the Moon by being shot out of a cannon.  Of course, when someone from the twentieth century crunched the numbers, they probably figured out that a cannon that could send a projectile around the Moon would reduce the occupants to a puddle of goo by virtue of the acceleration needed to reach escape velocity in just the few seconds that the “bullet” was inside the barrel of the “gun.”  And yet these twentieth century engineers didn’t just throw their hands in the air and say “Impossible.”  They invented chemical rockets.

And maybe that’s what will happen with space flight.  Even in “2001: A Space Odyssey,” Frank and Dave have a rotating ring with pseudo-gravity.  Maybe a practical way to protect humans from radiation will also be perfected.

Or maybe the science fiction of the future will involve robot missions to the planets and stars but with some kind of instantaneous communication to allow humans to experience the sights and sounds of the robotic mission as if in the first person.  Or maybe they’ll fall back on good old “psionics” to allow humans to explore space-time without leaving the confines of Mother Earth.

Or maybe we go back to the suspended animation idea.  And we add to that a nice heavy duty radiation shield around the cryo-unit.  We can have a robotic autopilot and only thaw the humans at the destination.

Or how about intelligent robots whose memories can then be downloaded for humans to view or even “experience” as transferrable memories.  Or maybe we can build a wormhole in high orbit around Earth and pop out close to other planets or even exo-planets.

And none of these things have to be proven science.  They just have to be figments of our imagination that give us the framework for a story or a future that entertain us.  In a decade or a century what we know to be impossible will change again.  And so will what we find to be possible.  We are very clever monkeys and what is impossible today becomes possible in a different way tomorrow.  There’s no reason to give up our stories or our dreams.

Some Thoughts about Philip K Dick

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I was listening to an interview that Philip K Dick (PKD) made back in May 1979.  Now I’ve never read any of his stories.  Of course, I’ve seen Blade Runner and I have heard him described as one of the best science fiction writers of all time so I’ve always meant to get ahold of a few of his books and read them but between work and wife and kids and life I’ve just never had a chance.

So, when I saw this YouTube audio-file I listened to it.  It’s two hours long and some of it is kind of hard to believe.  But it is extremely interesting.  I would say PKD was a very intelligent man but I’m pretty sure his grasp on reality was extremely tenuous on certain subjects.  He believed that at one point he was possessed by some kind of spirit or intelligence that controlled him and fixed a lot of his financial and even health problems.  And listening to him describe this chapter in his life it’s hard not to assume that either he was dealing with some kind of split personality or he was suffering from schizophrenia.

Now based on what I’ve read about PKD’s fiction he was intrigued with the idea that reality wasn’t what we think it is.  That different people experienced radically different perceptions of reality and maybe none of these perceptions were particularly accurate.  And so, with this type of belief I could see how he might accept versions of reality that most people would find absurd.

Now, in the audio-recording he is asked by the interviewer about his use of drugs and their impact on his mind and writing.  PKD goes to great lengths to deny that he used LSD more than once.  He claimed that the drug he abused was an amphetamine that he used to be able to produce prodigious amounts of fiction writing.  The implication was that his drug use did not affect his writing by altering his mind.  And maybe this was true.  But listening to this man I got the distinct impression that even if LSD wasn’t the source of his delusions, that he was indeed substantially untethered from reality in a lot of his beliefs about the world around him.  In short, I think he was in some sense insane.

So, how does this jibe with his undeniable creative talent?  I think that both these things can be true at the same time.  Look at Vincent van Gogh.  He was undeniably a creative genius in his field of art but he was also a tortured madman who finally killed himself to escape his mental anguish.  So, whether PKD was driven insane by his drug use (of whatever substances) or whether his mind was damaged for whatever other reasons there might have been, his grasp on reality (or lack thereof) did not stop him from producing very entertaining science fiction.  And perhaps it was his delusions that actually made his stories so interesting.  Strange man.  Well, I’ll start with “Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?” and see how I like it.  Maybe I’ll read some more.

How Do You Get to Carnegie Hall from Here – Practice, Practice.

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Dystopias seem to be the dominant science fiction type in the last decade or two.  And the dopiness of the ones ending up on the large and small screens doesn’t encourage much hope in the genera.  We have the ever popular “Handmaid’s Tale” that bangs away at the female victim of the evil patriarchy trope.  And then there’s the “Hunger Games” which I suppose reflects the idea that somehow resources on Earth are about to collapse and a zero-sum game will emerge where we all will be fighting for our lives to get a loaf of bread.  Wow!  Who knew science fiction could be so much fun?

I’ve recently heard that horror is becoming a big genre with young men (apparently written stories and video and also video games).  But that doesn’t alarm me.  I think this is wrapped up with the popularity of video games and I think that is more a matter of the desire to work through puzzles and shoot monsters with guns (which is always a good thing!).

I have a theory that the current science fiction publishing model will not endure much longer.  I don’t think they can make enough money from selling romantasy porn and feminist dystopia much longer.  Of course, it’s possible that AI writing will completely destabilize all fiction writing.  In that case the whole thing becomes academic.  That would leave us just downloading AI slop at virtually no cost.  But either way the world will be changing to resemble nothing like what we old-timers remember from the before time when books were an industry and grammatical sentences actually existed.

Of course, this is a hell of a time for me to become an author.  But in a sense, it may be the best time for me to write.  The barrier to getting published doesn’t exist.  The only barrier is figuring out a way to let the reading public know my book exists and what it’s about.  But that’s far from a trivial problem.  Key words and algorithmic search engines and Amazon ad management are complicated and confusing topics and I’ll confess that I know next to nothing about any of that.  But I’m slowly picking up some practical and painful experience.

For instance, so far today my Amazon ads have 23,417 impressions.  I believe that means, that number of people had the chance to see my ad on the search pages they viewed on Amazon.  Out of those thousands, only 16 people clicked on my ad.  Out of those 16 people only two bought my book (e-book version).  And that was with the e-book discounted to $0.99.  So, there was $1.98 worth of sales.  Of which I only get 30% (~$0.59).  Now currently the cost per click is $1.71.  Which means so far today I’ve been charged 16 X $1.71 = $27.36!

Obviously, this isn’t the way to become rich through writing.  But it is a very educational exercise to understand how the current self-publishing model leaves quite a bit to be desired.  But I still have few more ideas to try before giving up on my dream of becoming the next great science fiction author.  Excelsior!

Guest Contributor – Tregonsee – 12MAY2026 – Good Stories for the Movies

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Interesting thought what would make good Sci-fi/Fantasy Movies. Previously much of sci-fi and fantasy was off limits as the settings (and other races) were unachievable at any price. Movies like the Avengers pictures, Project Hail Mary, Lord of the Rings and the recent Dune show that the capability is there (although at a steep price in some cases.
Some I can think of are:

Lensman series: Start with Galactic Patrol, tweak SOME of the characters (e.g. make C. MacDougall a full blown doctor instead of a nurse). The No Female Lensman will be a hard sell (with one exception) but I think it has to stay. At one point J Michael Straczynski of Babylon 5 fame was looking at this in the early 2010’s but I think the rights expired

Zelanzy’s Amber Series. Nine Princes in Amber starts as a noir pulp mystery and then goes weird. Casting will be hard, the initial movie shouldn’t be too hard/expensive, though, as we move through things, the movie cost goes up. Do it right, and it will be no problem

Heinlein The Moon is A Harsh Mistress, No aliens, mostly indoor shooting, a rogue AI this actually might be a cheap one and done right would be a stunner.

Connie Willis To Say Nothing of the Dog . Again mostly indoor shoots and outdoor in some equivalent to the River Thames River C. 1890. Get all the Victorian costumes from the BBC for a few pence. A comedy, a time travel story, a mystery, rescuing an extinct species, and some romances rolled all into one. It’d make a great date movie. Again, I think casting will be critical, people are going to have to really sell their roles and the number of modern actors who do that well are limited.

Matt Dinniman Dungeon Crawler Carl series: I just ran into this. It is a riot about how Earth and its populace get turned into a reality show of a dungeon. all the fantasy animals will be a bear and having a magically enhanced Persian cat as a main character may present issues, but again, limited sets, and this will draw the male/gamer audience back to the theater (and their Dates may just enjoy themselves in the process)

Any other thoughts on these (or others)?

More Movie Talk

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So, I had some fun re-imagining “THEM!” as a 2026 sci-fi reboot.  Alright what’s next?  Well, John Carpenter beat me to the punch with “The Thing.”  That was a reboot that in many people’s minds outdid the original (“The Thing from Another World”).  But a whole bunch of classic sci-fi movies have already been redone (The Day the Earth Stood Still, Invasion of the Body Snatchers, Invaders from Mars, War of the Worlds).  So maybe we don’t need another reboot.

As I said in my discussion of Weir’s “Project Hail Mary,” what we really need are new movies.  Sure, they’re mostly just variations on the million science fiction stories that are already written but even small differences can freshen up old ideas.  Instead of any more trash from the Star Wars industry why not give us some pulp?  Burroughs or Doc Smith or Howard.  Those stories were made to be put on the big screen (or the smaller one in my living room).  And I read where they’re working on bringing back Schwarzenegger as an older Conan.  That would be perfect.  A beat-up old Arnold playing a beat-up old Conan with the right writer and the right director could be the perfect swan song for him and a wonderful treat for us if they abandon all the woke crap and let Conan be the barbarian he’s meant to be.

And if we digress into fantasy, I wish they’d try again to make a movie or a series out of the Dresden Files.  Jim Butcher’s series of books are some of the most entertaining and filmable stories in urban fantasy.  Of course, I wish they’d start by doing justice to Larry Correia’s Monster Hunter series first.  With the combination of interesting characters, vivid monsters and high caliber weaponry they would make a very exciting series of movies.  But I suppose instead we’ll get more nonsense like “The Rings of Power.”

But of course, what’s really needed by both the larger movie audience and the film-makers’ bottom line is a cable series based on Jake Barter’s “The Sniper.”  The combination of economically but vividly drawn characters and remarkable plotting make this story the most cinematically perfect vehicle for a studio to reap the harvest of multi-billion-dollar profits.  Joseph Boghadair is an iconic figure and the many fascinating sub-plots and characters will spawn a whole series of sequels and spin-offs that will explore the multi-faceted world that the author is creating.  New technologies and industries are waiting for Paul Connors’ empire to recover from the ravages of war and reap the benefits of the new political situation that Bogey’s “war” has created.  And the political changes that will sweep across North America will change life on the whole planet as better ways for humans to cooperate and socialize and organize themselves politically emerge.

I am toying with the idea of including some short stories in this “world” I’ve built and putting those out next as a short-term addition to the saga.  That will allow me to push off in several directions at once before I commit to any one story for the next novel.  Well, that’s enough for now.

Giant Ant Suspension of Disbelief

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War Pig mentioned the rumor that there is a studio remaking “THEM!.”  My reaction is an unqualified, Yeah!  But I immediately thought to myself, “Hey wait a minute.  This isn’t 1954, it’s 2026!  What about the illogic of an insect fifteen feet long weighing thousands of pounds, breathing by passive diffusion of oxygen through spiracles?  And how about the other unscalable aspects of its anatomy and physiology like weight and strength of exoskeleton vs. the thick bones found in large land animals like rhinos and elephants.”

Sure, I’m being a spoil sport.  If we want giant ants living in the sewers of Los Angles we should get them.  And look how timely it would be.  Imagine a nighttime forage of giant ants finding it’s way to a homeless encampment just by smell alone.  Now, there is the danger that this could be considered cruelty to animals.  And most homeless could be considered poisoned bait.  After all, if an ant ate one of these denizens of the City of Angels might it not die from a fentanyl overdose?  I mean, that’s not really fair, is it?  The ant is just doing what millions of years of evolution (plus a century of radioactive fallout) has taught him.  It’s not his fault that Mayor Bass and Governor Newsom have put these temptations in his way.  To him they’re just appetizers.

So, maybe there should be some hand-waving and exposition to provide an infodump to explain how rapid evolution adapted the giant ants so that they now have an internal skeleton and an efficient circulatory system but somehow have preserved the external appearance of an ant.  And here’s where AI can come in handy.  In order to have the necessary gravitas to sell the audience on this cockamamie science of giant ant biology we will need Santa Claus.  We will need an electronic avatar of Edmund Gwenn to play Dr. Harold Medford.  He alone can walk us through super 8 film clips of ants.  However, we can recast the part of Dr. Patricia Medford.  For this part I would recommend Sydney Sweeney as she possesses unique personal assets which will not lend her scientific gravitas but which will boost the movie’s financial bottom line significantly.

All in all, I think a remake of ‘Them!” could be an enormous hit.  I think to make it more topical; it would make sense to recruit Donald Trump to play himself as the President who employs all the massive resources of the US military to combat these deadly and terrifying creatures.  Perhaps we can shift the anti-nuclear message of the movie if we show how nuclear weapons can be used for good.  Perhaps the outbreak in Los Angeles proves too far advanced and a decision must be made by Trump to nuke LA.  It can be stressed that almost all of the human population escapes (maybe only Bass and Newsom are being held hostage by the ants).  And so nuclear weapons become not only the cause of the problem but also the solution!  Then we can have Santa Claus and the hot chick give that speech where they talk about opening a door into a new world where anything is possible, even giant crickets in the inevitable sequel.

Rebooting Heinlein’s Starship Troopers

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I was watching a video where it discussed sci-fi movies that were going to have a sequel or reboot made soon.  And one of those movies was Starship Troopers.  Now the video spun the fact that the original 1997 motion picture lost money as a case of mistaken identity.  If you saw that movie you know that the director wasn’t faithful to the spirit of Heinlein’s book.  In fact, he used the movie to satirize the Heinlein plot as a story of fascism gone wild.  Paul Verhoeven used all the avenues available to him to paint the government in Heinlein’s novel as basically a nazi-like regime.  He even dressed the military officers in what looked like nazi uniforms.

And according to the narrator of the video the movie failed because audiences mistook the satire Verhoeven produced for actual approval of fascism.  Now I tend to believe that the movie failed because fans of Heinlein’s book read reviews that told them that the movie was a criticism of Heinlein’s story and not an honest presentation of the themes of the novel and stayed home.  This would seem to be a more reasonable explanation for such a popular book failing to attract its audience to the movie.

Now, the video debated whether the director who is supposedly making the new movie would copy Verhoeven’s lead and make the new movie a satire or would instead follow the book’s interpretation of the story.  I guess the guy making this video is hoping for a satire that clearly explains ahead of time that it is mocking Heinlein’s story.  This seems a wildly absurd idea.  If the original satire lost many millions of dollars, who would think it was a safe bet to try the same strategy again and expect a different result?

Now I can’t claim to know whether thirty years later there still exists a large enough audience of Heinlein fans to make a faithful screen adaptation of Starship Troopers a big success.  His original fans have aged pretty radically.  And the later generations are hardly the kind of people who would espouse a world view that requires military service as a perquisite for the right to vote.  So, I wouldn’t see any reboot of Starship Troopers as a guaranteed box office success.

But by the same token if it was made with state-of-the-art special effects and gave us an exciting glimpse of what interstellar warfare might look like, I wouldn’t be shocked if it was extremely popular.  There have been several very popular science fiction war movies in the last ten years and the special effects were very good in some of them and made the movies spectacular to watch.  If you take that technical capability and add a sympathetic hero and his journey through the military experience, I could see young and old viewers enjoying it.

Honestly, I’m not even sure this reboot is going to be made.  Hollywood has lost a lot of money in the last five years and I’m sure they’re getting nervous about big budget science fiction movies.  But I guess I’m secretly hoping someone will do Starship Troopers right, the way Heinlein wrote it.  Fingers crossed.

Movies, Taxes and World-Building

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Well, what’s to say today?  I was talking to some family and we were discussing this and that and I said that I wanted to see “Project Hail Mary.”  And some knew about it and some had heard a little bit.  Well, I think I talked them into getting together and going to see it.  Now I plan to see it this week with Camera Girl.  She’s not the biggest sff fan by any stretch of the imagination.  When I brough her to see the original Star Wars film she was not particularly impressed.  And come to think of it, she’s never been impressed by any sci fi or fantasy movie (or book) I ever gave her.  Well, I take that back.  She read “The Hobbit” back in 1975 and liked it.  But that was it.  When I told her to read the “Lord of the Rings,” she laughed in my face.  So, she may not be the most willing audience for this movie.  But since one of the characters is a puppet I’m guessing there may be an appeal there to her love of animals.  So, I’m going to see the same movie in the theater twice?  I think this may be the first time I’ve ever done that.  Well, I’m sure it won’t kill me.

The other thing I’m doing next week is go see an accountant about how to pay my taxes on the royalties from my book.  I have an inordinate fear of the Infernal Revenue Service.  I think they’re a malevolent force causing pain and suffering for ordinary people at every turn.  So, I’m going to find out what the process is for this kind of capital gain.  I don’t think I have to pay quarterly but you never know so I’m not taking any chances.  Also, I think there is a way to write off expenses like advertising and marketing so if I can find out whether it’s worth it I may even break even on this whole experiment (maybe!!!).

A friend was asking me about the sequel to the “The Sniper.”  He had particular questions about the back story for some of the characters like Connors and Cutter.  I said I’d love to tell him some of the details of their back stories but I still haven’t made them up yet.  I think he was a little shocked that these important facts didn’t actually exist yet.  Maybe even betrayed for investing in a story that was sort of a Potemkin Village.  But I feel justified in pushing out the corners of my little universe as the spirit moves me.  Although I will admit I’ve decided to do some outlining of the world, at least from a 35,000-foot height.  I need to decide what stories will grow out of the eucatastrophe I set off in the first book.  I mean, you don’t sink the White House, Capitol and Pentagon into the Earth’s crust without taking advantage of the elbow room that provides for political and social upheaval on a grand scale.