How to get into 20 classic science fiction shows: The ultimate guide [Scifi 101]
Even if you're a massive science fiction fan, there are probably still some great shows you've yet to discover. But for massively long-running shows, where to begin? Here's our guide to how to start watching twenty classic science fiction shows.
It should be pointed out that this guide is meant for potential new fans, not people who already love these shows. We advise in quite a few instances to skip entire seasons of shows, and that's not something a big fan of a show is likely to agree with. But this is all about the best way to get hooked on a show, and we of course recommend checking out the rest of a series once you've sampled the best of what a show has to offer.
We're also focusing more on seasons of shows than specific brilliant episodes, because it's easier to reach consensus - and thus make useful recommendations to the most people - on an entire season than one particular episode. So, let's start with the biggest, most daunting science fiction franchise of them all...
Star Trek: The Original Series
Since it only ran three seasons, the easy answer is just to tell you to watch all of it. Unfortunately, the third season has a whole lot of badness in it, which is the result of slashed budgets and the influence of new producer Fred Freiberger. (He also presided over the similarly derided second season of Space: 1999.) There are a few decent episodes in there - "The Tholian Web" is probably the best of the bunch - but most of the classics are to be found in the first two seasons, and almost all the notoriously awful episodes ("Plato's Stepchildren", "Spock's Brain") are season three entries. So just stick with seasons 1 and 2, then head into season 3 with extreme caution.
Star Trek: The Next Generation
This one is fairly straightforward - start with season three. The show hit some real lows in its first season, and anybody unsure about whether they like TNG is unlikely to get past the first dozen or so episodes. The second season, while a bit of an improvement, is missing one of the show's main cast members, as Gates McFadden's Dr. Crusher was replaced by Diana Muldaur's Dr. Pulaski. There's a lot to like about the second season (and Pulaski is hardly a total disaster), but everything clicks into place with the third season. That season has the added benefit of ending on what may be the biggest cliffhanger in television history. If that doesn't have you coming back for more, nothing will.
Star Trek: Deep Space Nine
Deep Space Nine was a far more arc-driven show than The Next Generation, so there's slightly more to be gained with starting at the beginning and putting up with the show's growing pains (which, to be fair, were never as bad as TNG's). Still, there's a fairly clear division in arcs between the first two seasons, which is more heavily focused on the Bajoran/Cardassian conflict, and the third season onwards, which focuses on the coming war with the Dominion. As such, for those on the fence about DS9, we suggest jumping in with season three.
Star Trek: Voyager
There's really no sense in pretending otherwise - Voyager isn't really all that good of a show, and if you're going to dive into nineties Star Trek, I'd head to TNG and DS9 first. Still, the show has its charms, and it did get better as it went along. I'd jump right to the last episode of season 3, the first half of the "Scorpion" two-parter. "Scorpion" is consistently voted the series's best episode, and it also introduces the half-human, half-Borg, all-sexy Seven of Nine, who is pretty much the one iconic thing to come out of this show. Most of the show's best episodes come in the fourth season onwards, and you get to avoid the only Star Trek episode so bad that everyone involved disowned it. (Although, depending on your mindset, that might actually be just the sort of thing you want to check out.)
Star Trek: Enterprise
When it comes to latter-day Star Trek, there's just something special about seasons 3 and 4, because that's where I'd suggest you start with for Enterprise as well. The prequel series took a while to find its feet, spinning its wheels for two seasons with a lot of not terribly interesting stuff about a new alien race called the Suliban and a far future conflict known as the Temporal Cold War. The show was retooled at the end of both the second and third season, and both were arguably improvements.
The third season ditched the Suliban as the Enterprise headed into the war-torn region of space known as the Expanse, in the hopes of either stopping the coming war...or winning it. The fourth season went with less long-form storytelling in favor of shorter, more contained arcs, which again produced a bunch of standout episodes. Although do yourself a favor - unless you absolutely love Enterprise, skip the series finale. Actually, if you absolutely love Enterprise, that's even more reason not to watch it.
Doctor Who
We're only going to talk about the new series, because a guide to getting into the classic series is an article in and of itself. (And here it is! Although I will say that "Robots of Death" is pretty much the perfect introduction to classic Who.) The best way to approach the new Doctor Who largely depends on what you want to get out of it. If you just want to get up to speed for the upcoming series, then I'd just watch the fifth season, plus "Silence in the Library"/"The Forest of the Dead" and maybe "Blink". That'll get you pretty much up to speed on the Steven Moffat & Matt Smith era.
If you're looking for a more general introduction, then I'd suggest starting with either the first or fourth season. The show definitely improves as it goes along, but the initial season, starring Christopher Eccleston, season has its own unique energy that's still a lot of fun to watch, and it's a good place to start (although the second season hasn't aged very well). The fourth season presents a great mix of stories without any real duds...well, until you get to the final two episodes. Those should be approached with extreme caution.
Finally, if all you want to do is sample the best (and biggest) of the new series to see if you like it, then here's the quick list: "Rose", "Dalek", anything by Steven Moffat and Paul Cornell, "The Impossible Planet"/"The Satan Pit", "Midnight", "The Waters of Mars", and, for better or worse, the five season finales.
Torchwood
But what of Doctor Who's anagrammatic spin-off? The first two seasons aren't a complete waste of time, but they're dangerously close, and even the best episodes (probably "Captain Jack Harkness" and "Fragments") are some degree of flawed or derivative. So unless your tolerance for nonsensical plots, general silliness, and lots of sex and angst masquerading as mature storytelling is epically high, I'd skip the first two seasons completely and head straight for the brilliant, brutal Children of Earth. The mini-series might represent the greatest jump up in quality from one season to the next in television history, and it's Russell T. Davies at his nastiest and most pessimistic - which, as he also showed in the Doctor Who episode "Midnight", also happens to be Davies at his absolute best.
Red Dwarf
While we're on the topic of British science fiction, let's talk about what is (pretty much by default) the best live-action science fiction comedy ever, Red Dwarf. I learned this the hard way when I tried to introduce a friend to Red Dwarf by showing him an episode from each of the six seasons: unless you fall instantly in love with the show, the first two seasons are very hit-and-miss. The show picks up considerably with season three, and it more or less keeps up the quality until the end of season six, when the original writing team parted ways and the show started to run out of ideas. So start with season three, save the first two seasons for later, and only head into the post-sixth season material if you really, really want more Red Dwarf.
The Prisoner
The show only ran for seventeen episodes, so how hard can it be to start watching? The difficulty isn't the number of episodes, it's the order in which you should watch them. There are at least four different preferred orders in which you can watch The Prisoner, and the show's already challenging enough without have to figure out which episodes goes where. The fact of the matter is, although I think the so-called Six of One Order is probably the best, it doesn't really matter. Just watch "Arrival" first and "Once Upon a Time" and "Fall Out" last, and you'll be fine. Oh, and you can skip "Do Not Forsake Me Oh My Darling." I'd say the same about "The Girl Who Was Death", but that one is just too stupidly fun to ignore.
The Twilight Zone
Rod Serling's legendary anthology series represents a particular challenge for potential new fans. There are 156 episodes, and nothing connecting any of them apart from Serling's iconic narration. Although the seasons have all been released on DVD - the first two are mostly brilliant, the third and fourth are a mixed bag, and the fifth is more bad than good - an entire season isn't really the best jumping-on point. I'd suggest seeking out some of the old "Best Of" DVDs they put out a few years ago. There are a few particularly brilliant showcases of the Twilight Zone format: "Walking Distance", "Time Enough at Last", "The Monsters are Due on Maple Street", "The Eye of the Beholder", "The Odyssey of Flight 33", and "Nightmare at 20,000 Feet" (starring William Shatner!) are all excellent places to enter The Twilight Zone.
Mystery Science Theater 3000
MST3K presents the same basic problem as The Twilight Zone. There are very few episodes that aren't at least mildly amusing, and the vast majority of episodes are hilarious. So where do you start? There's no point in going in any particular order - the show has barely any continuity, and it's all the better for it - so it's just a question of finding the right introductory movie. Some of the show's most famous episodes, like "Manos: The Hands of Fate" and the Coleman Francis magnum opus "Red Zone Cuba", aren't the best places to start because the movies being riffed on are just too horrendously boring. It's better to start with movies that, while equally awful, are a bit more exciting, like "Santa Claus Conquers the Martians", "Space Mutiny", "Mitchell", "Time Chasers", or "Eegah", and then move on to the exquisite tedium that is "Manos: The Hands of Fate."
The X-Files
The X-Files is a good example of a show that, if you're going to start watching it now, it's probably wise to not get too invested in it, because it's all going to end in frustration. (Lost is another obvious example.) The show gets off to a good start in its first season, and it keeps up a consistently high quality for roughly its first six seasons, including the first movie. But the show starts running out of steam in the seventh season, and by the time Mulder has left the show in the eighth and ninth season the show is a pale shadow of its former self. Worst of all, the show's central mystery has never really been fully resolved, and it most likely never will. So definitely enjoy the first six seasons of The X-Files as nineties science fiction - hell, nineties television in general - at its finest. Just be prepared to have more questions than answers when it's all over.
Buffy the Vampire Slayer
This one is a bit tough, because there's no obvious consensus as to which seasons were the best, and there's even less consensus as to which season is the worst. Still, it's probably safe to say that season 1 can be left for later, and the second season is a good place to start. The show had worked through a lot of its first season growing pains, and the second season sets up a lot of the characters and arcs that would endure for the rest of the show's run.
If you want to skip ahead to the even stronger third season, I don't have a problem with that. (Particularly because the bad guy is Mayor Wilkins! How cool is that... for me!?) As for when to stop watching... well, some people hate the later seasons, which had less direct involvement from Joss Whedon, and some think they're the best of the bunch. So this is probably one of those rare times to just bust out the pragmatism and keep watching until you no longer enjoy it.
Angel
Do yourself a favor - skip the first two seasons of Angel. A very worthwhile show eventually emerged, but it took a while for that to happen, and you're not missing anything if you just skip right ahead to the third season. Seriously, what is it about science fiction shows getting really good in their third seasons? If this is actually a general rule of science fiction, I'm a little scared to imagine how good Firefly would have gotten if it had survived another couple of years. I think we can safely assume it would have won multiple Nobel Prizes for Literature... and Chemistry, just for the hell of it.
Dollhouse
For Joss Whedon's shorter-lived shows, the temptation is to say you should just watch them all. For Firefly, that's pretty much the case (although "Shindig" and "Safe" aren't that great), but Dollhouse definitely has some eminently skippable episodes. The first five episodes are all fairly inessential, the result of - this will come as a shock - meddling on the part of Fox executives, who wanted the show to be more episodic and less serialized. There's an argument that it's worth watching the first episode "Ghost", which helps introduce this strange new world, but the sixth episode "Man on the Street" rehashes most of the essential points anyway. After that, all the rest of the episodes are more or less essential. (It's also worth watching the unaired pilot, which is included as a DVD extra and covers a lot of the same ground as the first half-dozen episodes.)
Babylon 5
Series creator J. Michael Straczynski always intended the show to be one big story told over five seasons - unfortunately, it didn't quite work out that way. When the creative team thought the show would be canceled at the end of the fourth season, they condensed the final two seasons worth of story into one... and then they got a fifth season anyway, forcing them to come up with new stories from scratch.
So, although all of the first four seasons are essential to the show's overall arc, it's only in the second season that the ongoing story picks up and the show really starts cooking. (In fact, there's an argument to be made that you'll get more out of the first season if you come back to it after seeing the later seasons, the better to appreciate the more subtle groundwork Straczynski and company put in.) The fifth season has its critics and isn't quite up to the standard of what came before, but it's also worth checking out.
Highlander: The Series
Although the original movie is more stupidly enjoyable than legitimately good, the TV series it spawned enjoys a relatively solid critical reputation. Like a lot of shows on this list, its first season is a bit shaky, but the second season is definitely well worth watching, and the next few seasons are also a lot of fun. Unfortunately, the show goes over a cliff in its sixth and final season, so that one can be safely left alone.
Battlestar Galactica
When we're talking about shows with an overarching mystery and complex mythology, it's difficult to say if it's better to just start at the beginning or jump on when the show actually got good. Thankfully, the 21st century BSG removes that conundrum completely, because the first episode of the series proper, "33", is quite possibly the show's best episode. Indeed, the first three seasons are all consistently very strong, and I actually don't think there's much of a dip in the fourth season either. (That point is...debated.) So, unless you really don't think you can commit three hours to something you've seen before, just start with the mini-series and go from there. Although do yourself a favor and skip "Black Market" and "The Woman King" when you get to them. Anything worth knowing from those will be in the next episodes' recaps.
Lost
It's hard to imagine who would want to start watching this show right now, particularly after all the rancor over the series finale. Still, if you are looking to get into Lost, the show is so heavily serialized that it really only makes sense to start with the first season. That said, the show had a tendency to spin its wheels and go nowhere slowly, particularly in the second season. If a season becomes too much of a drag, you might want to skip ahead to the next season and restart - just be prepared for a lot of googling to figure out what the hell's going on. (Another trick is to track down those special recap episodes Lost would air before some of its seasons.)
The Stargate Franchise
Let's finish off with a look at the three Stargate shows. Of these, the original SG-1 is the most difficult to get into, considering it ran a colossal ten seasons. The first season is a bit bumpy, like a lot of the other shows on this list, and it starts to show its age in the ninth and tenth seasons. We'd recommend the second through eighth seasons, with seasons three and four as particularly strong. As for Atlantis, our resident Stargate expert Meredith Woerner recommends anything spotlighting Rodney McKay (but then...she would). The show was fairly consistent in quality throughout its five-season run, so you can just start at the beginning. Finally, Stargate Universe is still just starting out, so we can recommend particular episodes to get you hooked: "Lost" and "Time" are two of the show's strongest episodes, and should help you decide, one way or the other, if Universe is a show for you.
Fri, 03 Sep 2010 15:42:00 PDT
Did Anyone Else Realize Mighty Morphin Power Rangers Is Entering Its EIGHTEENTH Season? [Mighty Bad]
As if Power Rangers staying on the air for 17 seasons wasn't bad enough, Nickelodeon is now bringing the show back for an 18th season in 2011. Note: children's TV executives are reviving Power Rangers, while Reading Rainbow remains canceled.
Fri, 03 Sep 2010 15:00:00 PDT
The Stainless Steel Rat still shines bright [Book Review]
It's been ten years since the last Stainless Steel Rat book, and now Harry Harrison is back with another tale of "Slippery" Jim diGriz. John T. Ottinger ventures into Harrison's dangerous world, and lives to tell the tale. Spoilers below...
Having never read any of the Stainless Steel Rat stories by Harry Harrison, I was pleased when Tor decided to send me a copy of the newest tale of space adventurer Jim diGriz. Ten years in the making, The Stainless Steel Rat Returns carries a lot of "baggage" in that readers have certain expectations of this long running series, and new readers may have come to expect a certain type of sophistication from SF which is not readily apparent in this story. But, if a reader approaches the tale knowing that it is both homage, pastiche, and member of classic SF from the 50s and 60s, the reader can really come to enjoy the tale immensely.
For myself, I sat down to read the book at 7pm on a Tuesday, and finished it at 11pm that same night. Partly this is because I am a fast reader, but the truth is, Harrison's novel is designed to be read quickly. The organization of the novel, though not delineated this way, can be broken up into four short stories with a meta-narrative tying them all together. Each of the four stories is set on a different planet, in which diGriz and crew get into various scrapes. Overlying all of this is the problem of diGriz's country bumpkin family, which suddenly appears on his doorstep (the first scene of the novel) expecting diGriz to use his accumulated wealth from working for the Special Corps of the interplanetary government (and his life of crime) to help them resettle on a new planet, along with their large, dangerous, and ill-smelling porcuswine herd.
diGriz's efforts to resettle his extended family provide humor and impetus for the Stainless Steel Rat to leave his life of luxury, along with his wife Angelina, and set off for the stars in a sabotaged rust bucket of a spaceship. diGriz careens from one problem to the next, solving them all with wit and audacity and a large dose of alcohol. It's wonderfully entertaining. Short, clipped sentences, a focus on dialogue to the near exclusion of all else, and writing from the first person perspective of DiGriz, allows Harrison to revive the old sense of wonder and entrancement that populated the early days of SF. Like Poul Anderson or Andre Norton, these stories have a hefty focus on interplanetary exploration, on creating new worlds, and populating them with various manifestations of humanity for the purpose of wonder. Harrison also adds a nice dollop of satire to the mix to give the story its own flavor.
Readers who do not like classical SF, with its patina of hope and adventure, are not likely to like this tale. The plotline is simple in construction, wastes no time on character building, nor has any sort of operatic quality to it. Character building is kept at a minimum. Harrison prefers instead to relate a tale of action, usually precipitated by some impossible problem that only the genius of diGriz can solve. This novel reads like a short story from the glory days of pulp magazines, and unless a reader enjoys that style of narrative, then they are unlikely to like anything about this tale.
It is a tale of problems, their solutions, and the subsequent problem raised by that solution. The story cycles like this over and over, which some readers may find repetitious, even annoying. I did at first, never having read Harrison's work before, and it took a little while to see what Harrison was doing in terms of writing style, but once I did, I was engrossed. If all Stainless Steel Rat stories are like this one, Harrison may have just found a new convert.
If readers enjoy Poul Anderson's Nicholas Van Rijn or David Falkayn tales, Asimov's Galactic Empire trilogy, Andre Norton's The Sioux Spaceman, or the more recent The Sheriff of Yrnameer by Michael Rubens, then The Stainless Steel Rat Returns is going to be right up their alley. This is an adventure tale, pure and simple, not concerned with illuminating social ills (though it does a little) or hard science (though it has a little here too), but rather just relating the rollercoaster ride of a thrilling voyage, fraught with peril and improbable solutions. Highly recommended for fans of classic SF from the so called "Golden Age", those looking for adventurous SF, or those that want more positive outlook in an era where darkly introspective SF seems to be the norm.
Time for some concept art! Not for upcoming games, though. Not for old games, either. These are for old systems.
These are all concept sketches for Atari systems! You never played them, of course, but now you can imagine that if you ever lived through a parallel 1983 that was a little more stylish than the actual 1983, you may have gamed on systems like these.
Some look horribly dated, as you'd expect, but other look like they came from the pen of Syd Mead himself. Or, if you're too young to know Syd Mead, they look like something you'd see lying around in Mass Effect.
Sandworms and Fremen caves: concept art for the Dune movie that never was [Concept Art]
2000 A.D.'s Jock created some amazing concept art for Peter Berg's Dune movie before Berg left the project. Now he's posted some of it on his site, giving us a tantalizing glimpse of an Arrakis that never reach our screens.
Berg left Dune a while back, and new director Pierre Morel is is reportedly planning on taking the film in a different direction. So this concept art is unlikely to resemble the finished product, but it's still gorgeous to look at. There's more over at the link. [Jock via ComingSoon]
Fri, 03 Sep 2010 13:30:00 PDT
Harper Collins creates global science fiction imprint, Harper Voyager [Publishing]
Today at WorldCon, Harper Collins announced it's rebranding its Eos imprint as Harper Voyager, bringing it in line with the Voyager imprints in Australia/New Zealand and the U.K. According to the press release:
"We are already globally publishing some of the biggest names in science fiction, fantasy, urban fantasy, and horror, including Raymond E. Feist, Robin Hobb, Kim Harrison, and Sara Douglass," said Brian Murray, President and Chief Executive Officer of HarperCollins Worldwide. "Uniting our sister companies in the United States, United Kingdom, and Australia/New Zealand allows readers globally unparalleled access to books and authors. This move enables us to offer authors a strong global publishing platform when signing with HarperCollins – whether the acquiring editor is in New York, Sydney, or London."
The Voyager/Harper Voyager editorial leaders are: Executive Editor Diana Gill in the U.S., Editorial Director Emma Coode in the UK (working with Publishing Director Jane Johnson), and Associate Publisher Stephanie Smith in Australia.
Each country has a vibrant, robust list of science fiction and fantasy icons; merging the lists under one imprint will bring readers around the world access to the masters of these fiction genres.
Two authors, Karen Azinger and David Wellington (writing as David Chandler), have recently been signed and are expected to publish with Harper Voyager and Voyager for a worldwide debut.
The Eos imprint will officially change to Harper Voyager starting with the January 2011 hardcover, trade, mass market, e-book, and audio publications.
Fri, 03 Sep 2010 13:00:00 PDT
In Burroughs' final Barsoom series, we see urban Mars, synthetic flesh, and Nazis of Jupiter [Book Review]
In the last installment of our Reading Barsoom series, find out what happens when Edgar Rice Burroughs tried to write an "urban" novel of Mars, why "synthetic men" suck, and how Nazi aliens built Salt Lake City on Jupiter.
One thing missing from the Mars series is ordinary Martian cities. Burroughs spends so much time shuttling his heroes through an endless succession of lost cities, forgotten lands, and exotic locales that normal Martian cities are little more than starting points for extravagant adventures. Even the nomadic camps of the green Martians are described in greater detail than the cities where John Carter and his red Martian cohorts spend most of their time. It's as though Burroughs was writing wild adventure stories aimed at an audience of Martians.
Swords of Mars is the closest Burroughs came to an "urban" Mars novel. John Carter returns to center stage to tell "a story of love and loyalty, of hate and crime, a story of dripping swords, of strange places and strange people upon a stranger world." It seems the Assassins Guild of Zodanga (the same Zodanga razed in Princess) is getting out of hand. John Carter personally goes undercover to infiltrate the guild. He signs on with a mad inventor as a freelance assassin and spends fully half the book skulking on the streets of Zodanga and skirmishing with the guild in some of the best sequences since the original trilogy.
But Burroughs couldn't resist the urge to go exotic. Guild leader Ur Jan counters Carter's campaign by kidnapping Dejah Thoris and spiriting her away to Phobos (Mars's nearer moon) using a newly-invented spaceship. Luckily, Carter's boss has invented his own spaceship and is in hot orbital pursuit. Life on Phobos turns out to be not that much different than Mars proper, filled with swords, dungeons, and escapes. The only notable twist is that Ur Jan is so impressed with John Carter he pledges fealty to him. So much for those out-of-control assassins!
While Swords is only half bad, Synthetic Men of Mars pretty much sucks cover to cover. The last full-fledged novel of the series, it's among Burroughs' worst work. Not that the set-up lacks potential; brain-swapping surgeon Ras Thavas from Mastermind returns, having created full-fledged synthetic life. The titular synthetic men force Ras Thavas into large scale mass production, with the goal of conquering all Mars by sheer weight of numbers. John Carter is able to spirit Ras Thavas away, but a production vat goes viral, producing an ever-expanding mass of living tissue that threatens to engulf the entire planet!
Unfortunately, the synthetic men are "a stupid, egotistical lot of morons," the blob is no match for a few well-placed incendiary bombs, and the usual forgotten cities are totally forgettable. One potentially great sequence, when John Carter escapes across the Great Toonolian Marsh, battling giant reptiles and insects with 30-foot wingspans, takes place entirely off-stage!
Thankfully, the series does end on a high note. By the time Burroughs wrote Llana of Gathol in 1940, the heyday of novels serialized in pulp magazines was rapidly passing. Llana was originally published in Amazing Stories as a series of four stand-alone novelettes. In turn, John Carter and his grand daughter Llana battle/escape from: 1) another lost city inhabited by remnants of the original Martians; 2) a hitherto unknown outpost of the First Born from Gods; 3) an army of yellow Martians out to conquer all Mars; and, 4) another lost city whose inhabitants have discovered the secret of invisibility. The format suited Burroughs' episodic plotting, and John Carter is in fine form throughout, hacking and slashing his way through some of the best sword fights in the series. Whatever Llana lacks in freshness and imagination it makes up for with sheer action.
John Carter of Mars, the 11th and final volume of the series, is an afterthought. Published posthumously during the Burroughs revival of the early 1960s, it collects two novellas, "John Carter and the Giant of Mars" and "Skeleton Men of Jupiter," tangentially associated with the series. "Giant" was apparently written by Burroughs' son for Whitman's Big Little Book series and allegedly hastily revised by his father for a quick magazine sale. The setting wildly is wildly at odds with the Mars so carefully described by the elder Burroughs: the apes are too short, the rats don't have enough legs, and suddenly everyone's toting ray-guns. John Carter's encounter with a 130-foot tall giant is totally stupid. Those who find Burroughs juvenile should read this for a taste of the real thing. Burroughs fans universally assign "Giant" to the apocrypha.
"Skeleton Men of Jupiter," on the other hand, is Burroughs near the top of his game. Apparently the opening novelette in an unfinished Llana-style quartet, you can almost feel Burroughs's excitement at having a whole new world to play with.
The titular "Skeleton Men" are the Morgors, Jupiter's translucent answer to the Nazis. They don't do science, they don't do art, they don't do architecture (Burroughs describes their capitol city "as depressing as Salt Lake City…on an overcast February day"); all they do is conquer stuff. Having overrun all Jupiter save for a few remote corners, they've turned their eyes to Mars.
They kidnap John Carter and Dejah Thoris in a scheme to extract information about the Martian defenses (apparently their military intelligence is as advanced as their art). John Carter discovers that he's just as adept as escaping on Jupiter, and they ultimately find refuge in one of the non-Morgor nooks of Jupiter. While the plot may have been routine, the freshness of the setting and the promise of inter-planetary war made this a promising opening to a novel that was never to be.
Burroughs would never write the great Mars/Jupiter smackdown. By the time "Skeleton Men" was published in 1943, he was bumming around the South Pacific as a war correspondent for the Honolulu Advertiser. After the war, a case of Parkinson's and a series of heart attacks hobbled him; he never wrote another story. But you can be sure that if he had, John Carter would have found himself Warlord of all Jupiter.
John Marr is the editor and janitor of the zine Murder Can Be Fun. He blogs at the Murder Can Be Fun Library.
Top image by (of course) Frank Frazetta.
Fri, 03 Sep 2010 12:30:00 PDT
Syfy readies a 4-hour Peter Pan origins tale, Neverland [Neverland]
Syfy is bringing you the backstory to Peter Pan in a four-hour miniseries called Neverland. We're not so sure how to feel about this one. We like who's involved, but the last few Syfy miniseries have been Riverworld-level bad.
The series is directed and written by Nick Willing, who is known for his work on Tin Man and Alice, two Syfy original features we really enjoyed. The project is slated for release in 2011, and it's nabbed Notting Hill's Rhys Ifans. So it would seem that it's set up to do well, it would seem. Here's the synopsis:
Raised on the streets of turn-of-the century London, orphaned Peter (Rowe) and his pals survive by their fearless wits as cunning young pickpockets. Now, they've been rounded up by their mentor Jimmy Hook (Ifans) to snatch a priceless—some believe, magical—treasure which transports them to another world. Neverland is a realm of white jungles and legendary mysteries of eternal youth, where unknown friends and enemies snatched from time welcome the new travelers with both excitement and trepidation. These groups include a band of 18th century pirates led by the power-mad Elizabeth Bonny (Friel), and the Native American Kaw tribe led by a Holy Man (Trujillo), which has protected the secret of the tree spirits from Bonny and her gang for ages—and that has meant war. But as the fight to save this strange and beautiful world becomes vital, Hook, Peter, and the ragamuffin lost boys consider that growing old somewhere in time could be less important than growing up—right here in their new home called Neverland.
This Is How the Star Trek Warp Jump Evolved [Image Cache]
From Star Trek: The Motion Picture to Star Trek 2009; from the first Enterprise and Birds of Prey to the NCC-1701-E and back to the Enterprise: This video shows all the warp jump effect types in all the movies. Engage!
I have to admit that the rainbow effect has a retro charm that is still surprisingly fresh today. [Gizmodo version built from the YouTube original]
Fri, 03 Sep 2010 11:30:00 PDT
New evidence that we could build water farms in space [Space Colonization]
Several years ago, astronomers discovered that a distant sun was surrounded by a halo of water vapor. Now they know how it was created. If we can make water in space, we've surmounted one barrier to space colonization.
According to CNN:
The water vapor sits in a dusty cloud surrounding IRC+10216. Scientists deduced that ultraviolet light from surrounding stars had penetrated that dusty cloud, breaking up molecules in it like carbon monoxide and silicon monoxide, which in turn released oxygen atoms.
Those oxygen atoms attached themselves to hydrogen molecules, forming water.
"The ultraviolet light didn't create it — it helped it to be formed," [astronomer Goran] Pilbratt told CNN.
Ultraviolet light is the only way water could have been produced in such conditions, he said.
The star in the middle of this vapor is a so-called "carbon star," a dim red giant, and now scientists are scanning the skies for similar stars in the hope that they may be producing water too.
Do water-consuming interstellar civilizations use these stars as water farms? Can they be created artificially by beaming UV into nebulae and other regions of stellar dust? The whole thing sounds like the setup to a great space opera about the galactic water wars.
Futurama offers up the most disgusting equality parable ever as its 100th episode [Futurama Recap]
Futurama's season finale was a nonstop cavalcade of horrific freaks, sewage, and wall-to-wall vomiting, all in the name of equal rights for subterranean mutants. Hilarious, sweet, inventive, and celebratory, this episode ended Futurama's new season on a high note.
Futurama has never shied away from gross-out material when it comes to exploring New New York's mutant underbelly, and "The Mutants are Revolting" pushed that to new extremes. The entire episode revolved around what happens to the surface-dwellers' sewage, which was thankfully kept a mildly disgusting green instead of something too horribly realistic. The mutant designs were even crazier this time around, and Fry's mutated form is maybe the most horrific thing the show's ever given us, at least in part because that's our Fry under all that hideousness.
So this would have been a thoroughly unpleasant episode if it wasn't so damn brilliant. Considering just how monumentally unlikely it is that Futurama ever reached its hundredth episode, you can hardly blame the show for so openly celebrating the milestone, and it lends the episode a little extra energy and zip. The in-universe reason for the celebrating - Planet Express's hundredth delivery - takes us to the asteroid home of the fabulously wealthy Mrs. Astor. Bender's running start around the asteroid is the sort of physics-infused craziness you can only get on Futurama (well, that and certain levels of Super Mario Galaxy).
The encounter with Mrs. Astor takes Fry, Leela, and the Professor to the annual banquet in support of mutant education, which sounds great until it becomes clear just how condescending and bigoted Mrs. Astor's motivations really are. Fry accidentally reveals Leela is a mutant, which leads to her exile in the sewers. When the rest of Planet Express (except Bender, who's too busy planning the big party to care) heads to Mayor Poopenmeyer's office to protest, they end up in the sewer as well, although their sentence is only for two weeks.
Fry's guilt leads him to do what Leela calls the stupidest, sweetest thing he's ever done - jump into the mutating sewer lake. He emerges as a horrifically deformed mutant, and he and Leela take up the cause of mutant rights with a little help from the now mutated members of Devo. The entire Planet Express team comes together on this one, with even Bender pitching in to help force New New York to notice the plight of its sewer-dwelling citizens.
In general, I've really enjoyed this season of Futurama, and the back half in particular has been chock full of great episodes. "The Mutants are Revolting" is another excellent addition, with Futurama's customary mix of jokes, emotions, and wild ideas. Every major character got his or her own little moment, including Hermes's self-defeating indignation, Amy's gemerald lust, the Professor's safe-opening techniques, and Zoidberg's remarkable (and cheap!) umbrella.
But I've got to talk about the craziest part of the episode: the Land Titanic, the gigantic land boat that sank at Fifth Avenue and 32nd Street on April 10, 2912. The show has already done a Titanic riff, but this one was about a million times more bizarre. One of the things I've loved about this new season of Futurama is its willingness to pursue ideas that feel utterly unprecedented in science fiction. A gigantic bus slowly crawling down Fifth Avenue definitely fits that bill. I can safely say I've never seen anything like the Land Titanic.
Bender's 100th delivery party was a great moment for longtime fans, cramming dozens (maybe hundreds) of supporting and one-time characters into Bender's immense party. Sure, it's a little self-indulgent, but again, I'd say Futurama has earned it, particularly when it's a quick moment of fun in such a strong episode. And, like pretty much any occasion when Bender dresses up, his basic cuteness shone right through. Seriously, Bender's so damn cute.
In the final analysis, I'd say this season has produced six out and out classics ("Rebirth", "Proposition Infinity", "The Late Philip J. Fry", "A Clockwork Origin", "The Prisoner of Benda", and "The Mutants are Revolting"), four strong efforts ("In-A-Gadda-Da-Leela", "The Duh-Vinci Code", "Lethal Inspection", and "Lrrreconcilable Ndndifferences"), and two missteps ("Attack of the Killer App" and "That Darn Katz!"). That's a pretty remarkable record for any show, let alone one producing its first broadcast season in seven years. Futurama is most definitely back as good as ever. And you know the best part? There's still at least fourteen episodes left to go.
Fri, 03 Sep 2010 10:00:00 PDT
First images of Arkham City's villains? [Arkham City]
Possible new images from video game Batman: Arkham City have us ultra excited for the Arkham Asylum follow-up game. Check out all the villains Batman will have to face.
A quick warning: We're not 100% sure these are the REAL deal. What we are 100% sure of is that they look awesome, so we were going to show you guys regardless. That being said they were pulled from a Flickr account, NeoGAF.
Harley Quinn looks so "street urchin" dirty. We love it!
Jane Espenson says Torchwood will allow her to "push the boundaries of what can be done on television." [Jane Espenson]
Writer extraordinaire Jane Espenson is writing three out of 10 episodes in Torchwood's upcoming fourth season, she told Blastr. In an unusual move for U.S. television, the whole season will be written before the show starts filming, and Russell T. Davies is keeping it tightly plotted. And she adds that she'll be going to new and exciting places with the show:
I love blending tones-mixing the broadly comedic moment in with the darkly dramatic one can heighten both. Torchwood is a show that welcomes that kind of moment. I'm also really eager to play with all the culture-clash material that comes naturally out of the show's pedigree. And I'm especially eager to write material that pushes the boundaries of what can ordinarily be done on television.
Terry Pratchett talks about putting darkness and death into fantasy [Books]
Novelist Terry Pratchett has lost both of his parents in the past two years, and he's also dealing with the degeneration of his mental faculties. In a wistful interview with the Guardian, he talks about how that's affected his fantasy.
The headline of the Guardian article contains a quote from Pratchett: "I'm open to joy. But I'm also more cynical." And the writer of the Discworld novels is definitely philosophical and seems brilliantly aware of the beauty in real life. But he also has confronted tremendous sadness in recent years, and the final Tiffany Aching novel, coming out soon, is, as the Guardian says, "full of worldly darkness – death, domestic abuse, old women's corpses being eaten by their pets, depression."
Tiffany's superpowers include second sight, third sight, and occasionally fourth and fifth, and they're basically a kind of self-awareness and awareness of what's really going on. At one point in the new novel, she gets her familiars, the Nac Mac Feegles, to "whizz around a depressed woman's very messy kitchen and clean it up – succeeding only in terrifying her." Says the Guardian:
Pratchett knows there are strict rules about making things so dark when you are writing for children – "a child's instinctive grasp of narrativium [sic] is that this has got to end well" – but he is also very clear that, while his witch can take away physical pain (she draws it out into a ball, then dumps it), she cannot, and will not, take loss, sadness, or grief.
Pratchett also talks about his desire to decide when he dies, and his frustration with current British law, and what it's like to deal with real-life grief and still feel his inner novelist turning everything into grist for the mill. It's all fascinating stuff, and well worth reading in full. [Guardian]
Fri, 03 Sep 2010 08:30:00 PDT
Websites for scifi's most famous evil corporations, based on real-life corporate websites [Design]
The best science fiction movies are only as good as the evil corporations they feature. But what sort of websites would Weyland-Yutani or OCP have? Artist Mikko Vartio imagines their websites, with a noticeable resemblance to some real-life corporate sites.
I like evil movie corporations, and for a long time I've wanted to do a case-study of their corporate imagery. The more I looked into it, the more it seemed as though these suckers make a fine match with some real-world evil corporations. I took my Adobe Fireworks, locked myself into bunker and reverse-engineered from scratch these six detailed lookalike-mashups of evil corporations.
OCP is the nasty corporation from Robocop. My vision of OCP's site has some noticeable resemblance to Apple's, but that is purely a coincidence.
Rekall meets RyanAir.
Paul Verhoeven directed Robocop, but he also directed another masterpiece, called Total Recall. The evil company Rekall specializes in screwing up your brain with false memories and pseudo tourism — stuff like travelling to Mars. Here's a Rekall website modeled on travel company RyanAir's.
Weyland-Yutani meets Toyota.
Weyland-Yutani should ring a bell, from the Alien movies. Here's a Weyland-Yutani site in the style of Toyota's.
Skynet meets Bing.
Skynet has been sending robots from the future, since The Terminator. Everybody thinks that Google is the new real-life Skynet, but I'd argue the stealthy search engine Bing from Microsoft is the real evil A.I. (Plus doing a Skynet logo with Google-colors would be way too easy).
Cyberdyne meets Microsoft.
When there is Skynet, there is also Cyberdyne. So here's a Cyberdyne site in the style of Microsoft's home page.
Tyrell meets RealDoll.
Blade Runner is a classic movie, where Han Solo shoots robots. While the evil corporation Tyrell produces too-realistic Replicants, our real-world equivalent RealDoll (website is NSFW) does the same with evil sexdolls.
Fri, 03 Sep 2010 08:00:00 PDT
Guess who's coming back for next season's True Blood! [Vampires And Sex]
With the True Blood season finale less than two weeks away, we're all wondering: Who is going to die in the epic vampire battle that everything's been leading up to? You're going to be very surprised. Big-time spoilers ahead...
According to E! News a bunch of the newer characters are going to survive the finale, and they will be back next year. But the most important character returning is Denis O'Hare, who plays the Vampire King of Mississippi. We assume he's just stopping by next year purely as a victory lap, for all but saving the third season from boredom.
But according to E!, "don't expect to see Russell too early in the year. We have it on good authority (Alan Ball's) that initially witches will reign supreme." Ugh. Looks like we're all going to have to embrace the magic side of True Blood, try and try as we might to avoid it. Other characters returning include the magical Jesus, Lafayette's sexy new lover, shape shifting puppy brother to barkeep Sam, Tommy Mickens, and finally the new witch at Merlotte's, Holly Cleary. Played by Jessie from Toy Story 2.
Fri, 03 Sep 2010 07:30:00 PDT
Why do light bulbs burn out just as they’re turned on? [Madscience]
Light bulbs are living on borrowed time, but why do their timers tend to expire just as you turn on a light, instead of flickering out randomly?
Everyone has had the experience of coming home from a long day, turning on the lights, and having the light bulb sputter at them as it flickers out. Fewer people have seem them randomly fizz out in the middle of the evening, after they've been on for a while.
Light bulbs give off light by pumping electric current through a thin tungsten filament. The filament heats and gives off light. Over time, the filament oxidizes and becomes more and more brittle, until it breaks apart and the bulb goes out. Since the oxidation occurs gradually and builds up, the light bulb should give out randomly, at any time. As anyone who lives in a house with electricity knows, this is not the case.
Tungsten gains resistance as it heats. Resistance is the amount of ‘push back' a material has against an electric current. The only thing that heats tungsten in a light bulb is electric current flowing through it. Imagine if a rubber hose gained strength only after water flowed through it. After some use, it would be able to handle a heavy stream of water. At first, though, it would bulge and strain like a water balloon before regaining its shape. Unless the rubber is in good condition, it will snap. In the same way, a tungsten filament is overloaded with current in the first few seconds after being turned on. The heat causes it to expand, and the filament experiences thermal stress, the strain of the material trying to expand due to sudden changes in temperature. Unless it is in good condition, it snaps.
What's more, over time, the filament becomes uneven. At certain points along the filament, the tungsten evaporates, thinning the filament more and more. At other points, the coils of the filament get pushed close together. When the high level of current surges through a stretch of wire even thinner than the rest of the filament, the heat builds up even faster than the rest of the filament. When it heats a section of coils pressed close together, the heat between them can't dissipate as quickly as it does in the rest of the bulb. The filament breaks or burns or simply melts.
It turns out that the average light bulb is not designed to be turned on. It's meant to already be on. The initial stress on the tungsten filament is far higher than the light bulb can handle. Those who wish to prolong the lives of their bulbs for ecological or sentimental reasons can pre-warm them before turning them on to a cozy 2,000 degrees before switching them on.
First clip from Let Me In will silence the haters [Vampires]
We've gotten excited about Matt Reeves' vampire remake of the acclaimed Swedish film Let The Right One In, after we saw the excellent footage screened at Comic Con. Now it's your turn. Watch the first clip from the film.
First off, hooray for Blue Oyster Cult. Second, this scene is exactly what we've been talking about. People have been absolutely buzzing about Ricard Jenkins' performance. When we interviewed Reeves, this particular scene was actually one of the first things he wanted to talk about:
This is an attempt at more POV film making and seeing things the way Owen might see them. We approached the pool scene from his point of view. I hope people see that, actually there's one scene in particular where we really identify with Richard's character [Richard Jenkins, who plays "The Father"]. To me it was inspired by Dial M for Murder, the sequence where they're going to kill Grace Kelly, but it all goes wrong. By the end you find yourself actually identifying with the killer. You feel bad for him by the end, that's kind of the visual approach we tried to take with this film. Very point of view driven.
That being said, a lot does depend on the young actors Chloe Moretz and Kodi Smit-McPhee. And we'll be waiting to see more from these two in the future. Until then, this brand new poster and clip will have to tide us over. The movie will be released in theaters October 1st.
A ring of fire forms around a new supernova [Space Porn]
A 6-trillion-mile-wide ring of gas encircles a supernova in the Large Magellanic Cloud, Supernova 1987A, and the explosions from the supernova are lighting it up like a candle, creating what will become a glowing ring.
According to the Hubble Space Telescope's news site:
An international team of astronomers using the Hubble Space Telescope reports a significant brightening of the emissions from Supernova 1987A. The results, which appear in this week's Science magazine, are consistent with theoretical predictions about how supernovae interact with their immediate galactic environment.
The team observed the supernova remnant in optical, ultraviolet, and near-infrared light. They studied the interaction between the ejecta from the stellar explosion and a glowing 6-trillion-mile-diameter ring of gas encircling the supernova remnant. The gas ring was probably shed some 20,000 years before the supernova exploded. Shock waves resulting from the impact of the ejecta onto the ring have brightened 30 to 40 pearl-like "hot spots" in the ring. These blobs likely will grow and merge together in the coming years to form a continuous, glowing circle.
"We are seeing the effect a supernova can have in the surrounding galaxy, including how the energy deposited by these stellar explosions changes the dynamics and chemistry of the environment," said University of Colorado at Boulder Research Associate Kevin France of the Center for Astrophysics and Space Astronomy. "We can use these new data to understand how supernova processes regulate the evolution of galaxies."
Download a bigger version of the image at the link. [Hubble]
Fri, 03 Sep 2010 06:00:00 PDT
Captain America will be subtle with the Marvel references, plus Breaking Dawn won't tone down the book's craziness [Morning Spoilers]
Check out the first script review of Alfonso Cuarón's Gravity! The Breaking Dawn screenwriter says they're not looking to tone down the sex scenes and vampire childbirth. Get a first look at Rihanna on the set of Battleship! Spoilers ahoy!
Captain America:
Director Joe Johnston explained most of the links to other Marvel movies will be minor mentions and Easter eggs that only devoted fans will notice, which suggests it'll be more like Iron Man than the sometimes overstuffed Iron Man 2 in this respect:
There are links between all the Marvel films, mostly ones that only the fans will pick up on. We have several subtle references to certain elements in Thor, but since Captain America is a period picture taking place in the 40's, there are fewer opportunities for contemporary links to the rest of the Marvel universe. We can, however, create events in our story that will be paid off in Avengers and other Marvel pictures.
A length script review is out for Alfonso Cuarón's science fiction film. Keep in mind this is for a November 2009 draft of the script, so a lot may have changed, but a lot of the basics are probably still in place. In short, the movie is about Ryan Stone (the Angelina Jolie/Scarlett Johansson/Blake Lively part) and Matt Kowalski (the Robert Downey, Jr. part), two astronauts who are out in space making repairs to the shuttle when a Russian explosion destroys the craft, killing their fellow astronauts inside. Stone and Kowalski have to get to the International Space Station while they still have air, but Kowalski quickly realizes he has to sacrifice himself to give Stone a chance at survival.
The script reviewer is fairly sure the movie unfolds in real time, and in fact the entire movie might be one long continuous shot, which would pretty much be the most daunting technical challenge ever. (So exactly the sort of thing Cuarón would want to do.) The reviewer says the draft has its problems, but there's definitely a great movie to be made out of this. Check out the link for the full review. [ScriptShadow]
Transformers 3:
Here are a couple set videos from the latest filming in Hammond, Indiana. Unfortunately, an extra was critically injured during filming on Wednesday. It's not clear how this will affect filming. [DJ Bigtyme Beats via TFLAMB]
Twilight - Breaking Dawn:
For all those hoping the final Twilight movie will deliver on all the crazy vampire/human sex and childbirth in the novel, consider this very good news. Screenwriter Melissa Rosenberg addressed both issues, starting with the sex, which she believes will be plenty racy:
"That doesn't mean that one has to see it all, but you do want that [eroticism]. With the birth scene as well, I just don't know that you have to tone it down. If you really look at the books, how much are you really seeing? I think [the movies] might wind up being saucier than the book because you're actually seeing skin-on-skin and the horror of the birth scenes. We're not shying away from it."
In the same article she addressed where the two parts of the movie will be split up. She said the split will be somewhere between Bella's time as a human newlywed and and as a vampire parent, so that the halves of the movie focus on these two parts of her life. [Hollywood Life]
And then there's the question of the birth of Edward and Bella's baby, Renesmee:
We're working on it to be as intense as it is in the book. I don't think it's about the amount of blood you show. It's about the intensity of it. It's on their faces. It's all from Bella's point of view when you're seeing what's going. It should feel visceral. I think it's going to be pretty intense."
Here's the first photos of Rihanna - sorry, sorry, Commodore Rihanna - on the set of Battleship, the adaptation of the Hasbro games in which battleships fight aliens. [Rihanna Daily via FilmDrunk]
Skyline:
Co-director Greg Strause summed up the movie, and what to expect from the next trailer:
"We have a character drama that plays out in this claustrophobic space. Whenever we do leave the space, we have huge shots. The teaser [trailer] is the big, epic, visual side of it. When you see the next trailer, you'll get a sense of the claustrophobic, character side."
The movie doesn't come out for another two and a half months, but talks are reportedly already heating up for a sequel. There's no details yet on what the sequel might involve, but this apparent studio confidence suggests they're pretty confident in the film's success. (Or at least in its ability to recoup its minuscule budget.) [ShockTillYouDrop]
Monsters:
Here's a new poster for the Mexico-set alien infestation movie. [Fangoria]
Devil:
A bunch of new promo pics have been released: [Fangoria]
Fringe:
In this interview with the always swoon-worthy Joshua Jackson, he questions how invested Peter will become in alternate Olivia before he figures out the truth, and then he offers his own fan theory on where he'd like to see the show go. He also addresses the most awkward Comic Con question ever: [Zap2It]
The press release for "Olivia" confirms Amy Madigan will be in it as Olivia's mother Marilyn, along with Andre Reyo as Henry. Here's the short synopsis: [SpoilerTV]
After the extraordinary turn of events that shockingly left an imprisoned Olivia "over there," she fights to find her way home. Meanwhile, Peter and Walter try to move on with their lives unknowingly alongside alternate Olivia.
And here's another batch of promo pics for the new season: [SpoilerTV]
Doctor Who:
Steven Moffat strongly implied there won't be any Daleks in series six, because they haven't come up with a good story for them (since when has that ever stopped Doctor Who?). [Digital Spy]
And now for another great spoiler roundup by super commenter bluehinter. The biggest news is that one of the two-parters - probably the first - will likely be set in Egypt, and it's rumored to be written by an unknown new writer. (If I had to guess, that'll be episodes 5 and 6, because Richard Clark is directing Neil Gaiman's third episode as well as episode 4, so that means the first slot for a two-parter is 5 and 6.) The series is also filming at the 17/18th century house Dyrham Park, and some third-hand information suggests the story is about "the Doctor in a giant dollhouse!" (Who wants to start a return of the Celestial Toymaker rumor?) And Neil Gaiman's script was originally called The House of Nothing, which might suggest the Dyrham Park episode is his... or maybe they're just doing a lot of house-related stuff this season. [Huge thanks to bluehinter for all these tips!]
Stargate Universe:
Episode 15 of season 2 will reportedly be entitled "Seizure." [SpoilerTV]
Here are cast interviews with Julie Benz and Jimmy Bennett: [SpoilerTV]
Additional reporting by Kelly Faircloth and Charlie Jane Anders.
Thu, 02 Sep 2010 17:45:00 PDT
Ten tropes you'll find in science fiction - over and over again [Scifi101]
Science fiction is a genre of limitless possibilities, but that doesn't mean there aren't a few ideas writers keep coming back to as trusty old standbys. Here are ten of science fiction's most common tropes...and how they've evolved.
Obviously, no list like this can ever be considered comprehensive, and we could probably do dozens of sequels to this post. But what we want to examine here are some of the most common building blocks of science fiction stories. For each trope, we explain where it came from, what cemented it as an iconic part of science fiction, and some of the things modern storytellers are doing to keep it and interesting. So, let's take a look...
1. Robots:
The Forerunner: Fritz Lang's Metropolis. Although Czech playwright Karel Čapek gave us the word robots with his 1921 play R.U.R., it was the German auteur's 1927 epic that introduced the world at large to the idea of mechanical men and women who could look just like people, yet have none of their essential humanity. The look of the mad inventor Rotwang's "Machine-Man" has been a basic template for the design of robots ever since.
The Iconic: Isaac Asimov's Robot stories. Asimov always said his stories about robots and the three laws that governed them were his effort to combat what he called the "Frankenstein complex", the irrational fear of what were ultimately supposed to just be helpful machines. As such, he developed three basic safeguards that governed all robot behavior, then spent fifty years trying to knock them down. The fact that he never really succeeded - and the fact that a lot of writers have since "borrowed" his laws for their own robots - tells you all you need to know about the success of his laws.
The Modern Twist(s): Transformers and Blade Runner. I doubt these two beloved works of eighties science fiction get compared all that much, but they present the two extremes of where robot fiction could progress. On the one hand, Transformers has robots with no obvious biological creators that can exist independent of humans without any particular trouble. In this case, robots aren't used to comment on humans - they're just robots because robots are awesome. On the other hand, Blade Runner presents replicants that are practically indistinguishable from humans, throwing into even sharper relief the thorny moral question of humanity creating an intelligence in its own image - a point that Battlestar Galactica later stretched to even more ridiculous extremes.
2. Interstellar Travel:
The Forerunner: Lensman by E.E. "Doc" Smith. Often called the first space opera, Smith's universe concerned the Galactic Patrol, galaxy-spanning breeding programs, and the unfathomably ancient races of the Arisians and Eddorians...and a whole lot more than that. But crucial to the vast scale of Smith's storytelling was accepting the idea that one could travel vast interstellar distances without any trouble whatsoever. He probably didn't invent the idea- it's now such a fundamental part of the science fiction fabric that it's difficult to track down its origins - but his stories popularized the notion, expanding the scale of science fiction from cannon rides to the Moon to the entire universe.
The Iconic: George Lucas's Star Wars. There are definitely more literary options - Frank Herbert's Dune and Isaac Asimov's Foundation saga leap immediately to mind - but the Star Wars universe has arguably the most crazily diverse range of lifeforms and maybe the most casual interstellar travel ever seen. In books like Foundation or TV shows like Star Trek, there's at least some indication that traveling all the way across the galaxy is a long and arduous journey. In Star Wars, characters travel from the outer rim to the center of the galaxy and back in what appears to be a matter of hours, days at most.
The Modern Twist: The Stargate franchise. At least Star Wars contained itself to its one galaxy far, far away. The Stargate TV shows took the original movie's basic idea of instantaneous travel over interstellar distances and just kept expanding the scope of it. Depending on which gate technology you're using, it's possible to travel between distant galaxies in a matter of minutes, and the fact that this is being done by members of today's US Air Force just makes it cooler. Even the one solid rule of interstellar travel - you had to use a Stargate to do it easily - eventually gave way, with aliens creating powerful interstellar warships in the shows' later seasons.
3. Time Travel:
The Forerunner: The Time Machine by H.G. Wells. Well, obviously, right? Its title is still the preferred term for a vehicle that can travel through time, and the unnamed narrator's trip to the year 802,701 AD continues to inform time travel stories up to the present day, with the most recent references in Futurama's "The Late Philip J. Fry." At times in his literary career, Wells could barely pick up a pen without inventing a new science fiction sub-genre.
The Iconic: "By His Bootstraps" and "—All You Zombies—" by Robert Heinlein. While Wells was content to explore time's eternal vastness, Heinlein dived right into the question of what would happen if you traveled to the one time you never, ever should: your own past. His 1941 story "By His Bootstraps" is all about how doctoral student Bob Wilson becomes the king of the world 30,000 years in the future, thanks to the time traveling assistance of Joe, another man, and Diktor, all of whom are just future versions of Bob. 1959's "—All You Zombies—" ups the ante by revealing the protagonist is his own mother and father, not to mention every other character we meet in the story.
The Modern Twist: Robert Zemeckis's Back to the Future. Sure, it's now 25 years old and verging into iconic territory itself, but it's probably the most famous time travel story ever, and definitely the most fun. (It's also become a fascinating repository of dated 80s slang and mid-period Huey Lewis.) What's the big twist, you ask? Well, it took the boring old time machine concept and put it inside a Delorean. As Doc Brown observes, "if you're gonna build a time machine into a car, why not do it with some style?"
4. Superpowers:
The Forerunner: Superman by Joel Siegel and Joe Schuster. Yeah, you could make arguments for pulp heroes like The Shadow, The Phantom, and Doc Savage, not to mention H.G. Wells's invisible man and the mythological Hercules, but even the might son of Zeus is just a minor literary footnote compared to the Man of Steel. It's a tribute to the fact that Siegel and Schuster so perfectly nailed the superhero formula (and Superman had the best lawyers - just ask Captain Marvel) that the Last Son of Krypton is still going strong 72 years after Action Comics#1 was first published.
The Iconic: Spider-Man by Stan Lee and Steve Ditko. You could of course make a very strong argument that Superman deserves to be both the forerunner and the iconic superpowered character, but let's give Spidey his due. As Stan Lee often (and rightly) points out, Spider-Man was pretty much the first superhero to live in a real city, to have realistic problems like paying the rent and making it to class on time. And at a time where DC heroes like Superman and Batman were headed in some veryweird directions, Spidey provided a much-needed jolt of realism. It might not be an accident that Warner Bros. is still struggling to properly bring Superman's story back to the masses, while the Spider-Man movies have made a combined 2.5 billion dollars, with a reboot on the way.
The Modern Twist: Watchmen by Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons. Oh, television has come so close to redefining the superhero genre, only to fall far short. Smallville is finishing up what might really be a ten-year origin story, and Heroes looked, for a brief wonderful moment in 2006, like it was going to completely redefine how the public saw superheroes. But both shows - Heroes in particular - faltered so badly that they never quite pulled off their promised update of superhero mythology. So I'll just stick with comics and go with what's still, 26 years later, the definitive deconstruction of the superhero genre.
5. Bodily Transformation:
The Forerunner: Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde by Robert Louis Stevenson. The original novel has suffered the same fate as Alfred Hitchcock's Psycho, in that nobody now remembers that the fact that Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde are the same person is actually the shocking twist, not the basic premise. As such, those going back to the original novel might be surprised to discover that it's mostly about young lawyer Gabriel John Utterson trying to work out what's the matter with his acquaintance Henry Jekyll. Stevenson's groundbreaking idea of literally releasing the monster inside you has since spawned countless adaptations and launched an entire science fiction sub-genre.
The Iconic: The Fantastic Four by Stan Lee and Jack Kirby. The X-Men would explore bodily mutation as a fact of existence just a couple years later, and the Incredible Hulk turned the Jeckyll and Hyde concept into the stuff of superheroics, but the Fantastic Four was probably the first story that showed life goes on, even if you've suddenly been transformed into a hideous freak. (Of course, the levels of hideousness varied from character to character.) Above all, Fantastic Four was about the strength of the family unit, and how crucial these close bonds are to holding onto your humanity in the wake of unimaginable transformation.
The Modern Twist: David Cronenberg's The Fly. Look, I realize we're all jaded, what with living in a post Human Centipede: First Sequence world and all. (At least we're still living in a pre Human Centipede: Full Sequence world.) But back when Tom Six was just sewing his stuffed animals into a fluffy little centipede, David Cronenberg and Jeff Goldblum unleashed the body transformation epic The Fly, which ramped the body horror up to almost unbearable levels while still intelligently exploring what it is that makes us human. I am Brundlefly, indeed.
6. Parallel Universe:
The Forerunner: Flatland by Edwin Abbott Abbott. (Yes, that really was his name.) This 1886 satirical investigation of how a square in the two-dimensional Flatland came to perceive other universes with different numbers of dimensions (including the 3D Spaceland, the 1D Lineland, and even the 0D Pointland) is the most straightforward early example of parallel universes. It places wholly separate universes on a more or less equal footing, except for the number of dimensions each has, and then lets characters travel between them.
The Iconic: "Mirror, Mirror", Star Trek. In the classic 1967 episode, we were introduced to the mirror universe, a ruthless, totalitarian cosmos where the entire crew of the Enterprise was, well, evil. Although Flatland and various fantasy novels lay the groundwork for parallel universes, it was Star Trek that really placed the notion into the popular consciousness, inspiring countless imitators and parodies. More importantly, it introduced the best shorthand ever for evil parallel universe duplicates: a goatee!
The Modern Twist: Fringe. The show is still slowly unveiling the mysteries of the alternate universe, a world where, among other things, the World Trade Center wasn't destroyed on September 11...but the White House was. The upcoming season is delving even deeper into the concept of parallel universes, with each episode alternating between the two worlds and the promise that we'll come to sympathize with both universes' versions of the characters.
7. Alien Invasion:
The Forerunner: The War of the Worlds by H.G. Wells. Wells's 1898 story of invaders from Mars took the then popular British sub-genre of invasion literature and simply substituted the French and Germans with Martians. While invasion literature died out (perhaps because a bunch of Frenchmen in hot air balloons isn't really a serious enough threat to sustain an entire genre), Wells's book awoke readers to a sobering realization: if there are aliens advanced enough to visit us, they're also advanced enough to wipe us off the face of the Earth. Thankfully, the aliens are defeated by common Earth bacteria, setting up a vibrant tradition of super-intelligent aliens being defeated by really obvious things, such as the common cold and water.
The Iconic: Every Doctor Who episode, 1970-1974. During the budget-slashed, Earth-exiled Jon Pertwee era, the Third Doctor and UNIT faced invasions by (deep breath) the Nestene Consciousness and the Autons, the Silurians the Mind Parasite, the Axons, the Daemons, the Daleks, the Sea Devils, antimatter creatures, a Sontaran, and, just for the hell of it, super-intelligent spiders. And that's not even counting the Doctor's own best enemy, the Master. Why the sudden spike in alien invasions? Something to do with radio signals, apparently.
The Modern Twist: Neill Blomkamp's District 9. Blomkamp's movie is maybe the clearest crystallization yet of the idea that even if aliens are unpleasant, humans can still be the real monsters. (It's also an Apartheid allegory, but for the sake of simplicity let's just stick with the purely science fiction elements.) Indeed, you could definitely argue the "invasion" isn't anything of the sort, considering none (or almost none) of the aliens were actually able to fly their ships and ended up hovering above Johannesburg purely by accident. Blomkamp's proposed sequel, District 10, might well involve a more traditional, vengeance-driven alien invasion.
8. Immortality:
The Forerunner: The Picture of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde. In Wilde's only novel, a vain, debauched fop named Dorian Gray sells his soul so that a portrait of him will age in his stead. Although immortality and eternal youth obviously go all the way back to the gods of old mythology, Dorian Gray is one of the first modern explorations of how a mortal might deal with the gift - or curse - of never growing old. Dorian Gray himself has gone on to appear in some more explicitly science fictional works, including Alan Moore's League of Extraordinary Gentlemen and James Robinson's run on Starman.
The Iconic: "Long Live Walter Jameson", The Twilight Zone. Rod Serling's legendary anthology series tackled immortality a few times, and the show always came to pretty much the same conclusion: people need death just as much as they need life. Maybe the show's purest exploration of this idea is the episode "Long Live Walter Jameson", in which an elderly man in the 1960s discovers his daughter's future husband somehow fought in the Civil War...and, as it turns out, that barely even begins to describe how old he really is. The episode ends with the 2,000 year old Jameson's death, as he's finally confronted with the sins of his eternal past.
The Modern Twist: The Highlander franchise. The original 1986 film took the tired old concept of eternal life and added some much needed pizazz, including sword fights, lots of beheadings, immortals killing other immortals for their life energy, and Sean Connery playing an Egyptian pretending to be a Spaniard. If nothing else, the movie gave us at least three or four classic Queen songs, including the all-important question, "Who wants to live forever?" As it turns out, the Highlander franchise did, quietly undoing the first movie's fairly definitive ending to open up the possibility of increasingly insane sequels and TV shows.
9. The Post-Apocalyptic World:
The Forerunner: Last and First Men by Olaf Stapledon. This 1930 book is one of the most ambitious future histories ever devised, spanning billions of years of human history. (His 1937 follow-up, The Star Maker somehow manages to be even more crazily ambitious.) Obviously, with so much history, there's a ton of ground to cover, but the first (of eighteen!) ages of humanity ends with a nuclear holocaust that kills all but 35 people. Of course, considering there are still seventeen more ages to go, humanity does get better, but that has to be considered a low point.
The Iconic: George Miller's The Road Warrior. Look, there are a lot of great post-apocalyptic movies out there. But only one of them turned the Australian Outback into a giant leather bar and turned survival itself into one long car chase, and that's The Road Warrior. (Well, there were two other Mad Max movies, but this was the best of the bunch.) Set in a vaguely described post-apocalyptic world that's reeling from nuclear war, peak oil, and the collapse of civilization, The Road Warrior stars an Australian-accented Mel Gibson before he became utterly reprehensible. And, again, those car chases.
The Modern Twist: The Road by Cormac McCarthy. This Pulitzer Prize winning 2006 novel is about as bleak as bleak gets, as an unnamed father and son trudge down a decaying highway on a dead Earth. For much of the book, it seems as though everything is utterly hopeless, as the last dregs of humanity wile away their days on a burnt-out cinder that used to be their planet. (For some reason, the mostly faithful movie adaption didn't pick up much of an audience.) Ultimately, the book ends on a note of minor optimism, but this book comes closer than almost any other in showing us The End - not just a great disaster or setback for humanity, but the real and actual end of the line.
10. Godlike Aliens:
The Forerunner: H.P. Lovecraft's Cthulhu Mythos. Are Lovecraft's beings aliens? Interdimensional monsters? Gods? Does it matter? Whatever Lovecraft's cosmic entities were, they're awe-inspiring beings of immense power. Cthulhu, for his part, was perhaps born on the planet Vhoorl at a time of immense supernova activity. He since molded the dreams of the first humans to guide their development and ensure the establishment of a doomsday cult devoted to him. And he might not even be the worst of the Great Old Ones.
The Iconic: 2001: A Space Odyssey, Rendezvous with Rama, and Childhood's End by Arthur C. Clarke. When Clarke introduced aliens into his story, he generally made them impossibly advanced beings, with vast, cosmos-spanning designs that were mostly beyond the limits of human comprehension. Mostly, aliens were around to help humans ascend to the next phase of their evolution, whether we wanted to or not. To cite a corollary of Clarke's famous law, "Any sufficiently advanced alien is indistinguishable from a god."
The Modern Twist: Doctor Who 2005-2010. The Doctor has always been amazingly powerful, what with the TARDIS and the regenerating and whatnot, but it's the revived series that's really suggested he's on his way to godhood. His fellow Time Lords are locked away forever in the Time War, which is also supposed to have wiped out most of the cosmos's higher intelligences. He's been taking faltering steps toward omnipotence ever since, seriously considering the offer of godhood in 2006's "School Reunion" and temporarily naming himself the all-powerful Time Lord Victorious in last year's "The Waters of Mars." And the rest of the universe seems to agree - to capture him at the end of the last series, an alien alliance had to build the Pandorica, a supposedly mythical prison meant to hold a trickster god. Which as it turns out, is pretty much what the Doctor is at this point, at least to his enemies.
Thu, 02 Sep 2010 17:16:35 PDT
Look - it's a baby Mi-go caught by divers off the coast of Japan! [Monsters Among Us]
In H.P. Lovecraft's mythos, the Mi-go are tentacled crustacean aliens who dwell deep in our planetary history - and deep in the oceans. Looks like some Japanese divers may have found the real-life inspiration for the creature.
Apparently one of the divers who found the creature commented on how suggestive it looks, almost like a fertility god - I just can't imagine why.
Spotted on Japanator (photos originally posted here)
Thu, 02 Sep 2010 16:41:48 PDT
What science fiction writers can learn from the flood of SF lit novels [Genres]
We're in the middle of a flood of literary novels that play with science fiction ideas right now. What's causing it? And how can science fiction benefit from all of this fresh energy?
There have always been a lot of literary writers trying their hand at writing about time travel, post-apocalyptic worlds or monsters, but by any standard this year is unusual. Instead of a couple of new literary books with science fiction aspirations, we're getting a bunch all at once. It seems like many, if not most, of the big literary books of the year deal with science fiction tropes one way or the other. The one glaring exception, of course, is Jonathan Franzen's Freedom.
Here's a partial list of recent science fictional books by authors with a literary pedigree:
Solar by Ian McEwan, about a scientist who stumbles on a way to use quantum physics to get more efficient solar energy. Read our review here.
The Four Fingers of Death by Rick Moody, set in the dystopian year 2025, when a struggling writer novelizes a cheesy science fiction movie. Read our review here.
Super-Sad True Love Story by Gary Shteyngart, set in another dystopian future, where a man who works for a company selling Indefinite Life Extension falls in love. Our review's coming soon.
Go Mutants! by Larry Doyle, in which the I Love You, Beth Cooper author visualizes a world in which aliens land in 1951, and 20 years later a tenth of the human race is half alien. You can read Elizabeth Hand's review here.
The Passage by Justin Cronin, in which the PEN/Hemingway Award winner creates a vampire apocalypse. Read a review here.
How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe by Charles Yu, a time-traveling, universe-hopping examination of selfhood and creation. Read our review here.
The Thousand Autumns of Jacob De Zoet by David Mitchell isn't overtly science fictional, but the Cloud Atlas author says it's the first volume of a trilogy that will turn more scifi in later volumes.
I know I've come across a few other lit/scifi crossovers lately, but these are the ones that jumped out at me.
So what's causing this sudden renewed interest in science fiction on the part of lit authors? It could be any one of a bunch of things.
There's the oft-cited notion that we live in a science fictional world, what with the miraculous technology and the dizzying pace of change. There's also the pervasive feeling on the part of anybody who watches the news that we live in an apocalyptic, pre-lapsarian world — Moody's book takes place in an America that's basically collapsed, and Shteyngart's book takes place in an America that has become a third-world country, ruled by the oppressive Bipartisan Party. Vampires and mutants, of course, are often markers for apocalypses and social collapse.
But it's also extremely likely that these authors have heard everybody saying, for years now, that science fiction has its own literary tradition and has something to offer the literary world. After years of people like Michael Chabon, Jonathan Lethem, John Kessel and the Washington Post's Michael Dirda touting the literary awesomeness of science fiction authors, it's become a more accepted view. It's been the case for over a decade that you lose points among literary hipsters if you haven't read Philip K. Dick, and now that's becoming true of an assortment of other authors too, from Ursula K. Le Guin to Gene Wolfe. I'm sure you can still find a literature professor somewhere who thinks all science fiction is rubbish, just like you can still find poets who only write in sestinas.
Shteyngart has talked in almost every interview lately about how he grew up reading Asimov's Science Fiction Magazine, and he'd wanted to write a science fiction novel all along, but as a neophyte author in an MFA program, he was discouraged from doing this. And he says he wants to write about how "technology is outpacing our ability to absorb what it's doing to us," which is a classic science fictional idea. Moody's also talked in interviews about how he grew up reading a lot of science fiction. And he told the SF Chronicle today that science fiction "allow(s) me an allegorical layer that's usually forbidden in conventional literary fiction."
And the thing that jumps out at you when you read this new wave of lit authors doing SF is how aware they are of the genre. You're not dealing with Philip Roth writing alternate history without ever having read any of it, or Margaret Atwood denying her SF is SF — Moody is, to some extent, paying tribute to science fiction. Charles Yu's book is clearly about science fiction. Cronin's book attempts to channel the style of Steven King as much as possible. Writing a science fictional book without acknowledging the genre would be missing the point for these authors — they're writing about genre as much as they are about science fictional ideas. (Although that's less true in some cases, like McEwan's Solar.)
In any case, whether these authors are acknowledging their debt to science fiction or not, this new crop of literary books is a huge boon to the genre. Science fiction has always relied on fresh revolutions, new shocks, to keep it fresh and forward-looking. No genre can afford to become inward-looking or self-referential, but science fiction can afford it less than most. Sometimes these jolts have come from within, like the New Wave of the 1960s and 1970s, and sometimes they come from outside. Right now, written science fiction is lucky enough to have two sources of external stimulus: the oft-discussed flood of popular YA books by authors like Suzanne Collins and Scott Westerfeld, and this new literary explosion. Both can be good for the mainstream of science fiction, in different ways.
It's true that not all literary novels with SF themes are good — you only have to read Jeanette Winterson's The Stone Gods to discover that for yourself — but a lot of them still bring something new and fascinating to the genre.
So what can we learn from these books, as readers and as writers of science fiction?
Well, first of all, they confirm just how close the themes of science fiction are to the zeitgeist of the times we live in. Thanks to the ever-accelerating pace of technological advances, the ways in which we communicate are changing. With crazy predictions like the death of print books within five years making the rounds, it's not just that science fiction offers a way to interpret this world — SF is also the most familiar thing in a world of strangeness. And then there's the aforementioned feeling that the world — and America, in particular — is headed for irreversible decline, that our wars and our crushing debt and our dependence on fossil fuels are going to make us the next obsolete empire, within no time.
Reading through a stack of these recent literary books, you're left with the feeling that these two themes — technological dislocation and imperial collapse — are resonating in the consciousness of the book-reading classes, and any author who manages to exploit these themes in an evocative way will make it big. There's a hunger for heartfelt, even disheartening, books set in the near future, and science fiction authors should be doing more deeply personal near-future stories if they want to catch this wave.
Which brings me to the second point — these books are personal, and more heavily character-focused than most SF novels I've read lately. Take McEwan's Solar, which clearly meets most definitions of science fiction — if you take out the scientific conceit, you have no more story. And the story is clearly about science in a fundamental way — but more than that, it's a character study of Michael Beard, the almost psychotically self-centered and hedonistic scientist whose foibles threaten to prevent one of the most important breakthroughs in scientific history from coming to fruition. By making his scientist both the proponent of progress and — because he's his own worst enemy — its biggest obstacle, McEwan confronts us with questions about the role of ego in scientific discovery, and whether humans' worse natures are doomed to overcome our better ones. So yeah, the resolution of the novel hinges on Michael Beard's character rather than the scientific ideas — but only because Beard's character winds up determining whether scientific progress is able to prevail.
Both Shteyngart and Moody have talked lately about how they wanted to avoid making their novels seem like bad science fiction — Moody, somewhat irritatingly, dismisses SF has having a tendency to be "more interested in technology than character" — but they both craft stories in which the near-future setting is important to the story. Shteyngart tells the Rumpus he was surprised
that I could allow the love story to take center stage with each subsequent draft. The initial drafts read like a bad version of an Isaac Asimov science-fiction magazine... Oh, God. [Makes masturbatory motion.] Anyway, but then it became-the more knowledge I dropped on this book's fat ass, the less it was compelling. The more I pulled back and let this love story go, the more I felt confident of the book's vitality.
The love story in Shteyngart's book takes place against a backdrop of neurosis and insecurity that are produced by technology and the ever-encroaching media world. Everybody talks in a ridiculous parody of text-speak, and the culture is fatally youth-obsessed, while youth really only belongs to the wealthy and the powerful — Lenny Abramov realizes eventually that the Indefinite Life Extension program he's selling will never be available to him personally, because he's the son of a Russian janitor.
And that brings me to the third thing I've noticed about a lot of these books — in comparison to the earnest, heartfelt works of the mid-2000s like The Confessions Of Max Tivoli and The Time Traveler's Wife, the dominant mode of science fictional literary books is satire — and dark satire at that. Whether you're looking at the would-be captains of the technological near future (as McEwan does) or its hapless victims (as many other authors seem to) a jaundiced look at human failings seems to be a key ingredient. The only way to navigate the bewildering, horrible future is with irony and satire. And copious amounts of weirdness — a lot of these books lavish a lot of description on some jarringly odd situations, from McEwan's protagonist's penis getting frozen to his zipper in the Antarctic to two of Moody's characters getting groped by a severed hand — not to mention his lengthy zero-gravity gay sex scene.
So it's finally come true — the literature of the future has become the future of literature. Our collective literary consciousness is crying out for near-future books that are deeply personal, obsessed with technological change, and viciously satirical. We could just be seeing the first wave of a whole new tide of science fiction novels, with authors from both the artificially constructed "science fiction" and "literary" genres making equally wonderful contributions. Let's hope so, anyway.
The future of sunblock is genetically-engineered bacterial colonies that live on your skin [Mad Science]
Amino acids that can block ultraviolet light are commonly harvested from algae, and used in cosmetics like Helioguard 365. Now researchers at Harvard have discovered the genes responsible for producing these materials and, with a little gene tweaking, managed get E. coli bacteria to produce them too. Now that bacteria can produce the sunblock, can a new product be far behind? I can't wait for a friendly colony of bacteria to live on my skin, and prevent me from getting burned.
Biologists reveal why mosquito repellent DEET is doomed to fail [Bug Overlords]
Everyone's favorite mosquito repellent, DEET, works by making a smell that mosquitoes can't stand, or by blocking their ability to smell humans, depending on who you ask. But even the greatest repellents won't stop all mosquitoes. New evidence suggests why.
It turns out that the Anopheles gambiae have a second family of olfactory sensors, previously unknown, which sniff out and activate due to completely different smells than the ones we already knew about. This could help explain why it's so hard to develop efficient repellents, and maybe help stop the spread of diseases from the insects.
Would you really watch a weekly show in the style of Paranormal Activity? [The River]
Paranormal Activity director Oren Peli and his collaborators are close to a deal with ABC to make a TV pilot in the same "spooky found footage" style. The River would focus on the search for a person who went missing on the Amazon. The Hollywood Reporter notes that ABC aggressively outbid NBC for the pilot, and the proposed deal would impose heavy penalties if ABC failed to air the show. [THR]
Thu, 02 Sep 2010 14:22:21 PDT
Charles Darwin performed the world's first terraforming experiment [Mad Science]
Nearly two centuries ago, famed scientists Charles Darwin and Joseph Hooker transformed the barren volcanic island of Ascension into a lush artificial ecosystem, unwittingly inventing terraforming. Now, Darwin's incredible achievement could help us transform Mars into a livable environment.
Darwin and Hooker, with the assistance of the Royal Navy, managed to create a functional ecosystem in decades, rather than the million of years it would have taken for such a system to develop naturally. Although much of Ascension remains arid, they were able to plant enough trees to capture rainwater without it all evaporating away, creating a self-sustaining ecosystem that made life a whole lot easier for its inhabitants.
Dr. Dave Wilkinson, an ecologist at Liverpool John Moores University, explains why he found the Ascension ecosystem so strange when he first visited in 2003, and why it's important:
"I remember thinking, this is really weird. There were all kinds of plants that don't belong together in nature, growing side by side. I only later found out about Darwin, Hooker and everything that had happened. What it tells us is that we can build a fully functioning ecosystem through a series of chance accidents or trial and error."
Wilkinson believes these principles could be adapted to colonization efforts on Mars, although he notes scientists have yet to seriously consider the lessons Darwin's work on Ascension could teach us. For more on this remarkable story, check out the full article at BBC News
Watch Arthur C. Clarke predict the world we live in, in a 1964 interview [Retro Futurism]
Rendezvous With Rama author Arthur C. Clarke predicts telemedicine, telecommuting and mobile phones, in a 1964 BBC interview. Too bad we don't have space colonies or mentally enhanced chimpanzee servants yet.
I love where he says, "If what I say seems to you completely reasonable, then I will have failed completely. Only if what I am about to tell you appears absolutely unbelievable, have we any chance of visualizing the future as it really will happen."
The Clarke interview (which starts at 3:50 in the video above) comes via Singularity Hub, which notes:
Considered one of the ‘big three' science fiction writers of the 20th century, Clarke also helped originate the idea of using geostationary orbits for communication satellites. As such, it may not be surprising that while many of his predictions seem outlandish his thoughts on telecommunication were remarkably prescient. By the year 2000 a good deal of the world could talk to their friends (via mobile phones) without knowing their exact locations. We've also seen how business travel may be slowly being replaced with telepresence, and telemedicine is a rapidly developing technology. All of these predictions can be heard in the first half of the Horizon program
Here's the second part of the 1964 interview:
Thu, 02 Sep 2010 13:00:00 PDT
The classic Doctor Who monster that terrified young John Barrowman [Book Excerpt]
Carole Barrowman talks about growing up as a fan of Doctor Who alongside her younger brother John — who became famous as the Doctor's sexiest companion, Captain Jack Harkness, in this excerpt from the anthology Chicks Dig Time Lords.
When my baby brother, John, was born, the Doctor was in his second regeneration, Jamie was the Doctor's companion, and the TARDIS still had that new time capsule smell to it. I was scared of Daleks, terrified of the Cybermen, and the new baby in the Barrowman house was driving me mad. He cried constantly. Even after packing his mouth full of salt ‘n vinegar chips in an attempt to silence the alien creature, he still managed regularly to disturb the peace of my childhood universe.
When the Doctor was in his third regeneration, ditzy Jo was his companion, I was still afraid of Daleks, a bit creeped out by the Master, but the baby brother was growing on me. In fact, so much so that while shopping in Glasgow one Saturday morning, I insisted – and when I say insisted I mean forced with my arms clamped tightly around his chest – he stand outside a department store window for two or three minutes to make sure the mannequins weren't really Autons and that they were not poised to crash out of the display and follow us home. They were not and they did not, but baby brother checked his back the entire trip.
When the Doctor was in his fourth regeneration, first Sarah Jane and then K9 were his loyal companions, Davros emerged from suspended animation with only minor injuries and John and I were finding our place in a new world. It was the late 70s, and my family had recently emigrated from Scotland to the United States. John and I spent many Sunday evenings watching the Doctor's exploits on WTTW in Chicago, relishing in the campiness of this particular Doctor's persona, and, at least for me, in the curiosity of journalist Sarah Jane. Next to Bob Woodward and his cohorts, I'm convinced Sarah Jane influenced my initial career choice. Problem was, in my world no newsrooms were offering time-travel as a perk. Two years ago in Cardiff Bay, John and I ran into Elizabeth Sladen (aka Sarah Jane). I mumbled incoherently when John introduced us (let me add here that I behaved in a similar fashion the first time I met David Tennant only with more gushing and giggling on my part).
Despite my advancing age during this incarnation (19ish), I remained skittish of Daleks and John continued to be terribly traumatized from his incident with the Autons in Glasgow. Although my family settled into our new lives in the US fairly smoothly, those Sunday nights held a certain nostalgia for John and me. We could almost taste the Doctor's jelly babies.
When the Doctor was in his fifth regeneration, well, honestly, I couldn't take him seriously as a Time Lord. This Doctor reminded me far too much of Dorothy Sayer's foppish detective Lord Peter Wimsey. Plus around this time I was watching reruns of All Creatures Great and Small and all I could see in this Doctor was Tristan Farnon – adorable vet. I expected that at any moment he'd do a flea and tic check on K-9. This Doctor's companion was Tegan, an "airline hostess" (it was the 80s), and later Peri, short for Perpugilliam (the writers had to be on drugs) who I seem to recall spent a lot of time dressed in shorts the width of a valance and skin-tight leotards. As young Americans, John and I loved that Peri was the Doctor's first American companion – and she would remain the only American companion until the entire series regenerated in 2005 and Captain Jack Harkness (a.k.a. my baby brother) and his Chula ship landed on the Whovian landscape.
During much of the fifth Doctor's exploits, I was in graduate school at Northern Illinois University studying the history of the novel, the Covenanters, John Milton and the Protestant Revolution. John was finishing high school, performing in amateur productions and high school musicals and reveling in the exploits of the Carringtons on Dynasty. The Doctor receded in our shifting universes, but John and I were known, on occasion, to begin phone conversations to each other humming the trademark electronic melody: "Bungalung, bungalung, woo hoo!"
During the Doctor's sixth through eighth regenerations I got married, got tenure, and had children; therefore, I've very little memory of my own activities – never mind knowing the defining moments of those particular Doctors or their trusty companions. I did, however, continue to nurse a deep dread of Daleks. In fact, I remember waking up in a cold sweat one night when my son's Darth Vader toy started rasping from under his blankets. I was convinced I was about to be exterminated.
"Kill Davros!" I shrieked at my husband before I'd let him back into bed.
Despite John's dabbling in the Lucas universe in the 70s and 80s and my developing passion for Mulder and his X-Files, John and I remained steadfast fans of the Doctor. It was during these final regenerations of the classic Doctor that John walked into a theater in London's West End for an open audition for a revival of the Cole Porter's Anything Goes and walked out with one of the lead roles. He went on to star in Andrew Lloyd Weber and Cameron Mackintosh's biggest musicals, sang Sondheim at The Kennedy Center, played Broadway with Carol Burnett, performed in a number of TV shows both in the UK and the US, and released a variety of CDs. Although his star was rising in the celebrity firmament, he still quickened his pace whenever he walked past mannequins in a department store window.
The Doctor's ninth manifestation may have been a short-lived one, but it dramatically altered our sibling universe when, nine episodes into the season, Captain Jack conned his way onto the TARDIS and into the hearts of fans everywhere. This Doctor's significant companion was Rose Tyler, and, although his persona was more brooding than playful, his regeneration kick-started the franchise anew and sent Who fans like me into our Dalek lunch boxes, or to the back of our basements in search of our sonic screwdriver pens and wind-up K-9s (one sits on my desk to this day).
As wonderful as it was to have the Doctor active in our universe again, this incarnation was traumatic on a personal level. To my complete horror in the final episode of the series, "The Parting of the Ways," the Daleks back my baby brother into a corner and kill him. Bam! Just like that. I was gobsmacked. I stared at my husband for a beat, paused the television, leapt from the couch, and grabbed for the phone. Within minutes of seeing my childhood fear realized and my unshakable paranoia vindicated, I tracked John down in London and interrogated him fully. What's your middle name? Mum's maiden name? My middle name? I had to be sure there was no permanent damage.
Given our shared history with the Doctor, I reveled in John's stories about life in the TARDIS (of course it's real). In fact, when John first read the script that intimated Captain Jack was the Face of Boe, he immediately called Russell T Davies to make sure he'd read correctly. Then, disregarding the time difference between the UK and the US, he called me. It was 4 a.m., and you don't want to know what my husband said before I could get back into bed.
"Kill Davros!" pales in comparison.
John had to keep this delicious detail a secret, but he was bursting with Whovian geekiness and he knew even if the Sontarans tortured me, the secret would be safe. John also knew no one else in the family would appreciate the sheer enormity and the utter brilliance of Russell's story arc. This cool revelation about Captain Jack notwithstanding, it's actually the single line mantra from Jack's debut episode that still sends John and I into a laughing jag.
At the groom's dinner the night before my wedding, John managed to convince the bartender that he and my soon-to-be-brother-in-law were indeed old enough to taste a martini or two (they were not). Minutes before we were to be seated for dinner, I discovered John and soon-to-be-brother-in-law giggling like idiots at the bar. Naturally, I reamed John out in the classic manner of Big Sisters everywhere. He listened stoically, and then, as I marched away, he yelled across the bar in broad Glaswegian, "Carole, you're not my mother!"
"Are you my Mummy?"
Respond loudly and in Scottish please: "No, Carole! You're not my mother!"
In the Doctor's tenth regeneration his companions were Rose Tyler, Martha Jones and Donna Noble – a mature companion with sass and sarcasm who reminded me of my own female friends. During this Doctor's tenure, Captain Jack was living and dying (and dying again) at Torchwood, the Daleks stopped off in Manhattan (yikes!) before battling for universal supremacy (again), and, in one of my favorite episodes of all time, the Doctor battled his wits with the Bard in "The Shakespeare Code." This Doctor's regeneration saw my children celebrate graduation and birthday milestones, John and his long-time partner, Scott, celebrate their civil union, and – at the height of this Doctor's escapades – after all these years I finally set foot on the TARDIS.
John and I were collaborating on his autobiography, Anything Goes, and I was shadowing him on the Torchwood set for six weeks. On my first day, John decided to give me a personal tour of the set, which is spread across an industrial complex in Cardiff. The Torchwood Hub shares the same warehouse space as the interior set for the TARDIS. This means to get to the Hub, John and I had to walk directly in front of this hallowed space.
Up to this point in my tour, John had been the consummate professional and polite baby brother. He introduced me to the Torchwood cast and crew, pointed out where to find lunch or dinner and how important it was to get to the food before Gareth David-Lloyd, and then he escorted me to a building at the rear of the complex. Inside, it was full of the flotsam and jetsam of years of scary monsters and fabulous aliens.
"Wait here a minute," John said, disappearing behind a heavy black safety curtain.
I waited and waited and when I began to worry that baby brother had left me there so he could beat me and Gareth to the food wagon, I yanked aside the black curtain.
A full size Dalek charged at me. "Exterminate her! Exterminate her!"
My heart went into tachycardia. I think I may have peed my pants.
John leapt out from behind the Dalek, laughing hysterically and chanting, "Payback!"
Later on our way to the Hub, John and I stepped up on to the TARDIS. Its circular console loomed in front of us, the marks of generations visible all over its detailed surface. I reverently touched a few of the controls. I may have giggled.
"We're ready for you, John," called one of the Torchwood assistants.
John and I stared at each other for a couple of beats as if our childhood, our own evolving companionship, was displayed in front of us. Then we high-fived each other and burst into a resounding chorus of "Bungalung, bungalung, woo hoo!"
This essay is an excerpt from Chicks Dig Time Lords, ed. Lynne M. Thomas and Tara O'Shea, published by Mad Norwegian Press. Get it here.
Carole E. Barrowman is an English professor at Alverno College in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, where she teaches courses on film, writing, and the art of the mystery. She often contributes to The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel and The Minneapolis Star Tribune. She and her brother John co-wrote his autobiography Anything Goes and the comic strip "Captain Jack and the Selkie" (Torchwood Magazine #14). John and Carole have also released a follow-up to Anything Goes called I Am What I Am, published by Michael O'Mara Books Ltd.
Thu, 02 Sep 2010 12:30:00 PDT
2010 will be remembered as the year the Arctic Ocean became a trade route [Environment]
In the 1980s, the Soviet Union built nuclear-powered ice-breakers, hoping to open a shipping route through the Arctic. They needn't have bothered — there's no ice left now in the summer, opening the fabled Northeast Passage to shipping.
According to a new report in Barents Observer, the Northeast Passage, now renamed the Northern Sea Route, will become the new shipping route between Europe and Asia, now that it's proved to be ice-free. The journey through the Arctic Ocean was a hazardous one when Finnish-Swedish explorer Adolf Erik Nordenskioeld made the 15-month journey in 1878-1879. But this summer, Norwegian explorer Børge Ousland sailed the exact same route in his little trimaran. It took a few weeks instead of 15 months, and he hardly saw any ice. In fact, he hardly saw any living things at all. He told a Norwegian broadcaster:
The most surprising with this trip is that we have hardly seen any animals at all. We have only seen animals, seals, walrus and polar bear where there has been ice.
The photos above and below come from 2007, and they show the icebergs in the region melting. But that ice is completely gone in the summertime.
According to the upbeat report in the Barents Observer, 2009 was the first year that shipping companies discovered the region was ice-free, and 2010 was the "breakthrough year." And 2011 will be the year that shipping in the region takes off completely. Says the Observer article:
The Russian and international shipping industry see the ongoing climate changes and the retreating of the summer ice-cap in the Arctic as a new opportunity. The distance from Europe to Asia is much shorter when sailing north instead of using the Suez channel or sail around Africa. Shorter sailing route save time and save fuel. In other words; save money. Also, the Arctic is free of pirates... When the future history of the Arctic will be written, 2010 will be marked off as the breakthrough year for commercial shipping along the Northern Sea Route.
If you have a question, just write it in comments below and Jemisin will get to as many as she can when she's with us tomorrow. Please be polite!
Want to know what this crazy io9 book club is about? Find out more here. Our next meeting will be Oct. 5. We are reading Zero History, by William Gibson.
Thu, 02 Sep 2010 11:30:45 PDT
The secret revealed: Gaze into the face of Buffy's ultimate foe! [Exclusive]
If you read the latest issue of Buffy The Vampire Slayer, you know Joss Whedon revealed a shocking secret on the final page. Here's an exclusive look at the cover to Buffy's next issue, which displays the terrible truth! Spoilers!
A "censored" version of this cover was released already, and you can see it above. But here's the full version in all of its horror:
That's right, it's the Master! The villain of Buffy's very first season, back from the dead. And with Whedon writing the final story arc of Buffy season eight, shit is about to get real. Here's the synopsis for issue #37:
Spike and Buffy are finally reunited (*sigh*) and lucky him-he's discovered the source of all her problems, and it's not Angel. Now Buffy must revisit the place where love was indiscriminate, the Scoobies were formed, and Hell's mouth was closed for good.
Joss Whedon and Georges Jeanty launch readers into the finale of Buffy Season Eight, promising more adventure, twists, and turns. Bonds are tested, lives altered, and oh!-the fate of humanity hangs in the balance.
Issue #37 is on sale October 6, and here's the link to Dark Horse Comics' solicit for it. [Dark Horse Comics]
Thu, 02 Sep 2010 11:00:00 PDT
The future of sexual fetishism in the asteroid belt [Afternoon Reading]
A new issue of Rudy Rucker's scifi magazine FLURB went live yesterday, and it's full of great free stories from Bruce Sterling, Kathleen Ann Goonan, Carter Scholz, Madeline Ashby, and more. Plus, my story "The Gravity Fetishist" is there too!
In "The Gravity Fetishist," we catch a glimpse of the future sexual underground in a world of artificial gravity and interplanetary politics - all seen through the eyes of an emotionally-conflicted protein engineer. You can expect Golden Age scifi asteroid-hopping, combined with sexy scenes that might be a bit NSFW. (For those of you who read my story "The Great Oxygen Race," this story takes place in the same city on Ceres, about 100 Earth years later.)
Here's how the story begins:
No amount of atmosphere purification could erase the smell of partially-metabolized alcohol. The stench, wafting from doors frenetic with disco light, turned the entire street into a chemistry experiment its inhabitants were doomed to repeat, despite knowing the results.
Chris checked out the bars while maintaining a brisk walking pace at the same time. This counter-intuitive cruising strategy might have caused him to trip and fall in another part of town. But this area, in a tented bubble of atmosphere south of the downtown dome, was emitting Martian gravity. It felt like home. Everybody in Bachelor City called the neighborhood SoDo. But his family and colleagues would probably call the place by another name, if they bothered to acknowledge it at all. This neighborhood was the dark sore on the crotch of decadent planetoid Ceres.
He wondered what Shel and Mikel were doing right now, back in New Maghreb. They were probably in the lab, slightly pissed that he'd gotten a free trip to the Belt just because he was first author on their paper, "A New Algorithmic Approach to Reverse-Engineering Protein Folds." And here he was ditching the prestigious ProTech conference during a meal break.
A chill worked its way up his spine as he contemplated how easy it had been to leave the convention center and follow a path that could mean the end of his career.
Whether by local tradition or deference to some idea of duplicating the Earth day, SoDo's bars and clubs tended to light up with activity at roughly 24 hour intervals, after people got off second shift. Chris had timed his visit to fall exactly 12 hours after peak time, when he reasoned that the place would be as vacant as it would ever get.
But SoDo wasn't exactly dead. Men in armor and fur groped each other in the doorway to a bar called Bear Hug. Dance music blared from a warehouse across the street; painted on its door was a glowing heart hung with chains. Chris slowed and allowed himself to stare in the window of a fetish shop at the costumes, uniforms, and fanciful instruments of torture and restraint. Two women walked out of the shop, their medieval princess dresses elaborately tattered. Thorny roses erupted from their heads instead of hair. One remarked to the other, "It's so annoying trying to find cisgender men who want to have sex with my new cock."
The pubnet hadn't lied about this neighborhood. The creased map Chris pulled from his pocket lit up with party notices people had posted here. His ears rang with blood as he gestured through search results, but he'd been planning this for so long that he felt no hesitation. If he could find what he wanted anywhere, it was going to be here, among the bear men and women with thorns.
Physics forced to come up with whole new equation to explain "impossible" soccer kick [Mad Science]
In 1997, Brazilian soccer player Roberto Carlos scored on a free kick that first went right, then curved sharply to leftwards in what looked like a physics-defying fluke. We've finally discovered the physics equation that shows it was no fluke.
The amazing goal, which left French goalkeeper Fabien Barthez too stunned to react, was scored during a friendly match in the run-up to the 1998 World Cup. A group of French scientists, perhaps desperate to prove that at least the laws of physics aren't actively rooting against their national team, were able to figure out the trajectory of the ball and, with it, an equation to describe its unusual path.
It all comes down to the fact that, when a sphere spins, its trajectory is a spiral. Usually, gravity and the relatively short distance the ball travels covers up this spiral trajectory, but Carlos was 115 feet away and kicked the ball hard enough to reveal its true spiral-like path. As you can see in the diagram up top, the ball would have kept spiraling if gravity (and the netting) hadn't gotten in the way.
This means that anyone can perfect this spiral trajectory if they're able to hit the ball far enough and with sufficient force, which might explain why Carlos has pulled off this supposed once-in-a-lifetime fluke so often.
Concept art for Disney new Tron theme park, ElecTRONica [Electronica]
So long Tomorrowland — the new addition to Disney's theme park is straight out of the digitzed world of Tron: Legacy. Check out the first ever concept art to Disney's hot new electronic clubland, but try not to get derezzed!
From the looks of things Tron is giving The Main Street Electrical Parade a run for its money. According to Disney Parks Blog this theme-land will sadly only be available at Disney California Adventure park. The park itself will feature:
"a dazzling dance club under the stars to an authentic recreation of Flynn's Arcade to some radical gaming, it's like nowhere else on the grid! Each night, we'll feature live entertainers, complete with lasers, glow accessories and the hottest music ever to rock the grid. ElecTRONica is "the" place to dance the night away in a fantastic world that only Disney can create. Highlights for the entire family will definitely be Flynn's Video Arcade, face painting and the TRON: Evolution video game area."
This park is just one of many massive undertakings Disney is prepping to help reboot the Tron franchise. Also on the menu, more movies and a cartoon! ElecTRONica will be active this Fall on Fridays, Saturdays and Sundays. Now comes the big questions, what do you serve all these hungry programs?
Thu, 02 Sep 2010 09:30:00 PDT
New exoplanet is proof that gas giants start life as dusty behemoths [Mad Astronomy]
The atmosphere of a young exoplanet didn't fit any of our existing models for what gas giants should look like. But when astronomers added huge dust clouds, it was a perfect fit, perhaps revealing a larger truth about gas giants.
The planet in question is HR 8799 b, a gas giant about seven times the mass of Jupiter. It's one of three gas giants revolving around the star HR 8799, located about 1,300 light-years away. The system was first discovered in 2008, and now astronomers have been able to perform spectroscopic analysis of the planets. These analyses are extraordinarily powerful, giving us close approximations of the planet's chemical composition, cloud properties, and even temperature.
We can figure out the temperature of an exoplanet by measuring the amount of methane in its atmosphere. According to the almost non-existence methane levels on HR 8799, its temperature couldn't be any cooler than about 1700 degrees Fahrenheit. But other metrics, such as the planet's apparent youthful age and the amount of energy it's sending out, suggest it should be about 250 degrees cooler than that, assuming our current models are right.
As it turns out, our models are wrong, or at least they didn't take into account the possibility of massive dust clouds on HR 8799 b. When those clouds are added into the equation, the data fits together perfectly and explains the 250 degree swing. Because this particular gas giant is one of the youngest we've ever observed and analyzed, it's quite possible that this extreme dustiness is just a natural part of a gas giant's infancy, which tells us something about the beginnings of our own solar system's four gas giants.
If you can't be at Worldcon, this is the next best thing [Magazines]
There'll never be a webzine to replace the late, lamented Internet Review of Science Fiction, but a new publication, Salon Futura, comes pretty darn close. The first issue includes smart essays, book reviews, and a heartfelt Satoshi Kon obituary.
Salon Futura is edited by Hugo Award winner Cheryl Morgan, who ran the awesome webzine Emerald City and is currently non-fiction editor for Clarkesworld Magazine as well as helping with the indispensable SF Awards Watch and ConReporter.com. The first issue, launched in time for Worldcon, features a great essay on innovation by Sam Jordison, Jonathan Clements' tribute to the late Satoshi Kon, Morgan's own essay on politics in recent science fiction and fantasy, and Karen Burnham's reviews of some recent short fiction that's available online. There's also a gorgeous cover image, R'lyeh by John Coulthart, which you can see a detail from above. And last but not least, there are interviews with China Miéville and Lauren Beukes.
It's well worth checking out, and supporting, a new fledgling non-fiction mag about science fiction culture — and it can help those of us who couldn't make it to Worldcon feel as though we're not missing out on all the cool conversations. [Salon Futura]
Thu, 02 Sep 2010 08:59:19 PDT
A "save the robots" movement in war zones, where robot death tolls are rising [Robots]
As the number of robots in the Iraq war and other combat zones have risen dramatically over the past five years, so too have robot death tolls. The problem? Soldiers consider these life-saving machines essential to their units, and the government considers their continued operation essential to their financial bottom line (a combat-ready robot can cost $100,000).
Sharon Weinberger reports that at a recent robot conference in Denver, robot manufacturers trotted out several new features for their soldier bots, all aimed at keeping them alive longer. Some may come equipped with the signal jammers that soldiers use to disarm cell phone IEDs; others may have lasers so that they can disarm bombs from a distance rather than getting close enough to be blown up themselves.
How ground-penetrating radar helps in the search for ancient bones [Mad Science]
Ground penetrating radar has brought to light ancient ruins, detected water leaks, and has recently helped locate a massacre site, all without anyone touching a shovel.
The traditional picture of an archeological site is a hole cut neatly into the ground. In that hole, people in tan outfits and wide-brimmed hats kneel with shovels and brushes, carefully scraping away at the dirt. Perhaps to one side there's a specimen table and to the other there's Jeff Goldblum talking about how scientists are so focused on figuring out whether or not they could do something that they didn't consider whether or not they should.
In reality, scientists often know that they shouldn't and so they don't (even if they want to). Sometimes a site is too large, to fragile, or too important to be hacked away at with pickaxes. In those cases, it's time to fall back on the old standby – waves. In this case, radio waves.
When a person shines a light on something, a certain pattern of waves comes back at them. Visible light waves travel relatively unimpeded through the air, but bounce off, or are absorbed into, most solid matter. Human eyes – with an assist from the human brain – have evolved with the ability to interpret the way those waves are bounced or absorbed and form it into a coherent picture of the world around them.
When a dolphin makes clicks or squeaks, a certain pattern of waves comes back at them. Audio waves travel through water. When they hit mass, just like light, they are either bounced back or absorbed. Dolphins have evolved the ability to interpret the way those waves are bounced back or absorbed and form it into a coherent picture of the world around them.
When a ground penetrating radar device emits a radio wave into the ground, a certain pattern of radio waves comes back at it. The radio waves, depending on their frequency, travel through certain kinds of soil, but bounce back, or are absorbed, when they hit other types of mass. The device has been programmed to use interpret the way the waves are bounced back or absorbed, and build a picture from it, the same way dolphins build a picture using sound or humans build one using light.
These pictures can combine to a three dimensional image that allows people to 'see' through soil. While they are gray and indistinct, the pictures can provide amazingly accurate information.
This is a needle hole sized leak in a pipe buried under the field of a football stadium:
The water affects the way the radio waves come back at the device, and allow geophysicists to figure out where pipes are leaking, even if there's no water on the surface of the ground.
There are certain conditions that need to be met for GPR to work. There has to be a difference in consistency between the soil it searches through and the object it's trying to find. It works best in dry, loose soil or dry hard rock. The depth is also limited to a few meters, and the lower the search needs to go, the lower the frequency needs to be, and the less detailed the picture is.
Nevertheless, GPR is a powerful, and noninvasive, searching tool. It's effective when it comes to finding the remains of ancient buildings under modern structures, or buried metal wreckage, but the most famous recent case of GPR being used is the mass grave of Duffy's Cut. Local legend had it that a number of Irish workers were buried in Duffy's Cut, Pennsylvania, after they had died of cholera. When people got curious, they started exploring the area where the graves were supposed to be. After years of searching they hadn't found any bodies. It was only once GPR was used, that they began finding human remains. Once those remains were excavated, it was determined that one of the skeletons they recovered died due to a gunshot wound to the head, and two others looked like they'd been beaten to death rather than died of illness. The newly discovered evidence makes it look like it was violence, not sickness, that killed many of the men.
