Stargate: Universe

As you may have gathered by now, I’m a great fan of the Stargate franchise. Its mixture of tongue-in-cheek action, applied ethics, and heroic adventure is fantastically fun, as long as it’s not taken too seriously.

I’m not a fan of SG-1’s successor series, Stargate: Atlantis, for a variety of reasons and despite its having some truly entertaining characters. Its writing team just couldn’t manage to create a balanced ensemble cast and properly integrate the discovery of Ancient technology into their plots; they had no long-term planning, and their primary villains were just silly. (The Wraith are the worst thing to happen to the franchise in a very long time, IMO.) Several cast members were reduced to secondary support roles, and more obnoxiously, their character concepts were never developed to any real degree or even discarded altogether.

But I had high hopes that things would turn around with SGU, and the first episode (especially the third part of it) had enough meat to it that I was encouraged. Since then, the show has basically failed to deliver. It’s been far too much like a soap opera for my tastes – character flaws are fine, but the constant harping on sex and fan-service-for-guys is annoying. There really are no strong, well-developed female characters despite having lots of interesting guys. And Chloe still doesn’t seem to have a purpose either in her own person or as a character on the Destiny – in every episode, she’s either moped or gotten weepy, and the one time she was ever useful was briefly assisting with first-aid in the middle of a montage.

Now, the first seasons of science-fiction shows are often very rough. SG-1 in particular had a difficult first season, with the writers and characters eventually finding their voices as time passed. I’m hoping that the first six episodes were an extended pilot of sorts for SGU and that things will pick up. But if it doesn’t, and the show becomes another Atlantis, I’m going to leave. I never hated SGA – I just cared less and less about the show until it wasn’t worth the bother to tune in. But there are elements in SGU that I’m beginning to actively dislike.

Telford’s Query

Stargate: Universe fan-spec ahead. Regular readers might not want to bother.

Everyone is rushing to hate on Col. Telford, with the last scene of the previous episode vaguely implying that he’s either going to seduce Young’s wife while pretending to be him, or blackmailing her somehow.

But there are other possible alternatives. For example:

“Mrs. Young, were you aware that I’m HIV-positive?”

Beautiful

The Magicians

Today’s review is of Lev Grossman’s new novel The Magicians.

So what’s it about? Imagine a self-conscious deconstruction of the Harry Potter novels and The Chronicles of Narnia, with a little Dungeons and Dragons blended together with snippets of Gulliver’s Travels thrown in to even out the mix.

Basically, a desperately unhappy young man goes to his alumni interview for Princeton and ends up taking a bizarre examination for a college he’s never heard of, where it’s the middle of summer despite it being early November. It turns out to be a school of magic – one that is in all ways almost nothing like Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry. Magic exists, but it makes brain surgery look like kindergarten painting day. Everything turns out about as well as you expect.

The novel is really about happiness and how you can’t find it even if you’re given your heart’s desire if what you’re seeking to escape if yourself – approximately. Also, the absurdity of certain kinds of escapist fiction and the worlds it postulates.

It’s not a bad book by any means, but I’m not sure it satisfies.

Thoughts on Stargate

For me, the most interesting aspect of the Stargate series has been their attempts to discuss, directly and indirectly, the nature of rationality and its implications for how we approach and interact with the rest of the universe.

One of the things that I disliked about the later seasons of Stargate was the change in themes. An early motif was that a sudden gain of power by a person or people unprepared to handle it led to tragedy and destruction. The first example (one which was often referenced later) was the death of Col. O’Neill’s son while playing with a gun belonging to his father. He of course didn’t recognize the potential consequences of treating a firearm like a toy, and the anguish of parents even indirectly responsible for the death of their child is all too salient for the audience. In the show, it destroyed the Colonel’s marriage and nearly drove him to end his own life.

The Tolmen civilization, which granted the secrets of perpetual energy generation to a nearby but less-advanced world, lost its homeworld when the recipients of its gift fell to warring among themselves and detonated their planet with the technology; the resulting ecological damage rendered the Tolmen’s world uninhabitable. Their refusal to share their knowledge with the SGC is easily understandable.

As the Nox put it, humanity is very “young”. Giving advanced technology to an unadvanced culture is no different from handing a gun to a child ignorant of the danger it poses. The burned hand teaches best, and even the best of intentions often lead to painful lessons.

But what happens in the later seasons? The Asgard give Earth all of their technology, which rivals that of the Ancients’ in its power.

I suspect the wiz-bang opportunities offered by advanced alien technology proved to be more appealing to the writers than sticking with their philosophical themes.

pandemonium

A strange and terrifying first novel by an author who lives in town.

I usually prefer to write my own reviews of works, but I thought the backcover summary was so good that I’m going to quote it in full:

It is a world like our own in every respect… save one. In the 1950s, random acts of possession begin to occur. Ordinary men, women, and children are the targets of entities that seem to spring from the depths of the collective unconscious, pop-cultural avatars some call demons. There’s the Truth, implacable avenger of falsehood. The Captain, brave and self-sacrificing soldier. The Little Angel, whose kiss brings death, whether desired or not. And a string of others, ranging from the bizarre to the benign to the horrific.
As a boy, Del Pierce is possessed by the Hellion, an entity whose mischief-making can be deadly. With the help of Del’s family and a caring psychiatrist, the demon is exorcised… or is it? Years later, following a car accident, the Hellion is back, trapped inside Del’s head and clamoring to get out.
Del’s quest for help leads him to Valis, an entity possessing the science fiction writer formerly known as Philip K. Dick; to mother Mariette, a nun who inspires decidedly unchaste feelings; and to the Human League, a secret society dedicated to the extermination of demons. All believe Del holds the key to the plague of possession – and its solution. But for Del, the cure may be worse than the disease.

The novel reads like a campaign of Call of Cthulhu run by a collection of truly gifted roleplayers. The situations encountered by the reader inspire genuine horror – not terror or disgust as is so often the case in media – and pity, which is more remarkable. Even the antagonists are, to some degree, sympathetic. It’s all too easy to grasp what might drive people to do such terrible things in a world where no one is safe from being seized by an unknown being and used like a hand puppet – and possibly discarded as an uninteresting or broken toy afterwards.

Stargate: Universe trailer

No, not the parody trailer with younger versions of the SG-1 cast. Nor the other, earlier trailer. A later version.

Questions: why are they kidnapping a geek? And why would a stargate connection take them a billion lightyears from Earth? Even a very old Ancient ship would have to be traveling for quite a while to go that far, and would be unlikely to be reached by a valid Stargate connection. Hell, you need eight symbols just to go out of the galaxy – the chances of stumbling onto the right combination by accident are miniscule.

Also: who the Hell names a military base “Icarus”? That’s bad juju right there. Naming has power, and calling yourself after the mythological character whose tragic overreaching caused his death attracts all kinds of undesirable destiny. Tempting fate is a NOT good idea.

Even More Stargate

(sigh)

Stargate: Atlantis failed because there was no overarching plan for the series, and one way or another the same old stories were used as filler. Pretty much the same reasons the most recent versions of Star Trek failed, actually.

Exactly who is responsible and who is to blame – writers, directors, executives, or the network – isn’t really important. What is important is that the basic premise of the new Stargate: Universe series seems to have been cribbed from Star Trek: Voyager.

I’m confident that there isn’t truly copying involved. There are only so many basic premises you can work with, after all. But it’s not an auspicious new beginning.

Look, eventually I wasn’t willing to watch Atlantis even to kill time, and for free. There was no long-term structure to the show, no consistent antagonists (and the ones that were there were fairly silly), and they messed up the mythology of the show quite badly. Many of the characters were never properly used, and the ones who were used well were used too much and too often.

I’m not hopeful that the SyFy network (long, tedious story there) can raise another Stargate series out of the ashes. I’ll probably watch the pilot, though.

Ghost Brigades and The Last Colony

Well, I finished the next book in the series and am rapidly approaching the end of the last one.

Well, Scalzi improved on some of the flaws in the first novel. The series is set in even more of a dystopia than I’d thought. Details will be refrained from as to avoid spoilers, but the overall scenario isn’t what it was presented as being. It’s still fairly implausible, but given that this section of the galaxy seems to be ruled by a Shadow-equivalent, possibly explicable within the bounds of the tale.

It’s not at all clear to me that a species that evolved from social insects and structures its society according to the expected principles would care much about threats to offspring. The point was necessary in terms of what Scalzi was setting up, but I don’t think it’s plausible on its own.

Old Man’s War

Old Man’s War is Scalzi’s first published fiction novel, and it shows. It’s certainly enjoyable – it reads like the offspring of Cory Doctorow and Robert Heinlein – but it’s rather flawed.

It doesn’t help that it is most similar to my least favorite work of Heinlein’s: Starship Troopers. Very effective at making people never want to be associated with armed forces or warfare in any way. I suspect it would have the opposite effect on some people, in the same way that Heinlein’s did, but those people are beyond help anyway.

Problems:

One fairly trivial problem is that Perry was diagnosed with testicular cancer during his physical exam. Given that he was seventy-five years old, that’s moderately unlikely. Testicular cancer is usually a young man’s disease, with 90% of cases occurring before the age of fifty-four and the majority before the thirties. It’s certainly not impossible to develop it in relative old age, but it’s sufficiently implausible that it brought me out of the story. It’s by far the most unlikely thing to have happened by that point in the novel, and it begins with a seventy-five-year-old man joining the army. In space.

A more serious one is that it simply doesn’t make sense that Earth survived long enough to produce a technological civilization in a universe filled with hostile, colonizing intelligences, many of which have a taste for our biochemistry and sufficient technology to make harvesting our flesh worthwhile resource-wise. (They certainly could grow flesh in vats, just as we can farm fish in tanks. Wild-caught food is still available, and is a status symbol for humans. Why should it be otherwise for aliens?)

I much prefer galactic civilization in The Android’s Dream (many interstellar civilizations, most of which have no interest in Earth) to that in Old Man’s War (many interstellar civilizations engaged in an endless war over living space and resources). Sadly, it seems mot of Scalzi’s work has been set in the OMW-verse. Oh well.

I’m not particularly fond of the ideological stances implicit in the work; they’re very common, though, so it’s not as if they’re surprising.