Category Archives: SF

Moments of Transition

I think that some of the most vital moments in a story, and it doesn’t matter if that story is told through a visual medium such a feature film or a narrative medium such as novel, are those moment when the character crosses a transformational threshold and enters a new phase of their journey of change.

The best stories are stories about a character’s change where at the end of the tale the character makes choices that would have been beyond them at the start. But along the way to those ultimate transformations the characters cross smaller thresholds that build upon one another until the full transformation takes place and those smaller moments of change are often powerful moments in the story. Here are just a few examples from popular films, and I am going to use older movies because it does dip into spoiler territory.

Jaws

Chief Brody’s transformation from a man who fears water to a man able to venture comfortably forth on the sea is clear but a vital moment of change comes at the hand of Mrs. Kintner. The fishermen have brought in their tiger shark and everyone is celebrating the end of the threat. The moods crashes when Mrs. Kintner slaps Brody because her son is dead, he knew the beaches were unsafe and left them open anyway. It’s a powerful emotional scene and Brody after it cannot go back to who he was before her accusation. It is crossing this threshold that propels him to do a ‘half-assed autopsy on a fish’ and make his first foray onto the ocean and stiffens his spine in encounters with the Mayor. Mrs. Kintner literal slaps his character onto a new path.

Alien

Alien is a tricky beast. The film’s opening acts it hides the identity of the main character. Ellen Ripley, and she didn’t get a first name until the sequel Aliens, a first presents as a person who avoids direct conflict and dangers. She doesn’t volunteer as part of the expedition to investigate the signal, and she’s evasive with Parker and Brett over the bonus situation. Ripley’s first moment of transformation occurs when Dallas and Lambert return with the stricken and ridden Kane. She makes the hard call and denies them access to the ship, almost certainly dooming Kane to death. This is a threshold the character had avoided but faced with an unknown danger she steps across it and after Ash violates the quarantine she is more willing to confront other characters over their misdeeds and actions. The sequence at the airlock is not only vital to the plot, getting the alien aboard the ship, but vital to Ripley’s character development.

When you are craft the important moments of your story look to the one-way door of transformation it is vital to your character.

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Cinematic Social Commentary: Robocop vs They Live

 

In the essay I will not be taking a position on the merits of either films observations. I trust my readers are more than competent to make their own value judgements and evaluations politically but rather I am looking at how the films made their comments and which films, in my opinion, succeeded more adeptly at its intentions.

In 1987, the penultimate year of Ronald Reagan’s presidency, Paul Verhoeven’s Robocop was released to theaters, the story Alex Murphy, husband, father, cop, who is murdered and then scientifically resurrected as Robocop makes important comments on the nature of humanity and identity but its sharpest social observations are on conservatism and Reaganism.

The next year John Carpenter’s They Live debuted and under the guise of an alien invasion movie spoke to the same social commentary about its views on conservatives and the effects of the Reagan presidency.

They Live posits aliens living amongst us that are subtly controlling and directly all facets of human life and social development. The title refers to the ‘waking sleep,’ created by a signal broadcasted by aliens, that keeps people from seeing the aliens around them and the subliminal messaging used to control the population. Global pollution is not a side effect of unregulated industrialization but rather a deliberate project of ‘terraforming’ the Earth to alien standards. Capitalism is an alien system imposed upon humanity for the purpose of extracting the planet’s wealth to the aliens and corrupting select human into acting as quislings for the invaders. Aliens live amongst us at every level of society but most importantly solely occupy the commanding heights of our cultural and political institutions.

The commentary here is not subtle. The direct one to one mapping of capitalist, the wealthy, and the powerful as a parasitic and controlling force with the alien invaders is a clear analog to class-based observations of our real-world economies, However, the worldbuilding is sloppy and not thought out in any logical manner. How the aliens extract wealth is hand waved away. The illogic of aliens travelling hundreds if not thousands of lightyears at great expense of energy to live as beat cops and bank tellers is ludicrous mudding Carpenter’s social commentary allowing neo-Nazis to reinterpret the text in an anti-Semitic screed. The fact that extremists on the right can see the commentary as supporting their racists position rather than attacking the economic system  they favor speaks volumes to the film’s failure to build any coherent statement.

Robocop is set in an undefined near future where crime is rampant and social services are nearly non-existent. The city of Detroit is crumbling under the lack of resources as the tax base evaporates and crime runs uncontrolled in the streets. Changes in the tax codes have benefited corporations concentrating wealth and privatization has turned social services such as prisons, hospitals, and schools over to corporate control and as the film open the fiction OCP corporation takes over management of Detroit’s police force. While corporate control of social services is presented in a plain and unflattering light the factions within OCP, standing in for all of corporate America, are given a richer and more nuanced portrayal. Dick Jones, a senior vice-president who is in bed with the city’s criminal boss, is a greedy immoral man only interested in the wealth and power he can extract from his positions. Bob Morton is a corporate climber and ambitious young man but seems to believe that the corporation can be a force for good and actually wants to deliver beneficial services. The ‘Old Man’ heading OCP is more of an enigma, it is unclear if he is even aware of the corruption within the company or if his ‘it’s time to give back’ speech is heartful or merely for appearances.

What is clear is that the film’s stand that corporate government is an ill is quite clear. Despite the story being about social disintegration and collapse there is no representation of actual government. Aside from a brief use as hostages, and there’s powerful symbolism in that, there is no mayor or civic leader presented in the film. The people and their representatives are whole absent a comment on their invisibility to corporate views.

As social commentary Robocop succeeds for better than They Live

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Leave Fiction in its Period

Last night my sweetie-wife and I watched a portion of the BBC’s live presentation of The Quatermass Experiment. Written by Nigel Kneale and originally produced as live television in 1953 the shows centers on Bernard Quatermass and Britain’s first men into space with the disastrous and horrifying consequences of that first rocket flight. Kneale is one of my favorite television and film genre writers who produced material that was both thrilling and thoughtful. His ghost story The Stone Tape remains a beloved production to me.

In 2005 the BBC recreated the energy of live television with this new production of The Quatermass Experiment. Transposing the action to the modern-day United Kingdom. Instead of Quatermass’ Experimental Rocket Group being part of the British government it now stood as a private space launch concern. However, much of the dialog and drama revolves around the concept of a first flight into space and for 2005 that’s a concept that simply doesn’t carry a lot of sense of the unknown. The mystery of where the spacecraft flew to simply can’t be sustained in our current technological world. And while 500,000 miles is further than any manned flight actually flown it’s still in our own neighborhood and unlikely to yield up a story about aliens and monsters.

The Quatermass Experiment belong to its period just as numerous other stories that shouldn’t be ‘modernized’ such as The Manchurian Candidate or Fail-Safe, another experiment into revitalizing live television.

Works of art are products of their time, the social pressures and environments that both inspired and constrained the artists as they created and it is in their time they should remain.

 

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Fiction Reveals the Author

There’s often a huge cry from some quarters that that creatives need to keep their politics out of their arts. The arts are there for simple entertainment not any form a grandstanding.

Naturally this is an ignorant position. Art has the most lasting value when it speaks to values and that can’t be done without stepping on toes.

This is all very evident in movies, television, and literature but even in other matters of creativity the worldview and positions of the author or authors influences the art.

I run an in-person Role Playing Game, or at least I did before the pandemic shut everything down, of Space Opera a massive game from the very early 80s with an amazing detailed, if poorly edited, set of rules. In order to make the game flow quicker and easier once we can assemble to players again, I have been crafting spreadsheets to handle the more tedious and complex calculations the game often calls for. One the objectives were met I decided to expand the project and create a spreadsheet that would use the rules to automatically general star sectors and that has been an interesting experience. Certainly, my Microsoft Excel skills have been expanding but it has also revealed interesting biases of the game’s authors.

For example, a society in Space Opera is rated for its social strength on a scale from 1- 10, with a  1 signifying a society that has collapsed or is in collapse, the world of Mad Max both the original film and its sequels, while a 10 represents a society able to withstand nearly any serious shock with it institutions remaining functional and intact.

The gamemaster rolls a 10-sided die for the social strength and then modifies it based on the type of society and those modifiers express the authors’ biases.

“Open Societies” no modifier, it is whatever is rolled though the game’s heroic Terran Union no planet will score below a 5.

“Corporate Society” no modifiers, somehow you can have both corporate societies that are falling apart which seems illogical, without rule of law there cannot be corporation and societies rock solid and unshakable.

“Aristocratic Society” no modifiers, lord, ladies, kings and all that can be utterly stable withstanding any shock.

“Socialist Society” Max social strength 8, 9s and 10s must be re-generated. hmm socialist systems, without providing a real definition of that means find true stability impossible.

And in case you thought ‘Socialist’ means USSR because this game is a product of late 70s engineering.

“Communist Society” max social strength is 7 with result 8-10 re-rolled.

There buried in the rules in the modifiers are the authors’ political belief that open, capitalist societies are inherently more stable than other systems.

All art, even gaming,  is political.

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How Did I Ever Run This Game in the 80s?

I have been a role play gamer since 1979 when my friend Jim, whom I met in Basic Training for the U.S. Navy, introduced me to AD&D. Very quickly I experimented with number of other RPG game systems in those early years when new game systems appeared like mushrooms after a moist summer evening. Fantasy Games Unlimited provided two of the system I played the most besides AD&D, Villains and Vigilantes, a comic book role playing game where with the right dice rolls a normal person’s punch could do more damage than a nuclear weapon, and Space Operaa game of high adventure among the stars that allowed everything from Star Trek style campaigns to Star Wars and everything in between.

Space Opera has three credited authors two fat core rule books, and apparently no editor. The rule books are riddled with typos, inconsistencies, and no logical organizational layout. Character creation can be a lengthy process taking hours to perform all the rolls, computations, and decisions in establishing your hero. In addition to all that the rules can get quite detailed in trying to model nearly every conceivable situation. Literally there are paragraphs devoted to performing a hand-off when one character has to pass an item to another character during combat or chaotic events.

Despite all this Space Opera turned out to be the sweet spot for my style as a game master. During the early to late 80s I ran a number of campaigns many of which are still fondly remembered. The wide-open setting, the rules that encompassed nearly every conceivable science-fiction trope, and the sheer imagination made this my favorite to run and a favorite among my players.

But, all the fiddly rules, calculations, and record keeping were a serious challenge. Space Opera, if you run as Lieutenant Saavik would, that is by the book, creates vast amounts of record keeping, some of which I kept up with, some of which I ignored, and some I fudged. Certainly, many of the detailed calculations I approximated rather than compute to their final precise answer.

Last year, after discovering I still had my original rulebooks and that all of the materials were available for purchase as PDFs online, I, at the urging of my players, launched  a new Space Opera campaign.

In the intervening decades I have become a little more focused on following game rules and of course that makes Space Opera quite a challenge. With the game decades out of print there is little, but not zero, fan support on the internet. When this game was published there was no internet and advanced players socialized through BBS. I have found a few data sheets that help turn the game into something more manageable and provide some assistance in the more detailed bits such as an excel spreadsheet for character creation.

Now I have turned my weak spreadsheet skills to the task and have started creating my own game aids. I have completed a worksheet for computing a character’s chance of advancing a level in a particular skill. One cell required an IF statement that was nested 18 times, but it works. Next up a ship’s log to record fuel use, maintenance requirements, and travel time computation. After that a campaign calendar to track these things for my players.

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Quick Hits July 17, 2020

Burn the GOP to the Ground

 

Pence would have been far from perfect but leaving corrupt incompetent Trump in has made the pandemic far worse and that is entirely at the feet of the spineless Republican politicians.

 

 The Towering Inferno Still Holds Up.

 

I’ve been watching this on HBO (I have the DVD, but HBO is in High Def.) and thoroughly enjoying a style of filmmaker that has fallen out of favor. Loads with stars and taking the time to tell stories. Though you gotta wonder about a team of firemen walking around with plastic explosives and detonators.

 

New Story Ideas beginning to bubble in my brain

 

This damned crisis, both global and personal, has been sapping my creativity but an idea for another Sf/noir is starting to take form in my head. It would be on a generation ship where sharp distinct classes have formed between crew and colonists and the murder that shatters the secrecy at the heart of the noir.

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Intertextuality and Vulcan’s Forge

Last night I watched a video essay on YouTube that argued the central flaw of most of Disney’s newer slates of film came down to a misuse of intertextuality. Intertextuality is when the text of one work impacted by the text of a previous work. It can be used as a powerful tool to explore themes and idea raised by the original work either in that work’s own text or as interpreted by the new text. An ideal example would be Tom Stoddard’s play Rosencrantz & Guildenstern Are Dead which follows as its central character Rosencrantz & Guildenstern two minor characters from Hamlet and uses that conceit to explore concept of narrative and fiction.

The essay argued that lazy utilization of intertextuality in the Disney live action remakes and the extended Star Wars trilogy resulted in a cheap ‘fan service’ rather than using the references to earlier works to comment either those previous pieces or to deepen the content of the new ones. The exception for Disney being the Marvel Cinematic Universe which stretching across more than 20 films and ten years is a grand experiment in intertextuality and uses those connections to paint deeper, richer, and more engaging emotional lives for its characters.

This leads me to think about my own debut novel Vulcan’s Forge. I shall avoid spoilers for the plot of that story but I will touch on how it itself is a work of intertextuality.

The protagonist of Vulcan’s Forge is Jason Kessler and on the colony of Nocturnia his job is to use mass media, principally film, to create, sustain, and reinforce the colony’s culture derived from mid-twentieth century Americana. To promote an idealized version of that culture, which honestly is more mythology than history, some films are elevated in their importance while others are banned as ‘corrupting.’ Jason, an ill fit for this suffocating version of American culture, is dismissive of some films and longs for the forbidden fruit.

Ideally, and only someone who has read the novel and also is unaware of the films it references can answer if I succeeded, the story can be read and enjoyed without understanding the film references but on an intertextual level the movies that Jason derides and the ones he adores informs the readers of the nature of Jason’s character.

Hopefully my use of intertextuality expands and deepens Vulcan’s Forge but even if I missed the mark making all of those film references was damn fun.

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SF Movie: Attraction (2017 – Russian)

After seeing clips of this film on a special effects YouTube program my sweetie-wife and I became interested in seeing Attraction. This was the same show that sparked out interest in the WWII Russian movie T-34 which was silly but fun.

Attraction is about a large alien spacecraft that crashes to Earth causing massive destruction and loss of life in the Chertanovo district of Moscow. The protagonist is Julia daughter of s senior military leader from whom she is estranged over the death of her mother. When Julia’s friend is killed in the alien’s crash landing, she and her boyfriend, along with his street gang, become fixed on the ‘invaders,’ though the aliens have remained unseen and taken no overt hostile actions.

What follows is a decent SF movie that manages to avoid most of the over used tropes while exploring Julia’s relationship with her boyfriend, her father, and herself. The movie at point looks to be retreading the tired excuse that the aliens are ‘here for out water,’ but then manages to subvert that expectation. With decent acting, writing, and impressive special effects Attraction is well worth the two hours of screen time. We watched it in the original Russian language

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Lifeforce: 35 Years Later and Still a Terrible Movie

Sometimes I will revisit a movie I disliked and check-in if it was the movie that was bad or my take on it. Usually the movie is at fault and Lifeforce, currently streaming on HBO, is no exception.

Released in 1985 and part of Cannon Films’ attempt to expand into big budget cinema Lifeforce, adapted from the novel The Space Vampires, is about a derelict alien spacecraft discovered in the coma of Halley’s Comet by a joint American and European manned space mission. The commander of the mission Col. Tom Carlsen (Steve Railsback), and seriously as a friend of mine once clued me in you can pre-judge a film’s quality by the haircuts of the ‘military’ characters and Carlsen’s is terribly non-regulation. Carlsen and his crew discover three aliens with human forms within the craft and bring back to Earth. Something goes wrong and the European space vessel Churchill arrives in Earth orbit but itself now a derelict. A rescue mission finds everyone aboard dead but the three aliens, still in their suspended animation, unharmed and the aliens are brought down to ground. The aliens are of course not dead and ignite a sweeping plague of energy vampirism, and not the cool kind that you get from Colin Robinson, that threatens humanity.

With a budget of 25 million dollars and box office receipts of under 12 million, which I and two friends were part of, Lifeforce crashed and burned on its release gathering neither critical nor commercial success. In some circles the most memorable aspect of the movie are the numerous exploitive nude scenes by the actress Mathilda May. ( I am pleased to report that this did not derail the young woman’s acting career and still is currently still working with nearly six television and film credits.) Lifeforce is a movie that cannot make up its mind as to what it wants to be. At times it’s a sensual vampirism flick, at other times it’s an invasion of body snatchers paranoia movie and by the end it’s an apocalyptic zombie movie with a tacked on happy ending.

There is scarcely an aspect of this movie that works, not in direction, casting, writing, or production design does this film make any sort of sense. Though I will admit that the end credit score by Henry Mancini is a terrific march.

While Lifeforce has found a following as a cult film it is not something anyone really needs to watch.

 

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Why Love Some Bad Movies and Not Others?

Recently I re-watched on HBO, though I own the Blu-ray, 1980’s Xanadu. This film along with Can’t stop the Music is credited with the inspiration that created The Golden Razzie award for bad cinema. Now I can both recognize that Xanadu is in many ways a terrible film, miscast, no character arc, very nearly plotless, but it is also a film that is near and dear to my heart. It is a romantic film centered on dreams and the message that dream don’t die we kill them. And what Xanadu is to me other bad movies are to other people, but it’s the rare bad film that really generates this sort of feeling.

Star Trek: Insurrection is a terrible film that is also essential a romantic film, not in terms of Eros but in rather prioritizing inner emotional life over reason, with a central message but that movie is a tedious bore and its message if examined closely is one that advocate murdering those who do not think as you do.

There lies the answer to the conundrum, it is in the emotional resonance that a bad movie can rise to something special. There are those for whom Star Trek: Insurrection is a beloved film, no doubt due to deep emotional connection to the characters of the cast. (I’m an old fart and more emotionally tied to the original series than and subsequent entry.) So, while Xanadu is mostly a string of expository scenes linking musical numbers it is in my own heart that its emotions truly lie. I love the film not because of what it is but because of who I am.

 

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