(1) TIE-IN BOOKS. “The Secret Life of Novelizations”, an 11 minute segment on WYNC.
Write a great book and you’re a genius. Turn a book into a great film and you’re a visionary. Turn a great film into a book…that’s another story.
Novelizations of films are regular best-sellers with cult followings — some are even more beloved than the films that spawned them — but respected they are not. Instead, they’re assumed to be the literary equivalent of merchandise: a way for the movie studios to make a few extra bucks, and a job for writers who aren’t good enough to do anything else. But the people who write them beg to differ.
OTM producer Jesse Brenneman goes inside the world of novelizations, featuring authors Max Allan Collins, Alan Dean Foster, Elizabeth Hand, and Lee Goldberg.
(2) SPOCK DOC. Lance Ulanoff reviews For the Love of Spock at Mashable — “’For the Love of Spock’ is a moving love letter to an icon and a father”.
For the Love of Spock is three stories woven together into a solid, emotionally charged strand. There is the story of a gifted actor — a renaissance man, as he is described in the film — and his journey from bit player to fame, fortune and permanent pop-culture icon status.
It’s also the story of a character who sprang from the mind of Star Trek creator Gene Roddenberry, but became flesh and blood — and Vulcan salutes — in the hands of Nimoy. And finally, it’s the story of a father and son and their decades-long journey toward love and mutual acceptance.
There’s no way to fit 83 years into a rather fast-paced 100 minutes. As a consequence, huge swaths of Nimoy’s life and career are mentioned all-too-briefly (his directing career) or not at all (Star Trek V and VI, and much of his latter TV career).
(3) MORE FREQUENT DARK. SF Site News says editor Sean Wallace has announced his magazine is stepping up its schedule.
Sean Wallace has announced the the dark fantasy magazine The Dark will shift to a monthly schedule beginning with the May 2016 issue.
(4) ADAMANT. J.C. Carlton says he is really, really right about that book he still hasn’t read – “Why Generation Ships Will NOT ‘Sink’ A Failure To Communicate” at The Arts Mechanical.
As an engineer, I think that Mr. Robinson is clearly wrong. Or at least, he doesn’t understand the basic rules for setting mission parameters and designing to meet those parameters. Mr. Robison’s vessel failed because he wanted it to fail. But to extend that to saying that ALL such proposals would fail is more than a little egotistical. And wrong, really wrong.
Now I haven’t as yet read the book.(Somehow this sticks in the craw of the people over at File 770….
Real pioneers don’t screw up because failure is not an option and incompetence is something that can’t be tolerated. Yes the environment and the unknowns get the pioneers, think the Donner Party, but the typical pioneers don’t go down without a fight. They do the work that needs to get done because they are working to make a better place for the next generation, not themselves. We as a culture have suppressed the pioneer spirit in the last few years and maybe that’s a mistake. Because pioneers desire and understand liberty and the alternative is tyranny.
Here’s a bunch of links to get the pioneer spirit started. Sorry, Mr. Robinson, our carracks to the stars will not fail because the pioneer spirits in them, will not let them fail. Look if my ancestors can cross the North Atlantic in a tiny leaky little boat, can I say anything less?
(5) HOWDY NEIGHBOR. “Never Before Seen Galaxy Spotted Orbiting the Milky Way”: New Scientist has the story.
The galaxy’s empire has a new colony. Astronomers have detected a dwarf galaxy orbiting the Milky Way whose span stretches farther than nearly all other Milky Way satellites. It may belong to a small group of galaxies that is falling into our own.
Giant galaxies like the Milky Way grew large when smaller galaxies merged, according to simulations. The simulations also suggest that whole groups of galaxies can fall into a single giant at the same time. The best examples in our cosmic neighbourhood are the Large and Small Magellanic Clouds, the Milky Way’s two brightest satellites, which probably orbit each other.
Orbiting galaxies
About four dozen known galaxies orbit our own. The largest in terms of breadth is the Sagittarius dwarf, discovered in 1994 – but it’s big only because our galaxy’s gravity is ripping it apart. The next two largest are the Magellanic Clouds.
(6) BATMAN V SUPERMAN V ABIGAIL. This is the kind of post that has inspired me to write Abigail Nussbaum’s name on my Hugo ballot from time to time. In the paragraphs following the excerpt, she deconstructs a scene from Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice and gives us a wonderful premise for understanding what shaped Superman’s psyche in the Snyder and non-Snyder movie versions.
Nor am I here to talk about how Batman v Superman fundamentally betrays its two title characters–and betrays, along the way, the fact that Snyder and writers David S. Goyer and Chris Terrio fundamentally do not understand what either of those characters are about. Because the truth is, I don’t really care. I’m not a comic book reader, but I’ve been watching Batman movies for twenty years, and good or bad they all depict the character as, at best, someone who is working out their mommy-and-daddy issues by beating up poor criminals, and at worst, an outright fascist. I’m perfectly willing to believe that there is more to the character, and that the comics (and the animated series) have captured that, but I think at this stage it’s a mug’s game to go to a Batman movie expecting to find more than what they’ve been known to give us. As for Superman, if I want stories about a character who is all-powerful yet fundamentally good, and still interesting for all that, I’ve got the MCU’s Captain America, not to mention Supergirl, so that fact that Batman v Superman depicts Superman as someone who seems genuinely to dislike people, and to be carrying out acts of heroism (when he deigns to do so) out of a sense of aggrieved obligation, doesn’t really feel worth getting worked up over. On the contrary, I was more upset by those scenes in Batman v Superman in which characters insisted–despite all available evidence–that its Superman was a figure of hope and inspiration, because they made it clear just how badly the people making the movie had misjudged its effect.
(7) TODAY IN HISTORY
- April 17, 1810 – Lewis M. Norton patented a vat for forming pineapple-shaped cheese. (Even John King Tarpinian doesn’t know why he sent me this link.)
- April 17, 1970 — With the world anxiously watching on television, Apollo 13, a U.S. lunar spacecraft that suffered a severe malfunction on its journey to the moon, safely returned to Earth.
(8) TODAY’S BIRTHDAY DUCK.
- April 17, 1937 – Daffy Duck.
From the CBS News Almanac: …That day saw the premiere of a Warner Brothers cartoon titled “Porky’s Duck Hunt.”
The cartoon followed Porky Pig as he attempted to bag a most unusual duck … a duck quite unwilling to follow the rules:
Porky: “Hey, that wasn’t in the script!” Daffy: “Don’t let that worry you, Skipper! I’m just a darn fool crazy duck!”
Actually, make that DAFFY Duck, in his very first film role — his first, but by no means his last.
(9) ACCOUNTING FOR TASTES. Fynbospress, in “Preorders” at Mad Genius Club, sorts out how that sales tool affects traditional and indie publishers differently.
Several years ago, indie publishers put up quite a hue and cry about not having preorders available to them on Amazon, unlike their trad pub competitors. Amazon listened, and made preorders available, with a few caveats to ensure that indie pub would indeed have the product ready on ship date, and not leave Amazon holding the bag while angry customers yelled at them.
With glee, indie pub rushed out to put things on preorder…. and promptly found it wasn’t all that and a bag of chips. It’s a useful tool, but it isn’t nearly as important to them as it’s made out to be.
The critical differences:
- Amazon counts a preorder toward the item’s sales rank the day the order is placed.
This makes logical sense in the non-publishing world, as the “sale” happens the day a contract to sell is agreed upon, not the ship date, not the date money changes hands, nor the date the customer receives the item. This is pretty standard whether ordering a run of shoes manufactured in China, selling wheat futures in Chicago, or a racehorse in Kentucky.
(10) QUIDDITCH ON TV. “Quidditch, the sport of wizards” was a segment on today’s CBS Sunday Morning. There’s a video report and a text article at the link.
Quidditch, anyone? No idle question in Columbia, South Carolina, where a big championship match is underway this weekend. Anna Werner attended last year’s contest, where she saw an author’s imaginary game come to life:
It’s been nearly 20 years since the first Harry Potter book came out and proceeded to cast a spell over fans around the world. J.K. Rowling’s creation became the most popular book series in publishing history, with over 450 million copies sold — and one of the biggest movie franchises in film history, with nearly $8 billion in ticket sales.
And now Potter-mania has spawned another craze, one based on the high-flying fantasy game played by Harry and his friends called Quidditch, which has now jumped from the world of wizards to the playing fields of Rock Hill, South Carolina.
Yes, real-world Quidditch, complete with players “riding” broomsticks.
“Quidditch has exploded into the college scene and the high school scene all over the world,” said one girl. “It’s absolutely amazing!”
It’s even been the subject of a documentary called “Mudbloods” (a Harry Potter reference, of course).
“People get passionate about it because they grew up with Harry Potter,” said one fan.
The documentary introduces Alex Benepe, one of the founders of Quidditch. He’s been playing since 2005, when a classmate at Middlebury College turned to him with an idea: “‘This weekend, we’re gonna try and play real-life Quidditch,'” Benepe recalled. “We were freshman. And I just thought to myself, ‘There’s no way this is gonna work. This is gonna be so dumb!'”
(11) PLAYING QUIDDITCH. CBS Sunday Morning also provides “A how-to guide to Quidditch”.
The Balls
A volleyball doubles as a Quaffle, which players use to score points, either by throwing it or kicking it through a hoop.
Bludgers are dodgeball-weapons used against opposing players; hit someone with a bludger, and they are temporarily out. They must drop whatever ball they possess, head to the sidelines, and touch a goalpost before returning back to the field.
In the J.K. Rowling books, a Snitch (or a Golden Snitch) is a winged ball that tried to avoid capture. Since magical equipment is harder to come by in real life, Snitches are instead played by people dressed in yellow, who run onto the field at the 18-minute mark and must evade players who try to steal their “tail.”
If a Snitch loses his tail (actually a tennis ball in a sock), the game is over, but in the event of a tie score, play goes into overtime.
(12) RUNNING LOGAN’S MOVIE. Once upon a time there was a Jeopardy! answer…
John King Tarpinian says “In the book middle age would be ten.”
And while we’re on the topic, John recommends Reading The Movie Episode 3: Logan’s Run, a 2011 video.
[Thanks to John King Tarpinian, Xtifr, and Andrew Porter for some of these stories. Title credit goes to File 770 contributing editor of the day IanP.]
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First Fifth!
12) What, so IRL middle-age starts at 25? (Never seen Logan’s Run, so I don’t know which way the pedantry is pointing.)
(4) ADAMANT. As a songwriter, I think that JT Carlton is hilarious the way he keeps repeating that he’s an engineer before going off on tears that constitute ideology rather than engineering. And I can tell you that I am certain generation ships will fail because there’s no Middle Eight.
Now I haven’t as yet read the book.
Gee, and he wonders why no one takes his critique seriously.
Hello I must be [tick]ing…
Fifth!
4) He really doesn’t like that novel, does he? And without having read it, too. I mean, I don’t care for KSR’s work in general and Aurora sounds like something I would really dislike, but I don’t harp on how much I dislike the premise, I simply don’t read it.
Yeah, c’mon
Love the scroll
It lookin’ good
C’mon
One more
Five to one, baby, second five
NelC: 12) What, so IRL middle-age starts at 25? (Never seen Logan’s Run, so I don’t know which way the pedantry is pointing.)
I think that the pedantry is coming from SF readers who believe that the movie (where Lastday age is 30) is far inferior to the William F. Nolan and George Clayton Johnson book, (where Lastday age is 21) — but that makes “middle age” in the book 10.5 years old.
JJ — Ah, right, I never read the book either.
Even so, that makes middle-age 35 IRL? I laugh at thirty-year-olds going through an existential crisis at waving goodbyes to their twenties, but I don’t know that thirty-five is such a big deal. I wouldn’t have put middle-age any lower than forty — until I got to forty. Since then, middle-age has been permanently five years away….
4) Carlton, read the bloody book already!
(2) No Mission Impossible? No Fringe? No In Search Of?
(4) Why is he so peeved about us dissing him for not reading the book? I mean, we did him the courtesy of reading his drivel before dismissing it. He also ignores that his ancestors weren’t gone for centuries on that boat, and they didn’t have to bring their own atmosphere with them. As well as the big boat made by engineers that famously didn’t manage the same crossing… and all those rockets that blew up… and the shuttles that blew up… and Apollo 13, and Galloping Gertie, and the WTC, and… Wishing doesn’t make it so. Is he a Puppy too?
(10) Call me when the brooms actually fly. Or even when it’s played on wheels, not feet.
@Lurkertype:
Yeah, they said we’d never have flying cars. Or broadcast power. Or –
Science Fiction closed the show on Saturday Night Live last night. It’s not as funny as the skit from a few weeks ago about the folks who got picked up by the flying saucers–that was amazing!–but it’s still pretty funny.
lurkertype: Is he a Puppy too?
Yeah, he is. Why, according to him, Worldcon voters are responsible for creating monsters like Vox Day (see item 7 here), because they didn’t take the “even-handed stance” of giving Hugo Awards to the sub-par works which were gamed onto the ballot by the Puppies. 🙄
The telecaller who claims that he’s from Microsoft, and says that he just needs my credit card number to fix my computer which I didn’t even know was malfunctioning, has more credibility than this guy.
(1) TIE-IN BOOKS.
I think it needs a specific skillset to do novelizations well, but in general novelizations & tie-ins don’t attract me as a reader. My loss, I guess.
(4) ADAMANT.
You can critique a book without having read it; just I can choose not to take your critiques seriously if you do.
Alan Dean Foster and C.J. Cherryh are the two writers whose novelizations I’ve bought because of the writer, not because of the work they were novelizing.
I’m not counting Arthur C. Clarke (2001) or Robert Sheckley (The 10th Victim) because I don’t think “novelization of a movie which was based on a story you wrote” is quite the same thing. But if you disagree, then add them as well. 🙂
(1) TIE-IN BOOKS. Tie-in books have never intrigued me – as @Soon Lee says, probably my loss. Uh, I guess a little fanfic over the years doesn’t count as tie-in??? 😉
(5) HOWDY NEIGHBOR. News items like this fascinate me and scare the cr*p outta me.
I. am. caught. up. (much rejoicing) Now back to Uprooted, which I started while out of town and am enjoying a lot!
Uh, Chuck “doesn’t make me” Tingle is busy proving Rule 34 some more (warning: not SFF and probably NSFW and generally just ::eyeroll::). I’m so glad(?) he’s moving on to bigger and better things.
ETA: The blog post I linked to must’ve gotten “Rule 34” wrong at first, ‘cuz the URL is “rule-36-…etc.” LOL. But they fixed the headline, at least.
I don’t understand why Carlton has difficulty understanding why his not having read the book affects how seriously people are willing to take his criticism of it. Reading the book before criticizing it seems rather basic.
As a bookseller who hasn’t read Aurora* or any of A.N. Engineer’s posts** about it I can tell you that KSR’s book is easily outselling anything Carlton ever wrote. The puppies tell us sales = popularity = awardworthiness. Therefore Carlton should vote for Aurora for best novel. I can’t be wrong because my ancestors traveled a long way once and probably read some books on the trip.
* Yet.
** And probably never will.
Kendall: Now back to Uprooted, which I started while out of town and am enjoying a lot!
Hie thee over to Cassy B.’s Book Discussion of Uprooted. You can read without signing up, or sign up for free to participate.
Mister Dalliard: Therefore Carlton should vote for Aurora for best novel. I can’t be wrong because my ancestors traveled a long way once and probably read some books on the trip.
*snort*
My father died less than 2 weeks after his 50th birthday. I was very conscious on my 25th birthday that while he certainly hadn’t realized it (he died three years after being diagnosed with lymphoma, and to my knowledge had no other particularly life threatening conditions before then), that age was in fact his middle age. Technically, given I was born as the firstborn when he was 38 and 5 months, he was in the last quarter of his life for all the time both of us were around.
And yes, it does/did have an influence on me. For example, my personal decision is that it’s very unlikely I would be a biological father at my age because of how old I’d be when the kid hit 18 and the not high but not insignificant odds that I might not make it that long (with a side order that I really mean at least 23 years from now; I’d want to be in the relationship with the mother for at least five years before drastically changing it, and I’m not currently involved with anyone.
JJ: You may well snort* but Tasmania’s a long way from Scotland. They could have finished a whole John F. Wright novella on that trip. Or the Mars trilogy, 2312 and two out of three Californias.
* Obviously.
@Mister Dalliard
Ah, but, how many milli-Hamilton’s does that calibrate to?
@Kendall
re: Chuck Tingle
Holy. Crapola.
(Although I have on more than one occasion, during Twitter arguments with Sanders supporters, accused their candidate of “emitting fairy unicorn farts.” 😀 )
(6) Abigail Nussbaum
That post is already on my 2016 Possibles list.
Mister Dalliard: Tasmania’s a long way from Scotland. They could have finished a whole John F. Wright novella on that trip.
Well, maybe, I suppose — if they’d gotten becalmed for quite a few months on the Indian Ocean during the voyage.
And if there was no other reading material on the ship.
Apparently the people on the Titanic just needed to think Positive Thoughts to avoid sinking. If they weren’t “pioneer”ing enough, then how about Franklin’s Expedition? Two ships, fully modern for their time, outfitted specifically for polar exploration, manned by professional seamen–and all hands lost.
Because failure is ALWAYS an option, especially when heading into the unknown. An engineer ought to know that. Canadian civil engineers wear iron rings specifically to remind them of that fact.
As it happens, I didn’t much care for Aurora, but the idea that the expedition failed because they were lacking in pioneer spirit is completely laughable. “Pioneer spirit” didn’t and couldn’t stop the Titanic sinking, in spite of all the immigrants to the New World on board. Too recent? Not “pioneer” enough? It didn’t and couldn’t protect Vasco de Gama from dying of malaria. de Gama too much of an explorer, and not enough of a “pioneer”? Or not American enough? How about Philadelphia in 1668? Is that “pioneer” enough for Carleton? Because thousands died of yellow fever. Surely if they’d had the proper Pioneer Spirit they’d have been immune! But wait, still not Pioneer enough? 2/3rds of the settlers of Jamestown died in its first year. 3/4ths of the settlers of Jamestown died in its first 20 years. The only reason Jamestown itself didn’t disappear was constant resupply, including of people, from England.
The folks in “Aurora” didn’t have that option. And they didn’t fail from lack of pioneer spirit. They failed because (spoilers in rot-13) gur gnetrg cynarg unq fbzr fbeg bs cevba-yvxr betnavfz be cfrhqb-betnavfz gung xvyyrq uhzna yvsr.
Oh, and before Jamestown, I found lists of at least ten other settlements of the New World that failed. Surprise! Pioneers failed ALL THE TIME. Ships sank, settlements starved or were killed or died of disease or all of the above. We just aren’t descended from those particular people, because they tended to end up dead. They still existed, though.
I love his mystical idea that if you wish something hard enough and with enough pioneer spirit everything will come out all right. Pity that didn’t work for vast numbers of actual pioneers right here on Earth, with breathable air, drinkable water, and eatable food.
Cally: I love his mystical idea that if you wish something hard enough and with enough pioneer spirit everything will come out all right. Pity that didn’t work for vast numbers of actual pioneers right here on Earth, with breathable air, drinkable water, and eatable food.
It’s all of a piece with the “if people actually wanted to have a job or a home, they wouldn’t be jobless or homeless” mentality, isn’t it?
(4)
I think he just single handedly created the No True Pioneer fallacy.
If you ancestors crossed the Atlantic in a leaky boat they were shitty shipbuilders.
I just hope he doesn’t apply his wishing makes it so mentality to his engineering designs. The designers and builders could wish and believe and have “spirit” all you like, but when the wind hit the right resonant frequency, the Tacoma Narrows Bridge still came down.
That’s what really made Moby-Dick so mad — somebody tossed one of those novellas overboard in his ocean.
Mike Glyer: That’s what really made Moby-Dick so mad — somebody tossed one of those novellas overboard in his ocean.
*snort*
That’d do it, all right. 😉
4) ADAMANT. J.C. Carlton says he is really, really right about that book he still hasn’t read – “Why Generation Ships Will NOT ‘Sink’ A Failure To Communicate” at The Arts Mechanical.
Yes it shows you don’t know what your talking about. Makes you look foolish.
Fascinating. Ignores history in every age from 2,000 B.C.E right through today with refugees. This makes him look way more foolish than going on and on about technical details in a book he hasn’t read.
Not impressed.
@Mister Dalliard: QED! Aristotle!
@Lis Carey: He’s a Puppy. He doesn’t need to read “Aurora” to know that the engineers in it didn’t have the True Pioneer Spirit, just like he doesn’t need to read anything that won a Hugo in the past {10|20|30} years to know it’s all SJW nonsense that no one ever liked. Puppies Know these things. If he read the book, he’d know that the engineering was awesome all the way through, but why spoil a good rant with facts?
He doesn’t need Cally’s facts about all the thousands of pioneers who died no matter how well prepared they were, either. Obviously all those people just didn’t have enough spirit.
(“We’ve got spirit, yes we do, we’ve got spirit, how about ugh, gack, dies messily“)
Tasha: You’re too kind to him. He’s ignoring history from at least 20,000 years ago, if not 200,000. Would that he was only ignoring the last 4,000.
(4) ADAMANT.
About a book he hasn’t read. I wonder who is being arrogant.
Since when did pioneer become a byword for political ideologue?
It bugs me on something like an aesthetic level to see arguments made so badly. It’s not like Robinson has staked out irrefutable ground, even though I agree with most of what he lays out in Aurora. You could talk about ways communities approach self-sufficiency on various scales, about the history of problem-solving via genuinely unexpected connections and synergies, about evolving understandings of how living systems work, and a whole lot more. But then of course a lot of that ends up running contrary to various Puppy dogmas about how the world has to work, and when you rule enough of ecology and sociology and a dozen other fields out of bounds….things won’t work.
I wanna see some good argument for alternative positions with regard to space travel and colonization from people who don’t start off at war with reality.
@lurkertype
I might still be super happy the gallstone is gone and the pain I’ve been in for years is way down. I’m sure I’ll be grumpier and less kind in a couple days while I’m overseeing Passover prep.
Maybe J.C. Carlton could come and engineer a way out of my problem. It’s simple enough – just need all my Passover prep knowledge of 18 years downloaded into 4 other brains and have those people also get my efficiency and working around others skills. 😉
@Tasha – Good to hear (Re gallstone) and best of luck with Passover.
Chambers Dictionary defines middle-aged as “that period between youth and old age, variously reckoned to suit the reckoner.”
With regard to Mr Carlton – well, firstly, anyone can have an opinion, but only an informed opinion is actually worth anything much, and you can’t have an informed opinion without information. Or, in other words, read the damn book already.
Also, does he not understand the concept of selection bias? The history of the European exploration of the Americas is littered with disastrous failures. “Pioneering spirit” didn’t help any of them. His ancestors crossed the Atlantic in little leaky boats? All this means is, he is descended from the people whose boats didn’t sink.
Re: Logan’s Run.
Yep, we covered this one on a Torture Cinema episode of Skiffy and Fanty last May
Re Carlton. I find it amusing that he’s thinks us being upset that he hasn’t read the book is a badge of honor. As an ancillary point, this reminds me of other Puppies, who have condemned other books without reading them.
Paul Weimer: Re Carlton. I find it amusing that he’s thinks us being upset that he hasn’t read the book is a badge of honor.
I find it incredibly amusing that he thinks Filers are “upset” that he hasn’t read the book, and that he’s too clueless to understand that what’s really happening is that he’s being laughed at for having the temerity to critique a book that he hasn’t bothered to read.
(4): This reminds me of my son when he first started to parrot words. He has no idea what he’s saying, but it gets a reaction so he keeps making word noises.
There was a brief, shining moment when it looked as if novelizations could be works of art, with William Kotzwinkle’s ET and Vonda McIntyre’s Star Trek books, but it fizzled out.
4) In a mild and minor defense of Carlton: Don’t most boats leak at least a little? It wouldn’t be a good analogy, because getting rid of a little water every day for a few months is not the same as recovering a little atmosphere every day for a few centuries. So probably the boats his ancestors came in did leak a little.
But criticizing a book you haven’t read? I almost did the equivalent of that in the early eighties. I wasn’t impressed by some of the west coast punk I’d heard and started to write a very short review of three sitting on the shelf of the record store where I worked. It was going to be just noise effects.
Two of those three records are now great favorites of mine. I wish I could remember what the third one was. I could use some more good listening.
Different nonPuppies are different, but speaking for myself what bothers me about Carleton’s opinions is that they seem to be at odds with what I know of history and what I know of biology.
What I know of history is that no matter how you stick out your steely jaw and say that failure is not an option, failures happen. Aside from the fact that lying down and giving up will noticeably increase the chances of failure, spirit doesn’t have much to do with it. Sometimes you try your best and you still fail.
What I know of biology is that setting up a long term self contained biome that will stably accept humans as part of it–turning our wastes into clean food and water and air–is extremely difficult.
I like the idea of colonizing planets around other stars as much as anyone. I think pioneer spirit isn’t going to be the issue, however.
The book of Logan’s Run was mediocre (at best), but it didn’t get the horrible reception of the movie. (Cinefantastique Quarterly‘s headline was “Logan’s Run: the SF boom starts with a bomb”). Changing to 30 was decided somewhere up in the hierarchy, on some combination of not wanting to be a teen movie and not being able to find actors.
@sievel: I love “I think he just single handedly created the No True Pioneer fallacy.” However, IIRC wooden boats generally did leak much more than most metal-hulled ones (as arkansawyer noted while I was writing this); there’s a reason that bilge pumps exist, even if you’re not one of Barrett’s Privateers. Note also that most shipbuilders stayed at home, for the same complex of reasons that few (any?) space engineers have flown on the shuttle.
@cally: Galloping Gertie was not brought down by wind hitting resonance; see Levi & Salvadori, Why Buildings Fall Down. tl;dr version: it waved even in breezes because it was badly underdesigned.
@Chip Re: Logan’s Run and 30 in the movie versus 21 in the book.
This also had the salutary effect of avoiding the issues of just-pubescent teenagers in the book engaging in sex. (Shades of that discussion of the John Ringo novel!). I recall in the book that a 13 year old propositions the 20 year old protagonist by promising that she was skilled above all others.
I’m days behind on my File770 reading. Over the weekend, I read the comments on the last thread where Aurora and the review of the review was discussed, and saw the comments about bioengineering our way out of the problem. I wrote a long rant about it, and while it was cathartic, I ultimately decided the thread was stale so I wouldn’t post. But since it has shown up again, I will reward everyone with my original rant. (The part on water breathing is there because someone had mentioned that specifically.) (After writing my rant, I stumbled on a recent not-unrelated sentiment by P.Z. Myers.)
(begin pre-recorded rant)
The problem is that the humans (and all organisms) are elaborate Rube Goldberg devices. Billions of years of legacy code with on-the-fly software patches layered on top of on-the-fly software patches. And the old code isn’t deleted, because code that once supported magnetic core memory has now been tweaked to support flash memory (and a different copy more radically modified to emulate the Soundblaster pro!) Genetics isn’t like the old concept of “one gene, one protein”, it is a total mess. A gene essential to producing keratin might also be involved in the uptake of nitric oxide by smooth muscles (in other words, the old joke that scientists have discovered a cure for baldness, except the main side effect is impotence.) A single gene may be reshuffled 2 or more ways during transcription or translation to produce 2 or more different proteins. Or parts of gene A for protein 1 and parts of gene B for protein 2 may be used to build protein 3.
Learning how to make major specific changes to a multicellular organism while not at the same time introducing negative side effects is, if anything, a much more complex, difficult problem to solve than fusion power plants, space elevators, and the propulsion/shielding issue for interstellar voyages. Accurately computer modeling the full biology of a multicellular organism (and even prokaryotes) would make modeling weather systems look like a game of tic-tac-toe. I don’t know how much more powerful the supercomputers would have to be than today’s best, but it would be measured in orders of magnitude. (No problem (you may be thinking) we can let a weakly-godlike AI handle it. Only the weakly-godlike AI would also require several orders of magnitude more powerful supercomputers than what we can build today.) We are a very, very long way from being able to make anything more than the most rudimentary changes to organisms. Curing cystic fibrosis by repairing the CFTR gene? Relatively child’s-play. Actually been done years ago in limited clinical trials with some degree of success. Probably will be as casual as a flu shot in the future (though there will unfortunately be anti-vax, anti-GM style nitwits around in the future, too.) But modifying someone so that they can breathe water? Don’t hold your breath. Water doesn’t hold enough dissolved oxygen to support large, warm-blooded organisms.
According to Wikipedia, an average diver needs 1 liter of oxygen per minute. The amount of oxygen that can be dissolved in water depends on the temperature and pressure. According these tables, fresh water at a comfortable 30° C and 1 atmosphere can hold 5.9 ml/l of oxygen. This means that the “average diver” would need all the oxygen from around 170 liters (45 gallons) of water every minute. The highest oxygen saturation on the chart is 40.9 ml/l at 0° C and 4 atmospheres, so the diver would need all the oxygen from around 24 liters (6.4 gallons) of that water every minute. Also pilfered from Wikipedia, I see that the typical tidal volume (amount of air taken in/expelled from the lungs with each breath) for an adult human is around half a liter, and the average adult breathes around 12-20 times per minute. For the sake of simplifying things, let’s call it 16 breaths per minute, and 8 liters of fluid per minute pass through the lungs. So for this “average diver” to get enough oxygen, the comfortable water would need to contain around 21 times as much oxygen as the saturation point, and the fatally-cold, high-pressure water would need around 3 times the saturation amount of oxygen. And that is assuming that the lungs could extract 100 percent of the oxygen from 100 percent of the water that entered the lungs with each breath. Actual extraction numbers would be only a fraction of that, and thus dissolved oxygen amounts would have to be even higher. The people would have to be made cold-blooded and live in bone-chilling water (needing less oxygen but becoming very slow thinkers—want to have the sloths from Zootopia making sure your spaceship remains safe?), or trail along large, lacy, and very venerable external gills, or find a way to make oxygen extraction by the lungs vastly more efficient (and in the process make it impossible for them to breathe air, because the amount of oxygen in “normal air” would suddenly be toxic to them.) And you would still have to deal with the issue of releasing waste carbon dioxide. So saying “it’s easy—just make someone who can breathe water!” is akin to saying “it’s easy—just invent a room-temperature superconductor!” or “it’s easy—just hang a cable that is 22,000 miles long!” or “it’s easy—just assume a spherical cow!”
tl;dr—Biology is not the easy part of preparing for interstellar travel, it is the hard part. We will understand everything we can possibly learn about materials sciences, particle physics, and all the other engineering problems of interstellar travel long before we understand everything we can possibly learn about biology and genetics and are making people who can breathe underwater or people with wings. Saying that modifying people is the solution to problems with interstellar travel is vastly, vastly underestimating the complexity of biology.