Category Archives: SF

Is it the Struggle That Compels Us?

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Recently I have watched the Twitter discourse rise up over the character of Syril Karn from the series Andor with a number of people debating if the show had been disrespectful of the character prompting strong feelings about the man.

Running alongside this discussion is the memory I have of a number of YouTube reactors being quite emotionally torn by both Syril and Dedra Meero, the Imperial Security Bureau (ISB) sector supervisor, as they navigate both enforcing the Empire’s authoritarian government and their own interesting romantic relationship. These were the bad guys, Dedra more clearly than Syril as she employed torture to get what she wanted while Syril remained essentially naive to the Imperial law and order that he strove to maintain. Pluck Syril out of Star Wars and insert his character in 70s New York desperate to catch the killers of two dirty cops and you have a classic anti-hero trapped in a corrupt and decaying culture even as he fights to maintain a ‘true’ sense of justice.

But he isn’t a 70s anti-hero. He is a cog in the fascist machine that is the evil Galactic Empire, and yet there is a pull to root for him as he tries ever so hard to clear his name and bring the hero of the story to ‘justice.’ Dedra is an equally compelling character. Her villainy is more evident, particularly her willingness to not only torture suspects but her disregard for their murder once their usefulness has passed. Yet, here we are again, feeling the pull to care about her. What is going on here?

Let’s look at some other characters from cinema and see if we can’t gain a better understanding in a manner that is more general.

Pulp Fiction gave us Vincent Vega, the street-level thug and murderer working for L.A. crime boss Marsellus Wallace. Our introduction to Vincent was his task of retrieving a briefcase for his boss and calmly murdering the boss’s former partners in the process. Vincent is a violent thug and drug user and yet over the course of his story within the film we are drawn to him and concerned as he falls deeper and deeper into trouble that may end with Marsellus Wallace having him killed as mercilessly as Vincent killed Wallace’s former partners.

Nightcrawler (2014), a neo-noir from Dan Gilroy, who also wrote on Andor, introduced the audience to Louis Bloom, a sociopathic man who rises from street-level thief to celebrated ‘journalist’ as he discovers his talent for finding and creating tragedies he can videotape and sell to local television news. Unlike the other characters mentioned here, I have heard of no one that held any sympathy for Louis, but while the audience kept him at an emotional distance, he remained an object of fascination and of deep interest even as he got his partner killed, murdered his rivals, and blackmailed a woman to satisfy his sexual urges. No one showed sympathy for such a cold, manipulative man, but he remained deeply interesting. Why?

There is a common thread running through all of these characters, criminals, cops, thugs, and bureaucrats; all of them have goals and all of them are fighting against forces that are keeping them from their objectives.

Syril wants justice and the killer of his men caught and punished, but a corrupt system would rather have good reports than truth.

Dedra, a novice ISB Supervisor, wants victory and enforcement of the Empire’s authority, but office infighting and backstabbing stymie her attempts to break a system that rewards staying within the line over creative imagination.

Vincent needs to show his boss’s wife a decent evening out, to make her happy, but their unmistakable chemistry and sensuality provide a temptation that is nearly irresistible to the couple and once she overdoses on his drugs, well then he has to save her life to save his own.

Louis desperately needs to prove to himself and the world that he is worthy, to find that success he is certain that he deserves as rivals and the police forces move in on him from every quarter, threatening to thwart his actions.

There is the key to why the characters are compelling. Each of them is facing off against forces larger than themselves and that struggle to overcome, to win, is that magic sauce that makes us sit forward and care.

Twenty years ago while at a Bay area SF convention and before the events of a convention had started, I caught a fragment of a World War II training video on television. An air crew of a fictional bomber had been captured by the Nazis. In captivity the Germans employed trick after trick, device after device to pry from the airmen the secrets that they kept in their heads. By the end of the video, I found myself on the side of the Germans, anxious to see if they were going to manage to get the information that they so desperately needed. This was a training film to teach our forces all of the many ways that the information might be gained, and yet there I was feeling for the enemy and not our boys.

The Germans were the characters with a clear, active goal. The airmen’s goal was a passive one, keep quiet and say nothing. It is the active character, fighting against the odds to claim some prize that hooks us as an audience and as readers. That is the lesson from the training film and all those movies, your characters need a goal and the odds against them getting it must be great. Syril and Dedra are both fighting to make something of their lives, to prove something to themselves and the doubters who surround them and that is why they become characters we can’t tear our attention away from.

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The Griffin Incident is not Science Fiction

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Star Trek: Strange New Worlds boldly left the confines of its genre of science fiction with the third episode of its fourth season, The Griffin Incident. While some have used the episode’s horror genre as a source of criticism, I instead want to praise the production for slipping free of constraints and having the courage to explore fascinating new realms for its characters.

Paramount+

The Griffin Incident has been, correctly, described as Star Trek meets Event Horizon, the 1997 horror movie that takes place aboard a haunted and terrifying derelict at the outer regions of the solar system. In the Star Trek episode, three characters, Spock, Jim Kirk, and La’An, discover the wreck of a lost Federation starship, the Griffin, and after becoming trapped aboard are visited, much like the characters from Event Horizon, by terrible specters and visions exploiting their unresolved emotional issues. In terms of graphic violence and explicit horror, particularly for television that is not produced for a premium channel, The Griffin Incident pulls no punches and is a quite satisfying bit of horror media, but is it science fiction?

No.

Science Fiction is, at its core, a rationalist genre and all the tales and stories within that genre exit within a rationalist, understandable, and explicable universe. This ranges from the ‘hardest’ of science fiction stories where absolutely no known understanding of the physical universe may be contradicted, no telepathy, no faster-than-light travel, and so on to the stories with the flimsiest of ‘scientific’ justification, often when the strangeness of quantum mechanics are used in place of just flat out magic. Star Trek, from its very inception and earliest pilots, has never resided in the hard science fiction territories and it’s never productive to force ‘real-world’ science on any episode of the series. (It does not bear to consider the thousands and thousands of nuclear bomb’s worth of energy that is released when the rest mass of an entire person to converted is energy for the mere act of transportation.) Even when it is employed as a form of magic to put the characters into an episode that obeys the rules of musicals, some ‘scientific’ explanation is used to justify the strange and wondrous events. That act of justification by way of warped and tortured science is what keeps a story within the pastures of science fiction.

Horror, on the other hand, works best when reason and rationality are lost and the characters, along with the audience, are suddenly thrust into a situation that is inexplicable and perhaps is even beyond comprehension. There is a style of horror where the supernatural is bent out of shape to conform to the universe as we understand it, a style where mass is conserved when werewolves transform from men into wolves and where blood for vampires is simply a nutrient, allowing them to substitute pig’s blood from a butcher for the essence of human life. That is a disservice to the genre, moving it from the uncanny to just a set of rules that can be followed and understood.

The Griffin Incident provides no explanation for why the ship is haunted, such as that the ship’s crew, driven insane by the very nature of space/time in the region, quantumly entangled with the material in the hull, imprinting psychic echoes that appeared as phantoms but were perfectly explicable.

Nope. It’s just a haunted ship and the characters survive but have no understanding of just what transpired in their lives, only that they survived. Science fiction demands that in the end every phenomenon has a cause-and-effect that is understood, but this episode, in the very best tradition of horror, abandoned such comforts leaving the characters and the audience in the terribly uncomfortable space where reason had no purchase.

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Movie Review: The Mandalorian and Grogu

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I am, at most, a casual Star Wars fan, old enough that I watched the original set of films on their initial release and to have been disappointed by the sequel set. Most of the television series that have followed I have had little to no interest in with the exception of Andor and The Mandalorian. Andorbrought a gritty moral ambiguity to the story of a rebellion that struggled to overthrow an authoritarian empire while The Mandalorian told tales in the setting of a more straight-forward morality much like many classic Western movies. Both approaches are valid lines of exploration within a setting as vast as the Star Wars franchise, and both appealed to me on very different thematic fronts. I will confess that while I adored the first two seasons of The Mandalorian, I felt that the producers had damaged their show and premise with the changes presented in its third season. Now, three years after that final season aired, a curious phrase considering that the program was never actually broadcast, the long-awaited feature film centered on the two principal characters has arrived in theaters.

Sadly, the disintegrating quality of the story-telling that began with Season three continues in The Mandalorian and Grogu. While I cannot honestly say that this film is bad in some ways, my opinion is worse than that, because this film is dull and uninspired, vanishing from my memory like a dream a few hours after waking. This movie strikes me as the worst sort of ‘fan service’ with callbacks to characters from other media that serve no thematic or story purpose beyond having a fan point and smile because they recognized the reference.

Lucasfilm/Disney Studios

The movie begins as we follow Mando executing the final elements of a bounty hunt against an ex-imperial officer that has set himself up as a warlord. It is a prolonged action sequence that carries no narrative weight; we know nothing of the person that is being hunted and have no emotional connection to anything that transpires. There is no drama or suspense as the movie’s principal character dispatches unnamed stormtroopers with an ease that drains the action of any stakes. Worse yet, the entire sequence has absolutely no impact on the events that follow. The entire bit could be excised from the film and not one following scene would change. To the plot it matters not at all. It exists only to be a ‘thrilling’ scene for the fans who want to see Mando ‘kick ass.’ I found the entire thing as interesting as playing a video game on ‘God Mode’ where your digital enemies are incapable of any victory.

The rest of the movie is equally meaningless.

Stories, when they are well written, are about change, about characters either growing into a better version of themselves or falling due to the flaws in their nature that they are unable to overcome. The Mandalorian and Grogu is utterly static. The characters enter and exit the story unmoved and unaltered by their experiences. Even when it might appear that Mando has caused troubles by eliminating a criminal contact that the fledgling New Republic had compromised itself by working with, an off-screen deus ex machina absolves him of any error with a bit of clumsy exposition revealing that the criminals were in fact, sans any evidence presented in the movie itself,  betraying the Republic the entire time. Our hero, The Mandalorian, is incapable of making mistakes of any consequence or of judgment. A hero like that can only come off as flat, dull, and uninteresting.

Truly, the only section of the movie that held my interest was the street food vendor voiced by the legendary Martin Scorsese.

The Mandalorian and Grogu has neither the cynical tone of evil acts performed for the greater good of Andor nor the direct and easily understood choosing the morally right path of the series The Mandalorian or of the films, instead telling a tale that makes no stand and chooses no side. I fully expect to have forgotten this movie within a week.

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Andy Weir, Social Commentary, & World Building

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Recently Andy Weir, author of The Martian, Artemis, and Project Hail Mary, commented that he dislikes and avoids social commentary in fiction, preferring to seek to simply entertain with his novel and expressing a disdain for ‘lecturing.’

I will take Mr. Weir at his word that he dislikes the tendency for some authors and projects to pull out the soap box and lecture their readers and audiences, but I do believe that it is impossible for an artist, particularly a creator of fiction, to craft their work wholly absent of social commentary. In creating the setting for their stories, a process known as world building an author makes decisions and choices, sometimes with intent and sometimes by subconscious processes, about how that world works and that reflects what the author thinks of the world that they inhabit.

World building by an author can fall into one of three major categories, a world that they fear, a world that they dream of, and a world as they see it around them.

1984, Fahrenheit 451, and The Handmaid’s Tale are all examples of world building where the author has constructed a world that they fear, one that makes a decidedly explicit social comment on what would be bad for the world to be like, be that a tyranny of political power, a tyranny of ignorance, or a tyranny of sexual domination. While all three are works set in the author’s future they are not predictions but a nightmare of a world that the author desperately wants to avoid.

Stories such as No Country for Old Men or The Remains of the Day, reflect an author that is world building from the world around them as they see it. These settings are often morally grey or even absent any morality at all though that is not a requirement of the type of world building. When such aspects are absent the piece is often called naive for its representation of humanity as basically good in the face of the few bad and evil individuals. It should be noted that world building as they perceive the world around them is not limited to contemporary fictions. Martin’s A Song of Ice and Fire while set in a world of magic, dragons, and multi-year seasonal cycles reflects a world Martin sees around him, one where, as he has said, ‘ruling is hard’ and power attracts the corruptible. JMS’ Babylon 5 is as much about America as he sees it as it is about space wars and alien races.

The final category of world building, the world as they want it to be is usually, but not always, the domain of utopian fiction. Star Trek, both the original series and even more so for Star Trek: The Next Generation is world building that reflects a world that the author wants to be real but is not. Roddenberry explicitly created Trek in the 60s because he wanted to talk about social issues that the network’s standards and practices would not allow. (see some of the script he produced for his earlier series The Lieutenant for examples.)

So, with these categories of world building in mind let’s look at the three novels of Andy Weir.

The Martian is the story of Mark Watney, stranded on Mars when the rest of the crew evacuated and believed Mark had died. The entire novel is Watney’s brilliant struggle for survival on the environmentally hostile planet and the desperate rescue attempt by NASA and the international community to save him. The Martian has no villains. There are no bad guys, no one that hated Watney and stranded him for some misplaced revenge, no ‘bean counters’ that decide that rescue is too expensive and undermine the efforts, no grandiose figure proclaiming that Watney is dying due to man’s hubris. The entire book from front to back is packed with smart capable and competent people working hard to save the life of another human being. Dictatorial governments give up state secrets to save Mark Watney, that is the extent to which Weir goes to have a story that is purely about people working together for the good of one singular person. The Martian is world building for a world that I would argue Mr. Weir wants to be real. It is an idealized world, one in which smart capable people make smart intelligent decisions and without greed or self-importance derailing the greater project.

Project Hail Mary presents a very similar style of world building, but replaces the one man in danger of losing his life with the prospect of the entire world dying should the solution not be found. Once again, we are presented with a narrative in which there are no explicit villains, no religious fundamentalists proclaiming that the dimming of the sun is ‘God’s will’ nor are their fanatical environmentalist announcing that the crisis is humanity paying for their sins of pollution. No, once again we are presented with intelligent capable people working selflessly and tirelessly towards a common goal. (There is a twist on that but its major reveal in the story and I shan’t spoil it here. But even that instance is not presented as evil but simply one born of all too understandable fear.)

Artemis is a horse of a different color, a story of corruption and conspiracy set on the moon’s only city. The novel in addition to being a very different plot that Weir’s other books is also quite forgettable. I read the novel the moment it was published and found it quite lacking. Weir handled a criminal and frankly noirish plot quite badly and aside from a few scenes that have stuck in memory for their faults the entire book has vacated itself from my brain. While I am sure this novel of criminal and conspiracies had its villain or villains I for the life of me cannot recall a single one. His attempt to write about human evil left absolutely no impression at all.

Weir, despite his protestations, does indeed make ‘social commentary’ in his novel, it is clear that in his view of an idealized world, people work together for the common good and without selfish and petty considerations.  It might strike some as Pollyannish and perhaps even deeply naive but that is a social commentary and one that strikes a deep and popular chord. Weir should take care when hurling stones concerning other artists displaying strong points of view and social commentary as it is inescapable for any artist, including himself, to not have a point of view that reveals itself in their creation.

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Do Not Think About Timeline of Star Wars

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I am sure that there are some devoted Star Wars fans out there that can conjure some twisty and convoluted explanation for the compressed and strange timeline that flows through the main sequence of the Skywalker saga in Star Wars, but if you sit and think about the years and the characters it really doesn’t quite add up.

20th century studios/Disney

Before I continue let me stress that there is much of the franchise that I am a fan of. I am an old fart and saw the original release in the theaters and when people mention Star Wars, much like with Star Trek, the images that fly to mind are of that original late 70s and early 80s adventure films. All the assorted material in comic books, novels, and television programs, both live action and animated, held little draw for me except for Andor, which I adore and is brilliant, even as it exposes the fault line in the ‘canon’ history of the saga.

The saga of Star Wars from the prequels, through the various programs, and the original trilogy, is the story of the fall of the Galactic Republic, the rise of the Empire, and, the restoration of the Republic by a dedicated rebellion. A story that in the films is principally told through the viewpoint of the Skywalkers, Anakin and his son Luke. When we meet Luke in Star Wars he is nineteen and ready to apply to the ‘Academy’ desperate to leave his life as a farmer and see the wider galaxy.

Nineteen.

Luke was born simultaneously with the Galactic Empire, Emperor Palpatine’s entire reign as the despot of the galaxy is about 24 years from start to his death on the second Death Star. In terms of Empires that’s a very short time, though it beats out Nazi Germany that lasted a mere dozen years, and Fascist Italy that managed to squeeze out 21 years. However a quarter of a century is still a very short period of time, you have only the youngest cohort of adults that know only the Imperial system with a much larger segment of the population that lived in the Republic era.

This was really brought home to me while watching Andor. (And again I adore Andor I think it is a masterpiece of television.) The character Dedra Meeroa, played beautifully by Denise Gough, announces that she has no family. Her parents were criminals and she was raised in an ‘Imperial Kinder Block.’ Ms. Gough was born in 1980. Andor  had its principal photography in 2020 making the actor 40 years old when she first portrayed Meero. Now, even if the character is 5 years younger than the performer that makes her 35 at the start of the series and by the ‘canon’ calendar with this being a mere five years before the destruction of the first Death Star, making the entire Imperial system just 14 years old. This makes Dedra 16 or so when she goes into the Imperial Kinder Block, provided that the systems starts with the Empire and still this is hardly ‘raised in a Kinder Block.’ The numbers simply do not add up.

And you know what — I don’t really care. It is a great bit of character building and backstory that explains the cold hard and dedicated Dedra Meero. I will always take good story over slavish devotion to ‘canon.’  Of course it is always best if you make everything fit neatly, but given the choice, give me great characters and great stories over a perfectly fitted history.

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Starfleet Academy Canceled and My Disorganized Thoughts

Paramount+

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The newest series entry in the Star Trek franchise, Starfleet Academy got its cancelation announced yesterday to cheers from the quarters that despised the program and tears from those who adored it. If you populate or have visited the SF and Trek communities online then it’s no news flash that the series prompted some intense feelings with many going on extended ‘explainer’ videos dissecting the show’s faults, failures, and lack of respect for the ‘good’ Trek that had preceded it. This was a discourse that I did not participate in and avoided consuming whenever possible. Not because I had any particularly strong love or any emotion for the show but because such emotionally driven tirades are tiresome and not worth the energy to even briefly consider them.

 

Star Trek to me has always first and foremost been the original series produced and broadcast in the 60s, a very different time from today in nearly every major way. Next Generation presented a new crew and several seasons where I enjoyed the program but also several seasons where it was tedious, tiresome, and quite preachy. Deep Space Nine had some interesting ideas and characters and I watched a few episodes here and there, but it failed to fully hook me as a viewer. Voyage? God, that was stuff I simply could not swallow with the exception of a couple of episodes I watched out of loyalty to my friend that had written them, I abandoned the series after the third episode. The next series, Enterprise I abandoned after the pilot as it was quite clear to me that the creatives behind that project had a very different vision for how SF and Trek in particular should be written than myself.

Discovery tempted me back with some very interesting casting choices and there was much I found intriguing about its set up – I have never been one overly concerned with ‘canon’ for a series that was never designed to have it — but ultimately I lost interest and the series just slipped out of my viewing habits. Without a deep devoted sense of nostalgia Picard failed to keep me engaged (pun very much intended) and again after a few episodes it slipped away.

Strange New Worlds is a very different story. The first ‘new Trek‘ series that gave me the feeling of that original series, even as they took their own quite large liberties with the supposed canon. Not only did i follow the show and watch every, admittedly too few, episode, I purchased the first two seasons on physical media.

So, with that background established I watched Starfleet Academy with an open but wary mind and heart, hoping for a new Trek that I could be a fan of. Sadly, Starfleet Academy prompted in me the worst reaction any film or television program can generate in the viewer, apathy. There is no worse reaction that indifference.

The series did not repel or offend me, even as it offered up recycled ideas from some of the previous programs that I certainly did not like, but neither did it engage me. None of the characters hooked me with an interest to know them any better, the situation didn’t pull me in, and the cast choices were at best a distraction. I did not avoid episodes but other programming kept displacing it as my sweetie-wife and I decided on which things to watch for our evening’s entertainment. The news of its cancelation brought no disappointment only a sense of acknowledgement. At the time of this writing, we hadn’t finished the first season and last night we made the decision to not finish. It wasn’t out of animosity, the program didn’t provoke enough to generate such a response but simply a recognition that we didn’t care enough to keep at it.

I am sorry for those who did find a connection with this series, it is always a bitter blow when the forces at networks remove from the offerings the thing that spoke to you. To those who are celebrating its demise, really? Is that the best use of your brief and valuable time on the planet, taking joy in even the minor suffering of others? There are better things to do, go do them.

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Movie Review: Project Hail Mary

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Adapted from the novel by Andy Weir, who also wrote The Martian, Project Hail Mary is a

MGM/Amazon Studios

science fiction adventure to save the Earth from a dimming sun which threatens all life on our fragile planet. A fantastic microorganism is populating the sun, causing the dimming, and a molecular biologist, Dr. Ryland Grace, whose published theories align with the newly discovered ‘astrophages,’ is recruited by a global effort to reverse the ‘infection,’ by traveling to Tau Ceti, the only star in the corner of the galaxy not showing signs of dimming. The film opens with Dr. Grace awakening from a medically induced coma used during their transit to Tau Ceti, finding himself the only survivor of the process and with his memory damaged and only recovering as he suffers intrusive flashbacks. The mystery of Tau Ceti’s immunity to the astrophages deepens when Grace encounters a massive alien vessel in orbit about the star.

Like Weir’s novel The Martian, this story is really about the sacrifice, skill, and dedication of highly competent people who have set out to solve a seemingly unsolvable problem. Project Hail Mary functions without the need for a villain or motivated antagonist, with the closest analogy being a medical drama as doctors fight to diagnose, treat, and save a terminal patient, but in this case the patient is all of humanity.

Ryan Gosling plays Dr. Grace managing to convey both the character’s brilliance and his goofy ‘every man’ nature keeping the audience engaged both intellectually and emotionally as Grace navigates a strange, terrifying, and nearly impossible task alone.

Directed by Phil Lord and Christopher Miller, the team responsible for writing and producing the Spider-Verse films, this film is visually stunning, inventive, and striking in its emotional core. Aided by a sharp script by Drew Goddard, who also adapted The Martian, Gosling carries the film effectively alone. While there are other important performers in this film the ultimate success or failure of the project rested on his shoulders and Gosling’s ability to make you laugh and cry in moments while still conveying unrevealed depths to his character is what makes him a star.

All in all this is a remarkable film and while the two-and-a-half-hour running time might give some pause before buying a ticket, I would recommend seeing this in a proper theatrical setting.

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That Firefly Announcement

If you have not been in the SF fandom community very long you may not have heard or experienced the devoted base of fans, known as ‘Browncoats’ for the failed television series Firefly.

Created by disgraced talent and Buffy creator Joss Whedon, Firefly a space western inspired by Whedon’s reading of The Killer Angels ran for 11 episodes on the Fox network before being canceled mid-season. Three years later Universal released feature film, Serenity, written and directed by Whedon, who hadn’t yet torched his reputation and career, wrapping up one of the show’s central plot lines while dispatching a couple of the main characters. From there the cast dispersed to their various projects and careers, while fandom possessed enough of an interest and hunger for the series that it lived on primarily in comic book and graphic novel form.

 

Now, more than two decades after the show’s aborted run on television and its middling performance as a feature film its central star Nathan Fillion has announced that the series is being revived as an animated series with all of the surviving cast returning to voice their characters. Ron Glass who portrayed the mysterious Reverend Book passed away in 2016. Whedon reportedly has blessed the project but also is reportedly not involved with this reincarnation of his creation.

I was a fan of the series when it aired way back in 2002. I recognized some of its shortfalls and limitations and thought it leaned a little too heavily into its mashup of the Western genre with the SF elements. Its science was patently preposterous but that I had long accepted as the price for seeing any SF on television at all. I mourned its premature cancellation and attended ComicCon in San Diego to see the panel discussion with the cast prior to the release of Serenity, so while I am not a ‘Browncoat’ I am not hostile to the series. I even own it and the feature film on BluRay, but for me this announcement stirs no excitement.

All art is a product of its time.

The people who made Firefly in 2002 lived in a different world than the one we live in today. Everything that is in the artist’s world, the grand and world changing to the small and scarcely noticed impacts on who they are influencing how they perceive humanity and its place in existence. Making Firefly or Doctor Who or Star Trek today will not recreate those properties as they existed in the early 2000s or in the 1960s. That presumes that the creative team on the animated series, sans Whedon, were the team that crafted the original series, and I haven’t seen any reports that those writers are returning. Which means that the writing will be done by people whose connection to the characters and settings is one driven by nostalgia, creating yet another layer of transformation beyond that imposed by the passing years. The actors have been changed by time as well and that will change how they interpret their characters, it is an inevitability.

Perhaps this animated Firefly will fly high and stun everyone who watches with its insight and engaging stories, but it will not and cannot be the same as that beloved cult series. Time flows onward and you can never truly go home.

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A Starship Troopers Reboot? Color Me Doubtful

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Sony is reportedly looking at a fresh adaptation of Robert A. Heinlein’s young adult novel Starship Troopers. The book has been previously brought to the silver screen in 1997 by Dutch filmmaker Paul Verhoeven, but that interpretation took the route of being a satire and in my opinion a terrible film. Yes, I know it has its fans, but I am not one of them and the point of this piece is not to debate that film or even the themes of the novel. No, I am here to say why I think this novel is nearly impossible to adapt as a film or television series.

Heinlein was the gateway drug that seduced me into fiction reading. Prior to being forced to read Red Planet for a book report I consumed only non-fiction, after that one novel, my course was set, I mention this so you understand that I come at this analysis from a position of someone who admires the author and the novel.

Starship Troopers has no plot.

It has a story, and it has a very strong point of view as the author ruminates, lectures, or rants, choose your preferred descriptor, on service, duty, and patriotism. The story has young Filipino Johnny Rico going from being a callow youth with self-serving interests, he only joined the service because of a girl, to a leader of men with a deep and dedicated sense of duty. The protagonist’s journey from boy to man is the story. To me story is the transformation of the character. Plot on the other hand  is the mechanical aspect of the tale, the objective and obstacles that challenge the protagonist. I can illustrate my views on plot vs story with two James Bond films.

Casino Royale has both plot, Bond tries to bankrupt Le Chiffre so he will be inclined to betray his clients to save himself, and story Bond opens his heart, making himself emotionally vulnerable only to be betrayed, becoming the cold man who uses women but who never trusts.

Moonraker has only plot. Bond must discover and stop Drax’s plan to eliminate humanity and reseed it with his eugenically perfect population. As a person Bond experiences no transformation, no growth. He ends the movie the exact same character as he was at its start.

Starship Troopers has story, Rico’s transformation into an adult but it has no plot. The war that supplies the narrative with its action scenes starts off-page while Rico is in basic training for his military service and the novel ends with the war still raging. There is no special big mission that drives the book from start to end. The ‘capture the brain bug’, something that would take place in a movie’s third act and might be the spine of an entire film, is not established prior to its introduction. In terms of a 3-act structure, Establishment, Conflict, Resolution, Starship Troopers simply doesn’t fit.

The novel is first and foremost a polemic of Heinlein expounding or hectoring (again you choose) the reader with his views on duty and sacrifice. Given that, I hold to my reservations as to how you can make a film adaptation that is both a good film and faithful to a controversial novel that is built around a series of classroom lectures.

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Pluribus: Season 1 Thoughts and Theories

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I have finished all the episodes of Pluribus season one and all of the mainline companion podcast episodes and as such I am ready to expound on the series.

Apple TV

First off, I really liked it. Its premise, that a radical infection, induced by an alien signal, unifies nearly all of humanity into a single group consciousness that is compelled as a biological necessity to non-violence and an irrational reverence for life is unique and compelling. That of the dozen or so ‘survivors’, individuals who due to their genetic makeup are immune to the ‘joining’, our protagonist is a person who, at least in her former life, was quite the anti-people person and now finds herself as the agent to save humanity is also very compelling. Carol Stucka, played by Rhea Seehorn, is a different kind of hero and that is welcome. I look forward to season two and what it brings. I have no doubt that show runner and creator Vince Gilligan has an ending in mind, just as he did with Breaking Bad.

So, theories.

I think the Pluribus effect is an alien weapon system that has been targeted on Earth. The signal originated from a stellar system 640 lightyear distant, meaning even if we caught the broadcast just as it started the aliens that transmitted it did so when the Earth was in the year 1386, without the technology to receive much less interpret the alien signal and its recipe for an RNA virus. It was transmitted blindly for whoever and whenever the people of Earth became able to utilize it,

The Pluribus effect is pretty devastating, both in the short term, where nearly a billion people died from the sudden global disruption, to the long-term effects which look to be an extinction level event.

The effect renders the ‘joined’ or the ‘others’ go with whichever term your prefer, pacifistic and compliant to the transformed. They seek to satisfy every desire and whim of the people who are cut off from the group mind, even delivering weapons of mass destruction if that is what they desire. The ‘joined’ seem wholly and utterly incapable of engaging in violence even in self-defense. A planet so infected presents no threats.

The ‘joined’ are also unable, by biological compulsion, to willingly and knowingly take any action to end any life. About halfway through season one we learn that this prohibition extends to plant life as well, rendering the ‘joined’ unable to harvest anything for food. Once the planet’s population has been transformed, their food source is what was harvested and manufactured before the event and the bodily remains of those that have died.

This means extinction.

The planet, post-event, has a store of calories available for consumption and a population consuming those calories without replenishing that store. Consuming the dead only delays the inevitable mass starvation of the population but with a planet untouched and unmarred by warfare. A far better result than even with Neutron bombs if you want nice welcoming planets around but without their pesky inhabitants.

This dire situation is exacerbated by the fact that the ‘joined’ are also compelled to ‘share the gift.’ That is to construct the massive antennae and power-supply to transmit the signal onto new stellar systems dooming other civilizations to the same fate as Earth, With the fantastic resources required for such a project (neatly described in episode one before anything has really transpired), the ‘joined’ population is diverted from working on a technological solution to the caloric conundrum the event has thrust them into.

The final element that leads me to believe that this is a weapon system is the fact that Carol learned that the process of the ‘joining’ is reversible. So, if the originator or an ally of theirs became infected, it could be undone. Safety for the initiator of the infection, death for the infected, that makes for a pretty good weapon.

I will wrap up this post with what looks like an oversight and a scientific error in the series.

As I discussed above, the ‘joined’ seemingly are prohibited from taking any action that would end any life, but they are more than willing to administer antibiotics, the very word means ‘contrary to life’. Apparently, their prohibition doesn’t apply to single cell organisms. I think more likely is that the series writers simply forgot that life goes all the way down to single cells. (A very competent argument can be made it does not extend to viruses.)

The scientific error deals with a major plot element. The ‘joined’ discover that they can tailor the RNA strand to the un-joined, bringing them into the single consciousness but the process requires stem cells from the individual. Carol refuses to give them the consent to collect her stem cells and believes herself to be safe.

Stem cells are cells that can be differentiated into any kind of cell in the body, they can become nerve cells, liver cells, blood cells, from a stem cell you can produce any tissue of the host.

Okay, I can buy needing stem cells, it is a little bit of a stretch but not a terrible one. The ‘joined’ reveal to Carol that they are using her frozen eggs, human eggs not chicken, to create stem cells to bring her into the collective.

Umm, I cannot see any way for that to work.

Human egg cells do not have the entire DNA of their host. They have only half of the chromosomes which will combine with the half of chromosomes provided by the father to create the full set of a new human being. You cannot create a stem cell with only half of the chromosomes required.

But all SF shows have their errors, some more than others, and this one I can look past as I wait for season two.

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