Heroes premiered tonight in German television. Overall a good show, but there were one or two things I didn’t like. I mean, young people who suddenly discover special powers that set them apart from the rest of humanity? I heard something like this before, only I guess when the idea was originally conceived in the 1960s it propably made more sense.
At the beginning of the show there is a professor blathering away how evolution will bring forth special powers like telekinesis or teleportation. Hell, no. We live in 2007, and everybody knows (or should know) that there is no plausible or even possible mechanism for psychic powers – it is much more likely that the woman of the future grows a botox gland, or even that men will aquire the missing take-the-trash-out gene (after all this would possibly help their chances with reproduction). I do not as such have a problem with reel science but frankly I had hopes that such a highly acclaimed show would come up with some new ideas. But then I hope that they used a weak idea to get the show started and won’t get back to the mutant thing as the plot develops, especially since the show has some good characters (”Super-Hiro !”, naturally).
In other news, I worked all afternoon to trim my proposal for an essay in a planned SF anthology down to the requested maximum of 750 characters before I realized that I had misread the specs and that they were really asking for 750 words. This is a little embarassing, and usually I would consider it a waste of time, but to bring down a full page to a super-condensed three-liner was in a way a brilliant excercise and so I’m not too sorry. Overall the restored proposal may be too big on words and too weak on theory, so I might have made a fool of myself, but then I loose nothing by trying.
Ha, did I cleverly deceive you with that headline – because, if course, said civil rights activist is propably better known for impersonating the character of Hikaru Sulu, Captain of the USS Excelsior and former Helmsman of the USS Enterprise under Captain what-was-his-name-again. And of course it should read: .. gets Asteroid named after him.
If the name ‘Sulu’ doesn’t ring any bells (which would mean that you are either quite young, have no access to a TV set or, more propably, that you are dead), I’m talking about actor and community activist George Takei (read his bio on his website). The IAU approved the re-naming of former 994 GT9 to 7307 Takei (which is about as official as it can get). Astronomy Professor Tom Burbine said he “suggested Takei’s name in part out of appreciation for his work with the Japanese American Citizens League and with the gay rights group Human Rights Campaign”.
I don’t think I’ll be able to see Takei in the sky due to the light pollution here in Berlin, so I rather look out for him in the SciFi series “Heroes” which is scheduled to start on October 10th in Germany.
I’m almost cured, and will resume work soon. In the meantime I might as well do a bit of advertising for two friends who managed to get some of their stuff published:
Jakob has a short story in an anthology published by the german Wurdack Verlag. And Nadja Sennewald - already an established writer – has a new book out, Alien Gender, an Analysis of depiction of gender in TV Science Ficion Series. If you read german and are interested in SciFi and gender politics this might be for you.
Busy busy busy… apart from the usual business there are some projects that have to be pulled through in quite a hurry. Berlin DJ Zuckermann needs a new site by the end of the month plus a somewhat embarrassed staff member from the Centrum Judaicum (New Synagogue Berlin – Centrum Judaicum Foundation) called to ask if I could do a small page for a new exhibition of theirs by the end of next week, which is a bit of short notice so to speak. So I won’t have much time for private stuff (only that I will still take the weekend off to visit the summer camp of the bike club Kuhle Wampe). But there are some things that shall not go unmentioned:
- Shuttle Endeavour has landed safely. There was a bit of worry about the heat shield that had been damaged in the launch but the damage had been investigated and NASA decided that repairs weren’t necessary. Obviously they were right. Go to the shuttle mission pages at nasa.gov and look at some images – the Shuttle is a magnificent craft and I’m sorry that it will soon be decomissioned.
- I finished Fifty Degrees Below by Kim Stanley Robinson, the Sequel to Forty Signs of Rain, and I still haven’t warmed up (global warming pun is accidental) to the series, partly because I still think it focuses to much on the private life of the characters but mostly because it reads more and more like a news report and less like science fiction. But please don’t let me detain you from reading it – both books are actually quite good, it’s more that at the moment I could rather do with something more escapist.
- If you’re into german science fiction: Jacob informs us that the second edition of the magazine Pandora is soon to hit the stores – he is one of the editors there, which gives him the opportuntiy to hang out with cool people like John Clute. Dang, I shouldn’t have given up on my writing career.
Now I going to burn some midnight oil to get some things off the desk. If you came to look for progress on the content item module for Joomla 1.5 I would urge you to download it and play around (not on production sites). I do not have much time to do testing on my own so I would be grateful for any comments.
Instead of dutifully working on Joomla module programming I spent the evening finishing Kim Stanley Robinsons Forty Signs of Rain, the first book in a trilogy on the consequences of (man-made) global warming.
I’ve seen a lot of people complaining about “the politics” in the book, which I found a bit odd – if you buy a book from a socialist writer on anthropogenic climate change you would expect it to be rife with politics, wouldn’t you, and it didn’t bother me in the least. But I found the book rather verbose (for example I learned a lot more about breastfeeding than I ever cared to know) and yet, while the life of the characters is described in much and often unneccessary detail I had trouble to tell some of the male main characters apart – they are all so remarkably unremarkable and similar.
But perhaps this is due to an artistic concept – I take it that Forty Signs of Rain is building the scenery and that things will get more lively in the sequels. The book introduces a number of characters who in some way are concerned with global warnings and what has been called the “war on science” – Charlie is a staff worker for an american senator, his wife Anna works for the National Science Foundation where she befriends the delegation from a small island nation that suffers from rising sea levels, and we learn about their private and professional lives, dinner partys, baby nursing, work conferences, grant comittees and lobbying work, until climate change ceases to be an academical question or the problem of tiny faraway nations when the coastal cities of Northern America are hit by a sudden flood.
Forty Signs, which could have lost a hundred of its 400 pages without much damage to the story, is still a good read, but in the end not really satisfying. It doesn’t stand very well on its own, and final judgement will depend on the quality of the sequels – Fifty Degrees Below is already waiting on the bedside table while Sixty Days and Counting is not yet available here in Germany. I doubt that KSR will make any proselytes with the series – those who deny anthropogenic global warming will simply dismiss the books as “too political” – but everybody who has accepted the scientific consensus will probably to some extent enjoy the book, which has the main fault that it’s outlook on a troubled future is perhaps to close to reality to be entertaining.
