Having seen large portions of several of the old and new movies over the Thanksgiving holiday, I can add one more to the list: Obi-Wan Kenobi is a despicable “hero”. 

Prior to the release of the prequels, I always had this impression of the character as being a wise and noble mentor to the young Luke Skywalker, a father figure whose efforts to help the latter learn his true nature and value are cut tragically short. In November I watched Episode 3 and most of Episode 4 back-to-back, and found Kenobi now comes across as dishonest and incompetent hack (or worse):

• His incompetence and inattentiveness regarding the young Anakin’s training and his failure to recognize the blatant, flashing-neon warning signs of the latter’s willfulness and disobedience led to Anakin’s temptation to disallowed romance and his corruption to the Dark Side. He was too young, inexperienced, and headstrong himself to take on such an important and demanding task, but he did it anyway, even begged for it.
• He walked away and left the maimed and burned Anakin to die, without properly finishing the job of killing him – finishing Anakin off was his responsibility, since his failures had led to Anakin becoming what he had become and because he was the one who had cut him to pieces. It was his duty to make sure the threat was eliminated, and having gotten to the point he did, and being a supposedly noble Jedi, it was his duty to exercise the virtue of mercy by finishing Anakin off instead of leaving him to suffer in agony for minutes or hours longer. This is where the “or worse” comes in – his incompetence let Anakin survive long enough to be rescued, but his leaving Anakin in agony revealed a cruel indifference to the latter’s suffering if not a vindictive satisfaction with it.
• When he first meets Luke in Episode 4, he lies to him regarding the fate of Luke’s father. In hindsight, this is as much a self-serving lie to cover up his own involvement in Anakin’s fate as it is the white lie for the not-quite-ready-to-know-the-truth Luke that it always used to seem.
• If we accept that his duty while in exile (as established at the end of Episode 3) was to conceal and protect Luke, how do we reconcile that task with the fact that Kenobi lived in a remote dwelling far away from the Lars farmstead, too far to keep watch on Luke, and that he had apparently never had contact with Luke for the first eighteen years of his life? Why was the Jedi master not training the boy from childhood to use the Force to protect and conceal himself incase he himself were to be discovered or to die? Again, incompetence…had Luke been better prepared, he would have been more effective in confronting the challenges that faced him.
• When entering the cantina, Kenobi would have been smarter to have used his “Jedi mind tricks” to persuade Luke’s two harassers to leave him alone rather than to lop off one of their arms and thereby draw unwanted attention to himself and his companions. Incompetence, and another instance of indifference to the suffering of others (specifically, others he has maimed with a light saber).
• Finally (though there are no doubt more instances to be found), Kenobi lies to Vader when he boasts that he will “become more powerful than you can possibly imagine”. It was all braggadocio – he never followed through on that threat.

It was all very disappointing to notice these elements in a character I used to like. But, it just goes with the territory when you’re talking about the Star Wars franchise.

UPDATE: Brian Preston responds, on behalf of science fiction fans. I should add for my part that I don’t agree with Shaidle’s attacks on science fiction as a genre, just with some of her criticism of the Star Wars movies. Some were good, and fun, but not great, and when you look at them with a critical eye towards character development and such, they really suffer.

I’ve been doing a lot of background reading lately as part of writing the sequel to In the Shadow of Ares, and this seems to afflict every book I’ve picked up. I’m slowly getting over the notion that I ought to read them before reading the book proper.

Over at AresProject.com, I explain how to do it via both Amazon and Barnes & Noble — it’s as easy as can be.

Over the regolith and through the catenas to Grandmother's house we go...

The TGGF program had brought 24 red roses to place at the gravesites on the opposite side of the Punchbowl.  The program crew actually had one of their men wearing a backpack and earplug walk through – infiltrate – our rose-laying ceremony hushing everyone.

It was a disgrace.

He ruined the somber mood and my blood was now beyond boiling.  Thankfully most of our vets were so focused on placing their roses they didn’t catch what was going on.  This moron laughed as he communicated with some other crewmember on the other side of the cemetery via his cell phone headset.  About this time, a caterer walked over grass and flat headstones, through our vets gathering, with a plate of blackberries and salmon for the actors to snack on.

Remember this the next time you hear some actor or director or other worthless but self-important celebrity whining about how they or their personal cause celebre doesn’t get the respect they think is due.

Corn’s sensitivity to the possibility that actions Americans do not anticipate based on the very different priorities of policy makers in other parts of the world could radically reshape the global picture animates his article on Germany.  He begins provocatively:

“If Clausewitz is right that “war is the continuation of policy by other means”, then Germany is again at war with Europe, at least in the sense that German policy is trying to achieve in Europe the characteristic objectives of war: the redrawing of international boundaries and the subjugation of foreign peoples….

Germany’s goal?

A constitutionalization of the EU treaties, which would irreversibly institutionalize the current “correlation of forces,” and allow German hegemony in the 27-member European Union to approximate Prussian hegemony in the 27-member Bismarckian Reich.

This is much more exciting than the usual bland pap about European politics one reads in the US, and Corn’s analysis is deeply grounded in what serious people are thinking and writing in Paris, London and Berlin.

Exciting indeed, but I’m not sure if that comment at the end about “serious people” is meant to be irony or not…

As Mead notes, Corn may just be getting over-excited, but it’s still worth considering as a thought experiment. And in my case, it’s interesting as fodder for a future history — if a resurgent Germany dominated the EU like the Zollverein and succeeded in bringing a demographically cratering Russia to heel in exchange for help shoring up its eastern border defenses, etc., what would that world look like in fiction?

NOVEMBER 7, 2500:

Seasons formed the rhythm of his work.

The passing seasons themselves formed years, but years were less important in marking the progress he had made. Seasons mattered more to nature, his focus and his purpose, yet sometimes the years intruded into his thoughts. Today, the calendar at the edge of his conscious mind told him it was the five hundredth anniversary of the most significant date in his life. A date more important even than his Uploading, a date which – unappreciated at the time – would change the face of the world itself. The sense memory of a smile colored his electronic thoughts. The seasons can take care of themselves for a few minutes.

Deep under what had once been called Cheyenne Mountain, the disembodied consciousness of Al Gore extended its senses across the world, and saw that it was good.

He had been studying rainforest canopy health in the Amazon basin when the significance of the date penetrated his awareness. The broad-spectrum image from the observation satellite was informative in ways his previous form could never have processed let alone comprehended at a glance, but nostalgia for his flesh-and-blood days moved him to limit his sensors to the human-visible range.  A mottled sea of lush blue-green foliage filled his vision, and a swell of pride surged through his quantum synapses as ancient memories were awakened — had he still possessed lungs, the beauty would have taken his breath away.  Herculean efforts had gone into conserving what little had remained of these rainforests at the midpoint of the 21^st Century and protecting the rainforest’s endangered plants and animals from extinction. Genetic advances in mid-century had allowed the resurrection of many species which had in fact gone extinct in the face of human encroachment and exploitation. High in geosynchronous orbit, his remote eyes zoomed in to a break in the canopy where the Madeira river met the Amazon, and he was rewarded with the sight of Boto dolphins leaping playfully from the swift waters.

Success with the Amazon project had led to further recovery efforts. A polar-orbiting satellite constellation fed him real-time imagery of polar bears frolicking on arctic sea ice – ice which had all but disappeared by the time he was Uploaded to coordinate restoration efforts across the rest of the globe. This view was always his favorite, on those rare occasions when he could take time away from saving the world to actually admire it. Drastic reductions in atmospheric carbon dioxide had been followed by a recovery of annual sea ice, and careful management of the new atmospheric composition kept the icepack within the targeted area and thickness limits.

He cycled his attention across his worldwide network of ground sensors and orbital observatories, taking stock of the fruits of his centuries-long labors. Bold light-blue swirls along the coast of Australia and throughout Micronesia attested to the renewed health of coral reefs, and by extension the oceans around them.  Throughout the western Pacific, the green caps and sandy outlines of low-lying islands poked up from the sapphire-blue sea, no longer threatened by sea-level rise. Looking down at Fiji, he felt a nostalgic longing – how nice it would feel to once again enjoy those broad, sandy beaches, to feel the wind in his hair and the sun on his face and the sand beneath his feet. That was no longer possible, hadn’t been for over four and a half centuries, and never would be again. But it was okay, he thought – some sacrifices had to be made to save the planet, and his physical body was the least of the sacrifices that had been required of him.

His work was by no means done, but he saw no harm in a moment’s pride in what he had so far accomplished. All of this, he mused, was based on the foundation of what had saved the polar bears: nearly 500 years of reductions and strict management of atmospheric CO2 levels. With the eradication of carbon-based industries and the changeover to wind and solar, it was possible to bring the Earth back into balance, and keep it within the limits established so long ago by climatologists’ reconstruction of what the environment was like before human industrialization. Those limits had been enshrined in UN conventions and served as the guideposts for his work to this day. Work which might never have come about but for circumstances which had seemed so unfair and unjust at the time. None of the progress he had made in healing the globe would have been accomplished, but for that strange twist of fate in 2000.

Had I won, he thought, the world would surely have lost.

An indicator interrupted his reverie. His power reserves were running low again, something he was prone to more often this time of year – solar generation was already down because of the shortening days, but it had been especially low for several days due to a cloud system parked stubbornly over the region. Once again, he wondered if it had been such a smart idea to dismantle the last of the wind turbines on the nearby plains, but he only had to remind himself of the millions of birds whose lives that action had spared over the past seven decades to confirm the greater wisdom of that decision. He sighed and prepared his systems to hibernate for the evening, so as to conserve what energy remained in his battery networks and flywheel clusters.

His higher cognitive functions began their scheduled shutdown, a strange simulation of drifting off to sleep. As he reflected a few more milliseconds on the triumphs of the past millennium, a profound loneliness crept into his fading awareness, one that always came at those moments when he wished he had someone with whom he could celebrate. He was always certain of the greater wisdom of this decision, too, but it was a loneliness he never anticipated when he concluded saving the world meant exterminating all of humanity.

It’s one thing to suspend disbelief regarding corpses rising from the grave and shuffling about in quest of cannibalistic munchies, but dead birds with the ability to sluggishly levitate would be something of a stretch. Especially if they were missing part or all of a wing or their tail due to decomposition.

On the other hand, it would be farcically amusing to see.

Last year, it was the double-header, and the time-lapse rig for the Iceland roadtrip. But after looking at some of this guy’s work and the toys he created to do it, I got hooked on the idea of a motion-control dolly.  I figured, I’m a mechanical engineer, right? How hard can it be?

Well, following his example seems to be a lot more difficult in the U.S. than in Germany. Finding the exact motors he used and an equivalent Igus slide were trivially easy, but finding gears and a gear rack to match have been frustratingly difficult — so much so that I’m giving in and ordering them from the same company he used, and hoping that the shipping and whatever import duties this entails balance out against the higher prices and half-assed selection offered by McMaster-Carr and other similar retail gear suppliers here.

The Igus slide arrived yesterday, and I was disappointed to discover that my mental impression of a meter corresponds more closely with four feet than three. But other than that, it’s a slick and simple piece of engineering:

The most fun part of all of this, however, came from digging into the motion control aspects. Ben’s setup used a simple voltage regulator to control the speed, but I quickly discovered there are better ways — specifically, using Arduino microcontroller components. It would appear that if you have anything that moves or needs to be monitored (or both), there are Arduino boards which can be adapted for the purpose — right up to navigating autopilots for DIY drones. And it’s all dirt-cheap.

I think this is going to be a fun little project, with lots of learning transferable to related follow-on projects (why stop at one axis of motion?).