Sci Fi

If you actually CAN watch this, then I guess their servers have managed to recover from yesterday’s crush. After trying for awhile, I just got the first episode of Joss Whedon’s “Dr. Horrible’s Sing-Along Blog” through a torrent. Neil Patrick Harris is Dr. Horrible, a struggling mad scientist hoping one day to join the supervillain group, “The Evil Society of Evil”. He occasionally does a video blog where he discusses problems like how his transmat ray is going, what his nemesis Captain Hammer (Firefly’s Nathan Fillion) did to him last week that really hurt, how his evil laugh is coming along (he has just gotten a vocal coach), and how nervous he is about talking to a girl he sees at the laundromat, Penny, played by Buffy’s Felicia Day. ...

Just discovered the blog of Javier Grillo-Marxuach, the creator, writer and artist for “The Middleman” comics and the new TV series of the same name. Monday nights. ABC Family. Lots of inside info about upcoming episodes and behind the scenes stuff. Yeah, I know YOU’RE already watching the best comedy SF show on television right now, but I’m just letting those other people who are too good and hip to watch television know about it. ...

Tor has been continuing their free release of books in electronic form, and I have been totally enjoying these free glimpses into new works, formatted to display well on my Sony Reader. First, though, is a book still hammered into the beating heart of dead trees. Matter by Iain M. Banks – Banks’ returns to his much-anticipated stories of people at the fringes of his Utopian spacefaring civilization, The Culture. In the Culture, all boring work is down by non-sentient machines, the intelligent machines and human-kinda people basically do what they want and live in gigantic spaceships or massive orbital stations, and are really kind of boring. Since it’s no fun being part of the Culture if you can’t fiddle with other less advanced civilizations, the Culture stories almost entirely focus on the Special Circumstances crew; those who have a taste for harsh living and interference. ...

The problem is not that Battlestar Galactica has tranformed science fiction television. The problem is that it has set such an impossibly high bar that its future imitators won’t be able to surpass it. I just got to watching Friday’s episode. This fourth and final season, every single episode goes places I have never seen in any sort of fiction, science or otherwise. I’m not even going to try and urge you to watch it. You do or you don’t. All I want to say here is, sometimes something comes along that changes all the rules. There has been a lot of good SF on TV – Babylon 5 was pretty awesome, but it went a different way. B5 was a mirror held up to the Star Trek shows that said, here are the parts of your shiny happy world you never talk about. Battlestar Galactica says, fuck the future. This is a cruel story, and all cruel stories end the same way.

Last night, millions of Britons (8.4 millions to be exact) sat down to the first episode of the latest series of Doctor Who, the first with Catherine Tate (who co-starred in the 2006 Christmas special). And today, millions of people outside the UK downloaded it and watched it as well. I watched it on my television via my Vista laptop running the media center extensions for a show I’d downloaded on my Linux desktop computer. The wonders of a home network :) As I watched it from the couch with my morning waffles and Diet Coke, I thought how wonderful it will be when BBC makes some sort of deal with some US network so we can see it the SAME DAY. ...

There’s something supremely, unapologetically geeky about going to a science fiction convention or comic convention. I went to San Diego Comicon back in 2006 and you know, it’s just our kind of folk there. Before that, when I was employed anyway (and living in the greater Bay Area), I would hit up Baycon, SiliCon and Fanime every year up in San Jose. Problem since I’ve moved to Connecticut is that I had no idea how to find out if similar things went on around here. I found out about Boskone way too late, but then, that’s in Boston, two hours away. ...

Arthur C. Clarke, grandmaster author of some of the greatest science fiction ever written and inventor of the geosynchronous communication satellite, is dead today. He’s one of the last from SF’s Golden Age. He worked with Stanley Kubrick, to turn his short story, Sentinel, into the movie (and accompanying book), 2001: A Space Odyssey. Without question, he will be missed. I’ve been a fan of his from my earliest discoveries of written science fiction. His light-hearted stories of tall tales told in a bar (many collected in Tales of the White Hart would later inspire such famed writers as Larry Niven and Spider Robinson. His book Childhood’s End, to be made at some point into a movie, was an obvious inspiration to such invasion epics as V and Independence Day, and was one of the first books which discussed the next stage of human evolution might bring, and what the effect on those of us left behind might be. Imperial Earth inspired in me a love of puzzles which is still with me today. ...

What has Portal got to do with Postsingular, anyway? I didn’t do a whole lot of gaming this weekend. I spent most of it curled up with my Sony Reader, devouring Rudy Rucker’s book “Postsingular”, which he is offering for free download on his website in PDF and Reader-friendly HTML. I love HTML books because I can scale the text up nice and big and make reading an anytime, anywhere pleasure. I have Iain M. Banks’ new book, “Matter”, in dead tree form and I can barely make out the words. Have I mentioned how much I love this thing? ...

First, a bit about LAST week. Playing for Keeps, the superhero podcast, came to a thunderous end last Thursday. If you’ve been hesitating to start it, wanting to wait until it was done, well, it’s done, so enjoy. Drew and I went to see Jumper Saturday. It doesn’t have much to do with the book. Among the things we don’t find out are: how people can have a high speed teleporting car race through the center of Tokyo without anyone noticing, what happened to the other Jumper, how many Jumpers are there, why don’t their paladins wear plate armor, why don’t you always make some false jumps to throw off the trail before making your final jump so psycho paladins with machines that can open the jump scars you leave can’t follow you, why don’t Jumpers get wealthy by “jump” starting a new business teleporting people and goods around (as the ‘jumpers’ in Kevin O’Donnell Jr.’s “McGill Feighan” books did). After awhile, the movie ends somewhere in the middle of the story. ...

I bet you thought I would forget about my Reader, return to paper books (and I admit, I do have Iain M. Banks’ “Matter” winging its way to me in dead tree form). But I swear to you, the Reader is my constant companion. Tucked away in my purse are about twenty books, some bought, some free, and whenever I have a few quiet moments to read, out it comes. ...