I STILL MISS THE ORIGINAL U.S.S. ENTERPRISE

After ten years of work, some Arizona researchers now claim that when popular TV series come to an end, or even when popular characters are killed off, fans mourn in the same way they grieve at the death of a close friend or relative. When I read this I thought it was ridiculous. Sure, when a favourite show ends after I’ve invested years into it, I feel disappointed, maybe even ripped off if I think the story was ended before it was complete. But mourning? Like over the death of a friend? Come on.

Then my wife busted me by reminding me how hard I took it when the U.S.S. Enterprise NCC-1701 was destroyed in the movie Star Trek III: The Search for Spock.

It’s true. I didn’t cry, but I felt real pain.

And the Enterprise isn’t even a human character—how could I relate to it so strongly as to feel that kind of reaction at its demise? I didn’t even feel as badly when they killed off Spock at the end of Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan (probably because we’d all heard rumours that Leonard Nimoy wanted out of the role, but I was pretty sure he’d be back somehow). Yes, I know the Enterprise has been replaced, many times, but they’re not the same. There will only ever be one original ship.

I grew up with that ship. I watched every episode of the original series when it first aired and watched them again numerous times in reruns and from tapes or DVD’s. My brothers and I had models of the Enterprise and the Galileo 7 shuttlecraft. Together with friends, we poured over blueprints—it felt like I’d walked the corridors myself and taken countless rides in the turbolifts. Most of all she took us on extraordinary adventures.

Yet even all that isn’t why I felt such a strong attachment to her. The way I felt was because of the way the characters felt. The Enterprise was Kirk’s first and only true love—he would do anything to defend her (and it could be argued that he might never have permitted her destruction if she hadn’t already been marked for decommissioning). She was far more than just a home to the other members of the crew, too—she defined them, and they her. And even when the original series ended, at least I could imagine the Enterprise voyaging on between the stars, continuing on its five-year mission and beyond. But not after Star Trek III.

Though there have been other Enterprises, I think the TV and movie creators have missed a trick by not invoking the same empathy and love in the audience for the ship herself. William Shatner’s Kirk and his Enterprise were like one being, indivisible. But Chris Pine’s Kirk doesn’t seem to be devoted to the ship at all, even though she’s his first command. I think that’s a mistake. And I think it’s a lesson for filmmakers and SF writers alike.

While we’re creating our heroic, charming, rascally, or just plain lovable human and alien characters, lets not forget their spacecraft, their time machines, their submarines or starbases.

Fans can fall in love with them too.

Science Fiction We Could Really Use Right Now

Maybe I’ve been overdosing on dystopian and apocalyptic fiction lately, in books, movies, TV—it seems to be everywhere. We call it things like “dark fiction” because that makes it sound more adult, as if anything “light” and optimistic isn’t worth our time now that we’re grown up. Don’t get me wrong, I love a good disaster story as much as anyone, but I can see real ones any time I feel like turning on the news. What about the hopeful fiction? Especially the hopeful science fiction? Have we lost hope in science?

I miss the days of the original Star Trek series and its inferior (but entertaining) contemporaries that placed their main characters in jeopardy every week yet managed to achieve a happy ending through some triumph of scientific reasoning, moral fortitude, pure luck, or any combination of the above. Much as I enjoyed the action elements of the rebooted Trek movie franchise, they’re not about science. And it’s rare to find an SF movie or TV offering that doesn’t focus mostly on the cost of scientific and technological advancement to our society, rather than its benefits.

SF has always had its cautionary tales, but the good stuff invoked a sense of wonder, too. I admired Phillip K. Dick and William Gibson, but I loved Arthur C. Clarke and Isaac Asimov. They made science exciting. Attractive. Even reassuring, in a way, compared to the current focus that offers a whole lot more cloud than silver lining.

Is it because our society feels let down by science? Fukushima, climate change, Monsanto with its frankenfoods. It’s easy to conclude that the major scientific advances have all gone toward ways to kill more people or to make the already-rich become obscenely wealthy. That’s not quite true—the tech developments with the greatest impact on our lives have been in computing and communication, so we can play video games with strangers across the world and our kids can text each other while they sleep. Hallelujah.

Maybe it’s time to rescue science—rehabilitate its image. That might be quite a challenge in the real world, but we could start in our fiction, to show the way. How about some stories that feature science once again making wonderful discoveries, fixing our problems of today, and painting a future where we’d actually like to live? That’s not hiding our heads in the sand, it’s providing the hope that our species needs to keep striving, advancing, and reaching for the stars (literally and figuratively). Maybe it’s time for an anthology of positive SF stories, or a special series of inspiring novels. I’m betting they’d sell, too.

Count me in.

INVISIBILITY: WHAT GOOD IS IT?

Now you see it—now you don’t. The most famous magician’s trick of all: making something disappear. It’s also a trick that’s driven a lot of scientific research over the centuries, and inspired it’s share of fictional treatments, too. I think my favourite is still H.G. Wells’ The Invisible Man (the Chevy Chase movie inspired by it was also a guilty pleasure, though), but James Bond’s car in Die Another Day and the invisibility cloak in the Harry Potter books would be pretty cool, too.

Or would they? And how close are things like that to becoming a reality?

There have been at least three announcements of scientific discoveries involving invisibility within the past month. One came from a team from Singapore who created a box of special transparent materials in a precise configuration that can redirect light and hide whatever’s inside the box while appearing to be see-through. Scientists from the University of Toronto unveiled a system involving small antennae that create magnetic interference and prevent radar from producing a return from the shielded object. And a group from the University of Texas have produced a kind of cloak material that might be almost as usable as Harry Potter’s except, so far, it only makes things invisible to microwaves, not visible light.

In spite of the effort poured into it, how useful would invisibility really be? Yes, spies might love it, and soldiers on the battlefield—if there weren’t so many other ways of detecting people and objects. You can envision invisible police speed traps. Or private detectives on a stakeout. Or cat burglars in buildings without motion detectors, I suppose. Or nudist colonies in the middle of a city, for that matter. We could imagine that, if invisibility shields were reasonably available they might be desired by criminal elements for bordellos, crack houses, or floating crap games. Naturally every secret government agency worth its salt would want invisible headquarters. The U.S. President’s Air Force One and Marine One would benefit from real stealth technology.

But think about it further. Whether a criminal operation or a government one, actual invisibility wouldn’t make sense. Suddenly there are empty lots all over the place where there used to be buildings? Not very subtle. No, fixed objects like buildings would benefit more from truly effective projections of false facades. Disguises yes, invisibility no. Even James Bond’s car wasn’t truly invisible—it was made to blend chameleon-like into the background behind it.

As I put my mind to this, one of the most likely applications of invisibility technology in the future might well be to hide the wealthy. In fifty years from now, perhaps, the “gated community” of today will have become the invisible community, with the richest of the rich relying on the premise of “out of sight, out of mind.”

Unless the wealthy, like the nudists, just can’t resist the urge to show it off.

A SPECIAL OFFER

If you’ve been coming to this page regularly but haven’t read my mystery/thriller novel Dead Air yet you can learn all about it here.

If you have read it, I could really use your help in the form of a review of the book at Amazon. So here’s a special time-limited offer: If you post a review of Dead Air at Amazon.com before November 18, 2013 send me an email and I’ll give you the link to a free sampler of my work. The ebook sampler includes two of my best published stories plus a sneak preview of my next novel, a techno-thriller called The Primus Labyrinth.

I’m not hoping to bribe you into giving a good review. I want honest reviews—online shoppers can smell a fake—so write what you really thought. But please do the review. It could really help shorten the time until you can have my next novel in your hands.

WHO ELSE IS OUT THERE?

Continuing analysis from the data gathered by the Kepler space telescope shows that of all the stars in our galaxy that our similar to our sun, possibly one out of every five has an Earth-size planet orbiting in the habitable zone—with temperatures that permit liquid water. That could mean billions of planets out there capable of supporting life that wouldn’t be completely strange to us. We don’t have to imagine unrecognizable life forms that breathe chlorine or methane or are made of silicon (although those are still possible, I suppose).

Why does this news excite us? Unless we manage to make an end run around the laws of physics—inventing warp drive, harnessing wormholes, or something equally exotic and improbable—we’ll never be able to get to more than a handful of those planets. They’re just too far away. Perhaps we could found a colony or two, but it’s really the thought of other intelligent life that’s the compelling part, isn’t it? Is there something comforting in the thought that we’re not alone in the universe—that somewhere “out there” others are looking back in our direction and asking the same questions? Even if we will never meet?

It’s fun to remember all of the different ways we’ve imagined alien species. For most of TV and movie history, there were the limitations of makeup, costumes, and puppetry. Think of the green Orion slave girls of Star Trek, or Mr. Spock himself, or Klingons and Romulans, Cardassians and Ferengi. Give them some prosthetics and suddenly they’re children of another star. Aliens from lower-budget shows like Lost In Space were embarrassingly cheesy. Dr. Who brought us dozens of roughly humanoid species, or human-sized robotic entities like Daleks and Cybermen. And then there’s one of the most popular tropes of all: aliens that make themselves look exactly like humans so they can a) hide among us, or b) communicate without frightening us. I hope the guy who thought of that one got a juicy bonus from his producer.

With computer graphics, Hollywood can make aliens look like anything they want, but so much depends on whether they’re meant to be our allies or enemies. Wookies and Ewoks are just teddy bears on different scales. E.T. the Extraterrestrial is ugly but cuddly. And then there are the willowy, large-eyed hairless aliens of The X-Files, Close Encounters of the Third Kind and others: they’re like us but smarter-looking because they don’t have to shave anymore and obviously have machines to do all the work, eliminating the need for actual muscles. But if an alien species is supposed to be an implacable enemy, they look like something from the insect world: the Bugs of Starship Troopers and the Buggers of Ender’s Game, or even the acid-dripping Aliens that made Sigourney Weaver’s life Hell. Somehow there’s never a giant can of Raid around when you need one.

The truth is, even our wildest imaginations couldn’t have come up with all of the bizarre manifestations of life to be found right here on our home planet, from the hidden depths of rain forests to deep-ocean volcanic rifts (though hopefully tube-worms aren’t intelligent). So we don’t have much hope of correctly imagining what’s “out there”. Is it still comforting to think of life on other planets? Give me your answer the next time you wake up from a nightmare about a slimy demon bursting from your chest.