Tag Archives: Science Fiction

What it All Comes Down to

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I guess it’s time for another update on what’s going on, what’s on my mind, and where I think things are going.

1. My Readership. I suspect I really don’t have anyone reading this blog (my main one). It gets printed also on Open Salon, which might grant me a few readers there, but even there it’s a crap shoot as to whether or not anyone actually reads (or cares about) anything I have to say. I also import my blogs to my Facebook profile, and even though I have a bunch of “friends” there, I suspect practically no one reads anything I have to say there either.

It’s a real problem for a writer who wants to be taken seriously when no one reads anything he has to say. It gets really frustrating. I mean, Snooki can write a book and it becomes a bestseller based on her outrageous behavior alone, but a consistent writer generally has to kill someone in order to get anyone to read his stuff. And they wonder why so many literary types kill themselves before they ever become famous, often discovered after they blew their brains out over the frustration of trying to actually make it as a writer or an artist.

This means when I post my blog, I get tons of traffic, but I suspect it’s a bunch of bots that are trying to get people to buy their shit rather than actual people reading my blog. My spam filter logs dozens of spam messages a day, which are all the type that say something like: “Read your posting, and I completely agree with you. You should try out this new version of sex medication which can be found at….” Yeah, it gets really annoying and frustrating.

But just because I suspect one of my stuffed animals might be reading this by tapping into my wifi at home, I’ll continue….

2. Snow. I really hate it. I do. I’m not from Michigan, even though I live here. I’m from California, and if I could afford to live there or could have ever found a job there, I would be there right now. I hate the snow. I hate the cold. I turned on my heater two nights ago for the first time (been using an electrical set of heaters all Winter long), and it was so much nicer than just being able to heat up one small room, and not very well either. Even though my electrical heater could get the room up to about 70 or so, it felt like it was 45. I’m now using my real heater, even though it’s expensive as hell. But I can’t take the cold any more. I really hate it here.

3. The Whole Nook vs. Kindle Debate. I’ve written a few articles on this because I bought both a Nook Color and the $189 Kindle 3G + Wifi. I’ve completely given up on the Nook. I had two subscriptions to magazines with the Nook Color (Consumer Reports and the New York Times Book Review). I gave up trying to get the Nook to download Consumer Reports. It would start to download and then just stop. I would check the wifi signal, and it would register as fine. After three days of trying to download a magazine I already paid for, I gave up, cancelled my subscriptions and I will never use the Nook again. Contest over. The Kindle wins. It might not look as nice, but at least I can actually get content onto it. The Nook Color is a piece of shit that should never have been sold to people. I will never recommend it to anyone ever again.

4. Egypt. Things are probably going to get really interesting now that Mubarak went on the air and basically told the protesters: “I hear you, but I just wanted to say go fuck yourselves. Have a nice day.” He’s decided that even though people are out in the streets risking their lives, he’s not leaving. The Army has now backed him, which means that one of two things are probably going to happen. They’ll crack down on the protesters, and this will be one of those sorry moments in human history that people try to forget when talking about how great a people we are, or the people are going to end up going the way of the French Revolution, overthrowing the government and killing Mubarak if he doesn’t escape out of the country first. If you’re a dictator, and you pretty much give the finger to your people when they demand you step down, you really don’t have a lot of options that can play out from that moment on. I mean, all sorts of things can happen, but right now, it’s going to be a slaughter of people unless a whole lot of people back down, and when people are backed into a corner, they usually strike back instead of back down. Unless they’re Americans. Then they either sue you or back down and say that they want to spend more time with their families.

5. Relationships. I don’t know anything about this subject. I’m not in one. I don’t recognize one when I am in one. I don’t even know what women are, although I see movies with them in it, so I do believe they might exist, although I can’t verify it in person.

6. Politics in the USA. We’re going to be heading towards another presidential election with no electable people in the Republican Party, a current president who has done nothing to be reelected, other than make arousing speeches that don’t translate to actual action, and a whole lot of self-important politicians who think they deserve to be the next leaders of the free (in theory, at least) world. Right now, the front runners for the Republican Party seem to be Sarah Palin (the joke that keeps giving), Newt Gingrich (a pompous airbag that comes installed as standard equipment), a just-announced “I’m seriously considering it” Donald Trump (another rich buffoon who thinks that being rich translates to leadership potential), and a bunch of other people no one knows, has ever heard of, or cares one iota about whatsoever. So, right now, I’m calling it a boring presidential election where we reelect Jimmy Carter, um, Obama.

7. The Academy Awards. A bunch of movies I didn’t see, don’t want to see, and don’t care about, are competing for the top honors this year. As you can guess, I’m holding my breath in anticipation.

8. SyFy Becomes Shark Attack Channel. I don’t know when this happened, but my favorite channel (I remember actually asking a television station provider if they carried the SyFy Channel and not caring about any others) went from being a station with original science fiction programming with shows like Stargate SG1. Atlantis, Warehouse 13, Eureka, Battlestar Galactica (then Caprica), some variation of Star Trek, and lots of that sort of stuff. Now, it’s Man-Killing Shark and really bizarre movie of the week crap that stars Erik Estrada as a small town sheriff who is fighting a shark that has grown feet and chases people on the beach, but Estrada, who plays Skip William, is afraid of sharks because a shark killed his family in a drive-by shooting in Compton. Okay, that’s not a real show, but it should be. Who stole my SyFy Channel?

9. The Federal Budget is Out of Control. Um, when has it ever not been? We’re approaching the debt ceiling in February, when they told us that if we didn’t do things right, we’d be hitting that debt ceiling by September. Um, it’s FEBRUARY and we’re already arguing for having to increase the limit. And this is the government that’s trying to FIX the economy? Really?

10. Facebook Went Public. I laughed my ass off when I heard it was going to happen. If ever there was a bubble corporation that has absolutely no value whatsoever being sold for so many billions, I couldn’t find one. At least GM makes cars. At least Microsoft puts out a browser or operating system every now and then. But what does Facebook actually produce? Your content. Your friends. Your information. In other words, not a damn thing. Yet, they’re bad boy of leadership is now a multi-billionaire, and they’ve been launched as a fake IPO (a real one wasn’t done because the SEC would have hit them with all sorts of legal injunctions, which should automatically tell everyone something’s not on the up and up, but even that doesn’t cause people to take notice). Yeah, I use Facebook, but it’s such a non-entity in the grand scheme of things and is really only as important as it is at any one moment, knowing that it can go the way of Myspace in a second. Or like AOL, which still tries to regain some importance. Or sadly, like Blockbuster, that sad commentary of a video rental store that hasn’t realized it was obsolete ten years ago.

11. Verizon’s iPhone. Finally. Not that I want an iPhone on Verizon, but now I don’t have to read 10,000 stories manufactured by CNN about how great it would be to have the iPhone on Verizon. It’s there now. Leave me alone and stop hyping the stupid thing on your news site. Nobody really cares, as we discovered when no one lined up at the early Verizon Store openings that day, letting the event come and go without much fanfare. Nobody really cared.

12. Groupon’s Super Bowl Ad. All of the people who are upset about this incident don’t want to even deal with the ramifications of what really happened. First off, they all got upset at the ad where Groupon poked fun at itself by using the controversy of China and Tibet as its canvas. Well, here’s what they’re not getting, won’t get, and especially won’t ever own up to. The humor went over their heads. Not that they didn’t get it. It went OVER their heads, meaning they had to be smart enough to realize what was going on. Consider the source. It came from the direction of Christopher Guest, who is well known for creating comedy that not everyone gets, mainly because it pokes fun at people who are on stage and represents entire groups of people who when they watch it don’t always realize they’re being seen as the morons they really are because they’re so locked into their own little worlds that they are incapable of realizing the rest of the world sees them as ridiculous. It was the exact same humor used with Groupon, and of course, the people watching it were not Christopher Guest fans. They were Super Bowl fans, which I’m going to go out on a limb here and say we’re talking about two completely different intellectual mindsets here. Fill in the blanks to figure out which one I’m probably insulting here. I don’t really care. I’m not selling ads. Those people just didn’t get it and went nuts against Groupon. Why am I not surprised? I’m also not surprised that no one else is either.

13. Lindsay Lohan’s Theft Charge. Okay, I’ll admit it. I enjoy reading about the many demises of Lindsay Lohan. I don’t know her, I’m not a fan, and I probably shouldn’t care. But it’s like watching a train wreck happen in front of me. I probably should call 911 for help, but I can’t stop watching. I don’t get the same trill out of Charlie Sheen. Nothing about him fascinates me, nor does his drama. Lohan’s, on the other hand, completely fascinates me because I keep thinking that ir probably won’t get any worse, and then it does. I don’t even think she stole the thing, but that’s not even what keeps me interested. What keeps me interested is how someone can take her fame and continue to destroy her career, her future and any support from the community that she might ever have. Just the other day, her legal team says that it’s not going to deal with the allegations in public; they’ll deal with it in court. Then the first day of the trial, Lohan tweets her whole ordeal to the public, trying it out in the public again, even though that’s exactly what they said they wouldn’t do.

I can’t stop watching.

14. Writing. I’m taking a break from my current novel and working on a screenplay. Then I’ll be working on a word text game app that I’m designing for the android platform. I realized recently that there aren’t a whole lot of word text games out there any more, and I think it would be fun to create a new one. I remember how fun they were to create back when we were first designing computer games for the early systems, before graphics took over the industry.

That’s really it for now. If you’re actually reading this, let me know. I’d really like to know that there are people actually reading the blog.

Why Television is Failing So Much These Days

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Networks really don’t want to admit this, but they’re losing big time in the ratings wars. Oh, they’ll acknowledge it by saying really stupid things like, “we have to compete with so many other sources, like computer games, Xboxes and cable” but what they’re really not admitting is that they’ve so lost the pulse of America that they may never gain it back. The reason they don’t want to admit that they’re failing big time is that everyone who works for the networks realizes that his or her job is on the line if someone higher up realizes how incompetent they really are. So, instead of admitting it and fixing it, they’ll go on pretending that the emperor has no clothes and hope no one notices either.

Well, I’m going to put forth a couple of problems and solutions, and then we can kind of figure out if the networks are ever going to get any better.

1. The Hiatus. One of the biggest mistakes the networks could ever make is to start up a new show that starts to gain the attention of the public and then SUDDENLY yank it off the air for three or four months, and then let it reappear again. If there was a number one stupid thing to do so you could derail any chance at succeeding in ratings THIS  it is.

The origins of this stupid idea quite possibly came as a result of the infamous writer’s strike that halted all production for a period of time right in the middle of a brand new season. As a result, some really promising shows got canceled prematurely because they didn’t even get a first half of a season to gain popularity. They were pulled off the air during the strike and then never brought back.

Now, I could see this as one of those once in a lifetime situations, but somehow the networks thought this was a really good idea to subject viewers to a gap in time right in the middle of a show, as if this would cause them to come rushing back to that show, because they’ve been waiting and anticipating its return. This is supposedly what happened with LOST. But because it worked for LOST, they tried it with every other stupid show they aired. They did it with Heroes, and then Heroes went completely downhill. Then they did it with every other shows as well. SyFy became famous for doing this (even though it’s not a major network), and it is quite possibly the reason for the destruction of Caprica. Caprica was a somewhat decent show, but they cut it right in the middle of its first season so that people just stopped caring about the show. Then the second half came, and well, no one cared. So it got canceled.

That’s the problem right there. If you give us a new show and then halt it in the middle of the very first season, don’t expect us to come back. Sorry, but you lose.

2. Remake Hell. There’s a reason some shows were canceled the first time around. They failed. Remaking a failed show from yesterday may sound like a daring idea, but all it does is show that your network has no creativity whatsoever. Hawaii 5-0 might sound like a great idea, and I’m kind of liking the idea of seeing Grace Park in a bikini once a week, but to be honest, Hawaii 5-00 wasn’t all that great a show back then. I’m not all that excited about it now. So, I don’t watch it. And when others get over the fresh car smell, they probably won’t either. And that’s the most popular of the remake shows to have been done. Imagine what happens to the ones that aren’t as popular. The show V sounds like a neat idea, but it’s been done before. Even though some of the actors on the show are all from a Best of Sci Fi of all time (watching the cast is like watching a recap of who was once great in sci fi), it’s very hard to get past the fact that almost nothing in this show is original. And then they put it into half season hiatus (see complaint Number 1), which means they’re going to be seriously struggling to maintain an audience. And when they cancel it on us, they’ll blame us for not wanting to watch it.

3. No Faith in a Network. This is one of my biggest pet peeves with the networks. I generally don’t watch a new television show any more until it reaches the third season because I’m so tired of a show being canceled in the first or second season, right after I’ve gotten drawn into it. They did it to me with Harsh Realms (remember that one?), Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles, Jericho, Jeremiah, Firefly, and Dollhouse. Why would I trust a network to actually continue a television show that I started to watch? It’s really not worth the effort until they’ve decided to reward us by actually continuing the show. But they won’t continue a show because none of us are watching it (maybe because we don’t believe you’ll continue it).

4. Rehashes of Overdone Formulas. How many Law & Order or CSI franchises can we create? As a matter of fact, do we really need another cop show of any sorts? At one point, I was getting paranoid while living in San Francisco because there were more cops on television from San Francisco than there were actual cops on the streets. I was scared to walk to the corner because on TV there was a crime happening every fifteen seconds in San Francisco. And I knew not to call a cop because they were all basket cases who were having problems dealing with their sanity (or ex-cops who were scared of their own shadows…thanks, Monk). Recently, there was a show with a guy who played a drugged out mafioso in New Jersey who was now a cop in Detroit. I was starting to wonder who I could trust anymore. I mean, I’m kind of scared just now writing about it. But stop giving us more stupid cop shows. There’s not as much crime in the world as there is on television. Stop scaring the crap out of us.

5. Bad writing. This is probably my biggest complaint these days. The Event stopped being an event for me because the writing was straight out atrocious. And then they backed it up with some of the worst acting since Pauly Shore decided to make serious movies. Or maybe he didn’t. I don’t know. Maybe it’s just a recurring fear I have. But either way, the writing is awful on some of these shows. I remember watching an episode of The Chase (or is it just Chase?), and three times in a row I was able to blurt out the next line of dialogue word for word before the actor could say it. And these were the “gotcha” moments that cop shows have where the hero gets to say the cool thing to the guy who is setting him or her up for a big dramatic moment. The writing was so bad that it was badly predictable.

That, in short, is why I find network television these days to be suffering. If they want to really compete with the competition that’s up against them, they have to raise their game. But they can’t raise their game if they’re going to keep doing the stupid things they keep on doing.

Ongoing thoughts on Stargate Universe

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Okay, I’ll admit that my personal jury is still out on this show. Most of the first part of the season was pretty crappy in my opinion, but I was giving it the benefit of the doubt because I figured they had to build some kind of backstory and character development. But it really felt like it was just treading water most of the time, right up until the mid-season finale, which was actually the one HUGE moment in the show. So, I thought I’d wait until it came back after the mid-season break and see how things are going.

First off, I’ve already said this before, but I HATE MID SEASON BREAKS. It’s one of the stupidest things a television show can do for its survival. If you really want to piss off your audience and cause your audience members to watch another show, that’s the way you do it. You go halfway through your season, take a LONG FREAKING BREAK and then pray that your audience decides to come back and watch your show that they’ve completely forgotten about because it wasn’t all that great to begin with. This is why the shows Fringe, Fastforward and Heroes are all failing. Okay, that’s not completely correct. Heroes is failing because it’s being written by two year old monkeys with typewriters, but that’s another story.

Anyway, back to Stargate Universe. The characters are somewhat okay. I had reservations in the beginning because here’s a run down of your main characters:

The leader is a boring colonel who might be in love with one of the boring women who is on the boring ship. The second in command is either some egomaniac, brainiac scientist who cares only for himself, or it might be some teenage kid who succeeded in getting to a final level in a FREAKING VIDEO GAME, so the Air Force recruited him to be their scientist problem solver. Really? Anyway, then there’s some somewhat attractive Asian chick who is third or ninth in command, who wants to overthrow the leadership so she can fly home and meet up with her lesbian lover back on Earth. Is this Stargate, or are we watching the third attempt at creating Melrose Place? Then there’s a whole bunch of other interchangeable characters who may or may not be regulars, including some lieutenant who is either in love with some girl that was the daughter of a senator who died in space, or he might be in love with the woman that the boring colonel might have gotten pregnant before they left for space, or maybe he’s in love with some strange sand alien that shows up every now and then to remind us it’s a science fiction show.

The plots tend to be something like: “Okay, they’re lost in space on this really old space ship, and they’re running out of food, water and air. So let’s argue about whether or not the really smart guy can trick someone into sitting in a chair that might cause instant death. Or we can change that plot out for one where we use these rocks that we’re carrying on the ship to switch our minds with people back on Earth so Lou Diamond Philip can get some screen time because we accidentally hired him to be a cast member but forgot to put him on the ship that’s lost in space.”

The plots really seem to be geared around the central idea of “how can we make being lost in space any more annoying to our audience?” But even with that being said, every now and then they manage to lull me into a sense of thinking there’s more to this show than what I’ve described before. Like tonight’s episode. They found this planet in the middle of nowhere that can sustain life. And there’s this HUGE obelisk that was obviously built by the smartest alien race that has ever existed in the universe. So, I’m intrigued. But then they had to leave because their flight was on stand by in that solar system and now is somewhere else where that obelisk planet is no longer accessible. But it might still be relevant. Or not.

Next week, everyone’s favorite Stargate character has a cameo, and of course I’m talking about Dr. Daniel Jackson played by Michael Shanks. I am all excited, but of course, I’m trying not to think about the fact that Dr. Daniel Jackson, like Lou Diamond Philip, is on Earth and has no idea where the Stargate Universe spaceship might be, so that means he’s probably going to be hopping on board by holding a stone in his hand which brings us back to that horrible method for producing episodes with actors who aren’t normally on the show.

All in all, I can’t shake this feeling that Stargate Universe is essentially Star Trek Voyager but in the Stargate universe. It’s a ship, lost in space, and everyone is trying really hard to get back home. You know what’s funny about that? The first sequel to Star Trek: The Next Generation was Deep Space Nine, which was about a space station instead of about the travels of the main ship. The first sequel to Stargate SG1 was Stargate Atlantis, which was about a space station instead of about the travels of the main ship. So, should I be surprised that the second sequel (which in Star Trek was Voyager, about a ship lost in space with a crew trying to get home to Earth) is Stargate Universe, which…wait for it…is about a ship lost in space with a crew trying to get home to Earth. I’m seeing a bit of a trend here.

But I’m still going to watch the show because as much complaining as I’ve done here, it’s still far better than 90 percent of the rest of the crap that’s on the other stations.

Building Worlds as a Part of the Writing Process

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A few years ago, I read a book by Richard Bartle, titled Designing Virtual Worlds. As an avid game designer and player, the idea of building worlds has always fascinated me. As a writer, however, designing a world has always been a process that has existed within me, and it has often made crafting a story one of the more difficult projects. In the beginning, when I first started writing, designing a world was simple. It was essentially Earth with different people in it. Oh, sure, every now and then there’d be a dragon instead of a rhino, but honestly when it came down to it, I wasn’t really designing anything; I was recreating what was already there.

As I matured as a writer, I came to realize that the world one crafts is as important as the story itself. Since then, I’ve created a couple of worlds that have existed as part of my writing. Two of them are important enough to discuss here, so I’ll introduce them now.

Reagul was my first real virtual world that I created. It was originally a part of a science fiction/fantasy hybrid I wrote over a decade ago that takes place in the era of Earth 3000 A.D. The Earth has become an empire, and one of the planets in its sphere of control is the medieval-like planet of Reagul. It was during the writing of the novel Destiny that I started to realize that Reagul was more imortant than just a setting for a large part of this novel. It took on a life of its own, and later it became the centrally located planet for the series of stories that became the book, The Tales of Reagul.

Reagul was a fascinating place because it was an experiment of an alien race known as the Minions, who were testing on human subjects from the young planet Earth. During the first century B.C., the aliens transplant a Roman collection of villages from Earth to the new planet. This series of villages grow up to become the central characters of the stories that take place on Reagul. A large number of short stories I wrote have been published in that series, even though most magazines at the time never knew there was a connection between any of these stories. In it, a whole literature was born that has continuously moved the history of this planet, which has nearly 3000 years of history before it reaches the point where it coincides with the first novel (the previously mentioned Destiny).

I figured that I would probably only write one major series in my lifetime, and it was going to be the Reagul series. And then the Soldier came along.

The Soldier was a character that started showing up in some of my earlier writings, first published in Lost Worlds magazine. That first story was mainly about a soldier who has been traveling since separated from his army, but even as I was writing, I realized there was something wrong with this guy, that he was much more than just a normal soldier. That’s when I started to realize that he was on a quest for something, something for which he was going to be spending the rest of his life looking. This item became the Deck Const, which then became the central talisman in my latest novel Rumors of War.

The Soldier is unique because his story is a world all by itself. He lives in a dystopian future where civilization has crumbled, representing an army of a nation that no longer exists. At the same time, his journey has been chronicled long before he was ever born, and many more people know as much about him as he does about himself, even though they have never met him. He becomes a mysterious character, even to himself, but at the same time is on a linear path, seeking out something that will bring civilization back together, while at the same time giving him a reason to exist.

The world of the Soldier is one of those that I often found myself returning to because it was so interesting. At times, he finds himself in a Hobbesian nightmare of a society that has fallen apart, but every now and then he comes across glimmers of hope in the waste lands, and often he is the instrument that brings forth that hope to others.

The point is that it is not just enough to write about a place and call that a “world”. There is so much more to the process than that. The people within that world are just as important to the world as the world itself. The Soldier couldn’t live in Reagul; he just wouldn’t belong, and he’d change that world into something much different than it is. At the same time, the sorceror/wizard Sarbonn (which is from where the name of this site emerged) could never have existed in the Soldier’s world. Both worlds are products of their people and their environment.

This is why so many science fiction stories set on bizarre worlds just don’t seem to work. The writer was spending so much time focusing on the world, or the character, that he or she never realized that the two needed to fit together somehow, and quite often they do not. Harry Harrison’s Stainless Steal Rat is a product of his environment and fits it so well. Asimov’s Mole fits into the Foundation universe that he created (which by the same measure his robots never fit into the Foundation universe, which is why the end of his Foundation series seems more forced than the earlier part of the series; you can’t force one series into another, or one world into another where they do not belong).

An example of a strong failure of this approach is the Fallout series, especially the recent one (Fallout 3). It was a great universe (or world) with the ultimate Dystopian wasteland, but then in one of the add-ons, they decided to add aliens to a universe where they really didn’t belong. Granted, in each story there was always a mention of an alien crash landing, but it was always a technique to give the player an out of control, overpowered weapon with many questions left unanswered. With the alien add-on, it took a Dystopian nightmare and turned it into an alien blaster story. They just didn’t belong in the story, and it diminished the universe as a result.

As a writer, there’s always that fine line that has to be traveled, and once one goes over it, it’s the literary equivalent of “jumping the shark”, even though I’m using the term incorrectly as “jumping the shark” was never really meant to be about going too far (it was always about trying to regain what you had before by doing something stupid). But that’s for another column.

One thing that’s interesting about building a new world is that sometimes that world can get out of one’s control. Star Trek is a good example, as is Marion Zimmer Bradley’s “Darkover” series. Both were great universes where the author/creator designed something magnificent. Then the fans took over. In Roddenberry’s case of Star Trek, the fans became such nitpickers that Roddenberry couldn’t make a decision without someone quoting a previous episode as to why a new episode was in error. With Bradley’s “Darkover”, the fans started creating sequels to the story, and it got to the point where the universe was somewhat out of Bradley’s creative control.

In the end, what can be said about building worlds is that there must be a reason we do it. Some would say we do it to explore our own universe, while others might say we do it to branch out and see things we can never imagine in our own world. For me, it was just a lot of fun, and the characters sometimes just make it all worthwhile.