No Happily Ever After

So, as has been mentioned previously, I’ve been making my way through Star Trek Deep Space Nine over the past few months. (I’m currently moving into the later part of Season 3. I am looking forward to Worf showing up next season.)

However, I’ve noticed something that’s really bothered me, and that’s that Chief O’Brien and his wife fight almost every scene they’re in. Maybe because I was just a kid when I watched DS9 the first time I didn’t notice, but Holy Sepulchre, Batman, they never stop. It’s unhealthy, really. It makes me uncomfortable.

That got me to thinking. In the whole of Trek, the O’Briens are one of the few married couples that 1) are main characters, 2) have both characters onscreen, and 3) one of them doesn’t die. With it being such a minority, why have them be so unhappy? Yes, yes, I know conflict = drama, but at this point I’m wondering why they just don’t get divorced because it seems like everybody would be happier.

Anyway, I was brainstorming other scifi, trying to think of happily married couples, and the best I’ve got is Han and Leia in the books, and I admittedly haven’t read a Star Wars novel since I was 14 so maybe I missed things there too. Everyone else I can think of seems to be more of background characters.

I can think of a single example in a fantasy novel, Dragonsbane, and even then, the relationship’s not…normal.

If a character has parents, they’re not safe either. So many main characters are missing a parent for some reason, whether they disappeared, were murdered, have been separated in order to keep the kingdom safe, etc.

I don’t know. It seems to me like you could keep the level of tension and drama pretty high and still let a character have a spouse. Not all aspects of life have to be terrible to keep a reader/watcher interested.

What do you think, Squiders? Can a married couple be happily married and still allow enough conflict? Do you have examples of where it’s done successfully? (Speculative examples, preferred.)

The Allure of a Good Sea Yarn (And Why the High Seas are Like Space Travel)

I think I’ve mentioned before, Squiders, that I don’t really like historical fiction. It’s my least favorite genre. That’s not to say that it can’t be well done, and, indeed, I have read some very good historical fiction in my time (Pillars of the Earth is one of the best books I have ever had the privilege to read), but, in general, it rubs me the wrong way and I tend to avoid it.

That being said, in the last few years I’ve discovered that there is a particular subgenre that does appeal to me, and it is that of high seas adventure. Apparently all I need to float my boat, pun intended, is a well-researched story that takes place on a tall-mast ship, whether the ship is navy or merchant or pirate.

I suspect these stories appeal to me because they have direct correlation to science fiction (or, more likely, science fiction has direct correlation to them. It is probably arguable as to which came first, because some of those early creation stories and mythology have some very interesting and unexpected allusions.).

A lot of military science fiction is directly based off the Navy, after all. Even Star Trek is. It makes sense, after all. When you look at the armed forces, which has the most experience living for months/years at a time in a craft that spends most of its time in an inhospitable environment that could kill you if you stepped outside? I like to think of living on a starship as the space-equivalent of living on a submarine.

Anyway, the books tend to have a lot of tropes that cross over to science fiction, such as exploration, dealing with new cultures/animals/places, battles against dangerous enemies in an unforgiving environment, having to work together to survive, etc. And I suspect part of me appreciates all the technical terms. Sure, a mizzen-mast is a real thing where a flux capacitor is not, but they both trigger the same technobabble part of the brain.

What do you think, Squiders? Am I way off mark?

(Also, do you have any books to recommend? I am slowly making my way through the Hornblower series and I like them rather a lot.)

Rewatching Favorite Scifi Shows

First off, I want to apologize for being so hung-up on science fiction lately. I can’t help it. I have a bit of an addictive personality, so I get fixated on things and it’s hard to break away to other things. Rest assured, I shall probably get sick of it soon, and then we can do all fantasy all the time instead for a while.

(If it helps, I am reading a fantasy anthology at the moment called Fantasy Gone Wrong. The quality of the stories varies wildly, like all anthologies, unfortunately.)

I’ve been rewatching Star Trek: Deep Space Nine lately. (Hereafter known as DS9.) It’s not really my fault. Literally all my friends are watching it right now, and it’s one of my very favorite TV shows, so I thought I’d watch it too. I’m a few episodes into season 3, so we’re starting to get episodes dedicated to the overall arcing Dominion plot mixed in with the occasional very strange character-based episodes.

(You know, I feel Sisko is a bit forgotten in the whole land of character-based episodes. Hm.)

Anyway.

It’s always interesting re-watching a show. When the show is new to you, everything is a surprise. (Well, hopefully, anyway.) You don’t know where things are going to go, what character twists are going to happen, whether those two characters you ship are ever going to get together.

When you re-watch, you may not remember everything that happened, but there’ll be episodes where you know the ending before you get there, where you know what the twist will be at the end because you know how the overall plot goes, even if you don’t remember the specifics. You anticipate new characters and plot points because you know they’re coming.

The mystery is lost, but it’s sort of like coming home to an old friend.

I admit I’m not much of a re-watcher. There’s so many series I hope to get to eventually. And something like DS9 is a big time commitment. But it is interesting to watch a show go from its inevitably awkward beginning to a well-oiled machine, to remember how subplots unraveled and foreshadowing was mixed in.

Any favorite shows you’re watching at the moment, Squiders? Any that you like to go back to again and again? Or do you prefer to move ever forward, leaving old shows in your dust?

Defiance and Other Scifi TV Shows

We’ve talked in the past, Squiders, about science fiction and television. And we’ve got a new crop trying their hand now. (Personally, I’ve been re-watching DS9. The second season never ends.)

The one that’s caught my eye is Defiance. SyFy’s been advertising the heck out of it, so odds are that you’re aware that it’s coming up. (Starts April 15, in fact, so just over a week from now.)

I admittedly don’t know a lot about the show except that, for some reason, all sorts of races are living together on Earth and Defiance was once St. Louis, and there is some sort of war going on.

Oh, and they’re releasing a MMO to go along with it. (It’s in Beta in Playstation Plus, but I do not pay for Playstation Plus and so I have not played it.) This intrigues me as a marketing idea. On one hand, if the MMO is well-done, it could enhance someone’s experience exponentially. On the other, it’s entirely possible that no one will play the game and it will have been a lot of wasted time and money.

(Oh, hey, apparently the game is live as of Tuesday. Well.)

The show itself, well, I’ll probably give it a try. At least, being on SyFy as opposed to network television, it’ll probably make it to a second season unless it totally sucks, in which case, I probably won’t care.

What scifi are you watching these days, Squiders? Revolution’s second season is coming up too, if I recall correctly, though I didn’t watch the first season.

Where Has All the Hard Science Fiction Gone?

So, I recently finished reading Inherit the Stars by James P. Hogan, a hard science fiction novel from 1985. We talked about some of the things that were a little bit jarring a few weeks ago in the Old Science Fiction post (to that, I add: an apparent lack of the understanding of plate tectonics), but overall I enjoyed the book and found the science to be mostly solid, even if the characters didn’t figure out what must have happened for things to make sense scientifically until about 100 pages after I did.

That got me to thinking. In general, I like hard science fiction–it must appeal to the engineer in me or something–but all the examples I could think of that I’ve read are older books. Rendezvous with Rama was published in 1973. Ringworld is from 1970. Contact is also 1985, and The Andromeda Strain is from 1969.

Even looking at the Wikipedia and Goodreads lists of hard science fiction shows that there’s been very little of the subgenre put out in the last ten years (and Goodreads’ list is a bit suspect. I am pretty sure Ender’s Game is not hard science fiction).

Why do you think that is, Squiders? Is it because hard science fiction, being fairly dry, just doesn’t ever attract that many readers, meaning a limited number is published at any point of time? Maybe it’s not any slower than before, but there’s just not a lot of it in general. Or is it a representation of some changing tastes in readers and/or writers, where people don’t want to think about science unless it’s accompanied by  explosions and starship chases?

I don’t honestly know, my friends. I welcome any thoughts you have on the matter, and if you do have any good, recent hard science fiction recommendations, please share.

Trek vs. Wars and Why It Is Silly

Among nerd circles, you run into rivalries between various fandoms or ships or theories. One of the most persistent is the Star Trek versus Star Wars one.

(In the interest of full disclosure, I hung out in a Trek-related community in middle and high school, and we would occasionally go over to the Star Wars chat rooms to troll the people there. But in my defense, it wasn’t because I disliked Star Wars, it was because the people there got hilariously upset by the whole thing, and it’s really hard to escape being a teenager without trolling somebody.)

I’ve always liked both. Trek more, certainly, but I enjoy Star Wars, have seen all the movies, read most of the “required” extended universe books, and can tell you the difference between a clone and a storm trooper. If I was forced to choose sides, I’d pick Trek, but I’m here to tell you that the whole thing is silly and we should let it go.

When it comes down to it, the main reason that the Trek vs. Wars thing is ridiculous is that they’re not even the same subgenre of science fiction.

It’s like comparing apples and oranges. What do the two series have in common? They both take place in space. The end.

Star Wars is space opera. It contains the classic hero journey. Its technology is more fantasy than technobabble. It has a clear main character with other characters in supporting roles. Ignoring the Clone Wars animated series (which I will for the sake of this argument, because I find most people who strongly subscribe to the whole Trek vs. Wars thing are older fans who have probably never watched it), the series is mainly represented by movies.

Star Trek is a mix of scifi genres, none of which is space opera. And it depends on the series. (DS9, for example, falls under military science fiction in the latter half, but I wouldn’t say most of the series do.) People have written books on the physics, the engineering, the biology of Star Trek–science is an important aspect to the overall franchise. It is always a composite cast, with most characters being of equal importance in terms of story-telling. It’s mainly delivered through television shows, which I think we can all agree are quite different than movies.

I think a lot of this stems from earlier, when the two were really the only big scifi series in town. But now we’ve got Babylon 5, Farscape, Firefly, Stargate, Battlestar Galatica…many of which have more in common with one or the other than they have in common with each other.

But I still run into people who feel like if they like one, they can’t like the other, which is just silly. I had a friend the other day who’s recently started watching DS9 tell me that she felt guilty about enjoying it (or even watching it) because she’d always been a Star Wars girl.

How many other people haven’t given something they could really like a chance because of some silly line drawn in the sand long ago?

Let it go, friends, let it go, and enjoy all the good science fiction you can.

For Love of Old Science Fiction

Oh man, I love old science fiction. I’m talking anything earlier than 1980. I love it because it takes so many chances, sends its characters all over the universe, and because I love to see what they got wrong.

Am I weird? Oh, probably. But I love to see how people thought the world was going to turn out in comparison to how the world actually did. No one could have predicted the way technology has gone, with smaller and smaller components making impressively powerful computers fit in your back pocket.

(Actually, technology seems to have pulled inspiration from science fiction, making an interesting cycle.)

So instead you get giant vacuum-tube supercomputers. In the book I’m reading at the moment (Inherit the Stars by James Hogan, circa 1985 or so) you can rent jets instead of cars, but in order to get data from one place to the other, it has to be relayed through a truly dizzying amount of satellites. There was no internet, and the idea that you can sit down in your living room and talk instantaneously to someone in Australia probably seemed too far fetched.

(Also, the company president states that he’s willing to ruin the production schedule for a client because they provide several hundred million dollars worth of business in a year. I’ve worked in the aerospace industry, and for several hundred million, you’re probably going to get two satellites, if you’re lucky. Most satellite programs run in the billions, easily. But that probably only bothered me because I’m familiar with such things. Who knows, maybe in the future that the book comes from, inflation has gotten so bad that we had to pull a Mexico and lop off a few zeroes at the end.)

I love how sometimes they’ll get the technology pretty well, but completely miss the societal changes. For example, Jules Verne’s From the Earth to the Moon isn’t too far off on some parts of space travel, but I love that he couldn’t figure out that some of the territories in the middle of the United States (the book is from the 1860s) would eventually become states. (There’s 36 states in the book. Which is about how many there were at the time. Colorado become a state in 1876 and is the 38th state.) (Also, I understand that Verne was French, but come on.)

(Here, have a Verne-related comic.)

I mean, look at 1984. We’re almost 30 years past that, and, luckily, that totalitarian government has yet to come to pass. I think part of that is an attempt to make an impact. When you are commenting on society, I can see how setting your story in the near future can be important. “Look at where we will end up if we don’t change our ways!”

Do you like to read older science fiction, Squiders? What’s your motivation to do so? Any recommendations?

A Protest Against Unnecessary Darkness

It’s entirely possible this is going to come off as fandom rage. If so, I apologize in advance. I try to stay pretty level-headed about such things, but I am not always successful.

I’ve noticed this trend, probably over the last decade, of taking something and redoing it darker. Sometimes this works awesomely. A lot of times it works awesomely, actually, but it’s almost become a requirement, and it sometimes seems like you can’t find genre anymore that it isn’t dark. The grittier and more realistic, the better.

Sometimes, though, it seems like this added darkness takes away from the original idea.

I’m kind of grumpy about this lately because, as I’m sure you know, J.J. Abrams has been named as the director of the new Star Wars movies. And these articles keep using the phrase “since Abrams saved Star Trek.”

Herein lies the fandom rage. Was Star Trek dead? No. Did it have issues? Yes. I’ve been a Trekkie practically since birth, but even I didn’t watch Enterprise, and I don’t consider any of the Next Gen movies past First Contact in my own personal head cannon. It got bogged down in its own mythology, and the people in charge were seemingly unable to come up with any decent new directions. And it did come down to the point where it seemed like people were beating a dead horse.

So, yes, the 2009 Star Trek movie did some good things for the franchise. It got new fans interested, a lot of whom went back and then fell in love with the series. But it didn’t really feel like Trek. It gets away with it with the whole “alternate reality” thing. To an extent.

(I have plot and character issues, but then this really will turn into fandom rage, so we’ll leave that be for now.)

And now, we have Star Trek Into Darkness coming out in May, and I find myself feeling very anxious about the state of Trek. It’s got “darkness” right there in the title, and I’m worried that Abrams is going to take away the thing that separates Trek from most of the rest of science fiction: its optimism.

Star Trek has always showed the good in humanity. We didn’t destroy our planet. We didn’t wipe ourselves out, we weren’t invaded by extraterrestrials. We banded together, we formed a peaceful planet-wide government. We went out into the universe, peacefully, and made friends. Look at us! Hoorah!

Sure, there’s some darkness there. There’s torture, genocide, murder, conspiracies, you name it. But overall, people are good. Humanity is good.

Or at least it was, in Roddenberry’s time.

But we can’t have that in today’s culture. Everything is dark, gritty, and humanity is doomed to failure. Why? Why do we need that? Why, when real life is bad enough, do we need darkness in our fiction too? Why can’t things be happy and rainbows and unicorns every now and then?

Opinions, Squiders? About the trend towards darkness, Star Trek, or anything in between?

Time Quintet Re-read: An Acceptable Time

Well, Squiders, here we are at the end of our re-read. I hope you’ve had a good time of it, and stay tuned for our next one, to be announced some time in the next few weeks. And it you hadn’t read the Time Quintet yet, I hope you enjoyed the books.

To be perfectly honest, I thought there were only four books in the series, but I did a Google search in the process of posting about the re-read and lo! there were five books.

I admit I don’t read much L’Engle outside of these books. I read A Ring of Endless Light last year and I didn’t really like it, so I think it’s the combination of science and religion that I like. She does it somewhat masterfully, really. To paraphrase something Bishop Colubra says in this book, it doesn’t matter if you believe in God, but he does, and that’s okay. Characters are religious or not, nephilim and cherubim exist, “El” talks to Noah, but none of it is in your face.

All right, onto An Acceptable Time. Maybe it’s just me, but I feel like characterization isn’t really one of L’Engle’s strong points. All of her main and peripheral characters are essentially good-hearted people who do the right thing, whether or not they are a native person from three thousand years ago or a modern person. I’m not sure, if you took Polly out and replaced her with Meg, that you’d see any real difference in the story.

Zachary’s an ass. He was one in A Ring of Endless Light too.

Let’s see. It’s nice to see some continuity between this and Planet, with the People of the Wind, though there is no mention of dark planets or IT or anything of that nature. (And now that we’ve gotten all the way through without returning to IT at all, I’m a little disappointed. Maybe if she’d tied IT to the events in A Wind in the Door a bit, I’d be less annoyed.) And the part in the past, if you ignore the ability of all the characters to learn languages rather quickly, is interesting.

I did have a bit of an issue with the “modern” day part, however — specifically how disbelieving the Murrys are about the whole idea of time-travel. They were there for A Wrinkle in Time and A Wind in the Door. They know things like this happen, even if they’re completely unaware of the events of Many Waters and A Swiftly Tilting Planet. I’m not sure why so many characters are suddenly so closed-minded.

(Also, did something happen to Charles Wallace? Polly mentions that he “would have liked” the changes to his bedroom early in the book, and then he’s not mentioned again, hardly, though Meg, Calvin, Sandy, and Dennys are.)

All right, onto the discussion questions. As always, feel free to ask your own in the comments.

1. Madeleine L’Engle is sometimes accused of being culturally insensitive when it comes to the People of the Wind. Would you say that this is true when it comes to this book?

2. Polly is staying with her grandparents to be homeschooled, but Charles Wallace and Meg were not allowed to be homeschooled earlier in the series. Why do you think attitudes towards this have changed throughout the series?

3. While most of the “modern” day characters have been seen in other books, why do you think Madeleine L’Engle chose to include the character of Bishop Colubra?

4. Time travel throughout the series is rarely set up so that the time traveler returns to his/her own time without some noticeable passage of time (the only exception being Sandy and Dennys in Many Waters). Why is it important for time to pass in both times?

5. Many of the characters in the past have nature based names such as Cub, Eagle Woman, Winter Frost, Dark Swallow, yet the main characters do not. Why the difference in the naming scheme?

Announcing Seasons Eternal

Hey Squiders, do you have friends or family (or yourself) that enjoy science fantasy? Do you need Christmas (or other holiday) present ideas? Then look no further!

The incredibly sexy ladies over at Turtleduck Press (myself included) have just put out their second anthology, and we decided to work from a shared world concept this year. Our going idea was: what would happen on a world where the seasons had stopped changing, locking entire regions into one of the four? How would society have to adapt to continue to survive, say, if summer’s heat never waned, if autumn never finished its decay?

We set up ourselves up with some vague parameters: the seasons would have stopped changing about a hundred years previously, only a few generations back, so that society could still be in a state of flux, but enough time had passed that they would have figured out enough to continue surviving. And then we went to it.

The result is an interesting mix, as each author had to imagine what a season that never ended would look like, what it would do to the land, the animals, the people, and then come up with society’s response. Would they turn to technology? Would they run from it? Would stories of the seasons make it into legend, or would they be forgotten?

Could it be fixed? Would they try?

As with our last anthology, the proceeds from sales go to benefit UNICEF, hopefully making children around world’s holidays a little brighter. Ebooks are available for 99 cents, and the paperback is available for $4.99. Cheap and for a good cause! Oh, and full of science fantasy goodness. More information can be found here, so give it a look!