Criticism

Finding Your Religion: Some Thoughts On Creating Spec-Fiction Religions

/ G. Scott Huggins / Leave a comment

 

I’ve been a follower of Christ and a science-fiction and fantasy writer for roughly the same amount of time, although I hope I’ve been a better Christian than I have been a writer (after all, I still haven’t sold a whole book!) A long time ago at Wiscon, I introduced, while on a panel on religion in fantasy, the ideas of Demand and Consequence. Roughly, I said that a religion’s Demand was measured by what actions a person must take to please the Divine, while the Consequence is what happens as a result of pleasing or angering the Divine. So, for example, Orthodox Judaism would be a fairly high-Demand religion. You follow all the laws. You observe the Sabbaths. You minimize your associations with outsiders. My own religion, Christianity, would be high-Consequence, possibly the highest: eternal paradise or eternal damnation, and you only get one shot at it.

(Of course it would go without saying that individual followers might perceive this spectrum very differently. I do know those who claim to be Christian who deny the existence of Hell, despite scriptural statements to the contrary, and would expect to find similar differences of theology in all major, and probably most minor, faiths.)

But it has recently occurred to me that the concept of Demand needs some work. After all, is Christianity high, or low-Demand? Jesus says that “if any man come after me, let him deny himself, take up his cross, and follow me.” That’s about the hardest thing that can be demanded, but most of us do not get martyred for Christ. Even many of the Catholic saints didn’t. On the other hand, Jesus also says that God will forgive any sin, for the asking. So it occurs to me that we need another quality to measure, between Demand and Consequence. What is the cost to a person to make up for failing the demand? I will call this quality Penance. Christianity, so far, would be a High-Demand, Low-Penance, High-Consequence religion.

But the different religions might also be considered in terms of what consequence simply not following the religion. I shall call this quality Allegiance. Christianity and Islam would be high-Allegiance religions. Not belonging to them is interpreted as a rejection of God. Buddhism, however, would be low-allegiance. Your actions are what make you enlightened or not, regardless of whether you’re actually “believing in” the Buddha or his theology.

On the Consequence side of things, there are also difficulties to work out. For one thing, Consequence may be perceived radically differently by those in different cultures or simply by different individuals. To me, Hinduism appears to be a fairly low-consequence religion. After all, if you believe in reincarnation, and you fail the demands of your religion in this life, you can always try again. However, given that fundamentalist Hindus are even now engaged in persecuting Muslims and Christians in India, I am going to have to assume that I am missing some vital piece of this religion, at least to some of its followers.

More crucially, though, the idea of Hinduism raises another point: does the religion teach that souls have multiple earthly lives, or one? That matters greatly to Consequence, enough so that perhaps a religion should be classed as a Repeating or Non-Repeating religion.

Another thing that considering Hinduism brings up is its habit of syncretism, or adopting the practices and prophets of other faiths. Hinduism, the ancient Greek faith, and Baha’i would be examples of faiths that tend toward syncretism, while the Abrahamic faiths specifically forbid it.

Finally, another quality that should be included is what I might call Zeal. How much pressure do followers of the religion find themselves under to spread the faith, and make others abide by its tenets?

So far, I have kept my examples restricted to real-world religions, and have only done so in a limited fashion. While you could use these scales to quantify and compare real-world religions, I don’t think that’s very useful, and would likely lead to a whole lot of acrimonious debate around the details that the devil is in.

But I think that as we examine SF-nal and Fantasy faiths that it’s interesting to look at some of the contrasts that show up.

One of my favorite Fantasy religions is Lois McMaster Bujold’s Quinatarianism (along with its Quadrene heresy). Quintarianism is Low-demand and low-consequence. It’s possible to offend the gods, but you really have to work at it. Damnation isn’t so much Hell as being condemned to fade into nothingness as a ghost. Low-penance and low-allegiance follow from the low-demand, here. It’s a non-repeating religion that is non-syncretistic. It’s zeal is fairly moderate. The Quadrenes are about the same but with much higher zeal, but this is understandable, since the major point of contention is whether the “fifth god” of the Quintarians is in fact a god or a demon lord. The Quadrenes believe that the Quintarians are devil worshipers, and since demons CAN be proven to exist in this world, their fear is somewhat justified. Quintarianism and Quadrenism feel like fully thought-out religions, with developed theologies, that assume their followers are more or less ordinarily reasonable people.

By contrast, we have Robert Jordan’s Children of the Light. This religion is Low-demand (there don’t seem to be any commandments of the Light) seemingly Low-consequence and Low-Allegiance, or at least no spiritual penalty is ever described for violating or ignoring the Light. It’s a repeating religion, but non-syncretistic. However, it’s incredibly high Zeal, as the Children of the Light have been for centuries trying to spread their faith and subdue their enemies (and have apparently succeeded only in taking over a nation about the size of Belgium). And so we are left with the question of why the zeal is so high. The Children are portrayed as essentially religious bigots who merely think themselves morally superior to everyone. And thus it feels as though this is merely the author’s own dislike of the overtly religious. Heinlein’s approach to the Martian language felt very similar in A Stranger In A Strange Land, when Michael Valentine Smith overturns all human religion by introducing the Martian language as the ultimate spiritual principle: (Low-demand, high-consequence, low-zeal, syncretistic and low-allegiance) Heinlein disliked existing religions, and invented one he, and many readers of the time, liked, which as a bonus, was absolutely provable.

My only conclusion from all this is that to create a real-feeling religion, the elements must be balanced coherently. Why, for example, have a high-zeal religion when there is low demand, consequence, and allegiance? But it raises some interesting questions for me as a writer. Like Heinlein, most authors today prefer to cast their religions as low-demand, low-consequence, low-zeal, and low-allegiance, to avoid the charge of religious bigotry. But if the religion is worth following, like Heinlein’s, the consequence HAS to be at least PERCEIVED as high at some point, or why does it succeed? Hinduism and Buddhism may be low-consequence in comparison with, say, Islam, but only in comparison, otherwise, why would people devote their lives to them? Also, is it possible to create a high-consequence, high-zeal religion that doesn’t feel like bigotry? Bujold portrays the Quadrenes as bigots and inquisitors, and yet, if they are right, their Quintarian foes are actively helping demons eat souls in the guise of piety. If true, that would be monstrous, and the Quadrenes would be the heroes. Could this be done in earnest, or is it impossible? It is a question that interests me, and I look forward to authors capable of taking up the challenge, even as I seek to do so myself.

Words: Stranger Things 2, Episode 1 Microblog (Much Spoilers, Many Wow)

/ G. Scott Huggins / Leave a comment

So, I’m going to take some time to talk about each Episode of Stranger Things Season 2 as I remember watching it, discussing some of the techniques from a writer’s and a viewer’s point-of-view.

The Good Stuff: In the last season’s finale, the fate of El was left very open-ended. We are unsure if she has died killing the Demogorgon or not. As an aside, I hated that El appeared to die. I reserved judgment on it, but it was one of the very few times I felt like this series dived into cliché really hard: young lovers admit their love for one another just in time for her (and it is always her) to die.
That said, I really appreciate that the series showed us El’s survival from the first, and didn’t try to extend the cliffhanger. Extended cliffhangers have become a form of literary torture in genre-fiction for the last twenty years (I’m looking at you, ghost of Robert Jordan) and I am sick to death of it.
Another thing that was left up in the air was Will Byers’ fate. Was he really unaware of his flashes into the upside down? Was that really Will Byers in that body? The answer to both of these questions was clearly revealed (No, and yes) with Hopper and Will’s mom, and Will acting like rational, but terribly confused human beings. As they should be. The series brilliantly continues to straddle the line between whether Will’s visions are flashbacks or real. Bringing up the horribly enticing question: how would you know?

The Bad Stuff: The new Lab Director seems very reluctant to even reassure Hopper that he takes his suspicions of leakage seriously. This just comes off as obtuse.

Further Questions Introduced: Is the new Lab Director really any improvement on Brenner? Or is he just more subtly evil? What is the story behind Max and her brother the new Keg King? Are they as much of a part of what’s going on at Hawkins as the mysterious “8” we see in the prelude?

Words: Stranger Things (Lots Of Spoilers), Part II

/ G. Scott Huggins / Leave a comment

So, yesterday, I talked a lot about why I liked Stranger Things. Now we come to some of my criticisms of the show. None of these spoiled my enjoyment of the show as such, but here we go:

Minor Idiot Plots: So I have to modify what I said earlier. There are a few minor instances of the Idiot Plot. The subvariant, in this case, is People Don’t Tell Each Other They Know Things: Jonathan doesn’t tell Mom he’s figured out that she’s seeing and hearing real things, and when Nancy very reasonably asks if they shouldn’t tell her, says something like, “No, she’s been through enough.” Well, yes, and a very large part of all she’s been through is nobody believing her. It should be obvious to anyone that telling Joyce she’s not crazy is the best thing you could do for the poor woman.

Toxic Atmosphere: This is one of those writing moments that truly baffles me, because there was absolutely no reason for it. When Hopper and Joyce are prepared for their trip into the Upside Down, Evil Dr. Brenner tells them the atmosphere is toxic. Um, no. Will has survived there for something like three or four days. I’m assuming he found water somewhere, because he’d be in a lot of trouble if he didn’t. He probably didn’t find food, but he wouldn’t die in four days. Hypothermia would be a bigger problem, but there’s probably a temperature cold enough to be uncomfortable but not cold enough to kill. But breathing a toxic atmosphere? For four DAYS? Or even three? Really dumb. I can only assume that the writers did this so they had a reason to show everyone getting dressed up in those scary, scary HAZMAT suits. Which frankly, was pants-on-head idiotic, as the risk of catching a disease from an entirely alien biosphere would have been enough to justify that.

The Creature: I think, for me, the development of the Creature (Demogorgon) was one of the most irritating things, because it was an example of a) a mistake I typically see from new writers, not professionals, and b) it would have been very easy to solve. Here was the basic problem: The writers wanted to give Nancy, Jonathan, and Steve a victory over the Creature. The writers also wanted to make the Creature something that only El could defeat. Something, to be exact, that El would have to apparently die to kill, because it would be immune to Human weapons. And the writers also wanted it to kill Brenner the Evil Scientist.
You can easily see what they did, and I used to make this mistake as a new writer, and I’ve seen new writers make that mistake many times: they wanted their Creature to have mutually contradictory qualities, and they tried to make that work. The result was that we have a Creature that is banished back to the Upside Down by kids armed with a spiked bat, a pistol, a bear trap, and some fire, but an episode later shrugs off hundreds of rounds of assault rifle fire at point-blank range like they were Super Soakers.
Now, the solution to this was pioneered as far back as Beowulf. All you needed was for Nancy, Jonathan and Steve to kill Grendel, and then have that draw the attention of bigger, badder Grendel’s Mom. This would have necessitated a bit of explanation, but certainly nothing too difficult.

Words: Stranger Things (Lots of Spoilers)

/ G. Scott Huggins / Leave a comment

I’ve decided to take some time to write about Stranger Things, the second season of which I am currently in the middle of watching. Today, I’m going to take the time to talk about what hooked me into the series’ first season and made me love it. Later, I’ll be talking about the flaws I see in it, and if I have time, I may start examining the episodes as i watch them. This is by way of being an experiment, and who knows: it may spark a conversation.

I’m going to have to say first off that one of the things that really draws me to this series is the setting: for a geeky/nerdy kid who grew up in the eighties and was almost the same age as these kids (Actually, I’d have been about three or four grades behind them), this is a wonderful series. It reminds me of Stand By Me if that had been one of Stephen King’s supernatural thrillers, rather than a coming-of-age story of dealing with the mundane evils of the world. And I loved Stand By Me. Actually, Stranger Things feels to me like someone asked themselves what Stand By Me would be like if you mashed it up with IT. But it has an innocence that has never been part of King’s writing. However, I can’t really talk about the feel with any critical value. You either like it or you don’t. I will say that it fits with my memories of what the eighties were like exactly. So on to the things I feel are actually worthy of analysis:

The characters aren’t idiots. Everyone passably familiar with the horror/thriller genre knows about knows that the easiest way for the characters to get themselves in trouble is to do incredibly stupid things. “Let’s chant the ritual in Latin! What could go wrong?” “The monster is after us! Let’s hide in the basement of the deserted farmhouse! It will never look there!”
By contrast, the characters in Stranger Things are observant, and yes, they take a lot of time to catch up with what we know to be true, but that is part of the horror element. Joyce is experiencing things that are very similar to things a grief-crazed mother might experience. She has proof that Will is alive, but it’s not proof she can show to anyone. Gradually, the other characters acquire similar proofs that demand they trust one another and allow them to take action.
Even the Evil Scientist isn’t stupid. Sure, he’s cruel and unethical as hell. But when his experiment succeeds in a direction he never guessed, he does something that is eminently reasonable: he tries to make peaceful contact with the alien species he has discovered. He is of course horrifically wrong to do this, but that’s not something he could have reasonably known.

The characters are flawed. All the characters we get to know are victims of their emotional flaws. Joyce was already a bit crazed about her responsibilities before Will disappeared, which makes it difficult for people to trust her. El deceives her new friends because she wants to keep them safe, rather than honestly balking them. And Mike and Lucas are each strong-willed enough about their own desires to lead the party in their own ways that they end up breaking it, nearly fatally.

Even the most flawed characters are redeemable. Steve Harrington and Nancy are pretty much typically selfish teenagers driven by their own desires and peer pressure. Jonathan, Will’s brother, becomes a stalker in lieu of any productive social life. Yet Nancy and Jonathan rise above their extremely bad beginning to become allies, and even Steve, who starts out as a quintessential cowardly asshole, redeems himself with a fair amount of courage, which costs him both physically and socially.

Well, that’s all for now. Tomorrow I’ll nitpick some of the flaws.

 

The Word: Faith and Hope and Charity: The Churches of Science-Fiction

/ G. Scott Huggins / Leave a comment

Note: Another of my columns for Sci-Phi Journal. Time to get back to blogging!

Now these three remain: faith, hope, and love. And the greatest of these is love. I Corinthians 13:13.

Every era has its popular villains. In the classical age, sorceresses and evil gods were popular foes of brave heroes. During the Cold War, faceless governments of fascists and communists (often interchangeably) provided the necessary cannon-fodder. However, with the demise of the Soviet Union and the subsequent popularity of soft socialism, the two favorite antagonists for our heroes in contemporary fiction are evil capitalist corporations, and tyrannical, mind-controlling religious establishments.

Of course, there has never been any shortage of books in which religion itself has been held up, often through sloppy but dedicated straw-manning, as the refuge of the evil and the stupid. Heinlein was dismissive of “shamans,” Arthur Clarke pictured humanity’s next step to be a brave new atheism immediately succeeded by a transcendent “godhood” of our own, and Philip Pullman made God into a bloodthirsty, soul-destroying tyrant. And of course, the villains are far too often the evil church leaders: Nehemiah Scudder, and the bishops of the Church of the Final Atonement. Religion has never been more terrifying than when it acts collectively and in power, especially in the power of the state, as Frank Herbert rightly warns us, portraying a Fremen “religion” that is a great swindle, perpetrated upon a simple but passionate people by eugenicists of great power.

But the ecclesiastical power is merely the power of the people assembled, which is what, after all the original ekklesia meant: assembly, the same word the Athenians used to designate their democratic body. And if the church ought to be founded on faith and hope and charity – or, more accurately, love, which is a better translation of the Greek agape than the King James’ rendering of the Latin caritate into ‘charity’ is – then perhaps it is worth examining some more favorable portrayals of the Church in science-fiction and fantasy.

Faith: Faith is used by both the foes of religion and, less excusably, its adherents as an excuse for believing in what is manifestly false. This is not the result or the aim of real faith, but its perversion, just as refusing to accept data that contradicts a long-held theory is a perversion of science. True faith as the letter to the Hebrews tells us, “is the substance of things hoped for: the evidence of things not seen.” I will discuss two examples of this. The first is portrayed in Dan Simmons’ brilliant work, Hyperion. The priest, father Paul Dure, first lured into the temptation of falsifying data to “prove” his Catholic faith, goes on to become the Pope who launches ships to bring help to mankind after their last, desperate war with their own artificial intelligences. The second, and far more visceral, is Mary Doria Russell’s tale of Father Emilio Sandoz, who goes to Alpha Centauri to meet the beings there, and who is mutilated and raped viciously by them. In both cases, the men involved go through unimaginable pain. Both despair. And yet, both come back from the edge of that despair because of their faith. It is not a simplistic faith that God will always do what we recognize as good, but a faith that the good that does not exist must be accomplished in spite of great pain, in spite of impossibility, when that good seems utterly unreal, because their faith in it is the evidence for it.

Hope: Closely akin to faith is the concept of hope. In S.M. Stirling’s Island in the Sea of Time series, the people of Nantucket find themselves swept back into the year 1250 B.C. Many of the island’s Christians initially fall under the sway of Pastor Deubel (whose name, in a Germanic linguistic pun, means, appropriately, Devil) who preaches that the islanders must commit suicide in despair, lest their appearance in the past prevent the birth of Christ in their new future. Rather than trust God and hope for the best, Deubel decides to burn the town of Nantucket.
When I first read this, I assumed that Stirling was using Deubel as an excuse to bash on religion, but was pleasantly surprised to find that the island’s leading priest, Father Gomez, pities Deubel’s followers. When the islanders decide to punish the fanatics by shipping them off to Inagua to mine needed salt, Gomez volunteers to follow them, hoping that by his own preaching, his fellow Christians may be restored to a state of hope in God’s goodness, rather than fearing His weakness.

Love and Charity: Lois McMaster Bujold is one of my favorite authors for this, as she sees so clearly that love is central to the human experience. It is, perhaps, no surprise that the Quintarian religion that she invents for her realm of Chalion turns out to be a true haven for the rejected. Quintarianism reveres five gods: The Father, the Mother, the Son, the Daughter, and the Bastard. While the Bastard is often feared as “the master of all disasters out of season,” he is not an evil deity, some excuse for Bujold to proclaim, monistically, that good and evil are all one. But the Bastard does show that what appears to be evil can often be a prelude to a good unimaginable to a human perspective. And the Quintarian church is a haven for those who do not fit easily into Chalionese society: bastards, by nature of their split parentage, and homosexuals, who could not marry the opposite sex, can find a place in the service of the Bastard.
My favorite portrayal of love expressed in the Church by a science-fiction author, however, is that of S.M. Stirling, in his character of Sister Marya Sokolowska in his alternate history series of the Draka. The Draka, as he portray them, found an anti-America in South Africa after the American Revolution. Founded by slaveholding loyalists, the Draka settle Africa and carry industrial slavery on straight through World War II, in which they conquer and enslave all of Eurasia.
Sold as a slave to a Draka master, Sister Marya, a Polish nun, has watched the other members of her order die, one by one. Again and again, she masters her anger and her fear to show the love of Christ to her fellow slaves, and, as much as she can, to her masters. In the end, she stands ready to sacrifice her soul by triggering a bomb that will deny the Draka a chance to interrogate her and an American spy that she has hidden.
What I find all these characters have in common is to remind us that faith and love and charity are difficult. They are not the rewards of ease, and practicing them does not come without real cost. But what is bought with that cost is the real freedom to act morally.

Worlds: Stupid Sci-Fi Film Tricks, The Expanse Edition

/ G. Scott Huggins / Leave a comment

SPOILER ALERT for Season 1 of The Expanse if it’s on your “to watch” list.

Are you effing kidding me, The Expanse? I mean, are you effing kidding me?

Here we have a show that most people I know in SF have been raving about, I mean, absolutely raving about for the last couple of years. So I finally decided to use my Amazon Free Prime trial and binge-watch a few episodes.

And it looks good. Man does it look good. Really, the only problem I have with it from a science perspective is I think that it VASTLY underestimates what happens to things and people when a hole is knocked into an Earth-pressure cabin in hard vacuum, but I’m pretty willing to let that slide, on the large scale of things. That’s like complaining about lasers being visible in space combat. Of course they wouldn’t be, but the Rule Of Cool, well, rules.

So, for the first six episodes, I just sat back and enjoyed the SFX, the dialogue, the action, and the whole ride. So, the Earth UN controls Ceres, capital of the Asteroid Belt, by rationing its air and water. Mars, an independent state, also hungers to control Ceres, and the Belters just want to breathe and drink and not die. There’s a Free the Belt movement, headed up by a freedom-fighter/terrorist organization called the OPA, and of course Earth Cops on Ceres try to keep these terrorists down.
As our story opens, one of our protagonists is an Earth Cop chasing an Earth heiress who sympathized with the OPA and who disappeared under mysterious circumstances. We find she has something to do with a freighter set up as bait to lure in an innocent rescue ship that is then attacked by parties unknown with evidence pointing to Mars, apparently with the goal of starting a war. Earth Cop finds more and more evidence tying missing heiress to a raid on a supersecret Martian research base.

And then, episode 7. Oh, gods….

So Earth Cop figures out that heiress was an agent of the OPA Maximum Leader, and assembles the evidence, bringing it straight to his boss… who promptly wipes his files, revokes his access codes and fires him. He figures out she’s in Maximum Leader’s pocket, and as he storms out, the camera focuses in on boss’s neck, where she is sporting an OPA tattoo.

Get that? The OPA’s paid agent, the chief of the Earth Cops in the Belt, is wearing a terrorist tattoo in plain sight, advertising her allegiance. Among detectives. And we’re supposed to believe that somehow, no one noticed this. I mean, this is like a U.S. Naval officer showing up for duty on his ballistic missile submarine in 1985 sporting a hammer-and-sickle tattoo on his wrist. You think someone might ask questions?

And the hell of it is, it’s completely unnecessary. I mean, I believed she could have been a mole. But no one in the solar system would be such a stupid mole and survive more than a month. It drives me nuts when filmmakers feel obligated to underline visually what’s happening for us as though we are too dumb to understand words and to imagine likely consequences of such actions. Stop it.

From Somewhere In Orbit

 

Yes, Star Wars Fans, It Was Always Possible To Track Ships Traveling In Hyperspace: The Evidence

/ G. Scott Huggins / Leave a comment

In The Last Jedi, the plot hinges on the idea that it is impossible to track ships through a hyperspace jump without cutting-edge First Order technology. I am going to make my case that it was always possible to track ships through hyperspace, and that this plot point is an example of bad continuity.

Now at first glance, it seems that I am just wrong. After all, the Millennium Falcon always escapes Imperial pursuers by going to lightspeed. However, we need to examine the circumstances, here. Plainly, hyperspace jumps are not instantaneous, just very, very fast. Also, ships do not seem to be able to interact with each other physically (e.g. to fight battles) while in hyperspace. Our first encounter with hyperspace is with the Falcon jumping away from Tatooine. Let’s look at that scene:

We have seen the Falcon jump to hyperspace. Then much later, at least long enough for Luke to start lightsaber training and R2-D2 to get involved in a board game with Chewbacca, Han comes in and says, “Well, you can forget your troubles with those Imperial slugs. I told you I’d outrun ’em!”
At the total lack of reaction he then says, “Don’t everybody thank me at once.”
Now, why this announcement, if the jump to lightspeed in itself meant they were untrackable? The clear implication is that the Empire was (or may have been) following them, and Han has spent the intervening time making sure of their escape. Of course Han was rather confident of his ability to do this: he’s flying the ship that “made the Kessel Run in 12 parsecs” after all (whatever that means) and believes himself to be one of the best star pilots in the galaxy.

Later, upon emergence in the Alderaan system, they encounter a TIE fighter. The exchange that follows is revealing:
LUKE: “It followed us!”
BEN: “No, it’s a short range fighter.”
The implication is that a longer-range craft could potentially have followed them. Ben isn’t just speculating about how it got there, because he doesn’t start that until his next line: “A fighter that small couldn’t have gotten this far into space on its own…”

Additionally, how is it possible that the Empire is chasing down Princess Leia’s ship at all at the beginning of the movie if there is no way to track ships through hyperspace? Rogue One clearly establishes that this has happened. Remember, Obi-Wan Kenobi, last of the Jedi Knights, is hiding out on Tatooine. There is nothing else of importance there and the Empire does not know he is there.

Now, in Empire we seem to see some of the strongest evidence that hyperspace tracking is impossible, because the Falcon’s final getaway is by jumping to lightspeed, and the whole plot of the film hinges on the Falcon’s broken hyperdrive. However, it seems reasonable that by this time the Empire has simply learned that the Falcon is uniquely able to elude pursuit by jumping to hyperspace because of its speed. If the Falcon can complete a jump and start a new one before Imperial forces arrive, then of course it cannot be tracked.

Now, when Han Solo pulls his disappearing act by charging the Star Destroyer, Darth Vader orders the Falcon’s trajectory extrapolated from “its last known trajectory,” after killing the Star Destroyer’s captain for incompetence. Clearly, Vader expected better. Perhaps that he could have tracked them through hyperspace? After all, how would Vader have known the hyperdrive was malfunctioning? That Han Solo pulled off a gutsy and complex maneuver that foiled the Empire’s ability to track them does not imply that no such tracking ability exists.

Finally, in Return of the Jedi, we have our strongest piece of evidence that tracking a ship through hyperspace is possible. It can be seen in this video at about 2:26-2:30.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iBLXIMBAtaM

There is a screen showing the Death Star II, and a cloud of rapidly approaching dots, just as Leia says, “Han, the fleet will be here any second.” Occam’s Razor suggests, “Hey look, the Imperials are tracking the Rebel fleet in hyperspace as it approaches.”

Now, none of this makes The Last Jedi a crappy movie. As stated earlier, I quite liked it. But it’s not in line with earlier continuity, and to my mind, that’s just a bit of lazy writing. I invite all arguments, but they’re going to have to explain away all of these incidents, not just one of them.

From Somewhere In Orbit

Movie Reviews Far Too Late: Why Pacific Rim Was Awful

/ G. Scott Huggins / 3 Comments

I have friends who love the concept of giant, armored robots. I, personally, dislike the concept. For one thing, most of them are simply too big to be even halfway believable without incredibly advanced materials, but even with those, the truth is that for the money and maintenance you would expend on one giant humanoid mech, you could build a tank battalion with a fighter squadron for close air support that would a) take down a comparable mech and b) not be rendered useless by a single malfunctioning joint.

However, during the discussion, I realized that the reasons I hated Pacific Rim had nothing to do with its blatant mech fanboyism.

First, it violated what, to me, is a cardinal rule of good science-fiction storytelling. It’s a variant of something the Russian playwright Chekhov said: If a gun is on the stage in Act I, it has to be used by Act III. My variant on this for SF is this: If you’re going to tell us that some piece of machinery or battleship or whatever is incredibly super badass, you have to show it being badass. Not just tell us this, and then have it crumple like toilet paper. We were told that there was this super awesome Chinese mech, and this super awesome Australian mech, and they serve no purpose other than to be kaiju chew toys in the climactic battle. This was not necessary. Each mech could have been shown taking a kaiju down easily, and then being battered into scrap by more (or more dangerous) kaiju than had been previously encountered, exactly as we see the Death Star detonate Alderaan and then get taken down by the Rebels.

Second, and most ridiculous, they use a nuclear weapon to close the rift the kaiju are coming through, and yet no one ever thinks to use nuclear weapons on the kaiju themselves, despite the fact that the kaiju mostly materialize in the Pacific and then start heading toward cities? Someone should at least have tried this. And before anyone says that this would have been dangerous to the planet, just stop before you embarrass yourselves. Where do you think the vast majority of US nuclear weapons tests happened during the Cold War? Literally thousands of nuclear weapons have been detonated in the Pacific, with few to zero ill effects on the planet.

Pacific Rim is a blatant attempt to use a terrible, but cool-looking solution to a problem. It’s like having mounted knights go fight ISIS in 2018. I grant you that the actual solution, having satellites warning uniformed men in bunkers that it was time to launch nuclear air or sea strikes against kaiju, would not have been anything like as cool to watch. But it would have been far less stupid.

From Somewhere in Orbit

I Have No Enemies…

/ G. Scott Huggins / Leave a comment

There’s an old story about Josef Stalin that alleges that the Communist leader and mass murderer called for a priest on his deathbed. Seeing as Stalin had been a terror to the Church, the priest tasked with this duty was frightened, but determined to tell the truth. In a shaking voice, he told Stalin that he must forgive his enemies. To his surprise, the dictator smiled and said, “That will be quite unnecessary, Father. I have no enemies.” Finding this impossible to believe, the priest summoned his courage and asked how that was possible. Stalin replied, “I’ve had them all executed.”

I watched the James Bond film, SPECTRE last night. It was pretty much a uniformly awful movie, with a predictable plot and nothing in it that hasn’t been done before and better by earlier Bond movies, notably the superb From Russia With Love, which the screenwriter had obviously seen approximately 472 times, but had failed to understand.

One of the worst features of the film was its depressing predictability: James comes home to find that “C,” a new politician, is considering dropping the 00 program entirely in favor of electronic assets. It is clear within 5 minutes of his appearance that C is either the ultimate bad guy of the film, or in direct cahoots with him, and C is indeed unmasked as a traitor in the service of Blofeld (whose motivation was apparently to dominate the world because he was jealous that he had to share a few hours of his daddy’s attention with James when they were both teenagers, which makes him the most ridiculous temper-tantrum thrower of a world-dominating villain since Anakin Skywalker in Episode II, but I digress).

The reason I bring it up is because it really highlights the feature of what seems like a lot of movies these days: anyone troubling the hero must be the worst villain imaginable. It seems as if it is no longer possible for the hero to be saddled with someone who is (even temporarily) perhaps an asshole, but on the same side. For C to consider dismantling the 00 program, he does not have to be a traitor. He can still be a problem James has to solve, of course. In fact, he’s a much more challenging problem if he is loyal, because then James can’t simply kill him.

Movies weren’t always this way. As recently as Pirates of the Caribbean it was perfectly possible for the heroes to have opponents, such as, Captain Norrington, who are kind of assholes and who have to be circumvented, but who are, when it comes down to it, on the same side against the pirate-zombies and who are reasonably brave and not traitors.

One of the most extreme examples of the decline in this sort of thing is the mockumentary CSA: The Confederate States of America. A much better film than SPECTRE, it imagines a Ken Burns-style alternate history in which the United States was defeated and wholly assimilated into the Confederate States in a short Civil War, after which slavery was legal up to the present day. That this is a dystopia is obvious, but the screenwriters take it to such extremes as to imagine the United States being sympathetic to Hitler in the 1930s while at the same time going to war with Japan in the 1940s. How this bit of political gymnastics works out is never explained. The film even goes so far as to have the Confederate States sneak attack the Imperial Japanese Navy in Tokyo Bay on December 7th, 1941.

You can see what they have done here: the Confederate States of 1941 must not only be evil, (as, granted, they surely would have been), they must be so evil that they cannot experience the injustice of a sneak attack themselves. They are literally incapable of being wronged. If the Japanese had launched the war as they did historically, and bombed a Confederate fleet at Pearl Harbor, then we might, horror of horrors, be forced to imagine that something even worse than a Confederacy might exist. Like people who might, say, perpetrate the Rape of Nanking, which of course, the Japanese did.

I see in these films a symptom of something I find to be ugly and dangerous. The idea that being challenged in our preconceptions and beliefs about what is best (or worst) is equivalent to an attack that must be met with lethal force and no shred of mercy. And that is indeed frightening.

From Somewhere In Orbit

The Last Jedi: My Thoughts (Not That You Asked)

/ G. Scott Huggins / Leave a comment

Introduction: I’ve been very grateful to everyone who has been thoughtful enough to avoid spoilers for the past month, or at least been thoughtful enough to warn me so that I wouldn’t read spoilers. Because of that, walking into the theater today, I was only aware of one major plot event in the movie, and very much appreciated that. Also, since having kids, I’ve gotten a new perspective on how impossible it can be to see a hot new movie within a reasonable amount of time, so am trying to be extra sensitive to those who may STILL be trying to avoid spoilers. Okay, that should fill up the preview for Facebook: ON TO THE SPOILERS!!!

The Good Stuff: I’m going to open up by saying that overall, I thought the good in this movie far outweighed the bad. I think Mark Hamill rose to heights of acting I’ve not previously seen from him. The rest of the cast likewise did well, but being a writer and not a drama geek anymore, I’m going to mostly discuss the writing.

I thought this film may have done more than any other to show what a Jedi on the cusp of “turning” to the Dark or Light really looks like in the complex relationship between Kylo and Rey. There was an ambiguity portrayed in these characters’ actions that explored how someone may reject a specific evil, and yet refuse to embrace virtue. There was a sense that Rey really was tempted by Kylo’s offer, not of power, but of belonging, whereas I never got the sense that Luke was ever truly tempted by Darth Vader as a father. Luke already had too strong sense of identity as Vader’s adversary for that.

I liked that there was no great secret behind Rey’s parentage, and the wound that this dealt her as she came to terms with that. I liked the backstory that filled in the reason Luke “lost” Ben Solo, and the tension that created with Rey.

I also really liked that Luke Skywalker correctly cut down the Jedi Council as a collective failure that allowed the Empire to seize power. I wish he’d turned some of that insight onto Yoda.

I very much liked that Supreme Leader Snoke had guards that actually seemed to be competent. I liked a little less that Kylo Ren, whom we saw stopping blaster bolts in Ep. VII, seems not to have considered directly using the Force a bit more in that fight.

I have to admire the visual homages to Empire and Jedi that managed not to feel nearly as much like a retread of those films as The Force Awakens did of New Hope. I am stunned and delighted that they had the guts to fit an homage to Hardware Wars in there.

The Bad Stuff: As far as the discussion that I am vaguely aware of regarding Vice-Admiral Holdo and her competence, I do think that Holdo’s command style was awfully opaque. Why, after all, not tell the people on her own ship what was going on, to give them hope? On the other hand, an opaque command style really doesn’t justify a subordinate relieving her of command. Poe Dameron is a mutinous idiot, and his and Finn’s and Rose’s actions led directly to the death of what appeared to be something like 2/3 of the Rebels Holdo planned to save. And him demanding to know what was going on right after her assumption of command and while she is obviously busy was just asinine.

One of my biggest peeves with the movie is the whole “no one can track anything through hyperspace” plot point. In all seriousness, this has ALWAYS been possible in Star Wars, from the very first: The Empire follows the Millennium Falcon through hyperspace to get to the Rebel Base. And before anyone says “But that’s because they put a homing beacon on their ship!” Uh-uh. Bullshit. Leia says “They’re tracking us.” Makes no mention of how. And if everyone knew it had to be a homing beacon, Han and Chewie could at least have searched for one. Moreover, if everyone knew that the only way to track ships through hyperspace was by means of homing beacons, someone aboard that Rebel flagship should have said “Great Maker! Some spy has planted a homing beacon aboard our ship!” Not “Wow! The First Order must have just developed a whole new order of technology that-a-stormtrooper-and-a-maintenance-tech-can-deduce-must-be-based-on-the-same-principles-of-any-active-tracking-and-if-we-talk-really-fast-we-can-slide-weaklogicbytheaudienceandscream IT MUST BE ONLY ON THE LEAD SHIP SO WE CAN MOUNT A HOPELESS COMMANDO RAID ON THAT ONE WEAK POINT ‘CAUSE WE’RE REBELS THAT’S HOW WE ROLL!!”
Oh, and yeah, the whole argument that no one’s ever tracked anyone through hyperspace is also bullshit because in Jedi Han and Leia read Imperial sensors that were tracking the Rebel armada before it emerged from hyperspace. So there’s that.

This next one pains me to say, but there’s no way around it: I loved that someone finally decided to use a hyperspace ram on the big screen. That was an epic moment. Except…

…if that was possible and so easy to think of, why did the Rebels not use it during the Battle of Endor when they seemed sure to lose? Three or four hyperspace lances through a Death Star would have ruined the Emperor’s whole day, and would probably have been a net gain of ships for the Alliance besides.

The Dumb: Yoda has looked less wise with each passing movie. I really wanted Luke to rip into him. Aside from the line about the importance of passing on our failures to our students (which was poignant and true), Yoda came off as a cheap trick that weakened Luke’s character.

Oh, and along the lines of idiotic command decisions, Leia has the gall to slap Poe for not aborting in the middle of his attack run and endangering the bombers? Why the hell did she not just order them to abort herself and make Poe’s attack run moot?

And speaking of idiocy, the Empire has still not learned that you can’t shoot fighters down with anything but other fighters? That lesson should be well over two decades old.

I’m sorry, but Leia saving herself from the vacuum of space with the Force was dumb. Even dumber was them opening the door for her and not losing the whole corridor and themselves to decompression.

Okay, that’s it for now. All my judgments are, of course, right and true and utterly immune to criticism. Unless I think of something else later. Jump in, the argument’s fine!