Red Dwarf X: Entangled

So, if last week was the low point of Red Dwarf X so far, I think this must be the week we can safely say that yes, the boys from the Dwarf are back on form.

Basically it involves Lister losing a game of poker to some genetically engineered life forms, and relying on a decidedly stupid scientist to save the day. Admittedly, her stupidness did get a little tedious at times, but that's easy to overlook just by considering how awesome some of Cat's lines were.

We're all acutely sorry bud. Apart from me and him and him.

Yes, this was the episode where he really came into his own, partly by virtue of being quantum entangled with Kryten, meaning they delivered some of their lines in perfect synch, much to both characters' surprise.

Lister is at his slobbiest, Rimmer at his most officious (having just reinvented the ship's health and safety rulebook), and Kryten is doing a fine Hitchhikers' Guide homage. All in all, classic Dwarf, and right up there with the moose.

Not really much philosophical discussion to the episode; Kryten and Cat develop a new understanding of the nature of coincidence, and there's a whole space station set up to establish whether two wrongs do in fact make a right.

But we don't need that. Entangled is a high point of Red Dwarf X; let's just hope they can keep the momentum going for the last couple of episodes...

Red Dwarf X: Fathers and Suns

OK, maybe Red Dwarf is going to become something of a recurring theme here over the next few weeks, but, well, why not? This review will contain spoilers.

Way back in series VII, thanks to some 'time-travelly, paradoxy, sci-fi smeg', Lister became his own father. In this episode, he realises he hasn't been a great father to himself, and tries to put things right.

It's not up there with the funniest Dwarf episodes ever, but every episode can't be a comedy classic, so that's all fine. A couple of lines could have got in much more obvious directions, which is good. Unfortunately the running gag about Chinese whispers was lame, although I could see something of a nod towards Arthur Dent getting the Nutrimatic Drink Dispensers side-tracked - again, not followed through to the same conclusion as in Hitchhikers. Nothing close to last week's moose gag though.

What we do have is some great science fiction - Lister plays father and son brilliantly, aided by a computer straight out of A Space Odyssey. And those two plot elements combine to give plenty of food for thought, if you want to drag seriousness out of the show. Like: is the mess we made of our lives our own fault, or can we blame our dad? Or to extend that into a Christian worldview, can we blame our heavenly father? And if our Dad is a total bum (or as he might have it, a bum, but not a total bum) how does that affect our view of God as a Father? Does he want to exercise tough love and throw our beloved guitar out of the airlock? Or will he, indeed, throw us out of the airlock if necessary?

And as for Pree, the predicitve computer, well, you could get an essay on free will and predestination out of her, but it's getting late, so I won't.

In summary: Fathers and Suns was a great bit of sci-fi TV, with more laughs than the average Star Trek.

Monday Review: How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe by Charles Yu

How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe, by Charles Yu, is the story of a book. In fact, it is the story of some of the minds behind the book, one of whom, the aforementioned Charles Yu, is a Recreational Time Travel Device repairman who chooses to spend most of his life hiding in limbo, living in a time machine which is not bigger on the inside, with only an imaginary dog and a manically depressed artificial intelligence for company.

This would be an appropriate moment for the reviewer to interject, and explain that the book itself is not quite as derivative of hitch-hikers as this review has been so far. There are certainly shades of Adams-esque humour (for instance, physics was only 93 per cent installed when construction was halted on Minor Universe 31), but the similarities in plot are, I think limited to those mentioned so far. The concept of a science fictional universe, of course, may also put one in mind of the Thursday Next novels, but all these comparisons are not doing the book in question any favours.

In fact, How to Live Safely is one of the most mind-bendingly original books in the whole of chronogrammatical space-time. If I was to attempt to give it a sub-genre, it would probably be literary sf, with the somewhat scant (but imaginative) plot serving primarily to hold all the author’s crazy ideas together and explore the father-son axis in a completely non-linear, temporally confusing manner.

How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe is good, clean, science fictional fun. Movingly funny, nicely written, weirdly conceptual, insanely brilliant and… well, frankly, one of the best time travel stories I’ve read in a long time.

Long Walk 2011

It is a tradition over at the Daily Audio Bible to take July 7th off, go somewhere beautiful, and spend the day with God. My intention had been to do a slight variation on the theme, and go for a long drive, take the Mini off into the countryside for the day. (The reason for this stems from Wild at Heart, something John Eldredge says about men getting closest to God when they feel most 'alive'; for him it's all manner of outdoorsy stuff, for me, it's a back-lane Mini blast.)

Unfortunately things were not as easy as all that: first there was a hospital appointment on July 7th (for my daughter) which would have taken half the day out. Still, no matter; July 8th was booked off work and the Long Drive was on. Except the aforementioned daughter was taken ill this morning. Not only that, but the rain did not look conducive to a back-lane Mini blast.

Still, as it turned out I was not required to make the trip to see the doctor, and was able to slip off for a somewhat shorter than planned walk, getting myself lost in the rolling hills of, um, Staffordshire.

I had no real idea what I was doing; I mean, the theory was simple enough - go somewhere quiet and listen to God. Easier said than done, obviously. But did I come away with anything? Well, maybe, although I'm not sure what it means, if anything.

I found myself surrounded by ferns, and as I looked at the repeatedly dividing pattern of the leaves, it occured to me that the closer you look at a fern leaf, the more detail you go into, the more accurately you can measure its outline, and the longer its outline will be.

Sass that hoopy frond

Taken to its extreme, you end up with the fractal theory argument that Britain's coastline is infinite. Plainly nonsense in practical terms, but an interesting point, that the closer you look, the more anything - a fern, a country, a person - approaches infinity. At some level, the Infinite is present right at the heart of everything.

I've been distracted

I realised Towel Day was coming, and it's taken me about five weeks to find my towel. That's why it's been so quiet around here lately. Honest.

Well ok, that's not strictly true. I actually forgot it was Towel Day until, well, half way through the day. But did I panic? I did not. Instead I chose to use Towel Day as an excuse to try and reboot the blog (again) in a completely non-labour intensive way.

Incidentally, the reason it's been so quiet around here lately is just that I'm rubbish at coming up with interesting and witty things to write. Could you tell?

Who is This God Person Anyway? (Fit the Seventh - The Fall)

I haven't done one of these in literally years, and Becky's recent post about the risk of a Christian author's work turning people away from God just reminded me that it's actually quite fun to deliberately do the exact opposite...

Arthur listened for a short while, but being unable to understand the vast majority of what Ford was saying he began to let his mind wander, trailing his fingers along the edge of an incomprehensible computer bank, he reached out and pressed an invitingly large red button on a nearby panel. The panel lit up with the words Please do not press this button again.

(The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy)

Similarly (well, similarly enough for the purposes of a blog post anyway) Eve, being unable to understand the vast majority of what God was saying, began to let her mind wander, reached out and took an invitingly large red fruit from a nearby tree...

OK it's a flawed parallel, not least because, unlike Arthur Dent, Eve had been warned of the consequences before she took the fruit. Arthur was technically tempted by the unknown rather than the explicitly forbidden, although I think a good rule of thumb would be that if you've never been in a spaceship before, pressing buttons as soon as you get the chance is not going to go down well with the spaceship's owners.

So, let us suspend our disbelief for a moment and agree that the temptations were broadly similar, and take a look at the outcomes. Now, poor old Eve, she would have been straight out that air-lock, snatched away from her space-borne Utopia with President Beeblebrox and made to fend for herself in the big wide universe. What does Arthur get?

A second chance.

To my thinking, that polite little warning the Heart of Gold gives him seems even more tempting than an unmarked red button. But he is given a pause to reconsider, reminded that buttons is spaceships are not there for the entertainment of earthmen, and asked not to do it again. He is given the Sirius Cybernetics equivalent of grace.

How many of us, when God's Heart of Gold tells us not to do something, think 'Well that wasn't so bad. I wonder if I can get away with it again...'? How many times can we press that button before the airlock opens and we, too, are snatched away from the Heart of Gold by certain death?

Hat tip also to Exploring Our Matrix for inspiring this post, and (indirectly) for the image :)

Fish Custard

Somewhere on teh intarwebs, someone must have drawn a comparison between the Eleventh Doctor and his first post-regeneration meal. Something like how all the ingredients are great, but please, not all together! Only that doesn't work, because Eleven and Amy Pond seem to work well together. It's a little early to tell, of course, what with the Doctor still cooking and everything, but, well, the first episode with the new Doctor didn't suck.

And that is as far as I'm going to go on the subject at this point; I mean, I can't criticize too much a show with a Hitch-hikers homage and a real Mini in it, and I've read/heard too much of 'the assistant is too sexy' or 'the Doctor isn't sexy enough' to be bothered joining in, even on a more intelligent level. Oh OK, I'll join in a bit: she's alright for a redhead, but seriously, have you people not seen Billie?

Um, anyway..... I'm not too keen on the new opening credits, but that's incidental. If the opening episode is any indication, it seems the new team have got a good balance between scary and funny, and between fish and custard for that matter, and as long as Eleven turns out to be a half decent incarnation and the whole thing doesn't descend into a horrible teen drama in spacetime as the younger cast might suggest (oh dear, I came across prematurely middle-aged there, I do apologise. You know you're getting old when the Doctors are getting younger, etc. etc.)

I'll cast judgement on the new Doctor properly next week, once he's properly cooked. For now there's not much else to say, I'll just hit publish before I have that crisis of confidence that I miscounted and we're on Twelve now, or Ten....

The Friday Review: And Another Thing...

This is something I should have posted about months ago, when I first heard that Eoin Colfer was writing an official Volume Six in the Hitch-Hiker Trilogy. Obviously I didn't get around to it, and the reason for this is that, having listened to it in audiobook format, I am distinctly underwhelmed.

It is, to paraphrase Douglas Adams, almost, but not quite, entirely unlike a Hitch-hiker novel. In Mr Colfer's defence, he doesn't go out of his way to copy DNA's style, which would quite possibly have made a bad book worse. I also laughed once.

But my main problem with this book is that it just misses the point by a country light year. I can't even remember what Arthur Dent did in this book. I'm pretty sure he was there, but far from being the continuing misadventure of an everyday bloke from Earth, And Another Thing seemed to be more interested in the (now single-headed) Zaphod having a little jolly around the afterlife.

I got the impression (as I did with the film) that this was a bunch of DNA's previously discarded ideas retrieved from under his desk and thrown together by someone who probably didn't know exactly where his towel was at the time. There's even a recycling of some of DNA's good ideas, like naming a character Hillman Hunter.

Nope, for me, the Hitch-hiker story ended with the Quintessential Phase. And Another Thing... is, to paraphrase Ford Prefect, mostly pointless.

Don't forget your towel!

Whatever you're doing today, make sure you know where your towel is, in celebration of perhaps the most remarkable, certainly the most successful book ever to come out of the great publishing corporations of Ursa Minor - more popular than The Celestial Home Care Omnibus, better selling than 53 More Things to Do in Zero Gravity, and more controversial than Oolon Colluphid's trilogy of philosophical blockbusters: Where God Went Wrong, Some More of God's Greatest Mistakes and Who is this God Person Anyway?

Yoda and I will be taking our towels to a classic car show, so I should look suitably random.

Hoopy Towel Day banner by Travis Avery.

I look like a dog with a caramel toffee

Yes, I am feeling ambivalent about the imminent return of Red Dwarf. Yes, I'm excited; I mean, this is Red Dwarf we're talking about, and we haven't seen a new episode for 10 years, as hard as that is for me to believe. Lister, Kryten and the Cat are back; Rimmer has an 'H' on his head, and Kochanski is nowhere to be seen. All would seem to be good in the Dwarfiverse. Well, except for the absence of Holly, but we'll get along without him (or her), I'm sure.

At the same time though, I live in fear that sombody is going to ruin my fond memories. I mean, this is Red Dwarf we're talking about here. I remember rushing home the night it debuted, just to see if it was any good (comedy sf up to that time pretty much consisted of Hitchhiker's and Spaceballs, as I recall). That was a couple of weeks before I turned 14; the last season aired the year I got married, so Red Dwarf covers a pretty important and character defining part of my life. (That's not to say Dave Lister is any more important than Mrs UKSteve, oh, no!)

But messing with important stuff like that is bad. It's like reinventing a motoring icon and turning it into a ridiculous overweight parody of the original. Please, Dave, don't let that happen to the Dwarf!

And returning to Earth - this is a departure from everything the series was meant to be - one man, stuck at the far side of the galaxy with a senile computer and a hologram of his dead bunkmate...

On the other hand, Series 8 was about as far removed from that as it's possible to get, what with the entire crew coming back, Rimmer not being a hologram, and Holly still having the same IQ as 6000 PE teachers... it can't get much worse than that, surely?

And of course, Doctor Who turned out alright, didn't it? Even (especially?) after the all new Doc quit after one season. And if Red Dwarf goes pear-shaped, at least I know the good Doctor will be waiting on a desert planet with nothing but the Bionic Woman and a London bus for company.

Who knew Easter would turn out to be about sci-fi?

Doctor Who: The Donna Noble Years

Readers with photographic memories will recall that I was always, shall we say, dubious about Catherine Tate returning to the TARDIS. At season's end though, I can pretty safely say that it wasn't her fault this year's Doctor Who wasn't as good as some.

So here's a quick recap of the year (may contain spoilers for those in other time zones):

Slimming pills that turn your beer belly into some kind of alien Furby. That's just silly.
Aliens were responsible for 'volcano day' in Pompeii. That's very Doctor Who.
SatNav is evil - not that we needed the Doctor to tell us that.

Best episodes of the season: probably Donna's first alien planet, the Ood-Sphere, where she discovers some pretty unpleasant things about the human race; and Silence in the Library/Forest of the Dead, by lead writer in waiting Steven Moffat.

And the finale? Well, Doctor-light episode Turn left serves as a sort of prelude to what is to come (and in itself is also a high point of the series), with the Doctor's former companions, Torchwood and UNIT together struggling to save the world without the Doctor's intervention.

Rose (presumably) manages to sprinkle the 'Bad Wolf' message all over alien Chinatown to warn the Doctor, and then he joins Torchwood and UNIT to save the world. The big cross-over with Torchwood and Sarah Jane makes the whole thing a bit crowded, and most of them don't do very much, but this is Donna's destiny. Rose Tyler striding between dimensions with a big gun like soem kind of inter-galactic Billie the Vampire Slayer was always going to be a welcome return, although Mickey and Jackie didn't do a lot other than follow her onto the set. Actually, K-9 would have been a more useful ally, I suspect, but even he had his bit part.

There's a few nods back to 'classic' Who, another blatant Hitch-hiker's moment (replacing aquatic mammals with honey-producing insects doesn't stop it being plagiarism!), and, of course, those supposedly extinct Daleks.

Sure, some of it was silly, but this is Doctor Who - it's entertainment, not hard sf. If you look past the end of term party RTD was obviously throwing for himself, dodge the obvious plot-holes, and just settle down to enjoy the ride, well, what's not to enjoy?

I could draw out plenty of spiritual lessons from it all, but it's entertainment, not Sunday School. Having said that, destiny, or God's plan, or whatever else you want to call it, is something I'm a great believer in. And that, for me, was the Big Theme of the finale, from Donna's alternate history through Dalek Caan's prophecies to the Doctor returning to his usual status as 'lonely god'.

Finale aside, not the best DW season, but still way ahead of anything else on telly. And, as it turned out, I was pretty sorry to see Donna go - not least because of the way she had to go. She deserved better.

Who is This God Person Anyway? (Fit the Sixth - The Total Perspective Vortex)

So we make a long-awaited return to the increasingly occasional series plucking at the spiritual threads of Douglas Adams' writings.

The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy has this to say about the Total Perspective Vortex:

The Total Perspective Vortex derives its picture of the whole Universe on the principle of extrapolated matter analyses.
To explain--since every piece of matter in the Universe is in some way affected by every other piece of matter in the Universe, it is in theory possible to extrapolate the whole of creation--every sun, every planet, their orbits, their composition, and their economic and social history from, say, one small piece of fairy cake.
The man who invented the Total Perspective Vortex did so basically in order to annoy his wife.
Trin Tragula--for that was his name--was a dreamer, a thinker, a speculative philosopher or, as his wife would have it, an idiot.
And she would nag him incessantly about the utterly inordinate amount of time he spent staring out into space, or mulling over the mechanics of safety pins, or doing spectrographic analyses of pieces of fairy cake.
"Have some sense of proportion!" she would say, sometimes as often as thirty-eight times in a single day.
And so he built the Total Perspective Vortex--just to show her.
And into one end, he plugged the whole of reality as extrapolated from a piece of fairy cake, and into the other, he plugged his wife: so that when he turned it on she saw in one instant the whole infinity of creation and herself in relation to it.
To Trin Tragula's horror, the shock completely annihilated her brain, but to his satisfaction he realized that he had proved conclusively that if life is going to exist in a Universe of this size, then one thing it cannot afford to have is a sense of proportion.

I was sort of going somewhere with this, like to parallel the Vortex with the way getting too close to God would annihilate the brains of Old Testament Jews, but really I just wanted to let the universe speak for itself.

Tuesday Tunes: Pimp My Chips

We interrupt this weeks blog tour for something completely different...

I guess this may have a slightly limited appeal among my usual readership (and those innocent passers-by on the blog tour), but I recently stumbled across what can only be described as, um, 11 pop songs performed on the sound chip from a ZX Spectrum. Obviously I have no excuse for mentioning it here other than that as a Spec-chum of yore I think it's brilliant. Check out Pimp My Chips here.

Sci-Fi Song of the Week

Among the songs covered on Pimp My Chips is a little tune by Radiohead going by the name of Paranoid Android. And it turns out the coder (Matt Westcott) has made the Spectrum version available as a downloadable mp3. Yay him!

Eight Random Facts

Posts are a bit thin on the ground here at the moment, mainly because the pesky day job keeps dragging me across the country for one reason or another. Tsk.

Still, those nice bloggers at The Sci-Fi Catholic tagged me for this, so I figured that since it saves me actually thinking too much I'd take a stab. So here are 8 (count 'em) random facts about moi:

1. My fourth car was a Mini. Yeah, my first one was too, but that sounded a bit predictable and not at all random. My second and third cars (and fifth and sixth) were Minis too.

2. I don't currently own a Mini though. Technically Yoda belongs to Mrs UKSteve.

3. I've gone off the idea of progress. It's over-rated.

4. I have an annoying tendency to quote The Hitch-hikers Guide to the Galaxy whenever the opportunity arises. Also Red Dwarf and The Italian Job if they are more suitable.

5. I have read His Dark Materials. Yes, the whole trilogy.

6. And if I go to hell, it probably won't be for that.

7. One of my first published writings was a witty little thing called '101 Things to do with a Kettle'. The sequel, '101 Things to do with a ZX81', was far better in my opinion, but due to the more limited target audience I have yet to make a fortune from it. I made a couple of half-hearted attempts to put it online, but never quite found the right format.

8. I don't think this blog has eight regular readers, especially not eight that haven't already been tagged by DGD and his blogging pets.

So, if you happen to be passing through and haven't done the 8 Random Facts meme yet, consider yourself tagged.

Actually, that was quite fun.

What are the chances?

Not that I was bored and just messing about online instead of working or anything, but by a curious coincidence, this happened:
Well, it amused me anyway.

Towel Day '07

I pondered a few ways to mark this occasion in my little corner of the blogosphere. I could watch and review the Hitch-hikers movie, but it still won't be that good a review, so I'll try something more positive. I could review the TV series, only I haven't watched that for a while. I could lament the fact that I ditched my old VHS copies of the TV series when I got it on DVD, before I realised that not all the VHS content was on the new version. Ah, little animated Babel Fish, you will be missed. A bit.

I should really review the CDs of the last 3 radio series, because they were actually good, but that would entail sitting through them again. Which would take longer than remains of Towel Day in this time zone.

Instead I'm going to cop out royally and post a slightly edited review I wrote when the Quandary Phase aired a couple of years ago.

Even though I was introduced to Hitchhikers through the TV series, the first time I heard the original radio series (on a mid-90s repeat airing) I knew I was experiencing something special. This was, after all, the medium Hitchhikers was created for, and it shows. The Secondary Phase, with a plot wildly different from any other Hitchhiker variant, remains my favourite part of the canon, perhaps because it remains the least well-known.

There are those who think the current crop of radio shows don't compare to the original late 70s episodes; the Tertiary Phase suffered mainly from poor source material - Life, the Universe and Everything, itself recycled from a rejected Doctor Who story, is the weakest of the five novels for my money. But So Long and Thanks for all the Fish was a love story, a change of pace from the all out action of it's predecessor. Hearing some of the same characters with different voices (Prostetnic Vogon Jeltz, Slartibartfast, and of course the Book) took a bit of getting used to, but the main characters sounded just the way I remembered them.

Overall Dirk Maggs made an excellent job with the new adaptations, modernising the source material much more successfully than the movie (mankind's early 80s fascination with digital watches being replaced with a 2005 fascination with cellphones, for instance), and it still sounds like Douglas could have written it.

The Tertiary, Quandary and Quintesential Phases are a far better reflection of the true genius of Adams' original than the movie, and for my money should be this generation's tribute to him.

Long live Douglas Adams.

It's bigger on the inside...

Your average 900-year-old renegade Time Lord probably hears that a lot on his travels. Those of us who have been vicariously travelling with him have heard it a few times too, so it's good to see that obligatory line served up with a healthy dollop of humour, as it was when Martha Jones first ventured into the ubiquitous blue box.

Yes, the hype started a few weeks ago, and the third series of the All-New Doctor Who Show finally landed, sans Billie, on Saturday. It wasn't the best ever episode (not a bad thing, I'm happy to wait a week or two for the show to get into it's new dynamic and deliver some top notch episodes), in fact, it was probably one of the more far-fetched moments in the Whoniverse, but Martha, having witnessed the destruction of Big Ben, survived the Christmas Invasion and lost her cousin to the Cybermen last year, takes all the bizarreness in her stride.

I couldn't help noticing though...

Separated at birth?

A Judoon from out of Doctor Who (2007 version)

Rocksteady from out of Teenage Mutant Hero Turtles (1987 version)

Actually there was more than a hint of Vogon in the Judoon, among other Hitchhiker-esque bits like the transplanting of a whole building from one planet to another, and the whole thing being put down to mass halucinations after the event. I commented a while back that the Tenth Doctor is in fact Arthur Dent, and as if any further proof were needed, there's even an episode this series called: 42.

Are we sure Douglas Adams didn't just regenerate?

Evil Santa, Alien Pop and the Apocalypse

So, Christmas has been and gone, and with it, Doctor Who sealed its place as part of it. After just two Christmas specials, the good Doctor is almost as traditional as the Queen.

The most recent special wasn't as good as the previous year's homage to Hitchhiker's, but the evil Santa's were back, there was a star-shaped spaceship over London, and (this being TV-land) it snowed on Christmas Eve. And the good Doctor saved the world while dealing with the loss of Rose, which happened immediately prior to this episode. There was even a subtle nod towards Torchwood, which also ended its first season this week.

At its best, Torchwood has been great viewing. Unfortunately it has had more than its fair share of mediocre episodes, and really, someone should tell the makers that adult TV doesn't have to include sex every week. Or, in fact, at all.

For me, Torchwood is at its best when trying to be the Welsh Angel. And sure enough, the season ended with a barely averted apocalypse straight out of the Buffyverse. I have to mention the ending, but I don't want to spoil it, so highlight the next bit if you want to know why.

The final episode starts with Ianto reading from the book of Daniel, as an introduction to the coming apocalypse. Imprisoned under the rift, and inadvertantly released in the last episode, is Abaddon, a big scary monster that instantly kills anything its shadow touches. Up to and including Captain Jack, who sacrifices his apparently immortal self to save the world. Gwen, still believing him to be immortal, spends 'days' with his corpse in the Torchwood morgue, until he awakes only to be spirited away by a passing TARDIS.

You can see why I had to mention it.

There are plenty of loose ends, and a second series has been commissioned. If we're lucky, the series will find its identity and Captain Jack and his crew will become more than two-dimensional characters who do little more than work and sleep with each other.

Elsewhere in the Whoniverse, it being the holidays, I managed to catch the pilot of the Sarah Jane Adventures. I wouldn't normally comment on childrens TV - and it was sillier than the most kiddy-friendly Doctor Who stories - but it seems the people in the Doctor Who spin-off department have swallowed a Bible, or at least a book on end-times prophecy. So we end up with Mrs Wormwood, a nasty alien come to take over the Earth by putting alien DNA in fizzy drinks. Oh, and there's an all-knowing kid created in a laboratory who may have some important role to play as the thing pans out.

Just another Christmas in the Whoniverse then...