The Fredösphere

I like DesignObserver, I really do, but sometimes they play to the stereotype.  Here they are, analyzing Spirograph:

The Spirograph demonstrates, if not promotes, the belief that design can be formulaic and that good design has something to do with simplicity and objectivity. However, qualitative aspects such as emotion, irrationality, and instinct are largely missing. The patterns themselves make no direct reference to a user’s nationality, ethnicity, social class, or gender. Choices are officially confined to color and template combinations.

...and inevitably, the Tet Offensive also gets a mention.  Only near the end does the essay get back on track.  I wonder what ominous visions of militarism one could see in Major Matt Mason (one of my favorite childhood toys) if one went looking?  I loved the space crawler, which one could mount atop the moon base and use as a crane (since it had a winch in its tail).  Don't make my mistake and confuse it with the crater crawler, another toy I owned but which is not of the MMMM (Major Matt Mason Mythos).  Don't forget, James Lileks has beautifully deconstructed the MMM Big Little Book.  Beat me to it--dang.

Labels: Design, sci-fi

In an earlier post I commented with pleasant surprise on a Swedish composer's attempt to create an opera on a science fiction theme.  Commenters assured me this was hardly the first composer to attempt such a feat.  Daniel Wolf cited as ancient an example as Haydn, which impressed me to no end.  Those of you familiar with my Haydn animus won't be surprised my mental picture of Haydn as a space opera-tor is that of the salt vampire of Planet M-113.

Anyhoo, I'm pleased to add another work to this growing list:  Jacques Offenbach's adaptation of Jules Verne's Le Voyage dans la Lune.  Wikipedia has the details, including a wonderful photo showing costumes and a set from the original lush (but to the modern eye, goofy) production.  Kudos is due (hey!  I conjugates that verb real good!) to io9 for dredging up this information (especially considering that deep historical perspective is not what you expect from a Gawker-related site) in a terribly interesting roundup of info on Georges Méliès' groundbreaking 1902 SF film A Trip to the Moon, which itself was recycled in a trippy music video by The Smashing Pumpkins called Tonight, Tonight:



And I suppose I'll have to comment on The Man that Fell to Earth if I ever get up the courage to watch it.

Space.  And opera.  What else have I overlooked?

Labels: Composition, Culture, Futurism, movie, Opera, sci-fi, VideoClip

I've been writing reviews of SF books for Starship Sofa.  My latest reviews cover The Jewels of Aptor, the first novel of Samuel R. Delaney (written when he was only 19), Neil Gaiman's instant-classic youth novel Coraline, and most recently, Space Vulture.  This last is an ambitious attempt to recreate the raw energy of the great pulpy space operas of 40-60 years ago, written by the creator of Roger Rabbit and his childhood friend, the archbishop of Newark, NJ.  Yes, we're talking about a confluence of very odd factoids.  If you want to find out if Space Vulture achieved it's authors' high ambitions, head on over to the Starship Sofa Reviews page.

Labels: sci-fi

Ambigrams.  Wow, and double-wow.  Plus, a bearded dragon named Fred.

Today's post is about religion in science fiction.  I wanted to write something that aspired to comprehensiveness, but that vain hope was quickly dashed.  These days there is so much fiction being written and commented on that fits that description.  Just finding all the blogs devoted to R & SF is too big a task.

Ted Chiang, author of the excellent (and award-nominated) The Merchant and the Alchemist's Gate displays the stereotypical SF author's attitude:

All science fiction is fundamentally post-religious literature. For those whose minds are shaped by science and technology, the universe is fundamentally knowable. Faith dissolves, replaced by a sense of wonder at the complexity of creation.

Yet Chiang's alternate realities subvert that belief, out of a playful sense of adventure, if for no other reason:

In "Tower of Babylon," a group of miners climb until they reach the vault of heaven, hoping to find God on the other side of the carapace of granite that enfolds their world. "Hell is the Absence of God" tells the tale of one Neil Fisk, whose wife is killed in a visitation by the angel Nathanael to a downtown shopping district. In Neil's thoroughly contemporary world, God exists beyond a doubt. Angels behave like weather phenomena, the miracle of their appearances tracked, quantified, and reported on the nightly news.

Another point of view is represented by this expert who correlates belief in aliens with Jesus and going to the bathroom while employing logical rigor to a degree I don't recall ever encountering before.

Whole blogs devote themselves fully or mostly to religious SF.  Old Testament Space Opera is the first to come to mind.  An impressive list of websites and more impressive steampunky graphics are maintained at Christian Science Fiction & Fantasy Central.  I also found a list of recommended titles and a list of authors by religious affiliation.  (The latter really needs to do some wheat-chaff sorting; I suspect a lot of these guys are nominals, which is a far more important distinction than how they fall out in the dreaded Congregationalist-Methodist schism.  For example, calling that Olaf Stapledon a Quaker is ridiculous in light of the letter he wrote to his unborn great-grandson urging him to fall off the religion wagon without delay.)  Finally, the unfortunately-named topic of "Christian science fiction" has its own Wikipedia page, wherein this tragedy of the publishing business is documented:

Christian bookstores, like some of their secular counterparts are often unsure how to deal with such stories, and may shelve what few they carry under the rather generic and somewhat unhelpful label "futuristic literature".

Catholics are everywhere in SF and speculative fiction generally--call it the Chesterton Effect.  For example, Insidecatholic.com likes the hard-to-categorize Tim Powers, author of Declare.  This link recommends other authors, and makes this observation:

That's a curious thing when you think about it. Science fiction is a genre whose founding fathers and mothers tended very often (though not exclusively, of course) to be the sort of people who were hard-boiled atheists of the Arthur C. Clarke/Isaac Asimov mold -- people who spoke the word "Science" either with a sort of religious reverence or with the sort of stentorian triumphalism of a Thomas Dolby tune. Some of them, like H. G. Wells, managed to achieve both science worship and stentorian triumphalism in their work, writing books which were combinations of fun narrative and some of the preachiest, creakiest, antiquated prophecies in print.

Outgrowing God is indeed a favorite theme of science fiction and fantasy. Evolution/technology/aliens/time travelers from the future/computers/whatnot are always just about to prove that God does not exist, life after death is a fantasy, the soul is a function of matter, man is but a sophisticated meat machine, Jesus never existed, etc.

And yet the astonishing thing is that science fiction and fantasy are absolutely awash in theological speculation. Lots of it is pagan, in the Chestertonian sense. That is, it is an attempt to reach God through the imagination, hampered by the inability to conceive of something truly outside of the created world. The result is a sort of quasi-supernaturalism that acknowledges planes of existence beyond the human, but refuses to entertain the notion of angels and demons.

I'd like to give more attention to religious themes other than Christian ones in SF, but I lack the knowledge or the time.  Once again, Wikipedia is a (meager) starting point.  I tend to hear about mostly the scandalous examples, like the rise of the Jedi Knights in the UK, or (most deliciously) graven images of Kirk and Spock.

SF Signal's symposium on the question, "Is Science Fiction Antithetical to Religion?"  One participant was John C. Wright (see him at livejournal.com) whom I have blogged previously.  John is an interesting case; he's an adult convert from skepticism to Christianity who nevertheless is pessimistic about inserting religious characters into fiction.  Does the new retro-space opera Space Vulture prove him right, or wrong?  Mostly right, I'd say, but there is plenty of contrary evidence from writers with higher ambitions and, frankly, better skill.  Take C.S. Lewis' Space Trilogy, for example.

Nevertheless, he's right to be skeptical.  Blending religion and SF does go wrong sometimes.  Oh yes, terribly, terribly wrong.

UPDATE:  Calvin College joins the party.

Labels: sci-fi, VarietiesOfReligiousArt

This week at the Starship Sofa podcast you'll find me in my occasional role as celebrity co-host.  Tony Smith and I discuss the five British Science Fiction Association nominees for best short story.  In 40 minutes we discuss slasher novels written by Mormons, the advantages and disadvantages of fax machines for souls, and two-headed bug-eyed aliens, as well as the topic at hand.  You can download the audio file directly from the Starship Sofa homepage, or better yet you can subscribe via iTunes.

Labels: sci-fi

Build time machine, travel back to 1936, assassinate Hitler:  what could be more simple?

Labels: sci-fi

Tuesday evening, I anxiously watched the weather, and rejoiced as the clouds thinned out.  I gazed at the moon through my binoculars, and noticed that the thin lacework of clouds, if anything, made the view more dramatic, with a layering that gave Moon a sense of context and proportion.  Around 9:30pm, I started to wonder what was going on.  By 10:00, a profound sense of betrayal settled in.  Somebody, somewhere, somehow, screwed up.

The next morning, I met the screwer-upper, and he was me.  I reread the email from my friend Doug, the amateur astronomer, and discovered the eclipse was on for Wednesday night.  (Rain or shine.)

Last night's weather was painfully clear and bright; perfect conditions.  I was struck by the sharpness of the Earth's shadow, and how its curved shape gave me the sense of the spatial relationships of two heavenly bodies too large for us normally to comprehend.  The only other time in my life I've had such a sense of vertigo while intuiting the roundness of our world was the time I viewed the tippy-tops of the skyscrappers of Chicago from a vantage point across Lake Michigan in New Buffalo, Michigan.  Each time I felt a momentary fear that, if I wasn't careful, I could fall right off this crazy spinning thing.

You know, don't you, that Moon's orbit is gradually increasing?

Drift away, but steal a backwards glance until the Sun grows cold.

Labels: sci-fi

My previous post on random album cover generators proved to be hugely successful, by my standards.  Do read the comments, which have links to other great examples of serendipitous album art.

I strongly recommend you read what Books Under the Bridge has to say about religion in science fiction.  It's a series of four blog posts, each with a long, stimulating comments section.  Read part one, part two, part three, and part four.

In the comments of part one, you'll see I grab an opportunity to flog one of my favorite religion-in-SF novels, The Mote In God's Eye, which is remarkable for the casual (and to me, believable) way religion is depicted:  always there, in the background, neither impotent nor menacing.  Also of note are the very long comments by SF author John Wright, a former atheist and current Christian (hmmm, what are the implications of that word "current"?  What will he logically turn into next--a Rosicrucian?  An anarcho-socialist post-Jesuit with a soft spot for vegetarian triumphalism?) who, oddly, is a skeptic on the question of including religion in any fiction at all, except in its extreme forms.  (Read his argument; it's more plausible than my summary makes it sound.  More plausible, and somewhat convincing, but not completely.)

Labels: Design, Religion, sci-fi

Its construction costs are lower, its launch capacity is greater, its per-payload costs are lower, and its feasibility is greater (i.e., non-zero as of now) compared to a space elevator...so why have I never heard of a Launch Loop (or Lofstrom Loop) until today?  I guess I know now how I'll be spending my time this weekend:  I'll be building one of these things in my basement.

I will need to be careful:

A running loop would have a stupendous amount of energy. While the magnetic suspension system would be highly redundant, with failures of small sections having essentially no effect at all; if a major failure did occur the energy in the loop [...] would be approaching the same scale of energy release as a small nuclear bomb explosion (350 kilotons of TNT equivalent).

Labels: sci-fi

So, it turns out my idea to write a science fiction story about the Three Wise Men is officially one of the Overused Science Fiction Clichés:

k. A major historical figure (Jesus, Einstein, Lincoln, Elvis) was really a space alien.

Meanwhile....

I was shocked, frankly, to read Jens Laurson's description at Ionarts of an audience's hostile reaction to music by MacMillan and Britten at a concert in Munich.  Let's be perfectly clear--we're not talking here about Munich, North Dakota:

Mad gallops toward the end of the third movement [of James MacMillan's Vigil] sent yet another wave of listeners out of the hall - and during the work's end over faint, silver touches you could hear those patrons just outside, discussing angrily what they had just been made to listen to.

It was a fine day for good new music and a courageous triumph for the Munich Philharmonic (which offered professional, if not great, playing). But it was also a monument to the lack of curiosity of much of its clientele. The Munich audience had proved by virtue of its absence that it will only pretend to be interested in modern music to a certain extent… and that programming a “modern, little known composer” like Britten (that’s sadly his status among many attendees) with a contemporary piece and some obscure renaissance prelude is far too much for them to respond to. As rich as the cultural environment is in Munich, and as much as it prides itself in its diversity, it cannot deny a certain provincial attitude that is often coupled with a plain ignorant and dismissive attitude of all (cultural) things Anglo-Saxon and, indeed, foreign. Give the subscription holders of the Munich Philharmonic their Strauss (either), Mozart, Brahms and they shall be happy. Give them Britten and they won't come - or come and leave mid-concert. A pity.

I'm always interested in these cases of overturned expectations regarding relative cultural sophistication.  I prefer the term "reverse provincialism" (alluded to in my previous post) in cases where a pseudo-sophisticate assumes the worst of supposed rubes, and only exposes his own ignorance in the process.  This is another, different, example of the same trend.  Frankly, I can't imagine such a thing happening in Ann Arbor or Detroit.  Britten?  Unknown???  And what about MacMillan--I thought he was Mr. Accessible Modernism.  I've heard of the locals here in S.E. Michigan walking out on an unusually screechy Kronos Quartet concert, but Britten and MacMillan?  Madness.

Oh, well, what does it matter?  We're all going to die.

Labels: Culture, sci-fi

Kyle Gann writes of Karl-Birger Blomdahl's science fiction opera Aniara, a surprisingly early (1959) attempt to merge these two disparate art sensibilities.  Blomdahl employs a wedge-shaped 12-tone row:

[T]ruth be told, there's something about science fiction, this "woo woo we're in outer space" feeling, that makes the discomforting 12-tone idiom ring more plausibly. In addition, the chromatic aura is cut by and blended with two other idioms. One is a kind of Swedish outer-space bebop that attends the "Yurg" cult around Daisi Doody - by which I mean that it doesn't sound like Blomdahl's trying to write bebop, only that he's created a hybrid music indebted to it. The other idiom is the electronic music used for various sequences, such as when the computer-like being Mima is transmitting images of the Earth destroying itself.

(Daisy Doody is a character in the opera, an entertainer aboard a ship adrift among the stars.)

There seems to be a trend:

In fact, one of the first things I did in Europe was to visit the American expatriate composer Wayne Siegel in Aarhus, Denmark, who teaches electronic music at the Royal Conservatory. (My profile of him just appeared in Chamber Music magazine.) And Siegel played for me excerpts of his own science fiction opera, Livstegn, or "Signs of Life" (1993-94), about a scientist plunged into a personal crisis by his unexpected discovery of intelligent life on one of Jupiter's moons.

Folks, we need to band together and smother these infants in their cradles.  We've got to shut down all news, all discussion; let the world forget these works were ever written.  Why?  Because I want to write my own space opera and I want to preserve the illusion that I got there first.  I also want to use the title Space Opera and pretend nobody else ever thought of it.

Indeed, I've been neglecting this blog lately as I give some attention to science fiction.  My latest project is a choral work which I've decided to combine with a science fiction story which will have the same title and theme.  I've progressed enough on the story that I'm sure at least it won't be a train wreck, so I'll start mentioning it now.  I'll still withhold the details (even from the Wifeösphere!) because I think it best to externalize my plans by implementing them, not talking about them.

I'm having fun with the gang over at Starship Sofa, an SF podcast.  Those craving to hear my voice should download this week's episode, wherein I play celebrity guest and explain why Flowers For Algernon left me wanting less.  (The novel is a favorite of host Tony C. Smith.)  I'm also an occasional contributor to the group blog there, and I've served a stint as a reader of stories for the podcast; I may continue if I decide I'm willing to put in the time required to prepare properly (which is a lot).

Finally, have a peek in here:  forget the giant face; scientists have found a secret doorway on Mars!

Labels: Composition, sci-fi

When ... Worlds ... Collide!  It was a mashup of religion, choral music, and sci-fi (sort of) when William Shatner read from the book of Exodus accompanied by orchestra and a choir of 350 singers.  A live recording of the work, written by David Itkin and performed by the Arkansas Symphony Orchestra, is due for release any time now.  No word if outtakes from rehearsals will ever make it on to the internet; I'm hoping to hear a sound engineer say to Shatner, "can there be a little more excitement during the plague of locusts?"

Labels: Choral, Religion, sci-fi

Starship Sofa is my favorite podcast.  Two blokes from northern England, Tony C. Smith and Ciaran O'Carrol, wing it on the subject of one sci-fi author each week.  Their unscripted approach (and these guys blaze new trails in unscripted--wow, are they unscripted) makes commercial radio, or the podcasts that emulate it, seem clotted and pompous by comparison.

Because I was an early, vocal fan, and for who-knows what other reasons, Tony and Ciaran have adopted me.  They read every email I send them on the podcast.  Although they haven't yet asked me to don a giant chicken suit (probably because this is an audio cast, not video) they do seem to view me as some kind of mascot.

It is the Starship Sofa (hereafter, SSS) podcast that is the outlet for my new venture in sci-fi authorship.  I have recorded myself reading my second story, Sofa God, and it will be included in a future SSS podcast.  I'm working on writing a bit of incidental music to accompany the reading.  This experience confirms what I found earlier:  writing music is laborious and frustrating; writing prose is easy.  Easy.

There's no point publishing Sofa God here on this website, since the story is merely one extended inside joke, written for fans of the SSS podcast.  My first story, however, is of general interest, and I'm trying to decide if I should publish it is sections, within blog posts, or perhaps record it with incidental music or even a mini-sound track, and post it here or distribute it as a free podcast.  In any even, I don't see that I have a chance selling it to any sci-fi magazine, because of its length and not-quite-sci-fi subject matter, but I'm not disappointed with it as a first attempt.  (This is the Emperor Augustus In The 21st Century story I mentioned before.)  It's titled In the Shape of a Man.  Anyone who wants to read and critique it can get it in a pdf file by emailing me.  (Lynn?  Are you interested?)

I'm working now on my first "real" story, the test of whether I'm wasting my time by writing sci-fi.  It's an alien abduction story involving a kid named Israel... well, never mind for now what his last name is.  It's controversial.  The wifeösphere has ordered me to change it.  Negotiations are at a delicate stage at the moment.  I'll get back to you.

Labels: sci-fi

I spent yesterday in the company of Lutheran choral directors, yet survived.  Brian Altevogt hosted a Sacred Choral Symposium at Concordia University here in Ann Arbor.  These events are enjoyable, not the least because of the vespers service we sang together at the end of the day, in the lush sonic environment of the Chapel of the Holy Trinity.  A choir of choral directors is the best kind of choir; I suppose you could say a choir director is the ideal chorister in the way a prison guard is the ideal death row inmate, although if you said it you would be insane.

As a bonus, I present the strange world of vintage pulp science fiction novels ... in French.  Here's a page devoted to author Vargo Statten, who has books translated into many languages, and was "notorious" for cranking out streams of action-packed, but otherwise brainless, prose. There's something endearing about novels with titles like La Flamme Cosmique and La Bombe 'G' and Le Martien Vengeur (and I dig the vivid artwork too).  As in the case of French jazz, one feels the urge to speak patronizingly of French science fiction.  Heck, they deserve pity points just for giving the world Planet of the Apes.

(You can read up on John Russell Fearn, who wrote under pseudonyms like Vargo Statten, Volstead Gridban, and even Vector Magroon, here.)

Labels: PlanetOfTheApes, sci-fi, vocal

Don't miss Trailers From Hell, a link I got from 2Blowhards. It's old trailers from films good and so-bad-their-good. It's got the trailer for Colossus: The Forbin Project, a sci-fi movie I'm fond of because I stumbled across it by accident on TV one Sunday afternoon. I found the evil computer to be hilarious; my experience as a programmer told me no giant hardware/software development project done with minimal testing will ever, ever result in a system that has more capability than the designer intended. No, not more, and almost certainly much less. I'm more forgiving now of these sci-fi classics, being more aware of how bad the truly bad stuff is, so I'd like to see the movie again.

In other artsy-geeksy news, Alex Ross links to nerdcore artist Bad Spellah and his take on that classic of speculative fiction, Wagner's Ring.

I met yesterday with choral conductor Brian Altevogt of Concordia University here in Ann Arbor. He gave me a fresh round of suggestions for improving my latest opus, The Prophet, a setting of a poem by Pushkin (translated with verve and élan by Babette Deutsch). Brian's ideas were all good as usual, and it's a privilege to work with an interpreter so deeply engaged in the creative process from beginning to end. It's also nice to hear my music played with feeling, something I don't get from my midi keyboard. Thanks to Brian's play-throughs, I come away from these meetings with increased optimism. Brian's latest plan is to perform The Prophet with his choir on November 4, at the Chapel of the Holy Trinity on Concordia's campus. Mark your calendars.

Labels: Composition, sci-fi

It's art!  Do yourself a favor and do not watch the video of the robotic cow tongue.  Really.  Don't watch it.

We got the music angle, the sci-fi angle, and the local angle covered, right here:  Tom Smith is an Ann Arbor "filk" singer who performs at sci-fi conventions.  SciFi.com reviews his comic opera, The Last Hero On Earth.  It is, apparently, funny.  Smith has another project in the works:  Lovecraft:  The Musical Comedy.  Hoo-boy.

Labels: Composer, fun, sci-fi

It's a graphic novel about a space-dude held hostage on an alien ship.  The all-blue, all-female crew have big hair, foxy ears, and unusual mating habits.  Am I tempted to link to it?  Maaaaaybe.  The (very) bad news:  author Arioch (aka Jim Francis) has been writing/drawing/computer-graphing the book since 2001, and chapter one is still incomplete.  Target date of completion is as futuristic as the storyline.

When I was a kid, we had comics with Aquaman and Wonder Woman.  Today's kids have superheroes like Nikola Tesla and Guglielmo Marconi.  Postpone the apocalypse!

Labels: sci-fi

Fair's fair.  (Be sure to follow this link; it's brilliant.)

In other news, his name is Wen Suchen, he travels the world in a flying ship of his own design, he is invulnerable to the most advanced weapons of the day, and he nurses a serious attitude of misanthropic independence.  No, there are no moody pipe organ recitals, but otherwise, it's Captain Nemo Does China, it's an alternative history of Chinese Science Fiction, and yes, he had me going there for a few minutes.  China's answer to Burroughs, Lovecraft, and many others also get reviewed.  Nice spoof, Jess.  (Hat tip Gravity Lens.)

Labels: Culture, sci-fi

Story tellers search continually for fresh ideas for their stories.  Always looking for some new deposit to mine.  The creators of Bobobo-bo Bo-bobo found some gold, and started digging:

In the year "3001.5," the world is controlled by the "Chrome Dome Empire" under Csar Baldy Bald the 4th, who has launched the EMBB Edict: Everybody Must Be Bald. To that end, he's sent out his Hair Hunters, soldiers who reduce the populace to skinheads, regardless of gender or age. But when a young pink-haired girl named Beauty is threatened by the Hair Hunters, a tall, improbably muscled man with a humongous blond afro appears and rescues her.

Using his nose hair as a weapon. And harnessing his martial art "Snot For-You."

Another well-worn tool for breaking writer's block is the random word generator.  Here's a passage from Peter and the Wolf given the Crazy Lib treatment:

Early one fortnight, Lawrence opened the gate and went out to the big orange valley. On a branch of a big popsicle sat an unconventional cat, Lawrence's mother. "All is short, all is short!", chirped the cat roughly. Yes, all is short. Just then a squirrel came conceding round. She was glad Lawrence hadn't groped the turkey baster and decided to take a nice swim in the deep skerry in the valley.

Story tellers would do well to heed the submission guidelines for Escape Pod, a podcast of new sci-fi and fantasy stories:

EP is a genre ‘zine. We’re looking for science fiction and fantasy. Please don’t send us anything that doesn’t fit those descriptions. And by the way, we mean SF/F on a level that matters to the plot. Your story about a little boy receiving a balloon before his heart transplant may be touching literature, but it probably isn’t something we’re interested in, even if you edit it so that the balloon’s an alien and the heart came from Satan.

Reminds me of my idea for the theoretical ultimate in soft sci-fi:  if one of Jane Austen's novels contained a space alien as a minor character.

Labels: Creativity, sci-fi

Very cool:  Terry Teachout is writing an opera.  (Aren't we all.)

I'm glad to say I've adopted Google Notebook as a tool for organizing projects, which mainly means a place to store bookmarks to poetry I'd like to set, snippets of lines I've written myself, and titles of works I'll probably never get around to writing (but who knows?).  I've needed a project organizer for a while, and especially lately, as I've become more serious (more is a relative term here, people) about writing science fiction.  Fans of this plot, rejoice:  I'm writing it.  I even have a audience of non-zero size already in place, ready to read it.  Teaser:  imagine Augustus Caesar sitting in Albert Einstein's lap.  (This Albert Einstein.)

Beyond that, I harbor special ambition to combine my two main interests into one project.  No, I don't mean anti-popes and synaesthesia, I mean composing and sci-fi.  I don't mind sharing with you my working title -- Space Opera -- since it has almost certainly been used already.  [Accessing ... accessing ... --yep!  Darn.]  I've got some plot ideas that I think are a teeny bit original, so I'll keep quiet about them.  Sadly, considering how long it will take me to write this thing, it's only chance of attracting interest will be as a piece of retro-futurism.

On a related note, yes Don, you're right:  this is the greatest shampoo commercial ever.

Labels: Composition, Creativity, sci-fi, VideoClip

Another collaborative filtering site, RatingZone, bites the dust.  Weep and wail -- although I must admit I disliked its results, which were too recent-blockbuster-centric for my taste.  Probably it never attracted enough users to unskew its database.  Still, a sad day.

Which sadness is only compounded greatly by James Lileks exasperating news.  Yes, we now learn his reassignment is in the context of a major layoff.  But still.

I other news, I found Michael Kaulkin's shameful confession exhilarating.  I, too, have found myself in rehearsal confronting a flow-interrupting question which I could not answer because I just didn't care about the music to that level of detail.  Kaulkin puts it nicely:

I’m R&D and the orchestra is Sales. Are they adequately selling the piece to the audience? That’s what really matters.

Finally, a teaser:  it looks like I may leave all you loser musicians without a backward glance and take up a new, much more lucrative, career.  As a sci-fi author.  Details to come.

Labels: Composer, sci-fi

Homeless no more:  my friend and very occasional guest-blogger Joshua Shank has launched a new website.  Among other things, he's keeping us informed on his premieres.  So many premieres ... so young, yet so successful ... don'tcha just hate 'em?

Meanwhile, I suggest you hum the song "You're the Queen of my Double-Wide Trailer" softly to yourself as you have a look at this.  Also seen at Gravity Lens:  retro-futuristic postcards circa 1900.  As someone put in in the comments section, all speculation about the future "describes the present, with tailfins."

Labels: Composer, sci-fi

What's the coolest thing about the latest CD by English vocal composer John Tavener?  It's been reviewed at scifi.com.  It seems Sir John wrote "Fragments of a Prayer" for use in the futuristic movie Children of Men.  To be clear, he's not the composer of the full soundtrack, which includes music from diverse sources, but his music "is used sparingly throughout the movie during scenes of hope or sorrow."

"Fragments" delivers the gorgeous tone bath we expect from a Tavener song, and it's presence in the movie signals the composer's willingness to provide a bit of class to the film where it's wanted.   Just as we expect 5 percent of all music sales to be classical, it seems nowdays we expect 5 percent of each movie soundtrack to be classical as well.

My favorite part of the review is the summary at the end.  The reviewer assures us that time spent getting the album's strange music into our ears "will be amply repaid."  Something about this pain-gain observation cracked me up -- maybe it was the implication that the typical reader would find the concept novel.

That's all I have to say, except to note smugly the confluence of vocal music and science fiction is so utterly my topic, and that in the whole internet it is at the Fredösphere alone you find the exhaustive analysis you crave of the liturgical music found in Beneath the Planet of the Apes (to cite the most perfect example).   It's the reason you, my loyal fans, keep coming back for more.  You may now return to your regularly scheduled lives.

Labels: movie, PlanetOfTheApes, sci-fi, Tavener, vocal

Today's topic is Invasion of the Body Snatchers in its original 1956 incarnation, which starred Kevin McCarthy and Dana Wynter.  But first, let's set the mood by heading over to The New Criterion and reading "A science fiction writer of the Fifties," a poem by Brad Leithauser.

I really regret that my youth was misspent on a too-steady diet of Isaac Asimov when it could have been misspent on more varied science fiction fare.  Yet I can testify that, in the old books, the women are indeed "keen / To fix the meals and be the secretaries."

Anyway, part of our weekend was spent staying with old friends over in Grand Rapids.  Through a long process that involved some tense negotiations, finally resolved by means of a stochastic algorithm (we drew names from a hat), we chose to watch the Body Snatchers movie.  Yes, it contains its share of plot holes and logical inconsistencies, and yes, we could argue all day whether its message is anti- or anti-anti- communist (or even anti-immigrant), but the real point is that the old flick still packs a nice horror punch.  (This in spite of the change of ending ordered ironically by pod people from studio management.)  The movie succeeds in part because it does not rely on elaborate futuristic visuals.  Nevertheless, I was stunned by one special effect:  Dana Wynter's wardrobe.

"I'm so glad to see you again, Miles.  In fact, I filled my dress with Reddi-wip just for the occasion."

Kevin McCarthy is quite old now, but still hard at work, and not too vain to have some fun appearing in a retro-future film.  His website has the story.

Labels: movie, sci-fi

I hope you all have run into Exclamation Mark by now.  This is a guy with an eye for beeeyotiful stuff, with a strong bias toward sci-fi art.

Did someone say sci-fi art?  I keep struggling with a way to express what this stuff does to me.  I look at it, and it immediately transports me to an alien world.  Call it Planet 1950s.

I'm starting to really get to know my way around that planet. I'm recognizing certain artists' looks.  Take this image, from the sci-fi art link above...



...and this one, from a page about the Rim Worlds Sequence.



Okay, that was obvious.  Same artist, same medium, same POV, same freakin' day, probably -- "Well, that wraps up that cover for Amazing Science Fiction Stories.  Say, I've got all these leftover teals and rusty reds on my palette; it would be a shame to waste them...."

Labels: sci-fi