About the Science Fiction Series "V"

Alright, I just started watching the science fiction series "V" starting with the pilot, and I thought I'd give some impressions before I forget about them and get lost in the rest of whatever this series turns out to be.

I'm always into shows' first episodes, or pilots, since the writers tend to put their best feet forward, and though the execution is usually poor, it is where the raw idea shows through. "V", for now though, strikes me as somewhat unoriginal so far.

So it starts: We have a few opening shots of regular people going about their lives in Southern California, and suddenly there's an earthquake.

You can tell it's an earthquake because in every scene and location, there's a shot of a little thing rattling off a table, or a glass of water rippling like in that famous scene from Jurassic Park. What seems funny to me right away, is that no one just says "oh yeah, we're in California. It's an earthquake. I'd better do the earthquake thing and get under a table." Instead, they're all like "What's happening! I've never felt the earth shake before!"

Also, their emergency procedures seem chaotic and unorganized. We're led to perceive, from the opening shots, that this is a movie set in our world. Two historical events are referenced in the first scene: The assassination of US President John F. Kennedy in 1963

, and the terrorist attack on the World Trade Center twin towers in New York City in 2001. We are also shown the ID card of one of the presumably main characters, who works for Homeland Security. Regardless on this emphasis on American paranoia, the scenes that result are, as I pointed out, chaotic. In this show, people still don't know what to do if there's an earthquake or a terrorist attack. There's still panic and chaos.

Anyways, there's no reason for panic, because it very quickly turns out that it's an alien spaceship that's responsible for the earthquakes, which people realize as soon as they look outside and up. Hmm, where have I seen this before? The 1999 movie "Independence Day", to name just one, but I've seen it before. Aliens come to invade by parking spaceships above every major city in the world. Most recently, this trope was used as a powerful and satirical device when, in the 2009 film "District 9", an alien ship parks itself over the dysfunctional city of Johannesburg, South Africa.

In "V" though, there's apparently no mystery, as the first thing the aliens do is turn the bottoms of their spaceships into giant video screens and broadcast a friendly message of peace and trade to the people of earth.

And that's where the show completely loses me.

If they have video screen technology, as well as the capability of interstellar travel, then clearly they should have the ability to communicate directly with "earth's leaders" whomever they might consider them to be. I'd contend that this remains the heads of state of the G8 most powerful countries on earth, the most important of which is the USA. But an argument could be made for the aliens contacting the United Nations, or perhaps one of the numerous scientific organizations with the capability to communicate with extraterrestrial visitors, like maybe NASA, or SETI.

[Speaking of SETI, I feel bad for them. They kind of get kicked around in funding and political circles because they haven't found anything yet. At least, they haven't found ETI, which is what they're Searching for. But as soon as they do find ETI with the capability of communicating with earth, it won't be SETI's job to communicate anymore. Some other agency will take over, and SETI will pretty much remain how it is today. Yes, they'll win awards for having found something, and by awards I mean they will get trophies, one-time cash prizes, and scientific apparatuses named after them, maybe even a planet or two. But the rewards that SETI will never be able to cash in on is the actual opportunity to communicate and deal with alien intelligences. This will be granted to someone with earth-bound experience in diplomacy and negotiation. SETI will instead be set loose on the universe again, searching for the next ETI, while at the same time searching our own planet for sources of funding which no one will want to do, since we'll have already found ETI. In many folks' eyes, SETI will have served its purpose, and made itself irrelevant. But the truth of SETI is that it will always be relevant, because there will always be more ETIs to discover. And it will always be questioned as to its relevance, no matter how many ETIs it ultimately finds.]

So for some reason, the "V" aliens decide that they want to communicate "democratically" with the "people of earth" by parking above our big cities and broadcasting a picture of a human woman. Interestingly, the human woman is a white woman, speaking English. Fortunately, the aliens speak French too, and the spaceship parked over Paris is conveniently in French.

But I'm beginning to wonder about these aliens. Apparently they speak English and French, and they've somehow determined that their spokesperson should be a white human woman. Usually when people have a message to get out to the mass media, they conduct focus groups to determine how to affect the recipients of their message most favorably. It turns out, in many cases, that a woman's face will garner a more positive response than a male face, if the topic is diplomacy and peace and love. A male face, on the other hand, tends to work well with messages of threats of war, economic sanctions, deadlines, and ultimatums.

So anyways, pop psychology aside, the aliens somehow got extensive knowledge of humanity long before they arrived, managed to reproduce a convincing female face, and yet for some reason never communicated with the governments or scientific agencies of Earth? And for that matter, where was SETI? Where was NASA? Where were the amateur astronomers of Earth? These spaceships are as least as big as middling asteroids, so why was no one able to detect them? No, they somehow manage to fly in, under the radar, and announce that they just want to be friends.

Look, if the aliens really want to be friends, they should park themselves in orbit. Not around Earth, because that's where our satellites are, and we don't want them interfering with our satellites. Preferably somewhere comfortably distant. Like the moon. Let them park themselves in orbit around the moon. And rather than fly in with giant TV screens, all Big-Brother-esque (have they not read George Orwell's "1984"? Are these aliens completely oblivious to irony?) if they really want to communicate with earth, all they have to do is hack into the major TV networks. Or hey, get on Twitter.

Alternatively, just get in contact with a spokesperson on earth who can disseminate information to the rest of the planet on a want-to-know basis. Because believe me, at least at first, if there are aliens on TV, or aliens on the internet, that's where people are going to be clicking. You don't need to hack in, you don't need to broadcast on a huge screen above every major city. People are going to want this information, and they're going to go to our numerous and extensive media outlets to get it. There's absolutely no need for the aliens to beat us over the head with the fact that they're here and they "just want to trade and be friends".

If you just want to trade and be friends, then why did you disrupt our most economically active regions, cause minor earthquakes and widespread panic (never mind your soothing message; what about deaf people, or people who just happened to be indoors at the time)?

And then there's this business about a "mineral" on earth that is found nowhere else in the entire galaxy. I happen to know that this is utter bullshit too. Any element found on earth can be easily found elsewhere in the solar system, and it would be far easier to extract from pretty much any other planet.

Want water? Try the comets, the minor planet Pluto, or Jupiter's moon Europa.

Iron? The asteroid belt is full of it, and far more pure than what you find on earth.

Carbon? Try the atmosphere of Mars, or Saturn's moon Titan.

Silicon? Back to the asteroids, or hey, how about Earth's moon, since there aren't any people or ecosystems there to disrupt with interstellar scale mining operations?

Hey aliens, we appreciate the fact that you want to trade and all, but right now, the most valuable thing we have to offer is our knowledge. And likewise with you to us. Anything material, from matter to energy, you can pretty much take from the solar system and there really wouldn't be much we could do to stop you. We'd certainly appreciate getting something in return for "letting" you mine the asteroid belt, but we're just not in a place technologically to have a real voice in the matter.

So anyways, that's all from the first five minutes of the pilot episode of "V". My guess is that some of the things I brought up here will turn out to be questions that the human characters ask the aliens, and maybe there will be satisfactory answers, and maybe there won't.

One Minute in my Brain

One Minute in My Brain

Ten ten two one zen eleven Ben
Where are all my riders then?
Grieve the poem and knock the rain
Don't go down the drain again
Buzz the ear and roll the street
Let's walk down and market meat.
Eat some food and drink some wine
Get it down the íntestine.

Break for me and die for me
And let's get making symphony
La, la, siss boom bah
Be a man and dance all night
And tender man

man man man man man man man

Look him in his tender booms
And sweep away his misty rains
And let's be funny, let's be men
Let's pull up our skirts again.

Sing a song for loving prove
And all the world is fun and love
I love it, and I feel it now. Just
Through my senses is all I feel
Like I must know you but it's gust
A récognition down the mind
Yet still I see your face it sets
It off.
the neurons shoot
Let's get down. Let's get down
Jump around.

And touch the ground.
Feel the love and reach your arms
Around the world
Poems have a logic too.
What am I doing?
Who are you?

Josh Treleaven, July 2009. Edited February 2010

To a Spojwoggner

Oh mamsantical spojwoggner
in the whilent glade:
Thy spamtiggles glisten breeble
under the cooling shade.

Behold now thy honk doffnet
with a gaffinour bleeze,
And sheggle forth the nonpellure
to gazble among the trees.

I Just Realized I'm a Nerd

I never thought I was qualified to be a nerd. I've always known that I'm socially awkward, but that's only ever part of the equation. To truly qualify as a nerd or a geek, I've never believed that it's enough to know how to play, and enjoy, eg.: chess, video games, pen-and-paper role playing games, literature, etc.

Two things put me over the edge though. One was listening to Wil Wheaton's podcast. One of the things Wil pointed out was how he ranted at his friend Brent Spiner who had made absolutely zero effort at consistency in his portrayal of the android character in Star Trek. Brent's response to Wil's criticism was "You're the nerd, Wil. I just did what was fun." That was when I realized that I was treating Star Trek exactly the same way as Wil and countless nerd Trekkies, who treated it as if it was meant to be "real", as if you were really supposed to lose yourself in the narrative, rather than just kind of laugh at the idea of weird people in space.

Okay, evidence that I'm a nerd: I know who Wil Wheaton is. I know he was Wesley Crusher in Star Trek: the Next Generation. I know that he plays role-playing games, which I also happen to play. I know what a podcast is.

But, I'm still hesitant to call myself a true nerd, because I don't own any copies of Wil Wheaton's books, neither in DTF (dead tree format, ie. paper) nor even in electronic format. I can't list the names of every Star Trek episode, and I don't remember what stardate it was that Wesley Crusher ascended to a higher plane of existence and left the Enterprise. I've forgotten most of what I know about role-playing games, and my extent of role-playing knowledge only ever really covered about one and a half Editions of the game of Dungeons & Dragons. I was never nerdy enough to go all the way back to Second Edition D&D, even though I did manage to acquire the books, I could never get through them. And when Fourth Edition Dungeons & Dragons came out, I was too lazy to learn a whole new ruleset. I tried, but I just couldn't get into it.

I know what a podcast is, and how to download them, but I don't have my own podcast. I don't know how to use XML, let alone other complicated programming languages like HTML, Java, C++, or even the names of other languages. Perl? I think.

I know how to edit Wikipedia, but I don't know how to create a template. See? I really don't deserve to be called nerdy.

The second thing that put me over the nerd edge though, was when I watched a video game review appear on The Young Turks radio show, for a video game called "Dragon Age." I don't know about the average guy on the street, but if you mention "dragons" to me, I think it's pretty awesome. But the host of the Young Turks, Cenk Uygur, immediately went to "Dragons? Aren't dragons kind of gay?"

Gay? I was not expecting that at all. I was expecting "Dragons? Isn't that kind of nerdy?" or "Dragons? That's a Chinese thing, right?" or "Dragons? Like as in King Arthur, right?" I do get it though, the psychological implications of being obsessed with dragons. If I was a true nerd, I could tell you if it was a Jungian or Freudian idea that dragons represent unbridled sexuality in the subconscious. Maybe it's a mix of both. But yes, I do get that dragons represent male sexuality, and a man obsessed with dragons might be expressing some unfulfilled desires in other areas of his life. But that doesn't change the fact, to me, that dragons are cool! Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar, as Freud said. And sometimes an awesome literary trope is just an awesome literary trope. And an author or a reader armed with this information can actually get a whole new level of understanding out of literature and video games, but it doesn't erase the other meanings that dragons carry to those of us who think about them and use them in our imaginative dealings.

Anyways, I'm just saying I think I might be a nerd if my first reaction to the idea of a dragon is "Cool!" rather than "Ew, gay!"

What is a blog for?

I'm going to set myself a challenge. Fear of failure is my biggest obstacle to my daily writing. So I'm going to try to fail and see what happens. My new goal is to get a piece of writing rejected five times. That's five rejection letters for one small piece of writing. As soon as I collect all five, the piece will become a blog post.

And hey, if I'm as good as I think I am, maybe I'll never get those rejection letters, and this blog will continue to suck, or at least dwindle away to even less frequent postings, because it won't have any real writing on it. Or I'll be a famous writer posting my speaking and book signing tours on this blog, or answering questions from all the other new writers.

What I learned at the library today

I learned that being a professional writer is actually two quite different jobs. One is the actual writing process, which you have to do all the time. The second job is selling your writing, which is almost as spirit-crushing as a regular day job, like how I used to sell kitchen knives.

The New Star Trek Sucks

This will be my attempt at a movie review. I've never written a decent movie review before.

It's all too easy to point out a movie's flaws, so as I am inexperienced at writing reviews, I will resort to being negative. But before I do that, I just want to say that I did enjoy the new Star Trek. It had some really good scenes, and it was really funny in parts. Unfortunately, it also had some really stupid scenes, and too many for my taste.

Let me try and pick out a few elements that stood out to me. For one, I think all the actors did a good job at reinventing the characters. All except Karl Urban, who played Dr. McCoy. Urban didn't reinvent the character so much as produce a "carbon copy" (his own words) of DeForest Kelly's version of the character. Part of it was the writing. Everything bout Urban's performance screamed "I'm trying to be DeForest Kelly". I actually thought this was really cool at first. "Hey, he sounds exactly like Dr. McCoy," I said. But then none of the other characters sounded anything like their previous versions. It was either one bright spot in a sea of poor imitations, or one try-too-hard in a film that was about forgetting the old versions. Either way, he didn't fit in the movie.

Another problem I have with the movie is the ridiculous position that Kirk is placed in. Throughout the first half of the movie, Kirk is nothing but a screw-up. He doesn't do a single heroic thing. The old James T. Kirk was the hero par excellence; not so with Chris Pine. He reminded me a lot of Hayden Christensen in Star Wars: Attack of the Clones. All hype, and no substance. Perhaps this is a common symptom of seeing your heroes (or villains) in the light of growing up and making mistakes. They're really impressive once they grow up, and it is clear that they have an interesting story that got them there, but once you see that interesting story on film, you lose some respect for their awesomeness. In Kirk's case though, I also blame the way the writers took the plot of the movie.

Actually, in Star Trek, Kirk's lack of heroism is explained by the plot: according to the story, he never becomes the hero he was destined to be, because he grew up without a father. His father was never supposed to die, and a well-adjusted Kirk grows up to be captain of the Enterprise. The orphaned Kirk turns out to be a total screw-up, and there's no reason given why he just "fails upwards" into the captain's chair, when Spock and several others are clearly better qualified for the position. Abrams said that this film wasn't made for the fans, but if that's true, then why bother with Kirk at all? I can't see how anyone who isn't already a fan would give two hoots about this ridiculous character.

Now, about the "moral" about needing a father, the movie sends out mixed messages. First, we discover that fatherless Kirk is a loser, and he fails at everything he does. So I guess having a father-figure is important. But then, magically when he meets the future Spock, Kirk transforms into the starship captain that he was always meant to be, father or no father. So it turns out it was his "friends", none of whom particularly like him anyways, that allow him to succeed. I'm actually fine with either message, friends or father, we all need someone to support us if we're going to take on such an important responsibility as a starship captain; I just would have preferred a consistent message, or a message that took me from A to B.

Next on my list of quibbles is Sulu. I think Sulu is a completely useless character in the movie. (unlike in the original series, in which he was awesome.) He has two moments: first, he fails to get the ship started. So he basically looks like an idiot and an incompetent pilot. Whatever. I don't mind that so much. But then there's the scene where he whips out a folding sword from nowhere. I guess it's supposed to be a homage to the original Sulu, who was an expert swordsman. But in the context of the movie, it makes no sense.

And then there's the red-suited guy that accompanies Kirk and Sulu on the skydive down to the drilling platform. As soon as the guy shows up in a red suit, if you're a Trekkie, you know exactly what his destiny is. He's going to bite it. He's gonna die. And for one happy moment, I was hoping that the writers would throw the fans a bone, and maybe toy with him a bit. Like maybe he wouldn't die right away, but something funny would get him. But no, he pretty much jumps straight into the blast of fire, no tension at all. I suppose to be honest, that really is true to the original series, because the writing was that bad there too. But the red-suited guy dying is a homage to bad writing that I could have done without. Or at least, they could have done it in a smarter way. As in "no no, guys, I'm okay, the fire didn't burn me. Let me just ... AAAAGH!" and then something unsuspected kills him.

Chekov was one character that I semi-enjoyed in this film. I laughed when the computer couldn't understand his Russian accent, but I would have thought by the 23rd century, computers would be able to compensate for things like accents.

Speaking of Chekov and him being a genius and everything, I sort of liked how the film gave out that each of the crew members were experts in their field. That said, I didn't like how it was presented. Rather than showing what they could do, each character was basically introduced as, for example "This is Uhura. She's really good at languages and communications stuff. She's a xenolinguist." (I actually love that word). It's all telling, and very little effort put into showing. So when an alien language issue comes up, there's no tension there either. It's just, "okay, we have an alien language problem. Do we have an expert for that? Yes? Uhura? Good. Problem solved."

And then "okay, we have a transporter problem. Do we have an expert for that? What? Chekov? But he's not in the transporter room! Have him run down the corridor really fast and then instantly solve the problem as soon as he gets in there."

I don't know how much I want to say about the aliens in the film. Except, in Star Wars, for example, the background is absolutely teeming with weird monsters and aliens. In Star Wars, you couldn't throw a rock without hitting someone in a rubber suit. In this film, the new Star Trek, every alien makes a statement. Every alien means something, although what that is, I can't really understand. For example, there's the beautiful green woman alien. She's green. And beautiful. And that's it. That's why she's in the movie. Because she's green.

And Kirk lands on a deserted ice planet, only to discover two alien creatures, both of which immediately try to eat him. There are two monsters on the entire planet, and Kirk manages to tick them both off.

And Scotty has a little alien sidekick that does nothing and says nothing. He just sits on things, and Scotty yells at him. And he's not inconspicuous. You always want to think, "ok, that little alien is going to come in handy somehow, I'm just waiting to find out his significance." But there is no significance. The alien sidekick is just there to be an alien.

I really don't know what I'm asking for here. I guess in a proper sci-fi movie, aliens and monsters are either part of the background, or they're somehow important to the plot. But every single alien in this Star Trek film, is somewhere in between. I think it's a case of the background intent, but the director is too proud of the aliens to let them sort of fade into the background. He wants them to stand out so that everyone can see how much money they spent on rubber suits and CGI.

Overall, maybe I was expecting too much from this film. Everybody said it was good, so I went in expecting a good story. What I got was some fun action sequences, a few chuckles, and a whole bunch of plot waving. (Eg. "we really need Sulu to do a sword-fight, so just before we have him pull out a sword, we'll have him say that he knows how to fence.") The science fiction part of the film was typical Star Trek fare, which is to say, often outright wrong scientifically speaking, especially when dealing with temporal paradoxes, but I can't complain too much about that.