Just The Caffeine Talking

A Curious Omission

Like most people, I went to see the Disney/Marvel super-epic Avengers: Endgame a couple of weeks ago. It was good; I give it an A overall. This post isn't a review or analysis of the film. It's just one question.

The question is this: during the Big Final Battle with all the heroes against the villain's legions with the fate of the Universe at stake (again) . . . where are the U.S. armed forces?

Seriously: the battle takes place in upstate New York, on American soil and within range of at least two Air Force bases, three or four Air National Guard bases, two Army bases, and an Army National Guard division dispersed around the state. This doesn't even include any local assets of the fictional military/intelligence agency SHIELD.

Now while the battle might well have ended while ground units were still rolling down the New York Thruway, there should at least have been some aircraft overhead. It's especially odd given that three of the Avengers are current or former Air Force officers themselves.

This isn't the first Marvel movie in which major military forces have been conspicuous by their absence. The climactic battle of the previous film, Avengers: Infinity War, took place in central Africa — but there was time for various superheroes to reach the scene and prepare for battle, which means "mundane" military forces have could been involved. However isolationist the rulers of Wakanda may be, they surely wouldn't turn down outside help in the face of an invasion by aliens bent on destroying half the Universe. Ethiopian Air Force MiG-21s could show up, or U.S. Marines in Ospreys from Djibouti, or carrier-based planes from the Indian Ocean.

No doubt the fictional, "in-universe" explanation is that the conventional military units simply couldn't arrive in time, or were engaged off-screen, or something. But why didn't the moviemakers at least acknowledge the existence of real-world armed forces?

After all, the trailer for the upcoming Godzilla: King of the Monsters shows the big G stomping into battle against King Ghidorah with an escort of F-35 fighters. (As I commented to my family, the only thing cooler would be if Godzilla was riding a Harley and holding a big American flag. Maybe they're keeping that for the sequel.)

I think Godzilla provides a clue. Real-world military forces are very powerful. A couple of A-10 Warthogs can turn a column of tanks into scrap metal. A B-52 can rain down 70,000 pounds of bombs in a single sortie. Compared to that, even a mighty hero like Thor or the Incredible Hulk seems kind of redundant. And the more human-scale heroes like Hawkeye or Black Widow become simply insignificant. What can a guy with a bow, or a woman with a Beretta pistol and a taser wristband do when there's serious firepower around?

Godzilla, at least, is an indestructible city-sized monster with atomic fire breath. He's in the same weight class as a military force. So he won't be overshadowed by some jet fighters. They can join in the fight without reducing his star power. Superheroes get left in the shade. So the armed forces have to stay off-screen in Marvel movies.

Still . . . just a couple of computer-animated jets in the background, or a line about the army being half an hour away, would have satisfied my nitpicker's soul.

Unleash The Wild Hunt!

No, not the one with mythical hounds and/or Celtic deities crossing the sky on dark nights. The one with University of Chicago students taking a break from being obsessive overachievers in order to overachieve obsessively. Here's this year's list. Can you get all these things before noon Sunday?

 

And if you haven't got the time or energy for that, you could always read my book.

Hollywood Insider Gossip!

According to my Hollywood sources the actual title for Star Wars Episode IX will not be The Rise of Skywalker, but rather

Everything Rian Johnson Told You Was A Damned Lie

A Film by J. J. Abrams

 

 

Be Careful What You Wish For

It's an old lesson, but one we must re-learn every now and then.

Recently I began to suffer from "gamemaster withdrawal" after half a year or so without running any roleplaying campaigns. I was bursting with ideas for games, so finally I sent out a call for interested players, and drew up a "prospectus" of games I'd like to run. The idea was that the players could vote on which campaign appealed to them.

I kept it simple. The prospectus had six campaigns on it:

• "Unknown Stars" — a classic Traveller game of mercantile exploration in a newly-reopened subsector,
• "Beyond Tomorrow" — a D20-based "Gamma World"-style campaign of space voyagers returning to a devastated far-future Earth,
• "Against All Flags" — a more-or-less straight historical pirate game set in 1714,
• "SHIELD Stories" — a game of doughty SHIELD agents in a world of superheroes (essentially my version of the Agents of SHIELD TV show),
• "Lost Decade" — a Call of Cthulhu campaign about characters who have all just recovered from amnesia and must find out what they were doing over the past ten years, and
• "A Billion Worlds" — I kind of just threw this one in on a whim, a campaign using a fictional far-future hard SF setting I've been developing for a fiction project.

Most of them were pretty low-effort. The simplest would be the pirate game, since my own knowledge of the world in 1714 is good enough to let them just sail around and bump into people.

The SHIELD campaign was almost as easy, especially since I intended to let my players occasionally take the roles of the mysterious "Steering Committee" setting objectives and priorities for the agency's operations. Their decisions would determine what kind of missions Col. Fury would hand out to their agent characters. All I needed was access to a couple of Marvel Comics fan wiki sites, and forty years of reading comic books.

The Traveller campaign and "Beyond Tomorrow" needed a little more preparation, but they were confined to fairly limited areas so I could generate some worlds or places for the party to explore, and expand only as needed.

The Call of Cthulhu game needed a bit more preparation, but I had not only a lot of existing support material for the game, but also H.P. Lovecraft's entire corpus to steal from.

So, no matter what game my players picked, I could run it without a lot of effort. Easy-peasy.

Guess which one came out first in the vote? That's right — my unlikely dark horse candidate, "A Billion Worlds." For that one I have to come up with dozens of intelligent species and subspecies inhabiting a billion artificial habitats, asteroids, terraformed moons, and planets, with eight thousand years of history to invent.

Now, fortunately, I have to do most of that anyway for the new novel I'm working on. So the roleplaying game and the science fiction project can borrow from each other.

Maybe this is for the best, really. Low-effort campaigns don't test my powers at all. The Billion Worlds won't be easy, but I doubt I'll get bored with it.

A Cinematic Contradiction

Recently I was watching a video bemoaning the current state of Hollywood. I won't bother linking it — you've seen it before, or read it in print. Hollywood has no creativity left, it's all remakes and adaptations of older stuff. You know the drill.

I don't really disagree. I do think that we forget how much Hollywood has always relied on remakes and adaptations. It's possible to acknowledge that and still be a bit put out by how poorly Hollywood is doing it nowadays. When a film like The Martian or Arrival faithfully adapts its source material, I am almost shocked.

However, one point in the particular diatribe I was watching made me puzzled. The critic mentioned that one cause of the "dumbing down" of cinema is the increasing reliance on foreign markets. For big movies, more than half the revenue now comes from Asia. That means the films have to cross cultures easily, so no subtle depictions of social class dynamics in a mostly-black Catholic private school in New Orleans in the 1970s, because nobody in Shanghai really gives a damn about that.

Okay, fine, and true enough. Globalization is real and ongoing. One reason so many films are about punching aliens is that aliens don't buy movie tickets and won't boycott or ban your movie for showing them getting punched.

BUT, this made me wonder about a seeming contradiction. If Hollywood wants to make movies for a global audience . . . why are so many films based on old American TV shows, toys, and cartoons? How many adults in China right now remember playing with a Hasbro Battleship set when they were kids? How many moviegoers in India have fond memories of watching Lost in Space? Heck, how many people outside the United States have read any Marvel comics lately?

Can someone explain this seeming contradiction? If you want to appeal to a global audience, why not just make movies about new characters and save the cost of buying rights and the grief of complaints from fans? Surely there must be some rational economic motive underlying this, but I can't see it.      

 

If you want an exciting adventure which is entirely new and different, check out Arkad's World, from Baen Books. Currently on the shelves in your local bookstore!

Disaster Excuses

One common thread running through science fiction, almost since the beginning, is a concept I call "Disaster Excuses." A Disaster Excuse is some awful event used to justify what would otherwise be an unlikely technological project, journey, or social change.

For a long time the standard Disaster Excuse was nuclear war. From 1945 up to the 1980s, nuclear war could justify almost anything. The most obvious was a return to medieval or even stone-age society — too many examples to count. It was also used to explain oppressive future religions, paranoid underground civilizations, secret time travel, and fertility cults. As with most Disaster Excuses, it was a prime mover for the colonization of space.

But it wasn't the only one. Beginning in the 1960s, pollution and overpopulation became equally prominent Disaster Excuses. Again, an overcrowded Earth was often the justification for colonizing other worlds or voyaging to the stars. Draconian population-control regimes served as the rationale for any number of dystopian futures.

Overpopulation waned a bit as a Disaster Excuse, for a couple of reasons. First, the trend lines have gotten less worrisome as the birth rates in country after country drop to replacement level or below. Second, once writers realized that most of the population growth was coming from outside North America and Europe, it was hard to ignore the kinda racist aspect of that particular apocalypse.

Pollution morphed into Climate Change, and is still going strong. It also seems to have spawned an odd backlash against space colonization. Because various writers over the years used environmental destruction on Earth as the pretext for terraforming Mars or settling planets of other stars, somehow the idea got around that this was a serious proposal. Consequently I've seen a number of critiques of space colonization centered around the idea that "we can't run away from Earth's problems!"

Astronomical disasters occasionally crop up as Disaster Excuses — most notably in When Worlds Collide. They do lack the social relevance of other excuses, since you can't really show off your political bona fides by taking a stand against colliding planets or interloping black holes.

All this does raise a question, though: why do we need a Disaster Excuse at all? Surely colonizing Mars or sending spacecraft to other stars are things worth doing even if Earth is a perfectly swell place to live. I'd even argue that a peaceful and prosperous society is actually more likely to tackle large projects like those. A starving or war-torn world is too busy struggling for survival. The Apollo program was launched in the booming 1960s; the leaner 1970s saw massive cutbacks in space budgets. Right now we're in another boom era, so that eccentric billionaires can afford their own space programs. I think I prefer that to fighting over my next Soylent ration.

SEE THIS MOVIE

The new Apollo 11 documentary is amazing. There's footage I've never seen, and I've probably watched every space documentary made in the past forty years. Skip this week's crop of comic book heroes and see a film about real ones. 

The Philosophical Alphabet Inside Us

Let us return to those thrilling days of yesteryear . . . specifically to Restoration-era England, when a group of intellectually curious men began to meet at Gresham College to watch scientific experiments and discuss matters like how gravity works and whether blood circulates. At first they were informally known as the "Invisible College" (not to be confused with the other Invisible College of that era), but eventually the group secured a charter from the King and turned into the Royal Society.

The membership list of the early Royal Society is a pantheon of Western European scientific greats: Elias Ashmole, John Aubrey, Isaac Barrow, Robert Boyle, Giandomenico Cassini, Kenelm Digby, John Evelyn, John Flamsteed, Edmund Halley, Johannes Hevelius, Robert Hooke, Christiaan Huygens, Anton van Leeuwenhoek, Gottfried von Leibnitz, John Locke, Marcello Malpighi, Nicholas Mercator, Isaac Newton, William Petty, Prince Rupert, John Wallis, Christopher Wren, and a host of less well-known figures.

The patron saint of the organization was Francis Bacon — by some accounts the whole idea for a scientific society was inspired by a group called "The House of Solomon" in his utopian novel The New Atlantis. But the real father of the Society was John Wilkins. Wilkins was a Church of England bishop, who managed to navigate the tricky shoals of religious politics from the pro-Catholic reign of Charles I to the arch-Protestant Commonwealth period under Cromwell to the libertine Restoration era of Charles II without losing his head. He wrote books on cryptography, engineering, linguistics, astronomy, and a science fiction novel. But his unfinished lifelong project was the idea of a Philosophical Alphabet (or "Universal Character" as he sometimes called it).

The idea of a Philosophical Alphabet was to do for language what mathematics did for numbers: create a language, ideally one which was ideographic so that words and concepts would have a single symbol, in which the rules of grammar and word formation would encode actual physical reality. That way, just as in mathematics, one could learn truths by manipulating the symbols. So just as by adding the numbers 2019 and 228 we get the result 2247, in Wilkins's hypothetical alphabet we could relate the characters for "Water" and "Cold" and thereby derive "Ice." Naturally, this language would be highly useful in diplomacy, trade, and in communicating scientific discoveries to people in other lands.

More importantly, a sufficiently well-compounded Philosophical Alphabet would allow discoveries to be made in the same manner. By playing around with the characters for "Light," "Velocity," "Time," and "Gravity," presumably Isaac Newton could have come up with General Relativity three centuries before Einstein.

But of course the project ran aground on the fact that a human-created system of characters can't incorporate information which the creators don't know already. (Numbers are a system for representing information, more like an algorithm than a symbol. In the argot of computer games, numbers are "procedurally generated.") Quite simply, there is no necessary connection between symbols and the things they represent.

Unless there is . . .

The "language" of DNA is composed of nucleotide sequences. Those sequences in turn create segments of RNA. And those RNA segments create proteins as amino acid molecules bind to the RNA strands, and then combine into protein molecules. This is not an arbitrary "translation" system: the structure of the protein comes from the arrangement of amino acids, which comes from the sequence of the RNA nucleotides, which comes from the sequence of DNA nucleotides.

DNA actually is a Philosophical Alphabet.

And now a group of researchers in Florida have expanded DNA's vocabulary. They've come up with four additional nucleotides, to create an 8-letter system of DNA instead of the natural 4-letter version. As yet, as far as I'm aware, the team have not created a complementary set of RNA which could then be used for protein synthesis, but I know of no reason why they couldn't go ahead and try.

Think of the potential results! Sure, the most likely product is collections of amino acids which don't bond together into anything useful. But amid the mountains of dross there could be entirely new protein structures — proteins impossible for natural DNA to produce. Proteins never before seen on Earth.

By creating and rearranging the codons of the DNA "language" we can discover new biochemical reality. Bishop Wilkins would be proud.

Art Forms of the Future

Despite the portentious title (or pretentious, your choice), this is actually just a link to a video. Here are some musicians performing in zero-gee, courtesy of a plane flying parabolic arcs. I call this art of the future because I suspect in a few years' time we'll see something like this filmed in orbit.

Changes in Fandom: A Different Perspective

Judith Dial (editor of the delightfully un-redacted Conspiracy! anthology) published some remarks on the Amazing Stories blog about the shifts in fandom which provide an interesting "parallax view" on my own musings about status and social class in SF. You can read her post here.