New Sci-Fi on TV

I\’ve been watching a few new sci-fi shows recently, specifically the pilots of the Bionic Woman and Flash Gordon remakes, and the pilot of the Sarah Connor Chronicles, a spin-off from the Terminator movies. And my opinions?

I have to say that all three were… okay… not bad to watch, but nothing special either. I was actually slightly underwhelmed after all of the hype. The Bionic Woman, by the same guys who produced the excellent remake of Battlestar Galactica looks promising, despite the relatively low-key start. The bionic babe herself is played by the always nice on the eyes Michelle Ryan (formerly of Eastenders), while Starbuck from Battlestar Galactica manages to look a lot less butch, much sexier, and positively radiating menace as the nasty original Bionic Woman.

Flash Gordon updates the original story to the present day, and replaces the original (quaint but fun) dildo-shaped rocketships spewing sparks and smoke with a Sliders-like wormhole thingy to provide travel between Earth and the planet Mongo. There are lots of sexy babes (Ming\’s daughter and Dale in particular), Dale is now a very Lois Lane-like newspaper reporter, and the story is now much more based around Earth and Flash\’s family. On the negative side, the guy playing Ming seems a lot less suited to his role than his predecessors (Max von Sydow and Charles Middleton in particular). Overall, it was watchable, but with lots of room for improvement.

The most disappointing of the three was, funnily enough, the most action-packed, and the one that should\’ve had the most potential of them all. The Sarah Connor Chronicles is a spin-off of the second Terminator movie, and each episode features Sarah and a more adult (mid-teens) John, running and hiding from a constant stream of Terminators while under the protection of a \”teenage girl\” Terminator. There was a lot more action and thrills in this pilot than in the other two, but, strangely enough, I reckon that there\’s a lot less potential for improvement than for the others. How many times will we be able to watch Sarah and John survive yet another attack by the umpteenth tenth-rate Arnie clone before the series starts to get really monotonous and tiresome? Not too many, I\’d reckon. This is the sort of thing that is more suited to the occasional movie, not a regular weekly TV show. I\’m really hoping that I\’m wrong, \’cos I was a big fan of the Terminator movies. Time will tell.

Overall, so far, all three shows are watchable, but nothing special. Definitely nothing approaching the quality of Battlestar Galactica, Doctor Who or Heroes. But it is early days yet, so here\’s hoping all three pick up a bit. I\’m still waiting for someone to do a Battlestar or Babylon 5-level quality series adaption of E.E. \”Doc\” Smith\’s classic Lensmen stories. Pretty much every space opera series or movie (Star Wars, Babylon 5 and others) have shamelessly ripped off the Lensmen and (to a lesser extent) Lord of the Rings. LOTR has had the big movie treatment. It\’s about time that the Lensmen also got the movie or TV honours. Why it hasn\’t been done a long time ago beats me.

A Good Day at the Shops

I\’ve had an interesting and fruitful day at the shops. Picked up a load of DVDs, a book, and a new set of plug-in earphones.

The book is the new hardback release of the final Harry Potter novel, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, which my local Tesco\’s was selling at a huge 50% discount.

The earphones (bought at my local HMV) are the absolutely gorgeous Sennheiser CX300 plug-in ear-canal earphones, to go with my equally gorgeous Cowon iAudio X5 DAP. I needed phones to do the excellent sound quality of the X5 justice (the iAudio X5 blows the iPod out of the water, when it comes to sound quality). The earphones cost just under £40, and are worth every penny. You\’ll be lucky to find anything better under £100.

Finally, to the bulk of today\’s haul: five Doctor Who DVDs from my local Virgin store, at only £9 each (most Doctor Who DVDs are selling at over twice that amount right now). Genesis of the Daleks, Revelation of the Daleks, The Hand of Fear, Earthshock, and the 1996 Paul McGann Doctor Who TV movie.

I\’m a huge fan of both the classic Doctor Who series and the new series, and Genesis of the Daleks and The Hand of Fear are particular favourites of mine from the classic series. So I\’m well chuffed with this lot. Now, if only the rest of the classic Doctor Who DVDs would come down from their relatively high price of around £20 apiece, I can start replacing my tatty old Doctor Who VHS video collection with a bunch of pristine new DVDs.

It\’s going to be an enjoyable week going through this lot. A load of nice music, DVDs, and a good book… what more could any self-respecting geek ask for?

Silver Surfer: Requiem

One of my current favourite comics is a four-part mini-series published under the Marvel Knights imprint, Silver Surfer: Requiem. The series is is written by none other than J. Michael Straczynski himself (yep, he of Babylon 5 fame), and the beautiful, painted art is by Esad Ribic, someone whom I haven\’t come across before, but I\’ll certainly sit up and take notice if I see the name again.

As you might have guessed, the overarching theme of the mini-series is the impending death of the Silver Surfer, due to the molecular disintegration of the silver \”skin\” which covers his body, and which is part of him, right down to the deepest level of his nervous system. Even Reed Richards, one of the smartest humans on the planet, can do nothing to help. So the Surfer, in his own stoic, pragmatic fashion, resolves to accept his coming fate, and enjoy his remaining time to the utmost. He hops on his surfboard, and heads off into the big blue (or black) yonder, to see as much as there is to see of the world and universe before he dies.

So far, there have been three parts published out of the four, and each issue is a separate-but-linked segment of the whole story. The first part deals with the visit to Reed Richards, who confirms the diagnosis of the illness, with a bit of a recap of the Surfer\’s origin and the fateful adventure in which he rebelled against Galactus and sided with the Fantastic Four and the people of Earth against his former master. The second revolves around a fascinating encounter with Spider-Man, with a nice ending to that segment of the story. And the third issue takes the Surfer away from Earth out to the stars, where he gets involved in a \”Sacred War\” between two interplanetary races.

The series looks beautiful, and is very well written (as you\’d expect with Straczynski at the helm). What I really like about it is the way it deals with people, examining with a critical eye both the beauty and the ugly flaws of humanity (even when the \”humanity\” is two alien races), the religious fanaticism, the aggression, and the corruption and greed of powerful rulers. Powerful stuff.

Excellent story so far. Can\’t wait for the fourth and final segment of the mini-series.

Eternals by Neil Gaiman and John Romita, Jr.

I tend not to follow modern mainstream Marvel or DC comics at all these days. With the exceptions of the various collections of Silver and Bronze Age material and the occasional, very rare, collection of modern material by authors that I like (Ed Brubakker, Warren Ellis, Mark Waid, Mark Millar, Kurt Busiek, James Robinson and a few others), they do absolutely nothing for me. Compared to the glory days of the Silver and Bronze Ages, the quality of new comics output by both companies is generally absolutely abysmal these days.

But every once in a while they do come out with something worthwhile, something a little different, like a brand-new kind of superhero story, or a high quality reimagining of an old one. One of the better \”reboots\” of a classic superhero comic that I\’ve read in recent years was Eternals, a seven-part mini series produced by Marvel Comics, written by Neil Gaiman, and with art by John Romita, Jr.

This is a reimagining of Jack Kirby\’s old Eternals title from the 1970s and early 1980s, and elevates what was really a second or third rate (although fun) Bronze Age Marvel series to true \”classic\” status. Although the original was an interesting enough series in its own right (and I myself almost always prefer the originals over reboots), in my opinion, Kirby was well past his best when he worked on it, and it showed.

I know that the purists will be screaming \”BLASPHEMY!!\” from the roof-tops at these comments, but I cannot emphasize just by how much this modern, \”Gaiman-ized\” version of the Eternals completely blows the original out of the water. Gaiman takes the original concepts and story and runs with it all, creating a fresh new look at the original, a more adult (in the good sense) story, and great characters. What else would you expect from Neil Gaiman?. All of the original characters, both protagonists and antagonists, get a real make-over in this new version.

The Deviants, in particular, are given the expert Gaiman treatment. These were the one-dimensional, bad-guy cannon-fodder in the original series. Now they\’ve been fleshed out, made more three-dimensional, and given a lot more depth, darkness and outright menace. The two lead Deviant antagonists are a nasty team altogether, obviously modelled on Vandemar and Croup, Gaiman\’s own creations, the two vicious assassins in his classic novel Neverwhere. These two are by far my favourite characters in the entire story.

Romita\’s excellent art also sets off Gaiman\’s writing perfectly, and the series was published in a number of variant covers (most by Romita) that all collectors will want to grab. I usually am NOT a fan of the multiple \”variant cover\” nonsense, but I made a point of grabbing most of these, because the Romita covers are so good.

I won\’t spoil things by revealing details of the story itself. Just go buy it. The series was collected in both hardcover and trade paperback. I bought both, and I\’d definitely recommend grabbing a copy of the trade paperback, at least. I\’d say that anyone who is not a hardcore original Kirby Eternals \”purist\” should enjoy this one.

Some Interesting Prehistoric Stuff

I love to browse the Sci-Tech page (page 154) on BBC1\’s Ceefax (teletext) service. There\’s always a lot of interesting snippets culled from various sources such as the New Journal of Physics, Nature and Science magazines. My favourite areas of interest are astronomy and space exploration, and palaeontology, and here are a couple of palaeontology snippets from recent pages:

Apparently scientists in Germany, Switzerland and the US claim that they\’ve found the point at which the African and Indian elephants split and diverged from a common ancestor. They compared genetic research done on both species and other research done on the extinct woolly mammoth and mastodon, and came to the conclusion that the split occurred 7.6 million years ago.

Another interesting snippet concerns the dinosaurs. Accepted theories state that when the dinosaurs first evolved, they swept all before them, and rendered the earlier, more primitive forms of reptiles (known as dinosauromorphs) quickly extinct. Apparently that\’s considered now not to be the case, and both lived side by side for many millions of years.

Just a couple of interesting snippets from the pages of Sci-Tech. Go to Ceefax page 154, and git yerselves ejjicated a bit. 🙂

Heroes Debuts on UK Television

The first two episodes of Tim Kring\’s Heroes, Genesis and Don\’t Look Back, aired earlier tonight (Wednesday 25th) on BBC2, followed by a short ten minute behind the scenes thingy, Heroes Unmasked. I must say that I\’m absolutely delighted. I\’ve been following its progress since it started on satellite TV, and it\’s nice to see this series coming to a more general audience on terrestrial TV. It\’s also nice to be able to watch it all from the start again.

The first episode seems to start off as a slow-tempo kinda X-Men clone, but it soon finds its own niche and transforms into something quite different. Conspiracies abound and there\’s lots of great action and complex stories ahead, so all the UK terrestrial TV viewers are in for a treat. And it is soooooo nice to see a series about super-powered folks, and not a single glimpse of a cape or tights (I\’ve always thought that capes \’n\’ tights look really naff on-screen – they only really work in comics or animation).

Heroes, along with Battlestar Galactica and Doctor Who, is right at the top of my list of current favourite sci-fi TV series. So let\’s roll on next Wednesday night, BBC2 at 9pm, and episode 3.

Cassini Finds Another Saturnian Moon

So the Cassini mission has found another moon orbiting Saturn? That brings the total of moons around the ringed planet up to a total of sixty. Sixty moons! Sounds mighty impressive, doesn\’t it?

It\’s a little \’un, only a rock, really, at a mere 2km (1.2 miles) in diameter. That\’s 4-5 times smaller than the mere \”meteor\” that supposedly wiped out the dinosaurs. If that\’s the case, and this new \”moon\” is so small, how can they justify calling it a moon? And how many of the other Saturnian moons fall into the same category? Most of them, I reckon.

Yet the scientists seem to be falling over themselves to increase the number count, according the title to every tidgy little rock they find orbiting the planet. Ironic, isn\’t it, considering the rush by most of them a while back to strip Pluto of its status as a planet? If Pluto isn\’t a planet, then this menagerie of large boulders is no more a retinue of moons than I am.

You\’d think they\’d at least have the decency to be consistent, wouldn\’t you?

Books, Books and More Books

The books keep on rolling in (mostly SF), faster than I can keep up with reading them. I sometimes wonder if I\’ll ever get to read even half of them (I\’ll be lucky) before I die of old age. But it won\’t be for lack of trying on my part.

Lessee – over the past two or three weeks I\’ve amassed somewhere in the region of 50-60 new books. A few of those have been computer and web design books. Some have been science books – I started hunting down every Stephen J Gould and Robert Zubrin book that I could find – and several have been history books.

However, at least 70% of the books have been SF, split fairly evenly between novels and collections or anthologies of short fiction. I\’ve bought a whole bunch of more recent Alastair Reynolds novels, a stack of Dan Simmons – Hyperion/Fall of Hyperion, Endymion/Rise of Endymion and Ilium/Olympos, several Mike Resnick novels – Santiago, The Return of Santiago and Dark Lady, and a list of others too long for me to bother typing up.

But, as I\’m a huge fan of short fiction, I get most excited by the collections and anthologies of short stories. Some of the best of my recent haul are:

  • The Year\’s Best Science Fiction 23rd Annual Collection, edited by Gardner Dozois
  • The Best of the Best Volume 2, edited by Gardner Dozois
  • One Million A.D. edited by Gardner Dozois
  • The New Space Opera, edited by Gardner Dozois and Jonathan Strahan
  • Cities, edited by Peter Crowther
  • Starlight Volumes 1, 2 and 3, edited by Patrick Nielsen Hayden
  • Galactic North (collection) by Alastair Reynolds

There\’s a whole bunch of other stuff, but these gems alone will keep me going for ages. I know I\’m a book addict, but maybe I\’m going a little overboard, eh? Talk about a junkie needing a fix…

Reading SF: Galactic North, by Alastair Reynolds

Now Reading: Galactic North by Alastair Reynolds

I\’ve just bought a very nice collection of SF stories by leading British/Welsh \”hard\” SF author Alastair Reynolds. A signed 1st edition hardcover of Galactic North, a collection of stories set in his Revelation Space universe. I\’ve been a fan of Alastair\’s SF going right back to \”Spirey and the Queen\” in Interzone 108 (June 1996). I began to take note of any other Reynolds stories that appeared, but it was with \”Galactic North\” in Interzone 145 that he became one of my favourite SF authors.

It was like being shot between the eyes, and just pushed all the right buttons for me. The blend of hard SF and exciting action adventure was like a breath of fresh air, and I began to hunt eagerly for every SF magazine that I could find containing Alastair Reynolds stories, followed by every Reynolds novel that was released. At the time, I didn\’t realise it, but this was the real start of my love affair with the then-relatively new sub-genre of New Space Opera.

Now I\’m delighted to get my sweaty, eager paws on Galactic North, his first collection. I\’ve already read almost everything in this, with the exception of the newer stories, but it\’s really nice to get all of these Revelation Space stories in one lovely hardback book, instead of having to hunt through back issues of SF magazines such as Interzone, Asimov\’s SF and Spectrum SF for individual stories. A must for all Alastair Reynolds fans, and I\’d recommend it to any fans of hard SF and ripping yarns who may have had the misfortune to not have read any Reynolds yet.

Now I have to find Zima Blue and Other Stories, his second collection, this time of a selection of his non-Revelation Space short fiction. Hopefully, some of these days, we\’ll finally see all of his short fiction collected in book form.

Comics and Sci-Fi: A Marriage Made in Heaven

One day a guy who works at the local comics shop (hi Chris!) made a comment that left me completely dumbfounded. He stated that he didn\’t like SF. He didn\’t like to read it, or to watch it, either on TV or at the movies.

After I\’d picked my jaw up from the floor, I managed to utter a few words, stammering…

\”But… but… but, you\’re a comics fan! How can you not like sci-fi? All those comics you read are full of sci-fi stuff – robots, spaceships, time travel. You sure you don\’t like SF?\”

\”Sorry, nope\”.

\”You don\’t like Star Trek, or Star Wars, or Babylon 5, or Doctor Who, Battlestar Galactica, or…\”

\”Nope. I\’m not into that kinda thing\”.

\”But… but… that\’s impossible. You can\’t be a comics fan and not like sci-fi. Man, you must be an alien or something… \” (Phil wanders off, shaking his head in bewilderment and disbelief).

I\’d met something/someone I thought couldn\’t exist. A paradox. A comics fan who actually, really did not like SF! I\’ve been a comics fan myself for over forty years, and I\’d never ever met anyone who liked one and didn\’t like the other, at least to some extent.

As far as I\’m concerned, they are inextricably linked. The first big daily newspaper SF comic strip, Buck Rogers, was inspired by Armaggedon: 2419 AD, written by Philip Francis Nowlan, an SF novella which appeared in the classic SF pulp magazine Amazing Stories in August 1928. The Buck Rogers comic strip first appeared in 1929, followed by the rival Flash Gordon strip (started 1934) in a competing daily newspaper published by the King Syndicate. The huge popularity of these strips led to the first sci-fi movie serials of the 1930s, the three Flash Gordon serials (1936, 1938 and 1939) and Buck Rogers (1939).

These serials were the progenitors of pretty much every interplanetary sci-fi and space opera TV series and movie that followed. So it can be argued without much disagreement that SF comics were inspired by SF literature, and spawned a lineage in US sci-fi movies and television that leads right up to the massive money-spinning SF movie blockbusters of the current era.

Most mainstream comics are steeped in SF imagery. Even the good old superhero strip is full of it, with all those aliens, and spaceships and robots and time travel, etc. The origins of most of the main Marvel superheroes are right out of the 1950s sci-fi monster movies: giant ants created by nuclear tests/Peter Parker changed into Spider-Man after being bitten by radioactive spider, giant tarantula created by nuclear tests/Bruce Banner caught in gamma bomb explosion and becomes the Hulk, nuclear tests on remote island turn iguana into Godzilla/four astronauts caught in cosmic ray storm become Fantastic Four, the list goes on and on…

I\’m not saying that all comics have SF elements – many of the classic comics are from other genres or \”real life\” (Berlin, Maus, Palestine, A History of Violence, and many others). But with most mainstream comics and superhero comics, the SF link has always been historically very strong.

And I still say that any mainstream comics fan who doesn\’t like SF is a mutant abberation… 🙂