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A while back I talked about the Sci-Fi Channel’s excellent Dune mini-series, and said how much I enjoyed it. Well, tonight, we watched the first part of the three-part DVD release of the sequel mini-series, The Children of Dune.

The verdict? So far so good. This first part moves a few years ahead to a point where Maud’dib and his Feydakin armies have swept across human space, defeating the old Imperial forces and sending the former Emperor and his family into exile. But there is great unrest among the Fremen, and a major conspiracy among the Imperial family, the Bene Gesserit and the Spacing Guild. Maud’dib has to deal with all of this, two attempts on his life, the birth of his two children and the death of his beloved Chani. Quite a lot to cram into only the first part!

While the first Dune mini-series covered the first Dune novel, The Children of Dune covers the next two novels, completing the classic Dune Trilogy. This perhaps explains the more hectic pace of the sequel mini-series, but The Children of Dune is none the less enjoyable despite that.

Overall, and so far, this is an excellent sequel to the original Dune mini-series. Well worth a look, and many kudos to the Sci-Fi Channel for producing these two excellent mini-series. I wish they’d keep up the good record of adapting classic SF to mini-series.

Phil

Someone once said (I think it was Isaac Asimov) that the Golden Age of SF was when we were twelve years old (as opposed to the standard answer of “the few years after John W. Campbell took over at Astounding magazine”). And y’know something, he was spot on.

I remember those heady, distant days back when I was a kid with a fondness that measures about 10 on the Richter Scale. It’s an era, a feeling that I can never again recapture, no matter how hard I try. And I’ve tried, believe me.

I’m not saying that it was a glorious, pain-free time in my life. Quite the opposite, actually. My mother had walked out the year before and left my father alone to raise five kids. And, as the eldest of those five kids, I was suddenly promoted to position of “surrogate mother”, dad’s “right hand man”, with all the extra responsibilities and pressures that this entailed.

To make things worse, we lived in an extremely poor and deprived area in Northern Ireland at a time which was at the absolute height of “The Troubles”. Every day there was rioting, shootings, bombings, killings and other chaos of some sort. I remember one day, coming home on the school bus, and driving very slowly past the site of a bomb explosion where two would-be bombers had attempted to blow up a crowded supermarket. The bomb had exploded prematurely, killing only the two bombers. I remember the scene vividly. The bus, taking what seemed like an eternity to drive past the scene. Myself and a busload of other frightened kids, pale faces staring out the windows. Dismembered body parts littering the sidewalk, a severed arm here, a leg there, mutilated torsos and heads covered in blood-soaked sheets. Frighteningly, a fairly common occurrence in Northern Ireland back in those days.

Not exactly the stuff of a happy childhood, eh? But, in a way, I was happy, in my little parallel universe of science fiction (and comics), safely cocooned away from the horrors of “The Troubles” and an unhappy domestic life. It was my escape, my retreat from a troubled reality. In many ways it was my reality, and all the other bad stuff happened somewhere else, to someone else.

And, for an impoverished young lad like me, the local library was my lifeline. I was almost a permanent resident there. During the summer break, when I had no school studies to worry about, I used to go to the library, pick out six books, read them all in two or three days, and go back for another six books. Read those, and back for more. Ad infinitum. It was at this time that I was first discovering all the classic SF authors who really launched me head-first into my obsession with science fiction - Clarke, Asimov, Heinlein, Anderson, Niven, and the multitude of other great writers regarded by all as fundamental pillars of the genre. It was also at this time that I developed my love for short fiction, as I started to read as many anthologies and collections as I did novels. To this very day, thirty-five years later, I still tend to prefer short fiction to novels.

I remember when the fancy new library opened up near to where I lived. It was huge, like an enormous airport terminal, except lined with shelves full of books. I was in heaven. The sheer number of books, and the vastly expanded SF&F section, were a marvel to behold. We’d waited so long for this, our previous library being only a tiny temporary building. I also remember the day, several months later, when this lovely new library was burned to the ground by brain-dead, rioting morons, most of whom had never read a book in their lives. Hell, most of them were so dumb they could barely write their own names. The library was never rebuilt. In a troubled hot-spot such as our neighbourhood it would only have been burned to the ground, again and again.

I cried that day, cried like a baby. I had grown so fond of books, of science fiction, that it felt as though I’d lost something really important in my life. The library, all those books, burning in an enormous bonfire, just to provide fleeting entertainment for a mob of mindless cretins. Makes me despair for the future of the human race. I know, I know, there are always other libraries. But that fact still didn’t make this needless tragedy any less painful for me, especially after the joy and euphoria of the new library opening.

Still, new libraries did follow, in other, safer parts of the town. And my love affair with reading science fiction continued unabated. And as I got older, and my financial situation improved, I began buying books of my own. Now I have a huge collection, more SF books than any library could hope to match, and I can find anything I like online. So I don’t bother with libraries anymore. But the local library is where my love affair with books, with SF, started.

Eventually we all have to get older, grow up, and take on the more hectic schedules and responsibilities of adult life. I left the heady days of twelve years old far behind. But nothing after that could match the purity, the innocence of my own Golden Age of Science Fiction, a period when things were so much less complicated and SF was the most important thing in my life.

It’s a pity we can’t turn back the clock, eh?

Phil

There was a nice article in Nature recently relating a few interesting facts about some startling hominid fossil finds in Kenya, finds which challenge some long-held views on human evolution.

There were two fossils - a broken upper jawbone and an intact skull - nothing too startling in that. But what was startling is that these finds challenge the standard theory that Homo Habilis evolved into the more advanced Homo Erectus, who later evolved into us. Now it appears that they were “sister species”, that they overlapped in time, and lived side by side at some point.

This brings back memories of an article which I read in Scientific American two or three years back. This article stated that, at one point in the past (can’t recall how many million years ago) , no less than thirteen separate species of hominids existed side by side on this planet, each occupying their own little niche. Hard to believe, isn’t it?

It’s even harder to believe that all of them, bar our own direct ancestors, died out solely through natural selection. Methinks our ancestors were just as handy with the old “ethnic cleansing” as their dishonorable descendants (us). Maybe some kind of evolutionary or biological imperative built into us that we’ll have to overcome before we can consider ourselves really “civilized”.

Reminds me of an early episode of Babylon 5, in which a drunken Londo was bragging that the Centauri used to exist alongside another intelligent species on their homeworld, but eventually exterminated them. Londo’s views on this awful genocide? “Good riddance!”

Sounds just like us. The Centauri and Earthers are descended from a common ancestor, if you ask me.

Phil

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). Overall, it was watchable, but with lots of room for improvement.

The most disappointing of the three was, funnily enough, the most action-packed. 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 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.

Phil

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 a local major bookstore was selling at a 50% discount. The earphones are the absolutely gorgeous Sennheiser CX300 plug-in ear-canal phones, 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 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 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?

Phil

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.

Phil

Just having a quiet night in with a bunch of mates (Tuesdays and Sundays are visiting nights). For a change, we’ve been watching a few DVDs that we haven’t looked at in a while (rather than new stuff). Started off with the first part of the Dune mini-series that was produced by the Sci-Fi Channel, moved on to Jaws, and now we’re watching Aliens, the Director’s Cut.

Both Jaws and Aliens are true classic movies of the kind that you see very little of these days. And I’d forgotten just how good the Dune mini-series is. It’s far superior to the 1984 movie release (although I must confess to having the David Lynch movie on my list of guilty pleasures). Both the Dune mini-series, and its sequel, the Children of Dune (both of which complete excellent adaptions of Frank Herbert’s original classic Dune Trilogy) are great examples of just how good modern sci-fi television mini-series can be.

Personally, I believe that TV mini-series provide far more complete and faithful adaptions of SF novels than any two hour movie could ever do, especially now that TV special effects are so good that they can do these series justice. I just wish that more TV networks would take a chance and invest in more productions like this. But I suppose that’s too much to expect. Sci-Fi/SF, despite its commercial success at the box-office, is still regarded as the poor relative by nit-wit TV executives who continue to harbour the long-standing prejudice that sci-fi is only suitable for kids and imbeciles. Pity it keeps most of these arse-holes in jobs.

The more things change, the more they remain the same…

Phil

Way back in the day there was no such thing as a separate science fiction “genre”. If you go back far enough (sometime in the 19th Century), there were no separate genres at all, just a single, all-encompassing “literature” umbrella.

Then, with the spread of literacy in the “Western World” and the advent of technology for mass-producing magazines (both occurring during the 1880s, if memory serves me right), there was an explosion of magazines - “slicks” being the glossy, upmarket publications for the better-off, and “pulps”, for the poorer lower classes, trashier publications printed on cheap, bad quality paper.

These magazines contained lurid, and mostly badly written stories of all kinds - mysteries, detective fiction, wild adventures set in darkest Africa or other unexplored parts of the world, fantasies and “scientific romances”, to name only a few. They gained great popularity, and circulations went through the roof.

These general fiction magazines quickly spawned newer publications devoted solely to single types of fiction, the most popular being the detective/mystery/crime kind of story. The splintering of fiction off into separate “genres” had begun, although the phenomenon wasn’t accorded any real recognition until much later.

Science fiction remained in the general fiction magazines until relatively late on, only splitting off into its own magazine (and genre) when the first issue of Amazing Stories was published in April 1926. Since that time, and right up to this very day, we’ve had an on-going conflict and friction within SF concerning the genre vs mainstream thing, something that can really get up a head of steam when the literary snobs and wannabies and SF genre-ists (is that a real word?) lock horns.

I’m not going to ramble on too much about the history of SF, the struggle by editors and writers to drag the SF magazines out of their lowly literary ghetto into the rarified stratosphere of higher literary sophistication. That struggle was won a long time ago, and SF is written today at a literary level as high (or higher) than any other genre (or the much-lauded mainstream).

The separate struggle, to get the mainstream to accord the SF genre “respect”, will never be won, and in my opinion is totally irrelevant anyway, a chimera, a mere distraction. We don’t need their respect, and the opinions of any of these non-entities (most of whom would give both arms to have the commercial success and money of a Stephen King, J.K. Rowling, Terry Pratchett or any other successful genre author) are something I personally couldn’t care less about.

Why should we worry what a bunch of literary snobs and crusty academics think of us? These people just don’t “get” SF, and never will, so it’s no use trying to convince them otherwise. And to the literary elitists within SF who are trying to attain their Holy Grail of reshaping the genre in the image of the mainstream, I have only one thing to say: Get Lost! If you don’t like us, piss off and go shack up with your mainstream buddies instead. Or are you afraid they’ll spit on you for being lowly genre types?

In my opinion, the genrefication of science fiction was a good thing, even if it was a rough experience for many authors for the first few decades. It gave the genre its own hardcore, fanatical readership and culture, and a strong, separate identity and characteristics, things that it would most likely never have developed if it hadn’t been locked away in its little ghetto. The literary sophistication came later, and ongoing improvement is always welcome. But, in my opinion, genre SF is doing quite well, thank you very much!

Phil

One of the best comics that I’ve read in recent months is Eternals, a seven-part mini series produced by Marvel Comics, written by Neil Gaiman, and with art by John Romita, Jr. It’s a reimagining of Jack Kirby’s classic Eternals series from the 1970s and 1980s, and really elevates what was really a second or third level “classic” series to true classic status. In my opinion, it blows the original out of the water. Gaiman takes the original story and concepts and runs with it, creating a great story, and great characters (what else would you expect from Neil Gaiman?). The Deviants, in particular, are given an expert Gaiman make-over. These were the one-dimensional bad-guy cannon-fodder in the original series, and who are now given a lot more depth, darkness and outright menace. The two lead Deviant antagonists are a nasty team altogether, very reminiscent of Vandemar and Croup, Gaiman’s vicious assassins in his classic Neverwhere novel, and are my favourite characters in the story.

Romita’s art sets off Gaiman’s writing perfectly, and the series is produced in a number of variant covers (most by Romita) that all collectors will want to grab. The series has been collected in hardcover, with a trade paperback collection on the way. Definitely worth grabbing.

Phil

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.

Phil