Loscon 43 Day 2

Day 2, Saturday, was my very busy day at the convention. Now to be honest the day did not start off well. The first panel I attended, the subject being why are manuscripts dead on arrival, was one that presented very little information that I did not already know and my alternate panel had been canceled, but those are the risk of a convention.

The next block featured a panel in which I was a participant, the subject being Redshirts, body counts and drama stakes in story telling. The panelists were all lively and informed, our discussion ranged far and I think went to very interesting places.

After that I took in a panel on stealing from history, Shakespeare, and other sources. Any panel featuring both Harry Turtledove and Tim Powers is neatly always worth attending.

The rest of the afternoon was taken up with science presentations on the Dawn Mission, a read and critique workshop that I facilitated, and a bit to eat rather late in the evening.

My final event was panel that I had suggested to the programming chair, discussing Roddenberry’s failed pilots of the 1970s.. I had envisioned this taking place during normal con hours with a panel of 4 or 5. Instead it was scheduled for 9pm, and while the programmers had slotted two panelists, I was the only one that turned up.

An audience however did attend and so the show had to go on. Luckily the audience was willing to roll with just me up there and in the end I think we had a lot of fun talking about the pilots, the filmmaking of the era, and Roddenberry’s career before Star Trek.

With the last panel completed I spent the remaining hours, until well after midnight, in a lively hallways discussion with friends old and new.

A truly good end to a good day.

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Loscon 43 Day 1

Things went fairly well for me on Friday. Now my day-job requires that I work ‘Black Friday’ as this is also the time of the year when Medicare complete applications arrive in a flood. However I was able to shift my work schedule so I started early and completed by shift at 3:00, then my sweetie-wife and I drove quickly from San Diego to Los Angeles and I arrived just twenty minute before my first scheduled panel.

The panel discussed Science, Fiction, and Politics. Despite the explosive potential the room remained civil and instead on rancor we had plenty of reasoned statements. I sat next to Harry Turtledove and managed to not make a fool of myself.

The evening was hanging out with friends, Ice Scream social, dinner with my sweetie-wife, and open room parties. I even managed to squeeze in about 40 minutes of editing on a new short story. All in all the day was good and ended well.

Now I head into day two and this time I have thee panels or workshops that I will be participating in.

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LosCon 43 this weekend

Thanksgiving weekend if when I head to Los Angeles for LosCon, an L.A. area Science-Fiction Convention. I have been attending for nearly twenty years and though my job now makes me miss most of Friday it is still one of my favorite conventions.

This year I will be on a few panels and here is where you can find me if you are going to the conventions.

FRIDAY

5:30 Science, Fiction, and Politics – St louis Room

SATURDAY

11:30am Redshirts and Body Counts – Atlanta Room

5:30 pm Rogue Read and Critque – St. Lous Room

9:00 pm Roddenbery’s Forgotten Dreams – St Louis Room

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Movie Review: Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them 2016

Happy Thanksgiving to everyone in the USA who celebrates this holiday and happy Thursday to everyone else. This morning my sweetie-wife and I went to an early morning screening of the latest film set in the Harry Potter universe, Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them. I am thankful that I did not hold high expectations for this film for it would not have met them.

1-fantastic_beasts_and_where_to_find_them_posterThis is not a bad movie, but nor it is a good one, it is at best middling and a mildly entertaining bit of spectacle. The problems with the film rest primarily with J.K. Rowling who is credited with the script and is a producer as well. The story has a fairly inconsistent tone veering from whimsical fun with silly magical beasts to dark conflicts endangering countless people. it takes a very deft hand to combine such disparate tones and Rowling fails in that task. As I said to my sweetie-wife on the drive home from the theater, ‘Whimsy and the threat of genocide do not belong together.’

This movie also takes quite a bit of time to get going. Oh, events happen right from the start, it doesn’t engage in the mistake of heavy exposition for a beginning, but the actual start of the plot is quite delayed and as such I found myself wondering just why I was watching. The twine plots, whimsical and serious, eventually meld but that unification takes place far too late and without much in the way of emotional stakes for the characters.

And that is the film greatest failing, the lack of deep emotional stakes in the climax. This is a move with lots of plot but very little story. There are hints and set-ups for possible future stories, but I really wanted more than what was delivered on the screen. All the fast paced action and dazzling special effects are hollow without a powerful emotional connection.

For me the film failed though not as badly as other major productions, but still it failed.

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Interstellar vs The Martian

In recent years we’ve had the good luck to see a number of high quality hard SF films released across the country; today I want to talk about two of them and why I like one over the other.

1-interstellarInterstellar is from Christopher Nolan the brilliant filmmaker behind movies such as Memento, The Batman Trilogy, and Inception. Billed as a hard SF story Interstellar depicts a dying Earth where blights are devastating crops around the world and humanity is struggling to grow enough food. The official stance of the U.S. government is that the moon landings were forged to force the USSR to bankrupt itself in a useless space race. Now with the world on the brink of collapse a last ditch effort to find a new home is underway thanks to a wormhole opened by friendly, off screen, aliens. Our characters are part of an expedition through the wormhole and encounter the bizarre and counter-intuitive effects of highly warped space/time. There are betrayals by people who have lost all hope but in the end, and with an expression of the twins paradox displayed for the audience, humanity is saved.

1-martian-9The Martian is from Ridley Scott and is a much more restricted in scope, dealing one man stranded on mars, alone and without the supplies required to stay alive until rescue can arrive. The story follows our hero as his brilliantly solves one problem after another and with his crew mates and people on Earth who devote tremendous resources, skill, and personal risk to save him. It is a man vs nature tale that focuses on a single man but also shows humanity as a whole fighting against an uncaring universe to save a single life.

Now both films have flaws in the science. The Martian storm that strands our astronaut simply can’t exist and that was a known fact my the novelist who penned the original book and the people who adapted it. In Interstellar the smaller craft used to go between their main ship and the surface of the various planets they explore flies by PFM, pure flippin’ magic. In neither case do I really fault the films for the scientific failures, you always have to give something and grading movies on a curve these examples are tiny error.

I do favor The Martian over Interstellar because the story is so free of unrequired cynicism. I do not object to a cynical take or tone in a story. I love noir and that genre requires a cynical worldview, but not all stories benefit from a heavy dose of the cynical. I look at Interstellar, particularly with its ‘love conquers all; subtext and find that the cynicism is at odds with the rest of the film. It is tonally uneven and discordant, where The Martian never breaks from the tone it aims for. It is always a story about fighting for survival and the common humanity in such struggles.

SF can be cynical, 1984 and the movie Blade Runner are both examples of fine SF stories that have and require a cynical heartbeat, Interstellar did not need it and its inclusion damaged the movie execution.

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Roddenberry’s Forgotten Dreams

If someone knows the name Gene Roddenberry it is almost certainly due to the 60’s television series Star Trek and it’s sequel series Star Trek: The Next Generation. During the 1970s Roddenberry attempted to launch a few other series before Paramount green-lit a Star Trek film and the whole cascade that followed in the wake of the titanic success of Star Wars. At my suggestion Loscon43 this year has a panel discussion, which I will be participating in, on these failed pilots.

In order the prep for the convention panel I have tried to hunt down the pilots and re-watch all of them. I succeeded in all of them except The Questor Tapes. If you are in Los Angeles do consider coming to the convention this weekend, but if you can’t make it here are some of my brief thoughts about these pilots.

Genesis II: NASA scientist Dylan Hunt is undergoing an experimental suspended animation technique when an unexpected rock-fall collapses the cavern where the experiment takes place and Dylan isn’t revived until well into the 22 century. The Earth is fragmented with some locales in post-apocalyptic barbarism while other areas have retained advanced technologies. Dylan ends up recruited by a group called Pax who are dedicated to rebuilding humanity but this time without its warlike nature. The pilot is dreadfully dull with most of the scenes tiresome exposition as everyone explains things to the poor Dylan and the audience. The most action packed parts of the pilot, Dylan rigging a nuclear device to foil evil-minded mutants, takes place off screen.

Planet Earth: Same set up as Genesis II, again our main hero is Dylan Hunt, a scientist from the 20th century who due to a suspended animation accident is transport to a post-apocalyptic Earth and works with a group called Pax rebuilding society. This pilot skips the origin story and drops us into an adventure as Dylan and a science team are forced to infiltrate a society where women enslave men in hope of finding a missing doctor needed to save the life of a leader of Pax. This pilot worked better, a lot less exposition but the dialog is stilted and the moralizing is heavy-handed.

The Questor Tapes: An eccentric scientist that few have ever met tricks the government into building an android. When the officials try to decipher the robot’s programming they damage the files. The android, Questor, awakens and escapes. The damaged programming has left him without emotions or knowing his purpose. With the help of a human friend, he tracks down his mysterious creator and learns that humanity has been guided through the centuries by androids keeping mankind for destroying itself. His creator is an android but is damaged and was unable to create his replacement, Questor. Questor is supposed to be the last in the line and if humanity survives Questor’s lifespan it will have matured.

I have memories of this pilot but I have not seen in it decades. Of course the moment Data was introduced in 1988 during the pilot for Star Trek: The Next Generation I felt very strongly he was Questor 2.0.

Spectre: The only non-SF pilot Roddenberry produced after Star Trek. Will Sebastian and his physician friend Dr ‘Ham’ Hailton are the occult’s answer to Holmes and Watson. Sebastian and Ham travel to London investigating an English Lord who is either a hedonist or a Satanist. Of Roddenberry’s post Star Trek pilots I liked this one the best, but when the credits flashed I noticed that on the screenplay he shared credit with Samuel A Peeples so it is clear he worked better with a partner than writing alone.

It should be fun discussing these project on the panel at the convention.

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Movie Review: Arrival 2016

Friday night after me sweetie-wife and friends finished our evening of board and card game I took the opportunity to visit a movie theater in y area and catch the new SF film Arrival before this weekend science-fiction convention, LosCon.

The theater is one I have been to a few time but generally is on the ‘do not go’ list because it had older and uncomfortable seating, but I had been told that the auditorium were now renovated with big recliners.

I arrived and true enough the seats were large, well stuffed, and quite comfortable. However the A/C had been set too high and I was quite cold foe the first third of the movie. I hope that is not indicative of their usual settings as this chain has the best prices and could well win my patronage.

1-arrival_ver11Arrival, based on Ted Chiang’s novella Story of Your Life, is a first contact tale with the emphasis on contact. A dozen alien vessels appear at locations around the world. No one can make out any pattern to the ‘landing’ sites and the aliens unannounced arrival is a mystery. The protagonist of the story Dr Louise Banks, played quite well by Amy Adams, a linguist the United States bring into the project with hope of forging a common means of communication with aliens.

The film is a steady, measured story about that trouble, learning to communicate with something that doesn’t think or perceive in the same manner as you. There is not ‘we learned your language from your broadcasts’ short cuts and the film covers a period of months as we struggle to understand. Jeremy Renner plays Ian Donnelly a physicist and co-equal to Dr Banks in the communications project which for the United States is being commanded by Col. Weber player by the always spot on Forrest Whitaker.

There are the usual tensions between civilian and military mindsets, but the script avoid clichés for the most part. The film is not an action movie in SF drag. This is a film about ideas and the deeper implications of contact. It is difficult to fully discuss this movie without venturing seriously into spoiler space. It is at heart a mystery and how much you like the film will depend on how well that mystery’s resolution work for you.

It worked for me and I thoroughly enjoyed the movie, but your mileage may vary.

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LosCon Next Weekend

Next weekend is Thanksgiving Weekend here in the United States and for me that mean the Los Angeles Area Science Fiction Convention, otherwise known as LosCon. I think I may have attended every LosCon from 1997 until now. It is one of my favorite conventions.

My very first turn at being on a panel and not simply in the audience was at a Loscon when I was drafted for an on the spot Firefly panel. (That was a blast.)

Now for the last several years I have been a panelist for local San Diego Conventions Condor and Conjecture. This year I will be on several panels for Loscon as well.

I do not yet have the rooms, date, or times for these panels but here is where you can find me at LosCon

 

Redshirts and Bodycount

Description: Star Trek, with its many generations and recent reboot, gives us the opportunity to consider the way stakes and violence have been portrayed in media from the 60s until today. Is it possible to have high stakes without violence? Is the threat of death always necessary? How does an exceptionally nonviolent movie like Star Trek IV hold up today? Is sanitized violence in fact more offensive than ‘honest’ violence? And is there actually any reason to strive for nonviolence, if the audience is enjoying it?

 

Science, Fiction, and Politics: Shaping Reality

Description: Come join our panel of people working in science and science fiction for a discussion of how science, and science fiction affects politics – and vice versa.

 

The Politics and Socioeconomics of Space Exploration

Description: How do politics, economics, culture, and space exploration affect each other?

 

Roddenberry’s Forgotten Dreams

Description: From the TOS episode “Assignment: Earth” until Star Trek: The Motion Picture Gene Roddenberry attempted to launch a number of SF television programs that never progressed beyond an aired pilot. Join us as our panel discusses the shows that might have been

 

In addition to the panel discussions I will also be leading a critiquing session either Friday or Saturday evening.

 

Rogue Read & Critique

Description: Bring 1200-1500 words of a work in progress. In a supportive environment we’ll listen and give feedback.

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Wish Me Luck

This weekend, instead of working half a day on Saturday, I will host the lunch for the local beta readers. (To those of you dispersed across the country I wish you could be here and you have my deepest thanks.)

The Beta Reader Lunch is a tradition of mine going back to the first novel I completed as an adult. (We shall not speak of the novel written in high school.) It’s my way of giving a little back to the people who endured the rough first draft of my novel.

The outcome of these feedback sessions has been highly variable. Sometimes massive restructuring and rewriting happens. Like splitting one book into two or dropping three chapters of meetings. Sometimes there are very small changes, just a point of clarification here and there. And sometimes a book does not survive the beta read process. After the feedback I declare the manuscript dead and file it away as an experiment that failed.

What will be the outcome Saturday? I haven’t a clue. One of the books that died during a luncheon was one that as I wrote I adored ad thought it was one of my best. That’s the point of the beta readers, an observation with some distance, the writer is too damned close.

This is also why all the readers, those at the lunch and those who can only submit responses to my surveys are so vital to the process.

If you did a test read of Phaeton’s Phoenix; thank you.

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Just a Few Words

I had thought that I might speak a little on the election, now that a week has gone by but I find the subject too painful. The election of our first carnival barker president – and that’s gravely close to insulting carnival barkers – is a low point for the Republic. However I also believe that the Republic will survive and that the long arc of history still bends towards justice, even if we have to fight backsliding from time to time.

It will be okay, but only if we fight to make it okay.

So there a few words on the election’s outcome. I wish I had more to say but today has been a rather difficult day.

I awoke at 2;30 am, my sinuses over-pressurized and a migraine exploding behind my eye. The slight motion of the head set of waves of agony and needless to say I did not go to work.

I am feeling somewhat better. The migraine and sinus meds are doing their thing and I believe I will return to work tomorrow.

So there you have it. I have nothing much to say, I remain slightly depressed only now I have added pain to the experience.

 

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