I first discovered Ken Hollings’ Welcome to Mars on Boing Boing and can’t recommend this show enough to anyone who is curious about the intersections of science, popular culture, science fiction, and the nooks and crannies of American history from 1947 – 1959. From government agencies setting up brothels in San Francisco to test various combinations of psychedelic drugs, to UFOs, to the creation of suburbia, Hollings takes you on a ride through the kind of history that you won’t find in textbooks or in a Ken Burns documentary. Subtitled “On the Fantasy of Science in the American Half-century,” the series begins with an examination of Levittown, the very first of the modern suburbs and weaves a narrative that is both compelling and somewhat disturbing. Hollings’ narrative is also underscored by the electronic music of Simon James; music that alternates between haunting and jarring. On first listen, the music may seem extraneous, intrusive, or just plain annoying. In part, because Hollings’ story is so damn intriguing that whenever the music pulls focus, you think to yourself “get back to the real part of the podcast, I want to hear what’s next.” On second listen, however, the music and sounds of Simon James, these odd and jangling, ethereal and robotic sounds become a part of the narrative. James provides a non-verbal commentary that weaves together the various fantasies of science and culture that Hollings reveals.

This show tapped into my personal reservoir of interest in UFOs, science fiction and science fact. From fantasies of government conspiracy to conspiracies of government fantasy to the desperate desire for alien actuality, I have—since childhood and my reading about Betty and Barney Frank, the Loch Ness monster, Bigfoot, and the Bermuda Triangle—been intrigued and excited by questions of the paranormal, cryptozoology, and the possibilities of aliens among us. What sets Hollings’ discussion apart from the typical kooky claims, is that he approaches these subjects as a web of cultural and socio-political inferences. For Hollings, the question isn’t “do UFOs exist?” but rather “what does it mean for a culture to believe, disbelieve, and variously represent the existence of UFOs?” As an erstwhile academic influenced by performance studies and feminism, I believe that the connections between government policies, movies, television, architecture, music, and popular representations of science are tremendously important in the attempt to understand ourselves. Hollings offers a snapshot of culture that reveals a number of aspects of the American consciousness that, on the surface of things, may seems trivial, but are, in fact, the very warp and woof of our national identity.

Welcome to Mars is a twelve part series, with each show about thirty minutes in length. If you are anything like me, you’ll probably devour the series in only two or three sittings as you fall down a rabbit hole and find yourself in a strange world that is our own but that is refracted and off-kilter. Like how, when you put your finger underwater, your vision doesn’t quite match up with your physicality. A world of interconnections that rebuild your perceptions about American history and our cultural relationship to science fiction and science fact.

iTunes Link

Website Link

Hollings also published a book version of the podcast that is available on Amazon, Powells, or through Strange Attractor Press.

Do you remember the feeling you got in the pit of your stomach when you saw your best friend kissing the girl you’d never gotten the nerve to ask out but pined for night after night and who you just knew would fall in love with you if only she could see just how much you were in love with her?

Do you remember that night when you were five, maybe six, years old and you caught your Dad getting into a Santa Claus costume and your parents assured you that he was just helping out the real Santa but you knew, knew in your fast beating little heart that they were lying to you and that there was no Santa Claus. If your parents could lie about something so important and fundamental as Santa, then how could you ever trust anyone or anything ever again?

Do you remember the first time you lied to someone you loved? Not a small lie, but an important lie. Do you remember how hollow you felt afterwards?

That’s kind of how I feel about the Battlestar Galactica finale.

What I look for in a series finale is some emotional closure. Sure we saw what happened to the characters, but it felt like nothing was left to ponder about their personal journeys. And I’m with Pablo. If there’s anything I want from a series finale, it’s a reprise of the show’s tone. And a mostly happy ending with everything neatly explained away was not what I thought of when I thought of BSG. And I guess that’s what disappointed me the most. – Theresa DeLucci.

Of all the criticisms that have been leveled against Ron Moore’s ending for what was a remarkable television series, Ms. DeLucci’s statement gets to the heart of the matter. We can argue about whether the epilogue was clumsy or cute (it certainly wasn’t clever), or if Starbuck’s “angel” status implies a necessary rejection of rational humanism in the face of some nebulous religiosity and narratively lazy use of “Fate.” We can discuss the relative merits of so many good guys surviving the final showdown or the incredibly bizarre and out-of-character scene with Adama openly mocking Boomer as a young Raptor pilot in training (a scene in which Adama appears to be drunk while on duty). We can pick over the various character arcs that seemed to be forgotten or dismissed, but at the center of the failure that was BsG’s finale lies the this fact: when Galactica reached this new and untrammeled “Earth,” the show became a stranger to itself and its fans; it stopped honoring the core narrative principles that made the series so compelling and it delivered a kidney punch to its reputation as a serious work of science fiction.

Earth means never having to say you’re sorry

Happy endings – No examination of how actions have consequences (Tyrol killing Tori at exactly the wrong time for peace to occur) – Gender stereotypes (Helo in a fit of machismo deciding that he has to be the one to teach Hera to hunt; Hera’s achievement is, at least on the metaphorical and mitochondrial level, to have babies) – Supernatural disappearances – Zero dissension or dialogue about throwing away what little technology and culture that has survived a near genocide – Romantic illusions of living off the land and fucking the natives – “Angels” moralizing about whether we will survive the decadence of a technological society

Really? That is what Battlestar Galactica is about? This melange of crappy dialogue, patently illogical choices, utter nihilism in the face of a second chance, and meaningless robot montages? So in the end BsG is an utterly boring warning about the dangers of technology and a potential robot uprising? I really really didn’t think so. At least I didin’t think so until Ron Moore and Company decided to exit a series that has examined violence, honor, love, betrayal, loss, strength and the will to survive with a brief overview of the current status of robot development in our world.

The moral of the story seems to be: technology bad, small hunter/gatherer societies good.

Let’s back up there for a moment.

The moral of the story? Really, a moral? BsG was remarkable in its attempts to avoid moralizing throughout the series. One of the show’s core strengths was that it didn’t make moral judgements, and instead forced its audience to consider multiple and sometimes contradictory moral viewpoints. So rarely did the show come right out and say “this is right and this is wrong,” that the going native as the solution to all our problems and the epilogue’s warning about our oncoming fate feel completely out of place. The ending makes an explicit link between the destruction of technology as a good thing and the potential dangers of our current technology that is reactionary if not downright Luddite.

So yeah, I’m pissed off at the end of BsG primarily because I wasn’t watching the conclusion the series I’d invested time and thought and emotion in. Instead, I was watching some weird cuckoo ending that stole the show’s heart and devoured it while I watched and could do nothing.

All that stuff we dealt with for 4 seasons? Nevermind.

All those questions of how society under duress can operate and the place of individuals in such a society. Thrown out. Who cares if we’re all just going native? We’ll just sleep under the stars and it’ll be peachy-keen and we’ll all just forget the last few years have happened and that the Cylons committed unspeakable crimes and that the humans turned on each other on New Caprica and that we no longer have a functioning, or even remotely democratic, government.

All those questions about personal responsibility and how each of us acts in a time of crisis or violence? Tyrol simply smiles a rueful smile and goes of to an island to hang out by himself after killing the woman he once loved (I would assume that since they all shared memories and Ellen had memories of their time 2000 years ago that he would have remembered being in love with Tory), and destroying a genuine attempt at detente between the humans and Cavil’s forces. He doesn’t face up to Helo or Sharon about his role in Boomer’s escape and kidnapping of Hera. People were killed in the mutiny, but hey, lets go make some nice antelope skin clothes. The Sons of Ares have become a kind of militia force that is attempting to gain power through violence and intimidation, but I’m sure they’ll be lovely chaps once they get down to farming a few acres of land.

All the struggles and sacrifices that people have made to remain a coherent civilization in the face of extreme peril? Fuck ‘em. They don’t matter in the face of Lee’s selfish idea to go rock-climbing instead of continuing to try to hold these people together. The worth of attempting to maintain a democratic government? None really, since we are just going to fracture into a few small tribes. The worth of forming a union and giving Tyrol the opportunity to fight for the workers? Absolutely nothing because now everyone gets to live a hard and short life with limited possibilities and limited resources to learn and study the universe around them. And guess what, without certain kinds of technology and learning, the Sons of Ares are going to run the place because they have the muscle and the meanness. The worth of Adama falling in love and realizing there was something more important than duty? Zilch because he obviously hasn’t learned to love his son or other people. The worth of Adama and Tigh’s relationship? Not much considering they go their separate ways with nary a care about the other. Starbuck’s journey? Well, since she just disappears and doesn’t have to put any of the things she’s learned about herself into practice . . . I’d say that her journey means pretty much nothing. Baltar’s journey? Oh he’s back to being a farmer so let’s just forget all about the fact that he loves intellectual puzzles and trying to understand the world around him and that even coming face to face with his own nature doesn’t mean he has to stop being a scientist. Oh wait, I forgot: science and technology = bad and scary things.

Going native, or, let’s make our kids’ future brutish, nasty and short.

Progress, far from consisting in change, depends on retentiveness. When change is absolute there remains no being to improve and no direction is set for possible improvement: and when experience is not retained . . . infancy is perpetual. Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it. – George Santayana, The Life of Reason, Volume 1, 1905

Let’s put the whole angel, fate, and higher power bullshit—not to mention that fact that 30,000 people would all decide to do the same thing (a miracle several orders of magnitude larger than angels and fate combined—behind us for one moment and just reflect on the decision to have over 30,000 people give up all their technology, their entire cultural history, the ability to make medicine, or teach surgical techniques. I’m not the only one to view this ending as completely and utterly implausible, irresponsible and just plain dumb and I’m sure I’m not the only one who will find this action the biggest betrayal of the entire series and will make me view Ron Moore’s future projects with a skeptical eye. Not only does this bone-headed decision make no sense from a psychological point of view, the consequences of such a decision don’t appear to have been thought out with any amount of consideration on the part of the characters or the writers. For a series that attempted, time and time again, to present problems without easy solutions and to engage characters in a dialogue about what is right versus what is necessary and where the line between survival and human rights can be drawn, this ending signals a complete shift in tone that offers no substantive discussion about the merits of such a drastic action. Don’t underestimate the desire for a clean slate? Oh come on, don’t underestimate the power of metal and electricity and medicine and engineering to offer people a higher quality of life. Don’t underestimate the power of a species to learn from it’s mistakes instead of throwing their whole culture into the sun. Sure, some of the humans and some of the cylons learned to work together and trust each other, but if the claim is that we are descended from them, we know what happened over the last 150,000 years and learning from their mistakes certainly hasn’t occurred. Which means that any progress made by the last of survivors of the 12 Colonies has been lost. Worse than lost, thrown away by those very survivors. Which is more tragic, near genocide or the survivors of that near genocide lobotomizing themselves and condemning their children and their children’s children, to a world of short life spans, high infant mortality rates, death from any number of preventable illnesses and diseases, and robbing their descendants of a rich history of music and art and culture?¹

Not only that, but can you imagine how betrayed you would feel if your parents had the power to fly between the stars but they decided to throw that away so that you could forage for roots and wear the skins of dead animals and struggle to keep a fire going and spend your entire life in the pursuit of survival and very little else. What kind of resentment and anger would that fuel, to know that your parents had the power to keep your sister from dying in childbirth, or your brother from kidney stones, or heal that nasty wound you got while hunting instead of letting you die from infection, gangrene and rot? Instead, they just threw all those abilities away in a spasm of selfish insanity.

Under the guise of a “happy ending” BsG concludes with what I think is the most selfish, cynical and obscene act ever undertaken in the the series. That in itself isn’t necessarily bad if the series had led up to such an act and showed us a group of people capable of destroying their own future. But we have spent four seasons watching people clawing their way through disaster after disaster, and all the while desperately trying to cling to their culture and keep themselves—politically and socially—from losing everything their parents and grandparents and great-grandparents, etc., had created over thousands of years. Nevermind that the conclusion fails because it ignores everything we know about human psychology (30,000 people are not dumb enough to dispose of their resources for making a better life for their family): the ending of Battlestar Galactica fails most because it makes all of the struggles and all of the journeys and all of the personal revelations worthless.

What is unconscionable from a series that has been dedicated to exploring tough questions about human lives and human society under extreme duress is this easy dismissal of human lives and human history. Starbuck tells Lee that what she fears more than death is being forgotten and then the writers promptly end the series with over 30,000 people participating in an act of collective and self-induced amnesia.

And it all could have been avoided.

I’m not usually one for second-guessing other writers and coming up with alternative storylines and plots. Perhaps because, as a writer, that kind of criticism is rarely helpful, but there are a couple of glaring possibilities that could have been exploited to make the ending much better even if the fleet still ended up on our Earth 150,000 years ago.

Option 1: Galactica Alone

Instead of our nice, neat, and happy reunion of those who volunteered for Galactica’s last mission and the rest of the fleet, Adama could have ordered Hoshi to return the fleet to Kobol on the understanding that no matter what, the Galactica would destroy Cavil’s forces. Then, when Galactica makes its last jump, they are unable to contact the fleet, but secure in knowing that the main threat to the surviving human’s has been destroyed. In this scenario, there really would be no point to trying to reconstitute their old civilization because there would be too few people. Our heroes can then go about hunting or climbing mountains or farming or whatever they want to do because they are so diminished in numbers that they literally could not hold onto their history and technology for much more than a couple of generations. You could even come up with some reason to shoot Galactica into the sun (unable to maintain a stable orbit, would eventually fall to earth and create catastrophe on a global scale, etc.).

Option 2: Atlantis

Ok, you want everyone to make it to this new world together? Have them build their city, have them become the basis for our legends of Atlantis or other lost civilizations. Have them try their hardest to remember and to continue and to build and to create a new life and in the end, their failure is one of human nature and time: 150,000 years is a long, long time and there are many ways that their culture and technology could have been lost over that period. Have their tragedy be our potential tragedy: given enough time, even technological civilizations can fall and forget and become condemned to repeat their mistakes. You wouldn’t even have show all of that, simply have them name the city Atlantis and we could work out from there what happens in their future.

I don’t claim that either of these ideas are brilliant or particularly original (they are neither). However, either scenario would offer more dramatic energy to the ending of show than what Moore gave us. Either one could be made to more closely fit the tone, atmosphere, and themes of the series as a whole than what we were offered.

If the conclusion had been weak, or not lived up to my expectations, that would be one thing. That the ending invalidated so much of what the series and the characters had explored and struggled with is much, much worse. I honestly expected that after the series finale, I would immediately want to start watching the show from the beginning again. Instead, I felt numb and unsettled. Completely disinterested in seeing either the upcoming Caprica series or the BsG movie The Plan. I am also unsure if I will watch the series again knowing that the ending of the story repudiates so much of what I most love about the show. With all due respect to Ron Moore, Edward Olmos, Mary McDonnell, and everyone else involved in the show, this ending was a lousy cheat.

Yes, Battlestar Galactica still stands as a remarkable show in many regards. I further contend that Mary McDonnell gave one of the most intricate, nuanced, and fulfilling performances in the history of television. Her truth and emotional honesty throughout the series was breathtaking. In all honesty, if anything brings me back to watching the show from the mini-series onward, it will be her performance. From a feminist perspective, the show remains an example of how to represent women as complex, strong, and, more importantly, socially equal to men. BsG also demonstrated, to a general population who are used to crappy science fiction movies and television, that science fiction can be an important and deeply emotional storytelling genre.² All of these positives remain and television is better off for having this series.

But do you remember when your lover sat you down and said, “we have to talk” and wouldn’t meet our eyes and told you that the foundation of your relationship had been build around a fundamental lie and everything you thought you knew about your love was nothing but ashes?

That kind of ending makes being friends with your ex all sorts of difficult.

1. How ironic then that these people had been led for years by an ex-teacher and now they have destroyed all need for teachers and replaced their cultural knowledge and past with a blank slate. Not, by the way, ironic in any interesting or compelling way.
2. However, enough with the whole BsG “transcends the genre” bullshit. It doesn’t and never did. What it transcends is poorly executed examples of the genre which, unfortunately, make up the bulk of any and all genres of storytelling.

Because I hadn’t had cable for several years, I’d missed the mini-series re-boot of one of my favorite shows when I was a kid: Battlestar Galactica.

When I was eight or so, I adored Battlestar Galactica and had no conception of just how badly written and directed it was. I loved it. I loved the Vipers that Starbuck and Apollo and Boomer piloted and would draw them over and over again when I was bored in school or at home. My drawing repertoire was never very large, and that Colonial Viper was just about the only thing I ever learned to draw well. And then, of course, there was Starbuck who seemed so frakkin’ awesome to me back then with his charm and grin and anti-authoritarian streak. He was a rogue and played by his own rules: exactly what I was so very not. Battlestar Galactica was a weekly adventure that thrilled me no matter how often they recycled the same canned footage for their battle scenes. I have no doubt that the premise, underdogs on the run and persecuted by a remorseless and relentless force, tapped into my own experience of the world as a child. Don’t misunderstand, I had a healthy and happy and overall uneventful childhood. But what child doesn’t see the adult world as generally oppressive and cast him or herself as the beleaguered hero in their own drama?

The mini-series and first season of the new Battlestar Galactica had come and gone by the time I started paying attention and so, one evening I took a look around and found that, yes indeedy, the mini-series was available as a bittorrent download and so I figured I’d check it out.

***

One of the powers given to a television series that sets it apart from other storytelling mediums is just how intimately its stories become woven into the fabric of our lives. Here I’m speaking specifically of the experience of watching a series as it airs. These days it is relatively easy to watch entire seasons of a series on dvd or through downloads or on Hulu.com, and watch them in an extremely compressed time frame, and I’ve done my share of obsessively watching a season or an entire series in a matter of days or weeks (13 episodes of Journeyman in 2 days, the entire series of Carnivale in 2 weeks, 2 seasons of Dead Like Me in 1 week, and the mini-series and first season of Battlestar Galactica in 3 days are just a few examples). As much as I might admire or fall in love with a series watched in such a way, the emotional impact of having a long term connection to a show can’t be recreated with such a compressed form of viewing. The act of coming back to a set of characters, of transporting yourself to another world week after week after week can build an emotional connection that cannot be matched by film or theatre. Doctor Who, X-Files, Twin Peaks, Northern Exposure, Buffy: these were all series that became part of the fabric of my life in deeply interesting and compelling ways.¹ Did these shows change my life? Did the recent Battlestar Galactica change my life?

Of course. Not in any profound, I’m-a-completely-different-person kind of way, but everything we encounter in life changes us in small and subtle ways. Powerful stories, whether in film, on television, in books, on stage, or told to us a grandparent, a lover, or an utter stranger will always change us in some fashion.

Stories and change are what it means to be human.

***

Last night I watched the final episode of Battlestar Galactica. In the time that I’ve been watching the show, I have left Richmond, moved in with Joya in NYC for what was the longest and most intimate relationship of my life, started and left a Ph.D. program, shared the sad realization with Joya that we needed to go our separate ways despite our love for each other, and left New York City. I have made an abortive but still emotionally useful attempt to move to New Mexico, decided to become a consultant and open my own business, realized that what I really want is to return to Academia and get my Ph.D. I have moved back to Providence, started temping for Kelly Services², have designed the sound for eight plays, and applied to Brown University’s Ph.D. program for Theatre and Performance Studies and was rejected. I have faced and fought a number of my own personal demons, sometimes winning, sometimes losing. I have quit smoking, gained weight, and have somehow wandered to the edge of my 30s and am peering, a bit uneasily, into the unblinking eyes of my 40s.

***

When I moved to NYC and moved in with Joya, I turned her on to the series in time for us to watch the second season in the episodic, weekly format. Later, she got her parents and sister hooked on the series while I did the same with my parents. The past 10 weeks of the show have been tinged with a sadness that lies outside of show coming to a conclusion because I have very much missed watching the show with Joya. Battlestar Galactica has overlapped an often rewarding and often turbulent period in my life that is indelibly marked by my relationship with Joya. She and I have shared an ongoing connection through the show since we moved apart last July because, even apart, we have been able to share in this tangible remnant of our life and love together. For the last 10 weeks we have been spending time in the same story even as we write entirely different stories for ourselves in the real world.

***

Good stories are my favorite things in the whole wide world. A good story is a gift. Sometimes we are lucky enough to be the storyteller and give a gift the emanates solely from within ourselves. More often, however, we encounter a story out in the world that touches us deeply or makes us laugh or offers us a piece of ourselves we’d thought lost along the way. We then loan the book to a close friend, or drag her to the movie theatre, or get him watching a particular show, or manage to get her to the theatre. The joy I receive when giving a story to someone I care about fills me with warmth and smiles and a dizzy excitement.

Never let anyone tell you that feeling deeply and passionately about a story is silly. Never close yourself off to a good story just because it may come in a format you aren’t very familiar with.

Battlestar Galactica may not have been a perfect story—the facts of producing a television show rarely make for the creation of perfection—but it was a good story, told honestly and with a love for its characters even when those characters’ actions led to pain, loss, and betrayal. This show was also a remarkable story in many ways, principally because of its strong commitment to gender equality, its commitment to examining deeply political and ethical questions without giving the audience clear-cut answers as to what is right and what is wrong, and its portrayal of love and sex through the bodies of older actors. Ron Moore and David Eick, along everyone who worked on the program, have given us a gift forged in creativity, effort, thoughtfulness, laughter, pain, and love.

So, to all of you who brought this story into my life and to all of you who have shared this story with me, I offer you my gratitude.

***

Was last night’s episode perfect? No. Could I spend another 1000 – 2000 words offering a critique of what didn’t work in the conclusion. Yes, and probably will in the coming days. Right now, however, I am letting myself savor the final chapter to a story I have lived with for several years. I am letting myself feel the precious weight of this gift I’ve been given: this story that has touched me, made me laugh, and made me cry. I am letting myself mourn the loss of a story and cast of characters that made me think about what it means to be human and what it means to be brave and what it means to love.

You will be missed, Battlestar Galactica.

So say we all.

1. Not to mention the shows I watched as a child: MASH, Buck Rogers, Battlestar Galactica, The Hulk, Land of the Lost to name a few.
2. Yes, I’m a Kelly Girl!

An amazing film that creates an entire world, offers compelling characters, and scary action scenes and does it in a few minutes and with no dialogue:

9 Nine Shane Acker Short Animation
by FrFKmeron

A lovely rendition of “While My Guitar Gently Weeps” on a ukelele:

If you never watched Ze Frank’s daily videocast when it was on, you missed out on something special. This is the first I’ve seen of him as an actor in a quirky and low-budget project that was put together during the Writer’s strike last year. While not in development, the project has some tantalizing elements that make me hope for a future incarnation:
The Remnants from John August on Vimeo.

A brief interview with one of my favorite writers. There are two parts, check out MIT TechTV’s site for the second half:

And finally, the trailer for Coraline, based on Neil Gaiman’s book. This looks beautiful and scary and so much fun:

Carbon Nanotubes

How would you like to wear your Facebook connection on your skin, or have a tattoo that moves and changes color? “E-skin” is on the way and how cool is that? Check out this article on IO9 about research into transparent circuits. (Link)

Also from IO9:

A group of researchers in France and Italy have published a paper today in Nature Nanotechnology that carbon nanotubes can act as neural workarounds in the brain, forming tight contacts with the already-existing nerve cells and conducting electricity between them exactly the way neurons do with each other. (Link)

True, nanotechnology lags far behind our imagination of what such technology might someday do, but stories like these show that we are definitely making progress toward a world where we build ourselves and our materials in ways radically different than what we have ever known.

The End is Nigh

Of course, one of the signs that the future is upon us is the end of civilization as we know it, so we may not reach our nanotech potential if the sun knocks out our electrical systems and sends the world spiraling back into the (literal) dark ages. Even our iPhones will be useless. *shudder* (Link)

Bodies Fabricated & Altered

This is a still from a new animated movie called Metropia that looks amazing. You can see a gallery of stills at Twitch. The bodies in the movie, while not proportioned the same as a “natural” body, are uncannily real. How soon will we have avatars that are visually indistinguishable from life? Based on this work, not very long at all.

The trope of body modification has a long history in science fiction literature and while we aren’t quite at the level of designing our skin to change color with our moods, or interfacing with computers directly, or altering our bodies to survive environments without protection (like the deep sea or extreme cold or the vacuum of space), the body mod sub-culture is certainly pushes the boundaries of what we consider “human.” The video might actually be disturbing to some, but I think it’s fascinating and a clear sign that we are living in a future that allows us to sculpt our bodies in interesting ways.

How cool was replicator technology in Star Trek? Nearly as cool as transporter technology. We may not be able to order an Earl Grey tea alongside Jean Luc Picard quite yet, but the beginnings of being able to simply fabricate objects instead of buying them. Need a coffee table—which I happen to need at the moment—just plug in a pre-loaded design or modify it to your specifications on your computer, send it to your in-house, 3-d printer and you’ve got yourself a piece of furniture to set you feet up on and write blog posts. Boing Boing links to a talk given at the Chaos Computer Congress that will get you up to speed on where we are and where we are heading with this technology. (Link)

Then there is robot sex. Need I say more? (Link)

~~~

Those are just a few instances that, when I came across them, I said to myself, “Self, the future is now.” Have you found something that strikes you as utterly futuristic but immanently now? Drop a comment to share with the class.

I’m currently about halfway through Stephenson’s latest book and it is an amazing, rich, thought-provoking, deeply intellectual, and engrossingly emotional novel. The kind of novel that you want to live in for a good long while. Even though I have over 400 pages to go, I’m already a bit sad that it will end in such a short time! With all the hype and build up focusing on the semantics of the world, I was afraid it would be a bit like Clockwork Orange, creating a rich and varied world but with the language being a pretty high barrier to entry into that world. However, Anathem is nothing of the sort. Yes there are words and cultural signifiers that are alien and I’m glad that he included a lexicon of words so you can look up key terms, but as a whole, the book is remarkably accessible. While there are some brain-twisting sections (especially if you aren’t used to thinking about geometric or logic problems), they are so integral to the story and the characters that they are no more off-putting than a description of a room or a character’s emotional state. Stephenson is a master at incorporating lessons—on the creation of money (among many other things) in his Baroque Cycle, on cryptography in Cryptonomicon, or on geometry and metaphysics here—into his novels without being pedantic or boring.

Anathem is quickly becoming one of my favorite science fiction novels of all time and I can’t recommend it enough for anyone who likes their novels rich with ideas and intrigue and characters that feel like old friend, or who likes their world-making detailed, internally consistent. This is a book that will offer you a new world and make you look at ours in a new way.

“Burn After Reading [Theatrical Release]” (Focus Features)

I have to admit that I’ve missed the last several films by the Coen brothers, but am sure glad I saw this one. There is something very relaxed about this movie. Not so much in the content, but in the execution of the movie. I don’t mean relaxed in a lazy way, but relaxed in the way that a gymnast can make the most complex routine look effortless. The script is tight, nearly pitch perfect and treats the audience to one of the best comedy of errors made this decade: perfectly balancing the laughs with a dark undercurrent of tragic ridiculousness. In addition, the characters all zig toward stereotypes but then zag into complexity. Well, almost all of them. Of the main characters, Tilda Swinton’s never quite makes that zag, which is a shame because she’s an incredible actor. The actors, even Swinton (given her character’s limitations), are at the top of their game. Even the minor characters are invested with a fullness that I usually associate with British films more than most American ones.

One of my pet peeves about movies in general, is that characters often seem to come from some never-never land where they have never watched movies or television or read spy novels or romance novels or science fiction novels or . . . you get my point. Most characters in movies don’t carry around the models of reality that we all carry around in our heads. All those books and movies and popular musics and television shows that tell us the world is like this and people are like that. These modesl have an impact on how we behave. Not only on how we behave, but how we actually see the world. The characters in Burn After Reading seem to be making their lives up as they go, and are doing so in ways that reflect a whole set of mental models that include how one might act in a movie or on television. Don’t misunderstand, the movie is not a collection of post-modern references and the character’s never mention movies or tv shows. Instead, the Coen brothers present us with characters whose actions make sense only if they have been raised on a steady diet of popular media.

While I’m sure that Brad Pitt will get a lot of attention for his performance because he is so damn good at playing silly-funny and does it so rarely, and Frances McDormand is as wonderfully delightful as usual, for my money, George Clooney’s performance is the richest and most nuanced of the film. He’s not a very likable guy, but he undergoes a rather profound journey. In fact, his story is almost too serious at times in comparison to the overall tone of the movie. Almost. In the hands of a less accomplished actor, or less accomplished writers and directors, his character might have upset the balance and tone. In the hands of Clooney and the Coens, however, it all just works.

This is a movie that I look forward to watching again and is well worth seeing in the theater.

“Systems/Layers” (Rachel’s)

Along with the Clogs, the Rachel’s are one of my new favorite bands. Lately I’ve been listening to a lot more instrumental music and finding myself drawn to the images and emotions that I can find through music without words. There is a freedom of interpretation to programmatic music and the Rachel’s are evocative and full of humor, intrigue and suspense. I get images of foggy mornings, looking out on a winter scene through a window fogged with breath, a dark-haired woman smiling sadly. And that’s just one song listened to once. Every time I listen I see different images, feel different emotions.

Here is one of their songs from Systems/Layers set to some archival film:

The basic tool for the manipulation of reality is the manipulation of words. If you can control the meaning of words, you can control the people who must use the words. George Orwell made this clear in his novel 1984. But another way to control the minds of people is to control their perceptions. If you can get them to see the world as you do, they will think as you do. Comprehension follows perception. How do you get them to see the reality you see? After all, it is only one reality out of many. Images are a basic constituent: pictures. This is why the power of TV to influence young minds is so staggeringly vast. Words and pictures are synchronized. The possibility of total control of the viewer exists, especially the young viewer. TV viewing is a kind of sleep-learning. An EEG of a person watching TV shows that after about half an hour the brain decides that nothing is happening, and it goes into a hypnoidal twilight state, emitting alpha waves. This is because there is such little eye motion. In addition, much of the information is graphic and therefore passes into the right hemisphere of the brain, rather than being processed by the left, where the conscious personality is located. Recent experiments indicate that much of what we see on the TV screen is received on a subliminal basis. We only imagine that we consciously see what is there. The bulk of the messages elude our attention; literally, after a few hours of TV watching, we do not know what we have seen. Our memories are spurious, like our memories of dreams; the blank are filled in retrospectively. And falsified. We have participated unknowingly in the creation of a spurious reality, and then we have obligingly fed it to ourselves. We have colluded in our own doom.

[From How to Build a Universe That Doesn't Fall Apart Two Days Later]

BBC Wales and BBC Drama has announced that Bafta and Hugo Award winning writer Steven Moffat will succeed Russell T Davies as Lead Writer and Executive Producer of the fifth series of Doctor Who, which will broadcast on BBC One in 2010.

[From BBC - Doctor Who - News]

This episode was really, really bad. More than that, however, it was actually insulting to fans of the show as well as the show’s own mythology in a way that felt calculated and cynical.

Let me stop you here if you are watching the show on Sci-Fi in America. The British air dates are about four weeks ahead of you, so you should probably stop reading right now and come back to this entry after you have seen this episode. For those of you in Britain or who are getting the show through, ahem, other channels . . . click through to read the rest of this rant.

Let me back up for a moment and talk briefly about my overall reaction to the new series. Several years ago, I posted here about the first series and I still stand by my assessment of those first 13 episodes and the grace with which the series was brought back to television after a hiatus of almost 20 years. My admiration for Russell T. Davies in pulling off what many had thought impossible is quite high and I will always be grateful that he had the passion, the dedication and the talent to give us a new generation of Doctor Who. That first series was the most consistent, in terms of quality, of the four series to date and I think it had a lot to do with the fact that Davies and his production team were laboring under no expectations, or, rather, they were laboring under their own high expectations for storytelling and for the characters involved. Not having much money and not having themselves to compete against, they crafted quality stories that were consistently character driven. Davies had a tremendous ability to make use care about even minor or secondary characters to the extent that if they were killed for plot purposes, we actually cared. I’m thinking here of the blue skinned maintenance worker in “End of the World,” as well as Gwyneth from “The Unquiet Dead.”

Stories such as “Father’s Day,” “Dalek,” and Stephen Moffat’s excellent two-parter “The Empty Child” and “The Doctor Dances” had plenty of action and tension and fear, but were primarily driven by the characters involved. These were stories you could watch over and over again, stories you would want to watch over and over again. Unfortunately, with each succeeding series, the level of storytelling seems to have declined and too often we are seeing episodes that depend on specious plot points or random “magical” solutions that have no impact on the characters in any moral way. Almost immediately, in the subsequent series, we have a story like “Tooth & Claw” – which focuses on trying to be clever and action-packed instead of letting us in on the real pathos and complexity of Queen Victoria or some of the other secondary characters. Instead of working for our sympathy, the writers begin to simply expect our sympathy. Certainly this is not true of every episode and in each of the series there have been wonderfully written characters and stories.

Let me also say that I grew very weary, by the middle of the second series, of the whole “companion in love with the Doctor” and was very disappointed when they revisited that idea when Martha came on board. So this year’s addition of Donna–an older woman with attitude and a maturity than neither Rose nor Martha possessed, makes me very happy (except we can cut the “we’re not a couple” bit that seems to creep into every single episode), and I really do like the way that the Doctor and Donna are relating to each other and the difference that she brings to the show after the past two years. To be quite honest, their relationship is the best thing so far in series 4, where the stories have ranged from the mediocre (“Partners in Crime”) to the decent-despite-a-cheesy-first-half (“Fires of Pompeii”) to the good-despite-a-cheesy-ending (“The Planet of the Ood”), to the mediocre Sontaran two-parter and finally, the atrociously bad “The Doctor’s Daughter.”

The last of which being, ostensibly, the point of this whole rant, I best get on with it . . .

Let’s start with the fact that at no point do the writers of this episode earn any emotional response from the audience, they simply conjure up a “daughter” and expect us to care. Think about what it meant for Rose to spend time with her father and compare that to the off-hand, almost casual way that they make up a new relation for the Doctor. Not only that, but we are expected to believe that cloning Time Lords is as simple as that? For @%*#’s sake, if it were that easy why haven’t the Sontarans, the Cybermen, the Daleks, etc, just scraped some cells from the Doctor and put it into a nice little cloning machine and run off some copies. The laziness of this seems to indicate that the whole episode was geared around the concept of the Doctor having a daughter and not telling a compelling story or the examination of a compelling character. Nothing about this episode felt honest. Just as the daughter was manufactured with a mechanical “poof,” the emotions expressed by all of the characters were equally manufactured and expected to elicit response from the audience because of the concept rather than the actual dialogue and characters. In the end, I cared more about that blue-skinned worker who had a scene of maybe 90 seconds in “End of the World” than I did about Jenny, the ostensible “daughter” of the Doctor. Why? Because the writers invested nothing in making her a three-dimensional person, because they invested nothing in making an honest examination of how the Doctor might react to another possible Time Lord, because they didn’t care.

I smell spin-off in the air. I smell cynical, money-grubbing, “let’s make a Doctor Who lite version with an annoying, perky young girl in order to capitalize on the success of this show,” in the air.

Some more specific problems:

1. What the hell was Martha doing in this story? She contributed nothing to the plot expect to take away air time that might have been devoted to a more honest examination of relationships between the Doctor and Jenny.

2. The “war” had only been going on for 7 days but countless generations? Um, why? How does this help the story? I mean, forget that there is nothing in the story or character’s to support it (how can the leader of the humans be an older man? How can you run a military command without the ability to measure time? for this to work there couldn’t be any overlap between generations which makes no sense), forget that it’s a dumb idea, how does it help the story? How does it help us care about or understand the people in the story. It doesn’t.

3. The Doctor’s “I would never” speech. Umm, have we forgotten everything from the first series? When the Doctor stands by and lets Cassandra die, that is a powerful and important moment. When the Doctor is willing to do almost anything to kill the last (but of course not the last) Dalek, you are shaken by the violence and desperation and fallibility of the Doctor even while, quite possibly, agreeing with him. If there was one thing that I felt Davies brought with him to the new Doctor Who, it was a moral complexity. In point of fact, the Doctor is lying when he say’s “I would never” because he has.

4. Let’s not even talk about the stupidity of having terraforming work in a matter of hours – again, a matter of writers being damn lazy.

5. When Jenny revives after her “death” why isn’t the Doctor able to feel that? If we trust that he can indeed sense his family and other Time Lords, why can’t he sense that she is not dead?

If the episode were simply a bad episode, I wouldn’t be so disappointed. The problem is that, by introducing a “daughter” into the story-line, this episode has consequences for the larger mythos of the Doctor. Having her blast off and go explore the universe (how does she know how to fly the shuttle? seems like extraneous knowledge to the purpose for which she was created) has consequences for future episodes and story-lines. The worst episode of the new Doctor Who has some of the most profound consequences for the show and the characters.

This is the episode where Russell T. Davies and his production crew have jumped the proverbial shark. Despite my true appreciation of what he has done, and despite my true enjoyment in the relationship between the Doctor and Donna, I am now waiting for two things: any episodes written by Stephen Moffat and the day when Davies and his team leave the show and let someone else (hopefully Moffat), run the show.

I will still watch. I will still be a fan (because that’s what fans do). But I no longer trust the show to invest the care and attention to story and characters that differentiates mediocrity from quality.

And that makes me sad.

Darknote provides an excellent analysis of some of the problems and failures of the new Doctor Who series. If you are a fan, definitely give it a read.

In the history of the revived Doctor Who series, there have been ten multi-episode stories thus far. If we classify these multi-episode stories into three rough categories of “hits”, “misses”, and “neutrals”, most of them frustratingly fall into the category of misses than anything else. The most recent two-parter helps to further solidify a theory i have as to what makes more of these New Who multi-episode stories disappointing and also touches upon a fundamental problem with the series overall.

[From mutli-episode stories in the New Who » darkblog resonate ]

Of course, only fans get to critique the show like this.