Kelson Reviews Stuff - Page 28

I liked season three of Discovery a lot better than season two. I think part of that was that it finally got to be its own Star Trek instead of trying to fill in the gaps between Enterprise and TOS. And it relies a lot less on the idiot ball, though I kept thinking they were very naive to simply assume the Federation still embodied the same ideals 700 years later.

Tonally, it amps up the Farscape: the madcap pace, the strange-to-the-heroes setting, and of course being the only ones with a rare travel tech that the ruthless villain wants. And it and adds a touch of Firefly: worlds are disconnected, with varying levels of technology, sometimes just scraping by.

Much as I missed Captain Pike, Saru really stepped up and continues to be one of my favorite characters. And while it’s still very much Michael Burnham’s show, the ensemble gets a lot more attention this season. The bridge crew finally feels like people and not just regular background characters.

As for the new characters: Adira manages to avoid the Wesley problem despite being a teenage genius, Book is so much more interesting than Ash, and Ossyra is an odd mix of ruthless and, well, casual. (There’s a great scene where she’s trying to psych out Tilly, and Tilly just throws everything back. It’s nothing she hasn’t already thought herself, and she’s learned from Mirror-Georgiou)

They did some really interesting things with the various ways familiar worlds adapted to the post-Burn galaxy (dilithium is scarce, the Burn destroyed most warp-capable ships, and no one knows if it will happen again), Discovery’s crew dealing with PTSD and overwhelming loss, and the importance of connection at every level from the minds in a Trill symbiosis to the worlds of a galaxy.

It would have been really weird to watch during 2020, when everything was still partially locked-down for the first year of Covid.

The original novel is a great read. Not just for the way it codified modern vampire lore. But for the way it’s built entirely out of diary entries, letters, news fragments, telegrams and so on. For the way it shows modern science coming to grips with ancient superstition and figuring out how to deal with it. For showing an early example of a woman participating in her own rescue. And for some of the parts that didn’t make it into general pop culture. (Count Dracula spends an awful lot of time in a shipping box.)

In some senses it’s the written-word equivalent of the “found footage” horror genre. Except the “sources” are wildly varying. John and Mina write their journals and letters to each other in shorthand. Business letters are of course written formally. Dr. Seward keeps an audio diary on a phonograph. Van Helsing’s speech is rendered with every quirk of his Dutch accent and speech patterns. And then halfway through the book, when all the major characters finally come together…they collate all the documents and Mina transcribes them on a typewriter, and they pass around the first half of the book so they can all read up on what the rest of them have been doing! (Literally getting them all on the same page.)

That’s not to say it’s flawless. It’s unclear why some victims rise again as vampires while others don’t. While the science/superstition contrast works well for the most part, eastern Europeans don’t exactly come off very well. Especially when they’d talk about the “gypsies” carrying Dracula around Transylvania. I mean, it could have been a lot worse, but it’s still jarring.

Overall, though, it’s an engaging read, whether approached as a book or, as Dracula Daily did, one day’s letters at a time from May 3 through November 7.

I started using FeatherPad on a low-end Linux machine, and was impressed with its speed, stability, and a feature set with just enough to make it practical as my main text editor. (Search of course, but also syntax highlighting, sorting lines within a file, and quickly switching word-wrap on and off.) It’s more stable (and faster!) than Gnome Text Editor and more capable than Gedit. I’ve since set it as my default on my main Linux system.

Every time I try to write something with WordPress’ block editor*, I get so frustrated because it keeps getting in my way. I can’t just write, jump back and forth, edit, cut, paste… Everything I do, it pops up a new toolbar in a different spot, or a modal dialog for how to display the link that I just wanted to be in plaintext, and so on and so on.

THIS IS NOT DISTRACTION-FREE WRITING.

I always go back to the classic editor (it needs a plugin to reenable it) because I can use it.

I remember watching the 1960 movie of The Time Machine many times on TV when I was growing up. But somehow I never quite got around to reading the book until now.

It’s a bit dry by modern standards, but the framing sequence does draw you in, and of course once he starts telling the story of his trip 800,000 years into the future, there’s a wealth of speculation. The narrator self-conciously admits that he’s drawing inferences on what’s going on beyond what he sees, that the short week he had in that time isn’t enough for him to be sure he really understands.

There’s a bit of adventure, a bit of travelogue, a side trip to the last days of Earth before the expanding red giant sun swallows it up. But time travel isn’t really the point. It’s just the mechanism to comment on 19th century western society.

Eat the Rich

The division between labor and capital, or working class and aristocracy, has become full-on speciation. Humanity has split into the beautiful, childlike, idle Eloi and the monstrous, brutal Morlocks who maintain the vast underground machines that provide the Eloi everything they need.

Ironically, the socialist Wells sets up his protagonist and his audience to have more in common with the Eloi than the Morlocks. The time traveler is upper class, has servants, and has the money and time to spend years tinkering with inventions. His friends gather for formal dinner parties, though they’re mostly professionals rather than idlers. He pities the Eloi for their complete uselessness, identifies with them as they look more like today’s humans, and of course has nothing to fear from them. The Morlocks look more monstrous to him, and you get the impression that even if they weren’t attacking the Eloi at night and stealing the time machine, he’d still be horrified rather than pity their fate.

(Interesting side note: the description of the Morlocks in the book is awfully similar to the way Weta Digital designed Gollum. And yet Bilbo and Frodo both found it in their hearts to pity him.)

It’s a cautionary tale of what happens when you treat whole classes as subhuman, and still insist that they do all the work for you.

Science!

With old science fiction it’s always interesting to look at how it stacks up to today’s scientific knowledge. And The Time Machine holds up pretty well.

Biologically there’s an engineered world gone feral, and the evolution of the Eloi and Morlocks is very much in line with the selection pressures (or in the case of the Eloi, the lack of selection pressure) that they’ve lived under. The Eloi are neotenous, never emotionally developing much past childhood, much like housecats when compared to their wild cousins. And it’s not treated as an endpoint but simply a later stage – one which spirals down to extinction because ultimately, neither the Eloi nor the Morlocks are resilient enough to survive in the long run. In the distant future, the time traveler sees a post-human world in which insects and other wildlife return, the garden landscape returned to the wild.

It was written only a few decades after On The Origin of Species, and Darwin’s theory of evolution has just kept collecting more and more evidence since then, with a lot more incremental refinements than major changes.

Astronomically, the time traveller remarks on the constellations being completely changed, but the Milky Way still being the same. Motion of stars has been known for a long time, but we didn’t know what galaxies actually are – or that there are so many more of them than just our own – until several decades later. But the sun’s path within the galaxy is going to keep it within the same band and around the same general distance from the center. The hazy view along a disc of distant stars is still going to be a hazy view along a disc of distant stars. It’s not going to look exactly like it does today, but it’ll be in roughly the same part of the sky and look similar enough to be familiar. And in the far, far distant future, it certainly seems possible that Earth could become tidally locked with the sun (which would definitely alter weather, wind and waves considerably!), and we do know the sun is the type of star that will become a red giant. The only thing that seems off in that scene is that there’s still (barely) enough oxygen for him to breathe, and that one of the inner planets has moved outward toward Earth instead of just being swallowed up by the sun as it expands.

Geology is a bit sketchier. He stays in the location of London, and can still recognize the landscape even with all the buildings gone, but it seems like there ought to be more of a difference after almost a million years. Even without considering plate tectonics (not yet discovered) and continental drift, just ordinary erosion ought to have changed something in a river valley. That said, it’s a good thematic choice that strengthens the link between the future world and the then-modern society being critiqued.