Lancer Kind

Hal and I were talking science fiction over beers one night, and for some reason Hal started listing a number of well thought out reasons why I shouldn’t have enjoyed the latest Trek. Before you could read this recounting, I used a high-tech, Xindi web technology to protected Hal Dace‘s identity from the hordes of people fooled into believing Star Trek 11 was a great movie.

Hal, you’re insane! The last movie was fantastic! Rebellious young Kirk, space battles, and another cool looking Enterprise. To jog your memory, it might be worth visiting Pirates Bay to try and watch the movie again. That way, you can make your own mind up. Personally, I think it’s a really good movie.

A Trek fan you may be, but a Trekkie you’re not. I’ve owned a Spock costume, both Enterprise sets of blueprints, the original ST Concordance, an action figure Spock, The Stare Fleet Technical Manual, The Physics of Star Trek, several “making of” books. I’ve studied the Star Trek canon and Trek 11 broke it often.

Shatner warned me about people like you! But since you’re buying the beer, let’s hear it: why is Star Trek 11 a fall from the garden?

The biggest reason for TOS’s (The Original Series of Star Trek which started in 1966) success was bringing together four elements: character-lead drama, intelligent analysis of scientific ideas, adventure, and a very positive approach to the future. It’s not easy, is rarely achieved, and Gene Roddenberry insured TNG (Star Trek–The Next Generation) kept to this rigorous formula. With Roddenberry gone, there has been greater experimentation.

Come on man! Paramount Pictures is based in California; there’s going to be more experimentation than a co-ed dormitory.

The most notable drifts have come with the darker dramas of DS9 (Deep Space 9) & Enterprise. I accepted it because all other elements were consistent with TOS values. In any future history there’ll be bright and dark stories.

DS 9 is a rough reflection of the Palestine-Israel conflict: suicide bombings in crowded markets, the Bajoran faith driving Bajoran policies. Enterprise turned into a “post 911 story” where an organization that seemed to have no home world attacked Earth.

In TOS, the Federation always took the high road. In DS9 and Enterprise, the Federation did a lot of things in the gray to sometimes even black. Star Trek 11 went too far in allowing our future to appear dark and there are too many inconsistencies. The tagline was, “This is not your Dad’s Star Trek.”

I was exhausted of the usual Star Trek stories. The movie before this one started with finding Data’s head, like a TV episode. I went to see the cool effects and the Borg but didn’t greatly care about the characters because they’d finish the movie with their dignity intact and no great character change (except for killing Spock). I liked what Federation did in the beginning although the writing was too derivative of TOS episodes. When it was clear Star Trek 11 was going the direction of Federation but sexed up, I hoped I’d see something that didn’t boil down to a 1960’s TOS episode.

Yes. Initially, I liked the idea of showing TOS characters at Star Fleet Academy. I didn’t even mind too much the idea of a permanent change to the original timeline. However, the producers made too many random changes to the original characters, values, and details, suggesting a simple lack of care and attention required by Trekkies. Leaving behind the Trekkies was a major mistake that will be regretted with time.

That sounded like a threat! Shatner was right about you guys! ‘Emo’ Spock worked for me. I was in love with Uhura as a kid so seeing a hot looking Uhura again was most excellent. Kirk womanizing, again! This was revelatory because until this movie, I thought Kirk was getting the chicks because of the captain’s uniform. The movie teasers got me excited, like that scene of cornfields and then in the distance, a starship construction yard. I wasn’t let down like some Trek movies did when I finally saw it on the big screen.

Yes, it’s easy to enjoy the glittery MTV-like Star Trek movie, dumbed down for your consumption. And you’ve just struck upon number 10 on my list: starships are never built on Earth, not to mention Iowa.

Ouch! OK, you have at least ten reasons. What one thing would you tell the producers of Star Trek 12 that they must do to be lauded by Trekkies? Remember, the film still has to be interesting enough to make money.

Don’t make the story about good guys and bad guys. Make it about exploration of a new planet that has strange life that raises ethical questions. Allow the adventure to build slowly until completely out of the blue the whole universe is threatened and Kirk & Spock save it. It’s not easy, but then it shouldn’t be, should it?

Hal, Hal, when did your work pull out your heart and replace it with a critic’s cold, calculating movie caliper?

Lancer, it comes with the territory. Star Trek 11 was just lazy movie making. Here are 55 points about why I feel this way:

1. They’re too arrogant to provide a subtitle.
2. A woman is sucked into space and sound effects fade, denoting the silence of space. The rest of the film sticks with the tradition of sound effects in space. This is annoying.
3. It feels more like Star Wars than Star Trek which, in my opinion, accounts for its unearned success (it’s been dumbed down). It is important to remember that one of the reasons kids in the 70s made fun of their Trekkie fellow students is because the Trekkies were nerds. Star Trek is supposed to be for nerds because it’s more intelligent than Star Wars. Most people who never liked Star Trek always pointed out that they didn’t want intelligent drama, just soap operas. Well, now they’ve got what they wanted and the true Trekkies have been left behind.
4. The Corvette scene directly contradicts Roddenberry’s vision of a future Earth as paradise; a place where parents are consistently loving, even step-parents, and that teenage rebellion has become rather rare due to the universal acceptance of the precept of personal achievement. A policeman would never appear dystopian. There are no canyons in Iowa. The scene is a cheap trick to wow the audience, and Kirk was never depicted as rebellious in nature (i.e. – they’ve changed the basic nature of his character which is simply unacceptable).
5. Sorry, I just don’t believe Vulcan children bully one another.
6. Spocks’s accents are completely inconsistent. It should be mid-Atlantic.
7. Uhura is from the United States of Africa and speaks Swahili. There really should have been at least the smallest reference to this. I personally found the dropping of the romance between Spock and Chapel to be very sad. The romance with Uhura is illogical! Vulcans only engage in romantic activities during the Pon farr. How could they drop this most basic of Star Trek elements?
8. In the TOS episode The Menagerie it is made clear Kirk only barely knew Pike.
9. Starships then never had more than a crew of 430.
10. Spaceships are never built on Earth, not to mention Iowa.
11. There’s no reason why Star Fleet would have any major facilities in Iowa (just because Kirk grew up there?).
12. It is too contrived that McCoy would refer to his bones.
13. Nero is depicted like an avenging human. Romulans, even disturbed ones, simply don’t act like this.
14. Nero’s dialog never rises above cheap exposition.
15. Orions do not join Star Fleet.
16. Why would McCoy be at the navigation station? No other version of ST ever made basic mistakes like this.
17. The Kobayashi Maru tests character and therefore can only be taken once. When a person already knows it’s a no-win scenario it is pointless to test a person again. Kirk would never have been allowed to take the test twice. In The Wrath of Khan the suggestion is that somehow Kirk knew the purpose of the test before taking it the first time, which makes sense. This doesn’t.
18. Spock refers to the Kobayashi Maru as, “a lesson”. Clearly it is not a lesson, it is a test.
19. Star Fleet Academy would never punish Kirk for the Kobayashi Maru incident, let alone put him up for trial in front of his classmates. Hopelessly stupid storytelling.
20. The constant fake lens flares are annoying.
21. Uhura bullying Spock to get on the Enterprise is ridiculous. This is the military. Things just don’t happen like that.
22. The depiction of how Kirk gets on the Enterprise is ridiculous.
23. San Francisco is ugly, like it’s supposed to be a dystopian future.
24. Why does Vulcan need help? Vulcan is more advanced than Earth and has many more ships. Furthermore, the Neutral Zone is mentioned as if everyone knows what it is. At this time in future history very few people knew about the Neutral Zone and the Romulans were a very mysterious species. For once some exposition would have been appropriate.
25. It takes longer than a few minutes to get to Vulcan. The dialog suggests it takes only a few minutes.
26. If they knew that going to Vulcan was a trap, why did they walk into it?
27. Why are torpedoes loaded manually on the Enterprise?
28. Romulans always speak very formally, just like Vulcans. Neither do so in this story.
29. Humans are depicted falling from orbit to just a couple of miles above Vulcan’s surface. Why don’t they burn up like meteors?
30. Sword fighting between the Romulan & Sulu is silly.
31. The drill idea is preposterous. The vast majority of the interior of any planet is made of liquid. A drill would simply have no effect.
32. Why didn’t anyone shoot at the red matter torpedo as it headed towards the drill hole? Also, Gene Roddenberry would never have allowed an event as dark as the destruction of Vulcan to occur.
33. It is too contrived that Kirk’s parachute should break.
34. They wouldn’t fall on the transporter pad just because they were falling when energized.
35. Why is it that Chekov can catch falling crewmen but not falling mothers?
36. Captains don’t verbally record their logs in front of the crew.
37. It’s unmotivated and contrived that Uhura would suddenly kiss Spock and he would hug and kiss back.This is the most obscene contradiction with the real ST universe. Everybody, and I mean EVERYBODY, knows Spock doesn’t show emotion.
38. Nero’s character is too monstrous without proper explanation. He’s not even a two-dimensional character and ST has always been excellent at providing proper motivation for its villains. This is simply not good enough.
39. Nero’s ship’s so powerful, his torturing of Pike serves no purpose. Gratuitous nonsense.
40. Why would Spock ask a communications officer (Uhura) which direction a ship is headed?
41. The talk of an alternate reality is completely unnecessary exposition. They would never have this conversation. Science fiction characters should only ever worry about changing the past. It should never occur to them that their future has been changed while in the middle of a conflict. They might briefly reflect on it when it’s all over, but it has no bearing on the conflict itself and so would never be mentioned.
42. Spock twice uses the word “destiny”. This concept is simple superstition and Spock would never use this word.
43. Spock was emotional in expelling Kirk; the brig would have been fine.
44. It’s inconsistent that Nero’s ship was able to destroy several Star Fleet ships in just a few seconds, but George Kirk’s ship (the Kelvin) was never destroyed and was able to protect shuttlecraft and ram Nero’s ship. Nero would easily have killed everyone on the Kelvin and hence no Jim Kirk, hence no story. In other words, Nero’s ship’s abilities change with the requirements of the writers; this is the definition of a contrivance and is the second biggest crime of the producers of this movie.
45. Spock asks, “You are not the captain?” Since he is not aware of the precise circumstances of the new timeline, his assumption that a 21 year-old would be captain is preposterous.
46. Why would a powerful empire like Romulus need Spock’s help to survive a nova? Novas are always predictable at least thousands of years in advance. The Romulans would have been well prepared, again, rendering the whole story implausible.
47. Scott’s materialization and trek through large transparent piping in the engineering section seems more appropriate to Willy Wonka.
48. Spock would never say fear is necessary for command, because fear is an emotion.
49. Scott says he’s beaming them to an unoccupied section of Nero’s ship. There is no acceptable explanation for why he failed. They have sensors. Star Fleet characters always know whether there are people about when using the transporter. Again, totally contrived.
50. The fist fight between Nero & Kirk is unmotivated and Romulans just don’t act like that.
51. I don’t like old Spock telling young Spock to put aside logic. Spock is logical and he should stay logical.
52. Why is McCoy always on the bridge?
53. Spock’s called a commander, but his rank at this time of the future history was lieutenant.
54. Again with the preposterous drilling of a planet, this time Earth.
55. Apparently black holes are taken for granted as being transportation hubs through both space and time. As we know, this is not true (notwithstanding string theory, which is unproven and extremely unlikely). Real Star Trek always provides at least a bare minimum of technobabble to explain why known physics have been circumvented for the sake of story. The producers of this film couldn’t be bothered. Lazy.

Other reviews of the movie:

Hal’s not the only one. Others have decried the movie and the criticism does seem to stem from the more Star Fleet Academy bumper sticker crowd, IE the far-out (sounds better than calling them the far left/right):

http://cinefantastiqueonline.com/2009/05/star-trek-one-trekkies-thoughts-film-review/

The comments connected with the Star Trek 11 trailer are grassroots movie reviews: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HcFLgkCKi1Q

Some of my hardcore–geek twitter friends say:

I invite the readers to add comments and more review links. Commenting on this blog site is free of hoop-jumping–no activation email nonsense. Enter your contact email in the form below along with your comment and then blamo! Trekkies that agree or disagree and Trek fans that agree or disagree, this blog loves angry letters or “yeah, that’s so right on!!” responses. The comment field is right below. Have at it!

Books have been around for a long while. I love them but it takes a lot of resources to make a book: trees, a plup mill, a printing press, a way to ship them to your door or nearby store.

In SciFi stories, people aren’t reading using parts of dead trees. They’re using some cool holo-something or thin e-paper thingy. Nowadays, we can read books with devices similar to scifi characters, and the devices are improving every generation. Two I’d like to talk about are the Kindle and Calibre.

Kindle

Kindle devices are pretty cheap at under $300 or $200 (model depending). My experience has been with Kindle software on the iPhone, and OSX. Kindle software can be downloaded for free from Amazon.(Windows, OSX, and other phone devices.) There’re benefits to using an ebook reader instead of a paper book. My favorites are: within seconds, you can start reading a book you found online (this is important because with the coming of The Singularity we don’t have much time to read); the ability to highlight text and then see a report on how many other people highlighted the same area (ever wonder how many other people thought some line deserved highlighting?); and clicking on any word in the text and getting its definition (China Mie’ville and William Gibson, you make me work so hard ;-)).

Yes, I’m saying that reading ebooks will expand your vocabulary more quickly and with less effort than standard books! Face it. Sometimes we get tired of thumbing through the dictionary and decide to guess the word by context so we can just keep reading the damn story.

The biggest drawback to the Kindle is that you can ONLY read books you buy from Amazon. (You can get around this by installing the Kindle Previewer–also free from Amazon, and then using the previewer’s “view->open on Kindle for Mac/PC” option, and the previewer will send the book to your Kindle software.)

All in all, though, I am a big fan of my Kindle. I am always ordering things from Amazon nowadays so it is really easy and convenient to be able to add an eBook to my shopping basket. Which reminds me, do you do any of your shopping on Amazon? If so, you absolutely need to start using some of their promo codes and coupons. I have saved a small fortune on my purchases recently thanks to all of the discounts that I have been getting. Correspondingly, if you would like to learn more about some of the most recent Amazon promo codes, you can find plenty of useful resources on the Raise website. In my opinion, there is nothing quite like knowing that you have saved money on your shopping!

Calibre

Calibre is an open source project that produces a free reader for the big three computer platforms: OSX, Linux, and Windows. Calibre allows you to download books from any book you can get your hands on, be it from an email, to an online book repository (can anyone comment if they’ve purchased a book in the Kindle store and then viewed it with Calibre?). Calibre’s UI is busy and isn’t intuitive like the Kindle. It’s a very effective ebook reader but my version (V 0.7.23) has some layout problems because it isn’t honoring section breaks.

Compare the screenshots of Calibre (OSX) and Kindle (iPad version) in the below gallery. (If you hover over the pics, you’ll get the caption in a bubble.) Notice Calibre supports every font my computer supports and displays the custom fonts used in the Honolulu Hottie ebook. The Kindle book supports only two fonts (a serif font and a sans-serif font), italics, bold, and a few sizes of those fonts. Once Calibre supports section breaks, it’ll render books much more beautifully than the Kindle. (You’ll get used Calibre’s strange user interface.) And Calibre will help make you smarter with it’s integrated dictionary.

If you want to give ‘reading like your living in a SciFi story’ a shot, you’ll find plenty of free and cheap reads in Amazon’s Kindle store or you can search around for more open alternatives with Calibre. If you don’t know where to start, click on the Honolulu Hottie book cover on the right side of this webpage and for less than the cost of a latte and within seconds, you can read an exciting Hawaiian cyberpunk novelette about surfing, a beautiful woman, and corporate malfeasance. With an an ebook, groking words like malfeasance, and well grok, are just a finger tap away.

In 1989 I read my first cyberpunk novel, William Gibson’s Mona Lisa Overdrive. That novel got me reading science fiction again. Until then, I’d been on a Fantasy bender for the six years, and yes, you can get drunk on fantasy. My apologies to my brother and sister, for making them dress like hobbits and forcing them to call me The Great One. They partied like ewoks on Endor when I moved out for college.

Cyberpunk is considered an old genre (the cool kids are doing steampunk) but it appeals to the mundane science fiction reader in me. It’s mundane because Cyberpunk has similarities to reality, such as the absence of spaceships flitting from star to star at speeds faster than light (at least OUR spaceships). Cyberpunk stories are near future and filled with high-tech lowlifes. It’s a good genre for tales of “warning” because it’s mundane enough to see how our day-to-day life contributes to the tale’s vision.

What’s Hawaiian cyberpunk? Sunglasses and surfboards with datajacks? (Might as well do something with that leash around surfer’s leg.) Honolulu Hottie is my take on it. It’s a novelette which is like a novel but a third of the size because I only kept the good parts. The story’s about Nafi, a world champion surfer who got a regular job but get’s seduced by a political activist. She gets him in trouble, he loses his job, and they’re on the run from a corporate coverup that requires them dead. Surfboards, datajacks, crime, and poy. You know, Hawaiian cyberpunk.

Honolulu Hottie is live on the Kindle for $3.00 to the worldwide public.

I’ll close with a surfer’s farewell: if you decide to ride that giant swell cresting the horizon, remember to keep the waxy side of the board up, the fin side down, and your datajacks rust free.

The real life situation was cliche enough for a movie (I’ll talk about the movie later):
An actor who played in cowboy movies was president of the US and was insinuating that the next toughest country was evil. Both sides had the firepower to destroy the world many times over. But then a movie came out on ABC and changed everything. A movie that produced a “what if” vision so terrifying that the US government and people started to carefully think about the consequences of attempting to destroy those they called evil.

Check out Alexander Veer’s writeup about how the movie The Day After changed everything in a powerful wave of activist science fiction.

It was 2009 (late) before I started watching the animated series Star Wars Clone Wars. The show had been running for a few seasons already. In fact, the animated series has been imagineered in a few different flavors: a movie released to theatres, a Cartoon Central TV series, and an Adult Swim styled cartoon movie.

Frankly, Lucas Films has made it an organizational mess. It took me a few hours of IMDB, Wikipedia, and Google research to figure out what there was to watch and in what order to watch them. Here is my prescription for catching up in four steps.

Step 1, watch the live action movies

The first two movies are the setup for the cartoons. Their names are: Star Wars Episode 1: The Phantom Menace, Star Wars Episode 2: Attack of the Clones, and Star Wars Episode 3: Revenge of the Sith. These are usually held in high regard by fans of the franchise (such as those who write on https://thedirect.com/StarWars/ and the like). If you are a very orderly person, you may opt to not watch episode 3 until you do steps 2-4. But I’m not very orderly so I recommend watching the live action movies first, and because sometimes it’s nice to know where a character is headed, and then watch that character at an earlier time and see how he struggles along that path. I love watching these movies with my whole house audio systems. They make the movies so much better.

Step 2, Go for an Adult Swim

Lucas wanted you to have something to do after watching Episode 2 Attack of the Clones in 2002, until he released Episode 3 Revenge of the Sith. So he gave you cartoon shorts. They were released in 2003, 2004, 2005 as teasers (sometimes on TV, sometimes in the theater). Notice the “Adult Swim” rough and minimal style of animation on the front cover. This series of shorts (also called the “micro” series) was later combined to make a large narrative about what Anni had been up to between Star Wars Episode 2: Attack of the Clones, and Star Wars Episode 3: Revenge of the Sith. I enjoyed watching it very much. It’s an example of doing narrative with sparse dialog and lots of showing.

Step 3, Star Wars: Clone Wars movie

Notice the distinctive difference in animation on the movie poster versus the “Adult Swim” style. This movie was used to kick off the TV series in Step 4.

Step 4, Star Wars: The Clone Wars TV series

This TV series ran immediately after the animated movie and is still running today (crica 2010). The animation style is the same as that of the movie. As of now, only two seasons are out in blu-ray.

Now go to Amazon or NetFlicks and find ways to enjoy the Star Wars experience! (Sorry, JarJar Binks is still included.)