New Dresden Codak!

The latest edition is up. About time.

Problems

After acquiring the legendary games Fallout and Fallout 2, my computer’s monitor broke down in such a manner that the system cannot be used. And it can’t be fixed – first the vertical scan broke, now the monitor only makes ominous clicking noises and will not turn on at all. This is immensely frustrating.

I’ve only gotten to Junktown in Fallout, but thus far it is the third grimmest thing I’ve ever seen, following closely on the setting material for Warhammer 40,000 and “Requiem for a Dream”. It’s interspersed with humor, but the gleams of light only serve to make the darkness seem darker.

I’m enjoying it immensely.

Mind Over Ship

I was all set to write an extended review of David Marusek’s sequel to the earlier novel “Counting Heads”, and then I realized that Cory Doctorow had beaten me to the punch months ago.

I find I have little to add to this summation – excepting such merely personal details such as the fact that I enjoyed the novel but found some of its premises annoying.

I’m afraid that for all of its interesting ideas, it’s yet another science-fictional universe in which some form of vitalism holds sway – in this one, biological organisms somehow can form ‘psychic’ links that transcend space-time, and the local equivalent of AIs wants human bodies for this feature. This sort of thing is extremely tiresome – even if biology has tricks that we haven’t yet figured out, a society of superintelligences should be able to reverse-engineer any feature given enough interest and build it into their own hardware if they so desire.

Show, not Tell

Thoughts on the SGU episode “Time”:

Why are the actors telling us how hot and sticky the jungle is, while at the same time they’re wearing multiple layers of clothing? Actions speak so much louder than words – when a character supposedly in a jungle says it’s hot, but his shirt isn’t soaked in sweat and he’s wearing visible layers of clothing over an extended period of time, what we see and what we’re told don’t match. And that does a lot to ruin immersion.

And I’m sorry to see Chloe losing her lunch over seeing an alternate self die on camera – by itself it is in no way objectionable, but in the larger context of the show it’s Chloe being emotionally fragile and weak *again*. Why couldn’t she have been the one to survive to throw the Kino into the portal, for example. Just to change things up a bit.

Identifying the Problem

Joseph Mallozzi responded to the question I asked in both a previous post and a comment on his blog.

Melendwyr writes: “What were the most important scenes from the first six episodes of SGU?”

Answer: That’s a matter of opinion. The examples you gave from other shows are not moments I would consider “important” in comparison to others.

I’m starting to gain a greater insight into why I’m not connecting the with crew of the Destiny. The moments I mentioned from previous shows are both widely recognized and generally beloved character moments – and more importantly, I suspect they’re the things that helped “hook” audiences into caring about the events in the shows. No such moments, no hooked audience.

On SGU, Greer, Eli, Young, Rush, and possibly TJ have had such moments. 2nd Lt. James had a minor such moment. Even “Salieri” astrophysicist guy has had his moment to shine. Chloe has not. And that may have a lot to do with why I’m not very sympathetic to Chloe.

Scenes

When we first met O’Neill, we were exposed to the idea of his having a tragedy in his past – and his doing things that made us root for the character – long before we found out he was supposed to destroy the mission if things went south. We were exposed to the heroic side of the character before we encountered the villainous side – and he promptly redeemed himself. He did some dumb things later on – like shooting the humaniform Replicator – but only after we’d already gotten to like him.

The most important scene in the first episode of Babylon 5 was when Garibaldi points out to Londo that the Centauri first claimed Earth was a lost colony of theirs, and Londo sarcastically asks if he wants blood and tells him to open his wrists. “Centauri don’t have major arteries in their wrists.” “Of course not! Do you think I’m stupid?”

The most important two scenes in the opening episodes of Firefly were when Wash was playing with his dinosaurs, and Mal kicked the thug into the engine intake. “Curse your sudden yet inevitable betrayal!”

Long stories tend to start with a few characters that we are meant to like – they make us smile, or laugh, or do something awesome that induces us to clear brainspace to keep track of them and their circumstances. They’re the hooks that draw us into the story. Once we care about one character, it becomes easier to care about the others.

What were the most important scenes from the first six episodes of SGU? The ones that made us like the characters before we were exposed to their unlikeable flaws?

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.