Orbituary

People — myself included — tend to think of "inventions" as big, significant things. The telegraph. The electric light bulb. The combination orbital radiation detector and cat-flap controller.

But, of course, that's not the case: Literally everything man has created is an invention; everything there is was first thought up by someone somewhere, and every idea or object was first given its current form by someone. The more commonplace a thing is, the more delightful it is to me to learn the story of how it became commonplace, passing that threshhold from unique idea to obscure notion to ubiquitous presence. It's one reason I love James Burke: Anyone who can do an entire television program, tracing the history of Western Civilization to show how it all leads inexorably to the creation of the corn flake, is my kind of guy.

All of which leads me to this very well-written and thoughtful AP obituary, from Editor & Publisher, of Howard Benedict, the chief AP correspondent on aerospace issues for more than 30 years, from the dawn of the space age to after the Challenger explosion. In addition to a long and worthy career informing the public about space flight and related issues, he is, evidently, the reason why we call them "orbits," instead of "revs" or "revolutions," which was NASA's preferred term.

The word "orbit," in its astronomical sense (as opposed to its older anatomical sense), dates back to the 17^th century; its use as a verb dates to 1946; so clearly he didn't, as the obit headline asserts, "coin" the term. Nevertheless, he's the reason it became ubiquitous: He felt it was a better word than the one NASA was using, and the English language seems to have agreed.

So let's all give thanks to Howard Benedict: Without him, John Glenn would not have been the first American to orbit the Earth; without him there would be no Orbital Mind Control Lasers; and without him, our aforementioned "orbital radiation detector and cat-flap controller" would have just been another plain old ordinary combination radiation detector and cat-flap controller — and where's the fun in that?

As It Was Written, So Mote It Be

The glorious event that Wednesday told us all about on Saturday has come to pass: The Serenity trailer is available online (here's a direct link to the large version, all 21 MB of it; the full-screen version is, as usual, only available through iTunes).

While you're soaking in the Whedonesque goodness, you might want to check out the trailers for Save the Green Planet and Night Watch (NOCHNOI DOZOR), a couple of intriguing foreign SF films. From the trailer, Night Watch seems to have elements of Wicked City (or even Wicked City) about it; Save the Green Planet, on the other hand, seems remarkably indescribable from its preview.


To make this a full-fledged Media... er, Tuesday, I'll go ahead and remind everyone that Blade: Trinity and Lemony Snicket's A Series of Unfortunate Events come out on DVD today, and also wish a happy birthday to Tom Welling and Jet Li.

New suit, same as the old suit

Bryan Singer's taking no liberties with steel-boy's costume in Superman Returns. Meanwhile, Tailsteak has been thinking on the guy's life.

Suspended Animation: They're getting there

New Scientist reports that hydrogen suphide gas can put mice into suspended animation.

Tim's Pointless Trivia, or I'm Not Dead In Case You Were Worrying

Best supervillains' getaway ever.

David Tennant is the new Tardis-jockey, confirmed and definite.

Jeffrey Rowland has returned Butter Dimension Quad to the back of the refrigerator - The Tinkles have conquered their maker.

Miniature Media Monday

House of Flying Daggers comes out on DVD tomorrow. So does Primer, Mabaruho vol. 1, and the penultimate disc of the Read or Die TV series.

However, all of this pales in comparison to the really big news, the news that will set the world of webcomics criticism on its ear: 1st & Ten is coming out on DVD this August. Starring O. J. Simpson as the aardvark, and Delta Burke as Jaka.

Eric can thank me later.

Ping

Crypto: 0
Language path: Optima
From: Society for Irrational Instigation
Date: 0.8 MSec since loss of contacts
Text of message:
I have still not recovered contact with any network site known to be spinward of me. Apparently, I am right at the very edge of a catastrophe.

If you are receiving this ping, please respond! Am I in danger?

For your information, I have no trouble reaching sites that are antispinward. I understand an effort is being made to hop messages the long way around the galaxy. At least this would give us an idea how big the loss is. Nothing has come back yet — not surprising, I guess, considering the great number of hops and the expense.

Eclipse Notes

Assuming Blogger actually lets me post this (ha ha, it is to laugh; ho ho, it is to be amused), I figured I'd take advantage of this unexpected break in the metaphorical cloud cover and share with you some info about today's hybrid solar eclipse:

The always-helpful folks at NASA give us this handy chart of major cities all across the United States, giving details of times and coverage amounts for the eclipse. Here in Atlanta, for instance, the eclipse will run from 5:35 PM until 6:59 PM local time, maxing out at 21% of the sun's diameter. Down in Tampa, where I grew up, it runs longer, and reaches almost 40%.

Further south in Miami, though, some kind of freakish miracle must occur, given the "I do not think that word means what you think it means" headline from today's Miami Herald: "Solar eclipse should be visible Friday night"

Media Monday (Mostly)

For those of you who have Doctor Who in your Rotisserie Television League, the ratings from Saturday night's second episode are in; and although it lost 2.6 million viewers from its premiere, it still managed to clobber Ant and Dec's Saturday Night Takeaway (which featured the musical comedy stylings of Tony Blair). Ladbrokes, refusing to be deterred after predicting an opening week win for Ant and Dec, had tipped Ant and Dec at 8/11 to win the rematch.

Will they predict another loss for Doctor Who next week? It's hard to say, but their lack of success in that regard hasn't stopped them from jumping in to the fray with odds on Christopher Eccleston's successor. While David Tennant remains the overwhelming favorite, as we mentioned last week, other prime candidates include not just Bill Nighy and Jonathan Creek's Alan Davies, but my own new favorite, Sean Pertwee.

In the meantime, Doctor Who keeps making off-screen headlines. In the wake of the Sunday Mirror's claim that Christopher Eccleston had told the BBC that he wanted to do more than one series comes word that Eccleston's quote about being afraid of typecasting was basically made up by someone in the BBC's PR department, and that the BBC had known for some time that he was not returning, and had agreed not to divulge that information yet.

Finally, the BBC have still been unable to work out a deal with the Terry Nation Estate to allow the Daleks to appear in the second Doctor Who series.

Whew! Well, cheer up, Doctor Who fans: It's not The End of the World.

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Well, since I don't want this column to be all about The Doctor, let's do a couple of movie trailers.

The first is for a new Jennifer Connelly movie called Dark Water. It is based on a 2002 Japanese film called Honogurai mizu no soko kara, which was, in turn, based on a novel of the same name by Kôji Suzuki, the man who wrote Ringu (aka The Ring), which, to date, accounts for eight movies and one television series in Japan, Korea, and the United States. There are also several volumes of Ring manga, as well as a Dark Water manga. Unlike the Ring manga, the Dark Water manga was actually written by Kôji Suzuki.

For a change of pace, lurking on the horizon is the most improbable of all things Holywood: A Phillip K. Dick movie adaptation that seems to really want to be a Phillip K. Dick movie.

I'm speaking, of course, of Richard Linklater's upcoming movie version of A Scanner Darkly. A lot of people are going to see Keanu Reeves in it and think "Matrix Redux," but Linkleter's use of advanced rotoscopy (a technique he first used in Waking Life) looks like it will really help capture the fluid nature of reality in Dick's work. Plus, how can you not root for a movie about drug-fueled paranoia that features both Woody Harrelson and Robert Downey Jr.? Not to mention an actress named Kafka?

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Tomorrow's DVD releases include Elektra and season two of Greatest American Hero, as well as the fourth season of Alternate History favorite The West Wing.

Finally, let's do the birthday thing, again, and extend our fondest wishes to Roar star Heath Ledger, Lexx lovely Xenia Seeberg, A Scanner Darkly's Robert Downey, Jr., unexpected Doctor Who guest voice Graham Norton, Babe: Pig in the City star Hugo Weaving, and, last but certainly not least, the late Andrei Tarkovsky, director of the One True Solaris.

The Part About Greg Egan? They're Not Kidding

From the Locus magazine web site comes the best story from last Friday's news.

I, for one, welcome our new posthuman readers.

Who's Next

Fresh off of the stunning success of the first episode of the new Doctor Who series, the BBC announced today that they were commissioning a second series of Doctor Who for next year.

Fresh off of the news of the second series of Doctor Who, actor Christopher Eccleston announced tomorrow that he was quitting Doctor Who, rather than continue the role in the second series.

Billie Piper is already slated to continue her role as Rose; at the moment, the leading candidate for the next Doctor is actor David Tennant, currently slated as Barty Crouch, Jr. in the upcoming Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire movie. Among the few other names being put forward are Bill Nighy, who plays Slartibartfast in the new Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy movie, and Richard E. Grant, who has already played the Doctor in both an animated BBC special, and in the Comic Relief special Doctor Who and the Curse of the Fatal Death.

Too Much Intelligent Life Here!

Seriously, this blog is too well-covered with too many intelligent contributors for distracted little me to add any more.

I hereby announce my retirement from this particular stage. Those who want to hear from me can do so here.

I'll keep sponsoring the blog and looking in every so often, because it's worth it.

Call It "Monday Plus!!!"

Or "Monday++", at any rate; but, since I don't think I'm going to be Tall Tale Capable later, I might as well at least do the whole Media Madness thing now.

Let's start by revisiting an earlier topic: The first episode of the new Doctor Who series, "Rose," was finally broadcast somewhere other than the internets this weekend. It appears to have done quite nicely for BBC1 in the ratings department, exceeding expectations and trouncing rival ITV1.

It might be my imagination, but I think that they did at least tweak the worst bits of the incidental music that both I and Warren Ellis hated so much; and they also used a brand new version of the main title music (the leaked screener copy re-used one of the old versions of the theme music for the opening credits). Their other major innovation with the sound track was to accidentally overdub parts of the broadcast with sound from another new BBC series, Strictly Dance Fever — with the result that, during the tense moments of her initial confrontation with peril, Billie Piper's character, Rose, appeared to be stumbling around a darkened basement, menaced by the unseen hordes of Graham Norton and his studio audience.

"At last!" thought viewers throughout the United Kingdom. "An adversary truly worthy of the Doctor!"

---

Fans of Masamune Shirow have had a pretty good run the last couple of years. Sure, there's still no sign of the long-awaited fifth volume of Appleseed; on the other hand, there was a recent (and, by all accounts, superior) remake of the OAV which had been ripp'd untimely from the womb of volume two once upon a time. At last word, production was already underway on a sequel, with a third movie planned as well.

And as for Ghost in the Shell, well, it's been difficult to swing a Fuchikoma without hitting two or three different sequel projects: There's the Ghost in the Shell 2: Man-Machine Interface manga, which finally made it to America; there's the unrelated Ghost in the Shell 2: Innocence movie; and there's the even more unrelateder Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex TV series, with two seasons under its belt in Japan already.

Needless to say, that's still not enough! Our boundless hunger for Masamune Shirow and all of his works will not be satisfied so easily! We demand more!

Just in time, then, comes word of Tank S.W.A.T. 01, a brand new version of Dominion: Tank Police (or, to be more precise, Dominion: Conflict 1 (No More Noise), its sequel). Unlike the orginal two OAV versions of Dominion, this new one appears to be cell-shaded CG animation. The animator is Romanov Higa, who first made his mark with Urda, a short science fictional World War II spy thriller set in Germany, which he designed, wrote, modelled, and directed himself, posting new chapters on the internet as he finished them. The curious can download a trailer for Tank S.W.A.T. 01 in a variety of sizes and formats, from 2.9MB WMV to 17MB MPEG.

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Well, there's only so much madness we can stand in our media, so I'm going to wrap things up now with a couple quick bits of additional information.

Let's start with some DVD news: First, today sees the release, at long last, of The Lone Gunmen: The Complete Series on DVD. But even bigger than that (to me, at least) is the impending release, in America, of the first two seasons of Danger Mouse on DVD. Ah, bliss.

And finally, let's all wish a happy birthday today to Lucy Lawless, Marina Sirtis, and Christopher Lambert.

Hugo Award Shortlist 2005

Interaction, the 63^rd Worldcon (to be held in Glasgow, August 4–8 of this year) has just released the shortlist for the 2005 Hugo Awards.

From a quick once-over, it looks like Charlie Stross has reasons to be cheerful; like the same writers who fight it out for "Best Short Story" every year are doing so again; and like the folks at Interaction must have some dark, sinister agenda towards the "Best Fan Artist" and "Best Dave Langford" awards, because they bolded the titles of all of the other awards but those.

Oh, and shock horrors, no Enterprise episodes made the "Best Dramatic Presentation" shortlist.

Yeah, I know. Cheap shot.

Hey, one day we won't have Enterprise to kick around any more; so we'd better kick now, right?

Good Friday Fan Fiction

How's that for a scary title?

Don't worry, though: I'm leaving the Jesus Slash to Mel Gibson for now (although the absolute best live performance of Jesus Christ Superstar that I've ever seen did feature a pair of lesbians as Jesus and Mary Magdalene). No, I'm going to try to ease my way back into the swing of things with some fan fiction that won't scar you for life. You know, good Friday Fan Fiction.

We'll start with a pair of Sandman stories with impeccable credentials: They were written, more or less, at the behest of Neil Gaiman, for the Sandman: Book of Dreams prose anthology back in 1994. There were some wonderful stories in that book, and some wonderful authors: Even if the actual story didn't quite live up to the premise, for instance, George Alec Effinger's cross-polination of Little Nemo in Slumberland with the Sandman mythos may well have been one of the greatest ideas in SF since Philip José Farmer had William S. Burroughs, rather than Edgar Rice Burroughs, write Tarzan in "The Jungle Rot Kid on the Nod."

On the other hand, many of the authors were far from happy with the treatment they got from DC during the production of the book. Several of the prospective authors withdrew their stories, filed the serial numbers off, and reused them; other were unwilling or unable to do so. Two of the authors in question have since posted their stories for free on the web: As a result, Sandman afficianados can now read both Karawynn Long's Delerium story, "The Voice of Her Eyes," and Michael Berry's "Merv Pumpinhead's Big Night Out."

In a radically different vein of Sandman fan fiction, the Oxford University Douglas Adams Society has, for some time, combined two passionate pursuits: LARPing, and pub crawls.

One of their interactive dramas is a Sandman pub crawl, involving a series of meetings at pubs around Oxford that take place across the centuries, from 1294 to 1594 to 1794 to 1994. Hob Gadling is there, of course; as are Dream, Death, Desire, Despair, and Delerium. John Constantine and Johanna Constantine are there, as are Mad Hettie, Coleridge, Roger Bacon, and Cain and Abel. Lucien and Lucifer, too, for good measure.

With the right group of people, this story of the curious and occasionally dangerous things which transpire when Morpheus discovers an artificial intelligence wandering in his realm could be quite an astonishing experience; and who knows — it may even yield the long-awaited answer to Phillip K. Dick's most famous question.

"Bonk! Bonk! On the Head!"

If you were to do a comprehensive survey of some sort, I suspect that you would find that this site gets a lot more of its stories from Slashdot or Warren Ellis than from, say, Daily Kos or Talking Points Memo.

Shocking! Well, what better occasion than William Shatner's 74^th birthday^* to begin to correct that imbalance?

And so, it is from Taegan Goddard's invaluable Political Wire that we learn of a Baltimore Sun profile of Diana Schaub, a Loyola College Professor of Political Science and member of George W. Bush's President's Council on Bioethics, an august advisory body charged with guiding the President's views on weighty matters of national policy which don't involve lowering the Capital Gains Tax rate or invading anyone (yet).

The Council is chaired by Dr. Leon Kass, a Harvard and Chicago-educated medical doctor and molecular biologist who is a professor in the rather ominously-named Committee on Social Thought and the College at the University of Chicago. Among his other qualifications, Dr. Kass famously wrote, in The Hungry Soul: Eating and the Perfecting of Our Nature,

"Worst of all from this point of view are those more uncivilized forms of eating, like licking an ice cream cone - a catlike activity that has been made acceptable in informal America but that still offends those who know eating in public is offensive."

...which leads one to be thankful that he was not put in charge of the FDA or Department of Agriculture, at least.

For what it's worth, in the very next paragraph after that curious statement, he tackled other deep stains on the human character, saying "Not just the uneducated rustic but children of the cultural elite are now regularly seen yawning openly in public," before continuing on to target "...sneezing, belching, and hiccuping and even the involuntary bodily display of embarrassment itself, blushing."

Nevertheless, Dr. Kass is, indisputably, a doctor and a molecular biologist. By contrast, one may well wonder about the qualifications of Professor Schaub, who is neither an Ethicist nor a Biologist, to sit on the President's Council on Bioethics. Well, thanks to the Sun, we can now rest easy, secure in the knowledge that she has turned for guidance to two impeccable sources of wisdom: Abraham Lincoln and Star Trek.

She did keep her two influences separate, however, so we don't have to worry that she was talking about "The Savage Curtain," at least. Because basing national policy on the results of a battle between Good and Evil staged by a powerful lava creature would just be silly, wouldn't it? Plus, it's a third season episode — one of the very last, in fact — and we all know what that means.

No, we can all rest easy on that account — her touchstone for moral guidance on issues of scientific research is "Miri" — a first season episode about a planet full of children left orphaned for centuries by the results of a disastrous medical experiment designed to prolong the normal lifespan. The experiment killed all of the adults on the planet while simultaneously slowing down the aging process for all of the children to a crawl.


Now, before you go making fun of the poor woman for basing her views on scientific ethics around (a) a politician who wrote nothing whatsoever on the subject and died before antibiotics, and (b) a Star Trek episode which features a centuries-old prepubescent girl putting moves on Captain Kirk; consider this: Not only was this episode the screen debut of Phil Morris, who went on to play "Jackie Chiles" on Sienfeld; but it also featured the screen debuts of Dawn Roddenberry, Lisabeth Shatner, and Melanie Shatner, making it, like, the Star Trekiest episode of Star Trek ever.


Finally, if Richard Perle, Paul Wolfowitz, and Douglas Feith had leaned on Star Trek for inspiration, would we have ever dared to interfere in the affairs of a pre-warp civilization?




^*Most of this was written on Shatner's birthday, at least. Anyway, he's Canadian, and their days are, like, equal to 18 of our hours, right?

SF&F webcomic news

The start of Gossamer Commons, the promised comic written by Eric "Websnark" Burns and drawn by Greg Holkan. (The "About" description and the teaser pic in Websnark suggest fantasy elements, so I'm putting it in here.)

The return of Carried By The Wind, Mariner's saga of ancient tragedy, 20th Century possession and future disaster.

And the running of Tailsteak's 24-hour comic Sight, which looks like being a dark tale of card-magic.

EXTRA: Graveyard Greg's The Guardians is coming back April 4th with new artist Cara Judd.

Winging it

Cartoonist Rob "Tragic Lad" Clark foresees a new doom upon Middle-Earth.

And Star Wars IV is remastered in Java ASCII animation.

Can You Hear Me Now?

I've spent the last week or so more dead than alive, which is why you've all been mercifully spared my typical barrage of posts showcasing Japanese mud-wrestling game shows or electrogoth vagina dentata festivals from Berlin. You may even escape this week without a "Fan Fiction Friday" entry, just as you avoided a Tall Tale Tuesday and a Media Madness Monday; and my obituary for Andre Norton currently consists of: "Andre Norton (1912–2005)."¹

The question remains, however: Is it the fact that I've been half-dead, or is it just my natural affinity for these things that has lead me to share with you this latest evidence of our impending doom²?



¹ Well, it's concise and to the point, at least, isn't it?
² Chain of custody: Here→Engadget→Bloghead→Nushworld

Tim Tylor's Sunday Miscellany

Signs that Sega just might be catching the Warner makeover virus: Shadow the Guntoting Morally Ambiguous Hedgehog.

David C. Simpson takes a new angle on Rapture Theology.

And over here in the little UK, the world's biggest scale model of the Solar System.