Astrogator's Logs

Those who read Standing at Thermopylae know I promised a response to whiny vaporings that appeared on the Apex blog. My response is now up: Steering the Craft. It talks of embroidered jackets and starships, of bread and roses. Here’s the end:

Susan Seddon Boulet, Shaman Spider Woman (1986)

War for the Country
By Viktoría Theodórou – Poet, resistance fighter

A soft mat she found and sat, on the leaves.
A song emerges from the flute of her throat,
low, so her light-sleeping comrades don’t awaken,
just so she accompanies their dreams.
Her hands don’t stay idle, she takes up thread and needle
to darn their socks with the hand grenade
she always carries at her waist, with it she lies and rises.
The grenade in the sock, round and oblivious
to its fire, thinks it’s a wooden egg,
that the country was freed and the war ended
and Katia is not a partisan in the snow-covered woods –
that she sits by the window behind the white lilacs
and sews the socks of her beloved, who returned whole.

Note: For those who are asking, this is an overture. I’ve been invited to respond on the Apex blog. I’ll post the link when I do.

And here’s the link, as promised: Steering the Craft

People versed in the basics of Hellenic mythology know that Athená is the god of wisdom, justice and knowledge — all attributes inherited from her mother, Métis, one of the Great Goddesses literally and metaphorically subsumed by Zeus. Fewer know that Athená is also the god of a particular kind of war: fighting in defense of one’s home.

I have been a vocal and unapologetic feminist my entire life, because I have strong reasons to think that treating women as less than human damages all of humanity. In many ways, I was lucky in the time and place of my birth. Elsewhere/when, given my looks, interests and character, I would be already dead by stoning, burning, drowning, lobotomy… or buried alive in unchosen, coerced domesticity.

Those brave enough to first tackle gender equality often paid for it with their life, health, relationships, reputation, sanity — common fates of anyone who challenges the status quo. Middle-class white women in Western nations, who now make faces at the concept of feminism as démodé, would do well to notice the relentless erosion that happens when we relax our vigilance even slightly. And we still have a long way to go, even in Western nations, even in communities comfortably self-labeled progressive.

Humanity has managed to limp along despite the fierce misogyny that is so embedded in our lives that it passes almost entirely unnoticed. Yet I think we will never truly thrive until/unless we untie that knot. If we do, we may be able to better face the problems that threaten to extinguish us — and perhaps even take to the stars one day, instead of dying out in the churned mud of our own sludge.

I am a feminist and I am feisty. I’m also past fifty, hollowed from the fatigue of chronic pain and my job situation is increasingly uncertain. I would rather have epiphanies in my lab, watch stars fall and flowers bloom, hold my snacho close, dream within book covers, continue to build the universe that I created in my sagas. Besides, I know how little fame and fortune there is in the endless, thankless toil of maintenance. That’s why it’s traditionally women’s work, regardless of culture.

So when another alpha-wannabe knuckle-dragger whines about “PC zombies”and “quality compromised by diversity” without even checking his facts (let alone his assumptions), part of me wants to laugh and ignore him. Especially as I have so many ideas jostling in my head, eager to take form. But that planting will have to wait. Because speculative fiction is my home. Because the world is my home. And I know first-hand how fragile civilization is, and how easily trampled by such boots. So the harvest will have to wait while I don my notched weapons and stand at the gates of my home. As long as I can stand upright, he and his ilk shall not pass.

Images: Top, archaic sculpture of Athená, Acropolis Museum; bottom, Gandalf facing the Balrog in Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings.

by Larry Klaes, space exploration enthusiast, science journalist

Athena’s note: Larry’s article is particularly timely, given the recent buzz about the Earth-type planet Gliese 581g.

Part 1

Part 2

For those who may still wonder and question just how much weight the words of the famous cosmologist Stephen Hawking hold for the concept of alien intelligences and their potential reactions to encountering humanity, consider this:  A new science fiction film coming out this November titled Skyline recently released its theatrical trailers.

One of the older Skyline trailers begins with the line:  “On August 28th, 2009, NASA sent a message into space farther than we ever thought possible… in an effort to reach extraterrestrial life.”

Now it is true that on that date a transmission was broadcast into deep space by a NASA-owned radio telescope located in Australia.  This collection of messages from people all over the world (sent as part of the Hello from Earth campaign) was aimed at a planet in the red dwarf star system of Gliese 581, which is only 20.3 light years, or 194 trillion kilometers from us.  That may seem like a long way to Earth-bound humanity, but on a celestial scale the Gliese 581 system is a near neighbor.  As of this writing, the transmission has traveled just over one light year.  That isn’t even far enough to reach our closest stellar neighbors, the Alpha Centauri system 4.3 light years away, let alone merit the title of the farthest-flung human message ever.

As a final point, we simply don’t know if life of any kind exists on or near the target of Hello from Earth, the fourth world circling the star Gliese 581.  However, astronomers now think at least one and possibly three planets in that system have the potential to possess liquid water, a major ingredient for the formation of at least terrestrial types of life.  Of course the transmission is not going to stop once it reaches that alien planet.  The messages will spread outward and onward into the galaxy at light speed, which will give them an increased chance of being detected some day by an ETI, assuming any exist in the signal path.

After this inauspicious beginning to the trailer, the viewer is treated to some apparently real news broadcasts about Hawking’s alien warnings interspersed with images of strange bluish-white meteor-like lights dropping down upon Los Angeles.  In the news segments, former CBS Television news anchor Dan Rather intones that “if extraterrestrials visit us, the outcome might be similar to when Columbus landed in America.  In other words, it didn’t turn out too well for Native Americans.”  The trailer caps off this dire warning with the text “Maybe we should have listened.”  And done what, I have to ask?  Cover Earth in black tarp with some stars painted on the outside and hope nobody notices us?

Too late.  The menacing spaceships of the alien Columbuses, looking like gothic metal sculptures, are bearing down on the places where the lights landed.  The name of the film flashes on the screen, then comes a close-up of one of the alien vessels hovering over LA.  Its underside open wide like the jaws of some immense beast, it’s pulling thousands of tiny screaming, tumbling humans up through the air and into itself for reasons yet unknown, but ones the audience has little trouble imagining may not be for the benefit of humanity.

A final text warning commands us “Don’t look up!”  The injunction is directly counter to everything our society has been taught in terms of social progress and evolutionary development – to say nothing of what the recently deceased astronomy popularizer Jack Horkheimer said at the end of every episode of his PBS program, Star Gazer, which was to “Keep Looking Up!”

More Than One Side to the Alien Encounter Debate

Aside from the near-certainty that Skyline will be little different or better than the majority of alien invasion stories of the last one hundred years, using the real words of a real scientist (and a cosmologist at that) to give a sense of weight and urgency to just one side of the concept of alien interaction with our species ultimately blurs and overshadows the wider range of possible outcomes for what may one day define the ultimate course of humanity among the stars.

While it is true that the primary overall purpose of Skyline is a material one – to line the pockets of its makers with money by appealing to the basic instincts of those who will provide said profits – the film (and Hawking) are nevertheless contributing to the debate on how we should deal with other intelligences in the Cosmos.  This is the case whether the filmmakers had any deep intentions of doing so or whether the idea is plausible.

Too many science fiction stories about aliens tend to focus on the negative aspects of encounters between different sentient species, thus biasing (and reflecting) public thought on this topic.  So it is both fitting and important to take a look at just how plausible dire predictions like Hawking’s truly are.  Of course, there are certain limits as to how much one can reasonably determine what an ETI may do in regards to humanity in its present state: not yet knowing for certain if there is any life beyond Earth tops the list here.  However, we do possess enough scientific and technological knowledge to make some plausible determinations on just how likely our greatest fears about our galactic neighbors might be.

Just as SETI requires its hypothetical subjects to share some common elements with humanity in order to work, any beings who wish to harm us must also think and behave somewhat like us.  So when examining types of invading aliens, I am excluding the ones with abilities we would consider to be godlike: able to appear at will anywhere or anytime and commanding so much knowledge and power as to make the act of rendering us extinct a quick and easy exercise.  I presume that if such superbeings wanted us gone, it would have happened by now.

The fact that this has not happened could mean a number of things: they are much too smart and nice to harm others; they don’t care about us one way or the other; or they will destroy us but just haven’t gotten around to it yet.  So I will not speculate further on superETI, except to warn that beings able to do just about anything blur the line between science and fantasy.  In addition, I make no pretense that my lists of alien motives and weaponry are in any way complete, so further ideas are welcome.

The Why of Alien Invaders

Since invading another world across interstellar distances requires serious time and resources, our hypothetical alien marauders will not attempt to take down humanity and its home planet on a whim or to follow some cliché of galactic hegemony.  Like the future humans in the 2009 film Avatar who travelled 42 trillion kilometers to reach the Alpha Centauri system moon Pandora for its mineral wealth to aid their ailing civilization, our invaders will have to come up with a compelling reason to travel all that way if they ever literally want to leave the ground.

Of all the “whys” for an alien assault on Earth, taking our planet as a new place to live and utilize because their homeworld is dying or destroyed for one reason or another, is at least as old as H. G. Wells’ The War of the Worlds.

Well’s 1898 novel was a reflection on how European colonizers of the era were treating the people and places they were colonizing and an extrapolation of the idea of advanced beings responding to the slow but inevitable demise of the habitability of their home planet, in this case Mars.  The numerous astronomical reports of seemingly straight lines on the Red Planet since 1877 had led to speculation that they were artificial.

The wealthy American astronomer Percival Lowell championed the idea that the lines were actually immense canals built by the Martians to bring water from the icy white polar caps to quench their drying, dying cities.  While Lowell seems to have assumed the superior Martians would eventually accept the end of their species and become extinct with dignity, Wells imagined these same creatures not wanting to go down with their planetary ship, thus their invasion of Earth.

Of course, one advantage Wells’ Martians had over just about any other species in the Milky Way galaxy was living so relatively near to our world.  A conventional rocket can propel a spacecraft to Mars in a matter of months, as they have in reality since the early 1960s.  However, it is an entirely different matter to send a ship between even the nearest stars.  Unlike the vessels of science fiction which are equipped with fanciful warp and hyper drives or have a convenient cosmic wormhole nearby, our current knowledge of what it would take to get from one star system to another is fraught with technological and celestial hurdles that make even a slow multigenerational ship a daunting task.

So even if an alien planet was going down the drain ecologically, geologically or cosmically, would it be wise (to say nothing of practical) to send a fleet across interstellar space to take over another star system?  Unless their sun was turning into a red giant or going supernova, it would be far easier to utilize the worlds in their own solar system for resources and settling.  For example, if an alien society was in desperate need of water like Lowell’s and Wells’ Martians, it would be much cheaper to mine the many, many comets that we know circle other stars, just as they do at the fringes of our Sol system.  And while we have yet to detect any exomoons, we do know that most of the moons circling the four Jovian planets are covered in water ice and some, like Jupiter’s Europa, probably have deep global water oceans.

The same goes for mineral resources.  The Milky Way galaxy alone is estimated to contain many billions of solar systems.  Presumably they have lots of planetoids and comets in addition to their major worlds, just like our celestial neighborhood.  It is also probable that many of those worlds are uninhabited but rich in elements that a technological civilization would find useful.  So even if our marauding aliens do want to journey all the way across the galaxy for gold or oil or whatever, why focus on Earth and its environs when the pickings are so easy and plentiful elsewhere?   Hauling all those rocks home would be expensive as all get out.  So trying to colonize a solar system that already has one intelligent species, even if that species is just starting to explore and utilize space, might be more trouble than it is worth.

Now let’s look at another classic reason for an ETI to want to come to Earth:  Dinner.  It has become practically an old joke that some aliens would see all the teeming life forms covering our planet and consider us an open buffet.  Not only do we once again invoke the question of whether it would be worth going to all that time and expense for a meal when there are probably much closer snacks at home; it is also virtually certain that our biochemistries would be so different that Earth organisms would be poison or cardboard to an alien creature (and vice versa).  The vastly different genetics would also prevent interspecies breeding, especially since it is unlikely that we and they will look anything alike.  As for needing a race of slaves, robots would be much less expensive and far more efficient.  Mission Serving Man sounds like some very old and very low-grade science fiction.

If it is just too much to fly all the way here for rocks or a meal, are there any other reasons why an ETI might still want to exterminate us?  We may not be a threat *now*, but perhaps there might be others who could see us as future cosmic competitors for available places and resources.  If the galaxy has beings who think in very long terms, certainly much longer than most present humans do, they may not want to wait until our descendants are arriving at their doorsteps and may want to take us out now instead.

I for one would like to think and hope that a stellar island of 400 billion suns over 100,000 light years across with perhaps 100 billion galaxies beyond our Milky Way in a Universe 13.7 billion light years wide would be plenty for everyone.  However, perhaps some cosmic real estate is more choice than others and its finite nature makes it a valuable target worth fighting for.  One estimate I saw in a Scientific American article from 2000 said the galaxy could be conceivably colonized in just 3 million years – a very short time compared to the 10 billion year age of the Milky Way.  The fact that our planet appears to be free of any alien conquerors/settlers may say something about that idea, or perhaps conquest and colonization is not as popular as we might imagine (and often do).

Even if we and others decide to be planetary homebodies for many generations, there will come a day when a home system’s main source of light and heat, their sun, will begin to die out.  Our yellow sun is no exception:  Sol is expected to start making things pretty unbearable on Earth in just a few billion years as it begins to expand into a red giant.  Even if Earth is spared being swallowed up by this bloated monstrosity of hot gasses, our planet will be charred into molten slag, killing anything living that remains.  Earth will later turn into a frozen iceball as Sol shrinks into a white dwarf and eventually a dead, dark cinder.  Even if our planet survives all this in at least its physical presence, when Sol goes completely so will Earth, its icy battered carcass floating off into the depths of the Milky Way as a rogue world.

So while we do have several billion years to prepare for this event, eventually nature will force our hand and make us choose either flight or extinction.  Even staying in distant parts of our system will become impossible once Sol starts collapsing upon itself.  And this is the fate of every star some day, even the very long lived red dwarfs, though some suns will also turn supernova or collapse into neutron stars or black holes.  I know things will be very different in those distant epochs, but anything beyond briefly visiting Earth or anyplace else nearby in those eras seems infeasible at best and deadly at worst.

Have other species around other suns realized this about their celestial hearths as well?  Will they decide to stay at home and wait for the end, or will they pack up and look for worlds where their suns won’t be going out quite so soon?  Will the fact that we have at least a few billion more years of relative safety be appealing to such refugees?  What happens when it is our species’ turn?  Perhaps there are many vague and hidden factors that will render all this speculation and prediction moot, but at least this idea has the merit of being a plausible reason why one might take up interstellar voyaging.

Another reason ETI might want to come to Earth is religion.  Perhaps like certain segments of humanity there are alien beings who strongly believe it is their sacred duty to share the Good News with everyone else, whether they want it or not.  Will alien missionaries ply the stars seeking to convert other species to what they perceive as The Truth, perhaps affecting “heathens” in the same way that missionaries affected other cultures in their zeal to save souls – settling in some very nice real estate in the process.  What will happen when a human group and an alien collective of very intense and very certain religious missionaries encounter each other?  Or is religion a primarily human concept?  Well, so far we have not been forced to worship any strange alien deities by clergy from the stars, unless some of our current religions were the direct result of an ancient missionary visit.

Images: 1st, the obligatory destruction of the White House by aliens, here in Independence Day; 2nd, alien appetites shown on Mars Attacks trading cards (Gelman, Brown and Saunders); 3rd, a bored godlike alien as embodied by Star Trek’s Q (John de Lancie); 4th, squabbles over choice real estate in Spielberg’s remake of War of the Worlds; 5th, A Case of Conscience by James Blish, an early SFnal example of planetary missionary fervor.

Part 3

…like amnesiacs
in a ward on fire, we must
find words
or burn.

Olga Broumas, Artemis

In the last few weeks, I’ve been watching the circus show of the (now postponed) Qu’ran burning with disbelief. Christians and Muslims have been playing variants of “If you don’t pay attention to my tantrums, I will shoot this dog” that was done far better by the National Lampoon. Government officials and media pundits are seriously suggesting that burning of a book that exists in millions of copies by a sad clown will touch off jihads. Yes, symbols are powerful — but fundamentalists will use any excuse for mayhem and bloodshed, whether they are white supremacists or the Taliban.

The real reason that many Muslims hate the US is because it has bombed two Muslim nations back into the Stone Age, is poised to do so to a third, and continues to pile up civilian casualties at a 100-fold ratio to US soldier deaths, while calling them “collateral damage”. Furthermore, to feed its petroleum addiction the US continues to staunchly support the primary source of militant Islamism: Saudi Arabia, whose deep pockets fund the madrassas that turn discontented, disillusioned Muslims into radical fundamentalists. However, it is equally true that imams and mullahs have issued death fatwas against books and their authors (Ayaan Hirsi Ali, Taslima Nasreen, Salman Rushdie, the Danish cartoonist who depicted Muhammad, to list just a few).

A favorite pastime of such militant religious thugs is destruction of knowledge. Islamists, like the self-labeled “man of God” Terry Jones and the medieval Catholics, burn books, burn schools, burn girls who try to attend school. They smash artworks – sculptures and paintings in the Kabul museum, the Bamiyan Buddha statues – following the example of the 9th-century Christian iconoclasts. People of this ilk burned the libraries of Alexandria. In those days of inscribing by hand, many works existed as single-number copies. As a result of this destruction, most ancient writers, scientists and philosophers are known to us only as names or sentence-long fragments.

This loss, in all its enormity and poignancy, has been portrayed only three times in contemporary popular media. It is the center of Fahrenheit 451 and of Umberto Eco’s The Name of the Rose, a thinking person’s mystery-cum-novel of ideas. It is also depicted in the recent film Agora, a romanticized version of the life of the legendary mathematician and philosopher Hypatia.

Catholic apologists took Agora to task for inaccuracy and “inciting to hatred against Christians”. This advocacy is odd on its face, given that there was no “Catholic” church at the time, and the Alexandrian Patriarchate went into the Orthodox fold after the schism. Nevertheless, the circling of wagons is understandable, especially since Agora came out at the same time that Belgian authorities finally decided to investigate child abuse cases despite the Catholic church’s attempts to stonewall them. Their hodgepodge “arguments” (italicized) include:

— Hypatia’s death was “purely” political; it had NOTHING to do with her gender, religion or occupation — which makes you wonder what their definition of political is.

— Alexandrian mobs routinely rampaged and she just got caught in the crossfire. This is routinely followed by the directly contradictory she was killed as a reprisal for the execution of the monk Ammonius (who had stoned the prefect Orestes, as shown in the film). In other words, Hypatia’s murder was not random and had everything to do with what she was and represented.

— The loss was small in any case, since Hypatia wasn’t THAT great a scientist/philosopher, she just rode on great men’s toga tails. This “reasoning” is very common (read Watson’s original depiction of Rosalind Franklin or Joanna Russ’ How to Suppress Women’s Writing). Conveniently, none of Hypatia’s own writings survived the various burnings. From my side, I could use this argument to point out that her loss far outweighed that of the monk.

— The REAL Alexandria library had been burned earlier by Caesar’s troops. The Serapeum library, whose destruction is shown in Agora, was unimportant. This shows interesting value judgments. Furthermore, Theodoros Vrettos, in his book Alexandria, City of the Western Mind, presents convincing evidence that the fire in Caesar’s time happened at the harbor, nowhere near where the main library stood.

There are more of these, but you get the gist. Make no mistake, Agora has its share of stiffness and clunk. As far as I’m concerned, its major error is to show Hypatia young at the time of her death. In fact, she was somewhere between fifty and sixty when Christian fanatics flayed her alive. Although the death of someone beautiful and young may pluck harder at heartstrings, the choice served to render older women once again invisible. Also, Rachel Weisz, radiant though she may be, is single-note chirpy whether she’s teaching upperclass youths, figuring out the truth behind the arbitrary Ptolemaic epicycles, or proclaiming her adherence to philosophy. Helen Mirren, Charlotte Rampling or Lena Olin would have made far more nuanced, haunting Hypatias.

Conversely, I applaud Amenábar’s choice to show Hypatia focused on her work, and not willing to be deflected from it by pretty faces and the security they promise. The fact that all men in full possession of their faculties are shown in love with her is fine with me. It’s a welcome reversal of the usual setting; at least Hypatia deserves such adoration, unlike most male film “heroes”.

However, the film’s title names its true core. Agora means “marketplace”, but it had a more specific meaning in older Greek: it was the place where people met to discuss ideas. The film celebrates love of learning, the beautiful workings of the mind, and laments the fragility of reason at the face of close-minded fanaticism. Hypatia’s death is a coda – as she tells Orestes, the thugs have already won. It is the looting of the library that gives the film its emotional power. It’s the burning of all these irreplaceable scrolls that makes you weep.

In conscious homage to Carl Sagan’s Cosmos, Agora occasionally zooms out to view earth from space. As it does so, the screams and weapon clashes fade. And that may be the film’s second powerful point: in the vastness of the universe, we are nothing – except what we make of ourselves and our world. We can choose the way of the Taliban, the Teabaggers, the Hareddim, the Inquisitors. Or we can take the path of Hypatia. Between these two alternatives, there is no conciliation or compromise.

Images: top, Hypatia (Rachel Weisz) and Orestes (Oscar Isaac) watch the library burn in Agora; middle, book burnings past and present; bottom, a Hypatia figure in Fahrenheit 451.

Note: This article has been reprinted on Huffington Post.

by Larry Klaes, space exploration enthusiast, science journalist

Athena’s note: Many readers assumed that I wrote this article, especially those who are familiar with my views on ETI.  I wish I had, but please note the byline.  Though this is superfluous, I should add that I completely agree with Larry.

Part 1

Several months ago, the famous British physicist and cosmologist Stephen Hawking shared his views on extraterrestrial intelligences (ETI) with the intelligent beings of the planet Earth. This was done in no small part as a way to gain publicity for his new television science series, Stephen Hawking’s Universe, video clips of which may be seen here.

Hawking thinks that if biological life evolved elsewhere in the Cosmos as it has here on Earth, then there is a good chance it will have a territorial and predatory nature similar to most creatures on this planet. These behaviors would persist even in species that achieve sentience and technologies that exceed ours.

Sounding very much like the alien invaders from the 1996 science fiction film Independence Day, Hawking’s advanced ETI would roam the galaxy in massive starships that serve as both transportation and home. Having used up the resources of their home world (and presumably the rest of their solar system), Hawking’s ETI would search for suitable worlds to “conquer and colonize,” using them up as well (subduing and/or removing any living native competition in the process) and then moving on to the next set of viable targets.

There are numerous issues with Hawking’s scenario, which even a modest student of science fiction knows goes back over a century, with the invading Martians of H. G. Wells’ classic The War of the Worlds being the most notable of the premise that alien intelligences might treat us the way most human cultures have treated others on Earth for millennia, right up to the present day. The numbers of novels, books, films, television series, and articles that have been made about this subject since Wells’ day would fill a decent size library. So why are Stephen Hawking’s views on this matter receiving so much attention from the media and public?

The most obvious reason is that Hawking is a famous and brilliant scientist, one of the few whom the general populace recognizes with ease, like Albert Einstein, even if they don’t always know or understand his work and ideas. These factors combine to make the public and media think that professionals like Hawking are therefore experts on virtually every subject in existence, including the nature and behavior of hypothetical ETI.

While few would dispute the high intelligence and knowledge of Hawking when it comes to his chosen career fields, the truth is that on the matter of extraterrestrial life he has no deeper insights than any other human on Earth, past or present. Hawking is still subject to his culture, era, and species when it comes to ETI. Even Einstein, to whom Hawking has often been compared, followed the trends of his place and time when it came to aliens. Einstein assumed there were intelligent beings living on Mars and even wrote about an optical method of communicating with the imagined Martians in 1937. Einstein did this despite the fact that by that time most professional astronomers seriously doubted that the Red Planet either had or could support complex, intelligent life forms.

This is not intended to be a putdown of these great thinkers. Instead, it shows that when it comes to predicting the forms and motivations of ETI, after two millennia of contemplation on the subject and just a few decades of actually searching for them, all we really have to go on for solid evidence are the inhabitants of a single planet called Earth and the tantalizing clues slowly popping up across the rest of the Universe.

So why do Hawking and so many others assume a Universe full of predatory life forms, be they amoebae or beings of superior intelligence and technology? Going along the theme that even great scientists are subject to the knowledge limits of their time, culture, and profession, life on this planet has long been viewed and portrayed as one which is in a constant struggle for survival against both the environment and other creatures, including and especially one’s own species. There is of course a great deal of truth to this, as virtually every terrestrial organism spends much of its life fighting for food, living areas, and mates, through either physical force or more stealthy manipulations.

However, in recent decades, it has been recognized that life forms across the board, especially those that exist in societies, are far more altruistic and cooperative than it may seem on the surface. Even humanity, despite its abilities to make war on a globally destructive scale and despoil entire ecosystems, is much more cooperative and conscientious of ourselves and our surroundings than we tend to give ourselves credit for. We have finally begun to recognize and act upon the fact that Earth is not some limitless playground that will tolerate our ancient instinctual needs and behaviors indefinitely. This has brought about our efforts to preserve and protect the remaining resources and biota of Earth – imperfectly, of course, but at least a global response is underway – and we have so far succeeded in avoiding a nuclear war or other similar form of drastic artificial catastrophe, something our military and political leaders considered both survivable and winnable not so very long ago.

With this being the case, would future humanity extend its current instinctual drives in an uncontrolled manner into the rest of the galaxy once we begin expanding our species beyond the boundaries of its home world? Would our children become what Hawking fears about ETI?

While no one can guarantee absolute certainties in either direction with our limited knowledge and experiences in these areas, I will say that I think living in space and on the other worlds of our Sol system, none of which are presently survivable upon without either dwelling inside protective enclosures or being heavily modified (which could take centuries if not millennia to work for the latter case), will force our space-residing descendants to work together for their mutual existence and evolution. The very harsh nature of reality beyond Earth will not tolerate the excesses and foolishness our species has been largely able to get away with for most of its existence.

Of course it is possible that future science could create a form of humanity genetically tailored to occupy just about any corner of the Sol system, on-worlds and off, or they could abandon biology altogether and place the human mind in a mechanical form and/or create a new kind of mind-being called an Artilect.

Granted, these scenarios are not something that will happen next week to be sure, plus they have numerous hurdles to overcome even if they are possible. However, they do illuminate the point that the best kinds of beings to survive and thrive on a cosmic scale are not necessarily the type of humanity that exists on Earth now, or any other form of life suited for one world only. Add to this fact that a spacefaring society would find vast amounts of resources among the planetoids and comet which we know exist throughout the stars and perhaps a species that spends its time marauding inhabited planets makes a bit less sense, if not as enthralling for the entertainment of our species.

Perhaps what Hawking and others fail to completely grasp is that any alien intelligences which do emerge in our galaxy will come from a world that is not a carbon copy of Earth and may in many cases evolve on a Jovian type moon, or a Jovian type world itself, or perhaps in some other kind of environment that current science would not consider to be a place for any kind of life. There is no certainty that even the behaviors or organisms everywhere are literally universal, including the kind that devour their home worlds and then have the ability and will to pack up and do the same thing again and again across the heavens. To be even more specific, the kind of actions and goals that may work for a creature confined to its home world may not be feasible beyond their domain of origin.

The fact that even someone as educated and intelligent as Stephen Hawking should view other societies in the Milky Way galaxy with fear under the presumption that all intelligences evolved in similar ways and will continue to behave in an instinctive manner even if they achieve interstellar travel shows how much of humanity still thinks and lives as if the whole of existence revolves and focuses around our one planet.

Accepting the fact that the vast majority of us have remained Earthbound and will continue to do so for at least a few more generations, our species nevertheless has been intellectually aware for centuries now that we dwell on a rocky planet circling one of hundreds of billions of suns in a vast celestial island. Just as the elements which make up this world are also found throughout the Universe, it is equally possible that biological organisms do universally behave just as Hawking predicts. The question remains, however: do they evolve into beings of higher intelligence who still retain certain instincts or do they eventually move away from them? Or does something completely different happen and is it unique for every species? That will be the focus in Part 2, along with a look at how events might go and why if an ETI ever did attack us and our world.

Images: Top, two archetypal hostile aliens — the xenomorph of the Alien tetralogy and the hunter of the Predator series; middle, the truly terrifying Kang and Kodos of Rigel VII and The Simpsons; bottom, the alien fleet approaches Earth’s moon in the V remake.

Part 2

Part 3

I recently had an exchange with a progressive friend. He had just announced that he had become a fellow of the Institute for Ethics and Emerging Technologies (IEET), a prominent transhumanist venue. Since I had trod that path before him, we inevitably came to the part where I pointed out that transhumanism is composed almost exclusively of white American men — and its upper echelon entirely so (H+ devotees invariably counter that most of their gofers are female and/or ethnic, so there!). Whereupon my friend replied: “Yes, it’s a white boys’ club. As far as I know that’s not because of a policy of exclusion. It’s because primarily white boys think about this stuff.” Which puts him in the same group (and class) as Larry Summers, who declared that women aren’t in the sciences because their brains just aren’t wired for numbiz.

Now, I’d been thinking and talking about issues colonized by transhumanists ever since I became a biologist: genetic engineering, prostheses, organ replacement and regeneration, longevity, brain function – for the simple reason that they are core domains in biology (to say nothing of medicine, society, etc). And ain’t I a woman? A dark ethnic one, at that? So no, Virginia, thinking Bik Thotz is not limited to white boys. But I guess that a thought doesn’t count as big (or even as a thought) until/unless a white boy utters it. Or, as a reviewer for one of my research manuscripts once opined, “If what you report were true, someone would have discovered it.”

The exchange made me realize the fatal error I committed about two decades ago: I neglected to call my thoughts a movement, give it a sonorous name and the glitzy rhetoric to match and register it as a non-profit with me as CEO – or President of the Board, I’m not picky. I could have become the Madame Blavatsky of transhumorism… er, transhumanism.  After all, given what passes as biology in the movement, I could do it half-asleep: I would recycle my Biochem 101 primer decked out in shiny costume jewelry with futuristic terms sprinkled liberally on the word salad. If qualified biologists objected to my prophesications, I would call them bioluddites and sic my devoted groupies on them. And like Pharaoh Hatshepsut, I would attach a beard to my chin and stroke it thoughtfully for more gravitas (and to illustrate postgenderism in action).

Alas, I did not avail myself of the golden opportunity. Instead, I opted to do basic research in the neurobiology of mental retardation and dementia. Not for me the mindmelds of the Humanity Plus Summits (where, this year, a satellite workshop will discuss “whole brain emulation, mind transfer, digital personalities, gradual replacement techniques…” – perhaps with hefty participation by the Syfy channel). Not for me the acolytes who would swoon from interacting with my Second Life babelicious bod. This lack of prescience will preclude me from being a Rupturee. No frolicking in the Matrix Hereafter in a clingy black patent leather outfit.

But I know myself too well. I’d be bored stiff in any place where charlatanism passes for provocative thinking or cutting edge science. Cults are very similar in that you have to actively suppress your brain processes to play along. I told my friend that we should revisit this conversation when his stint at the IEET is done. Unless the Singularity happens first, of course.

Image: Agent Smith and his homogeneous whitebread associates (The Matrix)

More references for those thirsting for enlightenment:

Girl Cooties Menace the Singularity!
Is It Something in the Water? Or: Me Tarzan, You Ape
If I Can’t Dance, I Don’t Want to Be Part of Your Revolution!

Chirality (handedness) is intrinsic to life across scales yet surprisingly absent from speculative fiction. The single time I recall a plot point hinging on it is during Mal’s battle with the Operative in Serenity. I have decided to explore this attribute in a series, which I will cross-post here and at Science in My Fiction.

The first article, Southpaws: The Hops in Humanity’s Beer, is up at SiMF today. Versions of it appeared very early on this blog with the title The Left Hand of Light and at HuffPo. I will follow with articles on carbon compounds (aka organic chemistry), biomolecules, brain lateralization… in short, whatever falls under the broad rubric of handedness and pleases my left-handed, left-leaning sensibilities!

Image: Southpaw by RobtheSentinel.

About twenty years ago, I was going through the gauntlet of becoming a US citizen. The immigration interviewer put her hand on top of the thick stack that contained copies of the Harvard B.A., the MIT Ph.D., the assistant professor appointment from Harvard Medical, the research papers, the Harvard Review articles and asked: “Have you ever been a whore? Are you one now?”

None of my credentials mattered. And given the specifics of the situation, she could humiliate and mistreat me with impunity. People who want to cut others down to their own size consistently employ this technique.

I had reason to recall this incident yesterday. A friend sent me a link to a magazine soliciting literary criticism and non-fiction of interest to the SF/F community. I e-mailed them asking if they would consider reprints. When told that they wouldn’t do reprints, I gave a link to an published example to showcase my work and proposed a brand-new unpublished review.

The editor — who prides herself in her progressiveness — didn’t deign to read through my message. Instead, she accused me of trying to “sell” used goods (for the astronomical amount of $100, one third of my hourly consulting fee). The last sentence of her e-mail, which is representative of her overall tone, reads: “I appreciate your chutzpah but you are wasting my time”.

The exchange was so fast that she clearly didn’t bother to even Google me. Maybe the non-Anglosaxon name was sufficient to disqualify me from consideration as either a writer or a human of sufficiently high caste. And obviously I did not register as someone who could affect her wallet or reputation – if I had, the refusal would at least have been polite.

As with the immigration officer, it made no difference that I’ve written a popular stealth science book, that some of my essays won awards, that I must turn down requests for reviews and articles for lack of time, that several SF authors consult me and send me their novel drafts for critique, that I’m one of the few people in the domain who is also a working scientist. The crucial point was to establish superiority by acting as if I were a sleazy impostor attempting to weasel my way into her gated community.

My words won’t change anything, because this person is deemed to be one of the industry Names who Must be Appeased (if only because “editors talk to each other”). And I’m sure I will hear the argument that her brilliance as a critic and editor excuses her behavior. The reality is that she represents the increasing mistreatment of writers by self-appointed gatekeepers who fancy themselves feudal lords and the rest serfs because it’s a buyer’s market.

This kind of behavior does nothing to enrich the stock of contributors or the quality of the contributions. When the overriding factor is massaging a primadonna’s ego, craft and imagination become distant second requirements. It does encourage other things, however: bootlicking and similar ghetto habits. And it may explain why speculative fiction increasingly cannot have nice things.

Image: Basil Fawlty (John Cleese), the epitome of rudeness to “inferiors” and obsequiousness to “superiors”.

by Alex Jacobs

This is the conclusion of Alex’s insightful rant about remakes of superhero films. In Part 2, he turns his jaundiced but discerning eye to the treatment of the other half of humanity in Hollywood reboots. I added a comment of my own at the end.

When I sent “No More Gritty Reboots,” it was intended as a stand-alone piece, but Athena did something rather irritating: she made me think. She pointed out that my examples only included male superheroes and asked if I’d care to see reboots of female superheroes.

I hadn’t realized I’d left such a gaping hole in my rant, but there it was. I had originally written it in a very stream-of-consciousness manner, which meant that female superheroes hadn’t even entered my train of thought. Why was that? It took me some time to figure it out, but the answers I came up with disturbed me a great deal.

I’ve no interest in seeing remakes of female superhero movies because the few that have been made have been so atrociously bad that I’d rather they scrap everything and start over completely. Most female superheroes work within groups (i.e. X-Men, Fantastic 4). While they may occasionally be given a worthwhile scene or two in films, such as Anna Paquin’s wonderful portrayal of Rogue’s fear at her growing mutant abilities in X-Men, the stories are still about the male characters. The only time a female hero has really been given equality within a group has been Elastigirl in The Incredibles.

To date, the overwhelming majority of female action heroes fall into two categories: ridiculously sexualized male fantasies (Catwoman) and male action heroes who happen to have breasts (Elektra). In very few instances are female heroes given the opportunity to explore what it means to be a female hero.

Catwoman had the potential to be a phenomenal character, as the comic books and the excellent animated series have shown.  Yet I have little confidence that Hollywood will move beyond the BDSM trappings and explore the reasons Selina Kyle has remained so compelling for over fifty years. While I would dearly love to be proven wrong, I suspect that Hollywood will see Catwoman only as a lithe young woman who wears a tight-fitting costume and carries a whip. While Tim Burton’s Batman Returns did much to explore the effects of trying to live a morally neutral life, even Burton failed to show Kyle as anything more than a freak avenger. Halle Berry did not improve matters and I see little purpose in rehashing that travesty.

I have even less confidence in Elektra. Her character was interesting in Daredevil because she was trying to balance her love for her family, a relationship, the risk of exposing herself emotionally, physically, and sexually, the danger of betrayal, and a drive for justice, all set against a world that systematically attempted to deny her agency in either a legal venue or as a vigilante. Is it any wonder she got a spin-off while Daredevil was quietly forgotten? However, Elektra completely ignored the character’s identity in order to prance her out in a ridiculously revealing costume to overly-sexualized, violent choreography (see this article on the impracticalities of female superhero costumes). Not even the fifteen year-old fanboy target audience was interested.

Jean Grey and Mystique do better in the first two X-Men movies, but the best female superhero in film remains Elastigirl from The Incredibles. As far as power and screen time goes, she is on par with the male characters. Her character integrates classically feminine roles (the caregiver) with classically masculine ones (the protector). Most importantly, she does not let herself be defined by either the superhero group or her family but chooses her own relation to both roles. To me, that is the ideal embodiment of feminism and gender equality: not a rejection of any given role because it is associated with one’s gender, but the power to choose one’s role. Our place in the world should not be defined by our birth, whether that means race, sexual orientation, class, or gender. In superhero movies, only Elastigirl truly gets it right.

Rather than remake these movies, I’d like to see completely different female superheroes get the full Hollywood treatment. I would hope that this would avoid female knock-offs (Superwoman, Batgirl, She-Hulk, etc). Rather, I’d love to see:

– Wonder Woman: Forget the powers. I’m interested in this movie because Wonder Woman isn’t just a powerhouse, like Superman, but a leader; not a soldier but a general. A Wonder Woman movie could not only serve as a positive feminist tale, but also expand our definition of heroism.

– Scarlet Witch: While lesser known than many other heroes, Scarlet Witch is one of the most fascinating. Her legacy is that of villainy but she often strives to be a hero. If we define feminism not as the championing of femininity against masculinity but as the attempt to rise above prescribed roles, I can think of no greater champion than Scarlet Witch. A Scarlet Witch movie would have more to say about individuality, family, and freedom than near anything else I can think of. That she’s a woman is part of her character, but not her defining trait.

– Stephanie Brown: If you’re not familiar with Stephanie Brown, please check Project Girl Wonder. Brown was the daughter of a super villain and, for a time, served as Robin, eventually dying in service in an incredibly disturbing and sexualized manner. The lack of acknowledgment of her death is a source of controversy within the comics community. I would love to see a Robin movie that featured Stephanie Brown rather than any of the rotating boys. Such a movie would include Batman but would focus on what it means to voluntarily work with such a disturbed individual for a choice you believe in. Whether Brown lives or dies in the film – and I believe the latter could be included in a respectful and appropriately literary manner – either conclusion would make it a tale well worth telling.

What are the chances of these movies being made? Pretty high, actually. Hollywood is motivated by money, and right now a super hero’s name in the title is the most overwhelming factor in whether a movie makes money. Will they be made well? That’s more debatable. Hollywood has shown that it can do superheroes well — even that it can do female superheroes well — but consistency is the big problem. Joss Whedon has shown he can deliver most consistently. He’s currently doing Captain America and The Avengers, which despite its historical lineup has no female heroes in the rumored cast, but maybe afterward?

I choose to hope.

Athena’s coda: Catwoman has been an incredible missed opportunity indeed, given the allure of Trickster figures. Additionally, she illustrates how differently women and men are judged for identical behavior. Both Catwoman and Batman are trauma-driven vigilantes; yet whereas he’s viewed as a hero and has the Establishment’s resources at his disposal, she’s often portrayed as a villain and operates without any external support. As for Elastigirl (girl?!), my take is less optimistic. Although she gets to exercise her powers, they are still strictly in service of her family — protecting her kids, cleaning up her husband’s messes — rather than the “larger” goals vouchsafed to male superheroes.

Superheroes who crack moulds: Xena Warrior Princess (Lucy Lawless); Catwoman (Eartha Kitt); Hiyao Miyazaki’s Mononoke Hime; Aeon and Sithandra of Aeon Flux (Charlize Theron, Sophie Okonedo).

Related posts:
Le Plus Ça Change…
The String Cuts Deeper than the Blade
Set Transporter Coordinates to… (the Star Trek reboot)
And Ain’t I a Human?

by Alex Jacobs

Today I have the pleasure of hosting the first part of an insightful rant by pen-friend Alex Jacobs. Alex graduated from Beloit College in 2005 with a degree in creative writing, literary studies, and rhetoric and discourse. In addition to amateur literary criticism, he currently teaches ballroom in Philadelphia, PA. Alex’s personal writings reside at Suburbaknght.

I’m sick of gritty reboots.

I was going to make a joke here about gritty reboots being the new black, but that doesn’t work. A gritty reboot just takes something and puts black on it. Don’t get me wrong, a gritty reboot can be fantastic (Batman Begins) but it can also be atrocious (Daredevil) or pointless (The Hulk, Star Trek).

I have to lay most of the problem at the feet of Batman Begins. Batman Begins was a fantastic movie, the reasons for which Hollywood seems to have missed entirely. Batman Begins took a superhero who’s always had a problem with camp and whose latest films had spiraled into self-parody and got rid of all the extraneous bullshit. Instead of ridiculous bat-themed gadgets we had tools that were actually useful and based on real technology. Instead of Gotham as a bright neon Blade Runner knock-off we got a shadow-shrouded city that was as much of a character as any of the actors. Instead of Three Stooges-esque comedy fight sequences we got commando-style combat encounters that truly felt threatening due to their violence.

These were great, but they weren’t what made Batman Begins a great movie. Batman Begins was great because it was populated by real characters. Bruce Wayne wasn’t interesting because he angsted but because his angst was a realistic and sympathetic reaction to what he’d gone through. Christopher Nolan and David Goyer wrote someone who was crazy enough that we all believed he could become Batman and but was still sympathetic enough that we wanted to observe the process. Batman Begins was about character.

Unfortunately, Hollywood didn’t pay attention to that. They saw sets with low illumination and characters with tragic pasts and said, “Aha! Keep everything dark! That’s what makes a great movie!”

No, no, no, no, no!

To paraphrase Aristotle, if characters in a drama behave in a believable manner and experience logical consequences because of that behavior, at the conclusion of the story the audience will experience “a useful fear.” It doesn’t matter if the circumstances aren’t realistic so long as the characters act in a believable fashion given the circumstances, because we will continue to identify with the characters and take something away from their experiences. That requires real characters.

Spiderman 3 was a fairly dark movie but the characters were morons. People don’t hate it because of the dance sequence and emo hair – they hate it because the dance sequence and emo hair are out of character, coming completely out of left field. Don’t believe me? Check out Doug “That Guy With the Glasses” Walker’s five-second movie. The first season of Heroes was amazing because it was filled with fascinating characters who behaved like real people despite the absurdity of dormant superhero genes, because we believed them when they reacted to such genes. The subsequent seasons fell apart because the story began to dominate the characters, and once that happens you realize how insipid the story really is.

I’m truly worried about Spiderman’s gritty reboot. I’m worried it’s going to be all grit and the producers are going to forget what made the first two movies so wonderful in the first place.

Then there’s the issue of rebooting origin stories. The origin story is the easiest to portray because it’s easier to sympathize with a normal person going through changes than a superhero dealing with being a superhero, but we need stories that go beyond puberty and mid-life crisis metaphors (X-Men and Iron Man respectively). We need stories about what it means to live in the new life you’ve created for yourself. Batman Begins was a great film but it was The Dark Knight that truly had something to say, and it was a message our society needs very badly.

Hollywood, don’t keep being gritty for the sake of being gritty and don’t keep rebooting because it’s easier to start over than to go forward. I want to see:

– A Superman movie that makes use of the “alien among us” concept to deal with 21st century loneliness.

– A Spiderman movie that uses choosing between two dreams as a theme and not a cheap way to raise the stakes.

– An X-Men movie that contrasts the team’s bemoaning their outsider status with the Brotherhood’s celebration of it (though one scene in X-2 did this very well).

I want stories that matter and characters I care about, not just endless dark-framed long shots followed by closeups of the heroes’ faces.

Images that linger, characters and connections that matter: Bruce brainstorms with Alfred in Batman Begins (Christian Bale, Michael Caine); Wolverine risks his life to heal Rogue in X-Men (Hugh Jackman, Anna Paquin); Theo and Marichka risk theirs to take Kee and her newborn daughter to safety in Children of Men (Clive Owen, Oanna Pellea, Claire-Hope Ashitey).

Related posts:
The String Cuts Deeper than the Blade
Set Transporter Coordinates to… (the Star Trek reboot)
Lab Rat Cinema: Monetizing the Reptile Brain

Five and twenty years ago, far back in the mists of time, a cyber-aficionado friend invited me to see her new game. Despite the primitive graphics, I liked the game’s feel, the sense of adventure and story, the witty allusions and non-linear play. The game was King’s Quest I. At about the same time, Rogue showed up. Since then, the major reason that I haven’t become a quest game addict is that developers stopped bringing them out for the Apple OS. Among my favorites I count Gabriel Knight, Syberia, Myst, King’s Quest, Circle of Blood, The Journeyman Project, the sui generis System’s Twilight, Christminster and its fellow interactive fictions – and of course that labor of love, Nethack.

The list will tell you something about my gaming tastes. I detest open-ended, multi-player, shooting and arcade games. If given a choice, I play a wizard or rogue and advance many skills rather than specialize. What captivates me is worldbuilding: story, atmospherics and the quality of the quests. That’s why the only Zork game I liked was Nemesis. It had a coherent storyline and context, and you became invested in the fates of its protagonists. And I don’t mind sparse graphics, as long as they’re evocative (System’s Twilight is a prime example).

Fast forward to 2007. Having decided not to buy any playstation, I was glumly contemplating the slim pickings for Mac users when I stumbled on Basilisk Games. They (well, he – it’s a single person who “followed his bliss”) had just launched Eschalon 1, a retro RPG game and the first of a projected trilogy for all major platforms. I looked at screen caps, downloaded the demo… and three years later, here I am in Eschalon 2, Grand Magus hat and Scout sandals on, Warmoth bow and Abyssal Freeze spell readied, facing rift harpies in the windy crags of Mistfell.

Like most games of this kind, Eschalon (henceforth EB) is based on the Dungeons and Dragons concept and is vaguely Tolkienesque. In a devastated world, a champion undertakes a quest upon which the fate of that universe depends. S/he starts with very little, acquiring knowledge, skills and ever more powerful accessories as s/he explores the world, completes quests, solves puzzles and dispatches enemies.

In EB 1, the future champion also starts with the too-common total retrograde declarative amnesia.  In Anglosaxon: she doesn’t even recall her name, let alone past deeds, though she still wields a mean blade. The handicap allows bystanders and texts to fill in the background story in carefully apportioned snippets, but at least here it fits into the story arc.

EB 2 starts where its predecessor ended but is reasonably self-contained. So the two games can be played independently, although playing both makes for a far more satisfying sense of story. Unusually for such a game, at the end of EB 2 what was up till that point solid fantasy veers into science fiction. The twist becomes intriguing after the disorientation of the shift dissipates, and it literally embodies the Clarke precept that sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.

EB has the usual player classes, “races” and alignments. Quests can be completed in any relative order until the story funnels into the endgame. Unlike Nethack and its many clones, it unfolds both above and below ground. It’s turn-based, which means you can relax and enjoy its ambience instead of frantically pushing buttons in an adrenaline haze. And though you cannot advance in levels without a good deal of slaughter, Eschalon also requires strategy – especially if you play warlocks, as I do.

The Eschalon games are not perfect. Names are the usual pseudo-epic hodgepodge. Unlike the clever, vital exchanges in Gabriel Knight, interactions with non-player characters are limited and underflavored. The dialogue is by-the-numbers (“Do you want this quest?” Choice 1: “Yes, I will undertake it and gain umpteen experience points!” Choice 2: “No, I’ll just go eat some worms!”). Entire squares of the map are featureless waste through which you must literally trudge. Worse yet, if you meet enemies in such regions you have no recourse but brute-force bashing coupled with fleeing to regroup. In some parts, the enemy throngs are numbingly monotonous. You cannot attain the highest levels unless you resort to the cheat of reloading a previous character into a new game. And unlike Nethack, Eschalon has no class-specific quests.

At the same time, the game has truly wonderful touches. Non-player characters fight enemies if you maneuver them within each other’s range. You can kill enemies by luring them under portcullises or near gunpowder kegs (which you can even place strategically in EB 2, though they’re damnably heavy). There is no respawning of hostiles and containers generate random loot that can be literally marvelous. In EB 2 you also have weather, which affects skill and equipment efficacy; and foraging ability, that gifts you with sacks of alchemy ingredients every time you camp.

The EB universe has beautifully rendered and logically varied environments – mountains, plains and coasts; tundras, forests, prairies, deserts.  Also, this is a water world, like Le Guin’s Earthsea. Rivers, lakes, seas are never too far away and play an active role in the game. During the day, birds sing or frogs peep.  At night, crickets trill and fireflies twinkle.  Then there is the music. It warns you if enemies are nearby, even if you can’t see them. It swells to a paean when you’re engaged in combat. And in EB 2 it has become a beguiling, elegiac Lydian background that is integral to the game’s mood, although it is not linked to quest context as it is in Myst.

Despite its quotidian larger concept, Eschalon is immensely appealing to me because it has a coherent story with context – and because it demands and rewards exploration. Lagniappes abound in the game: a hidden chest in this rocky cove, a skills trainer in that secluded glen. And the fragmentary texts and conversation snippets that you encounter or trigger (especially in EB 2) have echoes, as if there are indeed layers to this world beyond its surface, itself riddled with abandoned buildings and half-completed works that add to the haunting effect.

Given that the Eschalon games are essentially the work of a single person, they are a real achievement, especially in evoking the sense of a rich, lived-in, immersive universe. It comes as no surprise that EB 1 won an indie award and created a devoted word-of-mouth following that awaited the advent of EB 2 with baited breath. It will be a real loss to RPG stalwarts if this devotion does not translate to enough income for Thomas Riegsecker to complete his own quest: finish Eschalon as he dreams – and as we do, along with him.

Images: Benoit Sokal’s Syberia; Nethack, tile version (partial level); Jane Jensen’s Gabriel Knight

Glimpses of my immersive universe (more in the Stories section):

Contra Mundum
Dry Rivers
Planetfall

Note: The article is now also at Huffington Post.

Last week, bio-entrepreneur icon Craig Venter burst yet again into the limelight.  He announced that a team under his direction inserted a chemically synthesized genome into Mycoplasma and succeeded in getting the resulting bacterium to propagate. The work duly appeared in Science and the predictable shouting ensued, from fears that humans are “playing God” to hails of “artificial life”.

Several important issues got lost in the din. Let’s leave the obvious potential objections aside – after all, humans started futzing the moment their frontal cortex became prominent and the consequences of this, intended and not, have decisively affected earth and all life on it.  Instead, let’s examine the clothes of this emperor closer up. To stick with the metaphor, Venter’s latest is like exactly reproducing a large cloak onto a new piece of fabric identical to that of the original. It’s not like creating a new garment or even cutting and pasting from previous garments to make a quilt, crazy or otherwise.

The Venter work is not a discovery, let alone a paradigm shift. It’s a technological advance and even then not of technique but only of scale. The experiment is merely an extension of a well-known principle that every biology lab uses routinely: namely, that bacterial genomes can be modified almost at will (barring a few indispensable regions) and in such ways as to turn the bacteria into potent mini-factories for specific proteins. The Venter bacterium is actually pedestrian because it carries an exact duplicate of a naturally occurring genome. Its only artificial aspects are the molecular “flags” that its makers included in the synthesis to mark the artificial genome for further tracking – standard operating procedure in all such modifications.

Most decidedly, this is not artificial life (though I hasten to add that there is nothing mystical or long-term unknowable about components of living cells and organisms, including the eventual ability to tweak them). To propagate the synthesized chromosome, the Venter team used a bacterium whose endogenous DNA had been removed but was otherwise intact. This means that they used existing natural components to do the real task of propagation – the entire structure and machinery of the host cell. This makes the endeavor even less groundbreaking than injecting genetic material into a mammalian egg or stem cell (as was done to produce Dolly the sheep with far less advanced technology).

Lastly, this does not bring us a single step closer to engineering customized functions, from vacuuming up oil spills, excess CO2 or methane to producing chlorophyll or unique drugs. Creating a synthetic cell totally de novo is theoretically doable but far below the event horizon. Altering existing genes and/or creating ones for novel functions is more distant still, because making the coding part is only a small part of the task — if we figure out how to get them to encode it, for starters. Persuading them to express at the right place and time is equally crucial. So is coaxing them to work in eukaryotic cells which, unlike easy-going bacteria, have carefully guarded compartments – the nucleus in particular.

In short, the Venter endeavor was expensive, glitzy – and banal. My advice to bioethicists is to save their energy for truly fearsome items, such as recombinant bacteria or viruses that may arise from species pushed together by abrupt dislocations of habitats (and for the inevitable push for a broad research-suffocating patent from this work). I’ve done far more “dangerous” work in my near-constant cloning than this sheep attempting to pass as a wolf… nay, a lion.

Note 1: The article is now featured at Huffington Post.

Note 2: The article has also been reprinted at io9.

by Larry Klaes, space enthusiast and science journalist

A slightly different version of this article appeared on The Tompkins Weekly on May 10, 2010.

Not since 2000 has an impending year so intrigued and concerned the general public like 2012. Many people have a vague idea that the world is heading towards some kind of doom because of a calendar created by an ancient and mysterious race. They see every new natural and artificial disaster as one more bit of proof that everything will come to a crashing end – on December 21, 2012 to be exact.

What are the real facts behind all the stories, hype, and concern about 2012? Ithaca’s Science Cabaret devoted its last program of the spring to this very year and topic. Titled “2012: Truths and Fictions”, the subject was tackled from two key angles by Ann Martin, a Ph.D astronomy candidate at Cornell and Wendy Bacon, an anthropologist at the University of Pennsylvania.

Bacon began with a very brief background on the Maya, the Mesoamerican culture which supposedly started all this fuss. Settled primarily in what is now southern Mexico and the bordering nations of Belize and Honduras, the Maya society (the letter n is added to the end of their name only when speaking about their language) existed from roughly 1500 BCE to 1500 CE when the Spanish conquistadors began settling their region. The Maya did not die out, however: Today between 4 and 9 million descendants of this once great society still live in the area, speaking twelve diverse languages and nestled among the rainforests and the remnants of the magnificent temples built by their ancestors.

Martin then took the stage to explain that a Cornell Web site titled “Ask an Astronomer” which started in 1997 and currently has over 800 answers to commonly asked questions about the heavens, began showing a noticeable increase in questions pertaining to 2012.

Martin examined some of the recent 2012 documentaries from The History Channel and the recent film with the year as its title. She noted that for the cable programs, sensationalism was prevalent. “Our days are numbered! Prepare for doomsday!” were some of the themes from the programs on The History Channel. As for what exactly is supposed to happen in December of 2012, Martin explained that we have been given three choices: A New Age style time of renewal, the actual end of the worlds, and a major astronomical event.

Bacon took the microphone from Martin to describe the Long Count calendar of the Maya which started our society’s focus on 2012. The Long Count began on August 11, 3114 BCE, a date chosen more out of numerical symmetry than anything else. The calendar’s choice of 2012 as its time to recycle is due to matching the number of days from its ancient origin. When Maya society began to collapse from the top down in our tenth century CE, the Long Count of measuring days went with it.  “2012 is based on something that hasn’t been used in a very long time,” stated Bacon.

Responding to the question of why our modern society has focused on a calendar system that has not been used by the people who originated it in centuries, Martin suggested that one reason is that 2012 will come about sooner than, say, the calendar of the Maya’s neighbors – the Aztecs – which will not see the end of its current cycle until 2027.

The Cornell astronomer then addressed the various celestial fictions that have arisen regarding 2012. As one example, some claim that Earth will align with the center of the Milky Way galaxy on December 21 of two years hence and this will somehow bring about a terrible disaster. Using a simple diagram, Martin showed that our world aligns with the center of our galaxy twice a year as Earth orbits the Sun, and has done so for roughly the last five billion years.

Martin dismissed claims that our globe will be destroyed when it plunges into the galactic core, which is over 26,000 light years away. She also explained that Earth and humanity will not be affected by plunging through the plane of the Milky Way or if the planets in our Solar System line up (which they will not do on any day in 2012). She noted further that Earth will not be struck by the mythical planet Nibiru, or be fried by the Sun if Earth’s magnetic field should suddenly reverse itself.

“The public should be excited about the Maya and astronomy,” said Martin. “But instead, people are freaking out about 2012 for false reasons. This is a real shame.” Martin and Bacon both expressed concern about how uncertain and frightened many people (in North America at least) are about the year 2012 due to these unsubstantiated rumors. The scientists foresee a backlash against science from these events, which Martin calls a “loss of cosmophiles” or people who might otherwise love learning about the Cosmos.

Images: Chichén Itzá temple/Maya glyph composite, Aaron Logan; glyphs from La Mojarra Stela 1, Veracruz, Mexico — the left column gives a Long Count date of 8.5.16.9.7, or June 23, 156 CE; Maya calendar cartoon, Dan Piraro.

There have been many branches on the hominid tree, but now a lone species walks the earth. We had company once, though, at least in Europe and West Asia – the Neanderthals.

Until recently, the scientific consensus was that they were sufficiently different from Homo sapiens that no interbreeding took place. We knew that they controlled fire; constructed tools, shelters and garments; took care of their weak, injured and elderly; and buried their dead with grave goods. But until two decades ago it was widely believed that they had attributes which disadvantaged them to such an extent that competition with modern humans led to their extinction (for example, lack of capacity for complex language, almost exclusive dependence on hunting for sustenance… to say nothing of the Tarzanist view that their doom came about because — horrors! — they allowed women to join the hunt).

This idea of Neanderthals as grunting, shuffling dead-end cavemen began to change as our techniques allowed us to examine Neanderthal fossils with more precision and depth. In the mid-eighties, bone and genetic analysis proved that their ability to hear and produce sounds was almost identical to ours (including a human-like FOXP2 gene, whose function is critical for language). Sequencing of their melanocortin gene indicated that some might have red hair and light skin.

Finally, the just-published draft sequence of their genome (headed by Svante Pääbo’s team from the Max Planck Institute) showed that up to 4% of the genes of non-Africans may come from them. If confirmed, this means that Neanderthals and Cro-Magnons indeed interbred when the latter first came out of Africa – most likely in the Middle East, before further migration.

The two branches of humanity share 99.7% genetic identity. They show differences in genes involved in cognitive development, skeleton structure, energy metabolism, skin physiology. They also differ in regulatory regions and microRNAs. This information will eventually help us answer the question of what makes us uniquely “human” – perhaps even what has made us so adaptable that we now threaten to overwhelm the earth.

When I read about the conclusions from the draft sequence analysis, tears sprang to my eyes, just as they do at spaceship and planetary probe launches. It moved me inexpressibly to think that they haven’t vanished but are with us still, a thread in our fabric, a whisper in our song.

Note 1: The best fictional depiction of the interaction between Neanderthals and Cro-Magnons is Dance of the Tiger by Björn Kurtén, a distinguished vertebrate paleontologist who was Swedish — as is Pääbo.

Note 2: The reconstructed image of the Neanderthal child at the top of the article is a collaboration between University of Zurich researchers Marcia Ponce de León and Christoph Zollikofer and sculptor Elisabeth Daynès.

Note 3: The article is now featured at Huffington Post.

After my second article about Cameron’s Avatar, a young British media critic who occasionally visited my blog accused me of snobbery.  He stated that my points about entertainment like Avatar went past aesthetics and “devolved into” political and moral pronouncements about people who like what he considers lowbrow art (he assumes I share his definition of lowbrow, of which more anon).  He further opined that classes of artful brows are just peer pressure.  Hence Cameron is as good as Ozu unless you “drip with disdain” for the hoi polloi.

In the article that started this discussion I primarily discussed biological drives.  I posited that certain types of entertainment arouse the fight-or-flight response and repeated immersion in them can lead to PTSD pathology, including mob-like behavior.  The argument that art is ever devoid of politics and (at least implicit) moral judgments is either naïve or disingenuous and my critic doesn’t strike me as the former. I suspect that his cultural background, awash in class distinctions and reverberations of colonialism, may partly explain his viewpoint.  Even more fundamentally, however, I think his definition of lowbrow art differs so much from mine that we are really discussing orthogonal concepts.

So I’m taking this opportunity to articulate my art classification scheme.  To give you the punchline first, my definitions have to do with the artist’s attitude towards her/his medium and audience and with the complexity and layering of the artwork’s content, rather than its accessibility.  In my book, lazy shallow art is low, whether it’s in barns or galleries.  What makes Avatar low art is not its popularity, but its conceptual crudity and its contempt for its sources and its viewers’ intelligence.

A common if usually implicit assumption is that quality and popularity are mutually exclusive.  Hence, “lowbrow” is often considered synonymous with mass appeal: bestsellers, platinum albums, blockbuster films.  Yet you can have wildly popular art that is light years away from least common denominations.  Umberto Eco’s The Name of the Rose comes immediately to mind; so do Alvin Ailey Dance Theater and flamenco; Peter Gabriel and Dire Straits (including their groundbreaking MTV videos); RPG games like Gabriel Knight, Myst and Syberia; and shows about nature or archaeological findings (as accessible “reality TV” as you can get) – or, for that matter, the cordon bleu-quality food you can buy cheaply in corner stores of any French or Italian provincial town.

My admittedly idiosyncratic definition comes from a cultural upbringing that makes no rigid high/low distinctions.  Hellenes still read Homer and watch Eurypides and Aristophanes for entertainment.  To use a parallel from my critic’s culture, Shakespeare and Dickens were not highbrow in their eras.  People of all classes watched Elizabethan plays in open-air theaters and Dickens’ serialized novels were the Victorian equivalents of soap operas.  Too, a lot of poetry, including that of Nobel-prize winners, has been set to compulsively singable music by Hellene popular composers – and the songs are sung across Hellas independently of social stratum.

Along similar (lack of) demarcations, there are no bestsellers or blockbusters in Hellas.  Books are printed in small runs and are not warehoused or pulped.  As a result, editors take chances on unknown authors but spend nothing on PR, and people aren’t trained to restrict their reading to genres.  Nor are films split between hothouse esoterics distributed solely to hoity-toity boutique venues versus “crowd-pleasers” shown in every mall (besides, Hellas doesn’t have malls – it has small shopping courtyards).  Finally, we live literally on top of several breathtaking, radically different past cultures, from Minoan to Byzantine. So our sensibilities tend to the syncretic.

Most cultures, if not terminally debased, have art woven integrally into the lives of their people. Folk art and craft are often extraordinarily sophisticated both in style and content: clothing, jewelry, utensils, instruments, furniture, dwellings, gardens, cooking, painting, dance, music can all be high art – yet they are part of daily life, not exhibited on museum walls or opulent stagings for the few.  This is important not only in itself, but also because such art was/is created disproportionately by women.  In such settings, artists/artisans are often political and moral forces to be reckoned with: builders and smiths, storytellers and bards.  In some nations they are honored as living monuments that preserve and transmit cultural knowledge.

A perfect example of my definition of high art is the Oscar-nominated The Secret of Kells.  It uses traditional 2-D techniques and is completely accessible – what my critic would call solidly bourgeois middlebrow.  Yet it engages and stimulates many levels of thought and emotion at once.  You can focus on enjoying individual aspects: the story teaches real history, since it’s based closely on what we know about the journey of the Kells manuscript from Iona; the conflict is not the usual tussle between monochromatic good and bad guys, but instead highlights the struggle between two versions of good (like Miyazaki’s Mononoke Hime – or Sophocles’ Antigone); the nuanced interactions explore the interplay between Paganism and Christianity, myth and history, imagination and discipline, nature and culture; the style incorporates both Celtic curvilinear forms (in the style of the Book of Kells as well as its Jugendstil descendants) and the tense, jagged shapes used in such graphic novels as The Crow or Sin City.

Put together, the film becomes Gesamtkunstwerk at the level of Wagner’s Nibelungen cycle or Jackson’s Lord of the Rings trilogy: a total, totally absorbing work of art that delights and also exercises the senses, the cortical emotions, the intellect – and achieves this feat without loudly advertising its intent or, for that matter, its artsiness.  Unlike the incessant trumpetings about the groundbreaking technique or “socially relevant” content of Avatar, The Secret of Kells came and left quietly.  Then again, art of this caliber doesn’t need to shriek for recognition or classification.  Its quiet but sure voice is potent enough:

Images and links: kilim rug (Konya, late 19th century); kohiki tokuri sake flask and guinomi sake cup by Kondo Seiko (Niigata, contemporary); poster for Tomm Moore’s The Secret of Kells; Aisling sings magic into Pangur Bán (who has her own lovely story) in The Secret of Kells.

Note: If you visit the comments section, you will find that this review drew the attention of the Kells screenwriter Fabrice Ziolkowski and its US distributor Eric Beckman. Additionally, its principal director, Tomm Moore, linked to the HuffPo version of the review from his blog.

The articles prompted by Avatar:
Avatar: Jar Jar Binks Meets Pocahontas
Lab Rat Cinema: Monetizing the Reptile Brain

Related articles:
Being Part of Everyone’s Furniture: Appropriate Away
The Hyacinth among the Roses: The Minoan Civilization

Lest anyone is worried that I’m slacking off, the reason for the (comparative) silence is that I’ve been toiling on three almost simultaneous articles.

— An expanded version of You Only Find What You’re Looking For appeared in Science in My Fiction. Opening paragraph:

“Extraterrestrial life is a staple of SF and the focus of astrobiology and SETI. Yet whereas SF has populated countless worlds with varying success, from Tiptree’s haunting Flenni (Your Haploid Heart) to Lucas’ annoying Ewoks, real ETs remain stubbornly elusive: nobody has received a transmission demanding more Chuck Berry, and the planetary probe data are maddeningly inconclusive. Equally controversial are the shadowy forms on Martian asteroid ALH84001, though the pendulum has swung toward wary favoring of the biological possibility after scientists discovered nanobacteria on earth and water on Mars.”

— I was invited to be part of a Mind Meld at SF Signal. The question was “What are some of the coolest robots in science fiction? Why?” I won’t put excerpts of this here, to avoid spoilers! Here’s a hint, though: my answer partly aligns with what I said in The Souls in Our Machines.

— My article Miranda Wrongs: Reading too Much into the Genome, which discusses naive views of genetic engineering, appeared on H+ Magazine. Opening paragraph:

“When the sequence of the human genome was declared essentially complete in 2003, all biologists (except perhaps Craig Venter) heaved a sigh of gladness that the data were all on one website, publicly available, well-annotated and carefully cross-linked. Some may have hoisted a glass of champagne. Then they went back to their benches. They knew, if nobody else did, that the work was just beginning. Having the sequence was the equivalent of sounding out the text of an alphabet whose meaning was still undeciphered. For the linguistically inclined, think of Etruscan.”

Revel in the bounty while it lasts! May will be grant-writing time again.  After that, I’ll concentrate on fewer, larger writing chunks.  In particular, my stories are banging urgently within my head.

Images:  top, T’uupieh of Titan, assassin, singer (Joan Vinge, Eyes of Amber); bottom, cartoon by Polyp.

My readers probably know that I’m one of those who think there is intelligent life in the universe besides humanity, although I also think that the timespace constraints for meeting (even by signaling) and the biological and cultural hurdles for mutual comprehension are formidable.

We have sent information about ourselves to the universe: in addition to the unavoidable EM transmissions, we put plaques and voice recordings in the Pioneers and Voyagers. These qualify as METI, Messaging to Extraterrestrial Intelligences.  The probes by themselves are messages, tiny bottles flung into the vast ocean of space.

Dr. Tibor Pacher, a Hungarian physicist working in Germany and a space enthusiast, has started a program called Faces from Earth to continue and expand these efforts, in the hopes of inspiring more people about space exploration — especially the young. Mr. Larry Klaes, a US journalist and also a space enthusiast (and a long-time friend and contributor to this blog) just wrote about Tibor’s work at Seti League: Facing the Galaxy.

Please visit both links and consider whether you might like to join. There’s a 6-minute video at Tibor’s site, with several faces and statements about why people think this is an important endeavor. Halfway into the video, you will see a face you may recognize… and catch a glimpse of my lab.

Image: One of the posters for Faces from Earth.

Note: The music for Tibor’s video is For Arnhem Land by Aalborg World Soundtracks.

“Ich bin ein Berliner,” John F. Kennedy announced to West Berlin in 1963. No doubt, Kennedy’s handlers, hearing the roars from the assembled throng, thought the young president had charmed the Germans. Had they listened closely, they might have heard guffaws escaping the crowd. After all, they had just heard the leader of the Free World proclaim that he was a jelly donut.

Fast forward to 2010. An up-and-coming fantasy author has written the customary trilogy and his world-building has been hailed as “meticulous, yet fresh”. A caste in his books names its male members after precious stones. One of the two main heroes is called Nephron.

Nephron means Kidney.

I gamely pointed this out in an online magazine that featured a worshipful review of the trilogy. In response, the author descended upon the forum and spake thus:

1. He was perfectly aware that nephron means kidney but those who possess deep learning and intellectual subtlety would be aware that nephrite is the Greek name for jade.
2. Despite point 1, surely he cannot be expected to consider every possible silly nuance. After all – and here I quote him verbatim – Lord of Wind might be construed to refer to farts.
3. And despite point 2, he researched everything in his trilogy within an inch of its life and he doth challenge me to prove otherwise. I’m surprised he didn’t say he would grade me.

The fact that I’m a native Hellenic speaker does not automatically make me an authority on etymology or connotations. However, I went to one of those bloody elite schools where they forced us to learn all the flavors of our language, from Homeric to demotic. I also became fluent or competent in a few more languages through the years and I love exploring patterns, links and shifts. So I know that in most Indo-European tongues the word for jade means “kidney(-like) or flank stone” because it was thought to help kidney colic: nephritis lithos (Hellenic), lapis nephriticus (Latin), Beilstein (German), piedra de ijada (Spanish). Nephrite is one of the two distinct silicates bundled into the term jade, nephritis is medicalese for kidney inflammation, nephritic means of the kidney.

Bottom line: Nephron, unmodified and standalone, still means Kidney and no amount of sophistry or posturing can change that.

To give you a parallel example from the same work, the other main hero is called Carnelian – derived from the Latin carnis, flesh or meat, because of that gemstone’s most common color. Nevertheless, the author did not name him Carne. The sensibility of the author’s own Romance natal language led him to avoid such a lethal blow to his work’s intended Wagnerian gravitas.

While the author was holding forth, I headed over to his site and read his synopses of the first two volumes of the trilogy. His naming system is a mishmash: for example, name endings aren’t linguistically congruent even within each stratum of each culture. So I suspect that his vaunted research into the suitability of Nephron probably went like this:

Author to the corner Greek or Cypriot grocer: Hey Spiro, does Nephron sound heroic to you?

Grocer (snickering discreetly, like the Berlin residents at Kennedy): Sounds fantabulous, mate!

Author (putting check mark next to the name): One more item deeply researched.

Tin ears and leaden tongues are not exclusive to Anglophone SF/F authors or directors with Hindenburg-sized egos. Most Japanese manga and animé blithely serve Name Mangle Royale. This actually goes down very well in satire, parody or light-hearted pastiches (think Xena or Samurai Champloo). However, it’s as enticing as thrice-thawed carne in wannabe epics that take themselves deadly seriously (Star Wars, Bleach, the Tolkien clones). In a secondary universe, character names invariably peg the creator’s ability to bring that world into life and make readers yearn to inhabit it.

Invented names and terms need to reflect the fictional culture they represent at several levels, because they serve as extra conduits into the created universe. This means they must have a fundamental integrity, and be more than half-digested scraps from shallow meta-sources. Their inventors have to be aware of the languages they base them on – their structure, rhythm, tonality, inflections. Being multilingual helps and so does research, but a good ear is even more crucial. Too little foundation, and you have cardboard; too little integration, and you have soupy cement. Poul Anderson knew this. So did Tolkien, though he got slightly carried away. So do Ursula Le Guin and Jacqueline Carey, adept at creating layered secondary worlds with names/terms that make you sigh happily and say “that’s it exactly – I couldn’t imagine this being called anything else.”

Which brings us back to Kidney and his world. As its names go, so does the rest of it. I was sorely tempted to take up the author’s challenge and write a detailed review of his doorstops. I read as much of the three novels as I could find on the Internet and found the excerpts predictable and pedestrian (and no, I don’t need to read the entire Twilight series to form an opinion of it). Besides its toe-fracturing heft, the trilogy also sounds like a fantasy version of the TV series 24: even its devotees mention that torture is graphic and constant, the action unfolds …in …real …time and the author is so enamored of world-building that the edifice creaks like Hollywood plywood town fronts. In other words, this is Robert Jordan or Storm Constantine for the kidneyed… er, jaded.

Even if I had the time and stamina to slog through such an opus, I cannot read violence porn for jollies or to prove my edgy sophistication. Torture shadowed my people till the mid-seventies and was used on my immediate family. It’s also worth reflecting that an equivalent amount of sex in the book (even the vanilla kind, let alone BDSM) would have consigned it to a very different category and we would not be having this sardonyx… excuse me, sardonic conversation.

Images: Kuzco in his llama incarnation, from The Emperor’s New Groove; cartoon, Baloocartoonblog, 2009; Ekaterina Shemyak, Therem ir Stokven – a beautifully named character in Le Guin’s The Left Hand of Darkness whose equally haunting tale can be read here.

Related posts:

On Being Bitten to Death by Ducks
Storytelling, Empathy and the Whiny Solipsist’s Disingenuous Angst
Being Part of Everyone’s Furniture; Or: Appropriate Away!

Women nominated for Best Director Oscars:

Lina Wertmüller, Seven Beauties, 1976.
Jane Campion, The Piano, 1993.
Sophia Coppola, Lost in Translation, 2003.
Kathryn Bigelow, The Hurt Locker, 2010.

Winner, 2010:
Kathryn Bigelow
Best Director, Best Picture.

Four nominations, one lone winner — out of 164 awards in the two categories since 1928. The award is long overdue, meager, and encouraging only if this tiny step is the first of many.

As for Bigelow’s major 500-pound gorilla competitor: sometimes bows and arrows do prevail over nuclear warheads, after all. Look at the bright side, fanbois. The price of Avatar lunchboxes should go through the floor.

Image: Angela Bassett as the formidable Lornette “Mace” Mason in Bigelow’s unfairly overlooked Strange Days.

Some people walk on water //
Some just keep falling down.

— from Ramon, by Laurie Anderson

Whenever the imminent death of SF from lack of scientific knowledge and/or mindset comes up, some people wring hands and point fingers at YA fantasy or the “feminization” of the domain, some spring to action:  Kay Holt and Bart Leib, the founders/editors of Crossed Genres, just launched a blog titled Science in My Fiction.  As Kay says, both in words and in the playful image she created to celebrate the launch (right):

“The purpose of the Science in My Fiction blog is to get science fiction and fantasy writers and fans thinking ahead of science again. Playful bloggers will take a look at recent scientific developments and extrapolate potential futures from them. // This is a fight for survival of the fiction. It’s time to seize culture and do science to it!”

Visitors to Astrogator’s Logs will recognize some SiMF contributors: Peggy Kolm, Calvin Johnson, and yours truly.  The first post is Extrapolative Fiction for Sapient Earthlings by Kay Holt.  Posts will initially appear twice weekly and may increase to thrice weekly once the contributors find their rhythm.

Go take a look!