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Alright, alright, no more puns. Upun my word.

The next event after Greg Bear was David Brin talking about the future. Wow, a double header and I was all a twitter but, I messed up the time because I was hobnobbing with Greg Bear (we hobnob) and thought the Brin show was actually an hour later than it was and holy moly! I’m late! and I burst into the middle of Brin’s…Skype call.  Drat. I thought this was gonna be an in-person performance and that may have been the original intent but circumstances prevailed. I guess. I came in late so I was not entitled to an explanation. So I surreptitiously put away my copy of Murasaki

which Greg Bear had just signed and settled in for the remainder of the show.

Brin is a bit PO’d at Andy Weir because Weir liked the movie version of The Martian while The Postman

had its synapses removed. I haven’t actually read the novel so I cannot make a comparison between book and screen version but the movie…yeech. I wonder how many authors hate their screen versions? That’d make an interesting survey.

Brin thinks going back to the moon is stupid. There’s nothing there. Now, putting a space station around the moon…yeah, do it. The tourism alone would pay the fare, and it would be a good place from which to launch intra-solar missions, like collecting asteroids or looking for the proto-molecule. It would also be an excellent place to keep security assets because they’d be immune to anti-sat weapons. Brin is my kind of militarist. And futurist. He believes there is a never ending human impulse to fall back on feudalism. No kidding. Instead of ever onward and upward to the Bright Shiny Future, we are one temper tantrum away from the Dark Ages. Be on your guard.

I then drifted into another panel I had been looking forward to, Faith and Reason in Science Fiction. I sort of have a stake in the topic

and was interested in the latest takes from the oh-so-smart panelists:

Okay.

One of the pastors on the panel said she did not believe in the literal Bible and that it was “too serious to take seriously.” This is why I no longer go to church. This is why a lot of us no longer go. The only churches left that still hold to a modicum of Bible-based faith are obsessed with evangelizing their already evangelized congregants or are taking the Bible too literally, like that whole 6000 years-old Earth thing. Or bringing in rock bands for two hour singalongs. No thanks. Soon to be spewed.

I don’t get the whole faith-versus-science trope to begin with. How does one obviate the other? How many of you have taken samples from a neutron star? Yet, you take their existence as a given because it’s based on “science;” no it’s not, it’s based on faith, faith in human thought and logic and the scientific method. God? Tut, how quaint, a sop for the ignorant masses who aren’t as brilliant as we. Word you’re looking for here is “arrogance,” which is the main issue between God and Lucifer, who wants to be like the Most High. It’s the reason we’re all here, to resolve the dispute. You say no, we’re here because there was so much nothing that there was something…which is just as silly as claiming we are riding on the back of the cosmic turtle. But you’ll cling to the “so much nothing” theory because the idea of a Creator interferes with the party. And we do love a good party.

It is not “either-or.” Indeed, each new scientific discovery speaks more and more to a Designer because, Holy Hannah, are we wondrously made. And science tends to refute itself, like that whole steady state universe thing, each refutation underscoring the wondrousness of how we are made and proving that science can’t be the basis for your faith. Find something else. Like that cosmic turtle.

Some of this was offered by the panelists, ironically enough by born-again atheist Robert Aldrich, who said science is not a faith system but an investigative system, which is dead-on right. He pointed out that scifi isn’t very sci because there’s laser swords, which are impossible. Lots of things that defy natural science show up in scifi because it can; it’s fiction and imagination and  a grand playground where every kid gets his own swing set. Guy seems squared away on this whole faith and science non-controversy. At one point, he rolled his eyes when one of the so-called believers on the panel contended that morality was Bible or God based, and I took it from aforementioned eye roll that he believes morality is an evolved trait that allows us all to live together in a civilized society, or something along those lines and I wanted to ask if that was, indeed, his position because I was going to challenge him to drive a school bus for one week and see if that revises his opinion but the Q&A, like all Q&As these days (see previous post) turned into a writing seminar for one guy who was interested in character development.

Other points raised seemed to be apologetics of one kind or another. The Battlestar Galactica reboot was scifi concerned with the questions of existence, yeah, yeah, and the older scifi tradition had room for religion and Star Trek had a chapel on the Enterprise, yeah yeah which doesn’t make any point towards the topic at hand. It seemed like the so-called believers on the panel were intent on looking progressive and open-minded while the non-believers got to be radically dismissive of any religious belief, even ones involving the backs of turtles. A world that does not believe in God will believe in anything, (yes, I know, a paraphrase of an apocryphal G. K. Chesterton quote).

I gotta ask: why are scifi people so reflexively pro-Marxist, anti-conservative, anti-Trump, anti-America? Is it just vogue? Prerequisite for invitations to the best parties? Because it makes me think that scifi people think in bumper stickers. Just a spare survey of history shows what a disaster planned economies are, yet on any given opportunity they gush about them. Don’t actually have to live in Cuba or Venezuela, so can be exuberant. And, boy, don’t mention Trump. Scifiers get downright poetic in their vitriol, I guess because his election has set the Federation back a few decades. You know, the Federation? where everyone will have their own hospital and neurosurgeon for free and we’ll all eat organic protein that’s non-organic and love each other regardless of species and have jetpacks?

This is the 50th Anniversary of 2001: Space Odyssey, the movie, and all stops were pulled out in celebration, as it should be because that movie turned scifi topsy and turvy. Before it, we had Plan 9 From Outer Space and It Came from Outer Space and other cheese and occasional good ‘uns like The War of the Worlds and Invasion of the Body Snatchers but this one, whoa. Never have so many loved a movie in which they walked out going, “Huh?”

EV2018 put on a seminar hosted by people who wrote books about the movie or who knew people who worked on the movie or were the children of people who worked on the movie. Like Fred Ordway, Jr, whose father worked at NASA, was a pal of Werner von Braun and Arthur C. Clarke. Ordway mentioned to Clarke some of the projects he was working on and next thing he knows, Kubrick is calling: say, Fred, Art tells me you’ve got all this neat stuff at NASA, can you box it all up and bring it to London for some movie I’m working on? Guess security was a little looser in those days. John Lang, the son of art director Harry Lang, said a lot of the original drawings for the movie were tossed, but his Dad fished them out of the garbage for later posterity. Oh, Greg Nicotero was on the panel, too. He said he was the model for the apes.

Harry Lang didn’t go to the movies much so he didn’t know who Stanley Kubrick was which, according to everyone, was a good thing. Apparently, Kubrick was rather difficult. Oh, just say it, he was a downright pain-in-the-ass, wanting to know such things as the payload capabilities of the Discovery, which had nothing to do with the movie other than background accuracy. At some point, Kubrick decided to change from Jupiter to Saturn but, when the costs came in, decided to keep Jupiter. Kubrick and Ordway ended up hating each other. Wonder why.

Ordway was an Army Intell officer gathering information on rockets. He was having meetings with Russian colonels in Greenwich Village cafes, and making the rounds of science conferences, where he met Clarke. Clarke was working on a short story, the Sentinel of Eternity and a timeprobe anthology when Kubrick contacted him, elements of both ending up in the 2001 script. This was in 1964 and Kubrick wanted the movie to be as accurate as possible and only NASA knew what the moon and rockets actually looked like hence the call to Ordway and the boxing up of Uber Top Secret plans and photos for later cinematic display. Sheesh. Today, if you Email your yoga schedule, you go to jail.

Ordway went to every aeronautical company in existence and got thirty scientists to show up on set and put in their two cents. Like the design of HAL,

which was first conceived as a walk-in computer. That design ended up as Mother in Alien.

Everyone thought computer memory would be molecular by the far distant year of 2001, so that’s why you’ve got those liquid filled baby monoliths that Dave is fooling with…what are you doing, Dave? The HAL 9000 was actually supposed to be the IBM 9000, but Roger Caras sent them a letter going, “Oh, by the way, your IBM 9000 is going to kill people.” “Really?” IBM responded. “Take our name off, then.” That’s how we ended up with Heuristic ALgorithm 9000. This was one of the first product placement movies, with logos and stuff everywhere. The companies wanted everyone to know they were still going to be in business fifty years from now. You know, Pan Am, Howard Johnson’s, Bell Telephone?

Then we got to watch the movie. In company of these people.

How cool is that?

Harked I to the Gaylord Convention Center this past Saturday for the Museum of Science Fiction’s Escape Velocity, their annual convention of all things science fiction, emphasis on the science.

Nice place.

They were happy to see me.

Security was tight.

Some guy tried to read my mind but it didn’t work.

Escape Velocity is a three day convention, but I only go on one of the days. No real reason, just do, I guess because one day there is like six days at any other convention because, Holy Hannah, they’ve got a lot of stuff going on. So many seminars, so little time, so you gotta be choosy.

I walked into a seminar billed as the Seven Dwarfs or Trappists,

which I thought was some Disney version of severe monastic life but no, silly me, it was real NASA scientists talking about seven exoplanets discovered in the Trappist-1 system, which is a red dwarf star a few miles from here. Sounded like rocket science, so I pulled up a chair.

The Seven Dwarfs are planets very close to their red dwarf star (so is that eight dwarves?), all within the same size orbit of Mercury to our sun, which, you know, is purty durn close. You’d think they’d get burned but the red dwarf is a lot smaller and dimmer than Sol so you can fly ‘purt near to it without getting scorched. Two of the planets are in the “habitable zone;” not too hot, not too cold, which doesn’t mean they’re actually habitable because that red dwarf is a real pistol. It’s throwing out flares of ultraviolet and X-rays willy and nilly and at great intensities and amoebas don’t do well in that. There might be a magnetic field strong enough to protect the atmospheres of the two candidate planets, but who knows if either of them have magnetic fields, let alone atmospheres. That’s why the NASAers are very excited about the upcoming James Webb Space Telescope, which will make the Hubble look like a pair of opera glasses. Even more exciting are the upcoming ELT (Extremely Large Telescope) and the OWL (Overwhelmingly Large Telescope) and the 30 Meter Telescope…yep, that’s their names. Gotta hand it to NASA, no ambiguity. The NASAers showed us a very cool little film

taken from an earth-based telescope of four Jupiter-sized planets orbiting another distant star and whoa, imagine when we get the OWL up there? We’ll be able to watch Russian soldiers on guard duty exchange pictures.

The TRAPPIST planets are weird. Their year is a day and one side is always facing the red dwarf. Permanent day, permanent night, depending on where you are. Sounds like an intriguing story idea. If there are plants, then their leaves will be black to absorb as much light as they can. Alien, man.

I then stumbled into the last bit of a seminar with Greg Nicotero, the guy who makes the zombies for the Walking Dead, which I have stopped watching because, geez, get to the point already, will ya? They cleared out for the seminar I was most looking forward to: Greg Bear. Yeah, Greg Bear who, along with Alastair Reynolds and Robert Sawyer, is one of the three best hard core SF writers out there, in no particular order.

Amazing how much Greg Bear and I had in common. He was a Navy brat; I was an Army one. He lived in the Philippines as a child; I lived in the Philippines as an adult acting like a child. He read comic books and Creepy and Analog and got stacks of scifi out of the base library, just like I did. He even remembers the spinner racks filled with paperback copies of Moby Dick and Olaf Stapledon that graced the floor of every single drug store and five-and-dime in America. He, also, sucked at math, killing his astronomy career, as I killed my own. I’m thinking at this point that he may be a long lost brother but no, that’s not it: we geeks of a certain age share a common lifestyle.

He sold his first story while a junior in high school and wanted to write fantasy more than he did scifi but did write both, which can diminish your audience because they generally choose one or the other…which I do not think is true. I love both, as well as horror and magical realism and anything that involves the weird and the future and the scary and the wondrous, no matter what you call it. I think this plethora of genres and their attendant subs diffuses the bigger category of imaginative fiction (I guess they call it speculative fiction now). Interestingly, Bear fingers the New York Times’ reaction to JK Rowling as the reason for this plethora. The Harry Potter series was so blowing away all the other books on the NYT Best Selling List that they created the YA category to give someone else a chance. And from there, what have we gotten? YA Tween Animal Fuzzy LBGQT Urban Myth Superhero. With zombies.

Bear has written a lot. A. Lot. Pro. Lific, he is. I brought along a mere nine of his books, including three anthologies (Drat! Forgot my copy of The Mongoliad), for him to sign, which he was very gracious in doing so. When you’ve been writing quality stuff since the 70s, you’re going to have quite the corpus. And you’re going to be influential. He wrote a book called Psychlone, about a giant ghost attacking the West Coast (poet, don’t know it), an idea he stole from James Blish and which he thinks Ghostbusters stole from him. He was also a columnist, once writing an article about the Nebula Awards that killed his career with Del Rey (apparently, they took exception to his taking exceptions). He also wrote movie reviews, the first one being for the 1977 release of Star Wars, which I guess is akin to starting your quarterback career at the Super Bowl. De Laurentis Productions called him afterwards for suggestion about other scifi books to turn into scripts and he said, “Dune.” David Lynch has hated him ever since. I don’t know why. I thought Lynch’s version was decent. Sting as a Harkonnen, what’s not to like?

His most famous book is Eon, which was inspired by Stapledon, but it got rejected by just about everyone. It finally saw publication in the UK through Blue Jay Books and then Tor picked it up. His second big one was Blood Music, which began as a reaction to an Isaac Asimov article in TV Guide pooh-poohing the idea of shrinking people down to a certain size and still retaining their intelligence (this from the guy who wrote Fantastic Voyage).Small brain cells, doncha know. Bear got around that with the concept of intelligent cells. Take that, Asimov.

He’s acquired a host of new fans through his Halo novels. Halo novels. Okay. He admitted that the SF community takes a dim view of media series and yep, I’m one of those community peoples. It’s why I don’t read Star Trek or Star Wars novels. Seems like cheating. But, the kids love him, so who am I?

He has just finished his War Dogs trilogy, which is a salute to all the gyrenes and swabbies he knew while a Navy brat, to which I say, good on ya, mate. He is going back to fantasy with a novel called The Unfinished Land, a mixture of Lovecraft and Robert Louis Stevenson set in Elizabethan times. Sounds very cool.

Bear said that scifi is generally regarded as predictive, but that’s not true. It’s actually based on a willingness to suspend disbelief. Scifi gets a lot of things wrong (where’s my damn jetpack?). It’s really about principles that have not yet been proved or discovered, such as FTL travel (which I don’t believe will ever be possible, nor will we ever discover intelligent life  in the universe. I mean, look at us).

We then got into Q&A and, I gotta ask, why do people use the Q&A as a means of proving how smart they are? Come on, just ask a simple question instead of prologueing it with a rambling, incomprehensible ten minute meander across the spectrum of scifi topics, all the time expecting the guest – or anyone in the audience, for that matter – to pick a question out of that mess. There was a lot of that from the audience and I gotta credit Mr. Bear with making sense of what was tossed at him. The only true straight up question he got was his source of inspiration and he said it was what Philip Jose Farmer called the Black Gang, the subconscious. Don’t ever criticize it. And then he said something of which I wholeheartedly approve: being a writer means being alone. It means developing your talent alone. And always, always, believe in yourself. If people say your stuff is crap, be polite, tip your hat, and no longer have anything to do with them.

Hear that, MFA Programs?

More on Escape Velocity later.