Video - Consider Again That Pale Blue Dot

I've said this before, but one of my favorite images is the famous "Pale Blue Dot" picture of Earth. This second video in callumCGLP's (Callum Sutherland) tribute series to Carl Sagan revisits the image that Sagan first so eloquently spoke about in his Cosmos series. In this video, Sagan deconstructs humanity's narcissism, comparing the inflated opinion of our position in the universe promulgated by humans through the millennia, backed by tradition and embedded in our faiths to the truth revealed by the image of the Earth, small and insignificant, floating alone in space.

As Sagan points out, there are more stars in the universe than grains of sand on all the beaches of all the world. He predicted that there would be worlds surrounding many of them, and subsequent investigation has confirmed this. As he made this prediction before his death in 1996, he had no way of knowing that planets would turn out to be not just common, but extraordinarily so. And he predicted that many of those planets would contain life. As he states in this video, humans have had a self-absorbed myopia that has caused us to accord ourselves a special place in the universe - a notion that has only recently be set aside by those willing to accept the scientific evidence of our inconsequentiality. One wonders, on those countless planets, how often life has evolved and developed intelligence, and when it has, do they engage in the same self-absorbed foolishness? Do they consider the universe to be the special creation made just for their benefit? Are all intelligent races as petty and small as we, or is this a uniquely human failing? Would it be more comforting to find that we are not alone in this foolishness, or that other intelligences are wiser than we? I don't know. Unless and until we actually communicate with an alien intelligence, we will never know.

Previous video in the series: A Universe Not Made For Us.
Subsequent video in the series: Wanderers.

Video - A Universe Not Made for Us

Though he's been dead for fourteen years now, there are still few people who can speak more eloquently about the tension between science and superstition than Carl Sagan. Sagan had the uncanny ability to distill the conflict down to its essential points and convey both the majesty of the reality of the universe revealed by science, and the petty and provincial smallness of the explanations most religions developed, and which many people continue to adhere to.

YouTube user callumCGLP (Callum Sutherland) has put together a series of tribute videos featuring Sagan. In this first one, Sagan takes the anthropomorphic visions contained in religious traditions to task, exposing both their falsity and their confined vision constrained by the limited imaginations of the innocently ignorant people who promulgated them. As Sagan notes, a few hundred years ago there was no shame in clinging to these concepts, we simply didn't have the tools to evaluate or understand the reality of the universe. But today we have a much clearer understanding, and mountains of evidence showing that the universe is older and grander than even the most fanciful superstition could have imagined, and also apparently entirely indifferent to our existence.

And of course, it is that apparent indifference that seems to cause many people to reject the reality that evidence points towards and attempt to substitute their fantasies of Gods and gardens and cosmic eggs and so on. It gives a false significance to their lives to believe that the universe was somehow created for them, and that there is a cosmic entity out there that cares. But this shrinks paradoxically the universe to pettiness, sapping the weight that this supposed significance grants to the believer. I'll stand with Sagan on this issue - the universe is bigger and more awesome than any religious tradition, and if we accept the meaning in our lives is constrained by the triviality that accompanies such superstition, then we are surrendering the greater meaning that science has given us - that our fate is in our own hands, and depends upon how we use the knowledge that generations have fought so hard to acquire.

This is the biggest dream ever dreamed by man: the universe does not care and our future is what we make of it. We should embrace this rather than clinging to mythology and sheilding our minds in self-imposed darkness.

Subsequent video in the series: Consider Again That Pale Blue Dot.

Review - PushBack by Alfred Wellnitz

Short review: A near future techno-thriller that seems to be more like an outline for a trilogy of books than a book in itself.

Haiku
Economy collapse
Leads to neo-Nazi rule
And freedom fighters

Disclosure: I received this book as part of the LibraryThing Member Giveaway program. Some people think this may bias a reviewer so I am making sure to put this information up front. I don't think it biases my reviews, but I'll let others be the judge of that.

Full review: PushBack is a near future thriller that presents a modestly interesting premise, but is ultimately an entirely frustrating book that accomplishes the rare feat of providing the reader both too much and not enough information. Though the events of the book are set in the 2030s, I wouldn't classify the book as science fiction, as there isn't really much meaningful difference between the posited future and the present, which is one of the first things that undermines the believability of the book. Given the substantial technological and cultural changes that have taken place between 1986 and now, it simply seems implausible that so little would change between 2010 and 2034 which serves to start the book off on the wrong foot.

The premise and plot of the book is fairly straightforward. The dollar depreciates drastically in value leading to the breakup and Balkanization of the United States. One of the successor states is taken over by white supremacist government led by a thinly disguised analogue of Adolf Hitler and backed by Russian oil money, and then proceeds to discriminate against and then expel or inter all the black residents under their authority. In response, black dissidents organize an insurrection that culminates in a reverse of The Sum of All Fears with the heroes planting a nuclear device and trying to set it off before the bad guys get wind of their plans and stop them.

But the book falls into an unfortunate middle ground between providing too much detail concerning the events leading from the present day status quo to the imagined situation of the future and not enough. In general, it seems as though a writer needs to choose between giving this sort of background cursory attention, as Heinlein did with background in stories like -If This Goes On and Friday, or devoting the bulk of the book to it. But Wellnitz spends almost the whole first 100 pages setting up the back story - in that span the dollar undergoes hyperinflation, the United States disintegrates, the CAN Party takes over the Federated States (basically comprised of the Confederacy minus Florida and Texas), and blacks are evicted from the region. There is a habit among some writers that having done a lot of research for their book, they want to show the reader all of their work, even the work that is mostly extraneous to the story. It is clear that Wellnitz developed a detailed timeline for the events in the series, but all too often he feels compelled to include this sort of detail in the book, which bogs the narrative down. For example:

"Three days after the planning meeting, Richard Robert Robinson messaged the group that he had negotiated the use of a storage building at the Macon cotton farm from 6:00 p.m. on August 5 to 6:00 a.m. on August 6. There would be a ton of ammonium nitrate in the building on August 5. Cost for the use of the building and the fertilizer: a non-negotiable ten thousand euros.

John informed the team that they had the use of the Federated Laundry Company truck starting at noon on August 5.

On July 16, John Renner drove down to Waycross, Georgia, to pick up a package that had been smuggled into the country through the Okefenokee Swamp. The package contained two detonators and a timer to be used in the bomb.

On the evening of August 5, Kevin Johnson, Richard Robert Robinson, and John Renner . . . ."

And so on. The book is littered with dates, details and lots of motion by the characters. But most of the detail is simply irrelevant. The reader doesn't need to know every instance in which the Black Resistance was in a specific place on specific dates from one specific time to another specific time. This sort of detail is more or less busywork the reader has to slog through that does little to advance the plot or develop the characters. While keeping the timeline straight might be important for the author to keep the story consistent, I found the inclusion of a constant stream of dates and logistical details to be distracting and tedious. It doesn't really add much to the story to let the reader know that at a meeting one participant had wine, two others had beer, and the last had a diet coke.

And the further problem is that adding lots of detail often simply raised more questions that were not answered. The political crisis of the story is precipitated by the massive devaluation of the dollar. But the reason for this hyperinflation is not addressed. The United States disintegrates in a handful of paragraphs and all of the successor states solve the currency crisis by adopting a new currency and immediately pegging it to the euro. But this just causes the reader to wonder if this solution was really that simple, why didn't the United States government do that to begin with? Further, in a world in which the dollar has become valueless, the idea that the euro would be a model of stability seems rather far-fetched (especially in light of the current struggles the EU is having keeping the euro afloat). Through the story it is reinforced that while the components of the former United States are suffering from a massive depression, the rest of the world is doing much better - the CAN Party is financed by a Russia apparently awash in cash, while in Central America a character is told by a local that the tourist business is kept going by vacationing Europeans, and so on. Given the massive financial and commercial interconnections between the United States and the rest of the world, including Europe, this seems implausible in the extreme. The Federated States are supposedly able to pull out of the economic malaise the rest of the successor states are mired in on the strength of becoming a transit point for imported Russian oil. But this also seems implausible. Nations in this position, such as, for example, Ukraine, do have money flowing through them, but the industry employs so few people that in general they still have unemployment problems, and non-oil related industries are not really buoyed by the presence of oil pipelines and ports. Wellnitz simply doesn't provide enough information to back up his assertions concerning his imagined reality. There is a dangerous middle ground that an author can fall into, in which he gives enough detail to raise questions, but not enough for the reader to be satisfied with the answers to those questions, and PushBack sits right in the center of that territory.

Sapping a little more energy from the book is the fact that the CAN Party, which takes control of the Federated States via a Russian backed coup d'etat, is such a close analogue of the Nazi Party. Carl Haas, the head of the CAN Party stands in for Hitler, and like Hitler he is a vegetarian teetotaler who is a weak public speaker who practices his routines in front of a full length mirror. The plan to remove or imprison all black inhabitants from the Federated States is labelled the "Ultimate Solution", paralleling the Nazi created "Final Solution" to do much the same thing to Jews in Germany. Towards the end of the book, Wellnitz throws aside any semblance of disguising the parallel and begins calling the guards that surround Carl Haas "SS guards". But making the CAN Party of the imagined 2030s such a thinly disguised version of the German Nazi Party of the actual 1930s causes the reader to wonder exactly why one would read this book as opposed to just picking up a text covering the history of the Third Reich.

Despite throwing tons of detail and an imitation Nazi Party headed by an imitation Adolf Hitler, the book seems strangely empty. Most of the characters are so bland that there is no one for the reader to really root of or against in any but the most general manner. John Renner, the putative hero of the book, opposes the CAN Party because he is black and they killed his girlfriend. But the girlfriend is so hastily introduced and then bumped off that one never really gets to know her character, and thus the reader doesn't share Renner's outrage at her death. On the other side, while Carl Haas shows up several times, he is too distant from the machinations of intrigue to be a useful villain, and all of the intelligence operatives used by the Federated States come and go too quickly for the reader to build up any sort of animus against them. All too often the reader is told about events without having a character to follow as they live through them - for example while we are told that black residents in the Federated States who remain in its borders are interred in concentration camps, this is presented in an abstract way. Giving the reader a character to follow into the camps and experience first hand the nastiness of the CAN Party would have made the evil more real to the reader. As the old saying goes, a single death is a tragedy, a million deaths is a statistic. Over and over again Wellnitz gives the reader statistics rather than tragedies. In general, the characters mostly enter and leave the story too quickly to be developed as much more than caricatures, and the few who do stick around are just not that interesting.

I'll also mention two story elements that really stuck out as poorly done. The first relates to the resistance to the CAN Party rule of the Federated States, which is dubbed the "Freedom Legion". Several times, Freedom Legion members pull a business card with their name and a Freedom Legion logo out of their pocket and show it to a potential recruit in order to convince them to join. This just seems so stupid that it is hard to see how the Freedom Legion could survive. When you are a member of a clandestine organization seeking to overthrow an authoritarian government, the last thing you would want to do is carry a business card with your name on it identifying you as a member of the resistance. Every time a Freedom Legion member whipped out their monogrammed card identifying themselves as what the CAN Party would label an anti-government terrorist, I imagined that they must lose most of their members to random roadblocks when the Federated States police rifle through their purses and wallets to find their neatly printed tickets to the gas chamber.

The second problem story element is the final resolution. Given that the illustration on cover of the book, it doesn't seem like much of a spoiler to let the cat out of the bag and reveal that the Freedom Legion smuggles a tactical nuclear device into Atlanta and detonates it. While the attack does serve to decapitate the CAN Party, it kills a couple hundred thousand people in the process. Immediately afterwards, the Freedom Legion takes credit for the blast and moves in to take over. But one would think that no matter how despised the CAN Party might be, killing a couple hundred thousand people would have huge negative political repercussions. It is likely that everyone in the Federated States would have had family members or close friends killed in the attack, which would probably spark a huge negative reaction to the Freedom Legion. Yet the book ends on a Pollyannaish note, with everyone pretty much feeling full of happiness and rainbows and the Freedom Legion riding in on a white horse to save everyone. But at this juncture, when what would likely be the beginning of the real political and logistical heavy lifting, the story ends.

While the premise of the story - a band of freedom fighters smuggles a nuclear bomb into an autocratic successor state to the defunct United States- is interesting, the execution of the book is simply lacking. The book is loaded with lots of little details, but leaves too many larger questions simply unanswered, or provides answers that simply don't make any sense when subjected to any scrutiny. Because it is loaded with lists of dates detailing exactly when events happen, complete with piles of logistical data, the book feels more like an outline for a series of books than a completed work in itself. If Wellnitz had fleshed out the book by filling in these gaps while giving the reader better focus characters, this could have been a compelling series of thrillers. As it is, the book is simply a collection of frustratingly unrealized promises.

Alfred Wellnitz     Book Reviews A-Z     Home

Review - Farscape: Exodus from Genesis (Season 1, Episode 3)

Clueless Crichton

"We will cut off the tip of our small finger for identification." - Ka D'Argo
"How about something a little less permanent?" - John Crichton

Short review: An infestation of bugs! Clones! Peacekeeper commandos! Rygel saves the day! Wait, what?

Haiku
Bugs infest Moya
Aeryn thinks John is useless
Sebacian heat death

Full review: The third episode of Farscape opens with D'Argo thrusting a slug into Crichton's mouth. Okay, that sounds more like soft core porn than it really is. The real effect of this scene is to bring the Farscape universe to life, since the slug is actually a "dentic", a bio engineered creature that various races use to clean their teeth, and D'Argo is responding to Crichton's complaint that he has been unable to get a toothbrush. The dentic apparently climbs around in the user's mouth and eats all of the foreign particles that are found there, answering the question "how do Moya's crew keep their teeth clean". While the stories contained in the episodes of the series are almost always at least good, and often great, it is moments like these where little details about the characters and their lives are filled in that make the series stand out.

The action then moves to the control center with Moya lurking behind a luminous cloud hiding from a strange looking little boxy spacecraft. As John Crichton (Ben Browder) serves as both the protagonist and the clueless new guy, the other characters are able to fill him (and the audience) in on the situation by explaining that the ship is a Peacekeeper Marauder scout ship filled with commandos, and likely hunting for Moya. Crichton then shows he's not completely clueless by asking how fast it is, and actually understanding the answer that Aeryn Soon (Claudia Black) gives him. Leaving aside the strange oddity that Moya is able to see the Peacekeepers while the scout ship's detection equipment is apparently completely befuddled by the luminous cloud, having this episode follow directly after I, E.T. (read review) reinforces the critical necessity of removing the Peacekeeper beacon from Moya. This is yet another reason why moving I, E.T. to later in the season made no sense.

But to get the A plot of the episode going, after the Marauder loses interest in scanning the cloud and heads off, the bulk of the cloud flows into Moya when the crew's back is turned, which leads to one of the huge plot holes in the episode. That a massive volume of particles could infest Moya without Aeryn, Crichton, D'Argo (Anthony Simcoe), Zhaan (Virginia Hey), and Rygel (Jonathan Hardy) noticing is fairly explainable. But it seems almost inexplicable that Moya herself would not notice this, and almost as inexplicable that Pilot (Lani Tupu) would not, since Pilot is directly connected to Moya's neurological system. Like the apparently weak sensor equipment carried by the Marauder, Moya appears to have fairly limited means of detecting outside threats when the plot demands it.


Moya is infested and Crichton is jumpy

A friend of mine has a mental game he plays called "spot the Star Trek: The Next Generation spec script that was repurposed for this other science fiction show". In general, Farscape avoids this, primarily because as the series progresses the quirky and specific personalities of the Farscape characters become such a critical and dominant element of the series, and the series becomes decidedly darker than any Star Trek series would be allowed to get. However, early in the series there were a couple instances where it seems like this happened. The A plot of Exodus from Genesis appears to be one of those instances, and the bizarre limitation of Moya's ability to feel an influx of parasites probably stems from that. The plot proceeds, as the infestation becomes a mysterious problem for the crew that eventually becomes apparent when Crichton captures a very large bug-like creature in his room, and Zhaan discovers that it was carrying his DNA. From there the story proceeds more or less like a typical Star Trek episode as the crew first misunderstands the nature of the problem they are confronting, eventually realizes their error, and finally discovers a more or less satisfactory way to solve it.

One Aeryn is dead. The other isn't doing much better

However, what sets Farscape in general, and this episode specifically, apart from being a mere Star Trek clone is that the A plot dovetails with the B plot and provides for numerous opportunities for character development. Some of these are small, such as D'Argo's reaction when confronted with the need to identify the crew amidst identical copies, or Pilot's outrage when D'Argo cuts into Moya without warning to get through a bulkhead. But this episode reveals one element that will loom large for much of the rest of the series: Sebacians are unable to regulate their body temperature, which becomes a critical element when the ship is invaded by the B plot in the form of the Marauder crew of Peacekeeper commandos. As Aeryn explains, when subjected to high temperatures, Sebaceans become disoriented, begin to lose their short term memory, and eventually lose their long term memory and finally enter an apparently irreversible state they call the "living death". Since one of the elements of the A plot is that the temperature on Moya is being systematically raised despite the crew's efforts to to lower it, when the Peacekeeper commandos board, the crew cranks up the temperature even more.

"We can't regulate our body temperature,
but our eyeshadow is STUNNING!"

This fundamental weakness of the Sebaceans makes me wonder how they are supposed to have become a military powerhouse. Since every crew member aboard Moya other than Crichton seems to regard this little bit of information about Sebacean physiology as common knowledge, one wonders why the standard operating procedure of any ship boarded by Peacekeeper troops isn't to simply pull their people back and crank up the temperature until the Sebaceans pass out from heat exhaustion. Even sillier, the vaunted Peacekeeper commandos don't seem to have any plan for dealing with the rather obvious ploy other than stumble about the ship while their mascara runs. Because while they seem not to have any idea how to respond to an enemy that uses their obvious weakness against them, they apparently made sure to apply their eye make-up before they went out to kill people. As seems to have happened in most of the early episodes of Farscape featuring Peacekeepers other than Aeryn, the costuming choices for these invading Peacekeepers are somewhat unfortunate, making them look goofy rather than menacing. In addition to the aforementioned heavy use of eyeshadow, the commandos are all clad in leather pants that are so bulky they all look like they are wearing adult diapers. On the other hand, this episode appears to be the first one that includes a recognizable pulse pistol, which is something of a milestone given how connected this weapon will become to Crichton's character.

"There are worse ways to end the day" - John Crichton

So, in the end, the somewhat laughable Peacekeeper commandos are sent packing in a fairly upbeat ending in which no one who isn't replaceable dies, everyone pretty much gets everything they want, and everything returns to the status quo ante. As becomes apparent in later episodes, this is just about as good as things get for the crew of Moya. In the meantime, Aeryn has established the beginning of a working relationship with Pilot, Crichton gets to display some snarky humor (especially when fighting himself), Rygel gets his ego stroked and a boost of confidence, and Aeryn begrudgingly recognizes that Crichton, as a lesser species, might possibly have some value. The show also closes by establishing one of my favorite locations on Moya, the observation deck, where by some form of advanced technology that characters can stand seemingly exposed to space on top of the ship with a panoramic view of the outside universe. Despite this, Exodus from Genesis is not a particularly strong episode of the show, which makes the network decision to replace I, E.T. in the airing schedule with this episode even more perplexing. While the character development and world-building are, as usual for Farscape, a strong point, the rest of the episode is pretty forgettable.

Previous episode reviewed: I, E.T.
Subsequent episode reviewed: Throne for a Loss

Previous episode reviewed (airdate order): Premiere

Subsequent episode reviewed (airdate order): Back and Back and Back to the Future

Farscape, Season 1     Farscape     Television Reviews     Home

Review - Farscape: I, E.T. (Season 1, Episode 2)

Crichton gets to know the natives

"Aquatic – that's water, not mud! Mud is... mud! You can't breathe in it, you can't move in it. It holds you, it grabs you, it sucks you down! You wanna know about mud? I know about mud!" - Dominar Rygel XVI

"The guy knows mud." - John Crichton

Short review: Efforts to remove a Peacekeeper beacon force Moya's crew to land on an unknown planet and tangle with the natives.

Haiku
Moya on a world
With xenophobic natives
Crichton meets locals

Full review: Television executives have a pretty extensive record of jerking science fiction shows around. The most recent example being, of course, the premature cancellation of Stargate: Universe by the badly misnamed SyFy channel, done at a point in which it was impossible for the show producers to even try to come up with a way to wrap up the series in any way. The mistreatment Firefly received at the hands of clueless FOX executives is almost legendary. Even a show as successful as Babylon 5 suffered too - having to shift networks in order to fund a fifth season (and the uncertainty surrounding whether there would be a fifth season cost the show the services of Claudia Christian, and thus the character of Susan Ivanova who was one of the best characters on the show, to be replaced with the forgettable Elizabeth Lochley played by Tracy Scoggins). And most science fiction fans are aware of the colossal interference TNT executives engaged in during the production of the Babylon 5 spin-off Crusade, which was probably the major factor in dooming the show to oblivion. And of course Farscape had its own cancellation screw over from the idiotic SyFy executives, which will be detailed in full when I get to Season 4.

But science fiction shows often are screwed with in smaller ways too. Many of Babylon 5's seasons were oddly broken up, destroying the narrative arc of the stories told within each of the seasons. For poorly thought out reasons, the last several episodes of each season would often be held back until just before the new season started. The theory was to "build up" interest in the new season. But each season built up more or less to a cliffhanger final episode which was intended to keep the viewer on edge for the months between seasons, and often had several character development stories in the middle of the season. So what this strategy really did was to "end" the season on a nondescript character building episode and kill the impact of the cliffhanger. So what all this has been building up to is that in the original run of Farscape the episode I, E.T. was a victim of this sort of network cluelessness. Although this episode was filmed and intended to be shown as the second episode in the series, immediately following Premiere (read review) (and is placed in that position in the Season 1 DVD set), it was shown seventh in the season by the network.

This may seem like a small issue, moving a single episode early in a show's run to a slightly later point in the initial season, but because the episode is set so early in the first season of the show, moving it creates some pretty annoying character continuity problems. Most of the early episodes of Farscape are spent establishing the interrelationships between the various alien characters and John Crichton (Ben Browder), and showing Crichton becoming acclimatized to his new environment. By the time this episode was shown in the initial run, many of these relationships had been established and Crichton was beginning to settle in to life aboard Moya, but by jumping backwards to show this episode out of order, all of that character development was wiped away. I suspect that network executives simply hold science fiction viewers in contempt, figuring that anyone who like the genre is just interested in flashy explosions and cool spaceships, so character development and world building are unimportant. If so, I'll take this opportunity to disabuse any network executives who happen to read this of this notion: Science fiction fans appear to consider these elements to be substantially more important than the average viewer (otherwise one would be hard pressed to explain, for example, the soft spot so many science fiction fans hold for the classic Doctor Who series). Fortunately, when one watches the show now, one can watch the episodes in their intended order and the idiocy forced upon us by stupid SyFy executives is no longer a problem.


Moya, the living ship

In addition to all of the character development problems caused by shifting the show later in the season, the plot of I, E.T. simply fits much better early in the series. The show opens with all of Moya ringing with the sound of an alarm, which is quickly identified as a Peacekeeper tracking beacon designed to aid in hunting down escaped Leviathans. In a bit of physical humor, the alarm also causes Crichton's eye to twitch uncontrollably. After determining that the alarm is broadcasting their position for anyone listening to hear, that it cannot be shut down with a DRD, and that the device is located in a sensitive and critical part of Moya's anatomy, the characters decide to try to muffle the alarm by setting down on a nearby swampy planet and cover the hull in mud, much to Rygel's consternation. As an aside, during this part of the show, Claudia Black playing Aeryn Soon makes a minor continuity error when she uses the mild expletive "crap" where "dren" would have been the in-character word to use. If the show had originally been shown in its intended order, this probably would have gone entirely unnoticed, as the Farscape-specific set of expletives (basically the words "frell" and "dren") would have not yet been established. As it is, it sticks out as a funny little gaffe, although an excusable one.

Once the ship has landed, Moya's crew have to figure out how to remove the beacon without killing the ship. This conundrum gives every crew member a chance to get a little character development: the beacon is in a location too confined for anyone by Rygel (Jonathan Hardy) to reach, to relive Moya's agony during the operation Zhaan (Virginia Hey) is revealed to have the ability to share another being's pain, to distract and evade some locals who turn up to investigate their arrival Aeryn and D'Argo (Anthony Simcoe) are able to show off their military skills, and to hunt down a tranquilizer to numb Moya, Crichton gets to be an alien planet's first extraterrestrial contact. As John Crichton is the primary protagonist in the series, this last element dominates the show, and it dovetails thematically with the events in Premiere. Whereas Crichton was confronted with making first contact on behalf of humanity in the previous episode, here he takes on the role of the visitor from another planet. And he handles it with his usual awkwardness - botching things up, patching them together again, and generally bumbling through until he figures out something somewhat satisfactory. As it is, this provides a perfect thematic counterpoint to Premiere, giving Crichton the opportunity to deal with someone who is more provincial than himself, giving a view of the alien-human relationship that is the reverse of the one that dominated the first episode (and which will dominate much of at least the first season of the show).

While Crichton is off socializing with the natives, the story manages to pack in a fair amount of character points for the other members of Moya's crew. The show pairs Rygel and Zhaan in the operation to remove the beacon from Moya's internal organs, while Aeryn and D'Argo are paired up acting as impromptu commandos to deal with the locals. These pairings allow the characters to both develop their own character - for example Rygel's insecurity in the face of his own incompetence - and establish relationships between the characters - as evidenced by Zhaan's patient prodding of Rygel to boost his confidence enough to get the job done (which is contrasted with Aeryn's rather direct attempt to force Rygel into undertaking the task). Among the strongest elements of Farscape are the strongly defined characters and the interactions of this disparate group thrown together by circumstances beyond their control, and even this early in the series these strong personalities begin to become evident. I believe it is also not a coincidence that while the various other characters mostly work together in pairs, Crichton is isolated on his own dealing with the unknown. This serves to tie the various other crew members of Moya together via the narrative flow of the story, while emphasizing Crichton's status as an outsider.

Although the episode might seem at first glace to be somewhat bland, since it mostly takes place on a fairly uninteresting looking planet and there are few flashy special effect sequences, it is one of the critical early going episodes for establishing the personalities of the rag-tag band that make up Moya's crew. This, combined with a healthy dollop of John Crichton navigating his way through unfamiliar waters with his usual mix of humor and incompetence, makes this a very enjoyable episode.

Previous episode reviewed: Premiere
Subsequent episode reviewed: Exodus from Genesis

Previous episode reviewed (airdate order): Thank God It's Friday, Again
Subsequent issue reviewed (airdate order): That Old Black Magic

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Review - Asimov's Science Fiction: Vol. 34, No. 8 (August 2010) by Sheila Williams (editor)

Stories included:
Crimes, Follies, Misfortunes, and Love by Ian Creasey
Warning Label by Alexander Jablokov
Slow Boat by Gregory Norman Bossert
Superluminosity by Alan Wall
The Lovely Ugly by Carol Emshwiller
The Little Battle of Little Big Science by Pamela Rentz
The Witch, the Tinman, the Flies by J.M. Sidorova
On the Horizon by Nick Wolven

Poems included:
Cultural Boundaries by F.J. Bergmann
A Wrong Turn by Elizabeth Penrose
The Great Peeloff by Qadira P. Garger

Full review: The August 2010 issue of Asimov's Science Fiction is a mixed bag of mostly decent stories. The issue is a little heavy on cyberpunk style dystopias, but also includes two decent time travel stories. As is often the case, one of the stories in the issue is not really a science fiction or fantasy story at all. In an unusual twist, it is probably also the best story in the issue.

Featured on the cover of the issue, The Lovely Ugly by Carol Emshwiller, is not a cyberpunk or time travel story, but instead deals with contact between aliens and humans from the perspective of the aliens. Told from this side of the story, the hubris of the human explorers is readily apparent, which seems to be the main point of the story, but the alien perspective is never entirely convincing. The secondary theme of the story, the lack of cross-species understanding, and how to bridge that gap, seems a little forced as well. Attempting to tell a story from a non-human perspective is a difficult endeavor at best, and Emshwiller manages to do it, but not well enough to make the story really work well.

Superluminosity by Alan Wall is a time travel story mixed in with a lover's spat. The story features a caution as to why it might not be a good idea to give someone who is angry with you too much power over your safety, although the design of the time machine in the story seems to me to have a severe design flaw (if one can signal that one is ready to return, why can one not simply trip the trigger that will cause you to return). Another story dealing with time travel, The Little Battle of Little Big Science by Pamela Rentz is actually a combination that includes both time travel and alternate history. Set in a alternate reality that assumes that Native American tribes control all scientific research, the protagonist is a scientist trying to impress her tribal elders enough to keep alive her project into building a time viewing machine. She confronts a collection of obstacles on her way to securing funding, but ends up realizing that others may not view the utility of her device in the same light she does. Although the premise is somewhat implausible, the story is interesting and enjoyable.

Crimes, Follies, Misfortunes, and Love by Ian Creasey is a post-apocalyptic story about the denizens of a post-industrial world sifting through the piles of mostly useless information left by people in blogs, Facebook profiles, and other data sources. Seen from the point of view of people struggling to survive, the current obsession with documenting the most mundane trivia of our lives seems both insane and compelling. While hunting for useful tidbits, the narrator of the story is also trying to uncover her own past in a society that frowns upon making new records. The story is full of melancholy and makes many of the same points Neal Stephenson made in Anathem concerning the obsession modern society has with trivial ephemera. Dealing with the overlod of information found in modern society from a different angle is the cyberpunk influenced Warning Label by Alexander Jablokov in which the protagonist tries to figure out the mystery of some inexplicably missing data. The story highlights the avalanche of useless information that we are already inundated with, and carries this element of modern society to an extreme that is both humorous and disturbing.

Another story told with cyberpunk sensibilities is Slow Boat by Gregory Norman Bossert featuring a kidnapped data hacker who finds herself on the titular slow boat to Mars. Combining the background of a Gibson story with the problem solving plot of a classic work by Asimov or Niven, the story is both funny and suspenseful. Another story with cyberpunk overtones is On the Horizon by Nick Wolven, a murder mystery set in a dystopian United States in which cities have become unmanageable regions turned over to gangs, and the agrivcultural industry has officially set about treating the illegal immigrants who work its fields in a manner reminiscient of the treatment of black slaves in the antebellum South. The protagonist is a felon turned into an empath to serve the government by hunting down other felons. The murder that dirves the plot merely serves as a backdrop for the political points being made by the author in a fairly heavy-handed manner, and as a result the story, while somewhat scary, has far less impact than it might have.

By far the most frightening story in the issue is The Witch, the Tinman, the Flies by J. M. Sidorova. The story, demonstrating the dangers of State adherence to a dubious scientific theory is almost not science fiction, and yet fits in the issue anyway. Set in the Soviet Union during World War II, a period during which official Soviet support was handed to the crackpot theory of Lysenkoism, and research into genetics was banned and suppressed. The story is told from the perspective of a young girl who befriends a geneticist keeping her head down to avoid notice by the NKVD. The story is chilling because it is so close to reality, and offers a strong statement on the dangers of accepting unscientific ideas in lieu of actual science. Given the debates working their way across the United States today concerning the teaching of actual biology as opposed to fairy tales like Intelligent Design, the story hits close to home.

Although the cyberpunk theme gets a little repetitive, the variety within that subgenre keeps the issue from getting tedious. While The Witch, the Tinman, the Flies is the only truly stand-out story in the issue, most of the rest are pretty good. Even stories such as The Lovely Ugly and On the Horizon are, at worst, moderate disappointments that tried for greatness and came up short. As a result, this is a moderately good issue of Asimov's Science Fiction and should be a decent read for any science fiction fan.

Previous issue reviewed: July 2010
Subsequent issue reviewed: September 2010

Asimov's     Sheila Williams     Magazine Reviews     Home

Review - Analog Science Fiction and Fact: Vol. CXXX, No. 9 (September 2010) by Stanley Schmidt (editor)

Stories included:
That Leviathan, Whom Thou Hast Made by Eric James Stone
Pupa by David D. Levine
Eight Miles by Sean McMullen
Spludge by Richard A. Lovett
Red Letter Day by Kristine Kathryn Rusch
Flotsam by K.C. Ball
The View from the Top by Jerry Oltion
Sandbagging by Kyle Kirkland

Science fact articles included:
Bad Medicine: When Medical Research Goes Wrong by H. G. Stratmann

Full review: The September 2010 issue of Analog Science Fiction and Fact is another example of the overall good quality of this magazine. Although it is weighed down by a lacklustre science fact article and a couple of mediocre stories, the high quality of the remainder of the issue more than makes up for these minor missteps.

That Leviathan, Whom Thou Hast Made by Eric James Stone is another entry into the odd field of Mormon based science fiction (seriously, what is it about Mormonism that seems to drive people to include it as an element in science fiction stories). In this story, an LDS member working on humanity's colony on the Sun tends to his flock of Solarian converts. The Solarians are the leviathan creatures of the title, giant hydrogen creatures that inhabit the insides of stars and who make interstellar travel possible. Humanity's attempts to convert these creatures to its faiths does not go unnoticed, and the conflict over religious freedom forms the core of the story. The story isn't bad, but it isn't particularly interesting either, falling back onto some fairly tired religious cliches in its resolution, although one character does point out that the main character has placed God into a no lose position with respect to the various potential outcomes, making the actions attributed to God less than convincing as demonstrations of God's power.

Pupa by David D. Levine is another story dealing with alien interaction with humans, this time told from the perspective of an alien who has to transcend the cultural and biological limitations of its species in order to ensure its own survival and the survival of its siblings. Humans in the story are looming giants, frightening and inscrutable, so the alien interacts with a child, albeit a fairly well-placed child. The only real problem with the story is that the humans the alien interacts with are so clearly intended to be members of Barack Obama's administration and family that the story probably won't age particularly gracefully. This is a shame, because the story concerning the alien and its culture is quite interesting and told quite well. Spludge by Richard A. Lovett is yet another alien contact story, this time told with a humorous bent as a long time practical joker figures out that the aliens who have landed may not be exactly what they seem to be. There's nothing particularly insightful about the story, it is merely a somewhat humorous interlude in the issue.

Probably the most memorable story in the issue is Red Letter Day by Kristine Kathryn Rusch, which tackles the long pondered question of the morality of time-travel. In short, the story poses the question: if you could send one piece of information back to your past self what would you tell them? More importantly, would you tell yourself anything? And if you did tell yourself something, could it cause more trouble than the danger you were trying to warn against? The story is set in a world in which such time travel is a reality, and everyone is allowed to send one letter back to their high school self when they turn fifty years old. Of course, some high schoolers don't get a letter, but instead get the so-called red letter indicating nothing was sent for them. The characters in the story are a group of these students, as they deal with the implications of the absence of communication from their future selves.

Flotsam by K.C. Ball is an old-fashioned engineering puzzle story, as a crew of space salvage workers must figure out a way to survive an accident in space that has crippled their ship. Typical of these stories, the fun in reading them stems from watching the characters unravel the problem they are confronted with and coming up with a solution using the tools at hand in Apollo 13 style. The solution the characters in this story come up with is pretty basic, but would probably work, and the story on the whole is pretty satisfying, if unspectacular. The View from the Top by Jerry Oltion is also something of an engineering puzzle story, although less obviously so. In this story, an astronaut assigned to a tour aboard the International Space Station finds himself subject to uncontrollable fits of emotion, and must either figure out how to get them under control or be forced to end his time in space prematurely. I'm not sure that the cause and solution that the characters arrive at is plausible, but I don't know enough about the specific science involved to state that it is implausible either. Decent characterization and good story-telling make the story pretty good either way.

Sandbagging by Kyle Kirkland is a dystopian tale in which the best of intentions have placed humanity's future in peril. Having turned all decision-making over to an orbiting computer, humanity finds itself subject to some unpleasant decisions made by its new overlord. Having already had most power sources turned off, humanity faces the possibility of mass genocide directed by its supposedly benevolent computer ruler, and the characters in the story, a set of professors and graduate students at the "University for Advanced Research" must cope with this information as well as the continuing academic squabbles over research. The conclusion of the story reminded me to a certain extent of the conclusion in Stand on Zanzibar, and any story that reminds me of that book is a pretty good one. Coming from an entirely different, but equally enjoyable angle is Eight Miles by Sean McMullen, in which a balloonist in Victorian England is hired by a wealthy Baron to hoist an unusual passenger up to high altitudes. The story seems influenced in equal parts by Edgar Rice Burroughs and Jules Verne, with plenty of Victorian gadgetry and planetary romance as well as a nefarious plot that the heroic protagonist must foil. Though it isn't anything more than a fun yarn, it is a really good fun yarn, and thus it is quite enjoyable to read.

The science fact article in this issue is Bad Medicine: When Medical Research Goes Wrong by H. G. Stratmann. Like most science fact articles focused on medical developments, it is fairly dry and bland. Put bluntly, although Stratmann does his best, there is almost no way to make an article that explores the failures of medical research as interesting as one concerning new discoveries in astronomy or developments in alternative energy. Still, the article is replete with useful factual information, and covers the intended subject fairly well.

Despite the dull and dry nature of Bad Medicine, and the moderately tedious nature of That Leviathan, the rest of the issue is quite good. Both Red Letter Day and Sandbagging are superior stories, and Eight Miles and Pupa are above average. Even the engineering puzzle stories are well-executed, making them enjoyable to read. Overall, this is yet another good issue of a good publication.

Note: This volume contains That Leviathan, Whom Thous Hast Made by Eric James Stone and Eight Miles by Sean McMullen, both 2011 nominees for the Hugo Award for Best Novelette.

Previous issue reviewed: July/August 2010
Subsequent issue reviewed: October 2010

2011 Hugo Award Nominees

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Review - The California Voodoo Game by Larry Niven and Steven Barnes

Short review: Set in the same future as Dream Park, the players return to the bigger and better game, but there is a murderer amongst their midst yet again.

Haiku
Role-playing again
Combined with murder intrigue
Plus voodoo magic

Full review: The California Voodoo Game is the third and final book written by Larry Niven and Steven Barnes revolving around elaborate live-action computer aided role-playing games. The book follows Dream Park and The Barsoom Project, and includes many of the same characters from those books. While the story is decent, there is something of a "been there, done that" quality to the story, as the basic plot of the book is once again a murder mystery set against the backdrop of an ongoing and high-profile gaming session.

The background of the Dream Park world is fairly straightforward. In the future, computer and hologram technology allows for the creation of elaborate illusions that permit the creation of interactive scenarios in which participants can act out fantastical stories. Gamers become celebrities, acting out their adventures which are broadcast for the consumption of their fans. As a strange sort of side element, the Dream Park corporation, which runs one of the most sophisticated (and expensive to use) gaming sites in the world decides to get involved in an attempt to colonize Mars (an element introduced and explored in some depth in the book The Barsoom Project). In each of the the Dream Park books, the plot of the story is framed by an ongoing game, with the players in the game, the gamemasters, and the various employees tasked with making the game run smoothly serving as the focal characters.

As an aside, I'll note that the nature of the gamers themselves, as portrayed in these books, irks me to a certain extent. As presented in the book, most of the players in these elaborate role-playing games are presented as superior athletes trained in fencing, martial arts, mountain climbing, and a variety of other physical skills. In this way, they are little different than most professional athletes of the modern day. While this may be a reasonable supposition, it is somewhat disappointing as people who are world class fencers, martial artists, and mountain climbers already have high profile showcases for their talents. While there are certainly role-playing gamers who are quite physically fit and who have a variety of physical skills, many of them are far from what one would call world class athletes. One thing missing from the stories is the idea that people become role-playing gamers so that they can imagine themselves doing things that they actually could not do. While some of the gamers in the book make a distinction between themselves and their characters, the characters they portray are much more like avatars of themselves than they are alternate identities that they play. One character returning from previous books in this one had actually joined the Army in order to make himself physically fit for the game, because his lack of physical conditioning hampered him in previous installments in the series. The one character in the story that seems most like an actual role-playing gamer is treated with some disdain by the other players in the game because of his lack of physical fitness. In short, rather than books about role-playing gamers getting to play out their dreams via technology, the Dream Park universe simply gives the physically gifted yet one more venue to showcase their talents.

The story itself is more or less evenly bifurcated between the events in the role-playing game and the investigation into the murder of a Barsoom Project employee. The book does not make the identity of the murderer a mystery in any way. The only real mystery in this element of the story is why the murder was committed rather than who committed it. Even though the reader knows the identity of the murder, the characters in the book do not, making reading the book a little like watching an episode of Law and Order: Criminal Intent as one follows the investigators on their quest to uncover the information that the reader already is privy to. As the murder mystery is unraveled, the layers of deception surrounding the real goal of the killer are stripped away, revealing to the reader the true intricacy of the villain's plot. In this respect, giving away the murderer's identity is necessary, as the story would have been impossible to follow otherwise. In the end, the murderer is revealed, his villainous plots foiled, and justice is served after a fashion.

The game that is played in parallel to the murder investigation is moderately interesting. As one might guess from the title of the book, the fantasy element of the game involves Voodoo, and it is a hodge-podge of just about every type of Voodoo imaginable, a fact that the authors freely acknowledge in the afterword to the book. In this book the game element of the story is transferred from the dream park facility to a ruined arcology in the California desert (which is something of a reference to the Niven and Pournelle collaboration Oath of Fealty). The size and scale of the place makes the game substantially larger than the games of previous books, giving the story a somewhat desperate air, as it seems like the authors are trying to outdo their previous efforts by upping the scale. As in previous books, the game element is somewhat overshadowed by the crime investigation - it is hard to continue to be primarily concerned with who will prevail over the imaginary Voodoo spirits when there are actual dead bodies to be investigated. In fact, the various rivalries and dominance games played by the players and game masters in the story makes them seem petty and obnoxious. As in the murder mystery, in the end goodness prevails in the game, cheating is punished, and life lessons are learned.

While this is a serviceable finale to the Dream Park series, and would most certainly please anyone who had read the earlier books in the series, it is probably good that the series ended with this book. With the recurring themes of industrial espionage and murder the series was beginning to run the risk of becoming overly repetitive, and highlighting a different somewhat obscure mythology in each book can only alleviate this problem so far. Despite the rapid advances in technology, it seems unlikely that anyone would create anything like the Dream Park facility, or at this point would want to, since I suspect that virtual reality technology could do the job just as well these days. Even so, following a bunch of high-strung athletes about while they unravel Cargo Cult, Eskimo, and Voodoo mythology is a diverting endeavor, and this book remains quite enjoyable.

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Review - Stealing from Each Other: How the Welfare State Robs Americans of Money and Spirit by Edgar K. Browning

Short review: An economist assembles an impressive array of facts to demonstrate the true cost of the welfare state, and the negative impact it has on some that it purports to help.

Haiku
When the government
Tries to make us  all equal
We steal from ourselves

Full review: It is accepted wisdom that the publicly funded social support network in the United States is weak and ineffective. It is also accepted wisdom that the American welfare state is drastically underfunded. In Stealing from Each Other: How the Welfare State Robs Americans of Money and Spirit, Edgar Browning challenges this accepted wisdom in the most effective manner possible: by examining the facts. After extensive analysis, Browning concludes that the U.S. welfare state is neither weak, nor ineffective, nor underfunded. However, he persuasively argues that as currently constituted it serves as a substantial and unnecessary drag on the national economy and in many cases serves to harm the poorest among us while functioning as a massive wealth transfer to the middle-class.

While many critics of the social safety net are primarily driven by ideology, basing their conclusions on appeals to emotion. Browning is an economist, and his method of argumentation is rooted in this background. Browning relies upon census data, the results of academic studies, and other public information to make his points. He sets about evaluating the true cost of the U.S. welfare system, identifying what he considers to be the true measure of economic inequality, and evaluating the effect of the various wealth transfer programs implemented in the United States. The conclusions he draws from this data are somewhat depressing. If Browning's analysis is correct, the GDP of the United States is depressed by about twenty-five percent as a result of these programs. One might quibble with his analysis, but Browning lays his data out in a step by step fashion, so if there is a bias in his analysis, it would be readily apparent to the reader.

Of course, one could argue that even if the U.S. welfare state is a drag on the economy, it is valuable and necessary to reduce social inequality and provide for the neediest denizens of the country. This is the opposing position that Browning identifies in the book, calling those who adhere to this principle "egalitarians" (the one failing of the book is that Browning spends too much of his text railing against egalitarians, when he is much more persuasive when he simply demonstrates the paucity of the arguments that underpin the egalitarian position). Browning points out that some inequality is justified, and at the same time points out that once a number of relevant factors are accounted for, many of the alarming inequalities highlighted in lurid media articles turn out to be little more than a set of illusions. But Browning also does an able job of demonstrating that the current system has already substantially eliminated true poverty (as defined by the Federal Government) even though the official data obscures this fact by leaving out substantial wealth transfers when evaluating poverty, and that much of the wealth transfers in the U.S. are actually not to the poor, but rather to middle-class households.

Browning's two most effective arguments center around two of the most pervasive social programs in the United States: the social security system and affirmative action. Browning makes the case that social security as currently constituted is probably irretrievably broken, comparing it (accurately) to a Ponzi Scheme. This is not a particularly new observation, nor is it unique - as he notes, members of Congress have known that the Social Security system was in impending financial trouble since the 1980s. Still, Browning ably lays out exactly why the venerable Social Security system is not merely a financial disaster in the future, but how it serves as an anchor weighing down both contributors and beneficiaries right now. However, it is on the subject of affirmative action in the education system that Browning makes the most damning case. While diversity at our universities might be a laudable goal, the statistics that have resulted from the system indicate that it serves minority students quite poorly. Put simply, by effectively lowering admissions standards to accept larger numbers of minority students, admissions officers at elite institutions create a cascading effect that results in minority students frequently being mismatched with education institutions that are more academically rigorous than those students are prepared for. This practice sets those students up for failure, and the numbers bear this out. Minority students drop out of college much more frequently, are very disproportionately represented at the bottom of the class rankings, and for minority students who attend and graduate from law school they fail to pass the bar at a much higher frequency than for comparable white students. In effect, the goal of creating diversity results in academic frustration and failure for students, harming those the program is intended to help.

Even though some may find the data presented in this book uncomfortable, as it challenges a collection of accepted truths about our society and our government. While one can always argue about the analysis, it is difficult to close one's eyes to the data that is assembled in this book, and that data paints a picture that is wildly at odds with the picture presented in our media and our political campaigns. Even those who are not persuaded by Browning's analysis, and who reject his suggestions for how our welfare system could be overhauled to alleviate the negative effects he believes result from the current system will find this book thought-provoking. For anyone interested in how the welfare state functions, how it affects us, and how it might possibly be improved, this book is a must read.

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Review - Build a Better Life by Stealing Office Supplies by Scott Adams

Short review: Dogbert gives advice on how to survive the modern office environment.

Haiku
Dogbert is evil
A management consultant
Steal to gain success

Full review: The second book to be made out of Dilbert comic strips, Build a Better Life by Stealing Office Supplies is based upon the premise that Dogbert, Dilbert's evil sidekick and sometime management consultant, has written it as a guide to being successful at the workplace. To keep the illusion alive, Adams is merely listed as the "illustrator" rather than the author. Of course, Dogbert gives advice applicable to the classic Dilbert workplace, filled with clueless bosses, lazy or incompetent workers, and wildly out of touch consultants. Dogbert offers advice on how to navigate the jungle of office politics, clarifies why one's budget never makes any sense, why management really doesn't care about employees despite pretending to do so, and offers advice on a myriad of other topics. Although the scenarios in the strips are exaggerated somewhat for comic effect, the truly scary thing about the book is that the exaggeration is generally fairly minor. In typical Dilbert fashion, the humor in the strip stems from the bitter reality being satirized.

The only drawback to the book is that the panel size of the cartoon strips has been expanded, and as a result, the book contains fewer comic sequences than it could have. The truly cynical might think that was done so that Adams could squeeze an entire book out of half a book's worth of content. On the other hand, the guidance provided by Dogbert in this book is probably more valuable and useful than the guidance found in most serious books on management or MBA programs, so that seems like a fairly minor quibble. As usual, Adams' insights into the workings of the modern office come in the form of bitterly satirical humor, made all the more painfully funny as a result of the fact that they are, for the most part, so close to being true.

Previous book in the series: Always Postpone Meetings With Time-Wasting Morons
Subsequent book in the series: Dogbert's Clues for the Clueless

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Review - Last Chapter and Worse by Gary Larson

Short review: A collection of the last Far Side strips published in the regular newspaper series, plus some bonus ones not published elsewhere.

Haiku
The Far Side strip ends
With a family story
Plus some added strips

Full review: As the title of Last Chapter and Worse implies, this volume contains the last Far Side cartoons published during the final six months of the strip's run in the newspapers. The volume also includes thirteen strips written after the conclusion of the strip's syndicated run that were written to fill out the pages of the book, and a brief funny story Larson attributes to his father.

The included strips include the usual assortment of talking cows, dogs, and chickens, devils trying to run Hell, cowboys sitting around campfires, cavemen, witches and all the other familiar motifs that reoccur in Larson's strips. It should go without saying that the strips all feature the bizarre, off-kilter perspective on the world that is the staple of the Far Side. Standout strips include God pouring jerks into creation, just to spice things up, an inmate in Hell explaining that the sandwiches sometimes have scorpions in them, because it is Hell after all, research scientists taking classes in maniacal laughter, and the mob putting people in glass boxes covered in mime makeup as a means of retribution. My favorite is probably the hunter who asks his assistant to take his elephant gun and hand him the mime rifle. However, picking the best Far Side strips is a little like picking out the best ice cream. No matter what flavor it is, it is still ice cream, and still pretty good.

All that said, one can see the cracks starting to form in the humor of the strip. Several of the strips included in the book aren't all that funny, but are merely bizarre. It seems as though Larson was probably getting burned out by the daily grind of putting out a strip on a daily basis. After all, by the time the strips in this volume were created Larson had been putting the strip out for fourteen years. This seems readily apparent when one looks through the thirteen bonus strips included towards the end of the volume, none of which are up to the usual standards of the strip in terms of humor. Though the volume is, as a result, sometimes disappointing, it serves as a suitable farewell from an artist who seems to have known just the right time to walk away from his easel.

Capping off the volume is a brief story of a joke Larson's father supposedly told him when he was a young boy, which Larson says serves as a window into his formative years and a possible explanation for the odd sense of humor he was able to bring to his strip. The story is simple, funny, and is perfect coda to one of the oddest and most enjoyable comic strips ever made.

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Review - Hi, Mom! Hi, Dad! The First Twelve Months of Parenthood by Lynn Johnston

Short review: A collection of mostly lovable but sometimes cloying one panel strips about the travails and joys of parenting  newborn through their first year of life.

Haiku
The first year of life
In single panel cartoons
Silly, funny, cloying

Full review: Before she began writing For Better or For Worse, Lynn Johnston wrote a series of single panel strips focused on pregnancy and the first years of parenthood. Hi Mom! Hi Dad! is one hundred and one strips that highlight the first twelve months of parenthood. Although the characters in the strips are not the Pattersons, who would feature in Johnston's later work, the situations and style of comedy will be familiar to anyone who has ever read For Better or For Worse.

The strips are little vignettes concerning the ups and downs of parenting an infant, and as one might expect they are often more than a little cloying as a result of their sickly sweetness. Some of the strips, concerning out of touch fathers, overbearing grandmothers with plenty of child rearing advice, and overly enthusiastic siblings are a little dated in execution, but the themes they touch on are universal enough that they are still relevant enough to be funny. More or less equal parts sappy and touching, the strips are probably only truly funny to those who have had young children, but whose children have grown up enough that the frustrations of sleepless nights, vomit, and diaper changes are behind therm.

As noted before, there are only one hundred and one strips in the book, so it is quite short. That is probably a good thing, because too much more would probably provide enough syrupy sweetness to turn any reader into a diabetic. However, for anyone who is curious to see the ideas that became the long-running For Better or For Worse comic strip in embryonic form, this book is worth a quick read.

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Review - Always Postpone Meetings With Time-Wasting Morons by Scott Adams

Short review: In the first collection of Dilbert strips, Dilbert lives the life of a nerdy engineer with a wise-cracking dog. The satire is bitter, but not yet honed to a razor's edge.

Haiku
Dilbert is a dork
Dogbert thinks he's real stupid
Just a beginning

Full review: The first collection of strips from the Dilbert comic series, Always Postpone Meetings with Time-Wasting Morons contains strips from the beginning of Dilbert's run as a comic through its first six months. Although a handful of the strips in this volume show Dilbert at the workplace, most of the comic is centered on the interaction between Dilbert and Dogbert as Dilbert faces the world as a socially inept technology obsessed engineer. While the strips lampoon Dilbert's nerdiness and Dogbert's megalomania, the bitter and incisive workplace satire that would come to characterize the strip in later years is almost completely absent.

Because the strip only touches on Dilbert's workplace in passing, many of the characters that are now familiar to fans of the strip are absent from this volume. There is no pointed haired boss, no Wally, no Alice, and no Asok. The strips do introduce Phil, the Prince of Insufficient Light and ruler of Heck, as well as Bob and Dawn, the dinosaurs who were hiding behind Dilbert's couch. As the strips mainly take place in Dilbert's home, they generally revolve around Dilbert's troubles dating women, his bizarre and often dangerous inventions, and Dogbert's undisguised contempt for him.

Although the Dilbert strip didn't really come into its own until the workplace humor took center stage, this book remains quite good. As the book deals so heavily with Dilbert's personality and his interactions with Dogbert, the strips provide a level of character development for the two of them that many of the later strips lack, as the later strips simply assume one is already familiar with their personal foibles. Though not quite as good as later Dilbert books, even a book that is mediocre by Dilbert standards is really enjoyable, and thus this book gets a strong recommendation.

Subsequent book in the series: Build a Better Life by Stealing Office Supplies

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Review - Analog Science Fiction/Science Fact: Vol. CV, No. 12 (December 1985) by Stanley Schmidt (editor)

Stories included:
The Blacksmith's Tale by Spider Robinson
Runner by Bob Buckley
The Case of the Gring's Mill Goblin by Thomas R. Dulski
The White Box by Rob Chilson and Lynette Meserole
Hatching Season by Harry Turtledove

Science fact articles included:
The Brush that Painted the Man in the Moon by J.E. Enever

Full review: It is interesting to read and evaluate an issue of Analog that is twenty-five years out of date. Most science fiction novels that old that one might want to read are still around because they were somewhat noteworthy at the time. The stories in a science fiction magazine, on the other hand, have no similar guarantee, so there is the substantial risk that they will have aged quite badly. Happily, while some of the peripheral material in this issue is humorously out of date (most notably the On Gaming article concerning then current computer games), the stories themselves have aged remarkably well.

The featured cover story in the issue is Runner by Bob Buckley, a post-apocalyptic story told from the perspective of a somewhat down on his luck "runner", a sort of combination messenger and mailman living in the post-nuclear wasteland. He is paired with a man who claims to be from the past, and who the runner thinks is nuts. Buckley weaves his story, from the runner acquiring a new vehicle, to delivering material to the boss of what used to be Manhattan, to discovering the truth about his somewhat nutty traveling companion. In the end, the protagonist gives up being a runner for what he believes will be a nobler purpose in life.

The longest story in the issue is the somewhat comic The Case of the Gring's Mill Goblin by Thomas R. Dulski, featuring a paranormal Sherlock Holmes and his less than willing Watson who head out to the Pennsylvania countryside to investigate reports of a glowing blue goblin that has been purportedly haunting the local farms. Of all the stories in the issue, this one shows its age most strongly, as the lack of current technologies like cell phones and internet search engines is noticeable. Even so, the story remains a fun and funny mystery that manages to mostly play fair with the reader, and yet avoid giving away the culprit until the end. Also humorous in tone is The Blacksmith's Tale by Spider Robinson, set in his now-familiar Callahan's Crosstime Saloon setting, and featuring a bar regular who meets a new face while both of them are standing naked on the roof of the bar during a rain storm. After an awkward introduction, the two hit it off until one of them saves the world from destruction by another bar patron. The story is, as one might expect, somewhat raunchy, fairly humorous, and in the end, bittersweet.

The White Box by Rob Chilson and Lynette Meserole was my favorite story in the issue. Having discovered a way to construct a device that seems to stimulate the human body to cure itself, humanity finds itself with no real need for most of the medical establishment. However, the story delves into the question of the dangers of relying upon a device whose working no one truly understands. It turns out that the miracle device may not be such an unalloyed miracle after all, and may actually be causing (or merely exacerbating) certain problems while acting to mask those problems at the same time. As with most really good science fiction stories, this one makes a point that is relevant to the real world, and in this case, that point is that understanding is as important as results, if not more so. The story makes a more muted point about the dangers that might be posed by alternative medicine even if it was shown to work, and was not merely chicanery.

Hatching Season by Harry Turtledove is a brief but decent time-travel story about a graduate student sent back to Cretaceous to study duck billed dinosaurs. Left on her own amidst the giants of the past, she finds herself lost and without her technological equipment to help her find her way back to the beacon that will take her home. The story is an interesting twist on the "engineering puzzle" subgenre of science fiction stories, since the puzzle the protagonist must unravel does not stem from the hazardous environment of space, but rather from the living hazards of the denizens of the distant past. The story is engaging and suspenseful while the resolution is both interesting and completely believable.

The science fact article in the issue is The Brush that Painted the Man in the Moon by J.E. Enever. Because the article concerns possible theories as to how the unusual grouping of craters on the northern hemisphere of the Earth facing side of the Moon could have formed, it has aged pretty well. Although the theory presented is essentially unprovable, the explanation given in the article is consistent with the observed data, and is probably the best explanation we will get. I am not aware of one, but it seems like the scenario described would make a good backdrop for a science fiction story. Either I have simply missed such a story, or there is a pretty good framework for a story waiting to be used by the right person.

Despite being published in December 1985, this issue of Analog Science Fiction/Science Fact remains an interesting and enjoyable read. With stories running the gamut of the genre from time-travel to post-apocalyptic adventure to medical drama, the issue contains a wide enough range of stories that at least some are almost certain to appeal to any science fiction fan, and the stories are generally of high enough quality that I found all of them interesting and enjoyable.

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