Category Archives: Science Fiction

Science, Science Fiction

The end of the space shuttle

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A timely post on QT3 today reminded me that the venerable space shuttle is scheduled for retirement this year. The current mission by the Atlantis is its last one. The last mission for Discovery is in September later this year and the last mission for Endeavor will be in November. Huge crowds are expected at Cape Canaveral for these final two launches. After that, NASA will be relying on Russian spacecraft for its missions until the alternatives currently under development by private companies like SpaceX and Orbital Sciences come to fruition.

It’s sort of hard to believe that the space shuttle has been in service for close to 30 years now given that it’s such a icon of technology and humanity’s ambitions for space. Reading through its extensive Wikipedia page however, it’s sobering to realize how much of it is still based on 1970s technology. Its computers are probably less powerful than the cheapest netbooks you can buy today. Until 2007, the shuttles could not even be used in missions that started at the end of December and ended in January of the next year as the software couldn’t handle the transition to a new year.

Yet back in the 1980s, the space shuttle seemed like only a foretaste of greater things to come. I remember newspaper articles crowing about space habitats and colonies, complete with artists’ renditions of such wonders as torus-shaped stations large enough to create their own gravity and grow their own crops. It’s pretty humbling how far back we’ve scaled our ambitions since then. In an age when governments are busy dealing with economic recessions and unemployment, it seems that even keeping the International Space Station from falling out of the sky is an achievement.

Even my own views on space exploration have come a long way since I was a kid. Back then, I’d have happily voted for any big ticket space project, regardless of cost. Nowadays, I see that these projects yield relatively few benefits other than prestige and that actually useful scientific work can be better performed with unmanned spacecraft and at far lower cost. It’s clever stuff like the Mars Pathfinder that is the future of NASA while the development of manned spacecraft should depend on its ability to sustain itself financially through space tourism.

Of course, the space shuttle has more than earned its place in history even if it did cost too much and didn’t do as much real science as its boosters like to pretend. It’s so recognizable and has fueled so many dreams that it simply can’t be otherwise. I understand that one of the shuttles is to be given to the Smithsonian Air and Space Museum while the two others will be sold off to private collectors. It would be interesting to see in whose hands they end being.

Films & Television, Science Fiction

District 9: sci-fi action at its best

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I pretty much had to drag my wife to the cinema for this one after reading rave reviews of it on QT3. Peter Jackson’s involvement in the film, after what he gave us in the King Kong remake, was not a glowing endorsement to us. Luckily for me, both of us enjoyed it thoroughly and I recommend it highly to anyone who enjoys action films that don’t try to treat their audience as if they were 5 year-olds. The rest of this post will be chockful of spoilers so if you haven’t watched it yet, please go away and come back later.

District 9 opens using a mockumentary format that combined with its South African setting, draws us into a realistic depiction of a world in which a gigantic alien ship has mysteriously appeared overnight. However, the aliens the ship disgorges turn out to be neither enlightened beings here to lead humanity to a brighter future nor nefarious conquerors bent on world domination. Instead they are nothing more than starving and desperate refugees. Not since Alien Nation has a major film treated the issue of first contact with extraterrestrials in as mature and serious a manner.

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Films & Television, Science Fiction

Star Trek is dead. Long live the new Star Trek

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startrekposter

Inevitably, I went to see the newest Star Trek film with my wife on Sunday. Now, I’ve always thought of myself as a Star Trek fan, even though I’m too young for The Original Series and it’s The Next Generation that is the most memorable for me. I never did get around to watching Deep Space Nine, only watched bits and pieces of Voyager and made a deliberate effort to avoid watching Enterprise.

Still, I’m reasonably up to snuff on the best parts of TOS and combined with the best parts of TNG, I have a very firm idea of what it is that makes Star Trek great: as a mainstream platform on which to tell high-brow science-fiction. After all, it’s not a coincidence that many of the very best episodes were written by the most notable writers of print-based science-fiction, for example, City on the Edge of Forever (TOS) by Harlan Ellison, The Measure of a Man (TNG) by Melinda Snodgrass, The Doomsday Machine (TOS) by Norman Spinrad etc. Plus, there’s the fact that Star Trek always had a single very clear vision: creator Gene Roddenberry’s dream of a unified and noble humanity venturing out to do good amongst the stars.

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Books, Science Fiction

A Book: Incandescence

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As for every human born since the Stone Age, as for the ancestors of every member of the Amalgam, there was nothing the universe was capable of doing that the Arkdwellers were not capable of comprehending. They were not mere clever-looking animals, with some hard-wired repertoire of impressive but inextensible skills. With sufficient motivation and freedom from distractions – and perhaps a modest boost in longevity – they could have grasped anything. Apart from the subjectivities of art or language, where everyone needed tweaking to cross the species barriers, there was nothing in the Amalgam’s million-year-old storehouse of knowledge that would have been beyond their reach. That was the ability, the potential in every one of them. There was, however, no drive to realize it: no curiosity, no joy in discovery, no restlessness, no dissatisfaction.

– Greg Egan in Incandescence

incandescence

(After thinking about it for a while, I’ve decided to write a discussion of the novel rather than a review. There are already plenty of reviews on it available on the net, most of them probably better than anything I would be able to come up with. For a favourable review, check this out. For a dissenting opinion, read this and maybe Egan’s rather fierce rebuttal to same.)

Cracking open a new Greg Egan novel is always a momentous occasion for me and since Incandescence is the author’s first new novel in six years, you can imagine how great the anticipation must have been. At the end of it however, I’m left with mixed feelings. On the one hand, I can recognize the tremendous amount of work that must have gone into it and on a purely intellectual level, can’t help but be impressed by it. On the other hand, with not much to go on in the way of plot or characters, I had a hard time being emotionally engaged in the book. In that sense, it may be a work of fiction, but it’s more of an extended thought experiment than a novel.

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Films & Television, Science Fiction

Aliens watch Hollywood film for free

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The latest Hollywood blockbuster right now is this year’s remake of the science-fiction classic The Day the Earth Stood Still starring Keanu Reeves. In one of the odder publicity moves, the producers have decided to beam the film into outer space just in case any extraterrestrials want to watch it. The transmission is being directed at the star system closest to our own, Alpha Centauri, which is about 4.37 light years away from our Sun, though the studio notes that it is a wide beam transmission so that any aliens who happen to be travelling within the cone of the transmission or even beyond Alpha Centauri should be able to tune in as well.

More seriously, it’s pretty unlikely that any aliens will be close enough to catch it, and it’s a big question whether or not the signal will remain coherent enough to be watchable at any reasonable quality 4.37 light years away. In any case, since Earth has been leaking radio transmissions into space for decades by now, if any aliens are in Alpha Centauri and wanted to send a reply, we’d have heard from them by now.

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Books, Science Fiction

A Book: Hyperion

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It was vaguely man-shaped but in no way human. It stood at least three meters tall. Even when it was at rest, the silvered surface of the thing seemed to shift and flow like mercury suspended in midair. The reddish glow from the crosses etched into the tunnel walls reflected from sharp surfaces and glinted on the curved metal blades protruding from the thing’s forehead, four wrists, oddly jointed elbows, knees, armored back, and thorax. It flowed between the kneeling Bikura, and when it extended four long arms, hands extended but fingers clicking into place like chrome scalpels, I was absurdly reminded of His Holiness on Pacem offering a benediction to the faithful.

I had no doubt that I was looking at the legendary Shrike.

– Dan Simmons in Hyperion

As an avid fan of science-fiction, I’ve read just about all of the classics of the genre. Dan Simmons’ Hyperion is one of the exceptions, so it was with some pleasure that I came across a copy of it while browsing at a bookstore at Warisan Square here in Kota Kinabalu. I’ve already had some familiarity with the plot, having read one or two of Simmons’ short stories based on the same setting in various anthologies, but this was the first time that I’ve actually read the book, and I have to say that it deserves every bit of the many accolades it has been given.

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Science Fiction

RIP Arthur C. Clarke

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March is turning out to be a bad month for geeks around the world. Gary Gygax, co-creator of Dungeons & Dragons, died earlier this month and Arthur C. Clarke, one of few remaining writers from the Golden Age of science-fiction and the last of the “Big Three”, has just died today at the age of 90. These days, the media remembers Clarke mostly for his collaboration with Stanley Kubrick on 2001: A Space Odyssey, predicting the concept of geosynchronous communications satellites before the technology for them became possible and for the often used quote that any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.

For me however, Clarke’s most memorable work was Childhood’s End, a novel about humanity transcending itself. It’s also the only one of my novels that my mother liked. Growing up, I had piles of science-fiction and fantasy novels lying all around the place and my mother would occasionally pick one up and flip through it. Most of the time, she never got past the first page. To my surprise, not only did she finish reading Childhood’s End, afterwards she asked me, “I liked that one. Do you have any more like it?”

Childhood’s End had captured my imagination ever since I’ve read an extract of it published as a short story in a collection edited by Isaac Asimov, another one of the “Big Three” writers, who died in 1992. It was collections like this that convinced me that the true soul of science-fiction, as the literature of ideas, lies not in novels but in short stories. I also remember the palpable awe that I felt when I first read Clarke’s Rendezvous with Rama. Nowadays, gigantic spaceships in space is an overused theme, but Rama was one of the first examples of it and Clarke’s words captured the huge scale of it in a way that no other author has been able to replicate since.

Clark’s later life in Sri Lanka was blighted by allegations of pedophilia that has been proved to be false and although he tried to continue writing, he never could quite keep up with the new crop of writers. Nevertheless, his place in the history of science-fiction is assured and he will be forever remembered.