Steven Lyle Jordan's Blog, page 41

Will Doctor Who get serious?

Peter Capaldi, the new Doctor of Doctor Who

The new season of Doctor Who has given us the conclusion to a unique type of cliffhanger that only this show can provide: Who will be the new Doctor when he comes out of the other side of regeneration?

The Doctor has changed actors over a dozen times now, over the course of the TV series and one movie… a unique invention by the producers to replace the original Doctor, William Hartnell, when he was became too ill to continue the role.  With each change of actors has come a change of the character’s mannerisms as well, with the new actor bringing some of his own quirks to the role.  So, since 1965, we have been treated to thirteen men who have all been very different—and yet were always the same character.

And now it’s happened again, with Peter Capaldi taking over the role most recently vacated by Matt Smith.  As well, Smith’s manic, over-confident and endearingly bumbling man-child of a Doctor will be changed to suit Capaldi’s take on the role.  So what does that mean for the show… and for us?

I know what I hope it means: That Doctor Who will get just a bit more serious.  Not that I disliked the more light-hearted, frivolous take on the show—in fact, light-hearted and frivolous has pretty much been its stock and trade for… well, forever—but that, in the midst of a television world that seems to be either abandoning SF for superheroes and fantasy content, or obsessing about the Big Brother mythos, it would be nice to see Doctor Who show us some more serious science fiction material.

Matt Smith, the previous incarnation of the Doctor

Not that this show can be totally serious; it is, after all, about a Time Lord, a few-thousand-year-old alien that looks just like a human but has two hearts and regenerates instead of dies, flying around in a stolen relic of a time machine that’s bigger on the inside and allows him to communicate with any alien species as easily as talking to one of us, and provides him tools like a flashlight-sized “sonic screwdriver” that can do anything and a sheet of “psychic paper” that can look like any identification a person wants to see.  Oh, and he occasionally meets himself (and even multiple versions of himself at once), has saved races, planets and entire universes, married the Queen of England once, and has become known alternately as the galaxy’s savior and its scourge.  He’s essentially the most dangerous nigh-omnipotent space pirate the universe has ever known.

So, okay, maybe I’m not expecting serious science out of this show.  But I would like to see serious stories about more than two-dimensional bad guys like the Daleks, Cybermen, Weeping Angels, etc, etc, etc.  The new Doctor hints that he’s made mistakes in the past, and it’s time he changed that.  Bravo: Let’s see a man who travels through time, making changes to history as he goes, who actually cares about how it affects the future; let’s see fewer zombie-mannequins trying to make London even stiffer than it already is… and more challenges that will have serious implications for the future.  Less “timey-wimey,” and more time-and-space-related “concept” stories.

Most importantly, let’s see more characters that have serious dimension to them.  Doctor Who has a host of supplementary characters, but most of them can be summed up in half a sentence.  (New record: Clara=The Impossible Girl.)  Surely the single most complex character was River Song, daughter of two of the Doctor’s companions, kidnapped and raised by enemies to kill the Doctor, finally defeating her “programming” and even marrying the Doctor… but due to some perversity of time travel, always traveling in opposite temporal directions from the Doctor, meeting his younger self as she got older.  A series as potentially epic as Doctor Who should be meeting more epic characters like that, and fewer posturing maniacs like Davros and the Master.

And with these deeper characters should come deeper emotion, feelings that go beyond the usual surface level that tend to be characterized as “feels.”  The kind of stuff that made you think beyond the person on the screen, and reflect them against all of humanity.

When Doctor Who was originally conceived, it was supposed to provide a bit of historical education to its audience.  Maybe the latest season can provide an education into the real effects of one’s actions, into responsibility to a larger world, and into relationships that last longer than a season or two.  And a little historical education, maybe providing some useful perspective of more recent events, can’t hurt.

Anyway, that’s my list of what I’d like to see out of Doctor Who.  Will we get any of that?  Only—hey, you know I have to say it—only time will tell.

Pre-order “Heroes!”

Silence in the Library Publishing has issued pre-order details for Heroes!, the superhero anthology book that will contain one of my short stories, The Never-Ending Battle.

My story will be among many short stories from a notable list of authors, including the late Aaron Allston, Michael A. Stackpole, Timothy Zahn, Gail Z. Martin, Jean Rabe, John Kovalic, Alan Dean Foster, Maxwell Alexander Drake, Janine K. Spendlove, Patrick S. Tomlinson, Dylan Birtolo, Donald J. Bingle, Sheryl Nantus, Sarah Hans, Daniel Myers, Bradley P. Beaulieu, Jennifer Brozek, Gregory A. Wilson, Bryan Young, Addie J. King, Aaron Rosenberg, R.T. Kaelin, Jaym Gates, Steven Saus, Tracy Chowdhury, and Kelly Swails.  The book will also feature illustrations for each story, and the original cover art pictured here.  (So you know: My character doesn’t look like one of those on the cover.)

I’ve done comparably little writing on superheroes over the years; but one of my earlier novels, Midgard’s Militia, was a story about a world that had suddenly lost its heroes to an extraterrestrial threat that was still approaching Earth; and As the Mirror Cracks is a novel about a virtual world that included monsters and superheroes in its program, and the threat to its existence that would have serious ramifications in the real world.

Print and ebook versions of Heroes! will be available.  Pre-order yours today!

 

Okay, I’m just gonna say…

I can’t believe this is even a question. Photographer David J. Slater’s camera was used to take this picture. There are plenty of examples of scientists and naturalists setting up cameras to be remotely triggered by animals (using motion detectors or light sensors), and there has never been a question of ownership before; those who owned and set up the camera earned the rights. So OF COURSE Slater should own the photo!

Promo art in the works

You may have noticed the promo art on the left of the page for one of my novels.  I have now created four, and may do more, that I can use online or in print projects as needed.

The first four—for Sarcology, As the Mirror Cracks, Worldfarm One and The House of Jacquarelle—were relatively easy, as they lent themselves to nice, easily-presented blurbs.  The others will require a bit more work, and possibly new art (as used for Sarcology), so they may take a bit longer to design and produce.  You’ll be seeing them here, and on other sites that I frequent.

If you see one you like, feel free to share it with others; they look great on social media.  Summer’s not over… someone you know must need some good books to read on vacation!

Have a look at Gabe Ibáñez’s Automata

This is the first I’ve heard about this movie (coming in October), but it looks like a movie to see: Gabe Ibáñez’s Automata, A serious look at the ethics of creating independent intelligence.

Blueprint for living on Mars

From Gizmag:

If humans successfully colonize Mars in the future, what kind of homes will they inhabit? NASA and MakerBot recently hosted a competition which tasked people with making a 3D-printed model home suitable for the Red Planet. Noah Hornberger won with his Queen B (Bioshielding) concept home, which offers food-for-thought concerning the future of interplanetary architecture.

The link has more pictures of this innovative house design.

Wild Cards Winter cometh

I just learned yesterday that there would be a new Wild Cards novel coming out in November.  Lowball is a Wild Cards “Mosaic” novel (which seems to mean that the various parallel-running stories and characters don’t necessarily meet up in a grand finale at the end, I believe), the followup to the WC novel Fort Freak.

Then, in checking the Amazon pages for the drop date of Lowball (November 2), I discovered that the ebook reissue of the fourth Wild Cards novel, Aces Abroad, will be released on January 13.  So, good winter to come for us Wild Cards fans!

I’ve waxed on about the Wild Cards series before; for me, it’s hard not to adore these stories, edited by George R. R. Martin and written by some of the best SF talents in the business, about an alternate universe where an alien virus was released after World War II and resulted in incredible mutations in the human population.  If there could be real superheroes and supervillains in the world, the Wild Cards books depict the world that would result better than anything else I’ve ever read.

Even better are the recent treatments, including the most gorgeous covers this series has ever had.  The first books are now being reissued, which includes an ebook version never before available, and vastly improved editing of the digital content compared to the first available Wild Cards ebooks.  The effect is a much more professional product all around, a huge step up from the bad covers and typo-filled ebook versions of the past.

These are duly added to my list of books to snatch up when they are released. They should be on your list, too.

Syfy to produce Childhood’s End

My own cover design for the iconic novel.

Syfy is gearing up to produce Arthur C. Clarke’s science fiction classic Childhood’s End.

According to Deadline, Syfy’s ordering Childhood’s End to production as a six hour miniseries. Producing the project are Michael De Luca (The Social Network) and Akiva Goldsman (A Beautiful Mind). Writing the script is Matthew Graham (Life on Mars and Doctor Who) and just hired to direct is Nick Hurran (Doctor Who and Sherlock‘s “His Last Vow”). If nothing else, this line-up certainly suggests that Syfy is serious about doing this and doing it right.

Although Syfy gets a lot of grief over its lightweight sci-fi content and complete fantasy content (like wrestling), the network, owned by NBC Universal, is fully capable of producing serious and quality science fiction.  It’s demonstrated this best with the rebooted Battlestar Galactica series, but it has also produced some quality miniseries, including two based on the first two Dune novels, and some retellings of classic stories based around L. Frank Baum’s OZ books and Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland.  In short, if Syfy decides they want to do this right, there’s no reason to expect that they cannot do it.

Childhood’s End, a favorite novel of mine since I first read it as a boy, tells the story of  an alien race that arrives on Earth and takes on the job of protecting us from ourselves, long enough for humans to reach a major event in our development. Though Clarke’s 2001: A Space Odyssey often gets lauded for its advanced thinking regarding aliens, in many ways it can’t hold a candle to the concepts presented in Childhood’s End.

Childhood’s End has been considered for movie and TV treatments before, dating at least all the way back to the 1970s, when Universal began development of a production.  It turned out Universal was not ready for such heady material, and over the years, the production was highly altered.  The final result was the original series V, the program about benevolent aliens in massive ships who turn out to be malevolent lizards come to eat us, and a rebel underground that fights them.  The massive ships (which have, since Childhood’s End, become iconic of the superior aliens’ arrival) are literally all that survived from the original novel.

Similarly, audiences were treated to the same arrival of massive alien ships in Independence Day; but again, that was the only element taken from Childhood’s End, the rest being a battle for Earth as the first ships immediately attack major cities.  It’s a shame that such a wonderful opening moment has been forever marred by its treatment by scare-monger film-making for the lowest common denominator.

Of course, there’s much more to the novel than that iconic opening, including: The conversion of Earth into a utopia for all; the efforts of some distrusting humans to expose the aliens as frauds; the truth behind the aliens themselves; and the fate of humanity that the aliens have been sent to shepherd through.  Added to that is the story of a man who stows away aboard an alien ship, in order to see what’s out there, and getting much more than he bargained for.  All in all, it’s an incredible story, credited by many as a novel that helped change science fiction forever, and worthy of serious treatment.

So I’m going to cross my fingers and hold out hope that Syfy does this marvelous novel justice.  Nothing would please me more than to see them impress us all with another miniseries jewel that I can add to my collection.

A Brief Look at Texting and the Internet in Film

A Brief Look at Texting and the Internet in Film from Tony Zhou on Vimeo.

New in FREE Reads

Two writing challenges from Sci-Fi Ideas have been added to FREE Reads:

The Ghost of Lynus Hayes— a space station’s ghost rises anew
The Blue— Moments on the Cat Planet