Woke up with my sinuses stuffed up solid this morning and couldn’t get back to sleep… as soon as I was awake, in fact, I went into a major allergy attack, with uncontrollable sneezing and my eyes watering so bad I couldn’t see for several minutes. Eventually got it under control, and I’ve moved the air purifier back into my room, so we need to head for Wal-mart and get another one to use out in the front of the apartment. Hopefully this thing will keep that kind of attack from happening again.

Paul finally got the job at Circle K today, so he’s simultaneously relieved and slightly annoyed that he’ll be going back to work. He’s got a day of training to do on Friday (and has to find a way to get a ride into Tampa and back out here for it) and after that they’ll put him into the rotation. As he’s the new guy, and stressed he’d work any hours to get the job, we’re both expecting his work schedule to be a thing of pleasure and beauty… to a student of chaos theory, anyway. But he needs the money and honestly, he could probably use the time away from me. I ain’t no beach picnic even in small doses. Hanging out with me 24/7 has to be stressful.

Paul’s friend Pat came around with a van today and we hauled most of my stuff (all the books on the back porch) off to a storage unit. It set me back another hundred bucks, so I’m very nearly broke now. However, my latest Unemployment check should be impacting in my bank account any day now, so that should be okay, and at least my books are somewhere out of the GODDAM ZEPHYRHILLS WEATHER.

Although, on that subject, I should note that I don’t believe it rained today, a first since I’ve moved out here. It was just godawful hot and muggy.

Paul thinks he’s been seeing a slight recurrence of roaches out in the front part of the apartment, especially in the kitchen, but I’m not seeing any back here, and I think the ones he’s seeing are the last gasp of the old horde, coming out of hiding in desperation, especially as I use the electric skillet to cook and the odors bring them out. Hopefully we won’t have a serious recurrence, but if we do, we can just buy more of that paste stuff and nuke ‘em again.

I haven’t heard anything from Jonathan on the Jeff book, which is slightly puzzling, but I hope it just means he’s busy. I’m trying to keep reminding myself that in every era prior to this modern one, it would take weeks for material to get to an editor (months if my editor was in Australia) and more months to get a response from him. This has only been a few days. Still, I hope he doesn’t hate it, or anything.

I’m tired… that allergy attack kept me from getting much more than four hours of sleep… and I’m a tiny bit annoyed with life, since I’m not wild about people who seem to think there’s something wrong with me because I don’t want to derange my senses artificially, as someone or other suggested on yesterday’s blog. I’ll put this very simply… there is nothing wrong with me for wanting to keep myself straight. If you want to jump to the conclusion that I think there’s something lacking in people who do have to take pills, drink a lot, or smoke out frequently simply to deal with real life, well, you can jump to that conclusion, but that’s not what I’m saying. I will say, I’ve seen how nervous and freaked out Paul gets if he can’t toke up every day, and I don’t think there’s anything wrong with me that I’m not in that box, nor am I willing to climb into it. Beyond that, I’m 41 years old and everyone in the world is welcome to shut the hell up about my personal habits. I don’t drink, I don’t do drugs, and if people have a problem with that, then in my opinion, they have a problem. Got it?

Sorry if that offends anyone, but honestly, it offends me when people imply there’s something wrong with me because I don’t get drunk or stoned. I heard this shit all through high school, all through college, and the first time I visited my family in Florida, one of my brothers walked up to me, offered me a beer, and when I looked at him exasperatedly and said “You KNOW I don’t drink”, he kind of shrugged, looked at me like I was a horrible disappointment to the entire human race, and said “Yeah, well, we were hoping you’d gotten over that”.

So let me be very blunt: in my opinion, keeping my head straight is not a problem that I need to get over. I try very hard not to be judgmental about what my friends and family do with their own brain cells, but holy shit. If somebody here has a problem, I don’t think it’s the guy who avoids addictive toxins, you dig? I find reality to be a drag a lot of times, too, but I don’t need to get wasted to deal with it, and I have no plans to change that in this lifetime.

All right. Sorry, but that’s been troubling me and I wanted to get it out there.

Ran the RPG briefly last night, since everyone more or less finished setting up their characters… however, with Paul starting a new and probably extremely randomized work schedule, I’m not hopeful about doing it regularly. But it was kind of fun, even for just a few hours.

God, I miss my pool.

BY YOUR COMMAND

Scott “Why Is There A Watermelon There?” Shepherd writes me an email in which he haughtily demands to know what my favorite SF films are, since I so thoroughly gave the back of my hand (well laced with spittle) to Minority Report. He kindly lists a lot of his own favorite SF films, which since Scott is generally quite an intelligent sapient indeed, also includes quite a few of mine. And we’ll get to that. But first, let me talk a little more about why I so thoroughly loathe the hideously deformed crawling slimelike celluloid blot that is the film Minority Report:

Most SF movies are stupid. Most SF on the tube is stupid, too. Gene Roddenberry used to instruct all the writers on Star Trek that there was no reason why a basic plot or story idea for that particular signature SF TV show to be substantially different from a script for a police show, a detective show, a medical show, or a Western show. He used to insist that any script that got bought and developed for Star Trek should have a central storyline that could have been bought and developed just as easily for, say, Gunsmoke. And this is why I loathe Gene Roddenberry and am happy he’s dead, and I wish everyone who considers themselves an ‘heir’ to Gene Roddenberry would stop working in ‘science fiction’ and go rivet sheet metal in Detroit.

You see, Gene Roddenberry isn’t simply wrong when he says that an SF story should in no way substantially differ from a story for any other genre. He’s viciously, vilely, repulsively and reprehensibly wrong. He is catastrophically and disastrously mistaken and misguided. With those completely idiotic and asinine beliefs and instructions, Gene Roddenberry managed to influence all of pop culture into thinking that ‘science fiction’ was just, you know, a Western with space ships and ray guns, and in so doing, he made ‘science fiction’ accessible to slope browed mouthbreathing drool producing pinheads with absolutely no imaginations at all, and turned the entire genre (at least, on TV and in the movies) into something mindless, unoriginal, and utterly formulaic.

Science fiction is about the exploration of the impact various different and as yet fictional technologies might have on human culture. It is a type of writing that requires, by definition, the rigorous use of the imaginative faculty, by both the writer and the reader. It is demanding and challenging. It is not for the stupid, or the trite, or those who simply want to read the same old story over and over again with slightly different characters in it.

Science fiction is very important. We are currently living in a world and a culture that has been so mutated and deformed by our wildly accelerating curve of technological progress that we simply cannot in any way remotely comprehend what is happening to our basic humanity at this moment, or at any moment in the last fifty years… and this is only going to get worse. The assembly line, the automobile, electronic telecommunications, the personal computer, fairly casual space travel (at least, to near-Earth orbit and back), genetic engineering, and various other things are shaping and reshaping our world all around us every minute of every day, and we do not even as yet really understand the effect that television has had on the last four generations of humanity, much less what the goddam Internet is doing to us and our society. Science fiction, at the very least, tries to stop and think about this stuff… it tries to say, ‘okay, if tomorrow someone invents antigravity or teleportation, or if a lot of kids were to be born with reliable telepathic abilities and in twenty years they all started working for the police force, what would the world be like then?’

This kind of imaginative extrapolation does more than provide the thoughtful reader with momentary escape and entertainment. It allows an insightful consumer to perhaps take some of those insights and apply them to the world we actually inhabit… a world in which, if technology hasn’t exactly run completely amok as in the societies depicted in movies like The Terminator and Robocop, it’s certainly running well beyond our ability to control or comprehend.

And, well, people like Roddenberry do our culture, and we as individuals, an enormous disservice when they take ‘science fiction’ and dumb it down. Roddenberry’s heirs are all over the place. They are not simply his homely wife and some guy named Berman who has made absolutely certain all the modern Star Trek franchises are just as dumb and stupid and uninspired and unoriginal and completely non-provocative as the original one was (or more so). George Lucas is a spiritual heir to Gene Roddenberry; there is nothing remotely thought provoking in any Star Wars movie (and that’s generally why they are all so successful). And Steven Spielberg, when he churns out crap like Minority Report, is also an heir to Gene Roddenberry, because while there are certain aspects of Minority Report that do indeed provoke thought, once they have done so, and the viewer has thought about these things at all, the only conclusion one can really come to is that all the futuristic technology in Minority Report is mind bogglingly stupid.

This is my primary problem with Minority Report. All the really cool futuristic technology that has shaped and molded that odd, commercially driven, crime free, strangely schizoid mid 21st century dystopian nightmare… make no goddam sense. None of it would work the way it is depicted; none of it could possibly function as the film attempts to show us it would.

Let’s look at the ubiquitous retinal scanning technology which allows the police to know exactly where everyone is at any given time, and which allows merchandising corporations to annoy individuals everywhere they go with holographic ads specifically targeted to your particular optic nerve by lasers, tailored to your particular tastes and credit history.

People simply wouldn’t tolerate this. If the technology became that universal, most people would wear wraparound mirror-shades, or, at the very least, hats with the brims pulled down over their eyes, whenever they left the house. People, in general, will not walk through a public area with their chins up and their steely blue gazes sweeping the horizons if they know that every time they take a step, four hundred different laser beams are sweeping across their retinas and identifying them to various authority figures and corporate predators. People, in general, do not like being tracked by the cops, and they do not like commercials, and if the way to turn off the goddam holo-ads is to wear a pair of sunglasses when you go to the mall, then I suggest you buy Ray-Ban stock, because in this particular future it’s going through the roof.

And all of this is ridiculous enough when it’s simply presented as ‘well, the cops can do this, and marketers can do this, and nobody seems to care’. But in this movie, Tom Cruise is such a goddam idiot that rather than put on a pair of sunglasses or a baseball cap and keep his head down when he walks through intersections, he goes out, finds somebody who it turns out hates him, and has this horrible illegal operation done to trade his eyes for somebody else’s. This is simply insane. Beyond that, it’s stupid. No one would do this. I don’t care if it’s necessary so his wife can walk around with one of his eyeballs in her hand at the end of the film and override security codes. It’s just plain goddam idiotic and I want no part of it.

But every last thing about this movie is idiotic. The highways are automated and no one has any control over their vehicles any more. Well, people would really hate that, but, hey, apparently, they have an alternative, because at some point in the next thirty years, someone has figured out how to make personal jet packs work. Isn’t that cool? But wait… only the police use personal jet packs, everyone else is still driving around in really expensive cars on the overcrowded, automated superhighways. I suppose we can simply say that only the police are legally allowed to use jetpacks, but again, this is stupid, especially in such an obviously capitalistic society. People would buy personal jet packs if they were on the market by the millions; therefore, it’s wildly unlikely that any democratic government structure would ever pass laws restricting the sale of such items to the public. Especially in such an obviously corporate controlled environment.

All of this, however, pales before the truly brain-stunning idiocy of this movie’s central technological conceit… The Pre Crime Division.

Fascinating though the notion is of using psychics to predict crimes before they happen, and then sending cops to prevent those crimes from occurring (and we’ll leave aside the truly mind-hurting quantum/entropic implications of this, although I honestly don’t think it’s remotely possible, since, most likely, there is no past or future, only a constantly occurring Present), the way the notion is presented in this film simply, once again, makes absolutely no sense at all and is utterly idiotic.

As the Cruise character notes early on, Pre Crime has made pre-meditated murder impossible to get away with, so the only murders that still occur are crimes of passion… events in which someone simply loses control and kills someone else. This sort of thing can’t really be prevented by effective law enforcement because it’s not rational. A cold blooded killer can simply decide not to commit any more murders in an area where psychics are being employed, but someone who isn’t planning to kill anyone can’t exactly make a conscious decision not to fly into a homicidal frenzy when he comes home early from the office and catches his wife in bed with some other guy.

Nonetheless, you don’t take someone who, in some alternate future you have now prevented from occurring, killed someone else in a fit of jealous rage, and lock them up. You give them anger management therapy, help them get a divorce from their cheating bitch slut wife, and tell them to be very very appreciative that they live in a great nation like this where there are psychic peeping toms not only monitoring everything they actually do, but everything they might do in some potential future as well, and then send them on their way. The poor schmuck that Tom Cruise and his Future Gestapo arrest for the future murder of his wife and her lover isn’t a threat to society; he’s simply a guy who had a really bad day, and who was prevented by Pre Crime from making it even worse. He’s not a career killer, he just badly needs to get laid and maybe, as my sister in law so drolly puts it, get tatered, as well.

What you don’t do with people like this is lock them up in suspended animation cylinders for all eternity, and frankly, I simply cannot for the life of me see what purpose that possibly serves that would not be served more cheaply by a more normal penitentiary, or, better yet, by giving the vast majority of these people some psychological therapy and then sending them back to their jobs.

Passing quickly over how glaringly moronic any legal system that allows ‘precognitive images’ to be used as evidence in a trial is (“let me get this straight,” the weary, incredulous judge says, “you’re submitting computer generated images that I’m supposed to believe fairly represent scenes and events that some mutant saw in his or her head, said scenes and events which did not and now never will actually happen, because you people prevented them from happening. I’m sorry… where’s the evidence of what, now?”), let’s just move to the complete, psychotic witlessness of the pre-cogs themselves…

Three people.

Three weird, irreplaceable, mutant people with bizarre powers that science does not understand and cannot duplicate. Three bald psychic freakazoids floating in a big bathtub surrounded by machines that in and of themselves make no sense at all… I mean, how the hell does a machine receive psychic precognitive scenes from someone’s mind and turn them into three dimensional movie images that anyone else can recognize? How do you design a machine like that? How do you build it? How does it work? Try and bullshit up even the vaguest possible hypothesis for how that thing could possibly function… go ahead, I dare you. It’s insane.

But never mind that the technology is insane, let’s get back to the fact that here in this really completely brain dead future, the government has spent billions or trillions of dollars developing an experimental crimefighting program employing probably thousands of agents and operatives that is all entirely dependent on, you know, three bald albino mutants floating in a bathtub.

They can’t make more of these guys. There is no known process for training future precogs, or injecting drugs into fetuses to turn them into precogs, or whatever. These three are it. The government found them in a State orphanage and determined (somehow, and don’t get me started on how wildly unlikely that was) that they could predict future murders, and set them up in this billion dollar computer complex, and created ‘the perfect society’ around them… and when they die (as, you know, they are going to, eventually) the whole thing stops working.

Folks, even Dubya’s Adminstration isn’t that stupid. When the technology is irreplaceable and you know it’s going to burn out in forty or fifty years, at the most, you do not use it as the basis for an entire cultural way of life. That’s just idiotic.

Leaving that aside, I have one further question… the Pre Crime Division is, we’re told, just an ongoing experiment that right now only works in the Washington, D.C. area. But now that it’s proven itself effective, soon it will be authorized to go online throughout America.

How are they going to do that?

Look… as far as I know, psychics don’t have dimmer switches. You can’t turn them up or down. You can’t punch in a command and say, ‘okay, you guys have only been predicting murders in a one hundred square mile area until this point, but now, we want you to really kick out the jams and start predicting murders across the continental United States, plus Alaska, Puerto Rico, and Hawaii. Hop to it, you bald headed slackers.’ I mean, what, they have little dials sticking out of their skulls and you just walk over and turn the knob from, say, 3, all the way up to 10? Or, in the case of the really powerful girl psychic, up to 11, like a Spinal Tap electric guitar? I mean, seriously, folks, what the hell is this bullshit?

This whole system is based on people with weird, unpredictable powers, and weird, unpredictable powers by definition cannot be controlled… at least, not the way you control an air conditioner or a radar installation. You can’t simply say to these guys ‘okay, vacation is over, now power it up, you little fucks’. Even if this project has some way of increasing the range of the psychics, I mean, my God… what if they all have massive strokes the instant you inject them with the mind enhancing chemicals, or turn up the psychic antennae arrays on the roof, or whatever the hell it is you’re planning to do to increase their precognitive range several thousand times? What if their hearts just stop? What if they simply become incapable of sorting out all the madly conflicting images in their heads and go autistic on you? Or lapse into comas? Or just lose their minds?

Let me reiterate: these guys are unique. If you break them, you have no more Pre Crime Division. Apparently they fairly often freak out just monitoring the Washington, D.C. area; now you want to run the entire United States through their cerebrums? Even leaving aside the fact that I cannot imagine how you can possibly increase their power level and range that way, isn’t the idea of doing it just kind of insanely risky?

I don’t know. That last is the sort of short sighted thinking that Administrations like Reagan’s and Dubya’s are perfectly capable of… that kind of willfully obstinate blindness that says ‘well, it’s worked fine so far, so let’s DO IT A LOT MORE, and nothing could possibly go wrong, because we don’t want it to’. So I can see someone, somewhere, simply saying ‘okay, the Pre Crime thing has really cut down on violent crime in Washington, let’s go national with it’. But the actual techs who work with the psychics should immediately turn around and say ‘uh… how? These guys have a certain range. What are you going to do, operate on their brains or something?’

And, assuming all this somehow works, where in the name of God are you going to get enough Pre Crime cops to prevent every murder about to be committed in a population of 800 million people?

Okay. Now let’s talk about, oh, say, deranged eye replacement surgeons. This entire sequence is simply obnoxiously idiotic. We find out that this guy Tom Cruise has gone to so he can get his eyes surgically replaced actually has a huge grudge against him. The surgeon gleefully tells Tom Cruise this, as Cruise is strapped into his operating chair and being sedated. Apparently, this was just to make Cruise (and the audience) worry, because despite this enormous grudge, and despite the fact that the surgeon is clearly seriously off his meds, he in fact performs the surgery perfectly and gives Cruise a new pair of eyes. Why? If he’s nuts (and he clearly is) and he has this huge grudge against Cruise (and he clearly does) then why would he just perform the surgery the way Cruise wants him to? And if he’s going to perform the surgery any way, why bring it up in the first place? He has someone he truly loathes in a completely helpless position, and he’s crazier than a crackhead snorting amyl nitrate, so WHY doesn’t he do anything? Why, in fact, does he go to the enormous trouble of actually successfully performing an eye transplant, when he could simply throw out Tom Cruise’s old eyes, shove a couple of golf balls into Tom Cruise’s empty bloody sockets, let Cruise wake up, and then caper around his shithole of an apartment cackling hysterically at Cruise’s horrible plight?

Oh, but I know. He does take revenge on Cruise. He puts the food he’s promised to leave for Cruise in a refrigerator, next to some really gross looking nasty old moldy rotten crap, and naturally, since Cruise is blind when he wakes up, Cruise grabs the nasty old moldy rotten crap and tries to eat it, which is, you know, hilariously funny when Cruise ends up spitting it out all over the floor.

Assuming, of course, that you’re four years old. Or just a big fan of really really witless juvenile non-comedy.

I can’t speak for anyone else, but when I’m halfway through a Spielberg magnum opus that has been touted by various (apparently retarded) film reviewers as being ‘the greatest SF/noir film ever made!’ and I suddenly find myself watching something from a Paulie Shore movie (from a really stupid Paulie Shore movie, at that) I have to wonder what the hell is going on. I mean, yes, A.I. had some really slow sequences in it, but there was nothing in there this truly ridiculously senseless. At no point do I recall any previous Spielberg movie descending to this kind of grotesquely vulgar slapstick non-humor. I mean, it’s like, suddenly I’m watching a Cheech & Chong film, except without Cheech & Chong in it. I half expected Cruise to suddenly throw his head back and yell “Gargoyle! More food!”

There’s actually quite a lot more that’s really really stupid about Minority Report but I’m tired of typing this crap, so let’s move on to My Favorite SF Films.

For the most part, I’m wary of SF films, and SF on TV, for the reasons I stated well above. Science fiction as a literary genre is always challenging and thought provoking (whereas its bastard child, fantasy, is pretty much simply pure escapism, even when done well). However, books have a smaller audience than movies and TV, and SF books (real SF, not STAR WARS shit) have the smallest audience of any literary sub-genre (except for maybe real post-modern artsie ‘literature’, which very few people buy, for the good and simple reason that it’s boring and it sucks). And publishers understand that; they understand that a really good SF novel by Lois McMaster Bujold or David Brin may sell really, really well, but it will be by SF standards, and those novels are never going to be on the New York Times best seller list. (If you want to get an SF novel on the NY Times best seller list, it had better be a Star Wars or Star Trek novel.) So when an SF novels sells 60,000 or 70,000 copies, it’s considered a success.

On then other hand, a movie that only 60,000 people pay to see is a dismal failure, and a TV show that only 60,000 people watch is a catastrophic commercial disaster. If only 60,000 people had ever watched the BUFFY THE VAMPIRE SLAYER movie, it would never have spawned a TV series, and if only 60,000 people had ever watched the TV show, it would have been cancelled after four episodes. Buffy has never been considered a huge commercial hit, but both the movie and the TV series had (and have) several MILLION devoted fans.

Millions. Thousands. That’s the difference between TV/movie SF and literary SF. One is meant to appeal to a few thousand people, one is meant to appeal to millions. And that means that, as a general rule, if you want to go from 70,000 fans to 70,000,000 fans (like the Terminator or Star Wars franchises have now), you have to dumb it down.

So, in general, ‘science fiction’ movies and ‘science fiction’ TV shows are no such thing. They are fantasy, or space opera, or whatever the hell you want to call them (generally they are action specials with high tech trappings in which the high tech trappings serve as prettier versions of horses and six guns; futuristic westerns with big F.X. budgets, in other words) but they are not really ‘science fiction’, and I generally sidle up to every new SF film or TV show project quite cautiously, with tongs in hand, ready to prod and poke it to see exactly what kind of vile, nauseatingly moronic and dumb ass thing it actually is.

Joss Whedon’s quickly cancelled and catastrophically doltish Firefly is an excellent example of truly dumbed down non-science fiction on TV. Apparently, in that particular future, terraforming technology has been applied to every planet in an alien solar system, and a lot of asteroids, too, transforming them into ‘new Earths’ that all have different cultures and societies for the heroes to wander around and interact with. What no one seems to care about is the fact that you can’t terraform asteroids, because they’re too small to hold onto an atmosphere, or to have any kind of gravity field. You also can’t terraform a planet substantially larger or smaller than Earth, because, again, the gravity field won’t be right for humans. And you can’t terraform a planet that is outside the ‘liquid water’ zone around the sun, by which I mean, the orbital area in which just enough energy from the local sun reaches the planet to allow water to generally remain in a liquid state. If a planet is too far away, water is a constant solid (ice) and that planet is uninhabitable for humanity regardless of what you do to it. If it’s too close to the sun, then water is a gas in its normal state, and never condenses, and, again, that planet is uninhabitable to humanity. As Joe Haldeman noted in his excellent novel Mindbridge, only in a narrow orbital band around the sun where just enough energy arrives to allow water to fluctuate around its own freezing point from one state to another can human life flourish.

Therefore, the notion that many planets throughout an alien solar system can be terraformed into ‘new Earths’ is completely pointy headed. Unless this alien solar system has a dozen or so Earth sized planets sharing the same orbital path around their sun (and that’s wildly unlikely), it simply isn’t happening… and if that DID happen, you could commute from one planet to the other in, effectively, short range Space Shuttle-like craft; you wouldn’t need big lumbering spaceships.

All of which is to say, when I list my favorite SF movies, as Scott has asked me to, well, it tends to be a short list.

But let’s look at Scott’s list first, with his comments in italics and mine following in bold: