Monthly Archives: July 2015

Wobosphere fun

Thoughts on Grabthar’s Hammer

And the adventure continues in the third blog post of an unintended trilogy….

The critics panning Pixels lead me to reflect: Galaxy Quest would have failed if the main characters were the kids instead of the actors.

The heroes of Galaxy Quest know less about their own canon than their obsessive fans do. They find it easy to see everything bad about their work, and much harder to remember why it connected with people. The comedy comes from their not easily stepping into the fiction. They’re fish out of water. In Armada, apparently, the gamers find their favorite snack food waiting for them at their battle stations. In Galaxy Quest, on the other hand…

“Are you enjoying your kep’la blood ticks, Dr. Lazarus?”

“Just like Mother used to make.”

[blood tick, still alive, jumps from spoon back into bowl]
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Fiction

“And Half the Seed of Europa”

In the previous post, I looked at one way to take the theme of geek-culture wish fulfillment and run sideways with it. Another tempting possibility is a more Evangelion variation: play all the genre conventions absolutely straight, and show just how psychologically damaged every character would be.

Say you’re one of those gamer prodigies who’s whisked off to fight a glorious war in which your mad skills are the key to Saving the World. What happens when the war is over? What happens when you get shipped home with a headful of PTSD? Everything you enjoyed in your old life now reminds you of ordering good men to their deaths.

When you were a child on Earth, you fled all your troubles by escaping into games of war. Then the war found you.

What do you do when you can’t escape any longer?

(Title based on Wilfred Owen.)

Fiction

Starfighter 2015

Laura Hudson’s review of Ernest Cline’s Armada (2015) reminded me that I had my own idea for a “reimagining” of The Last Starfighter (1984). In fact, I’ve had this notion knocking around for a few years now, but I’ve never written down a synopsis in an easily accessible format. So, here goes:

Our protagonist is Alix, a young trans woman trying to make it in the field of video-game journalism. Tired of regurgitating press releases for ultimately forgettable AAA titles, she decides to delve into the mystery of Starfighter, a science-fiction action-adventure game that appeared on the net seemingly from nowhere. Nobody knows who wrote the code or even the IRL identities of the people who first noticed it, but once it caught a little attention, its popularity snowballed. Alix, a fiend at Starfighter herself, gets a lead on where it might have come from. The movie opens with her on her way to a big SF/gaming convention in some large city. At the convention, she meets a fellow we’ll call Greg, because he asked for it. Greg knows Starfighter amazingly well, not just its game mechanics and the design of its fictional world, but the details of its code, too. They joke around about Phillips-head sonic screwdrivers, reversing the polarity on the main deflector dish and so on.

Alix and Greg are walking back to the convention after dinner with some champion Starfighter players, when some ominous guys who have been skulking about the shadows burst out and instigate a fight scene. Greg snaps into action and fights them off, using martial-arts moves that escalate until they really should be impossible without wire work. Just when the ominous guys have been roundly trounced, their reinforcements arrive, and they run over Alix with a Humvee. Fade to white.

Alix awakens, floating in microgravity, wearing a jumpsuit uniform over skin that feels a bit too much like plastic.
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Bibliophilia, Science history

Those Who Aspire to Solaria

A certain mindset sees the movie Aliens and thinks it would be awesome to be a Space Marine. Because it’s like being a Marine, but in space.

A certain mindset skims a bit of cyberpunk fiction and thinks the future will be amazing, because Ruby-coding skills will clearly translate to proficiency with katanas. You know, katanas.

A certain mindset learns a little about the Victorian era and is instantly off in a fantasy of brass-goggled Gentlemen Aviators, at once dapper and wind-swept, tending the Tesla apparatus on their rigid airship. All art in the genre carries the tacit disclaimer in its caption, “(Not pictured: cholera.)” In the designation steampunk, the -punk has nothing to do with anarchy (in the UK or elsewhere), the suffix having been conventionalized into a mere signifier of anachronism. A steampunk condo development promises units for the reasonable price of 2 to 7.5 million dollars apiece.

[To be fair, Gibson and Sterling’s The Difference Engine (1990), which is in some part responsible for the whole wibbly-wobbly steamery-punkery, did spend some of its time with the run-down and the passed-over. It also, I’m guessing unintentionally, underscored the incoherence of the premise, when in its final pages, Ada Lovelace describes a fanciful notion of the late Charles Babbage, whose fictional version dreamed of doing computation with electricity. The fictional Babbage’s never-implemented plan relied on such hypothetical devices as resistors and capacitors. The book’s plot begins in 1855; the Leyden jar was invented 110 years earlier. Carl Friedrich Gauss built a working telegraph years before the historical Babbage even designed his Analytical Engine. But our aesthetic can’t allow that, of course.]

It is against this background that we should read “Silicon Valley is a Science Fictional Utopia,” a recent piece in Model View Culture. I have enjoyed and appreciated MVC quite a bit in the past few months, which is why I was rather flummoxed to find a statement in that essay that just refused to parse. The overall thesis sounds roughly right to me, but not all the examples seem to fit as written. Here’s the part that jumped out at me:
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