I cohabit happily enough with the odd spider that wanders indoors – as the cobwebs behind certain pieces of furniture attest. But after an overdose on the third season of Babylon 5 – while trying to rest a thumb registering overuse – I must admit to a momentary hesitation about reaching down to pull the computer plug when I saw my 3" fellow tenant crouching behind the power bar.
Category Archives: Science fiction
Why I love this man's work
JMS, in his commentary on one of my favourite B5 episodes, “Severed Dreams”, pointed to the scene in which the crew make the choice to stand and fight as pivotal. Later, he lingers over the scene of Sheridan and his father as one of his favorites: two people talking, saying less than they feel, but affirming a connection when one of them may not return. He does fine action – his commentary on the battle scene is full of relish at the accomplishment of pulling off such a sustained, complex special effects sequence – but what is important is the drama. And that’s why I love his work.
‘Twern’t always so. B5 left me cold when I saw the pilot on my old B&W TV in Leeds. There was this guy with big hair and a Transylvanian accent, the alien with a lech for human women, another alien composed of substances we wot not of drifting around emitting gnomic utterances, and the usual clutter of uniforms. For the first season I ignored it. Then, for reasons unknown to me now, I tuned in again for the second season episode “Revelations”. Over the subsequent three and a half years the guy with the Transylvanian accent turned into one of SF’s great tragic villains. The lecher proved to have deep religious faith and a capacity for change as impressive as his bombastic arrogance. The ‘good wizards’ – figures seldom questioned in SF – proved out to have unsuspected ties to the great enemy. The uniforms backed, step by step, into mutiny, insurrection and war. Much of it done with a control of narrative technique that is an education. The replay of B5 on Space Channel at an inaccessible hour during my residency has prompted me to master a technology which has intimidated me for years: the VCR.
To enumerate some of the show’s other delights:
- Stephen Furst’s Vir, a timid man with a sure moral compass.
- Mira Furlan’s Delenn, a lady, a scholar, and kicker of Earth Force’s collective butt.
- Bill Mumy’s Lenier, a good and devoted young man who, alas, has not faced his own darkness
- Walter Koenig’s twitchy, oily evil portrayal of psi cop Bester.
- The estimable Dr. McCoy would never, as Dr. Stephen Franklin does, fail to find a cure for a plague, defy a parental veto on treating a fatally ill child and see the parents kill the child to save its soul, develop a drug addiction and nearly lose his own life while trying to find himself.
- Michael ‘even paranoids have enemies’ Garibaldi, as his unrecognized brainwashing gradually turned him against his former allies, culminating in his betrayal of his commander and friend.
- The central place of faith to many of its characters. TV SF tends to treat religion in terms of politics or ritual, and render it either prosaic or grotesque, when not shying away completely. I think particularly of the STTNG episode “First Contact”, marred for me by the cowardice on making the opponent of contact a “political officer” defending an “ideology” which insists the Malcorans are alone in the universe. Religion in B5 can be absurd, transcendent, colourful, mystical, moral, irrational, much as it is in the real world.
- The shocking filmic elegance of those moments of violence which are both plot-pivotal and emotionally crucial: Garibaldi’s shooting by his second in command, the Narn security recruits throwing themselves against the entrenched Night Watch, the mob murder of Lord Refa, the betrayal and capture of John Sheridan.
- The noshing! Someone on rec.arts.sf.babylon5 once compiled of a list of who ate what with whom in the first two seasons. Infinite diversity in infinite combinations indeed.
- The voracious little blonde briefly assigned to John Sheridan as a security officer, who was seen tucking in with a will on at least two occasions. What a touch of characterization. Tell me the last time you saw an slim, wicked woman on TV doing anything other than picking at a salad?
- The gloriously spiky Shadow ships. For that matter, all the various, distinctive shapes.
- The handling of sex, subtle where it needed to be, charged where it needed to be. One area where it’s readily proven that ‘the secret of being boring is to tell everything.’
Westercon, second day and after
Somehow I managed to produce my last post in triplicate; serves me right for messing with the template, trying to contribute to the Technorati thread on Westercon.
Second day (yesterday) consisted of 3 panels sat on, none listened to, two books bought, one bank found, one old stamping ground revisited. The first panel was “Part time writer”, four writers, all from BC (does that says something about BC funding for the arts, BC writers, or simply about the networks) talking about writing when you have a full-time day-job (the basic condition of the majority of writers, since as Derryl Murphy pointed out, the mean annual income of SFWA members from their writing was in the $2000-$3000 range). The panelists were Derryl Murphy, whose first short story collection Wasps at the Speed of Sound is just out; Nina Munteanu; and Mark Anthony Brennan, and myself). Discussion ranged over how to make the switch from daytime work to nighttime work, how to recharge oneself, writing every day versus writing in bursts, how the daytime work fed into the nighttime work, Canada Council Grants, writer’s retreats, protecting time and space, the freedom to be noncommercial vs the risks of being noncommercial.
[Continued, August 21] The next panel was Earth as a Model for Other Planets, which went in unexpected directions. I should have read the panel description a touch more carefully, to realize that it specificially evoked prehistory as a model. I came prepared to look sideways; however co-panellists were Blair Peterson, James C. Glass and Larry Niven, and we got all the way down to the molecular, discussing the properties of water in supporting life, as well as back to Snowball Earth.
Making a Human Alien (third day) was another strong panel that covered a lot of ground. Memory’s a little foggy, but I think the roster was Danita, Blair, Kathryn Myronuk, and Hayden Trenholm, all of whom came with background in genetics, medicine, or policy, and all of whom came at the idea of human bioengineering from different directions – feasibility, vs. lack of feasibility, individual procreative choice vs. social good. Much of the discussion took on a technical feasibility vs. post-9/11 paranoia theme: Would the need to experiment and cull – acceptable in plants, unacceptable in humans – restrict the rapid implementation of these methods in humans, or would cheap and rapidly automated biotechnology land us in a scenario similar to what we are seeing today with the internet and computer viruses, with biohackers, bioterrorists, and garage virus engineers rampant?
On the Monday I managed to pause in my social whirl and attend two panels, the first being the future of Tor books, and the second the alternative energy panel. I made it in time to hear the last three paragraphs of Dave Duncan’s reading.
Westercon, first day
Arrived late Thursday night. So far the score is No. panels given, 1, No. panels attended, 0. I am abashed, because there were several panels I would have gone to but that I had a couple of items left over from the week at work to take care of that I thought could be done within an hour. Slight misjudgement there. I am determined I have left work behind me now.
The one panel I sat on was a relaxed 9 pm panel on “SF Mind Control” with a good-sized, active audience. The other panelists were Donna McMahon and Danita Masian (whose first novel, Rogue Harvest, had its launch today). We had as much real world reflection as SF: cults, Bountiful, propaganda, Nazis, cold war, office life, conformity, the “7-up” series of documentaries, religion, gender socialization, criminality, biological basis of behavior; what was socialization, what was indoctrination, and what was mind control; whether the Internet was something that gave us immunity from the kind of media control that fascist and Bolshevik regimes exercised. Books and films mentioned: The Manchurian Candidate, 1984, Brave New World, We, The Invasion of the Body Snatchers, The Puppet Masters, Stepford Wives, Dances with Knives.
I also caught up with people – having lived in Calgary from 1995-2000, and attended at least 5 Con-Versions over 8 years, there are a great many familiar faces – and having 4 days instead of the usual 2 is making that a much less scrambled affair. I’ve made it into the Dealer’s Room, which at the last con I went to (V-con) I never even did, and I might make it into the art show. This year they’re offering guided tours with a docent, which I think is an excellent idea.
Calgary is extraordinarily green and puddled, and you ask locals about it and they just shake their heads and groan. I’ve heard sad stories about flooded basements and destroyed books, including stocks of the writers’ own. Mosquitos are plentiful with all the standing water, so there were opening night jokes about mosquitos bearing off some of the guests. A zealous parent outside the Y nailed not only her wriggling child but my passing self with citronella. Prince Edward Island Park was flooded, so the Shakespeare in the Park has moved to Mount Royal – but it alas does not start until after I leave. Stampede is impending, with even the swank downtown hotels mounting plywood saloon faces and all the guests appearing at opening in white 10-gallon hats.
Orbital Burn
Another Calgary acquisition, one I had gone with the intention of acquiring, was fellow Edge author Adrian Bedford’s first novel, Orbital Burn. Immediate conflict of interest statement: I’m published by the same publisher, and Brian gave me a copy. So there’s bias. Having confessed that, I can now enthuse. There’s the odd rough spot, but I read it while heat-sick and hiding in a basement, feeling sorry for myself, and I still liked it a great deal.
It has a great first sentence, a classic SF first sentence: “One morning, not long before the end of the world, a dead woman named Lou sat drinking expresso in Sheb’s Old Earth Diner, one of the few places still open in the cheap part of Stalktown.” Lou is a freelance, unlicenced PI. As a privileged, feckless eighteen-year-old she fell victim to “accelerated tissue necrosis nanovirus”, released with murderous malice at a party. Now she exists with the help of nanotechnology that rebuilds her body as swiftly – more or less – as the nanovirus causes it to decay, but the nanotechnology wears out and needs topped up, so her existance is as precarious as her tenuous cash-stream. Lou’s decay – described effectively – is paralleled by the decay of Kestrel, her home colony, which is about to be destroyed out by an asteroid; the affluent are long gone, and the dispossessed huddle around the Stalk, the space elevator, in hopes of being lifted off in time. Lou is delaying her own departure, knowing that it is likely to mean loss of her livelihood and shortly thereafter, disintegration. When, into Sheb’s Old Earth Diner comes Dog, a cybernetically enhanced beagle, who hires her to look for his adopted charge, a retarded, sickly biological android boy for whom he has been caring. The boy has been kidnapped and Lou is the last PI in Stalktown.
If I go much further, I risk spoilers. Suffice to say, Lou comes up against the usual hazards of a down-and-out PI as she moves through the mean and crumbling streets and towers of Kestrel: lawless cops, the amoral elite, the thoroughly untrustworthy ex, and a client with his own secrets. Kestrel is grim, pitiful and memorable: the decaying neighbourhoods, the abandoned luxury residences. This being SF, there are a number of other forces that also cross Lou’s path, on her way to a resolution that would be an SF cliche were it not so right for Lou’s psychological journey. She was young and still maturing when she died; she has, in a way, been frozen in time. She has a resolution to reach, things to learn about love and acceptance, and the book has a tangible (at least to me) theme. The integration of character and setting, theme and resolution, and the sense of place are the book’s strengths, along with an unabashed echo of its influences, 40s and 50s hardboiled PI and classic SF novels.
Some faint damns among the praise. The viewpoint strayed during the first couple of chapters before settling into Lou’s head; perhaps in an attempt to solve the information transfer problem. There is some action that sets up one of the key scenes in the book that seems forced and need not; the elements are already there to support Lou’s reaction, but are not deployed effectively. But the scene it leads into – I don’t think I’d be giving much away when I say it is a courtroom scene – is one of my favorites. Along with the one in which Lou’s mysterious rescuer tries to elicit the former party-girl’s thoughts about her soul. In Bedford’s Universe, humanity, and law, has to accommodate biological androids, the walking dead, and sentient computers.