scifi

On Flying Cars and Flying Snowmen

/ JD Byrne / 7 Comments

Years ago John Scalzi wrote a post about how his wife, when it came to reading their daughter a favorite story, couldn’t get past the idea of a flying snowman. This didn’t make a whole lot of sense. As Scalzi pointed out she had no problem with a snowman who could come to life, wear clothes,
and talk with children, so why was flying a bridge too far?

The fact is, we all have a point beyond which we simply can’t suspend disbelief any longer. As a writer of fantasy and science fiction I’m doubly aware of that. Some people will happily turn their brains off to enjoy a good story, but if you trip that wire that goes beyond their comfort zone of disbelief, they’ll turn on you. There’s not much you can do about it, except recognize that we all do it and we all do it at different points. In other words, we all have our own flying snowman.

I bring this up not because of some great work of fantasy or science fiction, but because of the seventh movie in the Fast and Furious franchise, which has dominated the box office this year (up to this point). Although I’m a car guy (autocrossing them since 1999) I’ve never been a fan of the series. If I’m honest, I’m not a big fan of action flicks in general, so the automotive overlay does nothing for me. My wife, on the other hand, is a big fan, thanks to her action movie jones and an abiding longing for The Rock, so I took her to see the new one.

It’s not bad, for a big loud popcorn flick that doesn’t aspire to be much more than that. In particular there are some really amazing stunts and some good quips. Can’t ask much more than that. However, there are some points where I reached my flying snowman point. Ken Levine’s line is apparently in about the same place, although he got a bit more aggravated by it:

FURIOUS 7 is an absolute fucking mess! What the fuck was that?! No, seriously! There’s not a fucking frame of this stink burger that’s rooted in any reality. Roadrunner cartoons are more realistic. Is this what the action film genre has become? Mindless idiotic fucking stunts that defy all laws of gravity, physics, logic, and common sense? Hand-to-hand combat where the combatants beat the living shit out of each other and neither is even bruised? They crash through glass walls. No cuts. They hit each other with lead pipes. No blood. Their heads are smashed through concrete walls – not even a mild concussion. What the fuck was I watching? Nobody dies. Cars go over cliffs, roll over seventeen times, are twisted gnarled wrecks when they finally come to a rest 1,000 feet down the hill, and the passengers just wriggle out without so much as a scratch. At least Wile E. Coyote looks disheveled when he swallows a lit stick of dynamite that explodes in his stomach. Not Vin Diesel. Not Jason Stratham. Not the Rock. Creative license is one thing but this is fucking preposterous.

Now, to be fair, some of what Levine rages against as CGI fakery actually isn’t (see, for example, the flying cars of the title). But, he’s right. Furious 7 apparently doesn’t take place in the real world. My flying snowman moment came when Vin Diesel and Jason Statham not once but twice staged deliberate head-on collisions from which each walked away without even a bruise. There’s a fine line between “I can’t believe they did that!” and “I can’t believe they really did THAT?”

My wife concedes the point. She doesn’t argue for the reality of those things, but is more willing to set aside concerns and just enjoy the movie. She’s not wrong, but neither am I. I just can’t go that far. At least not for Fast & Furious.

Star Wars, on the other hand . . .

The defining image of the second trailer for The Force Awakens is the star destroyer crashed on the surface of what JJ Abrams swears is not Tatooine. When I saw that, there was a large part of my mind that immediately started into how impossible it was for a craft of that size to plummet through the atmosphere and crash land more or less intact. But another part thought it was about the coolest thing it had seen in years.

Guess which side wins? That’s because, when it comes to something I’ve loved since I was a kid, my flying snowman threshold is much higher. I’m willing to turn the more rational part of my brain off and just enjoy the awesomeness. Not every part, mind you.

Which is just to say, as a writer and a reader/viewer, you don’t necessarily need to know where the line is, but be aware that everybody has that line and you can’t hope to be certain you don’t cross it.

Weekly Read: Sex Criminals

/ JD Byrne / Leave a comment

I’m not a big fan of “high concept” art, the kind of thing that can be pitched in a single, mind blowing sentence.  In my experience, the quality of the execution rarely matches the quality of the pitch.  There are exceptions, however.  How about this for a one sentence pitch: “Two people meet who literally stop time when they have sex.” Kudos to whichever of Matt Fraction or Chip Zdarsky came up with that idea.  More kudos for pulling executing that idea in a way that makes it funnier, and more thoughtful, then it probably has a right to be.

Sex Criminals is not a comic book about purveyors of kiddy porn, flashers, or the skeevy guys who lure kids into their vans with the promise of candy.  It’s a love story, really, about two people who share a very uncommon trait – when they have an orgasm, time stops.  Literally and completely.  They’re able to walk around in this stuck time – in a wonderful encapsulation of their personalities Suzie refers to it as “The Quiet,” while Jon calls it “Cumworld” (and uses the time to take a shit in his boss’s potted plant).  So they start exploring together when they hook up.

The first volume of Sex Criminals (One Weird Trick, collecting issues 1-5) is really funny, visually inventive, and unlike anything you’ve seen before. It ends with the arrival of a trio of self-appointed sex police who patrol The Quiet.*  The second volume (issues 6-10, dubbed Two Worlds, One Cop) expands the cast of characters and dives into some heavier relationship and personal issues, all the while exploring just what The Quiet is and who the cops are.

I admire Fraction and Zdarsky for taking that route.  Honestly, after the first volume their only other choice was to crank up the outrageousness and silliness of the whole thing, which probably would have spun out of control.  Making the whole thing more “real” (although that’s probably not the right word to use) sets things up better for a long term run.  It does mean, however, that the second volume isn’t quite as fun as the first, as the first blushing excitement of discovery is gone, for the reader as well as Jon and Suzie.

Nevertheless, they continue to tell their tale with style and wit, not to mention an astonishing frankness that you wouldn’t expect in a comic book.  Yeah, it’s smutty and explicit, but it’s fun and thoughtful and deeper that people might otherwise expect. Unless you’re a complete prude, it’s worth delving into Sex Criminals. Step into The Quiet.

* What, you think just because Jon and I share a first name I’m going to sling “Cumworld” all over the Internet? My parents read this!

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Weekly Everything: The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy

/ JD Byrne / Leave a comment

Last week marked the anniversary – the 37th, to be exact – of the debut of The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, in the form of a BBC Radio play.  In the decades since it’s conquered just about every form of media – books, TV, film, video games, the Internet.  It’s been one of my favorite things in the world since my brother introduced me to it lo those many years ago.

But I do have a bit of a confession.  As a writer, my favorite version of Hitchhiker‘s should be the books, right?  Not only do they cover a lot more ground than the other versions, they’re books!  Alas, ’tis not the case, for my favorite version, the one I return to again and again is the TV version.  Yes, the cheap and exceptionally dated BBC production is what I think of when I think Hitchhikers.*

Part of that is almost certainly because that’s the version I experienced first.  I think (it’s been a while, after all).  But I also think that the TV show comes the closest to getting it “right,” if there can be a “right” for Hitchhikers, given that Douglas Adams was involved in all the various permutations.  I think that comes down to two things.

First, the TV show does the best job of integrating the Guide itself into proceedings in a way that really works.  The animation, combined with the voice of Peter Jones, allowed the Guide to really exist apart from the main story.  Here’s one of my favorite examples:

Wouldn’t life be better if Wikipedia worked that way?

The other thing that I think works in the TV show’s favor is, perhaps counter intuitively, it’s tiny budget.  I’m not talking cheap – to paraphrase Frank Zappa, cheap has nothing to do with budget, although it helps – but it’s clear there were certain limitations that the BBC crew were working under when producing the series.  It looks low budget because it was, but it’s not cheap.

But the low-buck approach yields an interesting benefit in that it comes across almost more like a theater production, where the audience has to buy into a willing suspension of disbelief to enjoy things.  Yes, we know Zaphod’s second head and third arm are clearly fake props, but so what?  It might even work better that way.

Science fiction is at its best when, in spite of its setting or embrace of gee-whiz tech, it’s holding up a mirror to humanity as we know it now.  It’s true for comedic work like Hitchhiker‘s as well as more serious stuff.  That’s sometimes harder to do in the modern CGI world.  Take, as one example, the Vogons, Adams’s ultimate bureaucratic nightmares and purveyors of bad poetry.

Here’s the Vogons of the TV show:

VogonTV

Here’s the Vogons of the 2005 movie:

VogonMovie

The movie version looks “better” in just about every conceivable way, including the fact that they are terribly alien.  But does that serve the story more effectively?  The TV Vogons look like people in rubber suits and, as such, are still somewhat recognizable as people.  Which is appropriate, since the Vogons aren’t really something that sprang fully formed from Adams’s brain from nothing.  They’re formed from our own real world experience – they are the ultimate cold blooded government functionaries.  They may be an exaggerated form of one of humanity’s worst traits, but they’re nonetheless rooted in humanity.

The movie Vogons, but contrast, are really alien.  They’re different enough that the connection to our own world is lost.  It doesn’t make the story worse, but the jokes don’t land quite as hard when they aren’t as grounded in reality.

None of this is to say that anyone else is wrong for having another version of Hitchhiker‘s as their favorite.  That’s one of the coolest things about it – it’s reached out so many ways that it doesn’t matter if you’re a reader, a watcher, or a listener.  Regardless, you’ve got a great place to jump in.

Just remember – bring a towel.

* Actually, that’s not completely true.  The first thing that usually pops into my head is the line about how Vogon ships hang silently in the air in “the way that bricks don’t.”  Utter brilliance.

In Defense of “The Cold Equations”

/ JD Byrne / Leave a comment

My first exposure to “The Cold Equations,” a short story by Tom Godwin first published in Astounding magazine in 1954, was in a college sci-fi and fantasy class.  I didn’t take the class – my roommate did.  But he shared the story with me and we talked about it quite a bit.

The story, very briefly, is this: a pilot is guiding a small spacecraft to a distant colony carrying medicine to help stop a fatal disease outbreak.  The ship is lean and purposeful, with just enough fuel to do the job with the expected payload.  Problem is, there’s a stowaway – a teenage girl who wants to see her brother, one of the colonists.  After some agonizing, the pilot does what the rules – and the laws of physics, the nominal cold equations – require him to do: push her out an airlock.  For, you see, with the extra weight of the stowaway there isn’t sufficient fuel for a safe landing.  Save the girl, the ship crashes, and all the colonists die.

The ending of the story has caused arguments since it was first published, I imagine.  My roommate and I had a good one, with me taking the side of, “this is stupid, there should have been something done to prevent this from happening.”  It was one of those things that college arguments are built on.

This time last year Boing Boing maven and sci-fi writer Cory Doctorow wrote a piece for Locus Online essentially taking the same position I did all those years ago.  Doctorow is entirely correct, as I was years ago, that things could have been set up differently to allow for a happier ending – one where the stowaway survives and the colonists don’t die of a nasty disease.  But I disagree with him when he concludes that the absence of those things makes the story a failure. Two of his arguments don’t quite sit right with me.

First, after setting forth all the ways that the story sets up the pilot’s dilemma, he writes:

It is, then, a contrivance. A circumstance engineered for a justifiable murder. An elaborate shell game that makes the poor pilot – and the company he serves – into victims every bit as much as the dead girl is a victim, forced by circumstance and girlish naïveté to stain their souls with murder.

* * *

‘The Cold Equations’ is moral hazard in action. It is a story designed to excuse the ship’s operators – from the executives to ground control to the pilot – for standardizing on a spaceship with no margin of safety. A spaceship with no autopilot, no fuel reserves, and no contingency margin in its fuel calculations.

That’s an odd accusation for a fiction writer to make.  Fiction is the ultimate contrivance.  Writers move pieces around and put them together in particular ways to tell particular stories.  That’s why in a legal drama the hero isn’t just defending an innocent man charged with murder, but his brother, or why the cute girl the guy hooked up with the night before isn’t just in the same line of work, she’s the main rival for the new account.  It can be a cheap way of ramping up the conflict, but it’s hardly unheard of.

Obviously one can critique a story for being overly contrived and unrealistic, but we are talking about a short (10,000 words, about) tale set on a spaceship.  There’s not a whole lot of room to explore the facets of this universe that don’t focus on the central conflict.  It’s a story about the rather obvious, yet compelling, theme that space is a dangerous place and it doesn’t care about the humans caught up in it.

The second argument is more implicit than explicit, but it comes up when Doctorow cites the litany of means the story could have used to avoid the tragic ending, from better engineered spaceships to better medical care at the distant colony in the first place.  All of these are true, of course – something could have been done.  But that misses a key point – is it unreasonable to think that in the universe of “The Cold Equations” such things might not happen?

Assuming the story is set in a future period of our own history it certainly isn’t.  History is riddled with tragedies that occur when some entity cuts corners on safety.  I don’t even have to look beyond West Virginia to find plenty of examples – mine explosions, the Buffalo Creek flood, the Hawks Nest Tunnel disaster.  All caused because safety was sacrificed for something else, either profit or political expediency.  Or just plain dumb assery.  Is there any reason to think the powers that be in the universe of “The Cold Equations” are better human beings than we are now?

After all, there was a sign warning unauthorized personnel not to enter the ship.  Is it too harsh to say anybody who ignored that sign got what she deserved?  Yeah, but that wouldn’t stop people from saying so.  Scour any Internet comment section in the wake of some tragic accident and there are plenty of people willing to blame the injured for their predicament.  Again, there’s no reason to think citizens in the universe of “The Cold Equations” would look at the incident any differently.

In the end, Doctorow’s main criticism of “The Cold Equations” seems to be that it’s not set in the best of all possible worlds, one where everything possible to prevent such a tragic event from taking place would be done.  But that world is a fantasy, one harder to believe in that most of what’s on sale in the bookstore.  Perhaps one of the reasons it’s endured all these years is that as readers we know it’s all too plausible.