Just The Caffeine Talking

Movie Review: The King

On Thanksgiving, after a huge midday dinner, we all sat down on the couch to watch a movie. We eventually decided to watch David Michod's 2019 movie The King, featuring Timothée Chalamet* as Henry V of England.

The three of us gave it a solid B+ — good acting, good filming, nice locations and costumes, bonus points for no flaming arrows. A decent piece of work.

But I'm left with a feeling of utter bafflement about why this movie was made. It seems to deliberately miss some key opportunities.

I can understand making another film of Shakespeare's plays about Henry IV and Henry V. They're great plays and have plenty of scope for cool stuff on the big screen. Orson Welles, Lawrence Olivier, and Kenneth Branagh have all taken a stab at the Henriad.

I can understand wanting to make a historically accurate biopic of Henry V, paring away the Shakespearian inventions to depict something close to the real man in his real times. That would be a fascinating film.

What I can't make myself understand is why one would make a heavily fictionalized version of Henry's accession to the throne and his campaigns in France, yet turn down the opportunity to use the language of the greatest playwright in the English language.

So we have drunken party-boy Hal slumming it in Eastcheap with his drunken pal old Sir John Falstaff. We have Hal fighting Hotspur in single combat. We have the Dauphin acting like Ming of Mongo — all from Shakespeare. The moviemakers even add some departures from reality of their own that Shakespeare never thought of. So we're not being rigorously accurate here.

But on the morning of the battle of Agincourt, when King Henry V has to make a speech to inspire his men, instead of using the "Saint Crispin's Day" speech from Shakespeare's play, instead the screenwriters have him holler at his men about how they're all about to die in order to unite England or some damned nonsense like that. You can almost see their morale dropping.

"Saint Crispin's Day" is a speech which would make even the most dyed-in-the-wool pacifist's heart race with patriotic fervor and a desire to thrash the nearest Frenchman. You can believe that Henry was a great leader if he could toss that off at his men and lead them to an incredibly lopsided victory over a powerful foe. Why not use it?

Once again I'm convinced that the tiny cog people have saved a misguided film from itself. The moviemakers made their incomprehensible choice, and made a movie which didn't need to be made. What saves it is the effort of the invisible multitude of costumers, set designers, historical advisors, armorers, and prop makers, who made it interesting to look at and reasonably authentic. They deserve all the credit.

*"Timothy Chalmette? Is he related to Harvey Marrero?"

Post-PhilCon Report: Oceans of Space

Last weekend's Virtual PhilCon went very well, and gave me a couple of 'blog post ideas. This is the first.

On Saturday the 21st, I moderated the panel on "The Oceans of Space." Moderating was easy because there was only one other panelist, the brilliant and charming Kelli Fitzpatrick. We had a pretty good audience, too. 

The topic of that panel was aquatic science fiction, and I guess I got tapped because I wrote A Darkling Sea. Both Ms. Fitzpatrick and I made up lists of ocean-themed SF for the discussion*, and both of us were struck by how short our respective lists were. There simply isn't as much oceanic science fiction out there. Which is odd, given that one of the taproot texts for the whole science fiction genre is Jules Verne's Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea. 

So: why is there so little underwater science fiction? I can think of three main reasons.

Number One: It's not science fiction. If you write a story of undersea adventure aboard a submarine, that's a sea story, or a "technothriller," not a science fiction story. Even if your tale has a madman with a futuristic undersea base, and super-tech undersea vehicles, that's still technothriller territory. Consider the works of Clive Cussler, who wrote undersea adventures for thirty years. His books included such things as unknown elements with fantastic properties, sonic weapons, a secret moonbase, and a vast array of apocalyptic plots. But Cussler's books aren't in the science fiction section of the bookstore. They're thrillers, ostensibly set in the contemporary world. Apparently weird goings-on in the ocean are normal.

Number Two: It's limited. Oceans on Earth are fascinating places — but they don't have strange new worlds and new civilizations. Quite simply, you can't really hang a novel on a newly-discovered species of cephalopod. You can put the story into an ocean on another planet (as I did) but that's a lot of work. Trust me on that.

Number Three: Symbolism. When you fly up into space you are literally ascending into the heavens. You are leaving Earth and Earthly cares behind. In SF you are soaring among the stars. But underwater? It's dark. It's cold. You're both literally and metaphorically under pressure. If space travel is a metaphor for liberation and transcendance; going deep underwater is a metaphor for confinement, blindness, and death.

So if you want to write a swashbuckling futuristic sea story, you can do it — but send the pitch to a publisher of technothrillers, not science fiction. If you want to write stories about alien contact underwater you can do it — but you'll have to create an entire alien world. And if you want to write a story with a big honking metaphor for death in it, there's your topic.

*Here's my list:

The Man Who Counts/War of the Wing-Men, by Poul Anderson

The Godwhale, T.J. Bass

Startide Rising, David Brin

A Darkling Sea, James L. Cambias

The Deep Range, Arthur C. Clarke

"The Maracot Deep," Arthur Conan Doyle

Dragon in the Sea/Under Pressure, Frank Herbert

Half the Day is Night, Maureen McHugh

The Face of the Waters, Robert Silverberg

A Door Into Ocean, Joan Slonczewski

OceanSpace, Allen Steele

Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea, Jules Verne

The Kraken Wakes, John Wyndham

"The Doors of His Face, the Lamps of His Mouth," Roger Zelazny

 

 

Godel Operation Now Up at Amazon!

My first Tale of the Billion Worlds, The Godel Operation, is now available for pre-order on Amazon. The official publication date is May 4 of 2021, but it's always a good idea to get at the head of the line. 

If you want a sneak preview of The Godel Operation, tune in to my reading session on the virtual PhilCon convention, at 4:00 p.m. this coming Sunday, November 22. I'll be reading the first chapter. Come meet Daslakh, Zee, the Penguin, Zee's Imaginary Girlfriend, and the other quadrillion inhabitants of the Billion Worlds.

PhilCon 2020 Goes Virtual

This year's PhilCon — the venerable Philadelphia-era science fiction con now in its 84th year — is going to be all-online. On the plus side that means no New Jersey traffic and mall food; on the minus side it means no spontaneous conversations in the hotel lobby, no room parties, and no basic human contact. But a virtual convention is better than none at all. 

Still, as in past years I will be participating, from my office in Massachusetts. Here's my schedule:

 

Friday November 20, 5:30 p.m.: Online Gaming: Not Just for Pandemics

Michael Ryan (moderator), Robert Hranek, James L. Cambias, Debby Lieven

The four of us will be discussing how the ongoing epidemic has affected how people play games -- will we go back to tabletops and rec rooms again, or is online gaming the future?

 

8:30 p.m.: From the Iron Bank to CHOAM: Business in Fiction

James L. Cambias (moderating), Anthony Dobranski, Elektra Hammond, Tom Doyle, Ian Randal Strock

A panel about the role of business and economics in fantastic fiction. How does a world's economy affect the stories one can tell? What does fiction get right and wrong?

 

Saturday November 20, 5:30 p.m.: The Oceans of Space

James L. Cambias, Tom Purdom, Kelli Fitzpatrick

I think I'm moderating this one. The three of us will discuss famous maritime science fiction, and how new discoveries in and beyond the Solar System may influence future ocean stories.

 

Sunday November 21, 1:00 p.m.: The Search for the Philosophers' Stone

Robert Hranek (moderator), Anastasia Klimchynskaya, James Prego, James L. Cambias, Elizabeth Crowens

We'll look at the history of alchemy, how discoveries in chemistry and physics changed our understanding of how matter works, and look at some other concepts which have shifted over time.

 

4:00 p.m.: Reading

I'll give con goers a glimpse into my forthcoming novel The Godel Operation, and the amazing far-future setting The Billion Worlds.

Ancient Alien Astronauts

When does speculative science cross the invisible line and become pseudoscience? That's a topic I grapple with when writing science fiction, and one which crops up whenever scientists air some of their wilder theories.

For example, Dr. James Benford recently published a paper on searching for alien "technosignatures" on Near-Earth Objects in our own Solar System. In short, he wants to look for ancient alien space probes. Benford is a scientist, and his paper got published in The Astronomical Journal. It's speculative, but it's Real Science. 

Fifty years ago, Erich Von Daniken published Chariots of the Gods?, a book asserting that artworks and artifacts of ancient human cultures contain evidence of contact with alien visitors. Von Daniken's book was pure pseudoscience, and it spawned a whole branch of pseudoscience with thrives to this day. His stuff has been debunked over and over but the idea continues to fascinate the public.

The maddening thing about the "Ancient Astronauts" pseudoscience is that it's not even crazy. The idea that the Solar System may have been visited in the distant past is entirely plausible. (Hence Benford's paper.) It's an interesting hypothesis which points to some very promising areas of research: detailed surface surveys of Near-Earth Objects, especially the Moon; radar mapping of other objects; the search for life on other planets; possibly even a search for chemical anomalies in ancient rock strata here on Earth. 

If Erich Von Daniken had proposed those ideas the SETI community would honor him as a visionary. But he didn't. His "theory" is based on ignorance and flat-out lies about ancient civilizations on Earth, ignoring mountains of solid investigation and analysis by archaeologists and historians. The best analogy would be someone trying to prove that America was discovered and colonized by the Roman Empire, using the architecture of Federal buildings and Caesar's Palace casino in Las Vegas as proof.

And speaking as a science fiction writer, I have to say that Von Daniken's ideas of alien contact don't convince me. Like most pseudoscience involving contact with aliens, it simply isn't weird enough. His alien "chariots" are too similar to 1970s aerospace technology. His visiting space gods have two arms, two legs, and a head on top. If he'd cited artwork showing entirely non-human beings I might be persuaded.

So what? A dude writes a book of crackpot science and makes a fortune off it. What's the harm? Why do I care?

Two reasons. First, the whole "Ancient Astronauts" pseudoscience has tainted the well for actual scientific research into the subject. Until the arrival of tech billionaires who were science fiction nerds willing to spend millions of dollars to finance searching for aliens, there was virtually no support for the search for extraterrestrial intelligence. It stank of woo. It has taken half a century for SETI research to overcome the "looking for little green men" stigma that people like Mr. Von Daniken helped pin on it.

And second, it's just wrong. Chariots of the Gods? is full of errors and misrepresentations — and not just about things which were disproved by subsequent decades of archaeology, but things which were known to be false when Von Daniken was writing. I'm pretty sure he knew it, too. Getting things right is important, or at least it should be.

One of the most dependable lines in the woo business is that "orthodox scientists" are too stodgy and unimaginative to accept the revolutionary ideas of the pseudoscientists. But that's actually the reverse of the truth. It's the pseudoscientists who are unimaginative, and their transparently bogus ideas get in the way of actual research into the speculative edges of science. 

I've always been fascinated and amused by pseudoscience, but I think the practitioners could do a better job. Do your research! Come up with weirder ideas! Who knows, you might turn out to be right . . .

 

 

The Godel Operation Is Coming!

The Godel Operation, the first full-length tale of the Billion Worlds, is on the Baen release schedule for May 2021. I'm already working on a second Billion Worlds novel and a short story. 

Best of all, we have cover art! Watch this space for new developments as the release date gets closer.