The Only Winning Move

Blakes 7, as I’ve said before, isn’t just a send-up of Star Trek, but it’s frequently at its best when that’s what it’s doing. No surprise, then, that I’ll be counting Season 1’s “Duel” among my top ten episodes.

This one isn’t a subtle jab so much as an outright taunting - for not only are we inverting Star Trek’s moral sensibilities like usual, we’ve actually singled out a specific episode to pick on. That episode is the first season’s Arena - you know, the one where some powerful aliens (the Metrons) decide to teach Kirk a lesson by making him fight that giant lizard bareknuckled on an empty planet. There’s enough stuff lying around to let whichever of the two is more intelligent (Kirk, of course) cobble together a cannon and kill the other. Kirk’s shot wounds but does not kill, and at the last moment Kirk declines to kill, thus demonstrating to the super-powerful aliens that put him in this jam that humanity may some day be civilized. (Any resemblance to any other episode is, naturally, entirely coincidental.)

By now this is a stock plot in science fiction. Arena was based on a short story and may well have been what started it all. I say this because in Frederick Brown’s original (1944) short story “Arena,” the Kirk analogue actually does kill the creature. Self defense, you see.

As usual, the problem with the Star Trek version is that it’s treating its morals as a luxury item. They’re not there to guide or inform or to help anyone grow so much as to flatter the viewer. Back here in reality, when a powerful alien race puts you and a murderous lizard on a planet to fight to the death, you either band together and try to find a way out, or you kill before you get killed. Only on goofy 1960s science fiction shows do things “just work out” so that you wound without killing and then have the luxury of showing off how merciful you are. The whole purpose of that ending is nothing more than ethical pornography for the viewer - so that he can pat himself on the back and say “yes, like Captain Kirk, I would have spared the giant aggressive lizard who destroyed Cestus III and Redshirt O’Herlihy and who was trying to kill me too because killing is WRONG. If only, if only the rest of humanity were as advanced as I am.”

As every 9 year old knows, killing is wrong with one glaring exception: self-defense. The only people who reach adulthood honestly believing that it’s not acceptable to kill in self defense are hippies trying to avoid the Vietnam draft - and even they don’t really mean it. It’s just a huge moral perversion to go around telling people that killing is always and under every set of circumstances wrong. People who believe that don’t survive. But that’s why the flattery works, of course. The viewer can only convince himself that he’s on a higher plane than the rest of us apes if what he’s supporting is so counterintuitive that it’s either collossally wrong or only seems so to feebler minds.

So of course in the Blakes 7 version Blake has no ethical issue with killing Travis, and the reason he spares his life is … well, complicated, but probably not based on mercy. But that’s only the beginning.

How is “Duel” an inspired improvment on “Arena?” Let me count the ways.

First, Blake is set to fight Travis, someone he conveniently is already on the run from. This is a huge improvement over it being Some Random Space Monster - since it was never really clear what the fight between the Federation and the Gorn was really about in Arena anyway. From the audience’s point of view, the Gorn were just being unreasonably hostile, and if these überpowerful Metrons that wanted so badly to teach Kirk (and the Gorn captain) a lesson in pacifism that they put him in a deathmatch (wait, wha…?) hadn’t been snoozing they surely would’ve noticed that … and just spiffied the Gorns across the galaxy or something. So good - at least now we’ve got real history and motive.

For our second neat twist, no one actually learns anything from the goofy ellaborate lesson, and indeed it’s made clear early on that the person who most needs to learn isn’t actually Blake or Travis but one of the godlike and (not-so-)morally superior aliens themselves. The whole time Blake and Travis (and Jenna and Travis’ mutoid pilot - another nice touch is that the aliens want Travis and Blake to experience the death of a friend as part of their lesson in pacifism, but of course Travis ironically doesn’t have any friends and ends up paired up with one of the Federation’s genetic slave class which he regards as a piece of equipment more than a person) are fighting, one of the pair keeps interfering to make things more violent since she apparently gets off on watching people fight. Unlike Kirk at the end of his encouner with the Gorn, Blake and Travis leave unimpressed with and unaffected by the whole ordeal.

And actually, that is rather the point not just of this episode, but indeed one of the major themes of the series: you can’t change people, not really, and you certainly can’t control them. Social engineering just doesn’t work. The entire Federation is a giant failed social engineering project - and there’s no better proof of that than that Blake is running about at all after all the mental conditioning he went through. And if these aliens’ little social engineering experiment with Blake and Travis doesn’t work either - it’s not the least because they themselves apparently haven’t learned the lesson they’re trying to teach.

This theme of control and power is introduced a bit clumsily in the space battle that opens the episode. Liberator is low on power and cornered by three Federation ships. It’s a desperate situation, so Blake resorts to the desperate measure of ramming the one of the three he thinks is Travis’ ship to get out. Where the scene is implausible is that Blake actually consults with the crew. Probably when time is this much of the essence you just tell them to trust you and ram full speed ahead - but never mind, because we get this brilliant bit of dialogue out of the confrontation between Blake and Avon:

BLAKE Have you got any better ideas? [Violent impact. As Blake and Avon reel back, Avon clutches Blake protectively, perhaps to steady him]
AVON As a matter of fact, no I haven’t.
BLAKE Does that mean you agree?
AVON Do I have a choice?
BLAKE Yes.
AVON Then I agree. [Lets go of Blake]

Maybe not the time for Avon’s wit (and it’s certainly out of character for Avon to be arguing about this - he’s the rational one who should have seen the merits in this plan even before Blake did), but the point is a good one. You can’t “agree” to anything you don’t have a choice about. And indeed, we’ve already seen this earlier in Giroc’s (Giroc is one of the two aliens who put Travis and Blake in the “arena” to fight) complaining about how she had no choice in becoming “The Keeper” (whatever that is). It comes full circle in Travis’ unsuccessful taunting of the mutoid pilot about her original identity. You see, mutoids are people who have been converted into cyborgs - or something. This one, like most of them, remembers nothing of her past and has been completely reprogrammed. But Travis knows who she was before and during some down time during the battle clearly hopes to tease her with the knowledge. He’s visibly disappointed when not only doesn’t she beg him to reveal her old identity, she’s not even the slightest bit interested.

MUTOID Memory is an encumbrance. All trace of it is removed and with it all trace of identity.
TRAVIS And it doesn’t concern you?
MUTOID Why should it? That identity doesn’t exist, even in the central computers.
TRAVIS Yes it does. I know who you were. Your name was Keyeira, Keyeira.
MUTOID Keyeira.
TRAVIS You were very beautiful, very much admired. Shall I go on?
MUTOID As you wish.
TRAVIS [Obviously disappointed] This doesn’t interest you at all, does it?
MUTOID How could it?

Which reinforces the theme - that there’s a paradox in the very idea of wielding power. No one thinks of having power over a computer: it’s just a machine. For Travis to have real power over this mutoid that obeys his every command it too would have to be human. And so he is disappointed to learn that it is indeed just a machine. It doesn’t resent his orders in any way - and there’s no fun in lording power over something that exists to be controlled! The irony of power is that one can only enjoy it when he doesn’t completely have it. Travis’ total control over the mutoid is meaningless because it is total.

The reason Blake is the good guy is that he understands this. He’s already made the decision to ram Travis’ ship, and Avon already knows that it’s the right choice. It’s still important to both Blake and Avon that it be clear that Avon is acting voluntarily and not under orders. As Avon wryly points out - one cannot “agree” if he hasn’t been given a choice.

But the critical scene in the whole episode - giving us what is probably the best line of the whole series - is that scene where Avon decides to go to sleep while everyone else is watching Blake on the viewscreen. This was satisfying on so many levels I hardly know where to begin.

First, there’s the silliness of the fact that they’re allowed to watch Blake and Travis fight at all. To what end? That was an even harder question to answer in Arena. Even if we deign to buy this hugely implausible story that some demigods whisked Kirk and this Gorn to an isolated planet to let them fight it out hoping that the winner would somehow learn that killing was baaaad, there’s really but really just really no explanation for these aliens’ need to show the whole thing like a movie on the Enterprise’s viewscreen. Nor is it any more plausible here in Blakes 7 - but Avon at least gets that. It gets dark on Blake’s planet, and he and Jenna climb a tree to get some rest. Watching from the Liberator’s control center, Avon promptly announces that he is going for a kip as well.

VILA Have you thought of another plan?
AVON Yes. I’m going to get some sleep.
VILA How can you sleep with all this happening?
AVON With all what happening? Blake is sitting up in a tree, Travis is sitting up in another tree. Unless they’re planning to throw nuts at one another, I don’t see much of a fight developing before it gets light.

HA! But here’s the clincher:

GAN You’re never involved, are you Avon? You ever cared for anyone?
VILA Except yourself?
AVON I have never understood why it should be necessary to become irrational in order to prove that you care, or, indeed, why it should be necessary to prove it at all. [Exits]

Hear, hear! Point, set, match to Avon (as usual). There’s nothing they can do to help Blake, and in any case there’s nothing going on. Why NOT sleep? And why, indeed, does Avon have to prove he cares? There’s the dagger in the heart of the vanity that was Star Trek. In order to prove humanity’s “civilized,” Kirk has to do somthing as irrational and sentimental as refusing to kill in self defense? Really? What kind of dope-smoking aliens are these? More to the point - would Kirk make the same gesture if he didn’t know the aliens were watching the whole thing? Is it all just for show? We never know - but we do know it’s stupid whatever the motive. Having to go to irrational lengths to prove that you aren’t a natural born killer sort of betrays the whole thing as a sham. It’s the lesson of King Lear, actually - the people who put on a show of feeling something generally don’t really feel it. If your answer to the question of “when did you stop beating your wife” is “My God I would never hit a woman! Hitting women is ALWAYS WRONG! I would rather cut off my hand, even if she started the fight!” - then I take your answer to be “just last week.” The crux of the whole matter for me is indeed why anyone should have to prove affection at all. Affection’s either there or it’s not. Surely it matters more whether one really cares than it matters how much he shows it. More than that - caring is the default assumption among a crew - even a mutually antagonistic crew - that lives on a ship and goes into battle together. OF COURSE Avon cares!

To me, the least plausible thing of all about Star Trek episodes like Arena (and the hundreds of others just like it) is the hugely pessimistic view of humanity they operate under. It just doesn’t square with the humanity I am a member of and with which I interact every day. In my experience, most people are not cold-blooded killer savages, and Kirk (and Picard, at Farpoint) should rather have been insulted (or, actually, amused) that anyone was questioning humanity’s generally caring nature to begin with. These aliens that forced Kirk and the Gorn to fight to the death may think we’re all barely literate bloodthirsty savages, but that seems a really irrational thing to think about a species that managed to survive long enough to build warp capable ships and traverse the galaxy! If humanity were anything like as mutually antagonistic as most Star Trek aliens constantly accuse it of being it’d hardly be capable of reaching their planets to get trapped into playing their games to begin with. And of course, Blakes 7 understands this. The aliens who force Blake and Travis to fight are, to all appearances, the last survivors of their civilization, which destroyed itself in a war. Note the contrast with the relatively stable Federation. It takes one to know one, in other words, and indeed, Giroc - one of the teachers - is the only character on the stage who actually seems to enjoy violence for its own sake. (Travis might - but it seems more reasonable that Travis is just obsessed with killing Blake in particular.)

So right - Avon has the right idea. When it’s night and there’s nothing you can do, you sleep. Irrationally keeping vigil doesn’t prove anything, and why should anything need to be proven at all? It’s rather the same point that Blake makes to Sinofar at the end of the episode.

GIROC Why didn’t you kill him?
BLAKE Too weak? Or maybe I didn’t entirely trust your motives. Besides, as long as he’s alive, he’ll be the one chasing me. And I know I can beat him.
GIROC [Laughs] At least you’re not stupid.
BLAKE [To Sinofar] I need time enough to get my ship away and to recharge the energy banks.
SINOFAR They have been recharged. I will see that your ship gets away.
BLAKE Another reason why I didn’t kill Travis: I would have enjoyed it.
SINOFAR Perhaps there was nothing for you to learn.

Blake never really answers Giroc’s question because he feels he doesn’t have to. “At least you’re not stupid,” she says - which, along with Avon wanting to sleep through the aliens’ filmschool project, nicely encapsulates the point of the show. Blake and his crew aren’t stupid - unlike some other interstellar dogooders we could name - and the outcome is so predictable you might as well wake me when it’s through. (Nor do I think anyone’s missed the fourth wall point that it’s actually Arena Avon is opting to sleep through.) To Sinofar he gives a somewhat better answer: I already knew what you were trying to teach and you needn’t have wasted your time.

Giroc and Sinofar’s lesson doesn’t teach anyone anything. Travis is a psychopath, and so forcing him to kill someone with his bare hands is unlikely to be a life-altering experience for him. Blake, for his part, knows better even before the fight starts. He’s already got his morals straight about killing, so he stays focused on getting out alive. Giroc (who might be the actual pupil the lesson is intended for?) only discovers she enjoys the violence - a fact which doesn’t stop her from laughing at Blake and calling him a savage at every possible opportunity. Sinofar is no closer to understanding killing when it’s all over. The whole episode has been a pointless, staged sideshow. Meant to be a moral lesson, it ends up more than anything just being entertainment for Giroc.

Thought experiments are useful to the extent that they help us discover our hidden assumptions. And science fiction is interesting as a literary genre in part becase it has a wider range with the thought experiments it can pose. But this only works IFF (a) some minimal effort is made to render the implausible situation plausible and (b) there’s actually something to be learned from the whole ordeal. Arena, of course, fails on both counts. As for the first - the writer is God. Any time you have to resort to omnipotent aliens to explicitly drop your characters into the situation you want to write about you’re probably not trying hard enough. And for the second - the “lesson” Kirk is supposed to have learned is neither useful in any way, nor does it really follow from the situation he was placed in. It’s moral pornography - an implausible situation contrived not to teach and explore but so that viewers can imagine they’re morally superior to the rest of humanity by kidding themselves that they agree with and understand Kirk’s “decision” not to kill the Gorn.

Blake’s reaction is more realistic: reject the lesson as a pointless waste of your time and go about your business as though it hadn’t happened. I love it.

As a veteran fan of 1970s science fiction, I’m good at suspending disbelief. Wobbly sets? No issue. Pitiful special effects? Bring ‘em on. Rubber suits and facepaint? I eat it for breakfast. Hell, I could probably even take someone standing with a sheet over their head as a ghost if I really thought the budget was that bad.

I can do all this and more, provided the plot works. But screw with the story, and we have issues.

Now granted, there are plot holes and there are plot holes. No one gets it right all the time; even in the best-planned series it’s inevitable that minor slipups will happen. And of course sometimes you let things go just for the sake of the story. For example, I couldn’t stomach Next Generation’s 5th season episode “Next Phase” because I could never get over the fact that invisible/semi-immaterial people who can walk through walls should also fall through (or at least sink into) floors, and yet Georgi and Ensign Redshirt seem to walk about just like everyone else. Worse than that, they can handle tools sometimes, when you’re not paying too much attention, but other times other things slide through their hands. It doesn’t make a whole lot of sense, and I’m certain someone along the editing process noticed it - but since explaining it all would’ve been little more than a distraction from the story, I guess they just quietly decided to let it go.

But then there are plot holes that are just … spectacular. The kind of thing that not only is it so obviously wrong that there’s no way anyone with even a barely adequate daily caloric intake would miss it, but that the writers have hidden right there in plain sight, apparently hoping you’ll be so stunned that you blink and shake your head and say “naw….” That’s the kind of plotholes I had to sit through in “Mission to Destiny” just now.

“Mission to Destiny” is an episode of cult BBC scifi series Blakes 7 - arguably my favorite TV show of all time, which just makes this all the more painful. I guess I should cut my losses and take as consolation that Blake never did anything half-assed: if they’re going to screw up, they give us the full royal fanfare.

The “plot,” such as it is, goes something like this. Jenna notices a ship on long-range scanners holding an odd pattern: it’s circling endlessly. The ship is an obsolete model, which makes it likely that it’s been abandoned years ago and just left. But on teleporting aboard, Blake, Cally and Avon find that the crew is simply sleeping. They’re victims of sabotage: someone has put tranquilizer gas into the air filtration system.
It’s a crude job, and Avon and Cally fix it quickly. When the crew comes back awake, it’s discovered that one of them is missing and one of the lifeboats launched. Dum dum dum.

The captain instantly worries that their precious cargo has been stolen. It turns out (and this, at least, is very cool) that they’re from Destiny, a small agricultural colony on the edge of the galaxy. Due to a deficit in light along a certain spectrum range, a terrestrial fungus is eating most of their crops and will soon consume the entire planet. They’ve mortgaged their whole economy to buy a specially-manufactured light refractor that they’ll put at a specific position between their planet and their sun which will bend the light to the necessary wavelength and kill off the fungus. Since the object - called a “neutrotope” - has been so expensive to manufacture and is worth the entire GDP of Destiny for several years, IF someone could manage to sell it (and give the writers credit - they make that point three times) they would be wealthy beyond imagination.

So, probably what’s happened is that the missing crewman has knocked out the crew and taken the missing neutrotope with him in the shuttle.

Bucept … they check and find the neutrotope right were it should be, in a “molecularly-locked” box in the captain’s quarters to which only the captain knows the combination. And then shortly thereafter they discover the body of the missing crewman. He’s been MURDERED. Oh, and by the way, the pilot’s been found MURDERED as well.

And of course from here the story falls apart rapidly. Blake suggests that he be allowed to take the neutrotope on to Destiny while Avon and Cally stay behind to help them with repairs. Incredibly, the captain agrees and doesn’t even insist that anyone from his crew accompany Blake to Destiny! That’s right, just hand the most valuable object in the known galaxy to a complete stranger based on his word that he’ll deliver. Oh, and the fact that he’s leaving behind two “hostages” in the form of Avon and Cally, though it’s not clear what good killing them will do if Blake absconds with the device and sells it. Even if Blake did care, he could presumably simply show up again in a day, claim to have delivered the goods, teleport Cally and Avon off and no one would be the wiser. But the BEST part is that the captain doesn’t even hand over the neutrotope himself. He orders Sara to go fetch it - not 5min. after he’s just told us that only he has the combination.

It helps a bit, I suppose, that Sara turns out to be the killer. So maybe Blake’s just too thick to notice that Sara must also know the combination … but surely Avon noticed? And yet, Avon spends most of the episode being completely wrong about who the killer is. And the thing is, when he does figure it out, it has nothing whatever to do with Sara knowing the combination - which would’ve been a clever way for him to figure it. No, it’s because the murdered pilot had helpfully written her name in blood - only not very neatly so for most of the episode the letters look like numbers.

Of course, Sara has done all this without her husband/boyfriend/whatever being in on the deal - so of course she tells him about it now that the die is cast and there are strangers running about on the ship. When he decides not to join her, she kills him too. ANOTHER MURDER. But the thing is, apparently he had decided to join her as Cally has only just seen him stuffing a Mysterious Device into another crewman’s bag. She retrieves the Mysterious Device to take it to Avon and ask him what it is.

Ok - so we’re expected to believe that Sara told Mandrian about her Nefarious Plot only after Blake et al show up, he then declines to join her, AND she lets him run about on the ship a little longer killing him ONLY LATER? AFTER he’s had a chance to go blab the whole thing?

And then there’s the matter of this homing device. Now - at the beginning of the episode, we saw Liberator scan the ship for any signs of life. Presumably this includes checking the entire known spectrum of communications frequencies for signals. And yet, they failed to detect this Mysterious Device that turns out to be a homing device to lead the rendezvous ship to them? Also - CALLY fails to notice that this is a homing beacon and has to ask AVON to tell her? Cally, who is a communications specialist, has to ask Avon the computer expert what a homing device is, and yet Cally who is not a computer expert but a communications specialist recognizes before Avon the computer expert that the sabotage was specifically designed to keep the ship in a holding pattern. Um… (And just why was the ship put in a holding pattern anyway? Why not just stop it dead in space? I mean, if it’s a homing beacon that’s going to signal your getaway car, it isn’t really necessary to have the ship going ’round in circles - a feat which requires a highly specific kind of sabotage of the kind that can’t be disguised as an accident.)

And of course, there’s the nagging question of why Sara’s knocked out with the rest of the crew at all. This is apparently her brilliant plan to sell the most valuable object in the galaxy. She’s going to knock out the entire crew with stun gas - herself included - and wait for a rendezvous ship to come pick her up. Why can’t the rendezvous ship just leave her sleeping and take the neutrotope itself? Well, presumably because it’s locked in that supersafe. But then, they’re going to have to wake her up selectively to get it opened, since we know she knows the combination. So I ask again, why is she sleeping with the rest of the crew and not wearing a gas mask or something? That way, at the very least, she would’ve been awake to kill Blake and Cally and Avon when they teleported aboard. More importantly, what is the point of framing Donovan (remember, she’s killed him and then launched off a lifepod, a plan that was disrupted when she discovered that moving his body to the lifepod was harder than she’d thought - apparently they uninvented the handtruck and the forklift when they developed faster-than-light travel)? Was she honestly planning to just hand off the most valuable object in the universe and then stay on the ship to avoid suspicion? Come now - even if she COULD trust her pals to cut her in for her share, she’s surely going to have some trouble explaining to the tax authorities back on Destiny why she’s suddenly worth their entire economic output for a year?

But the best, most stunning, display of plot holes is in the beta plot - as Blake and the Liberator crew go to deliver the neutrotope to Destiny. They need to do it in the Liberator because Liberator can make the trip in four hours - compared with five days for the Ortego. Fine. But halfway there they encounter a giant asteroid field. Going around it would add a day to the journey, and Blake is unwilling to do that. So what he does instead is burn out the forward force shield plowing straight through. We know that he burns it out because Zen forces him to choose at the last minute between power for drive and power for shields and - apparently unaware that even a dust particle will destroy a ship that impacts it at faster-than-light speed - Blake chooses drive instead of shields. Ohhhh-kaaaay. But they make it. Of course, as they’re coming out of the field the hermetically sealed box with the neutrotope conveniently slides off the table. Worried that the most valuable object in the galaxy might have been stored in such a way that allows it to shatter if the box it’s in has dropped (never mind that this thing is designed to hang in space and presumably collide with things from time to time), Blake decides to open the box (and, apparently, he has the combination, since we see him enter it successfully - I guess it’s available at openmylockedboximmediately.com), only to discover that the neutrotope is - gasp! - not inside. Because, you see, Blake undertook this critical mission to save the planet Destiny without bothering to check that the registration was there in the glove compartment. You almost wish the writers had skipped with the whole asteroid field thing so that Blake could’ve made it to Destiny and handed them an empty box with lots of ’splainin’ to do. THAT would’ve been entertainment!

But no, they decide they have to head back immediately to get the neutrotope. Which is sensible - and what’s even more sensible than that is that they decide to just ignore the asteroid field on the way back. You know, what with their forward shield being completely burned out and all. Maybe they backed through?

In any case, they’re back at the Ortega in no time. Meanwhile, Avon is playing Hercule Poirot. He has everyone gathered in the captain’s chamber so he can give us a normal detective speech about every minute detail about how clever he is at finding out the killer. Of course, at a crucial moment he turns his back on the killer whose identitly he supposedly knows long enough to let her pull a giant laser gun out of her tight-fitting suit (where was she keeping it? O.O). Because hey, it’s no fun for the audience if you arrest the killer BEFORE the big revelation scene and deny us our chance to be in little-to-no suspense as she pulls a gun on everyone!

The best moment in the episode comes when Blake literally does That Thing that you were always waiting for to happen on Star Trek but which somehow never did: he beams down at precisely the moment that will distract Sara long enough that she can be disarmed, and everyone lives happily ever after.

Apparently concerned that we might have missed two of their biggest, most artfully crafted plot holes, the writers then treat us to a final scene on board Liberator, where Blake has helpfully decided to take the entire Ortega crew with him to Destiny. That’s right - what someone, ANYONE, on the ship would’ve/should’ve suggested earlier (”Why not take us all with you, and they can send someone back to salvage our ship later?”) is now happening. So just in case there was someone watching out there in TVland who missed this angle, we can now rest assured that everyone now gets just how silly the earlier part of this episode was. To add insult to injury (’cause hey, why not?), the closing line of the episode is Vila asking Blake to take them ’round the asteroid field rather than straight through it this time. So - in the extremely unlikely even that anyone missed that they had to come back through the asteroid field after having burned out their shields and power reserves, Vila has helpfully reminded them. Unless, you know, it’s a one-way asteroid field - one of those that is there if you approach it from one side but transparent otherwise?

I can only hope that this was intentional self-parody - but as the 7th episode in the entire series run, it seems more than a little unlikely.

There are signs, to be sure, that more was going on than met the eye. For one thing, there’s that scene where Avon turns his back on the killer just as he’s sketching out who she is for everyone to see. IF I could believe that it was intentional, it would’ve been a brilliant satire of the locked room armchair detective fiction genre - certainly in keeping with a show whose whole MO is turning Star Trek on its head. You know, Avon’s strutting back and forth being clever even though he doesn’t actually have a clue who the killer is - he’s counting on intimidation to make him (erm, her in this case) reveal himself. Maybe. Given the way that scene was played, I can almost believe it (of course, since he does say her name before she announces she is pointing a gun at everyone it doesn’t quite work…). Also - there’s the matter of Mandrian stuffing that homing device in another crewman’s bag - apparently framing him. That just doesn’t square with the official story that Mandrain wasn’t in on the plot. Why would Sara just give him the homing device that is her only escape route if he hadn’t agreed to join her? And if he’d agreed to join her, why kill him? Or, if you’re going to kill him anyway, why kill him just in time to broadcast to everyone that the killer is still on board and hasn’t escaped in the lifeboat? Why not just wait until you’re rescued and kill him then? Something about the whole setup with Mandrian doesn’t add up - and not in a “plot hole” kind of way - more in a “there’s actually another story going on here if you’re clever enough to catch it” kind of way. It is interesting, after all, that Avon admits to suspecting Mandrian for no good reason.

CALLY I agree. So who do you think it is?
AVON Mandrian.
CALLY Why?
AVON Instinct. I discount Dr. Kendall.
CALLY I thought you mistrusted instinct.
AVON I do, so I am probably wrong.

That line sort of tickles at my brain. The hyper-rational Avon actually admits, for the first (and last) time ever, to going on instinct, and that he’s probably wrong for this reason. This is soon after we’ve been shown a scene of Mandrian planting a homing device on someone - an action that squares with no possible explanation for the plot, but would make sense if Avon’s instinct were right. WAS Avon right about Mandrian? Conveniently, we never really know since Mandrian gets snuffed soon afterward.

But of course, no matter how convincing this line of reasoning, nothing makes up for the one-way asteroid storm. That’s just … wow.

A lot of the reviews I read online of this episode were unfazed by the plot holes. Everyone seems to notice at least some of them but likes the episode anyway. And I can see that. It WAS fun, in spite of itself. But more than that, I think it’s because whatever went wrong with the main plot, the characters stayed consistent - and in fact we even got some good development scenes. Why does Avon agree to stay on board? Why - to be with Cally, of course. It’s hinted throughout the series that he’s attracted to her - and here’s yet another hint. His “I don’t like leaving mysteries unsolved” explanation certainly isn’t the real reason! Even better is the way Cally rolls her eyes when Avon is berating her for having bet their lives on Blake returning. If everyone else is convinced that Avon is completely callous and selfish at this point, Cally at least sees through the charade (as does Blake, actually, but that’s always been more obvious). And I think that’s what explains everyone’s affection for this obviously broken episode: we get to see Avon and Cally up close, and neither slips out of character. Some people have pointed to Blake’s booby trap at the end (he plants bombs on the entry hatches so that when the rendezvous ship arrives to pick up the neutrotope from Sara it will be destroyed) as inconsistent, but I don’t think so. Quite the contrary - we know from plenty of other examples that Blake is highly conflicted about the use of violence. Ideally he would avoid it, but realistically he knows it’s necessary. When he does use it, it tends to be because he’s getting restless, plauged by the feeling that he’s accomplishing nothing in his fight against the Federation. So blowing up the rendezvous ship seems perfectly consistent to me. Blake is a man with an itchy trigger finger but the morals not to use it. Here is a situation where he can be reasonably sure he’s killing people who would’ve condemned an entire planet to death by selling the means of survival they had purchased at huge expense on the black market. They’re clearly a legitimate target - IFF, of course, we’re right about the situation and IFF the rendezvous ship isn’t something like a passenger ship with conspirators placed on board. The beauty of this setup is that Blake can be reasonably certain he’s right, but he doesn’t have to stick around to take any unintended consequences that might arise from factors he failed to foresee. It seems like the perfect time for someone with an itchy trigger finger but the morals not to use it to do just that.

But let me not kid myself. Despite some bright patches and some unexplained plot twists that I would like a second look at, this was a horrible episode, absolutely eaten to shreds by plot moths. Even for the 70s, even for the BBC, it’s hard to see how this one made it past the script editors and the director and even the actors, and onto film.

In the wake of the Great Election, io9 has been going a bit overboard in the Cultural Critiques of SciFi department.

Exhibit A - Zombies are Red, Vampires are Blue.

This one isn’t actually all that fleshed-out, but I’m not unsympathetic with the underlying logic. The idea is that Vampires are the scary creatures when the Democrats (substitute analogous center-left party if foreign) are in power, Zombies when it’s the Republicans (again, if foreign substitute analogous center-right party). Unfortunately, they get even their slim analysis wrong:

Tuesday’s election of a Democratic president, meanwhile, comes at the start of a new cycle of vampire films (’Twilight,’ ‘Let the Right One In’) and TV shows (HBO’s ‘True Blood.’)

Coincidence? Or something spookier? . . . Perhaps the bloodsuckers’ latest incarnation, as less-threatening undead citizens, reflects a more inclusive politics. ‘Suddenly,’ said Robert Thompson, professor of television and popular culture at Syracuse University, ‘the vampires have become people just like us.’

‘After the upsurge of zombie films that symptomized the Bush era, the latest re-investment in vampirism signals hopefulness,’ said Larry Rickels, a UC Santa Barbara professor of German and comparative literature.

I mean, it just never bloody stops, does it? Am I alone in thinking that it’s more than a bit cynical to see vampires as symbols of hope?

But I don’t want to dismiss this out of hat. I think there is something to it - it’s just that io9, being staffed, to all outward appearances, by Democrats, isn’t doing its homework on the cultural critique here.

First, the basics. Yes, I think there’s probably something to the idea that Zombies are the appropriate monsters when the right-ish types are in power and Vampires the appropriate monsters when it’s the left-ish types. The point that’s being missed here, I think, is that people have stopped seing vampires as monsters, even though they are. It’s easy to see why Zombies are scary when it’s the right wing in charge. The big fear about the right wing is that it’s populated by people like Sarah Palin, who are all for religion and simple-mindedness. Zombies are the grotesque exaggeration of forced conformity - a bunch of people wandering about with no thoughts of their own feeding on the brains of others. That they primarily eat brains is an unsubtle reference to the fear at the core of the image: that we’ll lose our will and intelligence. Most of all, Zombies are UG-LY. Which all plays to the sterotype of small-town simpletons. You know, they’re inbred and deformed, and probaby overweight. The fear with zombies is not so much that there’s small town cultural creep, but that we’ll be forced to lead small-town existences ourselves.

Vampires, by contrast, are pretty and intelligent. These are your basic metrosexuals. They’re cultured and thin, they spend entirely too much time grooming themselves, they lead lives of leisure that involve lots of books and classical music and wine, and they’re nothing if not burdened by an overdose of personality. But for all that, they’re still bloodsuckers. In order to live, they have to feed off the life force of others.

So the short version is that zombies represent our fear of a society overrun by inbred hillbillies, and vampires represent our fear of a society controlled by annoying, probably gay, self-absorbed intellectuals. So right, zombies are scary right-wing monsters, and vampires are scary left-wing monsters.

I think if there’s a valid cultural criticism to be made in the recent spate of vampire-dramas, it’s that people seem to have forgotten that vampires are monsters. Starting with Buffy to a lesser extent, but certainly in things like True Blood and Twilight - and NOWHERE more so than in the Anne Rice tripe that laid the groundwork for all this a couple of decades ago - vampire stories seem to be less concerned with scaring the reader/viewer than with catering to vampohilia. And what everyone seems to miss is that this is a Nietzschean fantasy.

Jonah Goldberg is not wrong when he sees fascism in the modern left’s genes. No, it wasn’t a coincidence that the official name for the Nazi Party, translated from German, is National Socialist German Workers’ Party. We get fed all kinds of crap about how the left and right are meant to be polar opposites, but the truth is they aren’t at all. The debate between Republicans and Democrats isn’t so much about which policy methods are appropriate, but about what ends they should be put to. I think there are members of the Republican Coalition that are non-socialist, but if you’ve been depressed over the last 20 years by what you see as a dumbing down of the nation’s political discourse, so that most elections are decided more by the culture wars than by policy ideas, I’m right with you.

Modern vampire stories are retellings of The Picture of Dorian Gray, but without the moral examination. People just want to be young, pretty, and generally superior to everyone without any thought that there might be a price. And I think on THAT level there’s a real metaphor for politics.

The nice thing about zombies is that you know one when you see it. The other nice thing about zombies is that they’re not all that difficult to outrun. If one comes after you, it’s more annoying than terrifying. You just beat it over the head with a shovel repeatedly and lock all the doors. And so it is with right-wing villains. It’s hard to be too scared by them because they’re all kind of just dumb lugs. Maybe they’re not pleasant to look at, but if you let them walk back and forth in the yard for a week they eventually just sort of starve themselves to death. Vampires, properly done, are genuinely scary, though. These are creatures that attack you from behind (they don’t even moan, for Chrisssake!), are stronger and more agile than you (resistance is futile), and the worst part is you’re not even that sure when you’re looking at one. That they’ve bloodsuckers to boot just rounds out the whole Democrat metaphor nicely. Zombies at least have to kill us to get what they want. Vampires, however, can just keep feeding and feeding and feeding day after day after day while you keep working. Taxes, anyone? Credit swaps anyone? Federal bailout much?

The telling thing about the modern vampire story is that the vamps are all sympathetic. They’ve retained all the trappings from Dracula and left out that crucial bit about him being a demon. Most telling of all, I think, is that modern vampires are more powerful than ever before. In Buffy they did away with the garlic thing, but holy water and crosses were still broadly effective, and they added that bit about having to be invited in. True Blood does away with the holy water and crosses bit. And Twilight just sort of drops all pretense and makes them invincible.

So sure, zombies are red and vampires are blue. But you people have truly missed the point if you think that vampires are a symbol of hope. If zombies are simple-mindedness made manifest, then vampires are the same for decadence. And the scary thing about decadence is that it’s hard to see it setting in, and even harder to fight the rot once it’s started. The key point of the vampire metaphor was that you beat it one of two ways: either by a stake to the heart, or by exposure to sunlight. In the first case, it means you can’t treat the symptoms, you have to drive right at the heart. In the second case, you beat it by exposing it for what it is: prettified rot. And indeed, the whole trick in Dorian Gray is that he keeps a portrait in his attic that shows what he really is, all outward appearance to the contrary. You can dress something up in fine clothes, but a bloodsucker is still a bloodsucker, and dead is still dead, and unnatural is still unnatural, in other words. The vampire myth is a story about what happens to us when we lose our moral clarity. And what happens is that a bunch of spiritually empty but seductive demons get to kill us slowly while they live off of the fruits of our labor. (Seen in the same light, zombies are what happens when you substitute forced agreement for moral clarity.)

True Blood is actually a bit more perceptive than even its author seems to realize. On the surface, it’s about learning to accept a scary other that looks like us - an obvious metaphor (and just in case you missed it, they’re happy to beat you over the head with it constantly) for gay rights. But if you give the show an honest look, there’s really only one good vampire about, and even with him it’s not that clear. For the most part, vampires are really bad people, and not a few of them seem to prefer the old days when they weren’t mainstream and could just go around killing people. Here’s the dark side of the gay rights movement, in other words - that contingent of people that recognizes that normalization means having to adopt middle class morals, the end of all the partying and easy sex and feelings of automatic superiority, and who see that as a bad thing.

Maybe Twilight is perceptive in its way too. I only read the first chapter of that book, and it wasn’t really anything for me. But the general impression was that it’s just candy - a vampire story unburdened by the normal vampire moral. And in that sense, I think Twilight probably is a perfect political metaphor for our time - not the least of the reasons for which being that vampires can walk in the sun and be openly envied now. Obama supporters talk about all the great things they’re going to do, but when all is said and done they seem to believe that just holding hands and hoping is enough. It’ll all come by magic. And the big crisis we face? That’s nothing if not a “vampire” problem. Large sections of the economy turn out to be spending on creature comforts that isn’t accounted for by anyone’s labor. The government now proposes that rather than facing up to this and start trying to pay it back, what we should instead do is prop it all up and keep it going and growing. Just like with vampires, spending is so much fun that it’s easy to miss the demonic side of it - the fact that it’s borrowed time, unnatural time, and parasitic life. So yes, I think it’s telling that the fantasies of our age aren’t so much about demons and how to fight them, but demons and how to become them, and about how demons might not really be demons. But don’t expect to see that pointed out by io9 or any of the vaunted cultural critics.

Exhibit B (remember exhibit A?) - The Return of Clinton Futurism?

This one’s an even bigger stretch. Basically, the idea is that now that Obama is president-elect, we can expect with a great deal of certainty that science fiction will start to look like it did in the 90s.

Yeah.

Zachary Quinto sure thinks so. He’s been saying for months that an Obama presidency means the new Star Trek movie, where he plays the young Mister Spock, will be a huge hit. Because both the Obama campaign and the new Trek are about optimism and diversity.

Fortunately, it’s not all that obtuse.

The future was a shiny place — but with dread lurking just beneath its polish.

And that seems to be the main theme of the article, to the extent that it has one. Oh - that and that a frequent theme of 1990s science fiction was about reversing gender roles (Mulder and Scully get a lot of air time with this one).

This article is longer and more involved, and I have two overall complaints.

First - that it’s a lot of reaching. I think the authors are kidding themselves that there was a common thread in 1990s scifi. There was certainly a lot more scifi about in the 90s than there is now (though what Clinton has to do with that, if anything, is far from clear), but I’m not sure that there’s much you can say about 90s scifi “as a whole.” One could argue, I suppose, that TV scifi in the 90s was generally more intelligent than TV scifi in the 80s, but I think that’s a cyclical effect more than a political one. Television was in general more intelligent in the 90s than in the 80s, which I think had more to do with the weakening of the networks’ grip on content than anything else. Television has been getting more intelligent with each passing decade since it was invented (say what you will about “Sabrina, Teenage Witch,” does anyone doubt that it’s an improvement over “Bewitched?”). One might argue for a general crash here in the zips, but I think that’s just network TV. If you go a bit off the main dial, shows of high intelligence and production values are everywhere. Yes, there were shows that inverted gender roles - but has that trend really abated recently? And will it now come back with gusto that Obama’s elected? Yeah, I’m not really seeing the evidence. I think the truth here is that who the president is doesn’t have all that much to do with TV scifi. No doubt there’s a “character of the times” component in there somewhere, but that’s bigger than the president, people.

Second - I think their readings of a lot of these shows are just wrong. For example - while it’s true enough that Star Trek is optimistic and aggressively diverse, I think people miss the hypocrisy of a lot of Star Trek’s vaunted diversity. That celebrated “first interracial kiss” between Kirk and Uhura? Yeah, well, it packs a bit less punch when you consider that it was under duress (they were being controlled by telekinetic aliens at the time). The original show went on to produce some genuinely anti-racist episodes, of course, but only by way of glossing over the nuances on the subject. Let That Be Your Last Battlefield, for example, implies a kind of moral equivalence between blacks and whites that probably wasn’t true in the 1960s when it aired. Back then, whites were the bad guys. But more importantly, the episode manufactures two “races” that differ only in which side of their body is differently-pigmented. It works as a sledgehammer, but it’s hardly what you’d call a real treatment of the subject.

I’m not a big fan of Next Generation, so I can’t really pick it apart as well, but I think the reason I stopped watching Star Trek of any kind after the third season of that series is relevant here. Next Generation was just sickeningly politically correct. Rather than having episodes about ideas, like the old Trek used to do, what generally happened on Next Generation instead was one of two things. Either someone had some kind of pop-psych character hangup, the solution to which was blindingly obvious, or the Enterprise has to meet some aliens which differ only slightly in appearance and customs from all the other aliens we’ve seen - despite the huge budget - and these aliens are vaguely unpleasant, but that’s fine because it gives the crew an opportunity to be tolerant of them and then pat themselves on the back for their hugely enlightened diplomacy. That this kind of a useless snooze ever passed itself off as “culturally aware,” let alone “entertainment,” is surely one of the bigger swindles of our age. The sooner Star Trek: The Next Generation is buried and forgotten, the sooner science fiction in general can start to recover from the whole ordeal.

As for The X-Files, io9 has really missed the point if they think this show is feminist. Yes, Scully “wore pants,” and yes, Scully was superficially more logical than Mulder. But did they just generally miss the fact that Mulder was right more often than not? That Scully’s “rationality” was actually nothing but, that in fact it was a leap of faith that embraced not “the scientific method” of looking at evidence and going where it points, but rather aggressively doubting anything that challenged her worldview? In the end, Scully wasn’t a practicing Catholic for nothing. When you scrape past the surface, I think X-Files wasn’t so much an inversion of traditional TV gender roles as a clarification of them. The man’s still in charge, and he’s still the star, and the woman is there to give him emotional stability, but she’s still bad at math and evidence. He’s the hero, she’s the supportive sidekick. And as for the government being shady - c’mon, that’s been going on since the 70s on TV.

So the short answer is no, Obama’s election isn’t going to have any effect on TV scifi. And the only-slightly-less-short answer is that you guys weren’t even paying that much attention in the 90s anyway.

One of the reasons I enjoy books by Peter Hamilton so much is that I never know exactly what to say about them when I’m finished. If that sounds like a bad thing, consider it this way: it means they’ve hit me on an unexplored level. They aren’t easily filed away and ignored - and indeed, I’ve read Mindstar Rising three times at least, and it’s yet to get boring.

In many ways Misspent Youth is even harder to talk about than the others. It’s not a book I intended on buying or reading; I didn’t even know it existed! Intending to follow the latest SFBRP podcast, which happens to cover Hamilton’s The Dreaming Void, I stopped by Barnes and Noble to pick up a copy only to find none available. Never mind, the pushy salesperson talked me into this one instead, and I can’t say I’m sorry I left with it.

It isn’t Hamilton’s most popular. Most of the reviews I read about it are written by his dedicated fans and are nevertheless negative. And Hamilton himself seems to sympathize:

I could see why it didn’t appeal to a lot of people. It was an unpleasant story about unpleasant people. With hindsight, it was never going to be as popular as my other works.

Be that as it may, I don’t mind going on record as an enthusiastic supporter.

It’s a queer book. It’s not exactly SF, but neither is it completely mainstream. Rather, it’s stuck somewhere in the no-man’s-land between the two, bound to come up short both for those who know and love Hamilton for his straightahead space opera, as well as for those who might have greeted him as the latest defector to the New Yorker genre. He’s too mundane for the one and not deep enough for the other, leaving us with the sort of book that’s bound to be, and largely was, misunderstood.

Misspent Youth tells the story of 78-year-old Jeff Baker, the first man to undergo rejuvination treatment - a process that replaces all the cells in one’s body with new, more robust copies, returning him to youth in the realest of possible senses. It’s 2040, and the EU’s move toward “ever closer union” has gone too far, swallowing individual memberstates into a behemouth, bureaucratic technocracy. Baker is chosen to be the protoype for this project - a project that costs trillions of Euros to complete for even this single individual - for two reasons, one real and one apparent. The apparent reason is that he’s a brilliant scientist who may recoupe Europe’s investment by helping them break through in superconductors. In reality, it’s more to do with his prestige as the man who invented and subsequently declined to patent data crystals, a data storage mechanism of such efficiency and capacity that it has effectively destroyed intellectual property. Europe’s government is still making the case for statist technocracy - and going about it largely by publicly one-upping an America that is no longer the superpower it once was. (Parallels with the Soviet Union are, one presumes, not entirely coincidental.)

But the story is a human one. The politics and S-as-in-”Speculative”-Fiction social thought experiments are the backdrop to what is, to my mind, a much more interesting tale about the effects of the treatment on Jeff’s personal life - his friends, his family, his view of himself. And it helps a lot, I suppose, that I completely agree with Hamilton’s take on the subject.

It should be noted that this most certainly does qualify as a “take” on the subject. Saying it falls short in this regard is the most common of the errors in the reviews I’ve read. Take this one, for example:

I must admit that however much I enjoyed the mini-soap opera that Hamilton creates, it did leave me slightly frustrated at points. Although the book is extremely well-written and constantly involving, it is completely character driven. This occasionally puts it in danger of neglecting its original concept. The psychological impact of the change on Jeff is only minimally examined.

I don’t think that’s true at all. It isn’t that the psychological impact of the change is minimally examined, it’s that the psychological impact is itself minimal. A blessing and a curse of science fiction is that everything is always so exaggerated. I can’t remember where I read it, but somewhere someone did a study about conspiracy theories, where they give subjects a scene of a president being shot, but the aftermath of the story varies. In one vesion, the president is killed instantly, in other versions the consequences are less dire (I can’t remember exactly - perhaps the shot misses completely in the mildest?). The point is that in the version where the consequences are the most dire, the subjects are more likely to show sympathy with explanations that involve conspiracy - presumably because it’s comforting to attach big causes to big consequences. Science fiction often operates on the same level. Something as counter-natural as immortality MUST be the singularity itself! But what if it isn’t? What if, instead of changing us into something PROFOUNDLY NEW AND DIFFERENT, we’re still just the same ol’ schmoes, only we live longer? And what if the impact only happens in the macrocosm, once the treatment is common, rather than at the microcosmic individual level? Hamilton never deceived anyone about the intended scope of speculation: by focusing on the first man to undergo such treatment he frees himself to concentrate on the psychological impact exclusively, and he finds, plausibly to my mind, that it isn’t actually all that great, at least not when it’s just one or two such people running about. It’s a modern Picture of Dorian Gray, really - and Wilde’s famous epigram applies:

The tragedy of old age is not that one is old, but that one is young.

Right. If people actually matured emotionally with age, it would be one thing. The problem is that so many never do. They’re in their 20-somethings well past the point where they can do anything about it, and so they grumble and complain about youth for being what they want to be but no longer can be. What would you do if you had the chance to do it all over again - the wisdom that only experience can bring given a second chance to right all your mistakes? Why, you cash in on what you learned about women the hard way, of course! Jeff finds it easy to get laid now because he’s been around enough to know what women want, but without the time lag that prevents him from using this knowledge to full effect. And like the GM weeds that have invaded the landscape, Jeff outcompetes and damages the delicate ecosystem that was his personal life. But - and this is important - only because he’s the only specimine. In truth, his motivations aren’t any different than they’ve always been. The suggestion here is that the “superior” knowledge that comes with age, if placed in a more powerful body, will be just like the superior information flow that came as a result of Jeff’s inventing the data crystal. With instant access to so much information, there is no room for producing more. As a result, people sit around watching reruns. The knowledge that comes with age is in many cases not “insightful” or “wise” so much as it is just a matter of “knowing the script.”

Another common complaint from the reviews about this book that I think is simply wrong relates to the first: the characters are unlikeable.

The book is something of a character study and a treatise on the emotional impact of the rejeuvenation technology, but although Hamilton can certainly create cool characters, he is less adept at providing them with onion-like layers of complexity and depth. His biggest mistake in Misspent Youth is making most of the characters inherently selfish and dislikable.

That they are. In fact, I found myself marvelling at how slippery the surface of the story was. You try to find someone to sympathize with and just can’t. There’s an elegance to how balanced everyone’s faults are, how well the faults of one complement the faults of the other. And the way Hamilton lures us into taking someone’s side just as evidence that that person is behaving hypocritically is passing out of short term memory is nothing if not skillful. The net effect is that you end up sympathizing with all of them, beacause in truth we all know and are these people.

One review that I read and can no longer find complained of character inconsistency - specifically that Jeff is presented as an altruist at the begining of the book, that we’re then given evidence that his public image is a sham, but that by the end of the book he’s behaving again just as he did at the begining! Pitched that way it does sound inconsistent - but the reviewer has simply missed the point. Jeff isn’t what changes - it’s what we know about him that does. If he was able to fool everyone into thinking he was an altruist at the begining, then it was only because there is something of the altruist about him. The confusion comes from the assumption that selfishness and self-sacrifice are polar opposites, and that people all occupy territory close to one extreme or the other. In fact, everyone is capable of both virtually at the same time, and that’s because they’re not poles so much as frames layered on top of each other. It’s a theme I find fascinating: the extent to which our understanding of life is a series of post hoc rationalizations. You find yourself in a situation where you have to make a decision, and if you had time to mull it over, perhaps you’d do something thoughtful or original. But you don’t have the time, and so instead you fall back on learned patterns - cliches, really. The story we tell about why we did what we did is something that gets filled in later. This is a point that was made especially well by the much-maligned ending. Yes, the ending comes off like a cheap ploy. It seems excessively sentimental, predictable, and more than just a little convenient for the writer (”maudlin to the point of ridiculousness,” as another reviewer more effectively put it). But ask yourself how you knew it was coming and really think about it, and I think you’ll find there’s more going on here. Or, rather, that there’s less going on here. Tim says the line that ends the book more because he’s on TV and he’s spent of righteous indignation than because he really means it. The interesting question is - does he come to mean it, having said it? The implication is that he does.

And then there’s the politics. How intrusive the politics of a novel are has a lot to do with whether you agree with them. This book is pretty strongly in the Euroskeptic camp. It’s an assertion of Anglo cultural superiority over the continent - not because the English are a superior race German- or Japanese-style, but because they’re just people and know it. It’s a damning indictment of top down social engineering - and if that indictment is a bit heavy for some people, then it is so because they don’t share Hamilton’s take. Which is fair enough. I happen to agree with him - about United Europe, about the evils of social engineering, and about Anglo cultural superiority - and so what for some people must seem like a lecture was for me insightful. But it isn’t something for everyone, probably. One thing I will say I think was misunderstood is the role of the English separatists.

Discounting some unnecessary English terrorists detracting from the fascinating thriller, MISSPENT YOUTH is an interesting look at the unintended consequences of science finding a Fountain of Youth.(source)

The English Separatists are unnecessary, but this hardly makes them distracting. Again, the fact that they’re unnecessary to the story is the whole bleeding point - because separatists everywhere tend to be a sideshow. The constant Europol police protection around Jeff is not necessary because the separatists don’t have it together enough to really do anything about him, and in any case when the whole edifice comes tumbling down at the end it’s more because of the unpleasantness of the continentals than the best-laid plans of England’s finest. If nothing else, there’s that brilliant scene in the pub where Jeff notices that these people are basically the National Front, only that now Indians are allowed to join. That’s some brilliant commentary, and if it wasn’t strictly necessary to the story it was at least an entertaining way to flesh out the world. I found it convincing: in the future imagined, there would be English separatists, and they would be every bit as ineffective as Hamilton paints them.

The book is not without flaws. For me, what stood out as a sore point were the sex “scenes.” A lot of commentary on this book focuses on how much sex there is in it, but I don’t really remember there being any. There are lots of occasions where people go off to have sex, but we’re mercifully spared the lurid details. What we get instead is nearly as bad, though - it’s the typical pedestrian science fiction author descriptions of what they wish sex could be but wouldn’t know because they’ve never had much of it. Things like “she was wicked and creative in bed.” Sounds great, but I don’t know what it means! What saves the whole thing from being as sexually juvenvile as Spider Robinson or Robert Heinlein is the hint of a wink. We might just maybe be getting these descriptions from the characters and not the author - which would certainly fit in with the greater point of the book, actually. But if this was the game all along, it wasn’t quite as obvious to this reader as it might should have been…

Topical art often runs the risk of being taken for what it’s criticizing. Reading through a lot of reviews today to collect my thoughts, that seems to be what’s happened here. It isn’t that what anyone says about the book is factually wrong, it’s just that they haven’t understood the point of what they’re quoting. I suspect that a lot of this book’s critics will pick it up again some day and read it with new eyes. Right now, no one seems to know how to take this one because, as mentioned, it is neither massive enough in scope to register as science fiction, nor is it rich enough in pointless stylistic detail to register as New Yorker genre. It is in a class by itself, a class which I count myself lucky to be able to appreciate. We happy few…

Highly recommended.

Reading for pleasure last night, I came across Ben Bova’s essay Isaac was Right: N equals one in the April 2003 issue of Analog Science Fiction and Fact (which he used to edit in the 70s). The basic premise is this: there is no other intelligent life in the universe, and the idea that there might be is based on a false premise. That false premise is that evolution, given time, invariably produces intelligence. And the reference to “Isaac” is of course to Isaac Asimov, whose stories about the future never contained aliens.

Bova is certainly correct that smart money is against the existence of extraterrestrial intelligent life. Scientist that he is, of course he doesn’t deny the possibility. But scientist that he is, the lack of evidence for intelligent extraterrestrial life after decades of looking certainly strongly suggests that there’s none to be found. And I agree: my main reason for disbelieving in aliens personally is not that I believe they can’t exist (they can), but because no one has been able to show me that they do. It’s the same reason I don’t believe in God (though not the same reason I reject organized religion - which is in most cases a priori silly).

Bova is also correct about the falsity of the false premise - and correct that a sizeable number of believers in aliens hold it, as far as I can tell - but he is incorrect that it is a necessary foundation for belief in intelligent aliens. Bova writes:

We tacitly assume that whereever life exists, intelligence will eventually arise, given enough time. But is that true? … Intelligence is merely one evolutionary tactic, an adaptation that helps a species to survive, little different from developing a shaggy coat of fur, or sharp-focusing eyes, or wings or gills or any myriad of adaptations.

Well, right, but what about this means that it can only be successful this once in this one place? I should think that if shaggy fur works for shielding against cold here on Earth it might on other planets as well - just as intelligence might work as an adaptive tool elsewhere. That isn’t to say it has happened, of course, just to point out that there is no need for it to be an inevitable consquence of life for anyone to find it likely that other planets have hosted it. All that is required is for there to be enough planets out there suitable for genesis of life that intelligence happens “now and then,” and for intelligence itself to be robust enough a survival technique that it tends to succeed.

And Bova is also correct that “Isaac was right” - but about aliens in science fiction, NOT about the existence of aliens in general.

In fact, Asimov’s stubborn refusal to write about aliens is one of the more redeeming qualities of his fiction for me - which I generally give an A+ for intelligence and a D+ on character and thematic development (making me appreciative, but definitely not a fan). But I don’t view the lack of aliens as a scientific hypothesis, and I hope that’s not how Asimov meant it, because I don’t think it is the job of the science fiction writer to accurately predict the future. I think it is merely his job, so far as he is writing about the future at all, to create a future plausible enough that we can believe in it for the duration of the story. Much the same way that it is not the job of a fantasy writer to describe fairies and dragons to us as he personally believes in them. He doesn’t have to believe in dragons at all (and we prefer it if he doesn’t, in fact). He merely has to give us a consistent one, one detailed enough to support the story. Nor does a romance writer have to describe real romances. He merely has to create romances that are plausible enough that they don’t distract from his reader’s wish-fulfillment. Indeed, get too plausible and the fun goes out of it! And so on. The future is a fictional vehicle typical of the genre - nothing more. Science fiction isn’t “about” the future any more than romance novels are how-to guides for getting laid. It’s true enough that couples may find sexual inspiration in romance novels, but if that’s the only reason you’re reading them you’re missing the point and using your time inefficiently: there are guidebooks for that in a different section of the bookstore. And if you’re reading science fiction to collect guesses about the future - well, again, you’re probably not using your time as wisely as you could be. There is a whole profession of non-fiction writers who do their best to make informed predictions about the future. Science fiction authors are, like authors in general, primarily employed to tell stories.

The reason I think Asimov is right to leave aliens out of his stories is that aliens are not human and his readers are. Aliens are not just unknown, but unknowable. Not only do we have no concrete examples to build on, I’m not sure there’s even a point to trying to build one. When you consider what passes for “aliens” in most space opera, you realize that they’re essentially (if not as blatantly) the “rubber foreheads” from Star Trek. They are humans with human motivations and concerns whittled down to a few easy generalizations in rubber costumes. The idea that Klingons are “alien” is laughable. They are no such thing. They’re Native Americans, only less so. And so it is with many so-called “aliens” in science fiction. They’re (insert name of random foreign culture) only less so. Take any human culture, exaggerate some stereotypical feature of it and fill in the rest with New York, and you have an “alien” species for all most science fiction readers care. This isn’t to say that writers can’t, and don’t, go to the trouble to create species that are plausibly alien, of course, merely to say that it isn’t the general rule and that in any case it doesn’t seem to be what readers want. And that’s because science fiction readers are humans themselves - with human concerns and motivations. They can’t relate to realistic aliens, and there doesn’t seem to be much point in trying.

Whatever his other literary flaws, Asimov got that much right. Spending time designing plausible aliens - while perhaps an interesting exercise in its own right - is a distraction from the main purpose of literature, even science fiction literature. Aliens work when they’re in the service of the “sense of wonder” that is at the core of what I and so many other fans love so deeply about science fiction. But they are silly at worst and pointless at best as regular characters. And so I like to believe that the lack of aliens in Asimov’s books are not an intentional scientific implicature so much as an intentional literary decision. Isaac got “it” right alright - but “it” is not “that N equals one.” “It” is that what N equals is irrelevant and uninteresting to writers and readers of serious literature.

It’s conclusive: science fiction made me the man I am today.

Emphasis on the MAN there. Because according to this clever site, which estimates the probability of you being male or female based on your browsing history, it is 97% likely that I am male.

The methodology is presented clearly. It’s a (very) simple likelihood function based on which of the Quantcast Top 10,000 sites you visit. And, helpfully, it then shows you exactly which sites in your history were contributing how much to your results.

It seems my stand-out MALE site is i09.com - a general-interest science fiction fansite, which is visited by 2.33 times as many blokes as birds. Runners-up are Slashdot, National Review, and Townhall, each at 1.74, followed by Valleywag and Lifehacker, at 1.7 and 1.64 each. In other words - science fiction, conservative politics, and an interest in programming and technology make you male. Beam me up, bitches!

In all the fuss about Jesse Helms’ death, it seems I’ve missed the other July 4th death - that of Thomas M. Disch, a pioneering science fiction writer who killed himself last Friday after suffering from depression for two years. RIP.

Wasting time this morning I read through the Wikipedia entry on Rod Serling and hit a gem.

Serling was also progressive on matters of gender, with many stories featuring quick-thinking, resilient women, although he also wrote stories featuring shrewish, nagging wives.

What a great, unintentional encapsulation of what’s wrong with feminism. Specifically, there are two problems with it.

(1) Why is there a conflict between writing about quick-thinking, resilient women and also nagging, shrewish wives? Both types of women exist in reality, right? Women are people too, possessive of good as well as bad qualities, are they not? Picking out only the good is not “progressive,” it’s propaganda.

(2) We’re overlooking the possibility that the shrewish wives may also be a feminist social commentary. Making women miserable by confining them in the house has the indirect consequence of making men miserable too. The system fails both sexes.

In a nutshell, that’s what’s wrong with feminism. First, it’s so unsophisticated that it can only see “progess” where women are unambiguously good and men unambiguously bad. The less polished of us might call that “sexism” (or “reverse sexism,” if we’re being polite, but I see no reason to be), but apparently we’re just not “progressive” enough. Second, this tunnel vision robs it of its ability to see social commentary that’s beneficial to it where that commentary would implicate men as co-victims of oppressive gender roles.

It kind of reminds me of something I read yesterday on the Feminist SF blog. They’re having a poll currently to make a list of underappreciated gems - with the catch being that these gems have to be feminist. The link goes to some of the suggested entries. Here’s a description of one:

The Psalms of Herod by Esther Friesner - It’s a feminist dystopian novel like THE HANDMAID’S TALE, on crack. Set in a postapocalyptic world in which food is scarce and the human race has mutated bizarrely, and a deeply-warped version of fundamentalist Christianity has become the dominant faith. Like animals, women are only capable of reproducing once a year or so, “in season” - if they have sex outside this time, they die horribly. Alpha males rule small homesteads in which they control the lives of their people utterly. Abortion is the highest sin possible - but unwanted babies are put out on a hillside to die of exposure. Women who refuse to obey are beaten or raped to death; men who show any hint of homosexuality (even if they’re raped) are stoned; people of color are killed on sight; and the most evil creature ever rumored to exist is the Jew.

In other words, reality as it is isn’t oppressive enough, so we’ve written a fantasy world where we can dream about being victims for real. How can you help such people?

Harvesting links for an earlier post, I came across this announcement that Blakes 7 will be revived. Color me skeptical.

I’ve been a big supporter of the “re-imagining” of Battlestar Galactica. Granted, I had my doubts about SciFi’s ability to pull it off - what with it being the casting catastrophe network and all. And on hearing that Starbuck was to be a woman I admit my PC alarms went off. But the miniseries put paid to any misgivings. The miniseries plus the first two episodes of the series regular rank as among the best hours in TV history in my book. And even though the series has been a huge disappointment since then (starting, roughly, with season 2.5), it’s indisputably better than the original.

I don’t think a remake Blakes 7 would meet with similar success. True, the shows date from the same time, and true that they serve roughly analogous social functions in their respective nations (as allegories for the role of the US and UK in the Cold War at a time with both nations were dispirited), true that they both self-consciously emulated westerns, and true that - at least on paper - both had dystopian premises - but that’s about where the similarities end. Where Battlestar was ripe for a remake, I think Blake should be left alone.

As I’ve said before, I think if ever there was a show that deserved a second chance, it was the original Battlestar: Galactica. It was a good idea with a poor execution, and there really wasn’t a good explanation for why it failed so spectacularly. Certainly ABC funded it well enough. And it had a good timeslot. And the premise - a ragtag fugitive fleet of humans fleeing from a race of cyborgs of inscrutable motive after a near-brush with extinction - was nothing if not ripe with potential. And with Lorne Greene as Adama, coupled with the conscious aping of TV westerns, it had a readymade target demographic. But despite the solid foundation, everything went wrong. The show was poorly planned, the actors weren’t very good in their roles, the late-70s insistence on “family friendliness” was supremely annoying (not to mention out of step with the dystopian premise), the writing proved to be sub-par. 1970s Battlestar was a gooey, sentimentalist bomb. A few standout episodes notwithstanding, it can’t have been much of a loss for TV scifi that the show saw an early cancellation after only one season.

The point here is that Battlestar failed in spite of everyone’s best efforts. The money and network support were there - the trouble is that no one took the time to think it through. Campy attempts at “alien culture” - like calling minutes “centons” - were as embarrassing as they were inadequate. The stereotyped characters - ESPECIALLY the much-lamented Starbuck - simply lacked dimension. And the plot JUST. DIDN’T. WORK. Baltar’s self-conscious betrayal had no good explanation, and it strained credulity to think that the kind of by-the-book bait-n-switch the Cylons pulled would actually succeed. Worst of all, there was a real timidity to the show. The show’s premise was a thematic goldmine - all it needed was a writer willing to explore it. But none were forthcoming. Instead of the thoughtful series the premise should have supported, we got a run-of-the-mill live-action cartoon with clear good guys and bad guys. Eminently forgetable.

The remake fixed all that. The Cylons are more interesting now. The writers don’t shy away from difficult themes. The characters are flawed, human, real. In particular, Baltar is believable, as is the success of the Cylon sneak attack. Granted - there were problems from the outset. The show was definitely once bitten twice shy on the “alien culture” motiff. Caprica is so much like Earth they’re practically carbon copies. And it’s pretty clear that no one really thought through the technology. It’s hard to believe, for example, that a culture that has long-range teleport for ships also uses cassette tapes for sound recordings. And sure, this show ultimately went off the rails plotwise too - but at least this time it wasn’t for lack of trying. No - all told, the re-imaginging of Battlestar is light years better than the original. I’m glad it happened.

But all these are good reasons why I really think a revival of Blake won’t work. If the original Battlestar was a good idea that failed in spite of everything, then Blake is something like the opposite of that. We know that its premise is something Terry Nation just kind of farted out of his brain at a program planning meeting. Nation is the first to admit that he was just running off at the mouth - had no idea what he was talking about. And unlike Battlestar, 70s Blake was underfunded. It looked terrible, even by BBC standards at the time - which takes some doing. Some of the actors - notably Blake himself - weren’t really satisfied with their roles - and Terry Nation, for his part, wasn’t really satisfied with the actors. In spite of its popularity, the show was constantly plagued by threats of cancellation, meaning that it was difficult to stick to any kind of coherent plan.

And yet, somehow in spite of it all, Blakes 7 really worked. Even ueber-skeptic Gareth Thomas (who played Blake) did a standout job in his role. The actors turned out to be really good - and while there were definitely some duds in the writing department (Horizon stands out for me as an unalloyed piece of crap), for the most part the episodes were superbly written as well. Despite a lack of initial direction or planning, the show’s story arcs worked. And the treatment of the show’s themes had an admirable subtlety - one that arguably has yet to be equaled by another science fiction show. It may have been an accident, but Blakes 7 came off.

And that’s the trouble, really. You can’t expect lightning to strike twice. If it’s something of a miracle that Blakes 7 worked in the first place, then you’re playing with fire trying to make it happen again. In particular, who’s EVER going to do as good a job as Paul Darrow playing Avon?

Here is a(n admittedly impromtu) list of things I expect to go wrong with the remake.

(1) Overplanning. Blakes 7 is famous for its moral ambiguity, and there will be a lot of pressure to recreate that. I think this will result in a lot of contrived situations. The moral ambiguity has to be an ambient thing - it can’t be something that you set out consciously to do. It should be something that naturally comes out of the world and the characters. But it won’t be. The temptation to “go Dark Angel” and make snarky, superficial, predictable political points in the name of being “edgy” will be too great for modern TV writers. What we’ll get in place of Blakes sardonic thoughtfulness will be a preachy, politically correct sledgehammer.

(2) Who’s going to play Avon? Sorry - but it’s a point that bears repeating. The major appeal of the original show was that fascinating character. As a reviewer on Amazon UK amusingly puts it:

[Paul Darrow's autobiography] is a must for anyone who remembers the BBC’s sci-fi series “Blake’s 7″ and spent the late ’70s and early ’80s wanting to a) be Kerr Avon or b) sleep with Kerr Avon.

Right. It was a show about Avon, and Paul Darrow was Avon. Any actor who touches that role does so at his extreme peril, and any conceivable “re-imagining” of Blake without Avon just isn’t Blakes 7.

(3) Atmosphere. It’s hard to imagine Blakes 7 being made any other time than the late 1970s. We’re just not this depressed anymore, and I don’t see how any modern show is going to be able to recreate the sardonic atmosphere. What, in particular, will be missed in any attempt to recreate the atmosphere is the feeling of “soldiering through.” Back in those days there was a sense of “detached involvement” that has been completely lost in modern times.

(4) Shocking ending? Most importantly of all, how are they going to redo that ending now that everyone knows what happened? (And not just the finale - but all through the series it pushed the envelope of acceptable plot developments.) That series ending has got to be the ballsiest note a show has ever gone out on, and I just don’t know what they’re going to do to top it. In particular, it’s the kind of thing that can’t be done intentionally. What happened on Gauda Prime was all there - latent in who the characters were and what kind of goals they were pursuing. To consciously try to top it is to impose something on the show that might not be there naturally.

All of which is to say that Blakes 7 is just fine the way it is, thank you very much. It succeeded in spite of itself; trying it twice seems like a bad idea.

What might be a good idea instead is to do something very loosely based on Blake. I mean, the show’s basic premise is generic enough that it can safely be redone - with some modern brushing up of course. And certainly I’m all in favor of another morally ambiguous show with an ensemble cast of complex characters. There are things in Blake that can be reused, no doubt about it. In fact, I’m one of the first to agree that Blake is a show that hasn’t been imitated enough, that wasn’t as influential as it probably should have been. And I’m enthusiastic about any show that exist to break Star Trek’s hegemony. So there’s no real problem using it as a shoving off point. It’s stamping anything with the brand name that seems doomed to fail. Blakes 7 was one of a kind, and recycling the moniker will either (a) bury the original show or (b) invite comparisons that are unlikely to cast the new show in a flattering light. So fine, “redo” it. But keep the “remake” far enough away from the original that you have room to maneuver. By which I mean, none of the original characters or even any plot connections to the original please. A similar show, set in a totally different universe with an otherwise clean slate to write on, in other words.

For the past year I’ve been slowly going through the criminally underappreciated BBC cult space opera Blakes 7 on YouTube, and it’s been thrilling. Granted, it takes an iron stomach for bad special effects to appreciate this one - even by BBC standards - but as fan of the Beeb from a young age, I’m a veteran.

Last night I saw the turning-point series two cliffhanger Star One, and it was better than I expected, even after reading all the praise it gets online. Of the episodes I’ve seen so far, this one is second only to series finale Blake, which is probably impossible to top anyway.

What’s so good about Star One? Hard to say, really. It was enjoyable all the way through, but there was something about the last couple of lines that triggered the idea that this was one of the greats. The interesting thing is that in isolation they’re the most medicore of stock space opera dialogue:

AVON Stand by to fire.
VILA Avon, this is stupid!
AVON When did that ever stop us? [pause] Fire!

Roll credits…

Yeah, see what I mean? Taken by itself, it’s standard sub-par Joss Whedon jokiness. But in context it works really well. Why?

Damned if I know. But here’s my stab at an idea.

The cliche about Blakes 7 is that it’s “the anti-Trek“ - a kind of calculated inversion of Star Trek, particularly of all the “goody two-shoes” moralizing. And the cliche about that cliche is that while it’s mostly right, we do Blakes 7 a disservice reducing it to merely a response. I wholeheartedly agree. But whether or not Blakes 7 set out to deliberately invert Star Trek, it’s frequently at its best when doing so - and this is one of “those episodes.”

The Hollywood cliche that’s being turned on its head in Star One is “power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely.” (And in that sense, maybe it’s really Star Wars they’re throwing for a loop here.) The plot, in a nutshell, is this. Blake has discovered the “best-kept secret in the galaxy,” the location of the computer nerve center known as “Star One.” This is a network of computers that runs literally everything in the Federation - including even the climate control systems on most inner planets. Obviously disrupting it would cause an economic catastrophe, leaving the Federation unable to govern itself and paving the way for a new order. Partly for this reason, and partly to keep anyone from holding it hostage, the Federation locked the door on Star One and threw away the key. Not even Supreme Commander Servalan knows where it is.

Of course, someone had to build it, and those people had to be silenced. So the Federation had all of their memories wi