Merry Christmas

Reindeer at Alderwood Mall

 

Alderwood Mall is in a suburb to the north of Seattle.

Book Review: Through the Storm

Through the Storm.  John Ringo and Lydia Sherrer (Baen Books 9781982192990, $28.00, hc. 352pp) November 2023. Cover by Kurt Miller.

 

John Ringo is the author of a number of military science fiction series, including the Black Tide Rising zombie series. Lydia Sherrer is the author of the Lily Singer cozy fantasy series. Together, they wrote an augmented reality story where the characters fight monsters while experiencing teenage angst.

Lynn Raven is the best player in TransDimensional Hunter, a game watched by billions throughout the world. Since it is augmented reality, not virtual, she can run into a tree if she’s not careful. She and her four fellow students on her team use their goggles to see monstrous snakes, spiders, flying tengu, and other grotesque creatures coming at them. They use guns as their ranged weapons, but also enjoy using their swords to dispatch the monsters into showers of sparks.

Although Lynn spends hours at a time in augmented slaughter, the teenage angst spurs some of the crucial plot points. Lynn’s nemesis at school is a rich girl who calls her a “fat cow.” Lynn’s best friend in middle school went over to the rich girl’s side, just because. But Lynn’s biggest external enemy are the paparazzi, which use unregistered aerial drones. They follow her around, recording whatever she says and does. She suffers immense anxiety over them, as any teenager would. But her low self-image due to body issues magnifies it all. If they continue to harass her, her gaming skills will suffer.

But more angst comes Lynn’s way when her former best friend, Kayla, suddenly says she wants to be friends again. Kayla realized she has not been able to live her own life, just obeying the rich girl and dressing the way she is told. She misses Lynn. Obviously, Lynn has trust issues. And Kayla’s stepdad owns a PR firm. If Lynn will sign with them, Lynn can livestream camera feeds from her battles, and do interviews. The paparazzi drones will go away. Lynn has to figure out if this possible solution is worth trusting Kayla. These bullying and trust issues deepen these characters into real teenagers.

When it becomes obvious Lynn’s team needs a new captain, Lynn accepts a guy from the rich girl’s team. Lynn cannot fully trust him, but they both have the goal of becoming the champion team at the finals. Readers can immediately see he’s a skeezy guy. He takes advantage of Lynn’s innocence and her insecurity over her body, tells her how beautiful she is, kisses her, and tries to go too far. We may be disappointed by Lynn’s naivete, but for all her ability to kill monsters, she is a shy teenager. Fortunately, she knows how to use her knee where it counts.

Then in the setup for the climactic scene, Lynn invites teams from around the world to help her take down a “boss” in the game. She has to get past her anxieties to address a hundred gamers. But she uses her motto of “Fake it till you make it.” Only by fighting through this last struggle of teenage angst can she lay out her battle plan and hector the teams into obeying during the battle.

Overall, Through the Storm does not have young people doing their own thing with no adult input. Lynn’s mother is very supportive of her. But when Lynn gets an F on an English assignment, that makes for a serious talk. Also, when the skeezy captain insists on calling the team members by their last names, we can figure out their ethnicities. This is s a simple approach that does not apply virtue signaling to the novel’s diversity.

The story also has more sophisticated content than slashing monsters and teen angst. As a public figure, even private conversations Lynn has can be distorted into public statements. Lynn is not political, but she is cautioned against saying anything controversial to a friend, because that could be recorded by a paparazzi to make money by publicizing her “statement.”

This novel is a sequel to Into the Real, in which Lynn’s online persona was Larry, an older male military veteran. Although Lynn references her Larry persona, this novel stands well on its own. Somewhat jarring are a few scenes that let us know that TransDimensional Hunter is more real than Lynn knows. Chapter 1 is that sort of scene, so it is best to skip it until finishing the story. But Through the Storm is great both for those who want gamer scenes and to see a teenager work through her issues. So yes, this is a YA novel, despite the cover. Although, there was one girl in my high school who looked like that.

Eclipse of the Sun in Seattle

I live in the Seattle area, and I was surprised that most of the people I told that there would be an eclipse today didn’t know about it. I used my NASA-approved dark plastic lenses to watch. It started out looking like a chunk had been taken out of the sun. At the maximum, 95% of the sun was covered. I definitely felt the wind pick up, since the decrease of heat in our area of the atmosphere caused unequal air pressures.

I tried a few times to get a picture, but my phone would just show a bright blur of light—that’s how bright the sun is, even during a partial eclipse. I finally got a picture. But it looked impossible. The eclipse was reversed! How could that happen?

I first thought the phone had somehow picked up a reflection of the dark lenses I was using. But the camera was aimed away from me, at the sun.

I finally realized it was some internal reflection inside the camera, caused by the brightness of the sun. The blur in the upper right is the real eclipse. The image in the lower left is the internal reflection.

But that was my fun in the partially-eclipsed sun.

Military Fantasy—Review of Winds of Marque

Winds of Marque Bennett R. Coles (HarperCollins Publishers 9780062820358, $16.99 pb. 368 pp) April 2019.

Bennett R. Coles is known for his brutally realistic military science fiction. In his Virtues of War trilogy and a short story in the same universe in the Infinite Stars anthology, he describes not only hurtling through atmospheric entry and small group tactics, but also needless intragroup conflict and questionable civilian casualties.

In Winds of Marque Cole throws all that aside and just has fun. The ship use sails whose masts are often in danger of breaking. They use the solar winds to travel—faster than the speed of light? The main weapons are cannons that use gunpowder in the vacuum of space. How does the physics of all this work? It doesn’t. This is a fantasy world in space.

Subcommander Liam Blackwood is a fearless officer. One might even say he is dashing. He accepts a commission from the Lords of his empire to be the executive officer on a ship sent without any support to a distant sector of space. Their mission is to clear out the pirates who are cutting off supply lines. If they fail, they will be denounced as mad rogues. But if they succeed, they will be granted prize money from the cargo they seize from the pirates—enough to make each crew member rich. He is aided by the hyper-efficient Quartermaster Amelia Virtue. She happens to fall into his arms when a ship is shaken in an early adventure. We definitely see where this is going.

Their society is highly structured. Pampered royals often wreak havoc when in command of ships in the Imperial Navy. Fortunately Blackwood and Virtue have a competent captain for their pirate raids, though she is enigmatic and never explains her perplexing orders to Blackwood. That is her prerogative, but eventually the crew loses confidence in her. They’re also saddled with a spoiled brat of a royal cadet, whose sheer obstinacy almost ruins the mission.

The battles are savage when they board pirate ships. Many of the crew on both sides get cut down by swordplay. (Blackwood has the only pistol, which only fires four shots.) Virtue, although a quartermaster, is right there in the swordfights. An interesting alien race are reptiles that can wield swords with their prehensile tales, which ends up being a problem for Blackwood.

Fantasy aside, Coles includes enough pragmatic elements to give the story a realistic feel. Bottlenecks in the loading of cargo threatens the ship’s ability to leave incognito, so even Blackwood and the ship’s doctor lend a hand. When asked if the boarding party is ready, Virtue delays answering while doing a calculation in her head for rigging the boats for assault and equipping fifteen sailors in armor and weapons. She says it will take over an hour. With only enough water left for a one-way trip to a pirate base, the captain gambles that they will win and find the water to return home. (They don't recycle water. Fantasy, y'know?) 

Although Blackwood is a royal himself, he does not fully understand his society’s unwritten rules. He and Virtue have a growing affection for each other. Then he gets furious when he sees her and the royal cadet kissing. Later, Virtue explains angrily that she had to play along. A royal could rape her and not be punished for it. This does make their society less likable, but it is somewhat akin to preferring the British Empire to the pirates they fight.

Fraternization is frowned on, so Blackwood’s inner conflict is to not let his growing love for Virtue adversely influence his decisions concerning her and the rest of the ship. Virtue really doesn’t have much inner turmoil to work through—she mainly reacts to what happens.

Overall, Winds of Marque has good tension and intense fight scenes. If one can accept old-style ship action set in space, the story flows nicely.

Book Review: Star Splitter

Star Splitter. Matthew J. Kirby (Penguin Young Readers Group 9780735231665, $18.99, hc. 320pp) April 2023.

 

Seventeen-year-old Jessica Mathers wakes up in a body printer. This is the fastest way to travel from Earth—to have her data transmitted and assembled. But something has gone horribly wrong. No one is there on the spaceship in orbit of a distant planet to help her recover. She finds blood on a console and a bloody handprint in a corridor. Then she realizes she is not on the spaceship, but in one of its landers that crash-landed on the planet. Outside, she finds the graves of the crew members. Then she meets herself—a Jessica who was printed earlier, but whose explanations of what happened seem a little too pat.

The structure of Star Splitter is deceptively simple: The chapters alternate between the viewpoints of the before Jessica, whose narrative begins days earlier, and the after Jessica, whose narrative begins after the crash. The before Jessica woke up on the spaceship, and her parents were printed two days later. This is where we discover she is lying to the after Jessica, since she tells her their parents never printed.

#

“And Mom and Dad are …?”

“Like I said, they never arrived.”

“Can we pull up their data? What if we just establish them here?”

“I thought about that … I checked the printer … It’s dead.”

#

The time difference between the two viewpoints is meant to build tension as the before Jessica reconnects with her parents, the reader knowing the entire time that some disaster will happen. It can be a little tedious, but the after Jessica goes through harrowing adventures, from being swept away by a river to making her way through endless underground tunnels.

Although they are the same person, the before Jessica is rather sulky—she hasn’t seen her parents in six years, since they decided to explore space without her. She spirals into an odd love/hate relationship with them. The after Jessica grows by overcoming obstacles. She is rather plucky and does not quit, no matter what. Kirby aptly explores both teenage paths.

Ultimately the reader will be satisfied or dissatisfied with Star Splitter based on the explanation of what happened, and the fates of the two Jessicas. I found the disaster not explained convincingly. As for the Jessicas, it is ambiguous as to whether it is a happy ending or not.

As a side note, the first chapter is more of a prologue. It is somewhat gross and unnecessary, so it is best to skip it.  

In the Pink— Review of Barbie

Barbie. Directed and written by Greta Gerwig. Starring Margot Robbie, Ryan Gosling, Kate McKinnon, Simu Liu, America Ferrera, Ariana Greenblatt, Will Ferrell. Rated PG-13 for suggestive references, brief language. Runtime 1 hr. 54 min.

Never before have I seen a movie with so much pink in it.

Barbie is a mostly successful comedy combined with surprisingly deep introspection. First, to get some stupidity out of the way: There is no map showing China’s nine-dash claim to the South China Sea. It is simply a child’s version of the world, with multiple dashed lines showing the path to the Real World. The movie does not have constant lectures bemoaning the patriarchy, nor does it do a triumphant smackdown of the supposed American patriarchy. There is no grooming of children. In fact, middle school girls tell her they haven’t played with Barbies since they “were like five years old.” There is no trashing of the U.S. Supreme Court. Barbie simply sees a billboard of an all-female band and mistakes them for the Supreme Court in Barbie Land. All these accusations were from people who had not seen the movie or saw it through some weird political lens, thus beclowning themselves. It’s a doll’s view of reality, okay?

Our story follows Barbie (Margot Robbie) as she goes through an epic journey of self-awareness. Barbie Land is filled with every Barbie you have ever seen in real life, and more. Barbie can be a physicist, a doctor, a writer, an astronaut, the president, etc. All the Barbies smile and wave in this cartoonish land. They dance every day. Every day is perfect—for the Barbies. Kens are simply sidekicks. Our Barbie’s Ken (Ryan Gosling) can only have a good day so long as Barbie looks at him. She is easily distracted.

Barbie’s crisis begins when she has thoughts of death. Then her feet go from stereotypical high heel position to flat. Horrified, the other Barbies scream “FLAT FEET!” She seeks out Weird Barbie (Kate McKinnon), whose hair was cut off and face was drawn on by her human girl. Weird Barbie tells Barbie she must go to the Real World and find the human girl whose troubles are affecting Barbie.

So she goes on her pink journey, with Ken tagging along. In Barbie Land, Ken had wanted to stay the night, but was too innocent to know why. In the Real World, construction workers make salty remarks at her. In Barbie Land, they never had to buy anything. In the Real World, they end up stealing clothing. Most importantly, Barbie sees sadness around her.

More importantly for Ken, a woman asks, “Sir, do you have the time?” No one has shown him respect before. He then leaps into a belief in an exaggerated patriarchy, where men hold all important positions. Enlightened, he rushes back to Barbie Land.

Meanwhile, Barbie has made the appropriate connection to a female in the Real World, and returns with mother and daughter to Barbie Land. There, they find it has been changed into Kendom, with the Kens acting out extremely exaggerated machismo—lots of beer and Ken wearing a fur coat?

Barbie is mostly a successful movie, Margot Robbie and Ryan Gosling looking every inch like a Barbie and Ken. It would have been so easy for Margot Robbie to overact the part, but she never does. She gives a surprisingly deep performance when Barbie is shocked by the Real World, and then by having everything taken from her. Unfortunately, the movie fails in what is traditionally called the third act, with a mess of a conflict between the Barbies and Kens.

This movie is a labor of love, years in the making by director and screenwriter Greta Gerwig. I have to rely on collectors to vouch that every accoutrement in the movie is authentic, but life-sized. They even briefly showed Midge, Barbie’s pregnant girlfriend. They even more briefly showed Sugar Daddy Ken (that was a thing?). On the flip side, a middle school girl goes on a tirade, saying Barbie ruined women’s lives, and calling Barbie a fascist.

Barbie also has outstanding dance scenes. The one towards the start of the movie is a showstopper, with imaginative choreography and highly skilled dance moves, and lots and lot of pastels. The one towards the end, which features the Kens all dressed in black, is just as imaginative and skillful, but too artistic for this movie. Also, I was shocked at what a great singer Ryan Gosling is.

So overall, Barbie is a fun movie. It does have some amusing cultural comments. But just enjoy it as a Barbie movie.

Bonus feature: The characters are clearly based on archetypes, most famously found in Alice in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass. The characters can slide around from one archetype to another.

Barbie is certainly Alice. Weird Barbie, who gives Barbie two choices, is the caterpillar, who offered two sides of his mushroom. The mother and daughter are mostly the white rabbit that Alice chases. They are sometimes Tweedledee and Twedledum when they argue. The insane CEO and his board (which I did not mention in the above review) are the mad hatter and his tea party. Allan, Ken’s friend (again, not mentioned), who mischievously fights for Barbie, is the Knave of Hearts. Ken starts out as the Cheshire cat, someone who is in and out of Barbie’s life. He becomes the Queen of Hearts, dominating Barbie Land.

Ex-Patriate Dream

Last night I dreamt of a school of bright orange fish in the deep blue sea. A solitary fish joined the school.

A cutaway view of a submarine showed a school of orange fish swimming inside it, though the sub seemed to be functional. The same solitary fish joined them.

The scene changed to what looked like a Middle Eastern countryside. It was the kind of place where ex-patriates from Europe might luxuriate in indolence. It felt like a previous generation.

A young woman with dark hair ventured out in a lacy white dress. She rode a donkey with a man escorting her. She reached out to a tree branch on a short slope. She leaned against it for the sheer joy of it, not caring who saw her.

The scene changed to a large plain hotel room. A couple of men and the young woman lounged there. A number of ex-pats could come and go as they pleased.

A man in a fez hat told at length to an ex-pat the names of all the corrupt people in the city. The ex-pat listened with interest. The man in the fez hat obviously hoped the ex-pat would act on the information.

After the man in the fez hat left, the ex-pat considered for a while. Then he decided, “Why not?” He gave a list of all the names to the authorities.

More time of indolence passed. Then a thirtyish ex-pat n a casual but neat suit came in from the ornate lobby, angry. He said to me, “Brown, you fool! The authorities arrested about a quarter of the men on your list. But didn’t you realize that the authorities enjoy doing business with the rest?”

He pointed at the young woman, concerned for her safety. “Get her out of here!”

It turned out I was Brown. I was the one that the man in the fez hat spoke to. I was the one who had accompanied the young woman. I was the fish who had joined the other fish in the sea.

I grabbed the young woman by the arm and got her out to the hot countryside, hoping to find some transportation.

public domain

Dream of Short Stories

I dreamt that I was at a convention with a workshop on writing, similar to Norwescon or Worldcon. The woman leading the workshop emphasized everything that needs to go into a novel. I had with me a manuscript for a long novel (for a beginner). It was written in four parts. As the woman continued to speak, I realized that what I had was actually four short stories, not a novel.

I had a meeting set for Wednesday, when a number of us could present our manuscripts for a professional to look at it. This would be a prime opportunity. But since what I had was not really a novel, I knew it would not work out. I cancelled my part in the meeting.

When I woke up, I knew the manuscript I had with me in the dream was for a science fiction novel I had written, with main character Ensign Tica Manus. What I had dreamt was true: This was not a novel, but four short stories. (They are actually more like novellas or novelettes.) I will polish them up and submit them to magazines.

In the nineteenth century, the German organic chemist Friedrich August Kekule tried to puzzle out the structure of the benzene molecule. He came up with a circular model of self-linking carbon atoms. His work revolutionized organic chemistry. In a famous speech, Kekule said he came up with the idea after having a daydream of a snake seizing its tale.

image by Français

Paul McCartney composed the song “Yesterday” in a dream. I have heard more than one version of this story. In one version, he rushed to write it down. In the other, he had the song going through his head for much of the day, not recognizing it. He finally realized he had composed it in a dream, then wrote it down.

photo by Mono Macca

It’s a pity such dreams cannot happen on demand. Have you had any such dreams, whether on solving a problem or creating new art?

Sprint into Fun: Review of The Flash

The Flash. Directed by Andy Muschietti. Starring Ezra Miller, Michael Keaton, Sasha Calle, Michael Shannon, Ron Livingston, Maribel Verdu, Ben Affleck. Rated PG-13 for partial male nudity, violence, foul language. Runtime 2 hours 24 minutes. 

After the obligatory action scene at the start (and who doesn’t love a superhero who saves babies and a dog), we move on to the central angst for Barry Allen aka the Flash (Ezra Miller): He is worried for his father, who is falsely imprisoned for the murder of Barry’s mother when he was a child. Overwrought, the Flash runs wildly fast and finds he traveled a short distance into the past.

Naturally, he wants to go back in time and prevent the death of his mother. Bruce Wayne (Ben Affleck) cautions him against this, saying he could destroy everything. Barry says he could also save Bruce’s parents. Bruce wisely says “these scars we have make us who we are." The emotional tug is too strong for Barry, so he goes back and does save his mother.

The way he saves her is reminiscent of the Isaac Asimov novel The End of Eternity, when a time traveler moves an ordinary-looking can and changes the course of a civilization. In this case, Barry has somehow removed the metahumans (Superman, Wonder Woman, Aquaman). What we have left is Batman, an ordinary human. Michael Keaton fills the cape in this alternate universe, and it’s a hoot seeing him as a burnt-out Bruce Wayne who no longer wants to fight the good fight.

Most of the dialog and character interplay are between Barry and a younger, pre-Flash version of himself. Because he didn’t quite come back to the present, the older, driven Barry has constant arguments with the college-age, carefree, obnoxious Barry. Ezra Miller is more than capable of filling both roles. While I was watching the movie, I wasn’t conscious of the fact that it was the same actor playing two characters; they seemed to be two different people.

Sasha Calle is a revelation as the anti-hero Supergirl. (Remember, Supergirl arrived on Earth after Superman, and that's why she exists in this universe.) This Supergirl brutally kills several bad guys. But at first she stays aloof from a world-threatening invasion. As she points out, she’s a Kyptonian, not a human.

Overall, The Flash is a treat for superhero fans. Although, the outfits are too tight in the loin area, if you know what I mean. One does not have to be a geek to recognize a number of multiverse cameos. And the plot holds up. They avoid the futility of endless cycles of endless multiverses, as well as the simplistic idea of always going back in time to fix things when something bad happens. This is more of a cautionary tale than just a show of superpower.

Book Review: Agnes at the End of the World

Agnes at the End of the World. Kelly McWilliams (Little, Brown 978-0316487337, $9.99, pb. 448pp) June 2021. Cover by Tom Bagshaw.

 

Agnes at the End of the World features Agnes, a young woman who has been raised in about the worst cult you can imagine. Most of the adult men (patriarchs) have multiple wives. It’s also a doomsday cult, with the leader—the Prophet—predicting the end of the world, hence the title. They are forbidden from having contact with the Outside, since all Outsiders are evil treacherous people. Agnes begins to doubt their teachings because her little brother Ezekiel has diabetes. She sneaks out to the cemetery once a month at night.

Holding a flashlight and blue picnic cooler, she hurried towards the small collection of headstones that rose from the ground like rotten teeth. The grass was velvet, the moon a white slice.

There, amidst the graves, a nurse gives her a supply of insulin. This nurse has only been kind and compassionate towards her.

The story is mostly from Agnes’ viewpoint, though sometime it’s from the viewpoint of her fifteen-year-old sister Beth. Agnes has been the model of a compliant girl, while Beth is more saucy (for a cult member). When the Prophet declares a revelation that Agnes is to be wife number six for a white-haired patriarch, she hesitates out of care for Ezekiel. The patriarch is sure the Prophet will get another revelation that he should marry Beth instead. Agnes has the stunning realization that the cult has been run on lies.

When Agnes finally escapes to the outside world, she finds a plague has ravished much of the world’s population. The story’s copyright is 2020, so McWilliams must have written it without being influenced by the COVID controversies and shutdowns. This pandemic is a nasty one—both animals and humans develop hard red carapaces, with bristles that can infect others. After a while, they gather into Nests—javelinas (feral pigs) together, crows together, humans together, etc. They are grotesquely intertwined with each other but still alive, though showing no intelligence.

Nothing is easy for Agnes, as she seems to have escaped from a bad world to a worse one, all while having to adjust to the Outside. McWilliams does a fine job with her up-close descriptions of Agnes’ constant dilemmas, having been taught that obedience is all and questioning is sin. When she takes refuge with others in a library, she is astonished that a teenage boy there just wants to play games on his device. Meanwhile she hauls water from a well, cooks, and cleans—not even half as much labor as she is used to. And she refuses to shed her prairie dress for a T-shirt and short pants, since she feels naked in them.

The character of Beth is problematic. She comes off as a bratty teenager who happened to be raised in a cult. And some things about Agnes do not fit. She often uses God’s name in vain while thinking, which does not match her upbringing. She learns to drive in one afternoon and escapes the cult by driving down black asphalt in the dark at eighty miles an hour for miles without crashing! She was only allowed to read the Bible and a few crude books for children. But she easily uses words like “illimitable,” “Gordian knot,” and “crypt keeper.”

Agnes’ most important internal conflict involves what she calls her “prayer space.” At first it seems to be a sense of peace she experiences. But she can use it to sense things and people beyond her sight. Outside the cult, she can sense things miles away. And it is not just an internal sense; at one point she uses it to ward off an infected javelina that charges her. Eventually, the prayer space helps her to sense that God is a fluid that permeates all things. Sometimes God tells her to do things, sometimes she can “use” it. This will be disappointing to readers who were hoping she could tease out the difference between the cult teachings and her core biblical beliefs. Others will find it an interesting science fictional element, somewhat akin to the Force in the Star Wars franchise.

McWilliams is a lyrical writer, going from scenes of twisted beauty to gritty details of survival. Be prepared for several pages at a time dealing with the prayer space as the voice of God. This is an original story, and readers should look at it carefully to see if it is their cup of tea.

Book and Movie Reviews—New Style

In the past, I’ve said this is not a negative blog. I’ve tried to avoid making negative comments on books and movies. This has prevented me from reviewing some books, because to be honest I would have had to say some negative things. From now on I’m going to give the sort of reviews one might read in magazines, which discuss both strengths and weaknesses.

Also, I’m not going to give a SPOILER alert anymore. Obviously, I will not try to spoil a book or movie for anyone. But the reader should be able to sense that the farther one reads a review, the more that might be revealed.

So this is still not a negative blog. But the style will change to be more in conformity with professional reviews.

photo by Christian Bohr

Magazine Review—Analog

The March/April 2023 issue of Analog is well worth reading just for the novelette “The House on Infinity Street” by Allen Steele. It’s a variation on the standard line given when some fan asks, “Where do you get your ideas?” The answer, given with a straight face, is “Schenectady.” It works as a nonsensical answer. If the fan takes the answer seriously, the more elaborate reply is that some mail-order place (I suppose nowadays it would be on TikTok or something similar) in Schenectady, New York will mail an author a story idea for a fee. Some people actually believe the answer, before realizing they’ve been spoofed.

So in a completely serious tone, Steele tells the supposedly true story of how a friend of his had the real experience. But it was in Deerfield, Massachusetts. This was in the late 1950’s—the age of Automats, and also when pulp magazines like Astounding and Unknown were in their heyday. A fellow named Shelby Weinberg got writer’s block, and in desperation wrote to a literary agency that dispensed ideas. What he got back was a description of a futuristic device. Steele, in the present, realizes it’s a smartphone. Shelby continued to get uncannily accurate future ideas, including technology like solar panels. The ideas seemed too real, so eventually a friend persuaded him to visit the literary agency, with unfortunate results.

“The House on Infinity Street” is an enjoyable stroll down memory lane, with Steele naming pulp after pulp I had never heard of before. He also details what it was like to be a struggling writer at the time, with one writer “borrowing” an idea from another. Even if you are not up on the pulp origins of science fiction magazines, this is an intriguing window into that time.

 

 Also enjoyable is the science fact article “Why are the Keplerians so Different?” by Kevin Walsh of the University of Melbourne. The Keplerians are the exoplanets discovered by the Kepler space telescope. Contrary to what many people believe, no one has seen any planets beyond our solar system through a telescope. Their existence is inferred by a star’s light getting periodically dimmed for a short time, which is presumably caused by a planet passing in front of that star.

Many Keplerians have orbits lasting less than ten days, which would mean they are orbiting their stars at immense speeds. Others have very low density, with one having only one tenth the density of water. Still others are quite massive. Walsh freely admits that a couple of these more massive supposed planets are probably brown dwarf stars. (My own take is that some of these exoplanets are also small stars, but in a new category similar to brown dwarfs.)

In any event, the Keplerian exoplanets do not resemble the planets in our own solar system.

So if you can order the March/April Analog or read it in a library, you will find particularly good science fiction and fact to read.

Movie Review—Suzume

Suzume is a high schooler in Kyushu who was orphaned when she was a little girl. She has been living with her aunt for ten years. One day a young man asks her if there are any ruins nearby. Intrigued, she goes there herself. She sees a lone door standing amidst wreckage. When she opens it she sees an otherworldly realm, but cannot reach it. She also sees a carving of a cat, which see pulls out of the ground. It comes to life and runs away.

After that, a monstrous creature comes out of the doorway, causing an earthquake. She and the young man—Souta—are barely able to close the door and avoid disaster. It turns out the cat was a guardian meant to keep the door closed. Suzume and Souta chase the cat across Japan, trying to shut other doors and prevent ever-increasing disasters.

Suzume has flashbacks of herself as young child, wandering around, looking for her mother. But are these memories? Or is she seeing herself in that other realm?

Suzume ranges from scenes of delicate beauty to looming horrific disaster. This is high quality animation, with good detail and realistic motion, no matter how odd the chase scenes are. What stuck in my mind was the kindness Suzume experiences on her journey: From a young woman her age hauling fruit, to a mother who sees her at a bus stop where the next bus will not come for hours, they all want to help her. Suzume does chores for room and board, which is heartening so see.

The director, Makoto Shinkai, has openly said he was influenced by Super-Frog Saves Tokyo, which also involves preventing an earthquake. That in turn must have been influenced by the Japanese myth of Namazu, the giant catfish beneath Japan that causes earthquakes.

The movie has a couple of weaknesses. I suppose this is where I put SPOILERS. Suzume and Souta spend the movie as travel buddies. Then towards the end she tells her aunt that she loves him. This is very sudden. Also, her aunt becomes unaccountably cruel in one scene and tells Suzume she wasted the best years of her life caring for her. It is unclear if another door guardian is making her say these things, but it is unsettling.

So Suzume is well worth watching. Definitely do not walk out the minute the credits start rolling. For those of you who are Makoto Shinkai fans and love his movie Your Name, have your friends watch Suzume first. It is hard for Shinkai to live up to his masterpiece, Your Name.

Norwescon 3—Supplemental

Last year, I took a lot of pictures, which took a long time to post. This year, I took much less.

 

 

 

 

 

Below, we see Batman and Robin getting photobombed by the Penguin.

 

Torrey Stenmark is in her floor costume below. She has the kind of light saber that sizzles. She recognized me, so she flicked it and made it sizzle as she walked by, which startled me.

 

Here she is in her Masquerade costume. I asked her who her character was. She asked me if I had seen Top Gun. I hadn’t, so I was a little puzzled.

 

Perhaps this will help.

 

click to enlarge

Norwescon 2—Supplemental

Norwescon was held at a hotel near the SeaTac airport. Here’s a view with an airliner taking off in the upper left.

 

I should have said in yesterday’s post that Kimberly Unger was one of the speakers on the subject of AI—or not really AI, just machine learning.

 

 Later, she won the Philip K. Dick award for best paperback novel (science fiction of fantasy) published last year. Here she is with the award for her book, The Extractionist.

For me, the best event was a workshop called “Plotting Your Novel with Save the Cat!“ A lot of people have good writing skills. They can write interesting scenes. But they are told their story structure will not attract readers. Our instructor, Emily Leverett, went over in detail the best story structure that works over and over again, using the book Save the Cat! Writes a Novel, by Jessica Brody.

As Emily Leverett emphasized, this is not a matter of imposing a wooden template that gets rid of originality. The story template comes from observing successful novels and movies. It can be seen in stories as diverse as The Lord of the Rings novels, the Star Wars movies, Jane Austen novels, the movie Legally Blonde, etc.

As to what the phrase Save the Cat! means, buy the book. It will do you good.

Norwescon 1—Supplemental

First a personal message:

Hello, HAZZARD. If you are reading this, it was pleasant to talk to you. You may already be familiar with the Medieval play “Everyman.” If not, I strongly encourage you to read it.

Mark

__________________________________________________

Norwescon is the biggest science fiction/fantasy convention in the Pacific Northwest that has a good focus on writing. Interestingly enough, the subject of AI was big. Although, panelists who spoke about it did not see it as an end-of-the-world development.

What they said is we do not have true AI (artificial intelligence) yet. What we have is machine learning that can do specific tasks. This machine learning is becoming rapidly more sophisticated. A number of editors said they are getting submissions written by these supposed AI programs. They say they can easily spot them.

So it is not a threat. Yet.

As an odd coincidence, the hotel parking lot has a robot security drone. An anonymous source said they had had some catalytic converters stolen out of cars, but this drone took care of the problem.

One conventioneer said he looked out his window one morning and saw a Dalek in the parking lot.

Never fear, there was a real Dalek there.

I thought it would be cool to have designed the security robot like a Dalek. But it might not be taken seriously. The sleek functional look is better.

Shazam 2—A Caution

Shazam! Fury of the Gods starts off where the first movie left off, in terms of storytelling. If you did not see the first movie, it is not clear at all which high school kid turns into Shazam. It’s Billy Batson. But his foster brother Freddy Freeman kind of dominates the first part of the movie, so a viewer might conclude it’s Freddy.

 

So to get people caught up, when Billy yells “Shazam!’ he turns into that superhero (played by Zachary Levi). Now his foster siblings (Mary, Freddy, Darla, Pedro, and Eugene) can do the same.

 

It turns out their powers were stolen from certain obscure Greek gods, and now they want them back, hence the title of the movie.

 

The Shazam! movies are not the dark sort of DC movies. They are meant to be more lighthearted, to draw children as well as teens and adults. So I have to warn you there is a scene where an adult commits suicide. I do not want anyone complaining I just did a spoiler. They want children and teens to see this. I am not under any obligation to hide what they show.

 

 

The original Shazam! had a good amount of humor, much of it childish. It was genuinely funny. This sequel also has humor, though not as much. I didn’t find most of it funny, but other people in the audience laughed. However, it was a good laugh when Shazam mispronounced Solomon as “Solo-Man.”

The cast made an unusually good catch with Helen Mirren as one of the Greek goddesses. Lucy Liu also looks great. But no offense, she doesn’t seem like a deep character while sharing the screen with Helen Mirren. Very few people can.

As for Billy/Shazam, he suffers from imposter syndrome. He does not believe he deserves the powers he’s been given. So he overcompensates by demanding the foster siblings always stick together for their adventures. But his imposter syndrome stays with him. Will he be able to resolve this before the end?

SPOILERS * SPOILERS * SPOILERS

TV Review: The Ark (continued)

So in my last post, I reviewed the SyFy series The Ark (also shown on Peacock). I have some additional thoughts.

At first, I thought that Richard Fleeshman (who plays Lieutenant James Brice) was contractually obligated to take his shirt off, since he did it in the first three episodes. But he hasn’t done it in the next three episodes, so maybe they got past that initial Twilight silliness.

The blonde Valley girl turned out to be a counselor. She made sexy remarks in the first three episodes. But they turned her into a serious character, so I hope they are over that silliness, too.

The science is not getting better. It’s still silly. Um, space is a vacuum. They don’t have to keep the engine running for the ship to go through space at a constant speed.

But they do a good job with at least three intertwining plot lines in each episode: the struggle for survival, the leadership struggle, and ongoing mysteries (starting with a murder mystery).

On a personal note, it took me a while to watch through episode 6. That’s because I had to sign up for Peacock’s monthly plan. When they first rolled out Peacock, they advertised it would be free, free, free, etc. Then it turned out to keep watching a series, a viewer has to pay. I was so insulted, I wouldn’t at first. But The Ark turned out to be so good, I signed up for their paltry monthly fee. So there you go.

TV Review: The Ark

A sleeper ship containing dozens of people in suspended animation has a violent impact just one year short of the planet they were sent to colonize. The entire command staff was wiped out in the impact. But that is just the beginning of their problems. They only have four weeks’ worth of water. They have six weeks’ worth of food.

Lieutenant Sharon Garnet (Christie Burke) takes command. Everyone on board is an expert in something: science, engineering, etc. She assigns some of the crew to retrofit the water recycling unit meant for the colony. This is no easy task: The right equipment has to be scavenged. An attempt is made to grow food in a cargo bay. But the power requirements for the lights can impinge on the search for equipment. Always, somebody disagrees with her decisions.

There are so many problems with the premier episode of The Ark. I don’t consider anything that follows to be a spoiler. When the crew wakes up from suspended animation, they are instantly alert and able to sprint to a safer part of the ship. Seriously? They later show the compression suits they were in was what allowed them to run, but inflated pants don’t work that way.

They use the centrifugal effect (actually centripetal force) to simulate gravity. One part of the ship stopped rotating. When it starts again, people in mid-air immediately fall to the floor. Physics doesn’t work that way, man! There is no reason why people in mid-air would suddenly fall like that. They would bounce off the walls and possibly the ceiling first before settling onto the floor. (The movie Passengers had the same problem, but I digress.)

While we’re at it, the ship has two rotating sections. They rotate the same way. That would make for an intense Coriolis effect, so the whole ship would rotate against its axis. It would be better if the sections rotated in opposite directions, or had one large section rotating one way, and two smaller sections rotating a different way. (Look at Ragnar Station in the premier of Battlestar Galactica. They almost got it right.)

For the more personal matters, some jerk sarcastically addresses a woman he thinks is Russian as “comrade.” What? That was a term used in the days of the Soviet Union. Why would someone a hundred years from now use it?

There is a blonde ditz who does “Valley Girl” talk. One scene implies she is showing off her naked body. Save that for soap operas. 

Two young geeky people wear geeky glasses. Why? To let us know they are geeks. I didn’t see anyone else wearing glasses.

There are three lieutenants. The other two dispute whether Lt. Garnet should be in charge, since they are all equal. Obviously they have equal rank, but they wouldn’t have equal seniority. If one of them was promoted even a day before the others, that one would be the senior officer. Lieutenants would be well aware of who is senior to whom.

Believe it or not, this is not a negative blog. Despite all the problems, I plan to continue to watch The Ark. The challenge of how they will survive is intriguing. I like Lieutenant Garnet. Also, I like Lieutenant James Brice’s (Richard Fleeshman's) Scottish accent.