SF Signal: January 2008 Archives

Wednesday January 30, 2008

What Do You Want To See From: LOST Season 4

It seems like forever since LOST was last on the air, but that's about to change in a hurry as season 4 starts tomorrow night, at 9pm ET. When we last left our survivors, rescue seemed immanent, thanks to Charlie disabling the Looking Glass hatch, allowing communications with the outside. Of course, being LOST things aren't what they seem, and the 'rescuers' may not be looking for the Losties at all. Cue end of season 3. So that brings us to season 4. There is a wealth of unanswered questions out there. But we'd like to know what you want to see from Season 4. Keep in mind that, with only 16 episodes this season (if we're lucky) you can't get all the answers. And just for Trent, I'll go ahead and place 'less clothes' (see accompanying picture) on his list.

Some of the things I want to see are:

Why is the island hidden from the outside world and how is that accomplished?

Where did the 'native' others come from and who don't they appear to age?

Who, exactly, is Jacob?

What is the smoke monster?

I know theres a lot more, but these are the ones foremost in my mind. Although, from what I've read, the smoke monster may remain a mystery for awhile longer. What say you?

MIND MELD: Which Predictions Did Golden Age Science Fiction Get Right & Wrong?

Although science fiction fans know better, the general populace likes to think of sf as being written with the express purpose of predicting the future. So we posed the following question to a bunch of people in the since fiction community:

Science fiction is often accused of being The Great Predictor. Which predictions did Golden Age science fiction get right? Which ones were way off the mark?

James Gunn

James Gunn, Emeritus Professor of English at K.U., has published a dozen novels and half a dozen collections of stories, and has edited a dozen and a half books. His best-known novels are The Immortals, The Dreamers, The Listeners, Kampus, and The Joy Makers. The Immortals was filmed as The Immortal and became a TV series. He published The Science of Science-Fiction Writing in 2002 and edited Speculations on Speculation: Theories of Science Fiction in 2005. He has been president of the Science Fiction Writers of America and the Science Fiction Research Association. His most recent publications are Gift from the Stars and the reprint edition of The Listeners, both available from BenBella Books. In 2007 he was named a Damon Knight Memorial Grand Master by SFWA.

Science fiction has included a lot of speculations that look like predictions, and some of them have come to pass, most spectacularly spaceships and atomic power and bombs, but prediction is a side effect of creating plausible scenarios about future change, not its intent. SF has been more important as a means of persuading readers to think about issues and the ways in which they might develop and how that might affect the human condition. As Isaac Asimov said in 1973, "We live in a science-fiction world, a world very much like the one we were writing about in 1939." It is a world that might well have been significantly different if science-fiction writers had not imagined it in detail. More specifically, to quote Isaac again, "Science-fiction writers and readers didn't put a man on the moon all by themselves, but they created a climate in which the goal of putting a man on the moon became acceptable." The same process is at work on other potential changes, in which, as John Campbell put it, futures are tested for human habitability. Or, as he went on, science-fiction is a way of practicing in a no-practice area. Some changes, like a parachute jump, have to be perfect the first time.

James Wallace Harris

James Wallace Harris is a life-long science fiction fan. With Olivier Travers, he created SciFan.com in 1999 and he programmed the database system. Since the early days of the web, James has maintained The Classics of Science Fiction, which was based on his article from the fanzine Lan's Lantern back in the 1980s. He quit SciFan to study fiction writing and he attended the Clarion West Writer's Workshop in 2002. He now practices blog writing at Auxiliary Memory. James has been happily married for thirty years to his wife Susan. He works as a programmer and sys admin but dreams about space exploration and writing a SF 2.0 novel.

Science fiction's greatest success at prediction was its greatest failure. From Jules Verne through Robert Heinlein prepared the world for human exploration of space. Even ancient Greeks imagined life on other worlds and throughout the centuries rare minds wrote about fantastic voyages to distant spheres. It was the Golden Age SF writers that spread the meme across the globe so even the average American family drinking their java and reading their Colliers knew it was going to happen. Science fiction inspired the engineers that formed NASA who built the Saturn V and Apollo 11. All those crazy Buck Rogers nuts were vindicated on July 20, 1969.

Rocket travel was pulp fiction philosophy. The colonization of Mars was seen as inevitable as the Mayflower coming to America. Then twelve mighty Americans walked on the Moon and the dream died. Those pulp fiction Platos lacked the vision to see that 99.99 percent of Earthlings didn't want to pay for the fever dreams of the .01 percent. John W. Campbell's disciples never imagined that the common homo sap just did not want to build cities in space.

I have tortured my mind for years to understand why my fellow citizens lacked the deep passion we science fiction fans feel for space exploration. My conclusion is science fiction failed to understand sex - the genetic low level programming to date, mate, marry and procreate. Even Robert A. Heinlein never noticed the urge to get laid is greater than the drive to blast off into the ether. Greed can trump humping but there are no El Dorados in space. People spend taxes on security, and although all our genetics eggs are in basket Earth, no Prudential Messiah has sold humanity the racial life insurance policy of colonizing Mars. SF 2.0 needs to revision space travel.

John C. Wright

John C. Wright is the author of The Golden Age Trilogy, The War of the Dreaming, Chronicles of Chaos and the upcoming Null-A Continuum, the authorized sequel of A.E. van Vogt's World of Null-A books. His short fiction has appeared in Year's Best SF 3, The Night Lands, Best Short Novels 2004, The Year's Best Science Fiction #21, Breach The Hull, and No Longer Dreams.

The key to this question is to interpret what is meant by the "Golden Age." Rather than straining my brain for the answer, I will simply pull up a convenient list of the top ten science fiction books of all time as compiled by Jim Baen.

Now, your list or mine might differ, but our lists will not have any greater weight of judgment behind them than the one drawn up by one of the most famous and longstanding editors in the field. Let us look at the books and see which predictions came true, shall we?

Let us list the books and their predictions:

A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court by Mark Twain
Prediction: Time traveling engineer travels back to the Dark Ages, outsmarting King Arthur, and introducing firearms and telegrams, which reverses the decline and fall of civilization.
Verdict: Um. I don't think that ever happened, but, depending on how time travel works, I support it could have happened in a multiple parallel universe that we are unaware of.

20,000 Leagues Under the Sea by Jules Verne
Prediction: Mysterious superscientist invents an ironclad submersible.
Verdict: Bingo! We have a winner! Submarines and polar expeditions! We also all remember when Robur the Conqueror, aboard The Terror attempted to fight Captain Nemo in his powerful ironclad Nautilus off the coast of Norway, but they were parted by the Maelstrom. Agents of the British crown and American treasury department are still seeking the secret of the rotary engine, and the other miraculous devices created by these scientific geniuses. Okay, okay, obviously the events did not happen, but the scientific predictions were utterly sound.

The Time Machine by H.G. Wells
Prediction: Mysterious superscientist visits AD 802701, and finds out that modern civilization will decline and fall. Aristocrats will evolve into helpless food animals. Workingmen will evolve into cannibal troglodytes.
Verdict: Not only did this prediction not come true, it will never come true. The Nexxial Timesweepers of the Fourth Era of time travel are carefully uncreating any time travelers before they come into existence, to eliminate the possibility of time travel ever coming to pass.

Foundation by Isaac Asimov
Prediction: A galactic empire is guided through its decline and fall by a mysterious superscientist who develops a predictive model of history.
Verdict: We do not even have flying cars yet, much less Galactic Empires. The idea for the science of Psychohistory is innately ridiculous. The closest thing we have to a predictive model of human large-scale behavior is a science called economics, and economics teaches us that wealth-creation is maximized when the five-year plans, ten-year plans, and (one must assume) the thousand-year 'Seldon Plans' are ignored and free men and free markets are best left to muddle through on their own.

A Canticle for Leibowitz by Walter M. Miller
Prediction: Atomic war causes the decline and fall of the modern world into a new dark age.
Verdict: This did not happen, thank God! Full-scale "Total War" with atomic weapons does not seem to be in the military plans of any world power at the moment.

Dune by Frank Herbert
Prediction: A different galactic empire is guided into its decline and fall by a mysterious superhuman messiah.
Verdict: Swords and spaceships, eh? Don't hold your breath waiting for the marines to switch from fully automatic firearms to poisoned knives. Dude, forget about the flying car. Where is my geriatric spice?

Lest Darkness Fall by L. Sprague deCamp
Prediction: A different time traveler attempts to prevent the decline and fall of a non-galactic empire by introducing double-entry bookkeeping into Gothic-era Rome.
Verdict: This one was also cleaned up by the Nexxial timesweepers. Agent Ravel merely chronoported into the continuum behind Martin Padway and shot him in the head. Done. Paradox averted. Time stream saved.

Against the Fall of Night by Arthur C. Clarke
Prediction: The 10-billion-year-old metropolis of Diaspar is humanity's last home. The Galactic Empire apparently declined and fell. One lone boy decides to investigate and rediscover star travel, to end the long Dark Ages of Diaspar.
Verdict: 10 Billion years old? Um.... We're still waiting on this one. Please note that Alvin does not have mysterious mind-powers, but the people of Lys do. He is only sort of a messiah figure.

Citizen of the Galaxy by Robert A. Heinlein
Prediction: Slave boy escapes from captors with the help of a mysterious superspy.
Verdict: While we don't have interstellar travel yet, the idea is chillingly accurate. Before World War II, slavery was wiped out, and it seemed, forever. But there are areas in the world where it is re-emerging, and for reasons not hard to guess.

Stranger in a Strange Land by Robert A. Heinlein
Prediction: A different superhuman messiah mocks organized religion and organizes orgies instead.
Verdict: Dead accurate. All the enormities and absurdities of the postchristian sexual revolution Heinlein predicted in his book have come to pass, and our civilization is declining and falling due to these things. And there is life on Mars, and the Martians have mystical mind-powers and talk to angels. Whatever, dude.

TO SUM UP: We science fiction writers could not make an accurate prediction to save our lives. We can not predict our way out of a wet paper bag. We write stories about galactic empires, dark ages, mysterious superscientists, super-messiahs, and mind-powers We are not trying to make predictions.

The future is merely the setting for our stories. We are not as accurate in our settings as writers of Westerns or Regency romances are in their settings.

Adam Roberts

Adam Roberts was born two-thirds of the way through the last century; he presently lives a little way west of London, England, with a beautiful wife and two small children. He is a writer with a day-job (professor at Royal Holloway, University of London). The first of these two employments has resulted in eight published sf novels, the most recent being Splinter (Solaris 2007) and Land of the Headless (Victor Gollancz 2007). The second of these has occasioned such critical studies as The Palgrave History of Science Fiction (2006).

I'm less interested, with a question like this, in specific items of hardware and gadgetry predicted correctly or otherwise: robots, jetpacks, rolling walkways instead of highways, all that. These are all toys: diverting, but not essential, to the future. I'm more interested in larger trends, in the way SF writers carry their social, systemic or ideological biases into the future, and so get it wrong. So, for example, the default position for Golden Age SF was that space will be explored and exploited by private enterprise and individual initiative. Heinlein's Rocket Ship Galileo (1947) the first rocket to the moon is built with private money; but the truth is that nations, not private companies, have funded space exploration. No sign of that changing in the near future. This bias in favour of improbably far-reaching individual application, and distrust of the nation-state, is immanent in the legacy of SF, although it mismatches the world.

Overpopulation is another example: Harry Harrison, in Make Room! Make Room! (1966) predicted crippling overpopulation by 1999; Brunner's Stand on Zanzibar (1968) predicted the same thing by 2010. The first prediction was wrong, and the second will be. Malthus, it turns out, was in error: a greater population does (as he argued) put more pressure on resources, but that doesn't result in inevitable humanitarian disaster becase the increased population also supplies a greater supply of people to come up with ingenious solutions to the problem with resources. Here's a prophesy of my own (what Age of Science Fiction are we in, now? Bronze, is it?): overpopulation will never, globally speaking, be a catastrophic problem for humanity

Mike Brotherton

Mike Brotherton is the author of the hard science fiction novels Spider Star (2008) and Star Dragon (2003), the latter being a finalist for the Campbell award. He's also a professor of astronomy at the University of Wyoming, Clarion West graduate, and founder of the Launch Pad Astronomy Workshop for Writers (www.launchpadworkshop.org). He blogs at www.mikebrotherton.com.

There's a t-shirt that Threadless.com offered a few years ago that says: "they lied to us -- this was supposed to be the future -- where is my jetpack, where is my robotic companion, where is my dinner in pill form, where is my hydrogen fueled automobile, where is my nuclear-powered levitating house, where is my cure for this disease"

I'll take a slightly different list of Golden Age SF predictions: ray guns, robots, flying cars, jet packs, nuclear powered everything, and world government. Although the military does use lasers as weapons, as well as microwave emitting devices, the concept of a hand-held ray gun seems to be a bust. Robots have been around in one form or another, and will get closer and closer to humanoid forms in coming years, so I think this one is going to be valid. Flying cars and jet packs have been developed, but haven't been practical from an economic or safety perspective to date, so I'll call that one a push. Nuclear power works and could be ubiquitous, but lost the propaganda war. We could see more of it in the near future if the oil supplies dwindle as some are predicting. World government? I think we're farther away from that than we were in the 1950s despite the end of the Cold War, so that has to be a bust for now and the foreseeable future.

On the whole, I think the spirit of the Golden Age was right. Science and technology have made great strides and people living today have a much higher quality of life than ever before.

What was the biggest omission? Computers and related information technology. The following quotes are from the business section of The Kansas City Star, Jan 17, 1995:

"Computers in the future may weigh no more than 1.5 tons."
- Popular Mechanics, forecasting the relentless march of science, 1949.

"I think there is a world market for maybe five computers."
- Thomas Watson, chairman of IBM, 1943.

"I have traveled the length and breadth of this country and talked with the best people, and I can assure you that data processing is a fad that won?t last out the year."
- The editor in charge of business books for Prentice Hall, 1957.

The novels of Robert Heinlein and many other writers well past the Golden Age continued to have their space adventurers working out calculations on slide rules, and Asimov's computers were giant, isolated thinkers. No doubt about it, missing the technology trajectory of computers was the biggest goof of the Golden Age.

Sue Lange

Sue Lange's We, Robots published in March 2007 by Aqueduct Press, deals with the SF prediction du jour: the Singularity. Her first book, Tritcheon Hash, was published in 2003. She has a few short stories published here and there as well.

Obvious things like Moonmen and Martians come to mind immediately. Totally wrong about them. In fact, I think anything about aliens is off the mark at this point. FTL travel is the limiting factor, which is another thing sf seems to have gotten wrong. The assumption was we'd be able to overcome that problem, but it doesn't look like it. Fermi's Paradox also comes into play. This is something today's sf writers are starting to come around on. Twenty or thirty years ago, everyone assumed that someday we'd meet aliens. Not everyone agrees with that anymore. Lots of people feel Fermi has a point.

Flying cars and the ubiquitous videophone could maybe be included in the list of bad predictions, but maybe not. I think the jury is out on such things. First of all, flying cars are impractical now because we can't even handle regular on-the-ground traffic very well. Driving on a road is fairly easy for even the most brain-dead amongst us, but I doubt we'd be good at taking traffic to the air. But just because flying cars haven't been invented yet, or should I say, mass produced yet (I'm quite sure somebody's got something somewhere in their back yard), doesn't mean they won't be someday. It all depends on the market. Same with videophones. We have the technology, but no one seems to be jumping on it. Is it because they're too expensive or because people don't want it? I think people are starting to come around to the idea, but who knows if it will ever really take. There's a lot to be said for not being seen as you make that call to Rush Limbaugh.

Time travel will probably not be happening.

I think where golden age sf really falls off the mark is with its predictions of cultural change. Mostly because there were no predictions. Society was going to go on forever as it was. There would be no civil rights movement, women would never become independent of men, people would always get behind a war, technological progress would continue unhindered by protests from the masses. Whoops that one might be right.

Where did it do right? Spaceflight. Communications. World peace. (Not yet, but with so many people working on it, it's got to happen, right?) Subcutaneous birth control.

Things that were missed: The rampant use of text messaging rather than actual voice communication, a cultural phenomenon.

Andrew Wheeler

Andrew Wheeler has been a publishing professional for nearly twenty years. He spent sixteen years as an editor for various bookclubs (most notably, working for the Science Fiction Book Club the entire time), ending as a Senior Editor. He is currently a Marketing Manager for John Wiley & Sons.

Just to be contrary, I have to start my answer by questioning the premise: I've always firmly believed that the point of SF is not to predict the future, but to tell stories - and those stories are always mostly about their own times. Explicit predictions often tend to be advocacy or horrifying object lessons, to show the readers what they might get if they follow the right or wrong path. Predictions that end up being correct are often pure luck, or are just smart extrapolation of well-known human behavior into new situations. (Witness Heinlein's kids in Space Cadet - one talking quickly to his parents on his mobile phone, while another notes, smugly, that he packed his phone away so he can't hear it ring. That's a prediction, of a sort, but it's mostly a moment of character interaction, and what makes is predictive today is what made it true in 1948 when Heinlein wrote it.)

But that's not what you wanted, I suppose, so let me think...Golden Age SF must have gotten something right, mustn't it? Maybe if I think long enough, something will come to mind...

I could fudge the question by talking about my personal Golden Age - which was twelve, as Terry Carr sagely noted - but I'll be honest and talk about the accepted Golden Age, that broad swath of history from Hugo Gernsback to John W. Campbell. (And that's a wide range of styles and stories, indeed.)

Gernsbackian SF didn't get much "right," because it wasn't trying to describe the future - it was trying to excite and motivate the next generation of engineers and scientists. The point wasn't to show what could happen, but to give a sense of the possibilities and wonders of science. And so there was a parade of brilliant, reclusive scientists working on monumental discoveries in secret, aided only by their beautiful daughters. And when those daughters were threatened by oxygen-breathing, bipedal aliens who spoke English and apparently wanted nubile Earth-maidens for either sex or meat (neither of which made much sense), the uber-competent young scientist was there to save the damsels in distress.

All of that, of course, was nothing like science or history - then or at any time in the history of the human race. And the coruscating rays of purple force, the planet-busting bombs, and all the other accouterments of mad-scientist-hood were similarly wrong as prediction, but just fine as pulp fiction.

Campbellian SF was somewhat better, with realistic organizations (the Foundation is a quite believable bureaucracy) and a solid grasp on how humans interact (like the labor action in Heinlein's "The Roads Must Roll" - the roads themselves are ridiculous, but what happens to and on them is very plausible). But even the explicit Future Histories, drawn from what their authors swore were iron laws of history - like Heinlein's, or like Blish's spindizzies - were completely wrong. (We haven't left the earth to the dogs, like Simak's City, either.)

The few "correct" predictions tend to be minor and beside the point, for all that SF triumphalists crow about "A Logic Named Joe." Some writers were good at predicting the texture of the future, like Heinlein (and, later, John Brunner), but even that was never the point. (There's also a point to be made here about Philip K. Dick, who's a little late to be "Golden Age," and whose stories often feel like the real 21st century, even though all of the details are completely different.)

So, all in all, my answer to the question of what Golden Age SF got right and wrong is...that's not really the question to ask, unless by "right and wrong" we mean not predictions but imagination.

Fred Kiesche

Fred Kiesche has been reading science fiction since the early 1960's. He has a collection of over 8,000 books at home, at least half of which is science fiction and fantasy and the rest are made up of books on science, history and other non-fiction subjects. He is an avid amateur astronomer, devoted husband and father, and is seemingly perpetually underemployed since 9/11/01. He blathers on this and other subjects at TexasBestGrok.

First, what is the Golden Age of SF? I've never liked to pin it to a specific period, preferring the answer that Ray Bradbury, Isaac Asimov and others have used (e.g., "The golden age of SF is twelve" or "The golden age of SF is fourteen", etc.). I know I get that golden age feeling every time I find a new author that excites me.

Second, who says that SF is the Great Predictor? Names! I need names! I never agreed with that. About the most specific prediction that I saw was that a Major Armstrong would be the first man to step on the Moon in 1964. The author ("Philip St. John", one of the many pseudonyms used by Lester del Rey, in the book Rocket Jockey) got the last name right, the date wrong, the rank wrong...

I'd rather talk about what science fiction, golden or otherwise, is good for. I think SF is good for education, enthusiasm, and inoculation. To explain...

Science fiction educates and enthuses. Spider Robinson claims to know of ten astronauts that got started because they read a book called Rocket Ship Galileo by Robert A. Heinlein (maybe you've heard of him?). Some would argue that he had an impact on the space program well beyond those ten folks. Me, personally, I got interested in a lot of science due to stories such as Sir Arthur C. Clarke's Saturn Rising (which led me into amateur astronomy). Collections such as the one edited by Isaac Asimov, Where Do We Go From Here? led to reading non-fiction on chemistry, biology and more.

As for inoculation, harken back to the 1970's. Perpetually on the best seller lists and perpetually found in yard sales and garage sales was Future Shock by Alvin Toffler. The future was coming! The future was scary! Things were changing faster and faster! I read the book and shrugged my shoulders. I had read much stranger stuff in SF. My mother asked me once about cloning. I gave her an answer and she was surprised by how nonchalant I was. SF has inoculated me against the surprises of the future.

2001 wasn't a bit like 2001: A Space Odyssey. No manned voyages to Jupiter, cities on the Moon, etc. Am I disappointed that we don't have manned spaceships to Jupiter? Instead we've had multiple probes to Jupiter returning data and wonderful shots like this one. Maybe, but I appreciate how SF has given me a sense of wonder that allows me to love shots that the one in the link.

Tube Bits for 01/30/2008

Sci Fi Wire recently visited the set of the new Knight Rider movie, and came away with some behind the scenes interviews with the cast and crew. The movie will air Feb. 17th at 9pm ET, scant three weeks away.

Sam Raimi will be dabbling in television, tentatively scheduled for this fall, with a show called Wizards First Rule, based on the The Sword Of Truth series by Terry Goodkind. It's a live action version of the story, although there is little detail on how Raimi will structure the series. I'd like to see something, and by 'like' I mean I think it would be neat, that is akin to the proposed live action version of Martin's Song of Ice and Fire series, where each book is a season. That could work, I think. Of course, I think that Wizards First Rule is the best of the bunch, so maybe they should just stick with that.

The Jim Henson Company and Apple iTunes have reached an agreement to bring Farscape and one of my favorite shows as a kid, Fraggle Rock, to iTunes. The shows went live last Monday (1/28/08) and episodes from the respective series first season are available. Although, I find it odd, reading the press release, that the half-hour Fraggle Rock episodes will cost the same as the hour-long Farscape ones.

The long and eagerly awaited season 4 of LOST is almost here. Buddy TV shows us the new faces who will be appearing this season. Of course, if you can't wait, you can find out what happens next below (created by the Fine Brothers).

Did you ever wonder what happened to the crew of Moonbase Alpha after the series ended? TVSeriesFinale has the scoop. Video below:

SF Tidbits for 1/30/08

And the Reuter's says....Ender's Game is becoming a video game. [via The Swivet]

SciFi Wire profiles author/artist Wayne Barlowe (God's Demon).

Speculative Horizons interviews John Marco (Skylords and The Black Mirror): "The idea of technological elements in a fantasy world always juices me up....[I] love the anachronism of a knight on a horse leading a mechanical war machine into battle..."

Paul Di Filippo reviews Red Spikes by Margo Lanagan, A Companion to Wolves by Sarah Monette and Elizabeth Bear, The Sunrise Lands by S.M. Stirling, and Eclipse One edited by Jonathan Strahan. [via Locus Online]

The Unshelved web comic has an episode that reviews Joe Abercrombie's The Blade Itself.

Free Audio Fiction: James Patrick Kelly has begun podcasting his Nebula-nominated story "Men Are Trouble".

The SFWA is setting up a new Nebula Award website.

Meanwhile, SFWA Blog lists 98 Reasons to Join SFWA.

Would you believe a woman is planning on opening a real, live physical independent bookstore? In this day and age? The gall!

[via Quillblog]

TTACon 9 is being held in London on February 9. Special guests include Ellen Datlow, Pat Cadigan, John & Judith Clute. Bonus: the venue is a place called "Filthy MacNastys".

io9 List Mania #1: Five Bollywood Science Fiction Movies You Should Know.

io9 List Mania #2: Five Ways 9/11 Changed Science Fiction. Stone Dead Parrot responds.

In a three part series, Books Under the Bridge looks at The Future of Religion:

According this Math Major, The Trouble With Science Fiction is it's "all too frequently just about the science, never the fiction".

Poker, politics, & philosophy looks at literary science fiction

Based on the list of 75 words every sci-fi fan should know, Geekend follows-up with 25 more words every sci-fi fan should know.

Holy Swine! It's a Batman Piggy Bank!

Monday January 28, 2008

The Sarah Connor Chronicles: More is revealed

After finally getting to watch the first 3 episodes, I think we can safely start to see a few things about the show that wasn't apparent from just the pilot. Spoiler alert - I'm going to discuss a few things from the plot if you haven't seen it.

I thought the show is interesting on a few fronts. The characters appear quite human and frail. Sure, Sarah is tough - she has to be one of the strongest female leads in a TV show in years - but she's also scared and not afraid to hide. I liked this about the Sarah character from the movies and I think they capture this well.

I felt the interaction between a teen boy and his mother were realistic. I know John felt she wasn't as forgiving as she was in the movies, but I'd mention that teenage boys are a lot more trying to parents than a 10 year old. I didn't know anything about the show going in, so I was surprised to see Summer Glau and then see her turn into a robot. I figured she was a classmate and love interest, but this has changed the dynamic. I doubt we'll see John find himself romantically attracted to Cameron, but we'll see how it goes. In fact, if that sort of story does develop it would be pretty progressive for TV. Human - cyborg relations indeed!

I was also pleased to see that the show doesn't have a weekly formula and is more like 24 in structure. I know this episodic format makes it hard for people to get into the show (and I give props to the Sci-Fi Channel for the Galactica movies that attempt to catch people up) but I personally like it. I would have been very disappointed to see a 'Terminator of the week' always just killed by the trio in the final minutes of the show. This way we get to see a plot play out over a full season (writer's strike be damned.)

John wondered why they didn't send back a T-1000. I hate to rationalize for them, but I can think of several reasons - it was a 'one of a kind' prototype and thus there isn't another one, they are hard/expensive to make and they are used only in special circumstances, SkyNet considers the first a failure and thus abandoned that line of research. However, my best guess is that we simply haven't seen it yet. It gives them a lot of room to ratchet up the story if they want to. Although on a practical side, I would suggest that the real reason we haven't seen it is that the special effects budget isn't high enough to pay for that level of computer graphics. As it was I thought the effects were pretty good. Oh, and while I thought the corny dialog ("class dismissed") was a nod to the past and was OK, I'm glad to see they haven't repeated it.

I think the biggest challenges for the show are dealing with the problems time travel introduces. In the movie Bender's Big Score the production team mentioned that they spent hours and hours keeping track of every element of the timeline to make sure they didn't make a mistake. I sure hope Chronicles producers/writers are doing the same thing. Without that, we're bound to see some major plot holes open up and that would detract from the story.

The first two episodes should probably have been shown as a 2-hour season premier. The second hour is a big improvement over the pilot in terms of better writing and better acting. The 3rd episode shows that there might be a formula here after all although I doubt they'll be finding another potential SkyNet builder every week. Instead, it seems that we'll either be advancing the overarching plot or will be dealing with some side issue such as the need for IDs. I can honestly say I'm looking forward to future episodes and I'm hoping it takes off.

GIVEAWAY: Win a Chronicles of The Necromancer Mega-Pack!

Here's your chance to win some bling!

One lucky SF Signal reader, chosen at random, will win a Chronicles of The Necromancer Mega-Pack, courtesy of author Gail Martin and Solaris Books. The Mega-Pack contains:

1 signed limited edition advance review copy of The Summoner
1 signed limited edition advance review copy of The Blood King
1 signed final copy of The Blood King (which has about 20,000 words of new material from the ARC)
1 red crystal ball "Soulcatcher"

THE FINE PRINT
To enter, send an email from a valid email account to [contest at sfsignal dot com] with your real name and full mailing address. We hate spam, too, so your information will only be used for this contest. Only one email per address will be accepted, others will be discarded. The contest is open to anyone, anywhere. One winner will be chosen at random from all entries submitted before Saturday February 2nd, 2008 11:59 PM CT (GMT-6). The winner will be notified by email.

REVIEW: The Dreaming Void by Peter F. Hamilton

REVIEW SUMMARY: Fans of Hamilton's galaxy-spanning space operas will not be disappointed.

MY RATING:

BRIEF SYNOPSIS: Various players and factions move about the galaxy, trying to decide what to do about the Void, a planet-eating region of space from which dreams emanate.

MY REVIEW:
PROS: Excellent world building; cool tech; some tense, page-turning moments.
CONS: Takes a while to get this behemoth moving along.
BOTTOM LINE: Solid SF Space Opera.

The Dreaming Void is the ambitious start of Peter F. Hamilton's new trilogy set in the universe we saw in The Commonwealth Saga - the duology that consisted of the awesome Pandora's Star and the not-so-awesome follow-up, Judas Unchained. The events of The Dreaming Void occur about 1500 years after the previous books.

To understand the central conflict of the story, it's important to know the state of mankind in this universe. Hamilton's main concern in these books is evolution. His future is populated by humans with extremely long lives thanks to advances in technology. (There are some aliens, too, but they are mostly offstage.) To them, death is more of an intrusion than anything else. Long life has ultimately allowed humanity to move in several different directions, in physical and non-physical form. Physical humans are one of three types: Highers use biononic upgrades to augment their lives and give them special abilities; Advancers rely on genetic modification to do the job; and Naturals lack any but the most essential augmentations. Non-physical humans are part of the Advanced Neural Activity (ANA), a near-postphysical intelligence collective made up of those that have chosen to leave their physical bodies behind in anticipation of the next stage of human evolution: posthumanism. The point of all this is that human evolution is being proactively decided by human individuals; they are controlling their own destinies. So which group gets to decide the fate of all of us? And do they have that right?

It turns out that humanity's fate is inexorably tied to the Void, the "Big Dumb Object" of this sweeping space opera. Only maybe it's not so dumb. The Void is a black-hole-like region of space from which dreams emanate. People are able to perceive these dreams through a galaxy-wide mind share called the Gaiafield, an "artificial neural universe" based on alien technology. The Void is believed to be home to super-advanced aliens that have figured out the ultimate path of evolution for themselves. But the Void is a source of both terror and wonder. Long ago, the Void was known to devour worlds for the energy it needs to sustain itself, but it has since become a source of enlightenment. Followers of the Living Dream movement (a cult based on the visions of Inigo, the First Dreamer) seek to make a pilgrimage into the Void. But naysayers (like ANA) believe that any interaction with the Void will cause it to become active again, this time consuming every planet and living being in the galaxy.

If all of this sounds very complex, welcome to incredible world building talents of Peter F. Hamilton. Fans of his previous space operas won't be disappointed by his extensively detailed portrayal of worlds, technologies, politics, and intrigue. But if galaxy-sweeping epics are Hamilton's trademark, so is the time spent getting these behemoth gears in motion. This can be expected, of course; you don't dive into a complex setting without feeling the effects of inertia. There is a generous cast of characters and a handful of storylines involved here and it takes the overall story a while to get going. But once it does, it feels like putting on a comfortable jacket; space opera is what Hamilton does and he does it well.

So, who are the characters? Most of them are new, but there are a few familiar faces from the other Commonwealth books. Aaron is a mysterious Higher with no memory of his past, but a clear assignment at hand: to find Inigo, the long-lost First Dreamer who first interpreted the dreams from the Void. Aaron enlists the aid of Ingo's old flame (and member of the Living Dream movement), Corrie-Lyn, and much of their gripping and fast-paced storyline involves following one lead after another, getting ever closer to the elusive prophet. The ANA is where we find the no-nonsense patriarch Gore Burnelli, pulling the strings of meatspace to the best of his ability. The ANA (at least some factions of it) believes that any interaction with the Void will mean the end of all humanity - in all its forms - so Gore sends his daughter, Justine (conveniently decanted back into a human body - see previous note about death being obsolete), to take part in the chase to find the Dreamer.

Meanwhile, Ethan, the new leader of the Dream movement, wants to lead his people on the impending pilgrimage into the Void despite the potential dangers involved. To that end, he is eager to find the so-called Second Dreamer, whose projected dreams involve the enigmatic Skylord and Waterwalker. That's also the goal of Paula Myo, the tenacious, genetically-engineered detective that we knew from the previous books. The physicist named Troblum, who is a pawn of one of the factions, has some interesting ideas about the barrier surrounding the Void. Outside the central power struggle is Amarinta, a seemingly innocuous citizen with big business plans, who is enjoying her newfound freedom from her ex-husband by dabbling in sexual encounters with Covey (a "multiple" - a single mind occupying multiple bodies of varying size, shape, and gender) and Likan (a powerful businessmen with his own ideas of sexual fulfillment). And then there's the utterly captivating story of the telepathic Edeard, trying to make sense out of his dreams about the Skylord while living on a technologically immature world that is crying out for social reform.

Whew.

That's a lot to keep straight. Fortunately Hamilton successfully juggles all of these multiple storylines in such a way as to keep them all distinct, memorable and enjoyable. It helps that the threads rarely intersect, though by the end (which is less a cliffhanger than it is a pause in the storytelling) we start to see hints of how they might connect. I note here, too, that Edeard's and Aaron's stories were particularly strong because they were filled with more drama and action than the others. In Edeard's thread, telepathic and genetic engineering abilities offer a palatable contrast to his medieval-like world. The height of Aaron's thread (a heist gone wrong) was just as nail-biting. Both threads offered some seriously page-turning moments, but that does not put the other threads to shame. What they offered in world building and sense of wonder was more than enough to provide solid sf entertainment.

As does the whole book. I get the feeling that Hamilton is gearing up for something big, so some ramp-up time can be forgiven. In the meantime, let The Dreaming Void stand as a very good example of Hamilton's own brand of engaging space opera.

[FYI: Some back story of Inigo's life is given in Peter F. Hamilton's short story "Blessed by an Angel" which appears in The New Space Opera edited by Gardner Dozois and Jonathan Strahan. I haven't read it yet, but I think it might be interesting to see how this character deals with his unique situation.]

SF Tidbits for 1/28/08

Omnivoracious interviews Daniel Abraham, Gardner Dozois, and George R.R. Martin - co-authors of Hunter's Run.

Tor has announced two new editions of Steven Gould's Jumper books to coincide with the movie's release on February 14th.

Kay Kenyon (Bright of the Sky) has a redesigned website.

Spectre Library offers a new (to me) gallery of Science Fiction, Fantasy, Weird & Occult covers.

World's Biggest Bookstore's Sci-Fi Fan Letter has posted an Alternate History Reading List.

The List Universe lists the Top 20 Geek Movies Of All Time.

Cynical-C find a YouTube video of Friends meets Superfriends.

POLL RESULTS: Where Surveillance Technology is Taking Us

Here are the results of the latest SF Signal poll.

QUESTION
Where do you think surveillance technology will take us?

RESULTS

(88 total votes)

Comments this week:

"The multis are already much more efficient mining our biometric and geographic data. They'll only get better... 'till the hackers strike back." - Jeff

"'Will' take us? We're already there!" - Paul Harper

"They're gonna put a little camera in toilet bowls to see what kind of tp we use. Assign each brand a numeric value and plug it into a logarythmic formula along with the results from the breakfast cereal camera, the gas cap camera and the lead paint camera, and send me a 10% off coupon for Long John Silvers..." - platyjoe

Be sure to visit our front page and vote in this week's poll about The Books of Philip José Farmer!