The official site of Kelly Sedinger: Reader, writer, photographer, and dreamer
Behold the single greatest piece of Star Trek fan art ever. (The more episodes of the Original Series you’ve seen and can remember, the more you’ll appreciate the staggering awesomeness of this.)
This comedy short (some salty language) just makes my inner-80s-child all happy and stuff. It’s the story of a remake of…the opening credits sequence for Simon and Simon.
A couple of science fiction booknotes! Zap! Pow!
:: I’ve seen some mention of a book over the last year or so on various SF blogs called Ready Player One, by a writer named Ernest Cline. Aside from those mentions, I knew nothing about the book until I picked it up on a lark when I saw it at the library. Boy, am I glad I did – what a fun book!
Thirty years from now, the world is a corporate dystopia, and the prime form of escapism is a virtual reality ‘game’, created by two men who grew up in the latter decades of the 20th century, which is so massive that it incorporates entire enormous worlds within it. One of the creators, a fabulously wealthy techno-genius who is also eccentric and reclusive (think Steve Jobs and Howard Hughes, blended into one guy) dies, and bequeaths his entire fortune, a truly staggering sum of money, to the first person who can successfully complete a ‘quest’ that he has created within the virtual world that he has created.
This is all, well, not terribly original. A few decades out, the world is a dystopia where everything is run by a few corporations? Yeah, we’ve seen that before. And the ‘reclusive oddball creates a quest for riches’ thing? Yup, that’s been done too. Basically this book is It’s a Mad Mad Mad Mad World meets Demolition Man. But you know, sometimes originality isn’t about creating something totally new; originality can be found in mashups that no one would ever think to do.
But what really makes this book something else isn’t the mashup, it’s the way all the details are ripped straight from the entire grand, weird, oddball geek culture of the last thirty years, with key focus on the 1980s. If you grew up watching Star Trek and arguing with friends over the Ewoks and listening to Duran Duran and planning your afterschool activities on the basis of which of your friends had an Atari console and so on and so forth, then there is stuff in this book that will thrill you to the core. It’s as if Cline has packed his book with easter eggs, hundreds of them, for people from that period to get. Luckily, I grew up in that very era, so I think I got them all. For the most part.
Ultimately, Ready Player One is geek-porn of the highest order. My only complaint was the nature of the modern dystopia, which is mainly because I’m just generically tired of dystopias. This book is really fun, though. It’s paced beautifully, there’s payoffs galore between the compelling characters and the great stuff they do, there are villains of the ‘boo-hiss!’ variety, and basically, the book would be a slickly entertaining piece of SF-quest fiction even if it didn’t have all the various references to 80s-and-since geek culture. I recommend this book highly!
:: A few months ago I positively reviewed a SF novel called Across the Universe by Beth Revis, which is the first book in a trilogy. I have now read the second book, A Million Suns, and I recommend that one equally.
I don’t want to say too much about it, since it’s the second book in a trilogy and thus discussing its plot will require somewhat spoiling the first one, but the story from that first book (of the ‘generation ship’ that’s not what it seems, and the teenage boy and girl who plumb its secrets) continues in interesting and effective ways. We learn more about the ship and the nature of its mission, and the villain from the first book turns out to have left clues behind about something that he discovered before things went awry for him. It’s a very good read that left me waiting enthusiastically for the third one, which is due in January. (And I have a few guesses as to what revelations will come in that last book that I’m excited to see either confirmed or disproved!)
A while back, Jason Bennion and Michael May did a thing called “True Geek Confessions”, which poses this query:
What is something you absolutely hate or love or just don’t get, or maybe it’s something you have never even seen or read. What is your deepest, darkest geek confession?
They both break this down as follows: Something you hate that everyone else loves; Something you love that everyone else hates; Something you don’t get that everyone else adores; and Something that everybody has seen or heard or read that you haven’t. So, here are my replies for each category:
Something I hate that everybody else loves. There’s a lot of such stuff, I suppose. LOST, for one. I tried, and I just couldn’t get there. I didn’t like any of the characters, and after watching five or six episodes, I wasn’t sufficiently hooked to stick around for what I deemed to be a likely-unsatisfying wrap-up. I could also cite Twilight, but that’s got more than enough detractors that I don’t think it properly falls into “everybody else loves it” territory.
For years, I would have listed The Beatles here. Thankfully, I got better.
Something I love that everybody else hates. Well, that’s easy: the Star Wars prequel trilogy. Yes, it’s imperfect, at times, deeply so. But I’ve never understood the vicious loathing of those films, and I really hate that they have become geek shorthand for “something which well and truly blows”.
Also? The Pirates of the Caribbean movies that came after the first one. Maybe they’re not quite in “everybody hates them” territory, but I like them all a whole lot, even if numbers two and three could have used one more trip through the script editing stage and, frankly, a more charismatic actor cast as the main villain (not Bill Nighy – he’s awesome! — the other guy).
I don’t love Spider-man 3 — it’s really a mess – but I don’t hate it as much as everybody else does, either. Ditto Green Lantern.
Something I don’t get that everyone else seems to: Wow, I can list a whole ton of stuff here! A few examples:
Batman. I like Batman Begins and The Dark Knight, but in general, the character doesn’t do a whole lot for me. I refuse to believe that he would last more than a few minutes in a fight with Superman, for example.
Quite a few music acts: The Beastie Boys, Nirvana, virtually the entire grunge or alt-rock era. I remember how popular this stuff was, and none of it made so much as a dent on me.
Teevee shows: The Sopranos, Mad Men, The Wire. I read descriptions of these and have zero desire to explore them, no matter how lauded they are.
Vince Vaughn. I don’t really get him. I liked him in Anchorman, but that’s a small role. I don’t buy his ability to carry a movie (and I just plain didn’t think Wedding Crashers was any good).
And, frankly, I’m wondering if I shouldn’t go ahead and list George RR Martin’s A Song of Ice and Fire here. I don’t think I have a failure to ‘get’ it, but I sure don’t think it’s anywhere near as good as everybody else.
Something that you would think I’m familiar with and yet am not: There’s a lot of such stuff I could list here, mainly because I tend to be really scattershot with my approach to pop culture, rarely troubling to explore what’s popular at the time it’s popular. But there is some stuff that’s been highly regarded for sufficiently long that you’d think I would have explored it by now. Examples:
The Paul Simon album Graceland (which Roger just blogged about). I have heard nothing but praise for this album and citations of its enormous influence on music since its release…and yet I have never heard it.
Every Steven Spielberg movie since Saving Private Ryan. This, frankly, shocks me to consider it. I need to get off my arse on these.
Any Kevin Smith film after Clerks. What the heck is wrong with me?!
Teevee shows: Buffy the Vampire Slayer; Farscape; Doctor Who; and so on. I’m working on it, folks. I’m already watching the Battlestar Galactica reboot show (and loving it, but that’s another blog post).
I’ve only read one book in the Wheel of Time series and didn’t think it was awful, but not good enough to keep reading that series. I’ve never read anything by China Mieville, and Neil Gaiman’s Sandman is pretty much a staple on my “Wow, I gotta read that someday” list.
So, what are your True Geek Confessions?
Heavens, what a movie.
I mean, really. Heavens, what a movie.
The Avengers doesn’t quite take the top prize as my favorite superhero movie of all time, but at this point, I just don’t think that Superman is likely to be dislodged from that spot in my heart, ever. But the spot for number two? I think that Spiderman 2 is in that spot…but I’m not sure if The Avengers didn’t just take it over. Or at least tied it.
I loved this movie. It’s thrilling and exciting. Its story is epic in scale, but fairly simple in its particulars. Its characters are all well-drawn and sharply written. Its dialogue crackles. Its action sequences are full of effects that look amazing even in this day and age, and the sequences are not impossible to follow. The Avengers is pretty much a joy from start to finish.
I’m a fan of Joss Whedon’s, although I’m not an obsessive one (I have yet to watch much of Buffy the Vampire Slayer at all), nor one who believes he is infallible (I watched four or five episodes of Dollhouse before I gave up). I do rank Whedon above the other great God Emperor of Geekstuff, JJ Abrams, though; Abrams is a fine director, but his writing just leaves me wanting. I was never a big fan of the Avengers during my own comics reading days, but when I learned that Whedon was writing and directing the film toward which all the Marvel superhero movies of recent years had been building toward, I was terribly excited. And I’m glad to report that this excitement has paid off.
The films leading up to this have, admittedly, been a mixed bag…but a generally likable mixed bag. Iron Man was a lot of fun; Iron Man 2 a bit less fun, but enjoyable. Thor was a blast, although its blend of New Mexico desert and an Asgard that looked made of freshly-painted plastic felt odd. Captain America was probably the best of all these; I enjoyed the hell out of that one. (Did I ever blog about it? Oh noes, I didn’t! Especially since I didn’t see it until just a month or so ago.)
So, along comes The Avengers. This movie has to reintroduce all these heroes, and do it in such a way that it reminds those of us who saw their individual movies what went on, but doesn’t bog down in reminders for people who didn’t see them. It also has to set up the villain (Loki) and explain what he’s up to. Whedon gets all these various pots boiling, and he does it with flair and confidence. Where lots of superhero movies falter is in their various first acts, but Whedon is able to keep all this pretty interesting. He doesn’t spend too much time in explanations, and gives pretty much exactly as much information as you need to make sense of what’s going on. (And, frankly, he honors the longstanding tradition of superhero comics that everything makes sense as long as you don’t really think about it too closely.)
This isn’t a perfect movie. The pacing is pretty relaxed in the first act, but each act picks up steam, until by the end of the movie, I was left pretty breathless. Whedon is able to make the film large in scale; this feels like a genuine epic, and it doesn’t feel artificially inflated. Here are some great things that Whedon does along the way:
So I’m launching yet another series, this one called the “A to Z Challenge”. The idea is pretty clear: write posts every day in a Month (excluding Sundays, excepting from that instances like today, when the first of the month falls on Sunday). I, of course, do post on Sundays, so this challenge may well guarantee that something fresh will appear on this blog every day this month. And who doesn’t want that!
So I’m doing this A-to-Z thing, and I’ve decided to give it a Fantasy and Science Fiction turn, as is my wont. So each entry in this series will take its inspiration from something or someone from F&SF, that starts with the respective letter of the day.
Thus we start with Adama, the Commander of the Battlestar Galactica.
Of course, we’ve had not one but two Adamas. The first one was played by Lorne Greene:
And then, in the remake of Battlestar Galactica from the 2000s, Commander Adama was played by Edward James Olmos:
Now, I’m at a small disadvantage because I haven’t yet watched very much of BSG 2003. In fact, I’ve watched barely any of it – all I’ve seen is the three-hour pilot movie, which I am actually currently re-watching as a prelude to watching the entire series. But I think I’ve seen enough of the Olmos Adama to make a small bit of comparison.
Both men are older, somewhat weary starship commanders who might well be at the twilight of their careers when the Cylons, humanity’s ancient enemy race of androids, launches a devastating attack that destroys the human homeworld and most of its remaining star fleet. Humanity is quickly rendered unable to stand and fight, and must instead flee in a desperate journey across the galaxy for a destination that may or may not be there. That destination? The fabled ‘Thirteenth Colony’, called ‘Earth’. So, Commander Adama not only has to rise to the occasion as a military leader; he must also be a political one, as he, his ship, and his crew are pretty much the only thing standing between the rest of humanity and the Cylon forces striving to kill them all off.
I’ve always dug this story set-up. It’s a nifty premise that can go a lot of ways, and I’m looking forward to seeing how it shapes up in the remake series. The earlier version, made with great fanfare in 1978 but canceled after one season because the ratings, while decent, weren’t sufficient to make the show cost-effective, was heavily steeped in Mormon lore and mythology; I expect that the mystical angle is downplayed in the remake series for a more character-driven SF drama. So it is that the later Adama seems to be a more three-dimensional individual than the earlier, Lorne Greene Adama.
Greene played Adama as a noble father figure who was often a source of wisdom to his crew. Olmos captures some of that, but his Adama is more flawed. He is tired and weary and, as the show begins, on the verge of retirement when the Cylons strike. Lorne Greene’s Adama is rarely seen anywhere but the bridge or his quarters, and I don’t recall ever seeing him out of uniform. This contrasts with Olmos’s Adama, who is in his dark, cramped quarters wearing only a t-shirt when his phone rings with the news that the Cylons have attacked. Adama sighs and says, “I’ll be right there.” But when the grim situation becomes clear, he is able to shake off his haze and take command in a forceful way.
There are also hints of future conflicts to come, which were not always in evidence in Galactica 1978. Greene’s Adama must also serve as de facto Head of State, but Adama is confronted by an actual Head of State: the Secretary of Education, who, as the only surviving member of the Cabinet, has just ascended to the Presidency of the Twelve Colonies. There is also conflict between the Olmos Adama and his son, Captain Apollo, whereas there wasn’t much conflict at all between the Greene Adama and his son Apollo. As the remake series dawns, the Adamas have not spoken much since the death of other son Zack. In BSG 1978, we see Zack die and we see the two Adamas commiserate over it.
Lorne Greene brought to the original BSG the gravitas that the show needed. So far, Olmos seems to be doing the same. So which Adama is my favorite? I don’t know yet. But we’ll see!
(By the way, the original Battlestar Galactica series is often derided as being a post-Star Wars bit of genre bandwagoning, and to be sure, the show probably never would have been picked up by ABC if not for Star Wars. But creator Glen Larson was kicking the idea around the networks much earlier in the 1970s, and really, the show holds up a lot better than many seem to think. It’s got its cheesy 1970s elements, yes, but it is not crappy teevee by any means. If you haven’t watched it, check it out. You may be pleasantly surprised!)
A person named Hal Hefner has come up with a list of twenty things every SF Nerd must have (physically or emotionally):
So you think you’re a NERD. Not the kind of nerd that would hang out with Lamar and Booger and the other Tri-Lams–BUT a REAL Sci-Fi NERD. Whell let’s just how how nerdy you really are. Below is a little checklist of 20 Things Every Sci-Fi Nerd Should Own To Earn, physically as well as emotionally. If you “own” at least twelve of these twenty things, you are entitled to your SCI-FI Nerd Badge.
So — setting aside the fact that I personally prefer the term ‘geek’ to ‘nerd’ — let’s see how I stack up!
1) Conan The Barbarian Soundtrack
Yes. This is an interesting pick, and well-chosen: it’s just obscure enough that it’s not going to be a mainstream thing that anyone outside of Geek Culture will own, but it’s good enough that one can reasonably say, “Yes, you should own this if you like film music/fantasy film music/cult classic stuff.” Whatever flaws that movie may have had, the Basil Poledouris’s wonderful score isn’t one of them. (I only wish it had been recorded better. The string sound on the score is thin and treble-heavy.)
2) Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep
Sigh. I own nothing by Phillip K. Dick. This is not good. I accept the demerit here.
3) The Twilight Zone Collection:
I don’t own it. But I do have a number of options for watching TZ, both online and via my local library. So I’m counting it.
4) The Original Star Wars Trilogy – WITHOUT ANY ADDED CRAP
Yes, I own it. On VHS. Which I can’t watch, because we don’t have a VHS player anymore. And I likely wouldn’t bother anyway. I’m just not that invested in the idea of preserving the 1977 Star Wars experience in amber. Lucas’s additions in later years just don’t add up to enough to offend me. (And at this point, I wouldn’t care if Han had never shot at all and Greedo had died when he got struck by a blowdart fired by a Jawa who missed his target and hit Greedo instead. I’m so sick of the “Han shot first!” whining and the conceit that changing a single two-second event somehow alters his character at the molecular level.)
5) A Profound Hatred for Star Trek Enterprise
I don’t have a profound hatred for Enterprise. I do, however, have a profound apathy about it. I don’t plan to ever watch it. By the time Enterprise came along, I was Trekked out. I would like to rewatch all of TOS, TNG, and DS9. But that’s about it.
6) The Lord of The Rings Extended Edition, The Soundtracks and all of the books
What is ‘all of the books’? I own three copies of LOTR, two of The Hobbit (including the annotated edition), and two of The Silmarillion. Do I also have to own all of the “History of Middle Earth” books and the various Tolkien collections and every other piece of Tolkien arcana that’s come out in the last twenty years? I don’t, but I’m counting myself good on this one, anyway.
7) A Profound Sadness for the Way Battlestar Galactica Ended
I just started watching BSG last week! As I’m only ninety minutes (the first half of the pilot telemovie) in, I’ll have to hold this one in abeyance.
8 ) A Passionately Favorite Version of the REAL Doctor Who
I’m not nearly educated enough on Doctor Who to have a solid opinion. But the first Doctor I ever watched was Peter Davison, whom I liked just fine. I need to watch more, though. Much more. (Also liked Tom Baker, as I saw some of him, too.)
9) A Fear That Will Smith Will Someday Star in The Movie Adaptation of Your Favorite Book
No, but I don’t know how Smith could appear in a movie of The Lions of Al-Rassan. I don’t recall any black people in that book. Maybe he could be a particularly dark-skinned Asharite. Hmmmm. Anyway, I don’t hate Will Smith.
10) Toys from Your Childhood That You Refuse To Part With
I don’t have anything from my childhood, save a nesting doll that’s around here someplace. I do, though, have toys that I acquired in adulthood that I wanted as a kid. That counts!
11) The Belief that the Word Midichlorian Was Just from a Nightmare and NOT a real Star Wars Movie
I don’t have a problem in principle with midichlorians; I reject the notion that midichlorians represent a shift from the Force as ‘mystical magic’ to something ‘scientific’. What bothers me about them is that there’s no real story reason for them.
12) The Original TRON Movie
Yup! Have it and love it. (I also seem to be in the minority of folks who loved TRON Legacy.)
13) An affection for the TV show Firefly
Oh, yes. I have this in spades. Firefly is just amazingly wonderful.
14) A Hatred for Chris O’Donnell
Meh. I didn’t mind him in Batman Forever (the Val Kilmer one), and the problems with Batman and Robin went a lot deeper than casting. O’Donnell’s just kind of there for me. I had a harder time with him as D’Artagnan than I did with him as Robin. (And even that didn’t bother me too much.)
15) You Know Asimov’s Three Laws of Robotics:
Absolutely!
16) You think Cheetara is HOT!
I never watched Thundercats. It fell, timewise, into an era for me when it was able to slip past me, completely unnoticed. I don’t even recall hearing about it back then, and I couldn’t even begin to tell you what channel I would have watched it on. It’s even possible that it started airing before we even had cable when I was a kid. It always interests me to see cultural things that just pass right by without even making a mark upon me. I have friends who are just a couple years younger than me who tell me how awesome Thundercats was. Sometimes a couple years is all it takes to shift your attitudes for life.
17) You Believe Aliens are our REAL Gods
I’m not even sure what this means.
18) You Have a Favorite Animated Cult Sci-Fi Movie
Heavy Metal? I guess….
19) You Blame Hot Rod for Optimus Prime’s Death
Sorry, but I never cared one whit about the Transformers.
20) You DESPISE Michael Bay for Masturbating on your Childhood
When did he do this? Transformers? Don’t care. I think Michael Bay is a terrible filmmaker, but that’s about it. He hasn’t yet sullied anything that was important to my childhood.
So, by my count, I only have eight of these. I’m close on some, but I miss out by virtue of the emotional qualifiers involved. So by this measure, at least, I appear to fall short of true Nerd- or Geekdom. But that doesn’t matter, though! Geekdom is like Zen or cool: it’s a state of mind.
William Shatner’s birthday is today. How old is he? Who cares? Here’s one of my favorite scenes from all Star Trek, from the much-maligned Star Trek V: The Final Frontier.
Trek V is what I consider to be a ‘noble failure’, in that it doesn’t succeed, but even as it falls short it has some really nice moments, and it really tries to do something interesting, something that really involves sending the Enterprise crew into an unexplored place to confront an unknown. The above scene comes early in the film, while the crew is on shore leave, and Kirk, McCoy, and Spock have gone camping in Yosemite. If nothing else, this film understands that at the heart of the original Trek crew is the three-way friendship of Kirk-Spock-McCoy, a fact which the folks in charge of the current Trek original crew reboot seem to be missing completely.
Anyway, happy birthday to Mr. Shatner! May you row your boat gently down that stream for many years to come!
