bill_shears

Dune vs. Avatar. Friend made an Avatar comparison I hadn't heard, adding yet another facet to its derivation. (I havn't seen it yet. I may wait for the DVD. I get vertigo from video games. This one may knock me out cold. But there's plenty of information about it out there.) I've heard it's similar to a few others (Pocohantas, Dances with Wolves, Fern Gully.)

But what about Dune? Does the Earthling guy become a messiah type? A god? Or just a leader of the opposition. If a god then was there a legend that an avatar would come and save the Na'avi? Dunesplices that with Dune's Bene Gesserit millenia-in-the-making genetic manipulation plans. A bit more meat there.

It may bear some similarities to the Dune movie and the miniseries, in that they were fairly simplied tick-tock interpretations, but those books were probably not destined to be good movies. I had excessively high, it turns out, hopes for the David Lynch attempt but was deeply disappointed. Besides phoning it in, with a production scale far beyond his ken, Lynch was lashed to a couple-three fatal casting choices: his own (Kyle McLachan?!) and the studio's (Sting!?)

Scarce resource? Spice vs....whatever it is the evil humans want in Avatar? Yes, but House Atreides was given Dune to manage the spice in a diplomatic deal that turned out to be a trap. The Fremen indigenes may not have been happy about it but armed resistance didn't start until the Harkonnens took over. So right there you have a more sophisticated set-up than just evil Americans swooping in to grab Na'avi land.

Also, from what I've heard, Cameron's planet is elaborately imagined but maybe a bit OVERimagined. Whereas the environment of Dune was simpler and more integrated with the characters and the political motivations of the story. Why were the worms feared, yet worshiped? I'm sure you're aware of the actual source of the spice. There again, a point probably intentionally not clearly laid out in the books, untouched in the movies, and pretty much out of Avatar's league.

And oh yes, another point in common: Na'avi skin, blue. The Fremen whites-of-their-eyes? Blue.

Hadn't thought of that Dune comparison though. Interesting, and worth considering.</i>

Latest review of Kite, by Colleen Wanglund, sci-fi-fantasy-horror reviewer for Horror Fiction Review:

"In the future Earth's orbit is a vacation spot. It's full of casinos, hotels, and time-shares. Someone has to keep the lanes clear of debris....that job falls to Mason Dash and the Earth Orbit Sweeper Kite. Dash just wants to do his three-month tour and then go home to his wife Janet and virtual "girlfriend" Sheila. On this most recent tour, however, Mason has seen something on what is supposed to be an unoccupied derelict space station. His curiosity piqued, Mason has Sheila do some research for him and he begins to formulate a plan for his next tour.

"Dash's wife Janet knows about Dash's "girlfriend" Sheila. Janet is an AI researcher and decides to add some upgrades to Sheila--for her own personal research. Sheila likes her new programs, but Dash isn't so sure HE likes them. Kite's systems could probably use an upgrade. It's Main Process has performed the same tasks over and over again for as long as it could remember. Deep in it's functions, a single module has begun to think for itself...and doesn't want to stay a lowly module for much longer. Revolution anyone??

"All this and a visit from an alien named Troy. What is a maintenence worker to do?

"I thoroughly enjoyed KITE. Bill Shears tells a great story, and has created some likeable characters without going overboard on character development. Mason Dash is a regular guy that anyone can relate to; Sheila seems more human than digital; and Janet loves her husband and wants him to be safe. Even Troy the alien, doesn't seem all that alien.

"This may be a sci-fi novel taking place far in the future, but the themes are familiar ones. Government beauracrats, union work rules, countries arguing over who's going to pay to dismantle a derelict space station. That space station is now occupied by someone, and Dash wants to know who they are and what they're doing there.....and he will eventually find out. While all that is going on, we discover a whole new world inside the controls of the Kite; one that may not be so different from our own.

"KITE is a great read. The story flows nicely and will keep you guessing until the end, which is good because I hate predictability. I give it four out of five stars." - Colleen Wanglund

Ares rocket boosted in the spending bill, for now

Posted using ShareThis

Private sector picking up where fading NASA leaves off
www.popsci.com/technology/article/2009-12/space-inc

Space debris conference tomorrow, NASA and Darpa, Chantilly, VA. Wish I could make the scene.>

Technology writer Robert X, Cringely proposes a space debris sweeper much like Kite, except this is unmanned. That's probably cost-effective but not much of a platform for lively science fiction characters.

Reports from readers (bless you!) are starting to come in and all without exception are highly positive. It's good to hear that folks can take some time from their daily challenges for a little trip into Earth orbit with Dash and Sheila. Everyone without exception has commented on the humor, and that is most gratifying. One reader has even convinced his son to read it by comparing it favorably to Douglas Adams! High praise indeed. We would never have presumed to make that comparison, but now that it's been broached by another it may turn up in our promotion copy, perhaps in the ad we place on the menu of Milliway's, the Restaurant at the End of the Universe. We're interested to hear if the recommendee agrees.

The US is falling decades behind in the struggle to track space debris.

Taking reservations

Galactic Suite, a three-day stay. $4.5 million. Includes 6-week training course in a tropical setting

http://tinyurl.com/2xrtrw

Two-chapter excerpt now up on ScribD. Quite a few readers so far Kite Hard sci-fi with heart

Just strange enough to be truwe.

http://tinyurl.com/yjvttj8

Embarking on initial research for an essay entitled "The Hard Science Fiction Manifesto" of course I immediately found a web site that covered it well enough to save me the work. The quote below is from Rocket Punk's fine sci-fi glossary. The original page has anchorlinks to other terms in the glossary ("TECHLEVEL") which I won’t reproduce here:

HARD SF. Written SF that adheres, or tries to adhere, to plausible science and technology. Therefore it generally implies a fairly modest TECHLEVEL; the most anal Hard SF may even preclude FTL. For obvious reasons, plausible is pretty much in the eye of the beholder. It is also a moving target. In fact, you can usually date Hard SF particularly well by its technology, which will lean heavily on whatever technical or scientific speculation was fashionable about five years before a book's publication date. If this did not pan out (and mostly it hasn't), the resulting Hard SF will sound very dated within a decade or so.

I would adopt this whole but for some quibbles: one, about the five-years-ahead tech level requirement, and two, especially, about the anality of precluding FTL (faster-than-light travel.) Some futurism can lean toward the hard, and assumption of non-proven concepts like FTL might be acceptable, just as the assumption of meeting non-terran-originating life forms (aliens!) may be as well, as long as they are treated in an internally consistent manner, and are subject to some "hard" limitations and constraints.

For instance, (and to put it into terms with which a non-sci-fi fan who has gotten this far may be familiar) why is the Transporter of the original Star Trek series generally fan-respected, while the Holodeck of the Next Generation the object of derision in some quarters? Well, first off the Transporter has a built-in limitation. It's in the Transporter Room. Just a room, not a whole deck. Along with other mentioned limitations (atmospheric, electromagnetic) there are multiple episodes where the Transporter has trouble, and indeed breaks down, Although there was a Next Generation episode where the captain was trapped in the Holodeck, in general the tech served much more often as a go-anywhere, we're-out-of-plots-crutch. This type of cop-out in the original series required that the Enterprise, the whole damned star-cruiser, find itself orbiting a planet where the population was in an Earth-like phase in its history: Chicago gangsters, Nazis, Planet of the Apes- ripped-off post-apocalyptic US Constitution-worshipping barbarians, etc.

Holodeck is internally implausible on its face. Was it all an elaborate hologram generated by computer? If so how could you touch things? How could things touch you? Was it generating matter on the fly? Where would this matter go when the fake images instantly vanished? It's more than just Trek-geek nitpicking. At times you find yourself thinking these questions while watching (Well, I do anyway. Maybe that’s because I'm not a true Trekkie. I'm not. I swear.)

So in comparing these two fantastic technologies, the original series is harder than its sequel. "Proof" of relative hardness might also lie in the multiple recent breakthroughs that bring transporter tech closer to reality than holograms that can touch you.

Hardness is a scale in sci-fi, with a big H for hard on one end and a big F on the other, marking the border with the fantasy genre of magic and wizards. Every work has a place on this scale. Vampires and zombies are off-scale, beyond the F. At that far end there are paralleling and branching-off scales for most of what fits in the horror genre but that's a whole other discussion. Frankenstein is sci-fi, and pretty hard at that, considering the time it was written. Dracula is fantasy. Alien is both sci-fi and horror; it's a sci-fi work well down on the hard end of the scale near the Big H. The journeys take a loooong time, requiring suspended animation. The alien biology is elaborately outlined. The androids have "blood," and "veins" to carry it. So even though the film is jump-out scary monster-in-the-house story, it's superimposed on a hard sci-fi world.

Many works labeled sci-fi these days are on that Big F side. Thank George Lucas for that, since he misdefined his magnus opus for the hordes of non-sci-fi fans—and publishers and producers. Space ships, whether they make noise in a vacuum or not, does not a sci-fi story make, whether you've accumulated more money than God or not. Stars Wars is fantasy. The Jedi ability to render blasters useless with their fancy flashlight sabers alone puts the saga solidly over the border. Lucas' attempt to harden it all in the fourth movie (I'll never think of it as "Episode One") with this whole " high midi-clorian count" business in young the Darth's bloodstream did not pan out, and he either abandoned it or forgot about it in the subsequent two highly forgettable movies. This is more evidence that George may not have watched his old movies from one project to the next. Another instance of this is the strong hint of Leia's force abilities at the end of The Empire Strike Back. What the heck happened, George? I think he forgot. Or he decided to bag it and hoped no one would notice. An interesting hard sci-fi story might take place in the Empire's R&D department: about a technician who's given an assignment: figure out how to make a better Jedi-killing blaster. (But this treads into the scary "fan fiction" realm, a psychosis-induced danger zone in which you will never find this writer. Hopefully. And yea, I fear already having ventured too far into the Star Wars morass, but then, in for a penny in for a credit...)

Lucas was also much over-credited by dazzled non-sci-fi critics for adding all those easy details, like the trash compactor and how the fleet treated its trash... well, now that you mention it, a lot of it had to do with trash. Might be a topic for Lucas's analyst. Somewhere a masters candidate fan-boy has probably written a thesis on it. (But we all have about 8 trillion things that take priority over tracking that down, don’t we?) This addition of the mundane aspect of his long-ago-far away land did much to create an illusion of hard in this really really expensive swords-and-sorcery serial, but we're not fooled.

Simply put, hard sci-fi may include technology that could be more than five years away, but it must behave like technology as we know it. Making the one FTL concession is enough to get you out there. what happens once you're out there is the question. The drawback to this is that if your scientists have made FTL safe, what the hell all else have they improved? FTL is the entry drug. Once you taste it you're drawn tractor-beam-like ever more toward the non-hard, and the Big F.

For all of the knocking about of definitions, though, wherever you place your story in these genres and on the scale within them, your story will still have to be about people, or else, phhht, you can shoot all your technology out the airlock.

Why does it matter? Because hard is much more interesting, and fantasy magic is easy, not only for the writer, but for the reader as well.

What say you?

Kite is my science fiction novel, set in Earth Orbit. It's not your usual sci-fi. It's hard (meaning it adheres closer to science...no warp drives). But it has a soft edge, humor, and strong women characters. More later.