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So, who thinks Carl and I were too sporty with the diggers and other robots in In the Shadow of Ares?

The humanoid robots are a little creepy in an uncanny valley way, but quite impressive for what they can do if even part of it is autonomous (it looks to me like the Petman demo involves someone driving the device in realtime, possibly by mean akin to motion capture, yet still with autonomous responses/reflexes at work in maintaining its balance). I found the robotic pack-mule the most impressive, probably because it (and the hexapod thing near the beginning) appears to be the most versatile and mature design – one can already imagine a production version being used in the field for a variety of applications (with or without cinder-block-tossing appendages). Or, imagine a future Mars “rover’ based on a similar platform, able to wander into more interesting areas of the planet’s surface than the current wheeled designs can reach.

The hexapod device really caught my attention, partly because Carl and I dreamed up a similar device a few months ago for Ghosts of Tharsis – more sophisticated of course, but something that is recognizable as a 40-year evolution of the device shown, augmented with the wholly-fictional (?) simulacrum intelligence technology. And if you thought the diggers were dangerous…

Posted on April 1st, 2013 under Entertainment, In the Shadow of Ares, Science & Engineering, Science Fiction, Useful Technology. Tags: Boston Dynamics, DARPA, robot, Science Fiction. Comments Off

Rand Simberg was watching yesterday’s press conference and offers more details and observations, and here’s their (still pretty thin) website. Should be interesting to see what details  come out of the IEEE paper.

A few observations:

• Yes, it looks like they will employ some sort of mission/habitation module.
• While they have a reference mission in mind that appears to rely on SpaceX and Bigelow hardware, there are indications that they aren’t wedded to a particular company or component (besides maybe Paragon). This gives me a little more confidence in the seriousness of the effort – it says to me that they are about the mission, rather than cool new hardware (or new applications of existing hardware).
• I just knew when I saw this headline that it would prompt howls of outrage from the non-cisgendered and anti-heteronormative: Fancy a trip to Mars dear? A ‘tried and tested’ male-female partnership in focus for space mission. And so it did.
• Along with the above came the usual (especially for a UK paper) whinging about rich people spending their money ‘frivolously’ when it should be flushed on human uplift here on Earth, and resentment that ‘we’re paying for this nonsense’. Which illustrates a peculiar (and increasingly common) envy-rooted mindset that holds private wealth to be interchangeable with government money: sure it’s their money, but I should have a say in how they choose to spend it.
• I’m not a fan of IM’s focus on promoting STEM as a reason for doing this. Why not just admit that it’s a grand adventure, and be proud of that? Focusing on that aspect of it will do more to inspire people (kids included) than turning it into the same sort of pedantic, boring, and cringe-inducing “science class” outreach NASA already does (something we lampoon in the first few chapters of In the Shadow of Ares). One reason most Americans don’t give a crap about what NASA does anymore is precisely because NASA presents its entire value to the public as STEM outreach and science generally: space under NASA is not about adventure and frontiers any more, or achievements or new possibilities or big dreams, it’s all about science for science’s sake, a labcoat-clad abstraction disconnected from the day-to-day experience of most Americans and from the big goals and larger themes science fiction has encouraged them to associate with space exploration. Science is good, but it’s not what compels. STEM is important, but severely limiting if treated as the entire goal vs. being woven in seamlessly. NASA’s approach is fine if it really is generating useful basic science and effective STEM outreach, and doesn’t pretend to have a lock on the business of inspiring or adventuring when it compulsively shuns both. If Inspiration Mars creates the perception that they’re only doing the same things NASA does just bigger! and better! and bolder! and with private funding!, they will fail to distinguish their effort from the already-ignored efforts of NASA. I’m dead serious about this – if they focus on STEM going forward as much as they do on their website at the moment, they will KILL public interest in the project.
• They also need to be very, very careful about involving NASA or Big Aerospace in their project. There is much to be gained in terms of knowledge and experience from these parties, along with access to unique manufacturing, test, and operations facilities, but there is also great risk in letting these camels entirely into the tent through lack of vigilance.

Posted on February 28th, 2013 under Economics, Science Fiction, Space Commerce. Tags: Inspiration Mars, Space Commerce, Tito. Comments Off

Thanks to a cheap promotional airfare and some friends willing to go on a weekend trip to the Arctic north, in the winter, on a lark, I now know what Iceland looks like in the dark.

Something like this…

…which reminded me of the agricultural bubbles at the Green in In the Shadow of Ares.

In fact, they’re a set of agricultural greenhouses in the town of Hveragerði, and despite their size are each about a tenth as wide and about 1/15th as long as their fictional counterparts.

CLARIFICATION: No, we did not actually go to Iceland on a lark. We used an airplane.

Posted on January 26th, 2013 under In the Shadow of Ares, Science & Engineering, Science Fiction, Settlement, Useful Technology. Tags: Iceland, In the Shadow of Ares, Science Fiction. Comments Off

Did you get a Kindle or other e-reader-capable widget or gadget or whoosiwhatsit for Christmas, Hanukkah, Kwanzaa, or Festivus? Boy, do I have the perfect book for you!

A 2012 Prometheus Award finalist, now only $2.99! What a steal.

And yes, we continue to work on the sequel. One of the downsides to changing jobs in December (along with the holidays, travel, etc.) is that the ensuing chaos disrupted the good progress we had been making. Another two weeks and things should be getting back to normal.

We do now have a working title for it: Ghosts of Tharsis. I’m not entirely happy with this title yet given the resemblance to the title of the bad John Carpenter movie Ghosts of Mars, but it suits the storyline very well (no, there are no literal ghosts in the book; it’s used in this case as a metaphor for secrets similar to but less passive than “skeletons in the closet” — these secrets want out).

Posted on January 6th, 2013 under Entertainment, In the Shadow of Ares, Science Fiction, Writing. Tags: In the Shadow of Ares. Comments Off

Bruce Webster is making some: The coming liberal meltdown.

Interesting. Plausible. Maybe or maybe not likely — who knows?

What I liked about his post was the element of prognostication from current trends and social/political circumstances, and how it resembles what Carl and I have been doing for the backstory for In the Shadow of Ares and its in-work sequels (the first of whose outline I plan to finalize today, given the crappy weather here in Denver). Whether or not his predictions materialize, it’s fun to take them as a set of initial conditions for a fictional near-future history — for example, the future-history potential of the Obama-Clinton feud:

• Imagine it escalating from the low-intensity political warfare he describes into an all-out factional “civil war” as 2016 approaches.
• Blue collarists, liberal-leaning Jews and Latinos, and other center-left Democrat constituencies line up with Clinton loyalists and erstwhile PUMAs behind Hillary.
• Blacks along with Progressives, ivory towerists, callow youth,  union extremists, and other hard-left Democrats follow Obama.
• Democratic women split between the two on similar lines, with Hillary not automatically winning the bulk of Democratic women due to Obama’s appeal to the more radical youth demographic.
• What happens next?
  • Does the Democrat party then split into two, or see the smaller faction peel off and join an existing third party?
  • If the party doesn’t split, does the internal divide render the Democrat Party nearly irrelevant for several election cycles, say through 2020, as they focus on factional infighting and sabotaging each other instead of running against Republicans?
  • Does Andrew Cuomo (as Webster hints) emerge as a “neither-nor” figure who is able to glue the factions back together while (under the pressure of emerging fiscal/economic necessity) bringing the party back towards the reasonable center from where Obama, Pelosi, Reid, and the Progressives have shifted it?
  • If not and the Democrats (as a single or split party) experience waning influence, what happens to Republicans, who experience show tend to drift from principles and platform quite rapidly in the absence of competition from an energized opposition?
  • Under such circumstances, could the GOP itself experience a loss of factional cohesion, with a non-negligible contingent of center-left, center-right, socially-liberal, and Progressive Republicans defecting to join Hillary Clinton’s “less extreme” new party? Would this result in a major two-party reconfiguration along the lines of the Whig-Republican split in the 1850s, or would we end up with a new equilibrium state involving three stable medium-large parties in place of two very large ones? If the latter, would there be an evolution to more discrete special interest factions akin to (say) the small parties in the Israeli Knesset, with the three parties becoming more explicitly coalition-based and the new equilibrium maintained via coaxing these factions to jump parties (difficult under the current party system, but since this is all speculative anyway, why not assume changes to it)?
  • If any of the outcomes above involving party splits emerge, would existing third parties (Libertarians, Greens, etc.) see greater influence? Presumably some not-insignificant portion of Democrats in the Obama/Clinton split scenario would be disgusted enough with both resulting parties to seek a third alternative. Same for libertarian Republicans in the diminished-competition scenario, with disgust with the squishiness and corruption of one-party GOP dominance motivating them to switch to the Libertarian Party. If the large parties get smaller and the small parties get larger, would the equilibrium necessarily stop at (say) three core parties? Why not four or five?

It’d be fun to tackle his other predictions in similar fashion (which I intended to do before spending too much time on the one above), but I’ve got too much to get done today.

Posted on October 27th, 2012 under Colorado Politics, Entertainment, politics, Science Fiction, Writing. Tags: future history, Hillary Clinton, Obama, politics, Science Fiction, speculative fiction. Comments Off

I managed to get in on the Colorado Springs showing of “Iron Sky” last night.

I won’t say it’s the best movie I’ve ever seen, but it certainly had a lot going for it.

First off, the bad:

• The dialogue was a little klunky through most of the movie, but once you allow for it it’s only jarring in a couple of places. It’s probably attributable to it being written and produced by ESL speakers, but it was a little irritating in hindsight since it would have been a trivial thing to fix: just hire an aspiring American screenwriter for a couple of days to polish the dialogue. (An American rather than a Brit, because the idiom/usage should reflect the Earth-side part of the story taking place in the U.S..)
• The screenplay was a bit inconsistent in its recurring gags and themes, for example the “Heil Kortzfleisch” bit and Washington being a racial token rather than an actual astronaut. Indeed, Washington’s whole situation was ripe with un-PC comedic potential that they seemed just a little hesitant to exploit in the way Blazing Saddles did (they appeared to be setting up an “oh they didn’t just go there” racial gag in the airlock scene, but…then…they didn’t go there). The “woman scorned” bit was completely hamfisted – it would have been far more effective to have had a few vague cues as to her motivations in leading the assault, and then follow up with the “did he suffer?” line structured in a way to turn the whole sequence on its head as the vengeance of a jilted lover rather than the defense of Earth.
• The acting was similarly inconsistent in places. This seemed to be a function of editing, however, as the actors involved did a decent job elsewhere.
• In one of the later scenes the albino makeup is poorly done, in that you can plainly see it is just makeup – the earlier shots are actually pretty convincing in that regard.

Now, the good:

• Overall it was good, silly fun. With a little polish on the jokes and dialogue, it could have been a Holy Grail-level classic. Just the premise of the film is brilliantly absurd, which even the characters on several occasions acknowledge (see trailer above).
• The special effects, sets, etc. were pretty impressive for such a low-budget film. They may have created a new sub-genre of Steampunk with the depictions of “advanced” Moon-Nazi technology – it was thoroughly retro, but in a clearly 1940s way rather than an 1890s way. Ditto the color grading – it was a nice touch how the backgrounds and background action in many of the lunar scenes were nearly monochromatic, like Nazi-era films and photos, as if things faded back into the 1940s as you moved away from the camera.
• While the effects of low gravity are otherwise set aside, the scenes of Washington’s escape attempt use the Moon’s gravity as a subtle sight-gag. Imagine a fleeing Jason Bourne leaping from one roof down to the next…but taking six times as long to get there…bellowing in terror all the way.
• While some of the humor came up short as noted above, there were a number of gags that were either subtly done (the Great Dictator references), unapologetically unsubtle (the Downfall bit), or just pitch-perfect (the Beetle sight gag and the use of classic Meier/Shaver UFO designs).
• The quantity and distribution of allusions was well-done. If you were paying attention, there were quite a few references besides those to The Great Dictator and Downfall,and they were fit in in unobtrusive ways (that is, they fit the flow of the story and weren’t clumsily thrown in to get a laugh). In particular, Dr. Strangelovemakes quite a few appearances.
• Renate Richter’s cluelessness about the actual nature of Naziism is exploited pretty well as a running gag. And when she figures things out, she is simply furious about it and takes action – she doesn’t turn into a moralizing, self-righteous, preachy Jane Fonda caricature who delivers long moral-relativist soliloquies on manufactured consent and the basis of all power structures in exploitative lies.
• The guy who plays Klaus Adler was an excellent casting choice. On the one hand, he has the same exaggeratedly chiseled features of the Ideal Aryan Übermensch one finds in Nazi propaganda posters, and on the other, his snarling grimace when angry is utterly creepy and the kind of thing you’d find in graphic-novel illustrations of Nazi villains.
• The parody of American politics is not totally spot-on, but it gets pretty close to capturing the venality, stupidity, and mendacity of the people involved. The satire of Sarah Palin seems confined to simply physical and cultural resemblances, and so isn’t gratuitously vicious and mean-spirited like a Hollywood production would have made it, and this is true of the political theme generally even though it’s clear the politicians are meant to be left-stereotypes of Republicans. Indeed, the real mockery concerning President Wagner and others is directed at general stereotypes of politicians: short-sightedness, mindless personal ambition, obsession with re-election, lack of principles, win-at-all-costs ethics, lack of loyalty to others, grandiosity, opportunism, and a woeful lack of knowledge about vital issues.It doesn’t come across as hackneyed Republican-bashing (like, say, Newsroom).
• While the music was a little jarring in one or two places, in many scenes it was amusing to pick up on a particular melody in the background and only a moment later recognize it as some bombastic Wagner piece.
• The ending sequence is totally unexpected – it can be read as a little preachy, but I give the producers props for making it a commentary on humanity in general and not (say) a cheap shot at Americans, or the West, or capitalism, or some other threadbare Approved Target of Hate which a Hollywood production would have used.

So again, not the greatest film of all time, but definitely worth seeing.

Posted on August 31st, 2012 under Entertainment, Movies, Science Fiction. Tags: Iron Sky, movies, Nazis, Sarah Palin, Science Fiction, Steampunk. Comments: 2

I’m not saying you have to. I’m just saying, you know, it would be nice, if you’ve read In the Shadow of Ares, to go post a (hopefully glowing) review on the Amazon page.

Consider it your good deed for the day. It’ll make you feel good about yourself. And who doesn’t want another reason to feel good about themselves?

Go!

Posted on August 26th, 2012 under Entertainment, In the Shadow of Ares, Science Fiction, Writing. Tags: In the Shadow of Ares. Comments Off

I haven’t seen it on the lfs.org website yet, but word is that In the Shadow of Ares did not win this year’s Prometheus Award.

But that’s okay. I didn’t really expect to win given who we were up against, and I’m thrilled that we were among the finalists – I never expected to get that far when we were nominated.

Posted on July 20th, 2012 under Entertainment, Science Fiction. Tags: In the Shadow of Ares, libertarian, Prometheus, Science Fiction. Comments: 2

Returning from a meeting in Cleveland on Thursday, I started reading John Wyndham’s Day of the Triffids (yes, the source material for the movie).

I’m about halfway through it, and it is so far a pretty decent post-apocalypse novel – one with a very different premise from your usual nuclear holocausts or zombie free-for-alls. The premise of the book differs slightly from that of the film (such as I remember, having seen it almost thirty years ago now – yikes), in that the titular vegetation apparently originated from a Soviet biological engineering experiment gone awry and not from seeds which fell to Earth. The meteor shower which blinded most of humanity left people at the mercy of the triffids, and didn’t in fact (at least as has been revealed thus far) “activate” or “awaken” the plants and send them on a mindless genocidal feeding frenzy.

While some of the events and characters’ actions are a bit twee, a lot of what they do makes sense in the context of a sudden, universal calamity of unknown origin. Wyndham spends a bit of time reflecting (through narration or dialogue) about the fragility of civilization, the tendency of civilizations to collapse, and the wryness of it collapsing in the wholly unexpected way it does rather than through nuclear holocaust or one of the other methods people had been fretting about up until the meteor shower. It’s the kind of intelligence one typically doesn’t find in books like (say) Pride and Prejudice and Zombies.

It’s also vastly superior in writing style to the other Wyndham work I read recently, The Midwich Cuckoos (the source material for Village of the Damned). That book was truly awful, filled with tedious asides and pointlessly overwrought descriptions of the bucolic scenery, as much a tour guidebook and ethnographic study of a small English country town as it was a science fiction/horror story. In the end, Wyndham’s treatment of the idea fell short of whatever potential it had — the movies are actually much creepier and better realized (even the Kirstie Alley/Christopher Reeve version). In contrast, Triffids is much more tightly written, shows a little more grittiness, and is far, far less twee, approaching at times a similar feel to Heinlein’s Puppet Masters.

Posted on July 2nd, 2012 under Entertainment, In the Shadow of Ares, Science Fiction. Tags: Day of the Triffids, John Wyndham, Midwich Cuckoos, post-apocalypse, Puppet Masters, Village of the Damned. Comments Off