Christopher L. Bennett's Blog, page 46

BUCK ROGERS IN THE 25TH CENTURY (1979) Reviews: “Awakening”/feature film (spoilers)

After I did my Battlestar Galactica reviews several years back, I always intended to revisit the other major Glen Larson-produced space opera from the same period, Buck Rogers in the 25th Century, which ran from 1979-81 and whose first season starred Gil Gerard as Buck, Erin Gray as Col. Wilma Deering, Tim O’Connor as Dr. Huer, and Felix Silla and Mel Blanc as (respectively) the body and voice of Twiki, Buck’s robot sidekick. I had to drop my Netflix DVD service due to lack of funds before I got around to those discs, but recently I finally decided to check my library for them, and so I’ve finally been able to do a rewatch. Along the way, I stumbled upon a treasure trove of magazine article scans from the period on the fan site ByYourCommand.net, providing a wealth of production insights that have helped me enhance my commentary.

The character of Anthony Rogers debuted in the pulp magazine Amazing Stories, in the 1928 novella “Armageddon 2419 A.D.” by Philip Nowlan and its 1929 sequel “The Airlords of Han.” Rogers was a World War I veteran who was trapped in suspended animation by mine gas and woke up five centuries later in a post-apocalyptic United States that had long since been conquered by an enemy interchangeably referred to as “Hans” and “Mongolians,” even though the Han Chinese and Mongols are entirely different nations/ethnicities. “Tony” Rogers fell in love with resistance fighter Wilma Deering, and together they used a mix of Rogers’s WWII combat skills and 25th-century technology to fight for the liberation of the United States. The stories are typical of the preferences of Amazing’s editor Hugo Gernsback, focused more on the details of futuristic technology and language than on characterization. They’re pretty feminist for their era, portraying Wilma and the other “girls” of her era as strong, skilled fighters. However, they’re also deeply and horrifyingly racist. The whole duology is essentially one long white-supremacist tract about the need to defend the noble White Race (it actually uses the capitalized phrase and equates it with Americans) and “blast the Yellow Blight from the face of the Earth,” going on at great length about the moral degeneracy of the Han and how they don’t love their children as we do. In “Airlords,” Nowlan’s heroes freely use nuclear, chemical, and biological weapons to exterminate the entire Han race from existence. It’s such a brutally racist, genocidal fantasy that I think it must have gotten complaints, because there’s a clumsily tacked-on retcon at the end of “Airlords” saying that the Han turned out after the fact to have been part-alien, so all the actual human races can get along as equals now that the alien taint has been expunged.

The first novella was soon adapted into a comic strip by syndicator John F. Dille, writer Nowlan, and artist Dick Calkins, who renamed its lead character Buck Rogers and added more characters including scientist Dr. Huer, the villainous defector Killer Kane, and his femme fatale girlfriend Ardala Valmar. The comic strip debuted at the start of 1929, initially adapting the same “war against the Mongols” premise as the novellas and employing the standard Asian stereotypes and caricatures in use at the time, but after the first year of the strip, the war was resolved peacefully by revealing that the benevolent Mongol Emperor was unaware of the atrocities his Viceroy was committing in America. After Buck and Wilma defeated the Viceroy, the Mongol angle was permanently, mercifully dropped and Buck became a planet-hopping hero taking on foes like the Tiger Men of Mars. Buck Rogers was the first space hero in American comics and radio, anticipating Flash Gordon by four years, though Flash made it to the movie screen first in 1936, in the form of Buster Crabbe.

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Universal produced the three Flash Gordon serials and the 1939 Buck Rogers serial also starring Crabbe, and they held onto the rights to both characters for the following four decades. After the failure of an initial 1977 TV series pitch developed by David Gerrold (rejected because it was more science-fictional than Universal felt audiences were ready for), they hired Glen Larson and Leslie Stevens (the former Outer Limits producer who probably contributed a lot more to the creation of Battlestar Galactica than is generally recognized) to make a TV pilot in 1979, the 50th anniversary of the comic strip. The original plan was to do a 6-hour miniseries, but Larson decided the first 2 hours were worth releasing as a theatrical feature, as he had done before with Battlestar Galactica’s pilot. Thus, scenes were added, cut, and reshot for the theatrical version.

The feature film Buck Rogers in the 25th Century opens with William “Buck” Rogers (not Anthony, although that’s later established as his middle name) as an astronaut who, according to William Conrad’s opening narration, is thrown into a 500-year orbit and placed in suspended animation by a freak accident. (Perhaps they were influenced by Planet of the Apes? As it happens, Gene Roddenberry’s earlier Genesis II pilot was rather reminiscent of the original Nowlan story, with Dylan Hunt trapped underground in cryogenic suspension to awaken in a post-apocalyptic world.) The narration sets up the main title sequence as a hibernation dream of Buck’s, though it’s bizarre, like a cheap knockoff of a James Bond title sequence. While the insipid title song “Suspension” is badly sung by Kipp Lennon (no relation to John, but a sibling of the ‘50s/’60s singing group the Lennon Sisters), several women in skimpy silver outfits lounge and pose atop a huge BUCK ROGERS logo on the floor, staring “seductively” at the camera while Gil Gerard’s Buck lies there “asleep” on top of his own name. These women include Pamela Hensley (Princess Ardala) and Erin Gray (Wilma Deering), even though this is supposedly Buck’s dream and he hasn’t met them yet. The rest are just random models, one of whom is wearing oversized round eyeglasses for some reason. It’s insane and inept. The TV version, “Awakening” (which is oddly included only as a low-quality, unrestored bonus feature on the final disk of the second season’s DVD set), mercifully omits this absurd opening in favor of the standard main title sequence and its strictly instrumental arrangement of “Suspension.” (I always liked the more driving, dramatic music under the opening narration and Buck’s “flight through time” much more than the “Suspension” arrangement over the cast credits.)

The first conscious characters we meet, aside from some random fighter pilots, are Princess Ardala of Draconia and her second-in-command Kane (Henry Silva), a defector from Earth. They intercept Buck’s shuttle, almost blast him before realizing there’s something odd about his ship, and revive him out of curiosity, all while en route to Earth for a diplomatic mission that’s secretly a plot to conquer Earth. Buck spends this whole time either woozy from his 500-year nap or stoned on pain medicine, so there’s not much established about his personality except that he cracks wise a lot. Kane sends him on his way to Earth, assuming that if they escort him safely through Earth’s defense shield rather than letting him fry, it proves he’s a spy. This plot point will have no further relevance and is just an excuse to get Buck on his way to Earth.

It’s worth noting that this version of Ardala is virtually nothing like Ardala Valmar from the comic strips and radio series, a Terran femme fatale and “adventuress” and the girlfriend of chief villain Killer Kane. I never realized it until this rewatch, but what the TV series did was to turn Ardala into a virtual clone of Flash Gordon’s Princess Aura – the sexpot daughter of an evil alien monarch menacing Earth (though Emperor Draco never appears except as a hologram in the theatrical edition), smitten by the stalwart Earthman hero, and partial to wearing ornate, bikini-like attire. The one respect in which this Ardala differs from Aura is that she remains a villain throughout. I would have thought they were imitating Ornella Muti’s Aura in Dino De Laurentiis’s Flash Gordon, but this pilot was written and shot in 1978, before De Laurentiis’s film even had its final script or cast. So I wonder what inspired the producers to turn Ardala into a near-exact copy of Aura. Maybe they felt it would make her a more impressive foil and love interest for Buck. Or maybe they just confused the two characters.

The Earth defense forces are confused by Buck’s transmissions to “Mission Control” and send up a squadron led by Wilma Deering, but in contrast to Kane’s expectations, they lead him through the safe path in the defense shield rather than letting him burn. He’s escorted to the Inner City, the only remaining outpost of civilization on Earth, which by a huge coincidence was formerly Buck’s hometown of Chicago. The Syd Dutton matte paintings representing the Inner City are the only good visual effects in the movie. While its spaceship effects are visually and stylistically similar to John Dykstra’s Galactica work (and its Starfighters are a rejected Ralph McQuarrie design concept for BSG’s Vipers), they’re made with less budget and/or skill and don’t look nearly as good. (They’re done by the same company that did Galactica post-pilot, though – Universal’s in-house FX outfit called Hartland, which Dykstra set up before moving to Paramount for Star Trek: The Motion Picture. I suppose maybe they had less time and budget to work on this one, because the FX are much better in the series proper.) But the Inner City sets are awful – mostly just an empty room whose walls are made of vacuformed pieces that look like Rubbermaid drawers. While in this 2-dollar set, Buck is briefly introduced to Dr. Huer, but the main characters he interacts with are Dr. Theopolis, a sentient AI or “quad” in the form of a circular box with flashing lights, and Twiki, the robot “drone” (or “ambuquad”) who carries Theopolis around like a giant medallion around his neck. Twiki (pronounced “Tweaky”) ws designed to look like a small boy with a bowl haircut, basically a mechanical version of Boxey from Galactica, but his large staring eyes and gaping mouth are a bit nightmarish and his head shape has been not unfairly compared to male genitalia. At first, Twiki only made low-pitched “Bidi-bidi-bidi” noises – sort of an electronic version of Porky Pig’s stutter – which Theopolis translated, but this was quite awkward and too similar to C-3PO and R2-D2, so Mel Blanc was given more actual dialogue to speak as Twiki as the movie progressed, in a deep wise-guy baritone that clashed oddly with Twiki’s wide-eyed moppet appearance. However, they kept the irritating “Bidi-bidi-bidi” at the start of his every line. (Amusingly, his first recognizable word was “L’chaim” when serving Buck a drink.) Inside the fiberglass Twiki costume was Felix Silla, an actor/stuntman best known as Cousin Itt on The Addams Family. Theopolis was voiced by Howard F. Flynn in the pilot, using a very HAL 9000-like voice (apparently they actually tried to get HAL’s voice actor Douglas Rain to do it), but the aptly named Eric Server would play Theopolis in the series.

Anyway, “Theo” and Wilma explain to Buck that Earth was ravaged by nuclear holocaust not long after he left, and that Earth has struggled to survive ever since, dependent on trade with other worlds for food and resources. Ardala is nominally coming in an unarmed flagship to solidify a defense pact with Earth against the pirates that have besieged its shipping, although Buck is suspicious about the carbon scoring on his shuttle’s hull. Meanwhile, in “Awakening” but not in the theatrical version, there’s a pair of scenes in the apartment assigned to Buck, one where Theo shows him its various futuristic features (presumably to lay pipe for future episodes, although the demonstrated features will rarely be used) and one where he expresses his frustration and rage at being cut off from his own time, in order to convince Theo to let him go out into “Anarchia,” the wasteland beyond the city dome, so that he can confront the reality of what’s happened. Buck then goes out into the ruins of Chicago with Twiki and Theo and finds the grave of his family, then gets into a fight with the mutants of the wasteland before being rescued by Wilma.

The post-apocalyptic element of the story is subsequently abandoned in favor of the Draconia story. Huer finds the homing beacon Kane planted on Buck’s ship to reveal the path through Earth’s defense field, and Buck is put on trial for espionage by the computer council (more quads like Theo) and sentenced to death, “to be carried out immediately.” However, apparently “immediately” means something different in 2491, since there’s enough time for Wilma to convince Huer to convince the council to suspend Buck’s sentence in order to let him visit the Draconian ship and help search it for weapons. We see this happen in “Awakening,” but the theatrical cut skips right from Buck’s death sentence to Wilma making her offer to Buck, making for a rather sizeable plot hole. On the Draconia, Ardala denies having met Buck before, then they almost immediately go out into battle against the “pirates” that Kane and Ardala have sent against their own ship to sell their story. These pirates are really Draconian “Hatchet fighters” softening Earth up to make it receptive to this alliance. The Starfighters’ combat computers prove useless against the Hatchet fighters, for reasons that are never explained, and Buck’s 20th-century Air Force fighter skills single-handedly save him and Wilma, though only after all the other fighter pilots are incidentally killed off. And then Buck and Wilma go back to Earth, completely forgetting their mission to search the Draconian flagship. Wilma starts to warm to him, and his death sentence is postponed until a retrial can be scheduled – another bit that I think was skipped over in the theatrical cut, making it feel like Buck’s trial was just forgotten.

But then, at a reception for Ardala, Buck livens up the courtly dancing by convincing the musician to play “rock” (which the musician has never heard of but picks up effortlessly despite Buck’s virtually nonexistent explanation of what it’s like), then seduces Ardala into making him think he’s defecting to become her consort, so he can get up to her ship and search it. This convinces Wilma he’s a spy after all. He gets Twiki to get him some potent headache pills before his “defection,” so he can lace Ardala’s drink and knock her out in order go search the ship – a rare case of a man giving a woman a roofie to avoid having sex with her. He also has to outfight her mute guard Tigerman, loosely based on the Tiger Men of Mars from the comics, to get away.

Twiki and Theo have snuck after Buck to see if he was a spy, but they learn he’s on their side when he uses a Draconian soldier disguise (with a samurai kabuto-style helmet, an echo of the Yellow Peril elements of the original novella and comic) to plant bombs in the tails of all the fighters, so they blow up when leaving the launch bay. The total lack of security in the hangar, allowing a single saboteur to wipe out the entire fighter squadron, is never explained. There is a second fight with Tigerman, but it was added for the feature version and they couldn’t get the first actor back, so there are two different Tigermen without explanation. Buck kills Tigerman with a bomb in his waistband, though the TV version omits the crotch kick that gives Buck the opening.

Wilma then braves the exploding ship to rescue the robots (and Buck, once Theo tells her he isn’t a traitor), Ardala and Kane escape in a shuttle before it blows, and the theatrical version ends with Wilma promising to be more of a “real woman” to Buck in the future, though Buck still seems more smitten with Ardala.

But “Awakening” skips Wilma’s “real woman” speech in favor of a lengthy final scene that sets the stage for the series to follow. With help from Twiki and “Dr. Junius from the Archives,” Buck has equipped his apartment with 20th-century furnishings, either genuine antiques or Twiki-made reconstructions. Huer and Wilma arrive to offer him an opportunity to work for them. Huer explains that every 25th-century Terran is thoroughly recorded and indexed from birth, known even by their enemies, but Buck is unique as an unknown quantity, a man with no digital footprint (in modern terms), and thus could help them with sensitive missions. Buck resists making formal commitments or putting down ties, but Huer predicts that some missions are bound to pique his interest enough that he’ll help out informally.

I really don’t understand why the DVD set’s makers chose to make the theatrical cut of the pilot the primary version and relegate “Awakening” to the bonus features on the very last disc of a different season set. It would’ve made more sense the other way around. The theatrical cut omits at least five scenes that are important to establishing the core characters and the foundations of the series to follow, as well as some important plot points within the story itself. Certain things in later episodes didn’t make sense to me until I belatedly saw the full pilot, particularly the basic question of just why the heck Dr. Huer kept recruiting Buck for so many missions. And the theatrical cut is a greatly inferior story as well, with a more superficial hero and a more incoherent narrative. If I’d seen the TV version first, I would’ve had a better first impression of the set. I also wouldn’t have had to rewrite this review, and several upcoming ones, quite so heavily.

But “Awakening” still has its problems with story logic and coherence, with a number of important plot elements being given the once-over and largely forgotten when the next bit comes along. The acting is mediocre; Gerard is largely one-note (again, more so in the movie cut) and Gray, though quite lovely (and one of my earliest actress crushes as a pre-teen, as I recall), is strident and stilted as Wilma in her initial, colder mode. O’Connor is given relatively little to do, while Theopolis and Twiki are given too much. Hensley’s wardrobe (or lack thereof) leaves more of an impression than her acting, though she’d do better in later episodes. Henry Silva is okay as Kane, but not as good as Michael Ansara, who would take over the role in the series proper. The best work comes from matte painter Syd Dutton and costume designer Jean-Pierre Dorleac, who comes up with good-looking future fashions and military uniforms for the Terrans and nice skimpy outfits for Ardala. (I do remember finding her bikini-like costuming quite impressive when I was 11-12. It’s still pretty impressive today.)

Looking back on a slow year

With 2017 coming to a close, I realize that I haven’t announced a single new writing project all year. I’ve had only three projects come out in 2017 — Star Trek: Department of Temporal Investigations — Shield of the Gods in June and Star Trek: Enterprise — Rise of the Federation: Patterns of Interference and “Abductive Reasoning” in August. (Also, Star Trek: The Face of the Unknown and “Twilight’s Captives” were nominally January 2017 publications, but they both came out in December 2016.) The last announcement I made of a new project was for “Abductive Reasoning” in November 2016, more than a year ago.

So what gives? Don’t worry, I haven’t retired from writing. But between one thing and another, it’s been a very slow year for me. The main problem is that Simon & Schuster has been renegotiating its license for Star Trek tie-in fiction, and for some reason, it’s taking an astonishingly long time to get resolved. I would imagine that the arrival of Star Trek: Discovery has created complications and/or distractions that delayed the process, but beyond that, I really have no idea why it’s been taking so long. I heard a month or so back that the deal was close to being finalized, and I’m hopeful I’ll be able to get back into Star Trek soon, but even so, it will still be quite some time before anything new gets announced to the public.

In the meantime, I’ve been pursuing a number of other options, mostly original fiction but one tie-in project as well. There are a few things I’ve actually made progress on, but this year has been a perfect storm of delays. There are two or three exciting new projects I’d expected to be able to announce — and to get paid for — by now, but they’ve all taken months longer than expected to reach a point where I could talk about them, a bizarre coincidence. On the plus side, those projects look like they’re finally coming together now, and I should have some interesting announcements to make in January. Meanwhile, I’ve got an upcoming opening to submit my long-simmering spec novel to a prospective publisher, but I’ve got to make some changes to it to fit the parameters, and I’m working on those now.

As far as this blog goes, I expect it to get a little more active in January, since I’ve been working on a new set of reviews of a vintage SFTV series. That should be ready to go very soon. In the meantime, my autographed book sale is still going on. I called it a holiday sale to get attention, but really, it’s open all year round, as long as anyone is willing to buy.

By the way, though it’s been a slow year for me in terms of selling (or at least announcing) new work, the same doesn’t necessarily go for my recent work. In particular, it seems that Patterns of Interference has been #1 on the Locus Media & Gaming Related Bestseller list for two months running, in November and December. I’ve even beat out the Star Wars novels, though apparently it was a close call in December. Thanks to David Mack for pointing these out to me. And thanks to my readers for buying my books. I hope you’ll be as generous with the new stuff I have coming next year.

Quantum teleportation revisit: Now with wormholes!

Six years ago, I wrote a couple of posts on this blog musing about the physics behind quantum teleportation — first proposing a model in which quantum entanglement could resolve the philosophical condundrum of whether continuity of self could be maintained, then getting into some of the practical limitations that made quantum teleportation of macroscopic objects or people unlikely to be feasible. I recently came upon an article that offers a potential new angle, basically combining the idea of quantum teleportation with the idea of a wormhole.

The article, “Newfound Wormhole Allows Information to Escape Black Holes” by Natalie Wolchover, was published in Quanta Magazine on October 23, 2017. It’s talking about a theoretical model devised by Ping Gao, Daniel Jafferis, and Aron C. Wall, a way that a stable wormhole could exist without needing some kind of exotic matter with arbitrary and probably physically unattainable properties in order to keep it open. Normally, a wormhole’s interior “walls” would attract each other gravitationally, causing it to instantly pinch off into two black holes, unless you could line them with some kind of magic substance that generated negative energy or antigravity, like shoring up a tunnel in the dirt. That’s fine for theory and science fiction, but in practical terms it’s probably impossible.

The new model is based on a theory that’s been around in physics for a few years now, known in short as “ER = EPR” — namely, that wormholes, aka Einstein-Rosen bridges, are effectively equivalent to quantum entanglement between widely separated particles, or Einstein-Podolsky-Rosen pairs. (Podolsky, by the way, is Boris Podolsky, who lived and taught here in Cincinnati from 1935 until his death, and was the graduate advisor to my Uncle Harry. I was really impressed when I learned my uncle was only two degrees of separation from Einstein.) The EPR paradox, which Einstein nicknamed “spooky action at a distance,” is the way that two entangled particles can affect each other’s states instantaneously over any distance — although in a way that can’t be measured until a light signal is exchanged between them, so it can’t be used to send information faster than light. Anyway, it’s been theorized that there might be some sort of microscopic wormhole or the equivalent between the entangled particles, explaining their connection. Conversely, the two mouths of a wormhole of any size could be treated as entangled particles in a sense. What the authors of this new paper found was that if the mouths of a wormhole were created in a way that caused them to be quantum-entangled — for instance, if one of them were a black hole that was created out of Hawking radiation emitted from another black hole (it’s complicated), so that one was a direct outgrowth of the other on a quantum level — then the entanglement of the two black holes/mouths would create, in the words of the paper’s abstract, “a quantum matter stress tensor with negative average null energy, whose gravitational backreaction renders the Einstein-Rosen bridge traversable.” In other words, you don’t need exotic matter to shore up the wormhole interior, you just need a quantum feedback loop between the two ends.

Now, the reason for all this theoretical work isn’t actually about inventing teleportation or interstellar travel. It’s more driven by a strictly theoretical concern, the effort to explain the black hole information paradox. Conservation of energy says that the total amount of energy in a closed system can’t be increased or decreased. Information is energy, and the universe is a closed system, so the total amount of information in the universe should be constant. But if information that falls into a black hole is lost forever, then conservation is violated. So for decades, physicists (notably Stephen Hawking) have been exploring the question of whether it’s possible to get information back out of a black hole, and if so, how. This paper was an attempt to resolve that question. A traversable wormhole spinning off from a black hole provides a way for information to leave the interior of the black hole, resolving the paradox.

I only skimmed the actual paper, whose physics and math are way beyond me, but it says that this kind of entangled wormhole would only be open for a very brief time before collapsing. Still, in theory, it could be traversable at least once, which is better than previous models where the collapse was instantaneous. And if that much progress has been made, maybe there’s a way to refine the theory to keep the wormhole open longer.

There’s a catch, though. Physical law still precludes information from traveling faster than light. As with quantum teleportation, there is an instantaneous exchange of information between the two ends, but that information remains in a latent, unmeasurable state until a lightspeed signal can travel from the transmitting end to the receiving end. So a wormhole like this, if one could be created and extended over interstellar distances, would not allow instantaneous travel. A ship flying into one end of the wormhole would essentially cease to exist until the lightspeed signal could reach the other end, whereupon it would emerge at long last.

However — and this is the part that I thought of myself as an interesting possibility for fiction — this does mean that the ship would be effectively traveling at the speed of light. That in itself is a really big deal. In a physically realistic SF universe, it would take an infinite amount of energy and time to accelerate to the speed of light, and once you got fairly close to the speed of light, the hazards from oncoming space dust and blueshifted radiation would get more and more deadly. So as a rule, starships would have to stay at sublight speeds. In my original fiction I’ve posited starships hitting 80 or 90 percent of c, but even that is overly optimistic. So in a universe where starships would otherwise be limited to, say, 30 to 50 percent of lightspeed, imagine how remarkable it would be to have a wormhole transit system that would let a starship travel at exactly the speed of light. Moreover, the trip would be instantaneous from the traveler’s perspective, since they’d basically be suspended in nonexistence until the lightspeed signal arrived to “unlock” the wormhole exit. It’s not FTL, but it’s L, and that alone would be a damned useful stardrive. You could get from Earth to Alpha Centauri in just 4.3 years, and the trip would take no time at all from your perspective, except for travel time between planet and wormhole mouth. You’d be nearly 9 years younger than your peers when you got home — assuming the wormhole could be kept open or a second temporary wormhole could be generated the other way — but that’s better than being 2 or 3 decades younger. Short of FTL, it’s the most convenient, no-fuss means of interstellar travel I can think of.

Or, looked at another way, it’s a method for interstellar quantum teleportation that avoids all the scanning/transmission obstacles and impracticalities I talked about in my second 2011 post on the subject. No need to use a technological device to scan a body with a level of detail that would destroy it, then transmit a prohibitively huge amount of data that might take millennia to send in full. You just pop someone into one end of a wormhole and make sure the handshake signal is transmitted strongly enough to reach the other end. I’ve long felt that wormhole-based teleportation would be a more sensible approach than the disintegration-based kind anyway. Although we’re technically talking about black holes, so it wouldn’t be the sort of thing where you could just stand on a platform in your shirtsleeves and end up somewhere else. Also, there might be a little problem with getting torn apart by tidal stresses at either end. I’m not sure the paper addresses that.

This idea could be very useful for a hard-SF universe. My problem is that the universes I have established are a little less hard than that, though, since I tend to like working in universes with FTL travel of one sort or another. But maybe some idea will come to me for a future story. And maybe some other writer will read this and get an idea. We’re all in this together, and any worthwhile SF concept can inspire multiple very different stories.

Welcome to my Amazon Author Page!

I decided this afternoon to do something I should’ve probably done a long time ago — signing on to Amazon’s Author Central so I could edit my personal author page. I’ve updated my author bio there and added a couple of books it didn’t have listed, and I’ve also linked my blog RSS feed to it, so this and future posts should show up there. There are one or two things coming up that I hope to be able to announce soon, and it would be nice to have a bigger audience for them.

To Amazon readers who come upon this blog for the first time, welcome! Please feel free to look around my blog and the associated author site, including pages for my Original Fiction, Star Trek Fiction, assorted TV and movie reviews, etc. And feel free to check out my autographed book sale!

Holiday book sale! Now with new items in stock!

Okay, guys — it’s holiday shopping season, and I really need to make some money, so hopefully we can help each other. So I’m offering autographed copies of my books for sale once again. I recently acquired new copies of some of my back titles for my signing events last month, but I didn’t sell enough to break even. But that does allow me to offer some titles here that I didn’t have before. Plus I can now offer my most recent book, Patterns of Interference, and I’m marking down Only Superhuman for the sale. And I’m offering some stray single copies that I’ve been holding onto for a rainy day. Everything must go!

You can buy these books from me through PayPal (via the “Send Money” tag with payments to clbennett@fuse.net, or simply use the PayPal button to the right of this post) for the prices listed below.  Please use the PayPal “instructions to merchant” option (or e-mail me) to let me know which book(s) you’re ordering, provide your shipping address, and let me know if you want the book(s) inscribed to anyone in particular (or not autographed at all, as the case may be).

Even if you don’t want a book, you can still make a donation to me through PayPal. Every little bit would be a big help to me right now.

Here are the books I have available, their quantities, and the price per copy (in US dollars):

Mass-market paperbacks: $8

Star Trek: TOS — The Face of the Unknown (5 copies)
ST: Enterprise — Rise of the Federation: Tower of Babel (4 copies)
ST: ENT — Rise of the Federation: Uncertain Logic (5 copies)
ST: ENT — Rise of the Federation: Live by the Code (5 copies)
ST: ENT — Rise of the Federation: Patterns of Interference (9 copies)
ST: Department of Temporal Investigations — Forgotten History (5 copies)
ST: DTI — Watching the Clock (1 copy)
ST: Ex Machina (1 copy)
ST: TNG: The Buried Age (1 copy)
ST:TNG: Greater Than the Sum (1 copy)
ST: Titan: Over a Torrent Sea (1 copy)
X-Men: Watchers on the Walls (1 copy)

Hardcovers: $20 (20% off!)

Only Superhuman (25 copies)

Trade paperbacks: $16

Star Trek: Mirror Universe — Shards and Shadows (6 copies)
ST: Myriad Universes — Infinity’s Prism (2 copies)
ST: Mere Anarchy (2 copies)
ST: The Next Generation — The Sky’s the Limit (2 copies)

Trade paperbacks: $14

ST: Deep Space Nine — Prophecy and Change (1 copy)
ST: Voyager — Distant Shores (2 copies)

I’ll try to keep this list updated with regard to availability, but if you have doubts (particularly with the single copies), query first. For buyers in the US, add $2.50 postage per book for MMPBs, or $4.00 postage for trades/hardcovers.  For buyers outside the US, pay the book price and I’ll bill you for postage separately once I determine the amount.

If you have a PayPal account of your own, please pay through that instead of a credit card.  PayPal charges a fee for credit card use, so if you do use a credit card, I have to ask for an additional $0.25 per mass-market paperback or an additional $0.50 per trade paperback or hardcover.

Thanks in advance for your patronage!

And finally, Erlanger LibraryCon followup

Yep, the Kenton County Public Library’s Erlanger branch held its LibraryCon yesterday. Unfortunately, it wasn’t very well-attended, at least not by people interested in my books. Maybe I should’ve remembered to remind people of the event a couple of days ago. But the cold weather was probably the reason not many people came out. Or maybe this is just a lean year — the current economic uncertainties may make people more reluctant to engage in recreational spending. This is my second signing in a row to have a disappointing turnout.

Still, I got some things out of it. I got to meet a few local creators and publishers, and I got to meet the “other” David Mack — the comics artist/writer known for his work on Kabuki, Daredevil, and the comics adaptation of Neil Gaiman’s American Gods, as opposed to my friend David (Alan) Mack who writes Star Trek novels for Pocket and the upcoming Dark Arts: The Midnight Front for Tor. I hadn’t known that the comics’ David Mack was originally from the Cincinnati/Northern Kentucky area. He’s a lot more down-to-earth than I would’ve expected from his rather ethereal art. Anyway, it was nice to meet him at last.

I also got a free meal out of it, at least. I actually brought my own lunch, since I didn’t know they’d be providing one, and since my metabolism’s still on Daylight Time, I ate it early, just before the convention formally started at 11. Not long thereafter, they passed around the catering order sheet from Chipotle — d’oh! Although lunch didn’t arrive until after 2, so I would’ve been starving by that point if I hadn’t eaten something earlier. And the burrito I ordered was so big and filling that I didn’t even need to have dinner later on, just an evening snack.

Anyway, the Erlanger branch was a pretty nice library, and it’s too bad I didn’t get a chance to take more of a look around. It’s a bit too far from home to drop into casually. But even with the underwhelming turnout, I’m grateful to the Erlanger staff for having me, and maybe they’ll have me back next year. The library’s apparently having an extension built, so it should be an even bigger space by then and hopefully able to host a larger convention, or so they told me. Maybe I’ll be able to sell more books next year. I should have at least one new thing to offer by then, which I’ll hopefully be able to announce pretty soon.

Michigan trip followup

Well, I’ve been back from my visit to the Detroit area for a couple of days. I had a pretty uneventful drive both ways, taking about 6 hours each way, what with stops for rest breaks, lunch, and fuel. (I had half a tank when I started, and I realize in retrospect that if I’d waited to fill up until it was low, I could probably have made the round trip with just one refill. But I didn’t.) The only problem is that my GPS shut down on me a couple of times, including while I was in the middle of Detroit rush hour traffic. That’s the second trip I’ve had where that happened — I wonder what the problem is. My smartphone is a few years old now, so maybe planned obsolescence is starting to kick in. Anyway, I don’t really need GPS for most of the trip, since it’s just straight up and down I-75. It was just the last leg getting to Huntington Woods, and getting from there back to 75 South, that I still need a reminder for.

So I had a nice little visit with family, and the book signing at the Huntington Woods Public Library was on Wednesday evening. It was a much smaller group than I’d hoped for. Apparently the World Series was in its seventh game that night or something, although I wouldn’t think there’d be that much overlap between my audience and sports fans. But whatever the reason, there were only about a half-dozen or so people there. So we all sat around one round table and had a nice little chat about writing and Star Trek and stuff for 90 minutes. I gave away most of my giveaway copies of Patterns of Interference, but I only sold one book. I was hoping for more financially, but otherwise I can’t complain. I guess I shouldn’t have expected a huge group (although the library reserved a really big meeting hall for me).

The one other thing of note I did on my trip was to visit the Cranbrook Institute of Science, a natural history museum that’s part of the larger Cranbrook Educational Complex, itself a historic landmark. Alas, I couldn’t afford the extra fee for the chocolate exhibit they’re currently showing, but the rest of the museum was interesting, particularly the geological specimens. I quite liked this iridescent fossil shell in the lobby, which came out really nicely in my photo, with a fiery glow seemingly from within:

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And here’s an item from the geology exhibit that’s close to my heart:

[image error](I think I once briefly considered using Beryl as Emerald Blair’s middle name. I figured it was too on the nose.)

They had a section on meteorites too, including a really nice Don Davis painting of the Tunguska event, which can also be seen here. There was also a replica T. rex skeleton that you can get really close to — I’m not sure I’ve ever really gotten a sense of just how big they were. That would’ve been scary. There was also a Michigan-centric section about Ice Ages and glaciers carving the landscape, and an anthropology section with items from various world cultures all displayed together. That section had a video presentation using that so-called “hologram” technology that projects what looks like a freestanding, translucent flat image in open space. I ducked down to the side to take a closer look at how it works, and it’s quite simple — there’s a horizontal video screen in the ceiling and a glass plate at a 45-degree angle reflecting it (basically a beam splitter), so that the reflection looks like it’s floating upright in the air behind the glass. They set it up so that the “holographic” characters (of course this has nothing to do with actual holography) appeared to be occupying the 3D physical display behind the glass, with the hostess standing on the carpet and a little towheaded kid right out of ’60s sitcom central casting sitting on a chest and listening to her lecture about human diversity. Since they were both in the same plane, the perspective of the illusion held up well as I moved from side to side, as long as I didn’t move far enough to see how flat their images really were. The bench in front of the display was not so wide as to spoil the illusion for kids sitting on the ends. But this is me we’re talking about — when I see an illusion, I want to see how it’s made. I was always more interested in knowing the magician’s point of view than the spectator’s.

As I mentioned, the drive home on Friday was pretty uneventful, but one weird thing happened: I got 4-5 spam calls on my smartphone within just a few hours, an astonishing number. Most of them I just rejected because I was driving at the time, but there was one that went to voicemail that was an incredibly inept scam, an obviously synthesized voice speaking in hilariously ungrammatical English about how I had to pay my overdue IRS bill or something or I would get arrested “by the cops.” I wonder why there were so many calls on that day alone.

So now I’m back home, caught up on my missed TV shows, and trying to get back to work. I’m doing copyedits for a project I should be able to announce soon, and expecting copyedits for another project I hope I can announce before much longer. Plus I just got a phone call reminding me that Election Day is on Tuesday, so I should remember to research the candidates and issues before then. (I’ve been getting a ton of election fliers in the mail, but I prefer to get my info from independent sources.)

And of course, I’ll be at Erlanger’s LibraryCon this Saturday, November 11, from 11-4. This should be a bigger event, so hopefully there will be more folks around to buy my books.

Books By the Banks 2017 followup

This year’s Books By the Banks event went fairly well. There was a reception for the authors Friday night, and though I’m not very good at such large-scale social gatherings, I managed to get something out of it. I noticed that the name of one of the guest, Mark Dawidziak, sounded familiar, so I looked him up on my phone browser and found that he was the author of The Columbo Phile, a behind-the-scenes companion and episode guide to the Peter Falk series, which I’ve had a copy of since about the time it came out in 1989, or at least not long thereafter. So I sought him out and brought that up, and he was quite pleased to hear I had a copy, since it’s apparently fairly hard to find (it’s long out of print and owners don’t like to part with their copies). He said he was actually a bit relieved that he never got a chance to do a revised edition or sequel about the ABC revival of Columbo, because the story of the original series was a tale of success, while the story of the revival… not so much. (It started out pretty good in its first couple of years, but had a long, slow decline after that. It did manage to do one last good one at the end, though not good enough to let them do one more movie and finish the series with an even 70 installments.) Anyway, he suggested I bring it in the next day so he could autograph it, which I did and he did.

So the reception went well enough, but I got a pretty painful foot cramp and had to leave early. I think it was standing on the hardwood floors for so long that did it, and probably the fact that I didn’t stretch my legs before I went out. Walking back to the downtown parking garage helped work out the cramp, but I had frigid weather and heavy rain to contend with, and I was in a light jacket with no umbrella, not having anticipated those conditions. It was most unpleasant, particularly after having an unseasonably warm autumn. And then I found out the garage had raised its rates since I was last there. And then I had to drive home in the dark and the rain, which I hate. I made it home in one piece, though.

At least I got a decent night’s sleep and was reasonably awake for the festival on Saturday. I was seated near one author I know from past events, mystery writer and Sherlock Holmes expert Dan Andriacco, and we talked some about my recent revisit of the Basil Rathbone Holmes films. I was seated between a detective-story writer, Rock Neelly, and a writer of sports-themed political thrillers, Dennis Hetzel — no other sci-fi people there, apparently, and not a lot of adult fiction overall represented this year.

As for me, Joseph-Beth Bookseller had provided a number of copies of Rise of the Federation books 2-5 and The Face of the Unknown, but unfortunately no Only Superhuman, so the only non-Star Trek items I had to offer were my postcard/fliers for Hub Space. (Hopefully I’ll have something else non-Trek to offer next year. Stay tuned.) While I got to listen to the authors on either side of me giving their rehearsed pitches over and over, I had to contend with the usual thing of trying to explain to the mostly non-SF-fan crowd that: no, I don’t write for the show; no, the books are not made into episodes; no, I’m not the person who writes all the books; no, the producers don’t tell us what to write; and, yes, books based on Star Trek are a thing that exist. Plus the occasional person who addressed me only to say that they weren’t into Star Trek, though at least most of them were apologetic about it. But there was one person who said he came to the event just to see me, which was flattering.

The most successful seller among my available Trek books was The Face of the Unknown. It soon became evident that it’s easier to sell a standalone than series books, especially when the first book in the series wasn’t available. I eventually modified my completely unrehearsed pitch to say that the books could stand reasonably well on their own since they filled in any necessary information about what came before. Anyway, the best seller among the ROTF books was Uncertain Logic, which is possibly due to its distinctive cover (or I like to think so, since the cover design was my idea). Eventually I was down to one copy each of those two. When I got up to stretch my legs with about an hour and a half to go, I noticed that behind me was a corralled-off space with boxes holding extra books, so I replenished my supply of those two books — and then I didn’t sell any more. Oh, well. At leat a lot of people took Hub Space fliers, so hopefully I’ll see a spike in sales there. (As in, some sales.)

So that’s one more BBtB down for me, and the first of my three close-packed events. In a couple of days, I’ll be heading up to Huntington Woods, Michigan for the library signing on Wednesday at 7 PM. There should definitely be Only Superhuman copies for sale there. And a new wrinkle: I’ll be giving away copies of Star Trek: Enterprise — Rise of the Federation: Patterns of Interference.

Now I just hope I can get through the next few days without catching a cold from walking in the rain and attending a crowded convention…

Book signings: Now there are three!

Looks like I’ve been neglecting my blog again these past few weeks. I’ve been struggling with a new project I hope to talk about soon, something I haven’t done before and am trying to learn the ropes for. But I want to remind folks that I’ll be one of the guests at Books by the Banks at Cincinnati’s Duke Energy Convention Center this Saturday, October 28, from 10 AM – 4 PM. Also, next Wednesday, November 1 at 7-9 PM, I’ll be signing books at the Huntington Woods Public Library just outside of Detroit, Michigan.

But that’s not the end of it! Just today, I accepted an invitation to yet another signing at LibraryCon, an SF/fantasy-themed library event in Erlanger, Kentucky. It’ll be Saturday, November 11 (Veteran’s Day) at the Erlanger branch of the Kenton County Public Library, located on 401 Kenton Lands Road, Erlanger, KY 41018. That’s just a couple of miles east of the Cincinnati/Northern Kentucky International Airport. I gather it’ll be a mostly outdoor event unless it rains.

So it looks like I’ve got a busy few weeks ahead of me! And lots of chances for people to come meet me and buy my books.

 

Coming soon: two signing events in a week!

We’re now less than four weeks away from the annual Books By the Banks book festival at Cincinnati’s Duke Energy Convention Center. As previously announced, I’ll be one of numerous regional authors attending the festival on Saturday, October 28 from 10 AM to 4 PM.

But I’ve now made plans for a second, solo book signing event just four days later. On Wednesday, November 1st at 7 PM, I plan to be at the Huntington Woods Public Library in Huntington Woods, Michigan, a suburb of Detroit. I should have copies on hand of at least my last three Star Trek novels (Rise of the Federation: Live by the Code and Patterns of Interference and The Original Series: The Face of the Unknown) and Only Superhuman, and maybe some older stuff if I can arrange it.

Why Huntington Woods? Well, I’ve had family in the area for decades, and my cousin Cynthia has been talking to me for years about arranging a book signing with the folks she knows at the library and/or a local bookstore. It never really went beyond the theoretical, but now my remaining relatives there are about to move to be with my other family members in the Washington, D.C. area, so this was our last chance to make it happen. So Cynthia, despite being very busy handling the moving plans and all, reached out to the library people, and here we are. So you can all thank her for this.

The Huntington Woods Public Library is located on 26415 Scotia Rd, Huntington Woods, MI 48070, just a bit northwest of the Detroit Zoo. It’s open until 9 PM on Wednesdays, so I assume I’ll be there for about two hours. I hope some of you can be there too.