Sorry, But There Are No Good Science Fiction Movies

Some thought inspired from watching the Ender's Game movie trailer...

I'm a long time fan of science fiction literature.  I remember when I first discovered the SF section of the public library.  I could have set up a tent and lived there.

But one thing I've learned in time is that SF literature is a very different beast from SF movies.  For a SF movie to be popular it has to follow the the Star Wars mold: plucky humans fighting against tyranny.  Blah.  I mean, it's okay ever once and a while, but even the new Star Trek movies -- the original series, for all its campiness, being the closest to the feel and style of literary SF that has even been broadcast on TV -- has become more like Star Wars.

In order to get an idea of how different literary SF is from movie SF peruse these following links.  These are all the Hugo and Nebula award winners for best novel.  (The Hugo and Nebula, if you didn't know, are to SF literature what the Academy Awards are to movies.)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nebula_award_for_best_novel
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hugo_Award_for_Best_Novel

Do you recognize any of the titles?  Care to guess how many have been made into movies?  Here's my quick count in case you don't have the time.

By my count here are the winners that have been made into movies:

• Dune (Nebula award winner)
• Flowers for Algernon (Nebula award winner)
• Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire (Hugo award winner and biggest sellout ever)
• Starship Troopers (Hugo award winner)
• The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe (Retroactive Hugo award winner)
• Fahrenheit 451 (Retroactive Hugo award winner)

If we include nominees we can add the following novels to the list:

•  Do Androids Dream of Electric Sleep? (the movie was called Blade Runner)
• Slaughter House 5
• The Postman
• The Handmaid's Tales
• A Game of Thrones
• A Clash of Kings
• Cloud Atlas
• Children of Dune
• 2010: Odyssey Two

And that's it.  They've been handing Hugos out yearly since 1958 and Nebulas have been awarded since 1965. If you only include those movies that were actually popular or even critically acclaimed the list gets much shorter.

The problem gets compounded when you realize some of the worst movies on this list are nothing like the books they were based on in either tone or content.  Not only are those SF movies based on great SF literature bad, they mislead the viewer concerning what SF literature is actually like.  Who on earth would want to read any of David Brin's work after seeing such a miserable movie as The Postman.  Not only is The Postman novel great, but Brin's Startide Rising is one of the greatest SF novels of all time (and it will even appeal to those of you who like your SF in the Star Wars fashion).

For those of you not familiar with SF literature here's a few recommendations to get a feel for the genre.  These books can be found on the list of award winners and nominees linked to earlier.

• Have Spacesuit -- Will Travel
• Dune
• Lord of Light
• Ring World
• Rendezvous With Rama
• Neuromancer
• Startide Rising
• Ender's Game
• Red Mars
• The Diamond Age

 And while I'm at it, here's an exhaustive list of movies I have watched that do the best job at capturing the feel of SF literature:

• 2001: A Space Odyssey
• Alien
• Bladerunner
• Primer
• The Fountain

There are some other good SF movie, after all Star Wars is a great flick, but they don't come close to capturing the style found in SF literature.

So, back to the Ender's Game movie.  I'm very concerned that the movie will be reduced to Hollywood pablum.  The story is disturbing and the ending is painful.  I can't imagine Hollywood being willing to do it straight.  I also heard they mixed in some of Ender's Shadow into the movie which changes the tone significantly (and not in a good way in my opinion).  I'll watch it, but with trepidation.

Mormons' Dismissive View of Theology

Terryl Givens once asked a big-wig at Deseret Book why they didn't publish more books on Mormon theology.  The response to his question was something along the lines of, "Well why don't you write one and if we like it we'll publish it."

This story highlights a weird trait about Mormonism.  Despite being very religious and spending a great deal of time reading scripture, they don't concern themselves much with theology at least as a systematic rational analysis of the word of God.  Sure, every Mormon is an amateur Theologian, but regarding official systematized theology, there's very little of it.  There's never been an Augustine of Hippo in Mormonism and never will be.

As far as official statements go, Mormon theology is very limited.  If you want to know every thing Mormons officially believe you only have to read James E. Talmage's Articles of Faith and Jesus The Christ.  Of course, these aren't nearly as useful for making straw man attacks against Mormonism as The Journal of Discourses or Mormon Doctrine and so aren't as widely known outside of Mormonism.

So if Mormons don't actually believe that many things why is The Journal of Discourses 26 volumes long and why doesn't Sunday School get boring?  As Matthew Bowman said: "There is a great deal which Mormons might believe; there is very little that they must believe."  (Actually his whole article is a great read: Why Is It So Hard to Figure Out What Mormons Believe?)

And this gets to the heart of Mormonism and it's extreme egalitarianism.  Not only can any Mormon be a prophet and theologian, they are encouraged to do so.

Joanna Brooks on the Daily Show

http://www.thedailyshow.com/watch/thu-august-9-2012/joanna-brooks

The Daily Show with Jon Stewart
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Maya Article from National Geographic

http://ngm.nationalgeographic.com/2007/08/maya-rise-fall/gugliotta-text/1

Introducing Young Children to Science (and Science Fiction)

I checked out a book from the library called Icarus at the Edge of Time.  It's a board book about a boy living on a generation ship who decides to defy orders and investigate a black hole.  Due to the gravitational effects on time, instead of coming right back to his family on the ship, 10,000 years pass and everything is different.

Zula loves the pictures, they are all Hubble photographs.  However, Ducky is disturbed by the boy never being able to return to his family.  That's the interesting thing about acquiring knowledge.  It changes us and maybe not always for the better.  Either way, it can be scary.

Also, it makes for pretty good Science Fiction, which is a horribly scarce even for adult readers.  Someone once told me that reading a favorite book is like hanging out with an old friend.  I've never viewed books in that manner.  To me they are more like the hole in to which Alice falls.  I want the author to blow my mind with a world of language and ideas.

Venus Transit

When I got home from work today I hastily constructed a five foot long pin hole projector in order to view the Venus transit.

I had the live broadcast from NASA.com going on the computer while the kids helped me cut out the cardboard and tape it all together.

It worked surprisingly well.  The Sun's diameter was about an inch and the small black dot that was Venus was visible on the projection surface.  We only barely finished it in time. The sun was touching the neighbor's trees by the time we got it going so we could see the trees moving around the edges of the Sun's image.  And a short time later the sun set.

I need to make sure I catch it again in one hundred years.

Lin Carter At World's End Book Review

While in Oregon recently I had the opportunity to pick up some 70's era pulp pastiche by Lin Carter.  I bought four Jandar of Callisto books as well as four World's End books.  We'll stick with the end of the world for now.

As I said, I bought four books in Lin Carter's World's End series and those are all that I have read.  Ten, or maybe even eleven, books were planned by the author before falling popularity put an end to his grand designs.  Only six books ended up getting published and they are all out of print.  Check out the titles: The Warrior of World's End, The Enchantress of World's End, The Immortal of World's End, The Barbarian of World's End, etc.

What I was looking for was some outrageous sword and sorcery styled pulp novels -- the kind of fantasy that was published before everyone decided that fantasy wasn't fantasy unless it was a Tolkien knock-off.  After reading the first paragraph of the first novel, I thought I had hit pay dirt.  I mean, check this out:

"At the western end of the Crystal Mountains there flourished in former ages the city of Ardelix.  Once it had been a great center of a race called [the] Hybrids of Phex, but at the end of the period of which I write it had long been abandoned to ruin by the Phexians, who were themselves extinct, having succumbed to the Laughing Plague half an eon earlier."

It's these kind of descriptions that provide what delight these books have to offer.  The book is set 700,000,000 years in the future on Earth's last great super-continent Gondwane.  Most of the world has succumbed to barbarism.  The moon is slowly falling and is much larger in the night sky.  The sun is dying and burns with a dimmer golden light.  You have floating islands, vast plains of purple grass, flying castles, giant tiger men, androids with silver hair, mechanical birds, and -- my favorite -- an entire mountain range thousands of feet high carved into cyclopean statues by a race of beings so obsessed with their morality that they felt the need to build a monument that would last until after the Sun burned out.

Alas, the characters are wafer thin, the plot is all camp, and anytime our band of heroes gets into an impossible jam, some deus ex machina device pulls them from the jaws of defeat before they can break a sweat.  They pale in comparison to "classic" pulp fiction which at least managed to maintain a pulse pounding thread of action and adventure throughout the narrative.  There's nothing to these books but the scenery, but at times that's enough to make them worthwhile.