Category: Culture

Enterprise Update

Okay, it’s mid-January now, so the new shows are starting up again after the Christmas re-run season.

Last night Star Trek Enterprise fired up its warp engines again and delivered an interesting episode.

Unlike the three-episode mini-arcs that it’s been working this season–arcs that allow it to tell bigger, more ambitious stories–this one was a standalone episode, but it will have a significant place in the Star Trek mythos.

The reason is that, even though it wasn’t a multi-episode story like others this season, it did do something that seems to be part of the mission of Enterprise’s season four: Fill in missing pieces of the Star Trek mythos.

The previous story had dealt with a civil war on Vulcan that led to the evolution of the Vulcans we know and love from The Original Series. In this week’s episode, we see the broader social revolution starting to spread.
That’s not the hole in the mythos that this episode fills, though. It’s something else.

Star Trek has always had a number of pieces of magical technology, the two chief ones being warp drive and the transporter. Over time, we met, learned about, and got to know the creator of warp drive, Zephram Cochrane. We’ve never had the pleasure with the creator of the transporter, though.

Until now.

This week’s Enterprise episode features a guest appearance by Dr. Emory Erickson, the heretofore-unnamed father of the transporter.

Like Zephram Cochrane, he is a flawed genius. He arrives on the ship with plans for a transporter so powerful that it could make starships obsolete (something that we know from previous Star Trek series was a technology that at least one alien civilization had). But he’s also carrying with him a secret.

That secret has to do with his son, and it’s no coincidence that this episode is titled Daedalus.

In the end, the episode turns in a poignant story of a father and his loss.

It’s not a planet-shaking story, but it’s touching nonetheless.

And it’s another piece of the puzzle.

If you missed it, it’ll be on this Sunday night on UPN.

CHECK YOUR LOCAL LISTINGS.

Is B5 Kiddable?

A young gentleman writes:

Jimmy,
   

Hi!  I was thinking of trying out the TV series Babylon 5, and I was just wondering if there’s any objectionable content that I might want to be aware of.  I’m 16 right now, and I have a sister who’s eleven who would probably end up watching whatever was being viewed in the house.  Is the show appropriate for children, or should I wait a few years?  Thanks!

Though most episodes of B5 are quite kid friendly, there are some scenes in some episodes that are not kiddable, particularly for someone as young as eleven. If your parents were interested in watching the series and skipping over these bits, it would be possible to watch them, but this would require a good bit of effort on their part and they likely wouldn’t have the time to devote to such a sustained effort. Therefore, I would just wait a few years.

Hope this helps and that you enjoy the series when you do see it!

NOTE: B5 fans, do not spoil what the unkiddable parts are in the comments box.

 

Lovecraft Makes A Slip

Okay, I’m listening to a story that H.P. Lovecraft ghostwrote (an appropriate thing for a horror writer) that is called The Mound.

One of the things I like about Lovecraft is the way he uses language. He had a real way with words and a phenomenal number of words in his active vocabulary.

But in this story, he makes a slip.

At one point, the narrator writes:

That evening the Comptons summed up for me all the legends current among the villagers.

Where might this "village" be? The Swiss alps? The island of Borneo? The sleepy hillsides of New England? They certainly have villages in all of those places, but they don’t where Lovecraft’s story is set:

Western Oklahoma.

Nobody in that part of the country talks about towns, however small, as "villages," nor describes their occupants as "villagers." In the dialect common in those parts, the proper, polite term is "town," and the proper way to speak of the inhabitants is "townsfolk." (Less polite terms are also available if you don’t set much stock by the town and its inhabitants.)

I suppose an exception would be made for "Indian villages" in the area, but then the inhabitants wouldn’t be called "villagers" but simply "Indians" (at least in 1928, when the story is set). But that’s not the kind of "village" he’s talking about.

In fairness to Lovecraft, his narrator is from the East and so is apt to describe things as an easterner would, but if he was really having a conversation with a local family about what legends were common among the townsfolk then they would likely have used the word "townsfolk" (or "townspeople" or something of this nature) and it should have ended up in the narrator’s narrative.

In any event, the detail rang false for me.

It’s very hard to imitate the idiom of another region and not get spotted by natives of the area (myself, in this case). I would never be able to fake Lovecraft’s New England setting and idiom.

So, if I ever write horror stories set in the present day, I guess they’ll have to be set in the South or Southwest.

UPDATE: I finished The Mound, and toward the end of the story it is revealed that the narrator is a Virginian. So: Unless they have "villages" in Virginia (and so far as I know, they don’t), what we have here is a flat-out mistake on Lovecraft’s part, letting his native New England idiom intrude onto a story about the South. He ain’t from around these parts, I reckon.

My Favorite Alarm Clock

Stll_alarm_clock_snoozeI recently bought the DVDs for the first season of My Favorite Martian, a 1960s sitcom that I have never seen but often heard about.

Just watched the opening sequence of the first episode and was laughing out loud in moments.

The first shot of the first scene of the first episode is of an alarm clock, which procedes to ring.

The single guy sleeping in the bed next to it (a very young Bill Bixby) shuts it off.

Then second alarm clock rings. To shut it off, he must get out of bed and walk over to a birdcage, which contains the sounding clock. He opens up the birdcage and shuts off the alarm.

He’s still so sleepy, though, that he is about to lay down in bed again when a third alarm clock sounds. To shut this one off he must leave his bedroom and go into the next room.

He seems invigorated by the trek, rubs his hair with his hands, and marches back into the bedroom to get dressed.

But sleepiness again overcomes him and he hits the bed.

Great visual comedy! And not a word of dialog in it!

Had to laugh because, not presently having a wife to poke me out of bed (unfortunately!), I happen to have three alarms set to wake me up in the morning. My cell phone goes off first. Then, fifteen minutes later, it goes off again. Then, almost immediately, my regular alarm clock sounds.

Guess human nature is now what it was in the 1960s.

Will let you know how the series turns out.

Dracula’s Father

The Year without a Summer caused Mary Shelly and her literary friends to hole up indoors during their Swiss vacation. To pass the time, they took drugs (laudanum) and told stories. Later, they published them. Shelly’s Frankenstein, or The Modern Prometheus.

Frankenstein’s monster wasn’t the only classic horror monster that came into being at that gathering. In fact, a character that, for literary purposes, is Dracula’s father got invented.

The character’s name was Lord Ruthven, and he was modelled off the notorious British aristocrat, Lord Byron. (Remember Byron. Remember Byron.)

An employee of Byron’s, John Polidori, wrote the story titled, The Vampyre and modelled the character after his master, while the two were on a trip in Europe (just like two characters in the story) and were stopped at the Swiss literary gathering by the Year without a Summer. (Strange how it all connects, ain’t it?)

The reason Lord Ruthven can be described as Dracula’s father is that, while there had been vampires before, both in the legends of Europe and other places, they were pictured as brutish, repulsive monsters, not the suave, debonaire romantic types that have dominated vampire fiction since.

So it’s interesting . . . the Year without a Summer ended up getting both Bela Lugosi and Boris Karloff the jobs that made them famous, 120 years later.

READ ABOUT VAMPIRES.

READ ABOUT THE VAMPYRE.

READ THE VAMPYRE.

Dracula's Father

The Year without a Summer caused Mary Shelly and her literary friends to hole up indoors during their Swiss vacation. To pass the time, they took drugs (laudanum) and told stories. Later, they published them. Shelly’s Frankenstein, or The Modern Prometheus.

Frankenstein’s monster wasn’t the only classic horror monster that came into being at that gathering. In fact, a character that, for literary purposes, is Dracula’s father got invented.

The character’s name was Lord Ruthven, and he was modelled off the notorious British aristocrat, Lord Byron. (Remember Byron. Remember Byron.)

An employee of Byron’s, John Polidori, wrote the story titled, The Vampyre and modelled the character after his master, while the two were on a trip in Europe (just like two characters in the story) and were stopped at the Swiss literary gathering by the Year without a Summer. (Strange how it all connects, ain’t it?)

The reason Lord Ruthven can be described as Dracula’s father is that, while there had been vampires before, both in the legends of Europe and other places, they were pictured as brutish, repulsive monsters, not the suave, debonaire romantic types that have dominated vampire fiction since.

So it’s interesting . . . the Year without a Summer ended up getting both Bela Lugosi and Boris Karloff the jobs that made them famous, 120 years later.

READ ABOUT VAMPIRES.

READ ABOUT THE VAMPYRE.

READ THE VAMPYRE.

Footfall

FootfallWatching the news tonight with the continuing coverage of the quakewave disaster brought me fresh impetus to pray.

It also brought to mind something that had occurred to me a few days ago.

The dynamic duo of Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle have an excellent sci-fi novel in which they try to do a more realistic take at what an alien invasion of Earth might involve and how we might be able to realistically defend ourselves–against aliens who at first seem completely invincible.

(The idea of being able to contribute something new and different to this well-worked-over theme was a precondition of Niven being willing to participate in the project.)

The cover has a nice blurb from Tom Clancy plugging it: "Nobody does it better then Niven and Pournelle. I loved it!"

I did, too.

Good book.

Very respectful of religion (Pournelle is Catholic). Interesting tidbit (and minor spoiler): The secret American project to deal with the alien mothership is called Project Archangel and involves developing a weapon known as Michael.

Why Project Archangel? Why Michael?

Because they’re hoping that Michael will drive the alien Satan from our heavens.

But here’s the connection that put me in mind of this novel (again, a deliberately vague spoiler): At one point the aliens deploy a weapon called The Foot that does something HORRIBLY reminiscent of what just happened to Indonesia and the surrounding area, only much, MUCH worse.

After the atrocity of unimaginable proportions, when the aliens start to get scared of what we do to them in retaliation (the fate of their race is on the line), you’ll cheer as a defiant human coldly tells the panicking alien leader:

"THIS is the price of The Foot!"

YEAH!

(Now if we could just find some alien butt to kick for what happened in Indonesia.)

GET THE NOVEL