(1) FEELING FELINE. Beware “Timothy’s Spoiler Filled Review of Captain Marvel” at Camestros Felapton.
[From the desk of the CEO of Cattimothy Media dot Org] This is Marvel’s second cat led superhero movie. Black Panther was a bit disappointing as they cast a human in the key role of the Black Panther. Disappointing but understandable given that big cats have been boycotting Hollywood ever since the tiger in Life of Pi didn’t get their fair share of the royalties.
Goose is a superhero cat who is a regular cat and also an alien cat….
(2) SURVIVORS. Aniara, based on a 1956 poem by Swedish Nobel Prize-winning author Harry Martinson, opensin theaters and on demand May 17.
A spaceship carrying settlers to a new home in Mars after Earth is rendered uninhabitable, only to be knocked off course.
(3) ATWOOD’S NEW BOOK. “Atwood to launch The Handmaid’s Tale sequel with live broadcast” – they’re making it into a big media event reports The Guardian.
Margaret Atwood is to mark the publication of her sequel to The Handmaid’s Tale with a midnight launch in London on 9 September followed by a live interview at the National Theatre broadcast around the world.
There will also be a six-date tour of the UK and Ireland.
The rock-star arrangements reflect just how anticipated publication of her book, The Testaments, is. It will be set 15 years after The Handmaid’s Tale, and returns readers to life in Gilead, a theocratic dictatorship with its roots in 17th century Puritanism that has replaced the United States’ liberal democracy. It is a place where women have almost no rights and are used as enslaved breeding vessels.
(4) NORSTRILIA. Galactic Journey’s Gideon Marcus, while at a comic fest in Southern California, paused to read the current (1964!) issue of Galaxy and review Cordwainer Smith’s latest: “[March 9, 1964] Deviant from the Norm (April 1964 Galaxy)”.
25 years ago, a group of fen met in New York for the first World’s Science Fiction Convention. Now, conclaves are springing up all over the nation (and internationally, too). Just this weekend, I attended a small event ambitiously titled San Diego Comic Fest. It was a kind of “Comics-in,” where fans of the funny pages could discuss their peculiar interests: Is Superman better than Batman? Are the X-Men and the Doom Patrol related? Is Steve Ditko one of the best comics artists ever?
…For years, Cordwainer Smith has teased us with views of his future tales of the Instrumentality, the rigid, computer-facilitated government of Old Earth. We’ve learned that there are the rich humans, whose every whim is catered to. Beneath them, literally, are the Underpeople — animals shaped into human guise (a la Dr. Moreau) who live in subterranean cities. A giant tower, miles high, launches spaceships to the heavens, spreading the Instrumentality to the hundreds of settled stars of the galaxy. All but one, the setting of Smith’s newest book.
(5) SF IN CHINA. Will Dunn analyzes “How Chinese novelists are reimagining science fiction” at New Statesman America.
One afternoon in June 1999, more than three million Chinese schoolchildren took their seats for the Gaokao, the country’s national college entrance exam. Essay subjects in previous years had been patriotic – “the most touching scene from the Great Leap Forward” (1958) – or prosaic –“trying new things” (1994) – but the final essay question of the millennium was a vision of the future: “what if memories could be transplanted?”
Chen Quifan, who is published in the West as Stanley Chen, says this was the moment that modern Chinese science fiction was born. “Earlier that year,” he explains to me in the offices of his London publisher, “there was a feature on the same topic in the biggest science fiction magazine in China, Science Fiction World. It was a coincidence, but a lot of parents then thought, OK – reading science fiction can help my children go to a good college.”
The magazine’s circulation exploded, as hundreds of thousands of new readers began to explore a genre that had previously been classified as children’s literature. Among those readers were Chen and other aspiring writers who would go on to submit stories to the magazine, and eventually to publish novels. This new generation of sci-fi authors has become hugely popular in China and, increasingly, around the world.
(6) MOON MEMORIES. Leonard Maltin has a personal review of this one: “Apollo 11: Reliving A Once-in-a-Lifetime Experience”.
I was a teenager when Neil Armstrong set foot on the moon in the summer of 1969 and, like millions of people around the world, I will never forget that moment. I can only guess how this film will play to viewers who didn’t experience the glory years of NASA and America’s space program, but I can tell you that I marveled at the sights and sounds of Apollo 11 and choked up as it reached its conclusion. (Moreover, I didn’t need a title card to identify the first voice we hear, which recurs throughout the movie. Newscaster Walter Cronkite has become synonymous with mid-20th century events.)
Watching this saga on a giant IMAX screen plays a key role in its impact. NASA documented every facet of its operations, but only a fraction of their vast archive has ever been tapped. David Sington was one of the first filmmakers to dig deep and find previously unused material for his excellent feature In the Shadow of the Moon (2007). Apollo 11’s Todd Douglas Miller made an even more dramatic discovery: large-format 65mm footage that was never processed, unseen for fifty years. This material was destined to be shown in IMAX.
(7) PEN AMERICA. “The 2019 PEN America Literary Awards Winners” were announced February 26. The list is at the link.
(8) TODAY’S BIRTHDAYS.
[Compiled by Cat Eldridge.]
- Born March 9, 1940 — Raul Julia. If we count Sesame Street as genre, his appearance as Rafael here was his first genre role. Yeah I’m stretching it. Ok how about as Aram Fingal In Overdrawn at the Memory Bank, a RSL production off the John Varley short story? That better? He later starred in Frankenstein Unbound as Victor Frankenstein as well. His last role released while he was still living was in Addams Family Values as Gomez Addams reprising the role he’d had in The Addams Family. (Died 1994.)
- Born March 9, 1955 — Pat Murphy, 64. I think her most brilliant work is The City, Not Long After. If you’ve not read this novel, do so now. The Max Merriwell series is excellent and Murphy”s ‘explanation’ of the authorial attributions is fascinating.
- Born March 9, 1958 — Linda Fiorentino, 61. She played Laurel in Men in Black but I forget what her one-letter designation was. Scant other genre work though she did appear on Alfred Hitchcock Presents early in her career and I see she was in What Planet Are You From?, a SF film a decade before she stopped acting altogether.
- Born March 9, 1964 — Juliette Binoche, 55. Several green roles including in the the recent remake of Godzilla as Sandra Brody, in Ghost in the Shell as Dr. Ouelet, and in High Life as Dr. Dibs.
- Born March 9, 1965 — Brom, 54. Illustrator and novelist who I think is best in Krampus: The Yule Lord and Lost Gods. Interestingly he did a lot of covers early on in his career including Michael Moorcock’s Elric: Tales of the White Wolf anthology and Jack Vance’s The Compleat Dying Earth on SFBC.
- Born March 9, 1978 — Hannu Rajaniemi, 41. Author of the Jean le Flambeur series which consists of The Quantum Thief, The Fractal Prince and The Causal Angel. Damn if I can summarize them. They remind a bit of Alastair Reynolds and his Prefect novels, somewhat of Ian Mcdonald’s Mars novels as well. Layers of weirdness upon weirdness.
(9) OPPOSITE SWEDEN. “Your money’s no good here” used to be a way of saying something was on the house, not a literal statement — “Protecting The ‘Unbanked’ By Banning Cashless Businesses In Philadelphia”.
Back in December, the Philadelphia City Council passed “Fair Workweek” legislation, joining a growing national movement aimed at giving retail and fast-food workers more predictable schedules and, by extension, more predictable lives. Low-income residents and unions lobbied lawmakers and put the issue on their radar. Similar laws are on the books in New York, San Francisco and Seattle.
That’s typically how it works. Advocates shine a light on a problem. A bill gets introduced.
That’s not the way it worked with another new law in Philadelphia. That law can be traced back to one man: City Councilman Bill Greenlee.
Last fall, Greenlee introduced a bill outlawing cashless businesses — brick-and-mortar shops and restaurants where customers can only pay with credit and debit cards.
“I heard that there started to be some establishments in Center City. Something just didn’t sit right with me on that,” said Greenlee.
Mayor Jim Kenney signed it into law last week, making Philadelphia the first big city in the country to ban cash-free stores. It takes effect July 1.
(10) DOTTED LINE. NPR finds the lighter side of the issue — “When Not Reading The Fine Print Can Cost Your Soul”.
Nobody reads the fine print. But maybe they should.
Georgia high school teacher Donelan Andrews won a $10,000 reward after she closely read the terms and conditions that came with a travel insurance policy she purchased for a trip to England. Squaremouth, a Florida insurance company, had inserted language promising a reward to the first person who emailed the company.
“We understand most customers don’t actually read contracts or documentation when buying something, but we know the importance of doing so,” the company said. “We created the top-secret Pays to Read campaign in an effort to highlight the importance of reading policy documentation from start to finish.”
Not every company is so generous. To demonstrate the importance of reading the fine print, many companies don’t give; they take. The mischievous clauses tend to pop up from time to time, usually in cheeky England.
In 2017, 22,000 people who signed up for free public Wi-Fi inadvertently agreed to 1,000 hours of community service — including cleaning toilets and “relieving sewer blockages,” the Guardian reported. The company, Manchester-based Purple, said it inserted the clause in its agreement “to illustrate the lack of consumer awareness of what they are signing up to when they access free wifi.”
(11) HUGOS THERE. Mark Yon reviews “An Unofficial History of the Hugos by Jo Walton” at SFFWorld.
…As this is an ‘informal’ history, there are clear favourite authors and non-favourites which are freely admitted by the contributors. Most noticeable is the consistent love of Theodore Sturgeon and Gene Wolfe’s work throughout. However Jo is not a fan of everything and everyone. She admits that she is not a fan of anything cyberpunk, Dan Simmons’s later Hyperion books and Philip K Dick’s writing to the point where she has avoided his work, including the 1963 Award Winner The Man in the High Castle. Although she is often an advocate of Heinlein’s work (such as Double Star), she is less enamoured with the more famous Stranger in A Strange Land (rather like myself, actually.)
(12) NOT IMPOSSIBLE. The Clarke Center’s podcast Into the Impossible, in Episode 21: Beyond 10,000 Hours explores physics, education, and what it takes to train imaginative scientists with Carl Wieman, Nobel Prize winning physicist with joint appointments as Professor of Physics and Professor in the Graduate School of Education at Stanford University. Dr. Wieman is interviewed by Brian Keating, UC San Diego Professor of Physics, Director of the Simons Observatory, and Associate Director of the Clarke Center.
(13) HEAT VISION. Scientists have used nanoparticles inside the eyeballs of mice to make otherwise invisible near-infrared light visible to the mice (Gizmodo: “Incredible Experiment Gives Infrared Vision to Mice—and Humans Could Be Next”). What’s next, X-ray vision?
By injecting nanoparticles into the eyes of mice, scientists gave them the ability to see near-infrared light—a wavelength not normally visible to rodents (or people). It’s an extraordinary achievement, one made even more extraordinary with the realization that a similar technique could be used in humans.
Of all the remarkable things done to mice over the years, this latest achievement, described today in the science journal Cell, is among the most sci-fi.
(14) OVERMATCHED. From Captain Marvel, “Talos Vs Nick Fury Fight Scene Clip.”
(15) VIDEO OF THE DAY. “One Minute Art History” is a video by Cao Shu on Vimeo which condenses a great deal of art history into a 90-second video.
[Thanks to Chip Hitchcock, Hampus Eckerman, Martin Morse Wooster, JJ, Cat Eldridge, John King Tarpinian, Mike Kennedy, Carl Slaughter, Michael Toman, and Andrew Porter for some of these stories. Title credit goes to File 770 contributing editor of the day Matthew Johnson.]
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[10] Oh, we dumb consumers! Imagine not reading every line of a densely packed forest of micro-sized type in endless paragraphs of jargon! It’s as foolishly careless as not looking up every single ingredient in food, or looking up every word of a book in the dictionary. Next thing you know, people will venture outside their homes without having read and understood every word of every law applicable to their person.
It’s just this little chromium tickybox here.
8) My first introduction to Brom’s artwork was the pieces he did for Dark Sun, a Dungeons & Dragons campaign setting from the early 1990s.
http://athas.org/articles/Dark-Sun-Art-Prints
Prefect not Perfect for Reynold’s series in Hannu’s birthday section. Guess I should go read quantum thief now!
Chris S.: Would Reynolds rather have his novels called perfect, or the series name spelled correctly? Nevertheless, I accept the correction — appertain yourself your favorite beverage!
Click.
Kip:
The Norwegian Consumer Council had a campaign a few years ago where they did a live reading of all the terms and services for the apps you’d find on a typical mobile phone. It was more than 250 000 words, I can’t find how much time the reading took but the estimate in advance was more than 24 hours.
https://www.forbrukerradet.no/side/250000-words-of-app-terms-and-conditions/
Clickity
I must confess that one of the things I love about Free/Libre/Open-Source Software (FLOSS) is the complete lack of lengthy, complicated, opaque legal texts you’re required to peruse (or pretend to peruse) before using the programs. The licenses for FLOSS tend to apply to potential distributors only; they normally require no user license at all. I can’t remember the last time I had to click “I agree!”
Of course, this means I won’t stumble across any hidden giveaways in these non-existent texts I don’t have to agree to, but I think that’s a flaw I can live with. 😀
10) A lot of the terms and agreements are anyway invalid because they are in conflict with consumer laws.
[click]
Click
(2) I usually hold SF movies to a lower standard than books or short fiction, but the premise here was so stupid it left me gasping for breath.
Earth is dying, so people have to move to Mars. Uh, it would take some doing to get Earth to be as bad as Mars is all the time. Whatever they’re planning to do to make Mars livable would be a lot cheaper and easier to do on Earth.
Their engines are so powerful they can get from Earth to Mars in just three weeks. With that much power at their disposal, I’m surprised (again) they can’t just fix Earth’s problems. But it also means they’ll be going very fast.
They veer off course and can’t control the engines. Okay, but that probably means they’re toast since they’ve almost certainly got solar escape velocity. Nope. They just need to find a planet to get a gravitational assist from.
What?! The authors must think there are unknown planets just lying around the solar system. Also, compared to the speed of this vehicle, gravitational assists are negligible.
The only way it could get more stupid would be if they saved the ship by making the passengers get out and push. Of course, this was just the trailer–they may end up pushing after all.
“This IrrePixel-able, Trantor ‘Original’, this Mule-produced crime”
2) Greg, this is not hard SF. This is based on a metaphorical and philosophical poem about existential dread, written in 1956. They could have tried to update the premise of the poem to current science, but as the science never was the important part, I do not really see the meaning.
I do try to skim through the terms and conditions of things I use a lot enough to look for the odd trap or joke or just weird clause but it would be impossible to do for, say, every place I use a wifi connection once, or every last app buried in my phone, especially the ones I don’t use or never see in use because they run in the background.
Or they’ve been reading Mike Brown…
Greg Hullender on March 10, 2019 at 8:47 am said:
Oh, there is plenty of room left for the movie to get more stupid. (And that also ties in to scroll item #5!)
8) Actually, Julia’s last genre film released was Street Fighter in which he played General M Bison, which came out in 1994 (Addams Family Values was released in 1993.)
Street Fighter is a truly god-awful film, but it’s easily considered in-genre, given the lightning-powers and supervillians. Julia actually got a Saturn nomination for best Supporting actor, being the only good thing in the movie.
Plus I like the fact that, even while suffering from cancer, he took the role because his kids were fans of the game, and he wanted to make something for them.
@Xtifr: You’re conflating free vs. commercial software licensing with terms of use of a service. Most of the TOS the average person sees are for services hosted elsewhere, not stuff they downloaded to use on their own device independently. That’s just the way the industry has gone. And the legal and commercial reasons why TOS are written the way they are are unrelated to whether the actual software being used to run the service is proprietary or FOSS(*).
Also, the brevity of most FOSS licenses is partly due to the fact that they include a very broad disclaimer along the lines of “we totally wash our hands of any problems that might ever arise from using this thing.” I wouldn’t really be in favor of making consumer products more like that.
None of the above is meant to downplay the value of FOSS, which I use heavily and contribute to.
(* Yes, I know what the “L” is supposed to signify, but personally I find that to be another annoying Richard Stallmanism that is useless without an accompanying explanation.)
Meredith Moment:
I typically post US MMs, as I’m in the US, but this one is Amazon UK.
Per the author’s email newsletter, The Tea Master and the Detective by Aliette de Bodard is 0.99p, for duration unknown.
@Darren Garrison
You’re right; there’s much worse out there. I read a story just this week in which Earth is threatened by an approaching black hole, so the heroes decide that the whole population needs to move to a planet in the Andromeda Galaxy. That planet doesn’t even have a sun, so they go elsewhere in the Milky Way to steal one for it. At the last minute, they discover this will cause the extinction of the only other intelligence ever found. That bugs them, but they do it anyway. Then they all die because they have no way back.
That one may be hard to beat. Unbelievable that Asimov’s published it.
F&SF had a competition many years ago for the worst imaginable SF plot. I don’t remember the winner, but one of the runners up was “The Milky Way goes bad and God throws it out.” To be competitive, I think that one would require the author to genuinely believe the Milky Way was made from real milk. 🙂
@Hampus Eckerman
Ah, but it presents itself as hard SF in that it’s about a spaceship with a drive malfunction and it’s trying to find an astrodynamic solution to save the passengers and crew. If you do that, I think you’re obligated to get it right or at least not get it so wrong that people choke on their drinks.
Anyway, bad hard SF–written by people who clearly know nothing about science and just don’t care–is something that ticks me off.
I’ll admit it’s more tolerable in movies than in print. Partly because you can forgive a lot for cool visuals, and partly because the movie is usually about the people, so once you swallow the bad science, there’s still something there. Bad hard SF short stories generally have cardboard characters and spew bad science page after page after page.
@Mike Glyer
Well, that’s just one, though. For the scenario in the trailer to make sense, there must be unknown planets out there scattered as thickly as islands in the Caribbean.
Greg Hullender on March 10, 2019 at 4:31 pm said:
gjkbiuygbhiuvbnkgobogblonbooihnogboihboi
(Picks off jaw from keyboard.) Okay, you win.
And the story was more than three years in the making?
Back when I edited at-con newsletters, I generally had a small box of “find print” with copyright information and similar stuff. I would sometimes insert lines that said things like “The first four people to come by the newsletter office and say the secret word ‘[word]’ will get one of the tickets to [show] we have here” or something like that. Sometimes we’d actually get takers, showing me that someone was reading the fine print (including where to find the newsletter office).
@Greg @Darren
Good lord. And Asimov’s published it. I wouldn’t accept that premise in an unedited self published ebook, much less from a major magazine.
Greg Hullender: Earth is threatened by an approaching black hole, so the heroes decide that the whole population needs to move to a planet in the Andromeda Galaxy. That planet doesn’t even have a sun, so they go elsewhere in the Milky Way to steal one for it. At the last minute, they discover this will cause the extinction of the only other intelligence ever found. That bugs them, but they do it anyway. Then they all die because they have no way back.
Ai-yi-yi. And I thought that “The Wandering Earth” was bad. 🙄
And in Asimov’s? Really???
@Greg Hullender:
For what it’s worth, reviews of the movie and descriptions of the poem strongly suggest that the “gravitational assist” thing is not a real option at all, but just the kind of “well, maybe we can do, uh… something” suggestion that people are likely to make in an entirely hopeless situation.
We all have off days. Some more off than others.
@2: The stage (operatic?) version, over half a century ago, was reported (by Amis at least) to be dreadful; we’re-all-going-to-die faking profundity. (If the original or the producers of this version weren’t attempting to be SF as Hampus says, they should maybe leave the tropes of SF alone — or at least present them in such a strange mode, a la Solaris, that it’s clearly not to be taken as real.) It will be interesting to see how the movie turns out, but the trailer is not encouraging — it looks like a mega-cast version of On the Beach written by someone who has no idea of what’s plausible and doesn’t care because they are Making a Deep Point. (I’d say “use Western Union”, but they’re out of the business.)
@4: an interesting anachronism: AFAIK “Smith”‘s pseudonym wasn’t penetrated during his lifetime (which still had 2+ years to run when this column is set), but the writer gives us some of Linebarger’s bio. Also: does anyone know whether the photos of SDCC were well-preserved originals or later recreations?
@5: oh great, SF as way to get into a good college. Dena Brown was right.
@8 IIRC, Fiorentino is never addressed with a letter; we only see her as an MIB in the last half-minute or so. She is somewhat less object and more subject in Dogma — still not the lead, but more active.
@14: wasn’t “heat vision” a projection? I’m sure expanded-range vision (in which I also don’t count see-through “x-ray” vision) turns up somewhere in the Superman canon, but the original was doing rather than observing. Yes, I’m being picky.
@15: the recent animated movie that told a story about van Gogh, using oil paintings in his style for each frame, was a slog (to do — the story was good); this collection of frames is seriously impressive because of the research it would have taken.
re comments on @10 and the length of the fine print: According to Smithsonian Air & Space‘s reportage, pilot William Glen Stewart, as part of his testimony in a trial for negligent endangerment of passengers, read aloud the landing checklist that was supposed to be read aloud during final approach, showing that it took longer to read than the time between when it could be started and touchdown. There used to be an ASCII transcript of this article online, but I can’t find it with Google and the two articles I do find (UPI verdict, Independent obit) both leave out a lot of key data (e.g., that if he’d done any of the captain-is-in-charge right things he probably would have been demoted or fired, or that the alternate autopilot he didn’t use was just as squirrely as the one he gave up on).
@Chip
I used SF as a way to get out of college – when I took the graduation writing test (we had to prove we could write in English to get out, after having to demonstrate it to get in), I got handed the essay topic “Why I believe [blank]”. So I wrote it on why I believe that SF is good for you. I passed…. (FWIW, the multiple-guess section was harder: there were questions where all the possible answers were very wrong.)
@ PJ Evans
In 10th grade honors Social Studies, my county required all students to write an essay on a book from a specified list. Some farsighted soul put Dispossessed on that list and I rocked out a great essay that led the teacher to call my mom in and accuse her of writing it. My mom (an organic chemistry teacher) looked directly at Mr. Nelson and said “I don’t know who Ursula K. Le Guin is!”
@Mike, the series is pretty good, but I wouldn’t go with perfect;)
Getting out and pushing can work in Kerbal Space Program. Lots of Delta v in the eva packs.
@Eli: I admit I glossed over some of the distinctions between various flavors of software licenses, but it didn’t seem all that relevant to my point: I haven’t had to click on “I agree” since the days when RealPlayer was a thing!
Aside: I’m surprised you associate “libre” with Stallman. I mostly hear it from Europeans. I actually use it in part because Stallman rejected the term without discussion many years ago (before Open Source and before Linux), and I still have some unresolved spite about that. Also, I like the term “FLOSS” because I’m a Zappa fan. 🙂
—
Greg Hullender on March 10, 2019 at 4:41 pm said:
Bad SF is bad, but I’m not actually sure there’s an association between bad science and cardboard characters.
Quick interjection: I mostly agree with you. This is quibbling, not disagreeing. But I have read stuff that has good characters and bad science, and once in a while it even has a superficial resemblance to hard SF. It’s not just movies that do that.
But yes, I also tend to cut movies more slack. I mean, you sort of have to, or there wouldn’t be any SF to watch! 😉
Greg Hullender:
No. This is the nutty nugget approach. If there are spaceships, then you are obliged to make it into hard SF.
But again, you are totally missing the cultural thing here. This is based on one of the absolutely most well-known Swedish poems. It was written in 1956 when we didn’t know as much as now. What you are saying is that if you would film John Carter of Mars now, then you would be obliged to find a realistic way for him to travel to a Mars with green men. But as you mess too much with the source material, you would make people angry and say that you have stolen the name and then made a movie about something else.
For some reason, I never see calls for Guardians of The Galaxy to be more realistic and scientific. But why this requirement for a movie based on philosophy and poetry?
Clip Hitchcock:
That is not what I’m saying at all. I’m saying that it is not Hard SF, not that it isn’t SF. And that they are trying to keep to the source material. See it as placed in another reality with different laws of physics if you can’t handle such a premise.
There’s already reviews out. They are very mixed.
https://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/aniara#contentReviews
(Belated) thanks for the title credit!
@P J Evans: cute. I did two papers on SF in high school — one justifying, a later declaring I wasn’t bothering to justify because it wasn’t needed — but didn’t get an opportunity to write such in college. We did have a writing test, but it happened very early; those who tested out of Expository Writing (as I did) had to choose from the selection of advanced Expository Writing courses. I took something vaguely biographical, and did at least one essay-in-story-form based on my experience as a stage manager.
@Rob Thornton: a teacher who makes such an accusation should be required, on pain of discipline, to provide reasonable cause; denying the better achievements of some students (or not even knowing they can so achieve) is denying the range that teaching must cover.
@Xtifr: having known Stallman from our undergraduate days, I would not pay any attention to any philosophical claim he makes; I don’t know whether his strangeness was entirely natural or in some part a pose, but it got old quickly.
@Hampus: Guardians is a melange of super-science space opera and fantasy-without-the-tropes; it is far enough removed from here and now that handwaving, and its casual attitude toward itself, excuse a lot. Aniara appears to be presenting as realism to be taken Seriously, which makes its violations ridiculous. The fact that it is considered a major cultural achievement in Sweden could be a reflection on Sweden, not on its quality; somehow I don’t think a country as ?advanced? as Sweden needs to prop itself up on ancient glories (or defeats — cf Serbia).
Clip:
If you find the violations ridiculous and that they do not fit your nutty nugget view of who is allowed to use SF tropes, it is easy to skip it. Myself, I am happy they are keeping close to the source material and trying to make it as beautiful as possible. They interviewed a few scientists in the Swedish media regarding the film and everyone said that the science of the movie wasn’t very important. I am happy with that. Waiting for it to come on local streaming before I see it.
Also happy to see other Americans who just found out about the poetry and seem to enjoy it very much. Such as those at Penny Arcade. Each to their own.
@Greg @Chip
As Hampus has said repeatedly, Aniara is not and was never supposed to be hard SF. It’s also a historical text. Coincidentally, it is also one of the very few SF-nal Nobel Prize winners.
Yes, Aniara contains a spaceship, but the poem was never about the spaceship and how it works or not. It’s about the people on board and how they cope (or not), once they realise that they will never reach their destination. That’s a completely different aim, but no less valid.
My own encounter with Aniara happened when I was much too young to appreciate it and basically went in expecting US-style SF (like Greg and Chip) and got something quite different. But the trailer looks interesting and I’ll check it out when it comes my way.
@Krampus: I don’t know where you get the idea that “nutty nuggets” are a priority of mine, or of anyone else’s; what I object to is the papering over of a morality play with the veneer of Science, in an apparent attempt to make it more plausible. (If he’d just written the whole thing as a fantasy, would it have been bowed down to, or dismissed?) There aren’t a lot of “nutty nuggets” in On the Beach or Brave New World, but we don’t miss them because the stories start with something deadly plausible.
@Cora: Aniara did not get a Nobel Prize; those don’t go to individual works. From this distance I wonder if anyone can know whether this work was treated as part of the corpus that got him the award or as a one-off embarassment to be ignored — I suppose there’s some record of the citation somewhere.
Nope, “Aniara” did not win the Nobel Prize for Literature, Harry Martinson did. But “Aniara” is considered one of his most important works and probably the one anybody not Swedish can cite.
Coincidentally, Harry Martinson eventually killed himself after he was called an unworthy winner who had “stolen” the award from more worthy English language writers in an early example or “Why did this person we’ve never heard of and who doesn’t even write in English win the price, when Graham Greene/Saul Bellow/Vladimir Nabokov/Philip Roth/John Updike still didn’t win?”
Clip Hitchcock:
To be called Krampus was a nice surprise! 😀 I guess it was autocorrect, but I have always loved the Krampus figures.
I do think it is “nutty nuggets” when someone sees a film using nice, beautifully displayed spaceships and therefore think the movies appearance also comes with an obligation of realism and adapting to hard SF. What is the difference from Brads talk of the appearance of a book cover? This weird idea that the movie tries to achieve a veneer of Science when the only thing it does is stick to the source material written 60 years ago.
And if you are going to attack poems and books from the 50s for not being realistic enough, then you will have a fun time. Good luck with that.
@Cora Buhlert: I’m still slightly peeved that Greene never won, but man! What a terrible thing to say about someone who did.
Cora Buhlert:
It was a bit more than that. Martinsson was a member of the Swedish Academy and the criticism was about corruption. That the Academy had a penchant for giving themselves awards and stipends. It is not well-known outside of Sweden, but the Nobel Prize is only one part of what the Academy handles. They administrate a lot more smaller prices and stipends and have been known to give them as rewards to friends.
There was actually a scandal about this last year. A man who witnessed for the “culture profile”, who had a close relationship with the academy and was convicted for two rapes, got a stipend of around 6 000 dollars. And no one in the academy could say who placed him on the list of those who should get one. That he was a mediocre poet that hadn’t published anything for years didn’t help.
But there is bo doubt that Martinson was one of the giants in Sweden. He had already won all other big award you could win when he got his Nobel Prize and Aniara was absolutely his master piece.
@Hampus
The problem isn’t with the cool spaceship images; it’s with the talk about astrophysics. I have seen stories where writers seemed to feel that the language of science was suitable material for art and used it for the sounds of the words, not their meanings.
And I hated those stories like poison.
However, we may be reading too much into a preview. Someone said the line about a gravitational assist wasn’t offered seriously. Sort of as if someone in the movie Titanic had said something like, “Not unless we can find an undiscovered island in the next couple of hours.”
Also, I think Brad has given nutty nuggets a bad name. 🙂
@Hampus
As for poems, I’ll have to admit I can’t think of any other adaptations of poems to SF movies. Or any movies, for that matter.
I just scrolled down, so I could scribe in pixels…
Aniara is (apart from starting as a poem) literally space opera, in that it was very quickly turned into, well, an opera that premiered in 1959.
So being literally based on “something that was a space opera”, I think we can forgive it for not being hard SF.
@ Greg – question of taste, I guess. For myself, I enjoy that more whimsical and/or metaphorical use of science. I’m thinking of The Little Prince or maybe BBC TV show The Clangers. Or even Michael Moorcocks (mis-)use of entropy as a metaphor for social decay.
Maybe 35-40 years ago, they took my class to see a youth version of the opera. I can’t remember much of it at all, apart from a vague memory of ignoring it and reading a book instead. It wasn’t my thing then and poetry is seldom my thing now. But I had classmates that were fascinated and my father loved the opera.
The whole poem can be found here:
https://gsproject.edublogs.org/gs-texts/texts-used-in-2017/aniara-by-harry-martinson-3/
As to Martinson’s Nobel, there is, in fact, a citation for each co-winner that year. Martinson’s says, in part, “…reflect the cosmos”. Given the subject of Aniara , it clearly could be said to “…reflect the cosmos”. It’s the only work of his that I’ve read and it seems to be the one he’s most noted for, so it’s most unlikely that the Swedish Academy considered it “a one-off embarrassment to be ignored”. One’s most noted work typically gets pride of place in the corpus.
Here in 9358, our feline overlords have made nose rubbing the primary form of communication.