At the end of one's tether ...

"Life's an awfully lonesome affair.... You come into the world alone and you go out of the world alone yet it seems to me you are more alone while living than even going and coming." -- artist Emily Carr

You've lost your young child through a freak accident.  Hurt and without bearing, you are adrift from your own life.  Everyday living gives you little meaning or hope.  There is no solace in the words of others and you are, figuratively, at the end of one's tether.

What are you choices?  Give up, give in to grief, or to trust in yourself and move on.  Stop letting the past and the way you have done things limit what you can do in your future.

Gravity is a metaphor.  It turns that figurative isolation into literal isolation. This story of astronauts struggling in the hostile vastness of space is rife with symbolism.  George Clooney's character, Matt Kowalski,  represents the past that Sandra Bullock's character, Ryan Stone, must release in order to move forward.  Entangled in cords, dodging the debris of a space station damaged by falling satellites, the both of them are doomed to die unless one or the other releases himself and allows the other to fight on and hopefully live.  Clooney's choice allows Bullock's character to go on, to not be limited by his literal weight and the figurative weight of her past. When she finally gets out of her capsule back on Earth, she struggles to stand and finally gets back on her own two feet, reveling in the moment that is much more than a physical release.  It is an emotional one.

I could be way off on my take of Gravity.  Maybe I've listened to one too many reviews of artsy French new wave films or stayed up too late trying to find meaning and subtlety where it was never intended.  But I don't think so.  Alfonso Cuarón is one of my favorite directors and he is not a plodding Hollywood hack.  With his fellow Mexican directors and friends, Guillermo Del Toro and Alejandro Gonzalez Iñárritu, they have carved out a niche as original, visual and artistic talents not constrained by conventional American/Anglo narratives. Their movies are full of symbolism and allegory (Babel and Pan's Labyrinth most notably).  And it is my belief that Gravity continues that trend.

I have purposely not read, watched or listened to any reviews of Gravity (except my bud Wil) because I didn't want to be influenced by what someone else may think the movie means.  I didn't even want to see a confirmation of what I saw.

Sandra Bullock and George Clooney are stars and very good actors and do nothing in this film to change that opinion.  Clooney is funny and charming, as always.  Bullock is subdued, for her, but this serves the role for the most part.

I will not get into the technical aspects of Gravity.  They have been extensively described elsewhere.  Suffice to say, Cuarón has infused Gravity with a realism that gets about as close to what I imagine space would actually feel like.  I saw it on a normal screen but will be revisiting it with IMAX 3D in the near future.

So, why didn't it completely work for me?  Too much detachment.  For all its visual beauty, I believe it lacks a heart.  Something just kept me from altogether buying in.  I can't even quite put my reservations into words.  Secondly, with the movie being very short for an Oscar-worthy film (90 minutes), more time could have been spent explaining exactly why a doctor is installing something on Hubble.  How did she even end up at NASA?  I'm not expecting awkward exposition or anything, but it seems like a little more could have been revealed through her conversations with Clooney's character.  Lastly, Bullock's role seems just a bit too much like a trick role, à la Tom Hanks in Cast Away ... a role set up to present well to Oscar voters.  Maybe just a bit too much earnestness and not enough reality.

I'm definitely curious how a second watching may temper my opinion.  Like similar space movies, Moon and 2001, Gravity has a way of making real the quiet, yet ominous isolation of space.  And similarly, I didn't appreciate those movies fully the 1st few times.  Grade:  B

As usual, Mr Stachour at Journal Wunelle has done a bang-up job of a review of Gravity here.  Much smarter than I, a superior writer and possessing much more knowledge of life in thin air, I think you'll like his take.

2013 VNSA Used Book Sale

A sampling of my finds from our yearly trek to the VNSA Used Book Sale:

Sci-Fi

Red Mars by Kim Stanley Robinson -- a modern classic sci-fi author that I have never gotten around to and what is considered his best book

Cyteen and Downbelow Station by C.J.  Cherryh -- another "classic" modern author that I have not read before
Anvil of Stars by Greg Bear -- a sequel to Forge of God, which I've already read and liked
Fleet of Worlds by Larry Niven and Edward M. Lerner
Earthclan:  Startide Rising & The Uplift War by David Brin -- I have read other Brin stuff and liked it.
Science Fiction:  The Illustrated Encyclopedia by John Clute --This is a really nice coffee-table book with a fairly comprehensive overview of all science fiction (movies, TV, books, comics, etc.)
When looking for new sci-fi books, I let my own experience guide me but I also referred to several lists of the the top science fiction books of all time, including:

David Pringle's Science Fiction:  The 100 Best Novels
Sci-Fi Lists:  Top 100 Sci-Fi Books
NPR's Top 100 Science Fiction and Fantasy Novels

Science Non-Fiction 

Chaos:  Making a New Science by James Gleick
Quantum Man:  Richard Feynman's Life in Science by Lawrence M. Krauss -- Feynman and Krauss ... two of my scientific heroes. 

Not a Drop to Drink:  America's Water Crisis by Ken Midkiff

General Non-Fiction & Philosophy

Don't Eat This Book:  Fast Food and the Supersizing of America by Morgan Spurlock -- a companion piece to the excellent documentary Super Size Me
The Island at the Center of the World:  The Epic Story of Dutch Manhattan and the Forgotten Colony that Shaped America  by Russell Shorto
Letters to a Young Teacher by Jonathan Kozol
Towards a New Architecture by Le Corbusier -- I'm a modernist nerd and this is considered one of the "bibles" of modernism.

Postcards from Ed (Abbey):  Dispatches and Salvos from an American Iconoclast
Bertrand Russell:  A Collection of Critical Essays edited by D.F. Pears

"For me science fiction is a way of thinking, a way of logic that bypasses a lot of nonsense. It allows people to look directly at important subjects." -- Gene Roddenberry

The warp drive could be come science fact

From Space.com (Clara Moskowitz) and Discovery News:

"A warp drive to achieve faster-than-light travel -- a concept popularized in television's Star Trek -- may not be as unrealistic as once thought, scientists say. A warp drive would manipulate space-time itself to move a starship, taking advantage of a loophole in the laws of physics that prevent anything from moving faster than light. A concept for a real-life warp drive was suggested in 1994 by Mexican physicist Miguel Alcubierre, however subsequent calculations found that such a device would require prohibitive amounts of energy. Now physicists say that adjustments can be made to the proposed warp drive that would enable it to run on significantly less energy, potentially bringing the idea back from the realm of science fiction into science ..."

See more of the story here.

That's part of the wonder of science ... when the line between science and science fiction starts to blur.  I love the closing quote of the article:

"If we're ever going to become a true spacefaring civilization, we're going to have to think outside the box a little bit, we're going to have to be a little bit audacious,"

It's that lack of audacity that is preventing us from solving the world's problems.  We have possible solutions to things like hunger, global warming, energy and space travel but small, superstitious minds rule the day.  Respecting other people's right to their own belief systems is fine and dandy, but not at the expense of progress.  And the argument that religion is useful for promoting morality is laughable.  You cannot go a day without hearing of religion encouraging killing and hate and bigotry.

Let's be audacious and use rationality and reason.

Nothing the God of biomechanics wouldn't let you into heaven for ...

I watched Blade Runner the other night, for perhaps the dozenth time.  A brilliant movie, obviously, with deep musings on the nature of life and consciousness.  It mostly relates to how other things besides humans can have that spark of life.  But not just that, Blade Runner is also a study in what it means to be a human ... for humans.

What I've been struggling with lately is what it means for me to be human.

Gaff: [voiceover] "It's too bad she won't live! But then again, who does?"

Tonight, it got me thinking that all too often it seems like I'm just sleep-walking through life. Especially lately.

Batty: "Quite an experience to live in fear, isn't it? That's what it is to be a slave."

Fear of failing. Fear of succeeding. Fear of change. A slave to conformity.

Is this really what I'm meant to do? Does it matter what we do each day to pay the bills? I think it does ... and I always have. I've quit jobs that paid better because I do not like others controlling what I do. I like having the responsibility, good and bad, for the choices I make and the actions I take.

I'm doing a job where I have all the control, but am I happy? This is not what I see myself doing for another 10 or 20 years.

I jump in and out of the lives of those friends I consider close. With those friends I've been lucky enough to encounter on the internets, my output and interaction is sporadic.

As a person of 43, should I have this all figured out?

What does it mean to be alive for me? I think it means to be constantly learning, to be intellectually engaged, to try and make my little corner of the world better than I found it, and to be someone my son would be proud of.

I don't really know if I'm succeeding on any of those counts. I guess it says something that I'm asking the question.

"... All those moments will be lost in time, like tears in rain. Time to die"

Wibbly-wobbly, timey-wimey stuff

“People assume that time is a strict progression of cause to effect, but *actually* from a non-linear, non-subjective viewpoint - it's more like a big ball of wibbly wobbly... time-y wimey... stuff.” ― Steven Moffat (Doctor Who writer)

One of the merits of good science fiction is that it's not all about the special effects. It's about the ideas. Of course, there are directors that don't understand this. Michael Bay comes to mind. However, director Shane Carruth does.

Carruth made the sci-fi film, Primer, for $7000 in 2004. Hell, Michael Bay's hair stylist made more than that. We're talking Robert Rodriguez, El Mariachi, Rebel Without a Crew territory. Sleeping in your parents' basement, McDonald's catering style.

When you are making a movie for that amount, you have to wear a lot of hats. Carruth wrote, directed and starred in the movie. His parents catered the movie ... for real.

I've had the DVD for a year or two. I had heard a good review of it on NPR or some podcast. I can't remember exactly. But, I'm glad I finally watched Primer.

There are no special effects. The shooting locations are a garage and a U-Haul storage location. The technical dialogue is intentionally complicated, perhaps to obfuscate, but not in a bad way. More just to confuse enough to make the story plausible.

Primer is about 4 engineers making some kind of device in their garage in their free time. The way they talk about it, it is some type of device that will be market-changing once it is perfected. Two of the engineers think that that is all the device is ... something industrial and useful. The other two engineers, through extensive experimentation and fine-tuning without the other two, discover that it is much more: a time machine.

They refine enough that each can travel ahead in time a day or so. They use this to obtain stock information that will allow them to make short term investments and make money. The complications arise out of the fact that each time they travel, they are creating multiple timelines and iterations of themselves. These iterations encounter each other and confusion ensues. Add on to that the fact that the story is told in a style that is either non-linear (a la Memento) or such that you don't know whose timeline you are following. The ambiguity and causal confusion is what makes Primer, and these types of stories in general, interesting.

I can't get enough of time-travel/multiple timeline/causation stories. No one can honestly say that they haven't thought about what they would do or how they would change things if given the ability to travel in time. Or as the tagline says,

"If you always want what you can't have, what do you want when you can have anything?"

I can't honestly tell you where to find this movie. I think I picked it up used at a Blockbuster Video. As far as I can tell, it is not on Netflix Instant. Anyway, if you want to see it, and can't find it, I'd be more than happy to mail you my copy.

... of my youth

Doing a semi-annual purge of my garage, I came upon a box of my paperback books from my late teens, early 20's. Taking a look at pictures I took of them, you get a window into the mind of a shy, but ambitious young man.

It's not just about content of the books, which were great and informed my outlook, but also the cover art. The books are bright, abstract, inventive. All the things that my upbringing in podunk Iowa was not. Escaping into these books gave me the hope that I would not always be where I was then and the impetus to escape once I was able.

I was able to escape, but just not to where I thought I'd end up. Naive me, I thought I'd somehow venture beyond Earth's confines (all sci-fi geeks do) ... or at least save the free world from bad guys and bed the hot Russian spy. Oh well. I may not have done those things, but at least part of me went there - my imagination.

"It is not in the stars to hold our destiny but in ourselves."
-- William Shakespeare

Religion/Politics

Book Review: Darwin's Children

Darwin's Radio is the second book by Greg Bear that I've read, The Forge of God being the first. I liked both as they are both good examples of my favorite type of sci-fi: near-future hard science fiction.

Set in the U.S. but with excursions to Europe, Darwin's Radio plays like a plague outbreak novel early on, not unlike The Hot Zone/Outbreak, and progresses to a more traditional science fiction later on.

The rapid spread of the endovirus SHEVA is seen as a typical, but deadly virus that seems to threaten a whole generation of newborns. The story is told through the actions of the scientists and researchers that would be involved in the containment of outbreaks. One of the primary scientists is an archaeologist who sees a link between a mummified family of neanderthals found in a cave in the mountains of Europe and the current "disease". Another is a research biologist who first sees that this may not actually be a disease but rather speciation ... the creation of a new species of human.

The reader can tell that Bear really researches his subject matter and if you are not careful, you can get buried by the minutiae of whatever he is writing about. In this case, evolutionary biology and infectious diseases. The premise is that evolution hasn't necessarily always been a gradual progression. In human history, and in current time in the case of this book, drastic changes have happened in as little as a single generation. It's a radical idea that has been realized in lesser species, but not in humans (as far as we know). That would explain some of those gaps in the fossil record.

Now Bear is not saying that this is really what can happen, and he goes out of his way in the afterward to explain that the biologists that he spoke to say as much. But he fills the story with enough details and plausible science, that the reader doesn't feel it is far-fetched. That suspension of disbelief is generally important for me and why I have always tended towards hard science fiction as opposed to fantasy. Explaining away things as "magic" can be a turn-off for me when reading fiction. Not always, however, as I obviously love Lord of the Rings and greatly enjoyed Harry Potter. But, in general, I like that foundation in science. Perhaps, it's the scientist/engineer educational background in me.

Darwin's Radio explores hot button topics of abortion, internment, the role of women and mothers in society, the government's role in outbreaks, religion and evolution, just to name a few. I like the book's exploration of how many different people (scientists, politicians, citizens) may do things that they feel are right but perhaps for the wrong reasons such as religion, fear, and intellectual pride.

Darwin's Radio won the Nebula and was nominated for the Hugo (sci-fi's most prestigious awards) in 2000. These accolades were well-deserved and I recommend this book. I own the book, but oddly enough, I read it electronically on my wife's Kindle. We've been checking out a lot of books through our local libraries' digital collections and I saw it listed there. Wanted to give her reader a test drive, I downloaded it. I have to say, despite still loving physical books, I thoroughly enjoy reading on the Kindle.

I also have this book's sequel, Darwin's Children, and will certainly read it soon while this one is still fresh in my memory.

Things I like: Science Fiction

For regular readers here, this is no surprise. And I mean that I like science fiction in all its flavors: books, movies, TV, graphic novels. And it doesn't even have to be great science fiction. I've said this before, but I believe that even bad science fiction has merit. This is because even the worst science fiction is trying to make a point or send a message. It may fail miserably, but it's still trying.

Science fiction is allowed to address important social and political issues that traditional genres would not be able to without being considered preachy. Most recently we saw this with Battlestar Galactica, addressing torture, fundamentalism and terrorism, among other things.

My early beginnings in sci-fi were the novels of Robert Heinlein, Arthur C. Clarke, Isaac Asimov and Frank Herbert. As I got a bit older, Larry Niven became probably my favorite hard sci-fi author. It might be cliche, but for a brainy and shy teenager, the escapism of science fiction was one of the few things that brought me solace and joy for those tough years.

In my adult years, I gravitated to the cyberpunk of William Gibson and Neal Stephenson. But, I'm still discovering authors that are fantastic, like Greg Bear and Iain M. Banks, and fantasy authors like Philip Pullman and Neil Gaiman.

Obviously, as with all males of my age, one of the most formative experiences of my youth was seeing the original Star Wars movie. In those days, there was no Internet, no DVD's, and VCR's really weren't prevalent yet. Going to a movie theater and seeing something like Star Wars was an indescribable experience. It's so indelible that I remember that it was at a drive-in in Salem, Oregon and we watched it in the back of my folks Jeep.

It was through Star Wars, Blade Runner, the Alien movies and the books of my youth that my interest was cultivated. The 70's and 80's were, however, NOT the heyday of science fiction on television. You had the original Battlestar Galactica (which may prove wrong my theory of all science fiction having merit) and Space 1999, both unintentionally campy and embarrassing. I had no exposure to Doctor Who until I was in college. It's really just been the last 15 years or so that science fiction has come into it's own through things like the X-Files, the Stargate shows, Firefly, Battlestar Galactica, the new Doctor Who, and many other shows. Something that was often an afterthought in programming now has a channel dedicated to it (SyFy) and just about every traditional network has at least one program that could be considered science fiction.

I just don't find issues of science, philosophy, consciousness, religion, the environment, war, etc. being addressed in such an entertaining manner as I do in science fiction. I don't read a lot of fiction, but when I do, about 75% of it is science fiction.

Top 5 favorite science fiction/fantasy books, no particular order: Dune, Lord of the Rings, Snow Crash, Neuromancer, Contact

Top 5 favorite science fiction movies, no particular order: 2001, Star Wars, Blade Runner, The Matrix, Children of Men

Next up, tomorrow:  Bluegrass music

Dark Ages

Having Netflix Instant, I've been working through some programs and movies that I might not have watched otherwise. One of those programs is Stargate SG-1. I had seen random episodes through the years but had not watched a whole season. I liked the show but just didn't take the time to follow it. Anyway, I saw an episode (called Enigma in season 1 that had a line that I found interesting:

“We'd be colonizing space right now if it hadn't been for the Dark Ages. There was a period of over eight hundred years where science was heresy and anathema. Maybe they didn't have that set-back.” – Daniel Jackson on the reason for the Tollan’s superior tech.

The SG-1 team had found a human society that appeared to be at least 500 years advanced of ours despite the fact that their humans had originated on Earth (and thus should be no more advanced). Dr. Jackson was commenting on the reason for Earth society's stunted scientific growth. The quote is interesting for a couple of reasons. First of all, is it true? I believe so. Given an additional 500 or 600 more years, imagine the advancements in propulsion, computing, physics, etc. (assuming we haven't destroyed ourselves).

That's the fascinating thing about science fiction. Sci-fi poses questions about life in an entertaining way and broaches subjects that would seem controversial or preachy in another context. Stargate is by no means on the level of Battlestar Gallactica as far as relevance is concerned. But, in its own way, it didn't do too bad in that department.

The quote is interesting for another reason. Does it say something about the current state of science and religion? Are we working towards a modern Dark Age? There is rampant anti-intellectualism. Anyone that dares to to doubt the existence of God is pilloried. Science that doesn't agree with someone's worldview is dismissed. People of influence and power in our government and media make quotes such as these:

Rush Limbaugh: "Despite the hysterics of a few pseudo-scientists, there is no reason to believe in global warming."

Senate candidate Christine O'Donnell on Bill Maher's show:

O’DONNELL: You know what, evolution is a myth. And even Darwin himself –

MAHER: Evolution is a myth?!? Have you ever looked at a monkey!

O’DONNELL: Well then, why they — why aren’t monkeys still evolving into humans?

And on FOX News: "They are — they are doing that here in the United States. American scientific companies are cross-breeding humans and animals and coming up with mice with fully functioning human brains. So they're already into this experiment."

And the always entertaining James Inhofe, global-warming denier par excellence:

" ... much of the debate over global warming is predicated on fear, rather than science. I called the threat of catastrophic global warming the "greatest hoax ever perpetrated on the American people,""

"I don't have to tell you about reading the Scriptures, but one of mine that I’ve always enjoyed is Romans 1, 22 and 23. You quit worshipping God and start worshipping the creation -- the creeping things, the four-legged beasts, the birds and all that. That’s their (the environmentalists') god. That’s what they worship. If you read Romans 1:25, it says, ‘and they gave up their God and started worshipping the creation.’ That's what we are looking at now, that’s what’s going on. And we can’t let it happen."

As Cincinnati columnist Ben L. Kaufman put it,

"In a nation accustomed to seeking simple answers to complex questions and a culture increasingly driven by belief rather than evidence, scientists today often are trying to communicate with the willfully deaf."

Something to think about. If rationality and reason are constantly subverted while belief and mysticism are elevated, are we diving headlong into another age of stifled development? Can our society survive another dark age?

"Science can teach us, and I think our own hearts can teach us, no longer to look around for imaginary supports, no longer to invent allies in the sky, but rather to look to our own efforts here below to make this world a fit place to live in, instead." -- Bertrand Russell

Movie Review - Equilibrium

I had several friends recommend Equilibrium to me over the last few years. Let's see ... Christian Bale, Sean Bean (LOTR), Emily Watson (Breaking the Waves), sci-fi, cool gun fights. I'm not sure why it took me so long to rent it. It came out quite a bit ago, 2002.

Equilibrium is a stylish movie, obviously borrowing from the Matrix in look and 1984 in concept. One of its cooler elements is the fictional Gun Kata martial arts fighting style that the director invented, borrowing from classic Kung Fu movie gun fighting.

The setup: near future. War has been abolished by making emotion and feeling illegal. Citing the extremes of emotion as being the cause of all war, people are required to take shots several times a day of a drug called Prozium to make them docile. People are not allowed to own or view art, listen to music, read literature. It's peace in name only. Classic war has been replaced with the state as judge, jury and executioner.

Christian Bale plays Grammaton Cleric First Class John Preston. Basically, they are instruments of the state that go out and destroy art and kill people for viewing it. He's the best at what he does and has a high standing in the government. Seemingly by accident, he forgets to take his meds and starts to feel natural human emotions. The main thrust of the plot follows Preston coming to terms with his humanity, with what society is, and his guilt.

Now, I like Christian Bale as an actor, but it seems like a lot of his roles are one note, and this is certainly no exception. Here, it reminds me of Keanu Reeves in the Matrix movies. Partly, that's due to the story ... you are not supposed to have emotion. But even once he has stopped taking the drug, he doesn't sell me completely that he feels. The rest of the cast is pretty good. I especially liked Angus MacFadyen (Braveheart) as the main bad guy, Dupont.

I've read reviews of this movie before and they're pretty universally negative. The movie bombed in the box office. Equilibrium came out during the height of the Matrix trilogy and I think it may have been unfairly compared to it. But it deserves to be judged on its own merits.

Equilibrium hits upon quite a few weighty subjects including oblique references to the MPAA film rating system and Prozac. The influence of art and propaganda are explored. Overall, I liked Equilibrium. It's certainly not classic, but like most sci-fi, it brings something intellectually to the table that makes it worth while. There's a yin and yang to life, light and dark. You might think you are solving a problem by eliminating the extremes, but you are instead destroying what makes us human. It's that raw emotion that creates true beauty, innovation, and love.  Grade:  B-

"One of the things which danger does to you after a time is -, well, to kill emotion. I don't think I shall ever feel anything again except fear. None of us can hate anymore - or love." -- Graham Greene

Book Review -- The Algebraist by Iain M. Banks

I just finished reading The Algebraist by Iain M. Banks this weekend. Cyberkitten read and reviewed the book several years ago. It's a great review and I agree with everything in it. This is truly an epic book and does a good job with characterization and bringing disparate cultures and species together in a believable story. Rather than try to improve on CK's review (which would be futile), I just want to list a couple of my favorite passages:

"The Truth went a stage further, holding that this was difference that could be made to make a difference. What was necessary was for people truly to believe in their hearts, in their souls, in their minds, that they really were in a vast simulation. They had to reflect upon this, to keep it at the forefront of their thoughts at all times and they had to gather together on occasion, with all due ceremony and solemnity, to express this belief. And they must evangelise, they must convert everybody they possibly could to this view, because - and this was the whole point - once a sufficient proportion of people within the simulation came to acknowledge that it was a simulation, the value of the simulation to those who had set it up would disappear and the whole thing would collapse.

If they were all part of some vast experiment, then the fact that those on whom the experiment was being conducted had guessed the truth would mean that its value would be lost. If they were some plaything, then again, that they had guessed this meant they ought to be acknowledged, even - perhaps - rewarded. If they were being tested in some way, then this was the test being passed, this was a positive result, again possibly deserving a reward. If they had been undergoing punishment for some transgression in the greater world, then this ought to constitute cause for rehabilitation.

It was not possible to know what proportion of the simulated population would be required to bring things to a halt (it might be fifty percent, it might be rather smaller or greater), but as long as the numbers of the enlightened kept increasing, the universe would be constantly coming closer to the epiphany, and the revelation could come at any point.

The Truth claimed with some degree of justification to be the ultimate religion, the final faith, the last of all churches...

...It could also claim a degree of universality that the others could not. All other major religions were either specific to their originating species, could be traced back to a single species - often a single subset of that species - or were consciously developed amalgams, syntheses, of a group of sufficiently similar religions of disparate origin..."

The "Truth" is the prevalent religion in the galaxy. Of course, any description of this religion that may seem similar to Christianity is purely coincidental (right). What I like about this book specifically and the sci-fi/fantasy genre, in general, is that you may seem like you are talking about one thing, but you are really talking about something else altogether. The cloak of science fiction gives one license to explore controversial subjects stealth-like. We've certainly seen that in things like His Dark Materials (The Church, free will) by Phillip Pullman and in Battlestar Galactica (fundamentalism, war on terror, torture, etc.).

The above passage and the following one also show that Banks is well-versed in philosophy. In this case, Bostrum's simulation thesis.

" ... Any theory which causes solipsism to seem just a likely an explanation for the phenomena it seeks to describe ought to be held in the utmost suspicion."

The Algebraist is also just a darn entertaining book that doesn't assume that you take any more out of it than that. But if you want the added meaning, you don't have to dig very far. You will not find much better fiction that explores the importance of rationality so well.

Movie Review - Moon

Summary from Metacritic:

It is the near future. Astronaut Sam Bell is living on the far side of the moon, completing a three-year contract with Lunar Industries to mine Earth’s primary source of energy, Helium-3. It is a lonely job, made harder by a broken satellite that allows no live communications home. Taped messages are all Sam can send and receive. Thankfully, his time on the moon is nearly over, and Sam will be reunited with his wife, Tess, and their three-year-old daughter, Eve, in only a few short weeks. But, Sam’s health starts to deteriorate. Painful headaches, hallucinations and a lack of focus lead to an almost fatal accident on a routine drive on the moon in a lunar rover. While recuperating back at the base (with no memory of how he got there), Sam meets a younger, angrier version of himself, who claims to be there to fulfill the same three year contract Sam started all those years ago. Confined with what appears to be a clone of his earlier self, and with a “support crew” on its way to help put the base back into productive order, Sam is fighting the clock to discover what’s going on and where he fits into company plans.

Is he going crazy?  Is that other version of himself really there?  Bearing more resemblence to the existential sci-fi of the past than of modern crap like Transformers II, Moon is a welcome little surprise.  The story is by, and the movie is directed by Duncan Jones.  That name is probably not familiar, but his lineage is.  Duncan Jones is David Bowie's son.
 
Old school special effects evocative of 2001 and a general look not unlike that movie and maybe the inside of the Nostromo in Alien.  This was a low-budget independent ($5 million budget, I heard) but the effects are not bad.  They really play to the story of a man who has been alone on the moon base for many years (longer than he knows).  There are subtle references and similarities to 2001, most notably in the robot voiced by Kevin Spacey.

In pacing and theme, reminds me of Solaris.  It's largely psychological like that movie.  Don't go into this expecting a shoot-em-up Hollywood sci-fi movie.  It's contemplative, some might even consider it plodding.  But I feel it's essential for the development of the plot.  And only an actor as talented as Sam Rockwell could pull it off.  Sam Rockwell is great. His performance is more than a little reminiscent of Tom Hanks in Castaway in that his acting is about playing off himself.  I really think he is one of the best American actors out there but he doesn't get a lot of credit.

 Moon explores the nature of consciousness, loving oneself, loneliness, paranoia, and even the individual's role in corporations.

There have been some really good sci-fi movies over the last few years (District 9, Serenity, Star Trek, Sunshine) and Moon is proof that the trend is continuing.  Grade:  A-

"Why our 'amazing' science fiction future fizzled"

I grew up as a sci-fi kid. I imagined I'd grow up to a world with Asimov's robots, Clarke's trips to Jupiter and Heinlein's moon bases. The truth is not quite so glamorous, having the gritty mixture of high and low tech of something like Blade Runner and avatar-based personas of Neuromancer. Where are technology and our society going? Technology that should be freeing us is tying us down. Innovation that can bring people from all over the world closer together is pushing us apart in many cases. Instead of the world of the Jetson's with jet cars, I see us moving towards The Road and I am Legend - alone, apocalyptic.

A recent article on CNN's website, "Why our 'amazing science fiction future fizzled" talks about this:

(CNN) -- ... Why isn't the future what it used to be?

... "Scientists are OK at predicting what technology is going to happen in the future," Wilson says. "They're really bad at predicting how it's going to affect us."

...People's fascination with technology's imprint on the future didn't start, however, in the mid-20th century with shows like "The Jetsons" or "Star Trek."

Joseph Corn, co-author of "Yesterday's Tomorrows: Past Visions of the American Future," found an inflated optimism about technology's impact on the future as far back as the 19th century, when writers like Jules Verne ("Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea") were creating wondrous versions of the future.

Even then, people had a misplaced faith in the power of inventions to make life easier, Corn says.

For example, the typical 19th-century American city was crowded and smelly. The problem was horses. They created traffic jams, filled the streets with their droppings and, when they died, their carcasses.

But around the turn of the 20th century, Americans were predicting that another miraculous invention would deliver them from the burden of the horse and hurried urban life -- the automobile, Corn says.

"There were a lot of predictions associated with early automobiles," Corn says. "They would help eliminate congestion in the city and the messy, unsanitary streets of the city."

Corn says Americans' faith in the power of technology to reshape the future is due in part to their history. Americans have never accepted a radical political transformation that would change their future. They prefer technology, not radical politics, to propel social change.

"Technology has been seen by many Americans as a way to get a better tomorrow without having to deal with revolutionary change," Corn says.

Today, however, a more sober view of technology has sneaked into the nation's popular culture. In dystopian sci-fi films like "Blade Runner," and "Terminator," technology creates more problems than it solves.

"Battlestar Galactica,'' the recent television series, is a prime example. It depicts a world where human beings have created amazing technology that has brought them to the precipice of extinction. There's no Buck Rogers zooming blissfully through the sky.

The show follows the journey of a group of humans who created a race of robots called Cylons. The Cylons rebel, virtually wipe out humanity with nuclear weapons, and pursue the survivors through space.

Mark Verheiden, a Battlestar writer, says the show's writers pay attention to current events when plotting their story lines. The contemporary world is filled with the unintended consequences of technology, he says.

"There are so many things you can't anticipate when you create a new technology," he says. "Who would have predicted that the Internet would be taking down shopping malls and wiping out newspapers?''

In Battlestar's finale, human beings abandon their faith in technology's ability to improve the future. They destroy their fancy machines and start again as simple hunter-gatherers.

"At some point, you can't expect a miracle to come in the form of technology to save us," Verheiden says. "At some point, the miracle has to come from a change in attitude and a new outlook." ...

Faith is the problem. And I'm not only talking about religious faith. We can't rely on God coming in to fix our problems. We can't rely on technology fixing our disconnect with the earth and with each other. We can't rely on the past. Just because we haven't destroyed ourselves yet doesn't mean that we won't in the future.

Maybe BSG had it right, maybe we need to get rid of it all. You can certainly see some of the signs of this now: No Impact Man, urban farming. But the true answer is somewhere in between. Innovate, but not just for the sake of innovation. As Google would say, "don't be evil".

"I just read this great science fiction story. It's about how machines take control of humans and turn them into zombie slaves! . . . HEY! What time is it?? My TV show is on!" -- Bill Watterson, author of Calvin and Hobbes

District 9

... When I try to sleep at night
I can only dream in red
The outside world is black and white
With only one colour dead
Oh Biko, Biko, because Biko

You can blow out a candle
But you can't blow out a fire
Once the flames begin to catch
The wind will blow it higher

...And the eyes of the world are
watching now
watching now

Biko by Peter Gabriel

From the opening scenes of squalor and poverty in Johannesburg, you know that District 9 is not going to be some sanitized and overly clean piece of Hollywood sci-fi. Actually, my first thoughts when I saw these scenes was not of science fiction, but rather of another movie based in South Africa, Cry Freedom, about the friendship formed between a South African journalist, Donald Woods, and freedom fighter Steve Biko. Cry Freedom, from 1987, is one of my favorite movies and it was very important at the time internationally. The movie, and the book written by Donald Woods that it was based on, did a lot to awaken the world to the plight of the blacks in South Africa under apartheid.

District 9, which chronicles the oppression of a stranded alien race in Johannesburg, is an obvious allegory for apartheid South Africa in the 80's. At least it's obvious for anyone that cracks a book occasionally. I'm sure there will be a large contingent, perhaps of younger people, that doesn't understand the symbolism, but that's OK. The movie works on a visceral level also. You can understand the transformation of the main character regardless of whether you know what the movie represents.

The parallels with Cry Freedom are extensive, at least to me:

- the apartheid angle

- a white Anglo protagonist who is initially critical of the resistance but comes around to being sympathetic to them

- that protagonist is not only critical of the resistance at the start but also active in it's suppression. Donald Woods writes editorials critical of Steve Biko in Cry Freedom. In District 9, a corporate operative under orders, Wikus Van De Merwe, seeks to relocate the stranded aliens.

- each performs a selfless act that endangers himself so that the resistance can escape in some manner ... whether it is literally in District 9 or through words in Cry Freedom.

- the character of Stephen Biko and the main alien in District 9, Christopher Johnson, seem initially like cruel and arbitrary terrorists but are actually brave advocates for their people.

- the resistance is dehumanized by their containment, their abuse, and the derogatory manner in which they are talked about. They are made to seem as though they were less than a person.

In every case District 9 does a great job of driving the symbolism home. It's cast is of no-name actors, though I recognized a few from Peter Jackson movies. Peter Jackson produced District 9 for his protege, Neill Blomkamp. They were initially going to work on a big-screen adaption of Halo, but that fell through and Jackson offered Blomkamp $30 million to make a movie on whatever subject he wanted. District 9 is the result. Considering it made back it's investment in the very first weekend, Jackson seems to be continuing his artistic lucky streak.

Now District 9 is not going to be everyone's cup of tea. I've heard some people complain about the extensive use of hand-held cameras. It can be nauseating at times if you are not prepared.

Others have complained that the apartheid symbolism is too obvious. If this movie was made in the 80's, I'd maybe agree with them. But it's made 25 years later. Sure, you could have set it in a different part of the world, but the director is from South Africa. He is making a movie that tells of his personal experience. You cannot criticize him for that.

The violence, gore, and moral ambiguity of some of the characters are sticking points for yet others. We've gotten into this discussion on another blog that I participate in, here. I won't belabor the points I made there, but my main point is that true art should be a reflection of the real world. It should represent some kind of truth. Not necessarily a pleasant truth, but one we should hear. Life isn't black and white and nobody is "pure". District 9 is just a representation of that fact. But District 9 is not a history lesson. It's still entertainment.

The movie may seem hard for some people to watch. How could humans possibly treat an alien species this way? You know how ... the same way in which they treat people of a different skin color or of a different religion. We've done it throughout history. We continue to do it. If you can't stomach this, then how can you stomach Gitmo, the Iraq war, Afghanistan? The point of good art is to get you to look at something in a different way, from a different perspective. By showing how we treat an alien race, hopefully this will show how we treat each other. But that's just my two-cents worth. Go see this movie, you won't come out of it apathetic. And while you're at it, check out Cry Freedom. Grade: A

Book Review: The Road

Father and son walking The Road in a post-apocalyptic world. We don't know the cause of the devastation. We can infer from the telling of the story that it has been many years since it happened (maybe 5 or more). All plant and animal life (save humans) are dead. The landscape is permeated with ash. The blocking of the sun's rays by the ash has rendered the planet cold.

The goal of their trek along "the road" -- getting to the coast. What awaits them, they don't know. But it is a goal. They live on scavenged cans of fruit from abandoned houses. They spend their days hiding from fellow travelers on the road. Some may be good ... others they know are bad.

It's a the story of a man's love for his son. What are you willing to do to save your son? And not just in the sense of life and death. How do you save his soul from the horrors he sees and has to endure?

You could call this a science fiction story, though many have tried to say it is not. It is not an environmental book, but it's not hard to take an environmental message from it. They're basically living on borrowed time in a world where the rest of the ecosystem has vanished. Though not inhabited with the zombies of another similar world's end tale, I Am Legend, the cannibals of this world are just as scary.

Written by Cormac McCarthy of No Country for Old Men and All the Pretty Horses fame, the author says more with less. He's effective with creating terror from the silences between events instead of the events themselves. Behind every shuttered window or blocked door, you steel yourself for the monster behind it. When it isn't there, you know you should feel relieved but like the characters in the story you know that they are only prolonging the inevitable. They almost crave the end because it will cease the agony of not knowing.

This is not a pleasant book to read, though it is not a hard read. The pleasures are fleeting and abstract. But it is well-written and The Road will stick with you. McCarthy has an odd writing style without quotes, apostrophes, or even most punctuation. It is dry but will go into highly poetic and symbolic flourishes, most of which I can't even pretend to understand. One of my favorites:

“No lists of things to be done. The day providential to itself. The hour. There is no later. All things of grace and beauty such that one holds them to one’s heart have a common provenance in pain. Their birth in grief and ashes. So, he whispered to the sleeping boy, I have you.”

That's the type of writing that we all aspire to, but few attain.

Like other McCarthy stories, The Road doesn't have a tidy ending. But, life doesn't really have a tidy ending. A movie of the book is coming out this fall, starring Viggo Mortensen. Hopefully, they won't Hollywoodize it. The power of the story comes from it's bleakness. I recommend this book.

Sci-Fi Movie Reviews

I am so far behind on movie reviews. Not behind on watching new movies, mind you ... just on reviewing them. I've been going to movies like a mad man. Anyway, I'm going to try and break it up into genres. First up are all the sci-fi or comic book adaptation movies that I've seen lately, oldest first:

X-Men Origins: Wolverine - As you would expect, this movie establishes the origins of the Wolverine character, from his birth in Canada in the 1800's, through his involvement in all the major wars and finally as part of a government group of mutants. The background is more interesting than the meandering story of the group of mutants. I'd explain it to you if I understood it. It's not that it's deep or complicated ... it's that it's contradictory and not well-paced.

I thought the special effects were not that great. Specifically, Wolverine's blades's effects were not seemless. I could clearly see it shifting on his hands. With the state of the art computer effects that movies have now, there is no excuse for that.

Ryan Reynolds was good, sarcastically funny as usual, but not enough lines. Liev Shreiber is a good actor, but I don't think his role as Sabretooth really required any talent. It seems like the movie was more concerned with establishing characters that could have their own spinoff movies, like Gambit. But they were just thrown in haphazard and didn't really have anything to do with the plot. Wait ... there was no plot.

The movie is full of good actors like Jackman and Danny Huston, but they're stuck doing stupid things and saying stupid stuff. The dialogue was iffy, even for a comic book movie.

I'm not saying it's a terrible movie, but in this age of comic book adaptations standing on their own as good movies (Iron Man, Dark Knight), you have to bring it better than this. This movie is not as good as any of the X-Men movies, which weren't exactly high art themselves. Grade: C-

Star Trek -- You could probably call this Star Trek Origins. The movie's goal of establishing a backstory like X-Men, however, would be the only similarity with that movie. In every aspect where X-Men falls short, Star Trek hits it out of the park.

Star Trek establishes how all of the Enterprise characters we know from the original series (and several bad movies) get to be on the Enterprise. It's a story point that has never been explored in depth, just hinted at. By doing this, we're released from having to use crusty old actors. All of the young(er) actors that they brought in to fill the roles are outstanding. Especially in the roles of Kirk (Chris Pine) and Spock (Zachary Quinto), they had to make sure that they got good performances. And they did. The characteristic bravado and charm of Shatner is there in Pine, but he's not mimicking him at all. He makes the role his own. Quinto takes the best traits of Nimoy but, again, inhabits the role. The other two performances I want to make note of are Karl Urban (LOTR, Bourne Supremacy) as Bones and Simon Pegg (Shawn of the Dead) as Scotty. They are both hilarious. But not in a campy way.

The movie as a whole is not camp at all. It makes a nod to some catchphrases that we all know, but this is not an inside-joke "wink, wink, nudge, nudge" type movie at all. It stands on it's own. If you had never seen a Star Trek movie or series, this would still be an entertaining movie. The special effects are nice, but at no point are they the point of the story, like in a George Lucas movie. Star Trek is much more about character development. As I mentioned before, several moments are funny, but just as many are touching, particularly the opening scene with Kirk's father. I'm not ashamed to admit that I might have welled up a bit on that one. Plus, there are some definite sexy moments.

I could get into the details of the movie, but that's not what I really do with my reviews. I don't want to ruin it, I just want to give my impressions. Suffice to say, there is some time travel, some Romulans and maybe a visit by someone we know. The familiar directing/writing/producing team of J.J. Abrams, Roberto Orci, Alex Kurtzman, Damon Lindenof, Bryan Burk (all of Fringe and Lost fame) does a great job with the film and I'm excited to see what the next film holds. Grade: A

Terminator Salvation -- This is a fairly dark, thematically and literally, account of John Connor in the future as an adult. Whereas Star Trek didn't rely on any previous knowledge, Terminator Salvation wouldn't really make a lot of sense if you hadn't at least seen Terminator and T2 (I don't think anyone saw T3).

Christian Bale, an actor I like a lot, plays John Connor. He brings to it his normal intensity and I think he does a good job. Bryce Dallas Howard (Spiderman) plays his wife but is underused. There are some other bit actors but the two I would highlight would be Anton Yelchin (Star Trek) as the young Kyle Reese (the Michael Biehn character in Terminator) and Sam Worthington as a terminator that is not aware that he is a terminator. Both actors are very good.

The movie is loud, but that's to be expected since it's really about them fighting huge robots in a post-apocalyptic world. But, in between explosions, the movie does a decent job of exploring the philosophical concept of what really makes us human? Is it flesh and blood? Is it a soul? Can machines have a soul? Etc. It's the combination of effects and philosophy that have made the previous movies interesting. And Terminator Salvation does a serviceable job of continuing it. Nothing great. Not as good as the first two movies, but much better than the third. Grade: B-

Nerd-dom Sacred Cows

This last week I saw Watchmen and finished the book, Dune: The Butlerian Jihad by Brian Herbert and Kevin Anderson. Not really related, you say. You're probably right, I say. But humor me ... I find it amusing to try and link disparate things. It gives me an excuse to do a blog post.

My premise is that there are several sci-fi/comic/fantasy artistic sacred cows out there that other artists have been reluctant to adapt or expand upon because of the anticipated backlash from "fanboys".

The first of those "sacred cows" that I'm going to discuss is the original Dune by Frank Herbert. It is one of the classic sci-fi novels and probably my favorite book of all time. I read that book and the others in the original series when I was in my teens. Loved 'em.


Starting in the late '90's, Frank Herbert's son Brian, along with co-author Kevin Anderson, expanded upon a lot of the back story that is mentioned when you read Dune. A lot of the information was firsthand from Brian's own conversations with his dad before he passed away and from his dad's notes. Since that time, they've written about 10 books, I believe.

While it is not the original Dune, and lacks the artistry of Frank Herbert, it's still quality sci-fi and serves the purpose of illuminating a lot of events and characters mentioned in Dune. These books chronicle events thousands of years before the events of Dune. I don't think it takes away from the original at all. I'm actually looking forward to rereading Dune with the added info.

With this generation of fanboys, Alan Moore's graphic novel, Watchmen, is held in even higher regard than Dune. A movie adaptation has been bouncing around for years with directors as diverse as Terry Gilliam, Darren Arronofsky and Paul Greengrass attached. Much in the same way that the LOTR movies were entertaining, Watchmen adds on to the world of the graphic novel without taking away from it. They are not meant as replacements but more as one fan's interpretation. And Zack Snyder is certainly a respectful, knowledgeable fan in the same way Peter Jackson was. While the Tolkien family viewed the LOTR movies more favorably than Alan Moore views Watchmen, that says more about Moore than it does about the movie. Moore does not even watch the adaptations of his novels and is openly hostile towards them.

I don't think that Snyder changed anything drastically that hurt the movie overall. Some of the flashbacks to the older super heroes were done in the intro. The comic within a comic about the sailor from a couple of hundred years ago is not included. How could it? It really wouldn't make any sense unless you had read the graphic novel. As it is, I'm sure that there are a lot of people that have seen the movie that don't understand everything because they haven't read it.

The casting in the movie is fine with the high points being Billy Crudup as Dr. Manhattan and Patrick Wilson as the Nite Owl II, but especially Jackie Earle Haley as Rorschach. He's fantastic. The low point being Malin Akerman as Silk Spectre II. She may be nice to look at, but she can't act.


The look of the movie is very faithful to the novel ... almost shot for shot. Snyder is the right guy to adapt graphic novels as his previous one, 300, did a great job with the look also.

The ending was changed a bit but there has always been some criticism that that was one of the weaknesses of the original story. I had no problem with the change.

So, overall, for fans of Dune, I recommend the Brian Herbert/Kevin Anderson collaborations. And for fans of the Watchman graphic novel, I do recommend the movie. Fans of all types need to lighten up a bit and not hold things quite so sacred. You're missing out on truly entertaining stuff. And just because you may enjoy an updating or reinterpretation of a story, doesn't mean the original is in any way diminished.

"Sacred cows make the best hamburger" -- Mark Twain

Book Reviews

All Tomorrow's Parties by William Gibson

I just finished reading All Tomorrow's Parties by William Gibson.

Ostensibly the culmination of the "Bridge" trilogy (the 2nd of which I'd already read, Idoru, but I've not yet read Virtual Light. They are not so much sequels as successive novels chronologically set in the same environment and sharing many of the same characters.

Like most Gibson works, you're exposed to a world that seems to be in the near future and has a lot of elements of our current world. He's so meticulous in the details and almost poetic in his writing style. It always takes me a few chapters in a Gibson book to get in the rhythm of it. But once I do, it's hard for me to put them down.

All Tomorrow's Parties explores the technologies that are just in the process of emerging and have not yet formed the world that is familiar in novels like Neuromancer. It's not necessarily the same future as that of Neuromancer but seems to indicate a move in that direction. The book also delves a lot into the nature of data patterns, a subject that occurs in a lot of his books, most notably Pattern Recognition.

One of the things I like about Gibson is the Blade Runner dirtiness to it. Even though his stories are about computers and virtual worlds, there is a real world earthiness to them. And a lot of punk and underworld references.

There are other "cyberpunk" novelists, but Gibson is by far the best and generally considered the original. About the only other author of this genre that I really read is Neal Stephenson. I've heard good things about Bruce Sterling (who has collaborated with Gibson) but have not had the chance to read him yet, though I do have a few of his books.

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Watchmen by Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons



I've come really late into the graphic novel genre. I was by no means a comic book kid growing up. I was a sci-fi kid and just didn't get the attraction of comic books. Naturally assuming their subject matter to be that of Saturday morning cartoons, I dismissed them out of hand. Kinda figured that only goobers who didn't like reading words bothered with 'em. Considering how much of a social outcast I was, I probably shouldn't have been casting aspersions.

With Watchmen being made into a movie and with the film success of renderings of graphic novels such as 300, V for Vendetta (also by Moore), Sin City, etc., I figured it was time. And from all that I had read, Watchmen was the perfect place to start.

The Watchmen refer to a group of superheroes in an alternate America. Where it diverges from a lot of superhero stories is in the development of the characters. These are deeply flawed people who don't always have the noblest of intentions or methods. In the same manner that Unforgiven deconstructs the Western, Watchmen is very much a revisionist comic.

It has a very unique narrative style that intersperses the main story with fictional supporting documents. Almost like a case file or dossier.

There are a lot of political and sociological elements in the story and like V for Vendetta, you can certainly find elements common with our current world, even though this story is over 20 years old.

Comic book readers certainly don't have to be told about Watchmen. I'm sure they've all read it. But if you are new to the graphic novel and comic book area, take a look at this one. You won't be disappointed.

Sunshine

First of all, Sunshine had something going for it by having Danny Boyle as the director. Admittedly not the first person you'd think of to direct a sci-fi movie, but he does a nice job. He directed one of my all-time favorites, Trainspotting, and has other good movies on his resume, Shallow Grave, 28 Days Later, etc. Anyway, I'd heard about the movie when it was in theaters but never got around to seeing it. I was at Blockbuster this week and bought several used DVD's including this one, Once, and American Gangster (I'll try and watch and review those two later this week).

The premise: "50 years into the future, the Sun begins to die, and Earth is dying as a result. A team of astronauts are sent to revive the Sun - but the mission fails. Seven years later, a new team are sent to finish the mission as they are Earth's last hope.(IMDb)

It looks good, has a nice cast of foreign actors playing American (Cillian Murphy, Rose Byrne, Michelle Yeoh) and does what all good sci-fi movies (and books) should do - ask questions not just about science, but about the human condition. Namely:

- What role should man take in controlling nature?
- Is our existence pre-ordained?
- Is the wonder of nature and our universe the "face of god" or just something else for us to study and understand?
- What effects do isolation have on the mind and our ability to deal with others?

As they near the sun, it comes to represent not just a physical entity that they must deal with but, to some of the crew members, a spiritual one. The sun is really the source of life on our planet and as such comes to represent a "maker" of sorts. There are some moments of suspense and action, but it's the moments of psychological tension that really propel the movie.

Like a lot of science fiction movies that involve a long mission, closed quarters, a computer and a small crew, there are undeniable similarities to 2001. That says more about how seminal 2001 was than that Sunshine is copying it.

Now, I've said before that I like all sci-fi movies, even bad ones, because they all, by the very nature of sci-fi, aspire to be more. But I like Sunshine not just because it is sci-fi, but because it is genuinely a good movie. Grade: B

"Three things cannot be long hidden: the sun, the moon, and the truth." -- Hindu Prince Gautama Siddharta, the founder of Buddhism, 563-483 B.C.